The narrator decides to keep reading Bruno's emails to determine whether his cave-heard "voices" are urging the Moulinards to sabotage state plans. For now, she shuts her computer and secures the Dubois country house with two programmable lockboxes, making it her exclusive base of operation. She prepares a cover story for Lucien about a woman alone fearing break-ins, and hopes Lucien's aunt Agathe stays away.

She walks the gravel private road through the Dubois walnut orchard into dense, dim beech and oak woods. The eerie light makes her uneasy and she reflects that Bruno is a lunatic, yet his cave-frequency talk reads to her as raw grief—a father searching for his dead daughter's voice. A heron carrying a gopher startles her on the path. She notes her unease in woods stems from the possibility of encountering people, recalling a vulnerable moment at an abandoned truck stop.

Emerging onto a plateau of farmland, she passes a crude stone hovel resembling the kind Bruno described inhabiting, and rows of vines heavy with the local purple-black grapes, which she tastes and finds as sweet as Bruno claimed. She acknowledges that despite her indifference to the region—she will leave for Paris and a new assignment once the job is done—Bruno's letters have taught her its features: the Occitan name Aguienne Neire, the black walnuts, the dense forests.

From a high ridge she surveys Vantôme, the logged hillsides, the lake, and the rivers. Through binoculars she identifies the four-towered Château de Gaume, which Bruno had described in a letter. Below it, in dense forest near the lake, she suspects Bruno is hiding, but the magnified view yields only blurred green.