Nothing.
I sighed. My neck had started to throb from craning upward at the panels, and my eyelids kept drooping, heavy with cold and exhaustion. Sleep was pulling at me from every direction. I tried to resist it.
What was a Red Thread? Something to do with relationships — binding people together, maybe? Or did it literally summon a spool of red thread that sat in the corner and did absolutely nothing?
And what about Ear Friend? Would it give me a familiar in the shape of a disembodied ear? Would my own ear detach and develop a personality? Would it at least be useful?
It was pointless trying to reason it out. I had no clue.
Selena had given me nothing to work with, and I was lying on the floor of a cellar with blue fingers and a skull that felt like it had been used as a football.
So I went with the one that sounded more interesting.
"I choose EAR FRIEND!"
The panels froze in mid-air. Then they shimmered — bright pink, almost cheerful, deeply out of place — and disappeared.
That same tingling sensation moved under my skin like static electricity, there and gone in a second.
The room darkened.
I looked around, straining my eyes. I didn’t see anything shaped like an ear.
I didn’t feel any different. No surge of power, no dramatic internal shift.
I tried focusing on my ear, imagining it coming to life, imagining it speaking to me in a small wise voice like some kind of cartilage oracle.
I imagined my ear transforming into a hot naked woman with massive tits.
None of it worked.
I laughed at the ceiling. A short, hollow sound.
This was a hallucination.
The cold had gotten into my brain and I was dying in this cellar imagining floating panels and pink light and supernatural powers, and in about six hours Beatrice was going to come down and find a corpse.
And then, mostly as a joke, I shouted:
"Ear Friend, I choose you!"
The room went dark.
Not the same dark as before. That had been murky dark — the ordinary dark of a room with no light source.
This was something else. Pure dark. Total dark. The kind of dark that felt intentional.
And into that darkness came lines.
White lines, thin as thread, tracing the contours of everything around me. The walls. The floor. The low ceiling with its exposed beams.
The lines built the room in outline form, like an architect’s sketch, and as I focused they extended outward — through the walls and beyond them, up through the ceiling, down through the floor.
Staircases. Corridors. Cupboards and doorways and rooms stacked on rooms. A skeleton portrait of the entire mansion laid out in white on black, reaching in every direction.
I stared at it.
*Okay. That’s progress. But this can’t be the whole ability. What else can I do?*
I tried listening. Focused, the way you focus when you’re trying to catch a conversation across a noisy room.
I heard water dripping somewhere in the cellar walls. A mouse scratching under the floor.
Neither of those were new — I’d been listening to both for what felt like hours. Whatever enhancement Ear Friend offered, it wasn’t raw volume.
I tried something else. I imagined moving. Leaving my body and drifting toward one of the white-line corridors above.
And it worked.
My body stayed exactly where it was, still flat on the cold stone, still broken and bruised.
But some part of me rose out of it like smoke, weightless, and passed through the cellar door as though it wasn’t there, up the staircase, into the room above.
Then I stopped. Something pulled at me — an invisible tether connecting me back to the body below. I could feel the limit of it.
I couldn’t go further without snapping it, and I had a feeling snapping it would be a very bad idea.
But I still didn’t understand the name. What did any of this have to do with "Ear Friend?"
Then I heard the woman moaning.
I couldn’t see where she was.
Ear Friend showed me borders and edges, not figures. But I could hear her clearly, and I willed myself toward the sound and followed it through a wall into what the white lines told me was a storeroom.
"Baby you so hot," said a man.
"We can’t!" replied the moaning woman. "We have our duties to attend to."
"To hell with duties," said the man. "You be so hot in your maid uniform. I can’t wait to—"
I realized I was eavesdropping on two staff members going at it in a storeroom.
So that was what Ear Friend meant. It let me fly around and listen in on conversations — and apparently everything else — within a certain radius.
"S-stop," said the girl. "Not here. Didn’t you hear what happened to Meena? We’ll get caught. Mistress Beatrice will ... mpphfhfh."
Kissing sounds. The man was sucking her mouth so hard I was afraid he might suck her lips clean off.
"It’s okay ..." said the human vacuum. "She won’t find us. Nobody comes into this storeroom. Come on. I want you bad. Pull down your skirt."
"But ..."
"Please! I’m hot for you."
"Okay. But Bregg, please don’t cum inside of me like you did before— ahhhh."
There was a squishy wet sound of insertion, followed by the unmistakable rhythm of balls slapping against flesh.
This was gross and I wanted to turn the Ear Friend off.
But I forced myself to keep listening. I needed information.
Names, at minimum. One was a guard or something. The other was a maidservant. Luckily the guy had PE. Ten seconds later he grunted and called out:
"Jeana," he groaned. "I’m gonna c-cum!"
"Bregg no, not inside!"
"Hngghhhh!"
"Ahhhh! Nooooooo! I’ll get pregnant!"
I flew the Ear Friend away from there immediately. That was enough. I filed the names away — Bregg, Jeana — and kept moving.
I pushed into the other rooms, testing the range of the tether. Three more rooms, all empty of anything useful.
Beatrice wasn’t anywhere within range.
I heard nothing but pipes and the distant sound of wind moving through the upper floors.
Eventually I let the tether reel me back in and returned to my body with a jolt, like falling in a dream.
"Ear Friend deactivate!"
The white lines faded. The pure dark faded with them.
I was looking at the ordinary murky dark of the cellar again — the mouse still scratching under the floor, the water still dripping somewhere in the walls.
I lay on my back and stared at nothing.
Was Ear Friend the right choice? Would Red Thread have been better? It was too late to wonder now. The choice was made.
I had a ghost projection ability, a sketetal map of the mansion burned into my memory, and the names of two staff members who were currently in a storeroom dealing with the consequences of Bregg’s poor self-control.
It wasn’t much.
But it was more than I’d had when I woke up with Beatrice’s heel drilling into my stomach.
I closed my eyes, pulled my knees toward my chest for whatever warmth that bought me, and settled in to wait. My next opportunity would come.
I just had to not die before it did.