Robin spends a sleepless night haunted by the thief who shares his face, fearing arrest for aiding the silver heist. In the morning, he and Ramy rush to their first day and meet the rest of their cohort: Letty Price and Victoire Desgraves. Anthony Ribben, a postgraduate, gathers their language credentials and leads them inside Babel.

Anthony tours the floors: the public lobby, Legal’s treaty work, the interpreters’ base, and Literature, where Vimal Srinivasan briefly debates priorities. He shows the research floors with the Grammaticas—unique, warded volumes—and explains Babel’s formidable, silver-based security and wealth. They ascend to the eighth floor workshop, separated by a fire barrier for safety.

Professor Jerome Playfair greets them, gives an idealistic history of translation as peacekeeping, then demonstrates silver-working with the German–English pair heimlich/clandestine, producing a palpable cocoon of privacy. He emphasizes that bars channel what is lost in translation. Afterward, Playfair collects each student’s blood to bind the tower’s wards to them.

At college tea, tensions flare when Ramy challenges Letty’s assumptions, but the group soon relaxes, trading stories of exclusion and disguise—Victoire and Letty posing as boys to enter a museum, Robin and Ramy fleeing harassment. Shared experiences of prejudice and precarity draw them into early, hopeful camaraderie.

Because women may not live in college, Robin and Ramy escort the girls to their distant lodgings; along the way the Twisted Root pub is mentioned. Robin then lies to Ramy, detours to Harrow Lane, and is stalked by his doppelgänger. The man recites intimate truths about Robin’s upbringing and invites him inside to talk, pulling Robin toward a clandestine meeting.