Chapter 21

[But during one particular window, 18:00–20:00, you can also hear movements within fifteen meters.]

Reading that, Liu Zhiyi felt a little rueful.

That window was when her mother got home from work; back in her school days, she'd strain to catch her mother's footsteps then.

[Otherwise, you can only hear movements within five meters — since the distance from the living-room couch to the security door is exactly five meters.]

The couch at home was pretty close to the security door, Liu Zhiyi thought.

But come to think of it, the props really were bound up with her own past.

Liu Zhiyi fixed her eyes on the last line.

[Note: with the headphones on, you can hear only those movements.]

Only those movements?

Meaning she could hear only the sounds ghosts made?

Liu Zhiyi took a few deep breaths first, then lifted the headphones off and let the breath out.

—Huff.

Hearing her own breathing, Liu Zhiyi understood.

Cat: "Can't hear it now?"

"Mm." She turned the headphones over in her hands. "Only certain sounds."

That said, Liu Zhiyi put them back on, then pulled one ear-cup aside, wanting to see whether she could keep one cup on her ear and leave the other ear free.

That way one ear could catch the ghosts and the other the world outside.

But the moment she pulled the cup away, the thing snapped back to her ear as if magnetized.

Cat: "Guess that loophole's no good."

Liu Zhiyi caught what it said. "So props do have loopholes you can exploit?"

Cat: "Right. And they can be upgraded."

"Upgraded?" That took Liu Zhiyi by surprise.

Cat: "Because a person's thoughts and feelings shift and change, and the props change with them — a lot of props even scale in strength with how intense the feeling is. The sadder, the more desperate you are, the stronger the prop…"

"…and the stronger the feeling, the harder it gets to leave the dungeon."

The cat let out a sigh.

Liu Zhiyi went still; she tipped her head up toward the sixth-floor balcony, paused a few seconds, then hung the headphones around her neck.

"Let's go."

The ground-floor entrance stood wide open, propped with a brick.

The door was a nuisance to open and shut, and loud with it, so someone had jammed it with a brick.

Her mother had complained to her about it, in fact.

Ah — thinking of her mother again…

Liu Zhiyi had learned by now to distract herself by studying her surroundings and turning over this and that, keeping her feelings from swinging.

Otherwise, in a place so full of the traces of her mother's life, it was hard not to be moved to grief at every turn.

Once she was on the stairs, she took off her shoes.

There was no help for it — the stairs in an old complex were that sensitive; step too hard and they'd set the whole stairwell humming.

Liu Zhiyi still remembered the watch's warning: "mama" was keenly tuned to any sound she made.

It was getting to the sixth floor and into the flat that would be the tricky part.

With a security door, even opening the lock as carefully as you could, that last turn of the cylinder always went "click."

In college it was that "click" that got Liu Zhiyi caught coming home late by her mother more times than she could count.

She did think about climbing in through the building's outer wall, but one look at the slick wall face and the flat cement ground below, and she didn't think her body had another fall in it.

In the end, Liu Zhiyi tiptoed to the outside of her own security door.

She patted herself down — with how hurried "mama" had been shoving her out the window, there was no telling whether she even had her keys on her.

One pat, and there they were, hanging around her neck.

As a child she'd always worn her keys on her neck: once she'd left them in the door and forgotten to pull them out, so her mother had simply braided a long cord and hung the keys from it — forget to turn around and the cord would tug at her.

After that, she never lost her keys again.

Just as she was thinking it, the watch buzzed.

Liu Zhiyi already had a feeling, and opened the tools tab.

[Key: A key that will never be lost.]

This prop's description was a lot simpler; Liu Zhiyi turned the key over and felt all around it, and none of the long spiel the headphones had given popped up.

So there were differences between one prop and another.

She fitted the key to the security door's keyhole.

Over the keyhole was a turning slide-plate; Liu Zhiyi didn't know the proper name for the thing, but you had to mind it going in — if the notch in the plate wasn't lined up with the hole, not only would the key not go in, it would make a sound.

She felt as if she'd gone back to her college days.

She'd been a bit rebellious then; for a stretch she'd go out to bars with classmates at night.

And coming home, this was how she'd do it — first easing the slide-plate straight with the tip of the key, listening for movement inside the door as she went.

Liu Zhiyi put the headphones on.

—Thud.

She flinched at it, purely a reflex of the body.

Back then, coming home late, this was exactly how she'd listen at the door, on edge.

—Thud.

Another.

That was rib-chopping.

She'd eaten her mother's sweet-and-sour ribs so many times that Liu Zhiyi could tell what her mother was cutting just from the sound.

Good timing — the rib-chopping was just right to cover the noise of her working the lock.

—Thud.

Liu Zhiyi pushed hard, all at once, and drove the key in.

The key scraped against the keyhole with a faint hiss.

—Thud.

She turned the key, reckoning the rhythm of the chopping, and gave it two full turns in time with it.

Damn — the door was double-locked!

At last, Liu Zhiyi bore down.

—Thud.

—Click.

The crisp sound of the lock opening rang through the stairwell; Liu Zhiyi dropped to her knees, pressing the headphones hard against her head.