Bishop spent the day in Hope's room, collapsing in a weary and headachy heap on the sofa after helping Hope back to his room and tossing a blanket over his coiled form. He was sleeping deeply, dreamlessly, for what must have been several hours before he was woken by a rapid banging on the door. At first Bishop thought it was just the pounding of his head and tried to roll over and go back to sleep, but the rattling continued. Groaning, body throbbing, mind a fog, Bishop staggered to his feet and went to the door.

The room was dark, bloodred curtains drawn to prevent any afternoon light from seeping in. Hope's bedroom door was still closed, which Bishop assumed meant Hope had slept through the noise. He hoped that was the case. Scratching a scab on his elbow, Bishop reached the front door and swung it open.

Freya was standing there. Bishop was struck all at once by how little she looked, standing with her hands behind her back, her hair mussed and her mascara smudged. It was sort of touching to see her in such a manner, tenuous and on edge. But Bishop realised what she must be here for – who, rather – and he made an effort to toughen his exterior, to look on coldly as she peered up at him with big, hopeful eyes.

"I was looking for Hope," she said.

"It is his suite," said Bishop, as if Freya could have been unaware. Yes; he was spending the day with Hope, and she was not.

She traded her weight between her feet. "I think I did something wrong. I wanted to apologise to him." She made to step forward, as if to brush past Bishop.

Bishop closed the gap between himself and the doorframe by resting his forearm against it, making a point of leaning lazily down so that his face was at her height. Her eyes flashed with defiance then, but nothing so resolute as she'd have needed to push past him. "He doesn't want to see you," Bishop said, though this was a lie.

Freya looked stricken. "I don't understand what I did wrong. Really, if you'd just let me–"

Bishop glanced over his shoulder at the inside of the room, making sure Hope's door was still closed, and then his gaze slid back to Freya with deliberate, tormenting slowness. His face read as if he knew something that she didn't, something terrible about her that she'd never understand. His face was a liar, of course. "I think you hurt him, Freya. He'd like it if you avoided him for a little while."

For a second, she braced herself as if for combat, glaring up at him, her jaw working on some retort. But in the end she took a resigned step back and looked down at the floor, her mouth falling slightly open with dismay. "I'll go, then."

"Good idea," Bishop crooned.

He watched her go until she was back inside her own room – she did not look back once – and only then did he retreat back inside Hope's, padding back to the couch, overcome by satisfaction at the interaction he'd just had. He had lied to her, been horrible to her, but this was a game, and he was playing it how it had been made to be played. If he was to get to the end with Hope, he had to make Hope believe Bishop was his one true ally. The only one that mattered; the only one he could trust. Elimination of other factors, other allies, was the most efficient way to ensure his success.

Bishop fell back to sleep on the sofa, and by the time he woke up properly at sunset, he had almost forgotten about his conversation with Freya entirely, having lost it beneath so many dreams.

When he woke, the suite was perfectly quiet. Hope's door was slightly ajar but there was no sign of him in the main room. When Bishop sat up, he realised that he was beneath a blanket, one that he had not gone to sleep beneath, and his head had been propped up on a satin pillow where earlier it had been resting awkwardly on the arm of the couch.

Rubbing sleep from his eyes, Bishop looked down and found, to his surprise, a note on the coffee table, written on a shimmery little white card that stood like a tent. All that was written on it was, J.A Library. Studying. And beside the card, two bowls: one of cut seasonal fruits, the other of several small Danishes, a book stacked atop the bowls to prevent the air or the insects from getting to the contents. There were pomegranate seeds in the first bowl. Seven of them. The food could not have been sitting there for more than an hour – Bishop must have been dozing peacefully while Hope prepared this for him. His head was blissfully empty as he reached to displace the book and take the fruit bowl into his palm. This strange, subtle kindness was completely absurd to him. The fact that Hope, hungover and haunted by a past he'd so recently escaped, had gotten up to not only prepare himself for a day of gruelling study, but had also allotted time to bringing Bishop food and warmth and a directory note, was so perplexing and endearing that for some moments Bishop was too stunned to even touch the food.

When he did, it was ripe and sweet, and as he ate it he was thinking of Hope, who was perhaps the best of all people in the world.

On the first of March, all of the women on campus enjoyed their own rendition of Matronalia, female contenders in the lead. The men were to exclude themselves, admire from afar but not interfere. Bishop intended to study all day, but he, along with most others, was drawn out onto his balcony after a certain point, too intrigued to dismiss the music, the endless laughter of the prancing women. Campus was colourful and bustling. With their hair falling loose and their dresses billowing, the girls revelled in the bliss that was their womanhood, cherishing one another with an intensity they'd never appreciated before. They were buzzing for days and days afterwards.

The weekend consisted of studying, in a more difficult and somehow simultaneously more enjoyable environment than Bishop had ever known. He felt the constant need to surpass his peers and they all did, too, so the sessions became a ravenous cycle of destroying one another and being destroyed. And yet there was something comforting about how typical the mayhem was. Nobody had died since the contenders had taken down Hunter and as the grief faded, a new sense of security was beginning to settle, like a warm blanket over the contenders' shoulders.

The contenders studied all together most of the time, but sometimes broke into smaller groups to discuss private matters or topics irrelevant to the general crowd. The shuffle was constant and unpredictable; it did not matter who was friendly with who. It mattered which gods were associated, who had been paying attention in certain classes, those with related majors who could draw on old knowledge. The consensus was: help and be helped. Contribute and be immersed. They migrated constantly between libraries, parks and unused art rooms, smelling thickly of paint and cardboard and oil pastels.

Daphne had often taken day classes in these rooms, shaping clay into imperfect female figures, cutting lino into landscapes and printing it on black paper. The contenders were almost wholly detached from the other Holloway students, but there were remnants of Daphne in this room. Drying portraits with her name scribbled in the top corner; books checked out from the arts library in her name. It filled Bishop with a deep and hollow sense of bereavement, as if her ghost was haunting him, and he could tell the others felt the same. They didn't address the topic of Daphne once despite it.

Because there was no predicting what the exam would actually be about, they studied everything. The tales of Metamorphoses and the words of Cicero and certain portraiture techniques. They examined images of architecture form various ages and attempted to apply dates to them. They came as close to certain poisons as they dared and named them. They plucked at lyre strings and Hope judged them from afar.

The trick to all of this was to move so fast, think so hard and so much, that there was no room for imaginations to stray or for idle chatter to turn dark.

Hope and Freya were keeping their distance as best they could in the stifling environment, giving one another a wide berth and dropping their gazes to the ground. Hope had obviously picked up on the fact that Freya was avoiding him, and so he was doing the same. Bishop looked on with dark entertainment masked beneath his indifference, proud of himself for orchestrating this routine of theirs. With any luck, it would last a long time. Long enough for him to solidify his superior bond with Hope. Long enough for Hope to begin steering clear of others out of will, rather than the obligation he felt now to reciprocate Freya's avoidance.

But Bishop was also noticing more and more people attempting to befriend Hope. Offering him their answers, their guesses at what might be on the exam in hopes of training him like a dog to associate them with success. They pleaded with him – Give me your ring, and I'll get you out of here. I'll get you to the end. Give me your ring and we will both win. They were all within proximity to simply steal the ring, but nobody was bold enough to face more death. Not yet, anyway.

But only Bishop knew that Hope had nothing to lose by keeping the ring to himself. Only Bishop knew that Hope didn't want to get to the end with somebody he cared little for; perhaps sometimes he didn't want to get to the end at all. All these promises of seeing his family again, returning home in one piece, make his eyes flicker darkly with an animosity that nobody else would ever understand but Bishop. There was nothing waiting for Hope at home. He'd win this competition for himself, by his own rules, or would not win it at all.

When they met the Overseers at the Museum on Monday night, the pair was in oddly good spirits, which immediately made Bishop ill at ease in anticipation for what he and his friends would soon be up against.

It felt a lot later than it was. The afternoon had been dark, storm clouds convening in the far skies at first and then crawling, in a foreboding manner, nearer and nearer. Now the air was crisp and tense, as if the world was holding its final breath before the storm broke out. But it was uncharacteristically chilly for Spring, and accordingly the contenders were all wearing coats. It reminded Bishop of their first day here, the new-winter wind stirring their excitement as they gathered, glittering and oblivious to all that would come. The academic aesthetic was made with cold weather in mind, Bishop had concluded after many years of being unable to compose a satisfactory outfit in warmer months.

The Overseers said nothing as they led the contenders through the maze that was the Museum. Over the course of their time here, they had all become more familiar with the Museum – found a home in it, even. Once one became familiar with the walls, the eerie statues, the glaring paintings, it was a comforting place. But after a few too many stairwells and sharp turns, Bishop realised that tonight, he had no idea where the Overseers were leading them. It was clear nobody else knew, either. It was perfectly likely that they walked and descended the same set of stairs and looped the same rooms a hundred times, but magic was distorting their ability to recognise all the locations weren't different. Even the Louvre didn't have as many storeys and rooms as the Museum seemed to, now.

However when they arrived in front of an elegant door, Bishop knew he'd never been in this part of the building before. The door looked like it ought to open into a throne room.

"Your exam," the Second Overseer said, "will begin once you step inside this room. It is a physical exam in some respects, but you'll find it highly demanding of your knowledge, as well. So, we hope you have been studying." She clasped her hands.

"We urge you to keep in mind," the man in brown said with a thin smile, "that although it is never our intention to hurt you or push you beyond your absolute capabilities, this is a competition where the fittest excel and the others fall behind. This exam will exemplify that."

There was no more information from them. The Overseers stood on either side of the double doors and, as if on command, they groaned open. An enormous black chasm appeared before the group and as one they stepped forward into the yawning entrance, drawn by its emptiness, its lack of promise. The Overseers encouraged them in. Tranced, the contenders crept into the blackness.

"Take careful note of what you see," the Second Overseer murmured ominously as the young magicians filtered by her.

But they couldn't see anything, and for some reason Bishop understood quickly that this would be the point of the trial.

Once all the contenders were cross the threshold, two things happened at once: the doors swung heavily shut, shooing some stragglers forward in their indiscriminate and rather barbaric slam, and light flooded the room.

Bishop immediately turned to Atticus, but this wasn't Atticus's doing. The overhead lighting, one single chandelier, illuminated the enormous space. It looked like a small ballroom, or school hall, and Bishop didn't know how it fit in the Museum or if they were even still in the Museum at all. But it was completely empty in the centre. On the walls there were windows, nothing but the foggy night sky beyond. Tentative raindrops lashed against the glass, the beginnings of a storm finally transpiring. The edges of the room possessed tall and artistic columns like those all over campus, a constant reminder of the history the Institute served. Then there were the statues, cherubs and fantastical heroes poised with bows and snarling beasts for pets, twirling the ends of their hair or staring into the distance evermore, aloof and determined. But the room had no books, no desks, nothing typically expected of an exam room, or any room, as a matter of fact. There was nothing to eat, nowhere to stand.

Bishop realised, when he made a quick whirl of distress, that the doors had an innumerable series of locks on them. Keyholes like pocks in the great hardened skin of the doors, bolts and padlocks and all sorts of barricades keeping the contenders in. Predictably, when Zion noticed this too, he hurled a vicious kick at the doors and drove his fists against them, to which they did not so much as rattle in place. Bodhi mildly tried the handle, but this, of course, also failed. The locks were serving their purpose: to bar the contenders in. Atticus sighed with exasperation beside Bishop. This entire sequence of events must have lasted just a few seconds.

Just as quickly as they had flicked on, the lights blinked out again, and the contenders were stranded once more in the invisible marble abyss.

Several of them swore beneath their breath. Bishop stepped backwards and toppled into the twins, who hissed like cats and shoved him away. He swung around, but they were gone before he reached them, laughing like jesters on his sides.

The darkness was not the sort that could be obscured by fragile rays of light or the sort that eyes could adjust to. Despite the windows in the room, the darkness was whole. If Bishop hadn't known better, he would've thought it was his own doing. The darkness was not a lack of light but another entity completely, and it was oppressive.

The contenders started to wander, muttering about how this isn't a proper exam and how they'd never been taught anything like this before. Before long they were all stranded individually in the darkness, feeling for non-existent landmarks, anything to secure their location, to understand.

"Atticus, light," Bishop urged.

"It's not working."

"It's not working? Your magic isn't working?"

There was a grunt of effort from Atticus but no result, no light. "There's magic keeping us in this room that's stronger than mine. I can't summon anything."

It was not so much that he couldn't summon anything, Bishop supposed. It was that whenever he did summon something, the darkness hurriedly stamped it out like a spark fallen to the ground.

Just as Bishop was about to start pushing his way towards Atticus, there was a mighty grating sound and several outcries from around the room. Bishop stepped forward only to find his way suddenly blocked. The terrible noise continued for several seconds on end and Bishop flailed with the new barricade before him, floundering above it like a mime, pressing on air where there was no wall in hopes of reaching over it. But the wall quickly met his hands and kept going up, up. He swung around, but he was boxed in on the other side, too. Several shrieks and accompanying groans of annoyance resounded around the room, and Bishop knew he couldn't be the only one trapped.

Panic lashed in Bishop's stomach like unruly vines. He pounded on the wall in front of him, then turned and pounded on the next, the next. His breath came in stops and starts. It was not so much the confinement that distressed him as it was the darkness. He hated it, knowing that shadows bore down on him and he had no control over them when, for his whole life, he had been burdened by his ability to tame them. Why, just when he wanted them, had they turned against him? He felt useless and frightened and overall quite pathetic.

Then something grabbed his ankle.

Bishop actually screamed. At the beginning of this competition he'd have sooner bitten off his own tongue than do such a thing, but now, nigh on a third's way through the game, with a diminishing cohort and a new fear of his very own power, he had no such pride. He stuffed himself in the corner and racked his brain for ideas on how he could possibly defend himself when he could see nothing.

"It's me. Jesus!" It was Annalise's voice.

Bishop snarled, heat finally rising to his cheeks now that the initial fear had been dispelled. "What are you doing down there?"

Though he couldn't see her, Bishop could tell Annalise had somehow pulled herself under one of the four walls boxing him in and was now using his sleeves to pull herself up. "There's a space under there," she said, like he was the idiot. "I just felt for it and crawled under."

Bishop felt as though he was losing his mind. He once would have checked all such possibilities before breaking down, and today he had hardly tested the solidity of all four walls before accepting his dastardly fate.

"I think we're in a maze," Annalise murmured.

"No shit, Barbie," Bishop snapped, but he was grateful for her corroborating suggestion. It made sense. He had thought he was completely barricaded inside this little square, but Annalise had found an entrance and crawled in – that meant there were probably several such open walls throughout the place, and Bishop had just been unlucky enough to get caught in a dead end when the walls had gone up.

The yelling started. Zion and Bodhi, calling out to one another, patting down the walls and taking little steps in hopes of finding one another, announcing their progress to the room. Atticus tried to find Annalise and Bishop but cried out with mixed surprise and delight when he instead ran into Harper. Bishop did not hear Hope's voice but did not call for him, nor for Maddox, who had also gone quiet. Chase chose to declare that he and Freya had been caught together and were safe; no need to look for them. Bishop suspected nobody had been planning to go searching anyway, all too pre-occupied already.

"The door had too many keyholes to count." It was Bodhi's voice, her pitch clear and intelligent, cutting across the now-silent room. "I suppose we just have to get out. That's the exam."

"How do we do that?" Zion's voice was lower, and there came the rapid thwack of a palm meeting flesh and Zion's sore grunt. Bodhi was clearly displeased with his lack of critical thinking.

"Look for keys," she said.

"In the darkness." Maddox's amused, cynical contribution.

"Yes. Feel around. Be creative with it. They've got to be around here, somewhere within these walls."

"It's one thing to say that," Annalise said, her voice sharp beside Bishop, "but if we can't see, how are we supposed to navigate the maze? Know where we've been, where we haven't? The keys could be lying right in the middle of the path and we'd still have no clue."

Bodhi was silent for a moment. "It's an exam," she said eventually, with an edge to her voice. "We're not supposed to just know how to do it. We're supposed to figure it out."

Bishop sighed frustratedly and attempted to compose himself, shutting his eyes for a few moments, managing his breaths, before reaching out and taking hold of Annalise's sleeve.

"We should stick together," he said.

It seemed like everybody else had a similar idea. Those who were in pairs already began muttering about which way to go next, which walls to test for doors, anything. There was never once a suggestion to split up – maybe it would cover more ground, but coverage would mean nothing if death was waiting around the corner and pairs were never reunited to discuss the outcome of their expeditions.

The first few keys were in likely places. Hidden trap doors in the floor; break-the-glass windows in the walls; hanging on statues' necks. The others were not so easy. Some were cemented inside the tile grout, and Zion had to smash the tiles apart to reach the keys. Some were hanging from the ceiling but only descended to a reachable level when three people stood on certain tiles and answered riddles derived from Roman myths. One was in the belly of an asp, who wrestled with a shrieking Harper until she started prattling off facts about Cleopatra and Caesar, and the snake dropped dead at her feet. She must have gotten something right, though nobody knew what. Nice as it was to believe the snake had had its venom removed just in case Harper had not been so lucky, there was really no telling if this was the case.

But for every key that they found, it seemed there were a hundred more that were still missing. The biggest lock had the smallest keyhole – it could've been anywhere, the tiny thing. There seemed to be an air of dejected resignation that gradually settled, in the way a blanket of fog might, over the previously hopeful, energetic contenders. The chatter died away and the slam of trap doors, click of keys fitting locks, and swish of movement vanished altogether. They had found the keys, so many of them, too many to count – but not the one that mattered.

Bishop and Annalise slumped against one another in the corner, bleeding and fed up. It could well have been the same corner they'd started in, for all they knew; in the darkness, every turn was the same, every wall a twin to the last.

"I think we are just going to die down here, then," Annalise conceded, dropping her head against Bishop's shoulder. He had a feeling that, in a bright room, she wouldn't have done such a thing. But here, where nobody could see her, there would never be any proof of her softness and so she succumbed to it for just a few weak moments.

"I suppose," Bishop sighed. "Tell me your deepest, darkest secrets before they're gone forever," he added, as a joke.

Annalise was silent for a moment. Then she said, "I tried to kill my mother last May," and she was not joking.

Anybody else might have rapidly drawn away from her, stared through the darkness at her with an aghast shock she couldn't see. Bishop was silent for a few thoughtful seconds and then rested his head on top of hers. "Tried?" he echoed.

Annalise's voice was bitter. "My sister found us. She was horrified. Neither of us liked Mother very much, but I was certainly the only one with the thought to kill her. I had not even lain my hands on her. All I had to get a grasp on was her mind."

Bishop understood. He'd always been envious of the magicians with a penchant for emotions. They could rewire minds, plant ideas that hadn't even existed as an inkling before just by switching somebody's happiness to grief in an ill-fitting moment. If Analise had overwhelmed her mother with an unshakeable depression, perhaps, or a manic compulsion to do something she'd never have the chance to regret, it could easily have led to an easily-coverable suicide.

"We were her most ground breaking accomplishments. Her revolution," Annalise said theatrically, and Bishop heard her hands lift in the darkness, only to fall back into her lap a second later. "We were the things she was most proud of and most hated. Bella and me. We served her like a queen until I couldn't take it anymore."

Bishop thought Annalise must really have thought she was going to die today, if she was sharing all of this now. At the same time, she did not sound disappointed in herself, not contemptuous or rueful. Bishop urged her on. "There is little else to say," she said in a strange, conclusive voice like she was voicing the finishing pages of a riveting story. "We were beautiful and magical and rich. She paraded us around on stages, at parties, before all her wealthy friends, presenting us like assets and not daughters. My father had the mind to leave her when we were young. He's not absent in my life – in fact, he's always asking me to some live with him. Leave France, come to Australia. Stay with me. But it's all bullshit. I'd rather be with my vain mother than my father, who is truthfully very stupid and equally self-obsessed. I'd be lending my bedroom to a stray young woman every night."

Bishop laughed lightly, but he obviously hadn't been meant to, because Annalise elbowed him in the ribs. "I mean it. He's an idiot. And my mother is terrible, but at least she's in high places. I thought in killing her, I might inherit that ridiculous throne of hers. Me and Bella." Bishop strangely liked the way that Annalise declared what she'd done, trying to kill her mother, rather than stating that she had tried to make her mother kill herself. There was some disparity between just how diabolic each was. She was not fooling Bishop into thinking she had merely tipped her mother over the edge. She had entirely gone out of her way to ensure somebody she abhorred would be out of her sight forever. But she had failed. "When Bella found us, I lost my concentration and Mother recovered. The following morning when I woke, they'd both fled, not so much as a note left behind."

"And you haven't heard from them since?"

Annalise stiffly shook her head. "I don't think I ever will, so long as Mother lives. Perhaps when she dies – the proper, normal way this time – Bella will find me again. But I will not go looking."

Bishop didn't respond to this. There was really nothing to say – nothing to do but dwell on this new knowledge, appreciate the Annalise he now knew, rather than the one he'd known five minutes earlier.

He still had not said anything when Annalise turned into his shoulder and said, "You have done terrible things, too. I know it. You carry the weight of it all with you, always. That's why I've told you this."

Bishop considered just then, for a fleeing moment only, telling her what he had done to his own parents, how he had sabotaged his own life and was still living with it, just like this imaginary weight she spoke of him harbouring. But he'd given Hope that secret. He couldn't well share it again.

Bishop was about to open his mouth, perhaps to weave some kind of comforting lie, perhaps to say something he'd regret. Whatever it might have been, he did not get the chance.

There was a tickle against Bishop's knuckles, curly hair, and suddenly Atticus was crawling under the gap in the wall. "It's Bodhi," he panted.

Bishop and Annalise were immediately alert. Annalise said, "What's wrong? What happened?"

Bishop said, "How did you find us?"

"Bodhi," Atticus said again. "She found the last key."

Atticus's huge grin was suddenly visible as thelights in the room burst back to life, and the maze started to recede into theground.