Eluvie would have gasped, but she had no voice. The words seemed to come from all around her. It had an odd quality too. It did not sound like the real voices she heard. Rather, it sounded like the invisible ones.

"What?" She asked. "Wait. Did I just speak?"

She had. And her voice sounded just like the invisible ones.

"I said, what is your problem?" The voice said again. "I didn't let you down here so that you could bother me. Who do you think you are?"

"No - I - who are you?"

"No one," the voice said. "Now, be quiet and let me sleep."

"No, please," Eluvie said. "I need help."

The voice remained silent.

"Please, if you could just -"

There was a roar, so loud and terrifying that Eluvie shrank into a ball once again.

"Why are you so annoying?! Are you a baby? Do you pay me? Do I look like your servant? So, why do you think your problems are my problems?"

"They're not. It's just -"

"So, stop bothering me or I'll throw you back up there."

Eluvie remained in silence for a few moments.

"You won't," she said. "You helped me escape from them. You're not cold-hearted. Besides, I don't want to bother you. I want to escape from here and never bother you again. If you help me until I can do that, I'll leave you in peace. But if you don't, I'll keep bothering you. And I'll tell everyone about you so that they can bother you too. Then, after they kill me, they'll bother you all the time, and you'll still have my death on your conscience - if you have a conscience. What are you? A ghost?"

There was a long pause, the tunnel closed, leaving only the space that she was occupying. She thought of complaining about the tight fit, but decided not to upset the ghost.

Curiously, she could no longer see the clinic. While the tunnels had remained, she had been able to see what was going on on the surface, despite her distance and the absence of a direct line of sight. Now, she felt as if she had been plunged into darkness. All she was aware of was the hole enclosing her.

Assuming the ghost had closed the hole leading up to the surface, she would now be more difficult to find. They would spend hours digging the entire area, searching for her.

Remember what happened the last time you felt confident?

Lady Mirab had a stick that caused pain and the rulers had handled her rebellion with self-assured calm. Perhaps they had not underestimated her. Perhaps she had underestimated them.

"Excuse me," she said.

The voice ignored her, but she knew that it could hear her.

"I don't mean to bother you," she said, "but do you have a way to help me escape? That way, I can stop bothering you."

Once again, there was no reply. Eluvie noted that she could not hear any other voices either. Typically, she could sense them, even when they were trying to be silent. Her bedroom was the only part of the palace completely empty of their presence. Her bedroom, and several hundred feet underground.

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"Please, say something," Eluvie said. "I'm starting to get claustrophobic."

There was still no response.

"If you don't respond, I'll just keep talking. I can talk a lot when I'm motivated."

"I'm not permitted to talk to you," the voice said. "And there's a limit to my patience. When a guest is ill-behaved, the host often throws him out."

Eluvie could have smiled. "Fine," she said. "No one is allowed to talk to me. I would ask why, but you probably can't answer that either. Are you simply not allowed to speak to humans? But, I'm not one. Oh, nevermind. If you can't talk, can you accept requests? Just help me do the things I ask until I can leave."

The voice said nothing.

"I'll take that as agreement," Eluvie said. "Firstly, I need to know what they're doing. Can you make me a tunnel that opens into their location? Make the end of it small enough that they won't notice it."

There was a moment's delay and a sensation of annoyance from the voice, but a tunnel opened upward from Eluvie's position, snaked upward, and opened as a pin-sized hole in the clinic. She climbed the hole - clinging to vertical surfaces was frighteningly easy - until she was just below the floor of the clinic. The room became visible a few meters before she reached it, and their voices traveled even farther. They were not loud; her senses were simply sharper.

Lady Mirab was still in the clinic. She was on her feet now, pacing and shooting occasional glares at the workers. Two shovels lay discarded on top of a mound of dirt in the room's center.

"She'll need light soon," Amu was saying. "This is unnecessary. Have people watching for her to come up to the surface."

Lady Mirab turned on him. "And what if she decides to just die down there? I can't believe the incompetence-"

"She'll probably come up," Amu said. "It will feel as if she's suffocating. She wouldn't endure it any more than we would endure drowning."

"Brilliant," Lady Mirab said. "So, we spread guards in every corner of this palace. Then, when she comes up, they'll what? Grab her and drag her out? I only have one lightning stick. There's nothing they can do to her."

Amu scoffed, disbelief written all over his face. "Still, you can't use the diggers. You can't just create a cave system under us. This place will collapse."

"You should have worried about that sooner, shouldn't you?"

Amu chuckled. "Lady Mirab, you can blame me for your failures if you wish, but if you don't want to keep failing, you need to consider your own role in this. You had the wrong approach from the beginning. Eluvie is a bright girl, but she isn't brave. She stood up to you because you pushed too hard. You should have let me sedate her for the baths, invent a good reason why she needed to be blindfolded. If she had never suspected anything wrong, she would have been anything you wanted."

"Well, thanks to your bias, we might not have the chance to start over. Better pray we capture her. Or I won’t kill you. I’ll let you try to find a job out in that mess," Lady Mirab said.

Lady Mirab left the room, leaving Amu and Eluvie’s four attendants to sigh in relief.

“She needs to pick a threat and stick to it,” Amu said.

Eluvie ruminated on their words. Lady Mirab’s statement about starting over especially bothered her. On the one hand, it seemed odd that Amu would acquiesce to a decision to kill her. But the idea that they had a way to “start over” seemed even more terrifying. She tried to imagine a world in which Lady Mirab had pretended to be kind to her, and felt like she had a mouth full of sour milk.

Just as worrisome was their claim that she would not last long without sunlight. She felt slightly ill, but she had attributed that to nervousness. Still, it seemed an easy problem to solve.

“Can you open another tunnel to the surface? To somewhere with sunlight but no people.”

There was a slight delay, and then a new tunnel opened, leading upward at an angle.

“Thank you,” Eluvie said. “Please close the other one. I don’t want anyone to find it.”

The ghost obeyed in silence. It was being oddly accommodating. Eluvie wondered when its grumpy self would return, but she decided not to dwell on that worry. She had other problems.

Excitement filled her at the thought of being in the sun again. In fact, she wondered why the idea had not come to her sooner.

She navigated the tunnel cautiously, aware that discovery could end badly for her. She stopped several feet from the surface and verified that there was no one in the vicinity. The tunnel exited in a patch of dry ground near the palace wall. It was well lit by the mid-morning sun, but too far from the guards stationed at the gate. Caution held her back for a few more seconds, but she eventually judged the risk to be minimal and sent a tendril to the mouth of the tunnel.

The effect was immediate. Strength filled the exposed part and traveled down to the rest of her body. She had only planned to test the exposure for several moments, but with each second that she remained there, the thought of leaving grew more distant. She told herself she would remain only a few more minutes, and then that she would leave if anyone came close.

And then she fell asleep.