A WEEK LATER, Yumi watched the most shocking thing she’d ever seen. Two people kissing. In front of her. In front of everyone, on the viewer. A man made from the blue hion lines, and a woman from the
magenta.
Locking lips, intimate. Right there.
She gasped and pulled her blankets closer, up to her chin. “Can
they show that?” she asked.
Painter just chuckled.
She threw a pillow at him in response—it didn’t even disrupt his spirit, but it made her feel better. Then she leaned forward, eyes wide.
It had become her habit, after practicing her painting for several hours, to stop and watch a drama. It felt like a frivolous waste of time, but Painter said that it was important to relax now and then—and it was his world. His rules. She was basically forced to do this.
Besides, the story continued each night—and she needed to see what happened. She followed three separate dramas, but Seasons of
Regret was the best. And the most scandalous. She cocked her head as the kiss continued. And continued. And… “How do they breathe?” she asked.
“In a kiss like that,” he said, “you share breath. You send the air back and forth, exhaling into each other’s lungs. It can keep you going for a good fifteen minutes.”
She believed it for the briefest moment, then saw his smirk. That earned him another pillow, this one straight through the head.
On the viewer, Sir Ashinata and Lady Hinobi broke apart. This was a “historical” drama, according to Painter. Which meant they were pretending to be from another time, before things like showers. Yumi sighed at how the two stared at each other, with the viewer showing their faces up close, tiny hion lines reproducing even their eyelashes.
That look. Could they really be faking? Painter must be wrong— these two actors must actually be in love. Because of that look. She had been waiting to see them look at each other like that for a week now.
Sir Ashinata was some kind of wandering warrior, and their pairing was forbidden. But they had finally admitted their love. It was wonderful.
“Now,” Sir Ashinata said, “I must go away. Forever.”
“What?” Yumi cried. “What?”
He spun and walked off, one hand on his hion blade. Lady Hinobi turned from him to hide the tears in her eyes.
“No,” Yumi said, leaping to her feet. “No!”
But the ending music started playing. The hour was over. He was leaving?
“That’s terrible!” she said, pointing. “We waited all this time, and now he’s just going away?”
“He’s ronin,” Painter said. “That is the way of his kind.”
Yumi glared at him, but…well, he turned away, wiping a tear from his eye. He didn’t like it any more than she did. And Painter wasn’t to blame for what the people who made the drama had done.
She collapsed into a heap of blankets and pillows on the futon.
She’d discovered at last that it wasn’t an altar. Painter had chuckled for a day after she’d finally thought to ask.
“But…” she said. “But why?”
“Some stories end this way.” Painter stood up and stretched.
“Depends on what the writer wants. It’s good that they’re all a little different. You don’t want them all to be happy.”
“Yes. I. Do.” Her voice grew softer. “They could create anything.
Make anything. Why would they make something sad?”
“I’ve heard people find it more realistic.”
“Is it?” Yumi asked, pulling her blankets tighter. “Is sadness realistic?” That felt more depressing than the ending itself.
“I used to think so,” Painter said. “And Yumi, many things in life are sad. So it’s realistic at least to some experiences. It’s good that some stories are happy, some are sad. That part is realistic.”
She shook her head and dried her tears in the blanket.
“Sometimes,” Painter said, “the more you think about it, the better an ending like this seems. It can be right, even if it’s painful.”
“There’s still hope,” Yumi said, fierce. “The program isn’t finished.
Something might happen tomorrow.”
“I don’t know,” Painter said. “That was the end of the arc—you can see it in the extra-long credits. Tomorrow they’ll switch to a different set of characters.”
“No,” she said. “It’s not over. You’ll see…”
She said it with more confidence than she felt. Ten hours awake in each body made for an odd schedule in some ways, but at least she could catch a drama each day. This one could turn out to be happy.
Couldn’t it?
Painter walked to the viewer to turn it off—he liked experimenting with what he could accomplish while a spirit. Yumi trailed over to the window to look out at the pure black sky. With its single point of light, distant as last night’s dreams. (Unfortunately, you’re not going to get an answer for why “the star” could pierce the shroud when the sun and stars could not. I don’t yet know. I have some answers about the shroud itself, and the nature of what was happening to Yumi’s and Painter’s lands. I’ll give you those when it’s appropriate.
But the way that one planet could filter through the darkness and reach longing eyes in Kilahito? No idea what was going on. I’m sorry to leave you with this mystery, but think of it as—instead of a hole—a promise for future stories yet undiscovered.)
“Want to get back to training?” Painter said, gesturing to the stacks of paper.
“No,” she said, turning away from the window and putting aside silly thoughts about a silly drama, even if her eyes were still wet. “I think it’s time for me to go out. Hunting nightmares.”
“You’re not ready.”
“You’ve said this is all I need to learn,” she said, waving to the stacks of painted bamboo. “You said I mastered it a week ago, Painter. You’ve been having me do nothing more than bamboo for days and days and days now!”
“Knowing how to paint,” he said, “is different from being able to do it in a stressful situation. That requires reflex and instinct. Like hitting a ball.”
“A ball?” she asked, picking up the small bowl of soup she’d forgotten as the ending of the drama arrived. She frowned as she sat down on the futon. “What ball?”
“You know,” he said, making a motion with his hand—as if that explained it. “Hitting a ball? With a snap-racket? You…don’t have that on your world.”
“Obviously,” she said, tasting her noodles.
Hey! They almost weren’t terrible.
“Try this,” she said, eager, holding the bowl toward him, pinching the spoon between two fingers and proffering it. He plucked the spirit of the spoon and was able to get a taste of the soul of the soup.
He looked up at her.
“It’s only my second week cooking,” she said.
“There is more salt in this soup than there is soup, Yumi,” he said.
“It said to salt liberally,” she said. “I didn’t know what that meant.”
“You could ask.”
It was…difficult to remember she could ask for things. Beyond that, cooking for herself was a strange experience.
“Well,” she said, holding up the bowl, “I consider this a success. It’s quite nearly edible.” She went to the sink and ceremoniously dumped it out. “But for all my weakness at cooking, Painter, I’m certainly better at painting. It’s time. We should go out tonight and look for that nightmare.”
He walked over. “You don’t even believe this is the reason we’re linked. You think it’s that machine and the scholars.”
“Yes,” she admitted. By now they’d seen that it could legitimately draw its own spirits, without help from a yoki-hijo. It merely did so very slowly, at a rate of one or so a day. “But what if I’m wrong?”
He met her eyes.
“I don’t understand any of this,” she said. “Painter, you said you thought that stable nightmare was the reason. So we need to pursue it. We need to try to find it.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets to think, his brow creasing.
Unfortunately they’d nearly run through his meager savings—and his suspension would soon be over. He’d need to immediately go back to work and prove himself to his superiors so that he didn’t get into further trouble.
Therefore, either she needed to start doing his job, or they needed
to solve this issue, ending their bond.
Did she want that?
Well, of course she did. She had duties—and more importantly, the spirits had called her to a special task. She needed to see that through to help them. Then she had to return to her life. Improved,
yes.
But still irrevocably alone.
She didn’t want to confront that. At least…at least there was that flying ship from his planet, traveling between their worlds. That meant something. For the future.
“All right,” he said, standing up. “Let’s pack the painting supplies.”
She nodded firmly. Today she’d dressed in sturdy work clothing.
For working. Something she’d never truly done, but it felt right.
Leggings under her dress, a thicker jacket than her lightweight one— short, not even down to her waist, but solid, with numerous metal clasps and buttons on it. Almost like armor.
“Something’s off about this,” Painter said, strolling over as she packed the painter’s bag. “Yumi, that stable nightmare should have been spotted by now. It’s been weeks. The Dreamwatch should’ve been sent for, should be working in the city. But if they were, it would be on the news. The Dreamwatch arriving is such a big deal…”
“Wait,” Yumi said, pointing at him. “Have you been stalling? Is that why you made me practice again all this week? You thought maybe someone else would catch the thing?”
He shrugged. She didn’t want to think of him as cowardly, but there were moments like this when he seemed perfectly willing to let someone else do the difficult jobs. Admittedly, she’d spent her entire life doing very little for herself. To an uncomfortable extreme. So she figured maybe she shouldn’t point fingers.
She shoved the last of the large canvases into the bag, then nodded. It was time, at long last, for her to try being a nightmare painter.
PAINTER MADE THEM wait past the time when shift started, just in case. He said he wanted to minimize the chances of her being spotted by the other painters—although eventually that would very much be part of their plan. That said, it would probably be okay if she happened to be seen. Someone else would be patrolling his beat until his suspension was up. However, he said that the area was wide, and painters often moved between sections as they patrolled, chasing leads. As long as she didn’t encounter any painters up close who could identify her as Nikaro’s sister, they should be fine.
The plan was simple. They needed to hunt for signs of the stable nightmare, see if it was still prowling these streets. If it was, they’d draw the attention of one of the groups of painters patrolling nearby.
Once they’d seen it, everyone could go to the foreman and corroborate what Yumi had told him. The Dreamwatch would be sent for.
It was a straightforward plan in concept, but each of the individual pieces daunted Yumi. She’d brought a device Painter said would make an emergency noise—it was a metal contraption with two round things on the sides that he said were bells. She’d seen bells though, and these weren’t those. How was something shaped like a large biscuit a bell?
But she trusted it would work. Newer painters carried these to call for help. So she’d turn it on if they saw the stable nightmare. But what if no other painters were nearby? How would they get close enough
to a nightmare to determine it was the right one, yet stay far enough away that it wouldn’t attack her?
She voiced none of this to Painter. He was too nervous himself, evidenced by how he suggested—no fewer than three times—that she return to the apartment. She resisted, though she’d never seen the streets so empty as she did tonight. Soon she crept out past the last line of buildings—built almost like a fortification, with windowless walls in a ring.
Here she finally got her first up-close look at the shroud: a shifting, seething wall of darkness. It was blacker than common night; night didn’t swallow light. And night didn’t feel like it was looking back. Her nerves failed her, and she didn’t dare walk all the way up to the shroud. Instead she hovered near the last line of buildings, staring at it.
She hadn’t expected it to shift like that. Turbulent. Undulating. Yet because of the lack of color, it was impossible to distinguish details.
That gave it the appearance of something much farther away. An impossible visual.
“Do you ever get used to it?” she asked softly.
“You grow accustomed to it,” he said. “Like a persistent noise. In the same way, you occasionally notice it anew—and suddenly it’s alien again. Terrifying again. You have to get used to it all over. It’s almost like making friends with someone who keeps changing personalities. One who stares at you in a way that makes you think they’re eventually going to try to kill you…”
She ripped her gaze away from the shroud, instead looking along the buildings here. Whitewash covered the bricks of many portions— a plainly deliberate design choice, a wall of white to ward off the wall of darkness. And on many of those whitewashed portions were paintings. Large murals painted with the ink of a nightmare painter— monochromatic, but incredibly detailed in contrast and subtlety of
shade.
“What are those?” she asked.
“Painters put them up when they feel like it,” he said. “One section
per painter.”
“Where’s yours?”
He shook his head. He didn’t have one then? Perhaps no one would be impressed by another painting of bamboo.
They started their patrol, walking back from the shroud through the nearer rings of the city streets. Despite what she’d said earlier, he hadn’t made her spend the last week only on bamboo. They’d talked about patrolling and about protocol for painters. So she understood what it was he did at night—how he watched for nightmare signs.
He still spotted the first sign before she did. “There,” he said, pointing ahead. To the corner of a wall by the street, about five feet up in the air. A smoking black spot marked the bricks there.
That high? She’d been watching the ground. They approached to find black smoke steaming off what appeared to be black tar—a piece of the shroud—covering a hand-size section of the corner. A sign that a nightmare had passed this way recently, brushing the building and
leaving a trail.
“How did you spot that?” she hissed.
“Practice,” he said, “and luck.”
The less you have of the first, the more you need the second.
Though he’d taught her that the next step was to follow the trail, looking for other marks, he continued studying this one. Then he
peered down the nearby alleyway.
“What?” she asked.
“This is a blatant mark,” he said. “Right on the street, obvious and bigger than most. Feels like another painter should have spotted this.
Yet I can see the next mark on that fire escape right inside the alley.
No painter.”
“So no one’s noticed this yet,” she said. “We’re first. What’s the problem?”
“No real problem,” he said. “It’s just that I had a horrifying thought.
The foreman thinks I’m a slacker.”
“A what?”
“He thinks I haven’t been doing my job for months now, starting long before you arrived. That’s why he put me on suspension; me claiming I saw a stable nightmare was the final stroke in the painting he’d made of me in his head. Point is, he believes I’ve been slacking off, yet no one else ever reported any problems with this region…” He looked to Yumi, perhaps seeing her confusion.
“I’m worried,” Painter explained, “that the foreman didn’t replace me on this beat after suspending me. We’ve been short-staffed, and from his perspective, this beat is a quiet one. I’m worried he assumed other painters were covering the region, or that it’s a section nightmares don’t often visit, which allowed me to supposedly goof off instead of doing my job.”
“And if he didn’t assign a replacement…”
“That would explain why the stable nightmare was never spotted,”
Painter said. “Why it could spend weeks prowling the city and never be caught. Most nightmare painters patrol and watch for signs only near the rim of the city, because nightmares have to pass through there to get farther inward. If this nightmare always entered through my section of the perimeter, it could move through the entire city unchallenged.”
A disturbing thought indeed. He waved her along with him into the alley, though she couldn’t see the second sign he’d spotted. As they walked, she whispered to him carefully, “Painter? Why is it that the foreman assumed you haven’t been doing your job? Why is everyone so ready to assume you were lying?”
Painter glanced down. And her instinct was to reprimand him, to insist that he explain himself immediately. His reaction was an obvious sign of guilt.
Yet had that ever worked on him as well as it had on her, when Liyun had treated her that way?
Had it ever truly worked on her? Demands, guilt, verbal punishment? She remembered days of exhaustion when all she’d wanted was a kind word, a teardrop’s worth of empathy.
Choice. She had a choice.
You don’t have to be like her, Yumi thought. You really don’t.
Such a novel idea, and so much harder to do than she would ever have assumed. Still, Yumi forced out the words. The ones akin to those she always wished she could have heard.
“It’s all right,” she whispered. “I know you’re trying. That’s what matters.”
Pay attention. At times, this is what heroism looks like.
Painter glanced at her, then let out a long breath. “Thanks,” he whispered. “But you’re right about me. It’s hard sometimes, you
know? Keeping on doing the same thing every day, feeling like you’re getting nowhere?”
He pointed at a fire escape—a metal lattice that ran up alongside a building. She squinted, and barely made out a trail of smoke coming off one of the metal corners on the second story. They started upward.
“In school,” he whispered to her, “the teachers always talked about the importance of our job. They’d preach about the meaning of art, about theory. They said painting was about passion and the whims of creativity. They teach us we’re supposed to see the shape of the nightmare, and paint that.
“Then you get into the real world, and find that it’s hard to be creative like that every moment. You realize they didn’t teach you important things, like how to work when you don’t feel passion, or when the whims of creativity aren’t striking you. What then? What good is theory when you need to feed yourself?
“In the real world, you realize you can do your job by making the same thing again and again. Bamboo captures nightmares just fine.
Whatever they say. All of those high-minded aspirations from school fade before the truth, Yumi, that sometimes…it’s just a job.”
They stopped on the landing. She said nothing, though it was hard for her. Merely nodded for him to continue.
“So I got into a bit of a rut,” he said. “Yeah, guess I can say it. I only did bamboo, day in and day out. Foreman Sukishi didn’t like that. He never liked me. I wasn’t…well regarded in school, as I told you. So he’s thought the worst of me. And he always assumed I was doing bamboo because I wasn’t actually finding nightmares.”
They reached the second story of the fire escape, near the sign of the nightmare. And as he looked toward her again, Yumi realized that she understood. She’d made different choices, putting perhaps too much of herself into her work instead of backing off like he had. Still, she could legitimately see how doing as he had wasn’t laziness; it was something more personal, and far more relatable.
“It’s really hard to be a great painter,” he whispered as they knelt beside the nightmare sign. “But it’s (lowly) easy to be a fine one.
Regardless of what the foreman thinks though, I did my job—and I didn’t let anyone get hurt. I would never allow that. I…I might not be
some warrior, like you wanted. I’m not the person anyone wanted. But I’m trying.”
She nodded to him and put her hand toward his shoulder for comfort, though she didn’t dare touch him.
“Get a good look,” Painter said, pointing to the smoke wafting from the corner where two small metal beams met. “The more of these you see, the easier it will be for you to pick out others when you’re patrolling.”
She leaned in close to inspect the metal—and the black coating. It looked like blood, in a way. Blood that evaporated.
“Why don’t they leave trails on the ground?” she said. “Like footprints?”
“Once in a while you’ll see a footprint,” he said. “But not very often.
We’ve never been able to figure it out.”
Curious. It seemed likely the nightmare had left this sign when it had brushed the corner while walking up the steps. “Maybe it has to happen accidentally,” she whispered. “Like when I went through that wall…”
Painter nodded, thoughtful. Then he pointed toward the top of the lattice, where another wisp of smoke was clinging to a bar near a window, all of it highlighted by the reflections of hion lines close above.
“Painter,” she whispered, “are they actually dangerous?”
“Of course they are.”
“But if the stable one has been free for weeks…why hasn’t it killed anyone?”
He didn’t answer, just stared upward at that window.
“Maybe what you know is wrong,” she said. “I thought I understood my life, but it turns out I’ve been profoundly lied to. Is it possible the same is true for you?”
“No. I’ve seen pictures of cities destroyed by these things.”
“How could one creature, even a nightmare, destroy a city?”
“They’re hard to stop when stable,” he said. “And they call to others. One reaches stability, and then others follow.” He paused.
“We think.”
“You think?”
“The most recent city this happened to was decades ago, and the few survivors couldn’t explain much. Dozens of nightmares rampaging.” He looked at her. “But I promise they’re dangerous. I’ve personally seen a child bleed after being attacked by one of these things. Maybe I don’t have all the answers, maybe there are holes in our understanding, but I know they’re a threat.”
She nodded to him, took a deep breath, and started to climb up to see what was in that window.
Painter, however, waved for her to halt. “My turn to be the ghost,” he said. “Have the bell ready in case. It’s wound—all you need to do is flip the switch, and the ringing should carry far enough to reach the nearby sections.”
She wanted to argue, but his point was valid. She shouldn’t risk herself if he could potentially sneak up on the nightmare unseen.
He’d let her know if they’d found the stable one, or if they needed to keep searching.
Painter moved silently up the last two stories, then peered in through a window at the top. Yumi waited, anxious, clutching the bell in one hand and the strap of her large canvas bag in the other— barely conscious that by pulling it tight like that, it was cutting into her shoulder. She didn’t dare think, and instead focused on her breathing,
in and out.
In and out. In and out.
Painter returned, shaking his head. “There’s a nightmare in there, but it’s not ours. We can move on.”
He started down the steps, but Yumi remained in place, looking up.
“What happens,” she whispered, “if we don’t stop it?”
“It could become stable,” Painter admitted, halfway to the next level. “It takes many visits.”
“You’ve been off your patrol,” Yumi said, “for over two weeks now.”
Twenty-seven days. “And there might not be a replacement doing your job. What good does it do for us to hunt this stable nightmare if we just allow a host of others to feed and become real, step by step, while we do nothing?”
“This nightmare might stray into other regions on future nights. It will eventually get caught.”
“And if it doesn’t? I could stop it now.”
“Too dangerous,” he said.
“How? If it’s not stable, it can’t hurt me. Right?”
He stopped next to her. “They feed on people, Yumi. Our dreams, yes. Also on our thoughts, our minds. Besides, it’s possible it has some stability. You can’t always tell by its appearance.”
She met his eyes, then started climbing the steps. She had trained for weeks. If not for this, then why?
Painter groaned behind her, then followed her up. She crept to the window, steeled herself, then looked in. An elderly woman lay on a bed there, frail. The light shining in through the window formed a square that framed her body, the shadow at its edge falling across her face. The voluminous bed seemed to have swallowed her.
The nightmare perched on the headboard. Yumi’s breath caught.
She’d imagined something humanlike. A shadow of a person. This was more arachnoid, with legs made of twisting smoke that clawed down around the old woman like a cage. It was (lowly) big. Large as the largest of the great hawks that hunted the skies. With those leglike tendrils stretched out fully, it would easily be fifteen feet across.
Yumi froze, a powerful anxiety seizing her in its grip. She wanted to bolt, to scramble down the steps, to run until her strength gave out.
But she couldn’t move.
Something buried deep inside her recognized that monstrous figure. And that piece of her was terrified. A primal instinct told her that you did not mess with a creature that saw humans as prey.
“Right,” Painter whispered. “Carefully remove your supplies and think calm thoughts, like I told you. It will focus on its victim, assuming
you don’t get too afraid.”
“How do I—”
“Meditate, Yumi. And get your supplies out.”
You couldn’t meditate and pull out supplies. That wasn’t the way it worked, at least not for her.
She remained still and tried breathing exercises. That seemed to help.
“As long as you don’t make sudden motions or speak too loudly,”
Painter said, “it won’t be drawn to you. With luck, you can get the painting going without it ever disengaging its victim. You can banish it
quietly, and that poor woman doesn’t even need to know what
happened.”
Yumi didn’t move.
“Yumi?” Painter said. Then a little louder, “Yumi.”
The nightmare shifted, then turned what might have been a head in their direction, with a face that dripped liquid darkness toward the ground. There were no eyes… Or were those tiny white spots eyes? Like pinpricks swirling scratchily into infinity. The thing quested out with four of its many legs, stretching them across the room toward the window.
It had seen them.
No…it had heard Painter.
“Wait,” Painter said, backing up. “Wait, it’s pointing toward me. Did it (lowly) see me?”
Yumi finally found her strength. She looked down, frantic, and dug into her bag for the jar of ink. With trembling fingers, she tried to unscrew the lid—but found it fastened tight, as if bolted in place.
“You can hear me?” Painter said louder, stepping forward.
The nightmare paused and withdrew its legs. Then it balanced its bulky body in an impossible posture on only two of them as all the rest stretched again toward the window—slowly, carefully elongating —as if the night itself were reaching to swallow Painter.
“You do see me,” Painter said. “I guess if Design can do it, it’s not so surprising that…” His voice drifted off, then he made a strained
sound, prompting Yumi to look.
To find him beginning to disintegrate.
Painter had gone rigid, his eyes wide, as parts of him became smoky and indistinct—his form fuzzing toward the nightmare. His essence twisted, coalescing into twin vortices of smoke like miniature tornadoes. One blue. One magenta.
Hion. His soul was becoming hion. And the nightmare—spreading its many legs around the window and drawing its center bulk toward Painter, pinprick white eyes facing his direction—was feeding on that
energy.
Yumi screamed.
He’d told her not to do that. Some weaker nightmares did react to sudden sounds, but a painter’s job wasn’t merely to frighten them
away—it was to deal with them so they didn’t assault someone else.
Still, a loud noise could disorient and frighten off a nightmare, and was a last resort for a painter who was out of supplies or otherwise indisposed. Not that this was her line of thinking.
Her line of thinking amounted to: “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHH!”
There are things a classroom can’t teach. For those, you need a good scoop of field experience plopped right on your plate, glistening like grease. Everyone at least feels like screaming their first time.
In this case, the nightmare drew back, its legs curling in. Then it darted away, fleeing through the opposite wall—leaving Painter to shake himself, his form snapping into place.
“That,” he said (lowly), “was unexpected. It could feed on me like it does a sleeping person.”
“How can you be so calm!” Yumi said, frantic.
“I’m probably just numb,” he said. “Thank you for frightening it off.”
“P-painter?” a voice said from within the room. The elderly woman had sat up and seemed disoriented.
“Tell her you’re simply checking on her,” Painter advised. “And you got startled by something. Nobody wants to know they’ve been fed on. It…is better this way.”
Feeling overwhelmed, Yumi did as he suggested. Then, blushing deeply, she grabbed at her bag. Her body was still electric, pumped full of every frenzied cocktail it could make. She felt like she should be doing something, even if it was more screaming.
Fortunately, Painter was calm, as if the incident was over. He wasn’t looking in the room. What if the thing returned?
Yumi’s shameful failure made her want to scrunch up and vanish.
Had she really been thinking of him as a coward earlier?
“That could have gone worse,” he said.
“What?” she said, shocked.
“Everyone has trouble their first few times,” he said, turning to her and smiling. “Don’t fret. I couldn’t sleep for days after my first field encounter—and I was shadowing two experienced painters. I think
you did fine.”
“I did nothing.”
“Which is better than running,” he said, then frowned. “Though I suppose that is going to be a problem…”
It took her a moment to realize what he was indicating. He’d moved to the railing and was pointing below. Two figures had entered the alleyway, worried, to check on the scream they’d heard.
Akane and Tojin.
