When the lights suddenly go out, Lyra is shaken less by the darkness than by Grayson’s earlier admission that he had not meant to push her away the previous year. Lyra tries to dismiss her own feelings, telling Grayson she is not afraid, while remaining painfully aware of the distance she believes exists between them.

Grayson immediately checks on Lyra, then focuses on Odette when the older woman admits she is not well. Odette describes symptoms that sound like anger rather than a medical crisis, and Lyra realizes Odette is furious because the blackout has destroyed their assumption about how much time remains before dawn.

Odette frames the blackout as a Hawthorne-style twist built on illusion, but Grayson rejects that explanation. Grayson argues that a real Hawthorne-designed twist would have been foreshadowed by clues and would make sense once revealed; this outage feels senseless, which convinces Grayson it was not part of the planned game.

Lyra asks whether the emergency and hint buttons still work, then finds and presses them herself in the dark. Nothing happens. Grayson concludes the radio is out, reinforcing his belief that the blackout is unplanned.

Odette then suggests a more troubling possibility: even if the outage was not planned by Grayson’s brothers or Avery, it may still not be a coincidence. Odette points out that the house, the room, the locks, and the chain reactions depend on power, leading Grayson to confirm that they are truly locked in, outside the intended design of the game.