After Alice’s prior confession, Peter offers quiet witness rather than comfort, holding Alice’s hand. They acknowledge that Grimes would not be in Desire, then Peter asks what Alice’s plan had been to retrieve him. Alice opens her notebook and admits she never had a true rescue, only a half-formed idea.

Alice recounts research into Erichtho via Dante, Virgil, and Lucan, detouring through the Colossi of Memnon and acrostic magick. She connected Erichtho’s practices to divergent series akin to Ramanujan’s Summation and devised a pentagram variant to bind a soul to a corpse’s coordinates. Her intent was to force Grimes’s soul to animate his remains long enough to speak under her control, using grotesque materials described by Lucan. She recognizes the plan as revenge and control, a solution Grimes himself would admire.

Peter responds with curiosity and respect for the ingenuity rather than moral condemnation. Alice admits it would not heal her. The two share a moment of clarity and steadiness in their entrapment, briefly easing the strain between them.

Time passes in searing heat; a skull continues its cuckoo call. The Kripkes do not come, suggesting they can wait out the pair. Alice reflects on Aristotle and Freud, wondering if humans are broken by intelligence or drawn toward death, while Peter counters that they are tangled but still seeking the light.

As hope wanes, Peter breaks the silence to confess that the equation Alice found was indeed his dominant strategy for retrieving Grimes. He says he would never have traded Alice; instead, he intended to ask her to trade him. Peter then reveals he believes Grimes’s death is his fault and that he should be the one to bring Grimes back.