Alex crosses Beinecke Plaza at night, reflecting on Darlington’s lessons about Yale’s architecture and her own exhaustion from classes and Lethe work. She slips through a secret panel into an abandoned operating theater hidden in Sheffield-Sterling-Strathcona Hall, where Skull and Bones’ Haruspex is already conducting a prognostication by reading stock market predictions in Dutch from the exposed intestines of Michael Reyes, a sedated psychiatric patient taken from the hospital.

Trying not to vomit, Alex monitors the circle of protection and the room’s “Grays,” two regular ghosts: a nude woman post-hysterectomy and a young male medical student. She recalls Darlington’s rules about not engaging ghosts and her precarious training since he vanished, leaving her to perform Lethe oversight alone. Background details surface about the Bonesmen’s logistics: nurse Jean Gatdula was paid to facilitate Reyes’s care and diet, the Scribe records predictions for wealthy alumni, and prognostications have a checkered history, including a fatality in 1929.

As Scarface blares from a screening next door, the ghosts begin to moan—a flat, inhuman drone—and lean over the railing, jaws distending unnaturally toward the chalk circle. Wood creaks under their grip; halogen lights flicker. Alex realizes the wards may be faulty and nearly bolts, hearing three reverberating booms like knocks from the other side, as if something large is trying to enter. Abruptly, the sound stops, the lights steady, and the ghosts return to their seats, leaving splintered rail where their hands had pressed. Alex apologizes and vomits from fear and strain.

By 3 a.m., the Haruspex and most Bonesmen depart to clean up and party. Miranda (a redheaded Bones member) helps Alex clean the mess, and Reyes is wheeled out under shaky obfuscation veils to be returned to the ward. Alex, chastened by how close she came to abandoning Reyes, resolves to sprinkle bone dust later and wonders why the ghosts tried to breach tonight. She reflects that Darlington would have believed her account, and clings to the plan to retrieve him at the next new moon.

Outside, Alex trades tense small talk with Tripp Helmuth, who’d been posted as guard, and maintains the cover story that Darlington is in Spain. She fights memories of Darlington at Black Elm and chooses to return to her dorm rather than face Dawes at Il Bastone, mindful of the ritual stink that clings to her after society nights.

Checking her silenced phone, Alex sees repeated texts from Pamela Dawes to “call in.” When Alex returns the call, Dawes tersely informs her that there is a body at Payne Whitney and that Centurion is on site; the death is a possible homicide. Alex, who was never trained for murder investigations, is left standing in the cold with the realization that she is expected to act.