Alice and Peter walk through Hell until they reach the Viewing Pavilion, where the veil between worlds is thin. A reverse image of Cambridge’s Graduate Lab Seven is above them, and they can see their peers reacting to the pentagrams they left behind. They enter Asphodel, where souls come to terms with their death and make amends before moving on. Alice hopes Grimes is still there. With items Peter brought—cigarettes, bread, and port—they make a sacrifice, hoping to bring Grimes to them.

Instead, they summon Archimedes, the analytical magick department’s cat. He is still alive, but cats can cross the veil; he fetches four undergraduates who died under Grimes’s watch when he was a new professor. Most are shocked that Grimes is in Hell, but one girl admits she recognized him when he asked for directions out of Asphodel. They point to the way out. 

Peter asks if they want to go together so they can pass over, and they admit they’re scared to reincarnate, in case they reincarnate into less-privileged lives. Alice thinks this is a prejudiced view. The Shades vanish.

As Peter and Alice contemplate how to get past the queue and exit Asphodel, they meet another Shade who encountered Grimes. He reports that Grimes was in a hurry to pass through the Underworld. They decide to pass the crowd by climbing a wall built of bones. Alice climbs easily but realizes Peter is afraid of heights. She coaches him through a panic attack.

When they reach the top, Peter collapses atop Alice, crying. There is tension about their shared history. On the other side of the wall, the ground roils and shifts, refusing to be mentally categorized into a “mappable image” (50).

They make it down the other side of the wall, where the plains of Asphodel are replaced by barren desert. Peter mentions he felt like Alice and Grimes were at odds before his death, and reveals he got a prestigious award that Grimes had told Alice she would get; she reveals Grimes took her on a research trip to Italy that Peter was supposed to go on.

After this, they both apologize for bringing up competitive details and vow to set worldly matters aside on the journey. Alice sets up her blanket and, realizing Peter didn’t bring one, offers to share.

Alice thinks back to before starting her PhD, when she was told to explore options other than a tenure-track job. Due to the rise of conservative governments in Europe and the United States and the emphasis on profit, tenured jobs in magick are rare, and it is difficult to work in that field outside academia, but Alice is not willing to entertain another option. She thinks back on her undergraduate advisor, who advised her not to work with Grimes because his students were infamously unhappy and had a 50% graduation rate.

Once at Cambridge, people continued to warn Alice about Grimes. Grimes’s only other female advisee, Olivia, had trouble graduating past coursework and eventually took medical leave and disappeared. Alice was excited by the idea of working with someone dangerous and frustrated that she got so close to graduation before Grimes’s death.

Alice wakes up nestled with Peter and enjoys the proximity until Peter gets a sleep-related erection. He apologizes profusely, and she changes the subject. 

As they eat, they discuss their own maps of hell. Peter’s, based on Orpheus’s map, looks like stacked pizzas. He thinks that by finding the center where the discs converge, they can go to whichever level, or “Court,” they want to. Alice thinks Orpheus’s map is too colored by his grief for Eurydice to be accurate. Alice sees the Courts as levels, connected by the Lethe, which acts as a Möbius Strip. She thinks they should search every level, and Peter acquiesces.

Before they leave, he brings up their sleeping arrangements again. Alice wishes their relationship could be as easy as it has been in the past. As Peter talks, the wall they descended yesterday disappears, and Hell takes the shape of a place they’re both familiar with: Campus.

A section titled “On Reincarnation” explains that Hell is not a place of eternal damnation. Rather, souls are “continuously flowing” (78) between worlds as one is reincarnated, though no one can agree how that works. They also do not know the role punishment plays in Hell. They do know that souls eventually travel to Lord Yama, known by other names in other mythologies (Hades, Anubis, etc.).

The map settles into a classic-looking campus, but with no greenery or undergraduates. Only the library building is in focus, and Alice realizes it must be the First Court: Pride. Inside, Shades move between the stacks. A Shade informs Alice and Peter that the task to move on is to give an oral defense of their answer to the prompt, “define the good” (84). 

A Shade named George Edward Moore volunteers to give them a tour. He explains that people can end up in Pride for anything, from insisting people cite their own research to simply being a creative writing student. Alice decides Grimes can’t be in Pride, as she believes his pride was proper, rather than the improper types Moore lists.

Moore takes them to his office; he wants to talk with Peter about Cambridge and ignore Alice, but she insists on asking why they can’t simply walk to Desire, the Second Court. Moore says they have to answer the research question first, but admits no one has solved it satisfactorily during his time there. Alice gets him to agree that if he uses two premises to support the conclusion that they must complete the question, they’ll stay. Moore gets lost in adding new premises, and Alice and Peter sneak away.