Ruth doesn't have any other choice but to listen. Her head's no longer swimming with nausea, but only by virtue of emptying it of everything else. (And that takes its own kind of energy, leaving her a different kind of tired and worn, but at least she's not bleeding. For now.) She felt her way around the room when she entered it, finding books and vases filled with dried-out sticks of flowers and the hard, wooden frame of a mirror. (For a moment, she'd hoped it was a window, but that instinct drained away when she realized she could prise her fingers behind it and feel wall.)

No doors. Neither food nor water. And nothing she can actually make use of besides herself and the junk she's tossed into an old backpack she found. Nothing until that voice.

"We aren't dead yet. Pardon, yes--" As she says it, she's still listening, running the tip of her makeshift cane (actually a yardstick) over the bare floorboards like she might hit a pair of shoes. The voice doesn't seem to have a body, though it sounds like it's here--not the crackle of her walkie-talkie, where everyone's voice gets compressed into tin. "Where sorry are you?"