Raphael enters the maze to find Matthew

Sarah Raphael’s entry into the labyrinth is both an investigative breakthrough and a rescue attempt: guided by Laurence Arne-Sayles’s account of Matthew Rose Sorensen’s disappearance, she deliberately follows the intellectual path that had drawn Matthew into the House. Her arrival brings the outside search into the labyrinth itself, where she calls for Ketterley and announces that she has come for Matthew as floodwater enters the halls.

The search reaches the labyrinth

Raphael explains that her search began with Angharad Scott, who had written a book about Laurence Arne-Sayles. Six years earlier, Matthew had contacted Scott because he was considering writing about Arne-Sayles; the two spoke at length, and then Matthew disappeared from her life. In May of the year Raphael recounts this, Scott contacted the London college where Matthew had worked to ask about his book. She learned that he had been missing for almost the entire period since their conversation. Because Scott knew of other disappearances connected with Arne-Sayles, she recognized a troubling pattern and alerted the police.

The connection between Matthew and Arne-Sayles was not already known to the police: Scott’s report was the first time they learned of it. Raphael says that the remaining members of Arne-Sayles’s circle—Bannerman, Hughes, Ketterley, and Arne-Sayles himself—made the situation appear deeply suspicious. Tali Hughes repeatedly apologized, Arne-Sayles welcomed the attention, and Ketterley lied whenever he spoke. Raphael’s account gives Matthew’s disappearance a wider human context: he was not an isolated missing person but another in a sequence associated with the same circle.

Arne-Sayles’s explanation

Raphael and her colleagues initially treated Arne-Sayles’s claim that Matthew was in a labyrinth as provocation. He had said it outright, but they assumed he was trying to wind them up; the claim sounded too extraordinary to be useful. Raphael chose a different method. Since Arne-Sayles liked talking, she let him continue, expecting that he might eventually disclose something actionable. The search therefore turns not on a single confession but on listening closely to a man whose habitual performance makes truth difficult to separate from deliberate misdirection.

A recording on Raphael’s small device preserves Arne-Sayles’s explanation. He argues that Matthew attempted to enter another world, and that the attempt caused him to disappear. In Arne-Sayles’s account, Matthew did not need to believe that another world existed: he tried because he wanted to understand Arne-Sayles’s thinking. Raphael asks whether the attempt itself made Matthew disappear, and Arne-Sayles confirms that it did. His explanation makes the attempt a dangerous method of inquiry, not merely a theory Matthew entertained from a safe distance.

Arne-Sayles then turns the same logic toward Raphael. Matthew, he says, sought to understand Arne-Sayles; Raphael wants to understand Matthew. If she adjusts her perceptions and performs the actions Arne-Sayles describes, she will learn what happened to Matthew. Raphael asks what she will know, and he answers that she will know what happened to him. When the recording falls silent, Raphael explains that Arne-Sayles had instructed her to return to a pre-rational mode of thought and told her which path to choose. She had assumed that the paths were metaphorical. Discovering that they were literal startled her: his directions had led her into the labyrinth.

A meeting amid rising water

By the time Raphael reaches the halls, Matthew—now living as Piranesi—has come to believe that Ketterley has set a trap for her. He reasons that Ketterley may have arranged to meet her and promised to tell her how to find Matthew, and he wants to reach her before she reaches Ketterley. The warning he remembers from the Prophet is stark: the closer Raphael comes, the more dangerous Ketterley will become. Piranesi’s priority is her safety, although he regards approaching Ketterley as dangerous in itself.

The confrontation begins with a voice calling Ketterley from among the southern doors. Piranesi recognizes it as a woman’s voice and realizes that Raphael is there. She calls again and declares that she has come for Matthew Rose Sorensen. Ketterley grabs Piranesi by the arm and shouts that he has Matthew and that Raphael should come and get him. His words make the danger immediate: the person she seeks is present, but Ketterley is using that fact to draw her closer while holding him.

The timing makes the encounter still more perilous. The booming of the tides grows louder, the hall reverberates, and water flows in through the southern doors. Piranesi warns Raphael that Ketterley means her harm and has a gun. A small, slight figure then steps from the doorway leading to the First Southern Hall. She wears jeans and a green jumper, with dark hair tied in a ponytail. Her physical arrival confirms that Arne-Sayles’s instructions have brought the investigator into the same dangerous space as the missing man—and into Ketterley’s reach.

From investigation to rescue

Ketterley keeps hold of Piranesi with his left hand and swings his right arm back to hit him. Piranesi moves with the swing, overbalances Ketterley, breaks free, and runs toward Raphael. The movement reverses the immediate balance of control: Ketterley had been using Piranesi as bait, but Piranesi’s escape lets him act to protect Raphael. As he runs, he shouts that a flood is coming and that they must climb. The search for Matthew has become an emergency escape from both an armed adversary and the rising tide.

Raphael’s entry is significant because it joins two routes into the labyrinth. The first is Matthew’s attempt to understand Arne-Sayles, which led to his disappearance; the second is Raphael’s attempt to understand Matthew, which carries her after him. Arne-Sayles deliberately presents the same hazardous method as a way to reach knowledge, and Raphael accepts it with a different aim. Her arrival therefore does not simply answer where the missing man went: it brings someone from his former life into the world where he has become Piranesi, at a moment when Ketterley’s trap and the flood converge.

The episode also sets the limits of Raphael’s knowledge. She has followed Arne-Sayles’s instructions and reached the labyrinth, but her arrival does not by itself make her understand the transformation Matthew describes: shocked and frightened when he first arrived, he fell asleep, and Piranesi was born. Piranesi now recognizes the old journal entries as Matthew’s descriptions of another world. Raphael’s search has succeeded in finding him, while the meaning of his divided identity still has to be explained between them. The rescue begins not with a return to ordinary life, but with a warning to climb as the waters enter the halls.