The narrator explains her motive for reading Bruno Lacombe's emails: in her briefings, Bruno was identified as mentor to Pascal Balmy and his group Le Moulin, so she searches the correspondence for evidence of past or planned actions. Six months earlier, five massive excavators were burned at the site of an industrial reservoir near Tayssac, and Pascal's group was suspected, though no proof exists.

So far, Bruno's emails contain nothing incriminating beyond his philosophical opposition to the state's "megabasins"—plastic-lined reservoirs that siphon groundwater into evaporating, toxin-leaching pools. Bruno argues water belongs underground in nature's own filtration systems. The narrator had expected Bruno to be guiding Pascal's sabotage strategies, but instead finds him obsessed with Neanderthals.

The narrator briefly suspects the Neanderthal emails are a decoy planted to distract whoever might breach Bruno's account. Bruno rejects the standard narrative that Homo sapiens simply outcompeted Neanderthals through superior intelligence. Instead, he describes a slow "soft war" of resources: as Europe warmed, sapiens' lighter bodies, long-range javelins, coordinated hunting, and slightly higher female fertility compounded over millennia into demographic dominance over the bravely intimate, short-spear-wielding Thal.

Bruno emphasizes that modern humans still carry two to four percent Neanderthal DNA—an heirloom of a being who knew the world before class society and domination. He urges Pascal and the Moulinards to reform consciousness not through ideology but by recovering the repressed deep past. Declaring he is no primitivist but faces forward, he closes by commanding them to look up at the stars, framing ancient history as a guide to the future.