The chapter begins with 13-year-old Olga, nicknamed Olya, struggling with her new reality: constant news reports about the Golosovskaya sisters, missing persons posters, and stricter curfews. Although her own mother, an interpreter who works up north, trusts Olya to care for herself, other parents are being more vigilant and keeping their children close.

Olya is upset at the impact the abduction has had on her relationship with Diana Nikolaevna, her best friend of five years. Diana has been spending less time with her, ostensibly because her mother thinks the streets are unsafe. When Olya sees a picture of Diana with three other girls on social media, she rushes to join them. During the bus ride to Diana’s house, however, she has second thoughts and begins to suspect the girls are laughing at her. Olya calls Diana, but her friend doesn’t pick up. Diana’s mother, Valentina Nikolaevna, phones to tell Olya she is no longer welcome in their home, calling her a bad influence.

Olya takes the bus to the city center and tries to buy a hotdog from a street vendor, but she doesn’t have enough money. She buys a can of Coca-Cola and a hot tea and settles on a bench to people-watch. She imagines that Valentina has confiscated Diana’s phone, and that she and her friend will find ways to see each other. A policeman confronts, Olya thinking she is Alyona. While answering his questions, she misses a call from Diana. The chapter ends with a personal revelation: Olya realizing she is alone and all the better for it.

Chapter 3 focuses on a relatively new couple, Maxim, or Max for short, and Ekaterina, or Katya. The two embark on a camping trip up north when Max realizes he forgot the tent, thereby irking Katya. She forgives him when she notices he is upset.

To Katya, Kamchatsky feels like a dangerous and unpredictable place in the wake of the disappearance of the Golosovskaya girls, but in the woods, she finds some measure of peace. The quiet beauty of the forest blocks out the troubles of the outside world. Katya questions her feelings for Max, who is clumsy, requires direction, and lacks acuity, yet she is sexually attracted to him. As the pair make dinner, Katya thinks about the weekend she and Max met at a work retreat she attended with Oksana, her friend and Max’s colleague at the volcanological institute. At the time, Oksana was upset because her marriage was falling apart and because she had witnessed the kidnapping of the Golosovskaya sisters. Katya struggles to contextualize the kidnapping, finding no parallels with the crimes that typically occur in the region.

Katya and Max discuss the status of the search for the missing girls. Max reveals that the authorities believe someone carried the sisters off Kamchatka by air or sea, since mountains and tundra block land routes to the Russian mainland. Katya, a customs officer for Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky’s maritime container port, disputes this theory, firmly stating that the sisters are still on the peninsula. Max responds that taking the search beyond Petropavlovsk is useless, since Oksana identified the kidnapper as a white man, and his car was too clean to have come from the northern villages.

Katya and Max go to the hot springs. They become physically intimate until Katya mentions the forgotten tent. They go back to the car to dry off and fall asleep. Katya awakes to a figure standing outside her car. She believes it is the kidnapper until she realizes it is a brown bear attracted by the smell of the salmon they had for dinner. Max wakes up, honks the horn, and scares the bear away. He exits the car to assess the damage. Realizing how lucky they were to have been in her car and not in a tent, Katya tells Max she loves him.

Valentina is the central character of Chapter 4. She worries about a blister on her chest, which she attributes to sun exposure from her time at her family’s dacha. She covers the wound with a bandage and quickly normalizes its presence. Months later, unnerved by how long the blister has been there, Valentina visits a doctor, who urges her to go to the hospital for immediate treatment. She worries she has terminal cancer, recalling how her grandmother died without ever knowing she had the disease because her doctors and family kept it hidden from her. The nurse, a native woman, makes Valentina long for “good clean Russian service” (50).

The kidnapping provides Valentina with an excuse to influence her family’s behavior. She believes that children are only safe when they are “raised in a close and loving family” (46). Thus, she insists on spending every weekend at the dacha with her husband and daughter, Diana, both of whom resent their new reality. The kidnapping also exacerbates Valentina’s fear of outsiders. The Kamchatka of her youth was tightly defended. One needed government permission to enter. Referring to the increasing presence of strangers in the region Valentina laments, “A whole civilization lost” (52). In a flashback, she recalls her conversations with Lieutenant Ryakhovsky, with whom she discussed the case of the missing Golosovskaya sisters. She believes she influenced the investigation, a thought she finds empowering.

Valentina disrobes. The doctor examines the blister and takes her into the operating room without allowing her to dress. Valentina thinks back to the native nurse who treated her humanely. As she enters the surgical suite filled with strangers, she vows never to tell anyone what has happened to her.

Chapter 5 tells the story of Ksenia Adukanov, nicknamed Ksyusha, a reindeer herder’s daughter from Esso attending university in Petropavlovsk. Ksyusha is in a long-distance relationship with Ruslan, a controlling white man from her hometown. Ksyusha’s cousin and roommate, Alisa, encourages her to join a native folkdance troupe. Ruslan objects, mimicking the dance and singing in a nonsensical version of the Even language. Ksyusha laughs, even though she is troubled by his actions. Alisa puts Ruslan on the spot until he allows Ksyusha to join the troupe. Despite his shortcomings, Ksyusha is grateful for Ruslan, believing herself unworthy of anyone better.

Ksyusha pairs with an indigenous graduate student named Chander at dance practice. She likes that he pays attention to the teacher’s instructions. More important, he comes from a Koryak fishing family in Palana, not far from Esso. The two grow close. Ksyusha soon finds herself torn between Ruslan and Chander.

Ksyusha and Chander discuss racism in Kamchatka. He does not trust Russians, claiming that they view natives differently than they view themselves. To support his claim, he brings up the missing Golosovskaya sisters, contrasting the media’s treatment of their case with that of Lilia, the missing native girl: “Reporters behaved as though the sisters from this summer invented the act of vanishing” (75). Ksyusha believes Lilia ran away. Chander questions this assumption. Whereas Ksyusha seeks to escape her heritage, Chander is certain he belongs with the Koryak.