Lyra runs because the pain gives her something she can control. After recovering the repressed memory of her biological father’s suicide, she has abandoned dancing, withdrawn from people, and fled to an out-of-state college, where she has been barely functioning.

As Lyra runs, she fixates on her parents’ financial strain and concludes that dropping out of college is the only way to reduce the burden on them. The thought hurts more than she expects because even an isolated, half-numb life at school still feels better than collapsing completely.

After exhausting herself on the track, Lyra is catcalled by a group of soccer players. When their ball rolls to her, she uses skills learned from her soccer-coach father to kick it toward the goal, deliberately bouncing it off the crossbar so it strikes the catcaller in the head.

Lyra then heads toward the Registrar’s Office to drop out, but she diverts to the campus post office as a way of delaying the decision. In her PO box, she finds a heavy linen envelope with no return address or postage, making it clear someone placed it there by hand.

Inside is a note reading, YOU DESERVE THIS, which crumbles into dust as she holds it. The second item is a thin engraved metal ticket bearing a QR code and the words The Grandest Game, revealing that Lyra has been invited—or summoned—into Avery Grambs’s famous competition.