Raven Sable, author, entrepreneur, and the apocalyptic horseperson Famine, presides over the product launch of CHOW™, a genetically modified food product that is more expensive and less nutritious than any food product on the market: “The idea was that if you ate enough MEALS™ you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition” (156). Raven enters a Burger Lord fast food restaurant in Des Moines, Iowa, to inspect his new product and is satisfied with the unhealthy quality of it. A delivery man then enters and gives him a package: “a small pair of brass scales” (159). Raven leaves the Burger Lord, gets in his waiting limo, and plans to return to England.

In the quarry, Adam regales his friends with supernatural tales he read in the copies of the New Aquarians magazine that Anathema has given him: UFOs, Atlantis, and all of it hushed up by the government. This new knowledge sparks Adam’s interest. “The world was bright and strange and he was in the middle of it” (165).

On a country road, Anathema studies her maps traced with ley-lines—alignments connecting structures and sacred sites associated with supernatural energies—when she hears a news report about the missing nuclear material.