Parisa reflects on how she discovered the Society's elimination secret: during an intimate encounter with Dalton in the reading room, she read from his mind that the sixth candidate must be killed, not merely sent away. Confronting him immediately, she deduced that the Society could never allow a rejected initiate to leave alive. Dalton tried to justify the ritual by claiming magic requires sacrifice and destruction, but Parisa pressed him further, sensing deeper reasons he kept locked away. When she threatened to tell the others, Dalton insisted she couldn't leave—and both knew she wouldn't want to. Despite the revelation, Parisa chose to bide her time rather than act immediately, waiting to see what Dalton would do.

Weeks later, as the group's studies shifted to time theories, Parisa found her specialization in cognition uniquely suited to the research. Drawing on Islamic golden age scholarship—particularly Ibn al-Haytham's work on optical illusions and al-Biruni's experiments with mental chronometry—she developed a theory that time travel could be accomplished through a single person's perception and memory, since intelligent minds experience time faster and differently. Dalton, who had been watching her progress closely, sought her out in the reading room one night. Their conversation wove together flirtation, intellectual exchange, and interrogation as Parisa repeatedly asked who Dalton had killed during his own initiation. He eventually revealed it was someone "not well liked" who had been killed with a knife in a drunken ambush. Dalton also disclosed that the victim had known he would be chosen and had planned to kill Dalton first.

During another encounter in the gardens, Dalton proposed a test: he would bury a thought deep in his mind and give Parisa one hour to find it. That night, Parisa entered his sleeping mind and found not the simple bank vault test Dalton had intended, but an elaborate Gothic castle surrounded by a labyrinth—mental defenses far more sophisticated than any amateur telepath should possess. She navigated the labyrinth, collecting grains of extra time scattered as fungi along the path, battling spectral guards, and ultimately reaching a tower with three doors.

Behind the first door was Dalton's romantic perception of her. Behind the second was a memory of the killing. The third contained a locked chest in a room designed like a Roman forum, hinting at the Forum organization. Parisa chose the second door and was plunged into Dalton's memories. She witnessed a younger Dalton—distinctly different in demeanor—discussing the elimination with his doomed fellow candidate. Young Dalton claimed to be an "animator" who could bring the dead back to life, falsely offering to resurrect the man after killing him. The memory then shifted to Atlas Blakely warning Dalton that the other candidates had voted to kill him because they feared his power, and Atlas urging Dalton to survive because the Society needed his unique abilities.

After a blackout, Parisa found herself face to face with a younger version of Dalton who seemed to be an animation—alive but barely, sentient but not in full control—separate from the current Dalton. This animated remnant revealed that the other candidate had suspected Dalton's lies and turned the group against him, but Dalton persuaded them to redirect the killing. He also admitted he had been wrong about being able to bring someone back without consequences, saying "someone always dies" or things go wrong. Before Parisa could learn more, a deep voice—which she later suspected was Atlas Blakely's—dragged her out of the mental landscape. She awoke seizing and choking, having drastically overexerted herself. When Dalton described his intended test as a simple bank vault puzzle, Parisa realized she had bypassed it entirely and stumbled into something far deeper and more dangerous within his psyche—something Dalton himself seemed unaware of, suggesting a piece of his identity had been severed or compartmentalized.