In Michaelmas term at Cambridge, Alice Law decides she must retrieve her advisor Jacob Grimes’s soul from Hell to save her dissertation, career prospects, and to atone. She studies perilous Tartarology, assembles supplies, and completes a complex transportative pentagram, determined to bargain with King Yama.

Peter Murdoch interrupts, instantly diagnosing her design and rudely modifying the pentagram to admit two travellers. He reveals he has been pursuing the same goal, explaining the mysteriously missing library sources. Despite resenting his easy brilliance and forced cheer, Alice accepts his help for speed and survival, weighing imperfect knowledge against collaboration.

They confirm the price of entry—half their remaining lifespans—and proceed, dividing incantation languages. Alice’s choice is clear: a shortened but brilliant life over aging into irrelevance. Peter hints at private necessity but withholds details. Together they chant the rite to fix the destination and target Grimes’s soul.

A flashback reveals the true cause of Grimes’s death: sleep-deprived, agitated, and distracted, Alice failed to close loops and skipped the Ant Test, turning routine set-theory work catastrophic. Grimes’s body was torn apart in a gruesome implosion. Alice concealed her involvement; the university deemed it an unforeseeable accident and moved on, but her guilt and need for Grimes’s patronage did not.

The spell completes in a column of light and force. After overwhelming pressure and disorientation, the pair emerge intact in gray, ashen plains beneath a red sky. Elated that the transit worked, Alice shoulders her pack and orients toward distant terrain, and with Peter beside her, begins the journey into Hell’s courts to find Grimes.