Night falls as Elspeth ferries Alice and Peter to a cramped, book-stuffed hold and offers them safety over water. Elspeth explains how many books wash up at Desire and points them to rest; Peter briefly excuses himself, leaving Alice and Elspeth to talk. Sharing cigarettes, Elspeth demonstrates a Shade’s deliberate bodily coherence, likening it to proprioception and the effort of continuously willing a form.

Alice asks about Elspeth’s suicide. Elspeth answers bluntly, probing Alice’s own ideation, then sketches her disillusionment: the arbitrariness of academic rewards, and how Jacob Grimes’s humiliations epitomized a broken system she refused to grant causal power over her choice. She insists she was brilliant, that the game was rigged, and that the promised rewards never existed.

When Elspeth calls Grimes overrated, Alice bristles and defends his newer work on memory and impermanence. A wary silence follows as they assess one another. Elspeth then presents the self-torturer problem to frame Cambridge as a dial that only turns up: incremental compromises yielding eventual numbness, where pain and pleasure blur and nothing matters until death restores meaning.

Reading Alice, Elspeth concludes she is “all fucked up” but reassures her, saying Alice still seeks a way back up. Alice resents the pity yet accepts the comfort and settles to sleep in the stacks.

Alone, Alice recalls her entrance riddle—the Ever Better Wine paradox—and her answer: accept a satisfactory moment rather than chase an impossible optimum. She distills a harsher takeaway for herself: happiness is comparative, and it is better to outlast rivals than be the fool who opens the bottle too soon.