Alice wanders a desert where the Lethe and all landmarks vanish, the terrain constantly reconfiguring. Time blurs; hunger and thirst dull as she rehearses the bare facts of her identity to resist erasure. She muses on bones in Hell, porous boundaries between life and death, and cycles of worlds, then pares herself to simple declarations to keep her mind ordered.

A starving, mangled big cat approaches. Alice and the cat shadow each other until she steps into a Kripke trap; moments later the cat is caught too. A bird skull’s call summons the trappers while knives rise on hidden pulleys. The mechanism judges by blood-yield and mutilates the cat, filling buckets, while Alice’s terror spikes with memories of Peter’s bleeding death.

Spotting the word “Chelone,” Alice recognizes the enchantment as Zeno’s paradox of motion. She drags a bucket close, soaks her chalk in the cat’s blood, and writes a corrective—invoking calculus to negate the trap’s premise. The paradox breaks; her legs release, and she rolls aside as the blades fall harmlessly.

After defusing the trap, visceral hunger overtakes her. She builds a fire from notebook pages, severs the knives, butchers the carcass, and eats organs and meat, reveling in the mess and warmth as a counterpoint to Hell’s sterility. Re-embodied and alert to futurity, Alice feels a new, frightening urge to kill—reframed as a sharpened resolve to survive.