“Huh. There’s another one,” Lilia noted. Cyclops lifted his head slightly, but the power of head scritches stole the strength from his neck a second or so later. He settled back down on Lilia’s stomach and made a questioning noise instead. “Well, you know how my soul sense has been getting better? I can see a lot of the town now. There’s a difference between living souls and undead souls that I don’t really know how to describe, but the important thing is that the number of undead souls has been going up bit by bit.”

  Mr. Bearbones tapped the table, drawing Lilia’s attention back to the game they were playing. She couldn’t move much with Cyclops laying on her belly, so she just reached out and moved a piece while reclining on the couch. Seeing that she’d made that move without examining the board first, Mr. Bearbones scrawled something on his tablet and raised it.

  “I am taking this seriously!” Lilia argued after reading his message. “You’ve just gotten so good at this that you see everything I do coming. At this point I can only surprise you by not knowing what I’m doing in the first place!”

  Granted, she still lost every game, but it still gave her a little satisfaction every time she left her friend dumbfounded.

  “Where was I? Right, the souls in the town. So, the weirdest thing is that there’s something off about these undead. I can’t sense them clearly enough to figure out what it is, but they seem different than you guys or even Master’s thralls,” Lilia explained. Directions sang a sad note and tilted his head to the side. “It’s okay if you don’t get it. I’m not sure what I mean yet anyway.”

  While Lilia spoke, Mr. Bearbones made another carefully thought-out move. Lilia once more countered by moving a random piece. All her moves were legal under the rules she’d made, at least.

  “I need to work on my soul sense more to figure this out…so I guess I’ll have to keep messing with Master’s thralls for now. If he didn’t want me messing with the rest of them then he should have come back sooner!” Lilia declared, entirely undermining the boldness of her words by not moving from where she lay.

  Calling forth her mana came almost instinctually at this point. It flowed freely from Lilia’s soul the instant she reached for it, just like turning the tap in the bathroom. At the same time, it also cut off the moment she decided she had enough. Lilia always felt amazed at how easy it had gotten for her. The progress she’d made had been so gradual that she didn’t even notice it as it happened.

  “Mmmm…I kind of wanted to leave the repair spells on this one intact, but I don’t think I can really learn anything more from them. And they kind of get in the way of figuring out what the others ones do. Guess it’s time for them to go,” Lilia decided, extending a tendril of mana towards a soul in the building above. She’d already forgotten what little she knew about the layout, so she had no idea what part of the home it was in.

  “Alright, there’s the spell, and now we shake.” With the tendril of mana pressed up against one of the outer spells, Lilia moved her mana back and forth rapidly. She found that easier than scrubbing across the entire length of the spell over and over again. Since there were no repair spells on the outermost layer, she just erased one she’d already figured out.

  There were other innovations she’d made over the last couple of months, too. Before Lilia would have used a separate glob of mana for each layer; now she just had the single tendril. Once the outer spell had been erased, Lilia continued to shake one end of the tendril while threading the rest of it through into the inner layer. For every layer she did the same, until she finally had the other end of her mana up against the final repair spell.

  In the same manner as she’d removed every other repair spell, Lilia dealt with the list. That left her with a long thread of mana already entwined in the thrall’s soul, able to interact with every layer at once. She’d come close to doing this before, but had always felt like she had more to gain by leaving the repair spells intact. With them gone, however, she had unrestricted access to every other spell Master had written into this soul.

  Having never had free access to anything below the first layer before, that meant Lilia had quite a lot to examine. For reasons unknown to her, only the controls for the left arm had been carved into the outermost layer. Master had several thralls around his house and they all shared that quirk. She couldn’t figure out before whether that had been for a reason or if Master simply did it out of habit, but with this level of access she might be able to.

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  “But first I should probably just figure out where all the controls are…and how to use them,” Lilia muttered to herself. From what little Master had said on the subject Lilia believed they were meant to just follow instructions, but she didn’t know how to send those to a thrall. It probably had something to do with the master-thrall connection, but she didn’t know how to form one with an existing thrall, or if it could be done at all.

  Every bit of information helped, though. So Lilia used her embedded mana tendril to poke and prod at spells one by one to see what happened. Most didn’t have any obvious effects. But a lot did. More than Lilia had expected, in fact. Every individual joint on the thrall’s body appeared to have a spell dedicated to it, which went a long way toward explaining why there were so many in the first place.

  Even if Lilia couldn’t directly see the thrall’s body, she could vaguely detect when it moved. The connection between spell and joint didn’t seem to be one-way. When she poked at a control spell and the joint moved, some kind of feedback ran back to the spell. She felt the response through her mana.

  Based on that feedback and her ability to sense where the soul had been anchored to the thrall’s body, she could get a feel for which limb or joint a spell controlled. Something between and to the sides of the mid-spine and skull could only be an arm; something on the other side of the spine had to be part of the legs or tail.

  Lilia lost track of time as she just lay there and learned. Poking at a spell from a different direction or using different levels of force changed how it reacted. Over time she noticed that the spells were also eating away at her mana every time she activated them. And eventually, she managed pieced together enough information to curl what she believed to be a single finger.

  “Perfect!” Lilia exclaimed, shooting up—and sending Cyclops for a tumble in the process. With an angry yowl, Cyclops righted himself and tackled Lilia right back. The impact reminded her that, while she tended to treat the feline like a house cat, he was in fact a bobcat. He had about triple the weight to show for it.

  Before Lilia could even remark about what just happened she had to take a deep breath. All her breath left her when she hit the couch. Unapologetic, Cyclops walked a small circle on her stomach while kneading her shirt.

  “Y’know what, that’s fair,” Lilia sighed as Cyclops plopped back down. Above them both, Directions sang a jaunty tune while flying a tight circle. He only did that when he found something especially funny. “Traitor.”

  Mr. Bearbones chose that moment to slam his tablet against the table a few times. Lilia looked his way to find him staring intently at the board.

  “What happened to you three encouraging me to practice? Now that I’m finally putting effort into it it’s like you want me doing anything else,” she complained. Predictably, that only got her a dismissive snort from Cyclops. If he anything in common with house cats it was being contrary.

  Adding insult to injury, Directions fluttered down and landed on Lilia’s face.

  “Ow—hey! Why is your butt in my face!? I’m not a tree branch!” Lilia shouted, quickly grabbing the bird and holding him out in front of her. “What do you even want?”

  She watched the cardinal flick his head back and forth between Lilia and the ladder. Lilia didn’t need to guess what he meant by that.

  “I’ve told you a hundred times! Master said to wait here until he comes back or I run out of food. I don’t see Master here and I’ve still got, like, half the food left,” Lilia pointed out, setting the bird aside and sitting up carefully. This time she shifted Cyclops gently onto her lap. He purred the entire time. She noticed Mr. Bearbones writing furiously on his tablet again.

  “Even if he was talking directly to me, that doesn’t mean you three were excluded,” Lilia replied after reading the message. “I know you’re all bored down here, but mom and dad said to listen to Master, and he said to wait for him to let me out. Mom and dad would be so upset with me if I ignored him!”

  Directions chirped rapidly, a sure sign that he was annoyed. Mr. Bearbones wrote a new message.

  “Just because normal people can’t tell Directions is undead doesn’t mean I can open the door just for him. For one, Master would be able to tell. For two, it wouldn’t be fair to you or Cyclops if only Directions go to leave.” Cyclops rolled over onto his belly and batted at Lilia’s hand, reminding her to keep petting him. She scratched at his head, careful to avoid the line where the skin ended. “Okay, Cyclops is happy as long as I pet him. But you would be all huffy.”

  Apparently realizing that Lilia wouldn’t budge on this issue, Mr. Bearbones tossed his head and moved his jaw like he wanted to groan. She only knew what he wanted to express because she’d seen a living bear do something similar after Mr. Bearbones scared it away. Meanwhile Directions flopped over onto his back much like Cyclops had. He spread his wings out and locked his legs into place, making himself appear dead.

  Dead dead. Not undead. He looked like every dead bird Lilia had ever seen…at least, before she revived them. She’d resurrected a lot more wildlife than even her parents knew about; most just hadn’t stuck around. Her parents never told her not to raise more animals, and they never asked her to tell them when she did it either.

  Basically, Directions was being overdramatic.

  “Look, just hold on until Master returns. And let me practice. I’m sure he’ll let me wander about more if I can show him how much I’ve learned!”

  Not once did it ever occur to Lilia that he might not return at all.