Alice dreams vividly of violence and Grimes, then wakes to Peter, tea, and the returned cat Archimedes. Distrust gnaws at Alice after discovering Peter’s proof naming her, yet she must travel with him. They descend the treacherous slope between Desire and Greed as Peter fills the silence with riddles, worsening Alice’s irritation.

Flashbacks frame Alice’s resentment: Grimes long positioned Peter as her yardstick, pushing her to be “exceptional.” Later, Alice overheard Peter joking with a visiting scholar, belittling her as a bird “eating out of his hand,” which she believes helped sink her Cooke chances, cementing a sense of sabotage and unequal stakes.

Back in Hell, they join other Shades funneling toward a camouflaged bridge composed of petrified souls. A dithering Shade becomes “stone seventeen,” and moans echo beneath each step. They witness a Shade shove another, whom Peter identifies as Bill Cadeaux, prompting an anecdote about academic treachery. Tension spikes when Alice rebukes Peter’s moral outrage; he probes whether she is angry about the Cooke, deepening her fear and mistrust.

Laughter lures them to the Weaver Girl, a celestial weaver haunting the Desire–Greed chasm after losing her mortal lover to Lethe. She offers a test: if both choose to go together, she will weave a bridge to anywhere; if both choose to go alone, both are cast into Lethe; if choices differ, the one who chooses alone gains guarded, unlimited passage while the other will “wish for oblivion.”

After a brief, uneasy consultation—Peter urging a cooperative, Kantian “shared ends” mindset—silks divide them. Presented with a red apple (together) and a green apple (alone), Alice recognizes a prisoner’s dilemma. Overwhelmed by pain, memory, and rage at Grimes and Peter, she chooses green. The curtain lifts to reveal Peter holding red, stunned by her betrayal as the consequences set in.