The chapter opens with a knock at the door. It's a knock from the branch of the family that's been keeping watch over the city. The chapter's epigraph is from a poem by a poet named Maria Bell. It says, "No one dies, shut be it, els, man ga." The poem ends with the line, "What true evil really looks like" , which is a reference to the fact that the branch family is evil. The branch family, the poem says, is evil because it's descended from the land god, the god of the sun. The idea that the sun god is evil is, in fact, a form of evil that the family itself is evil at.