“I…KNOW HE sometimes tells untruths,” Yumi said to the group.
“I’ve heard him speak them. I think they’re mostly just to avoid hurting people’s feelings. He’s more reliable than he seems.”
The others shared glances. Yumi didn’t know what to make of their behavior. Tojin wouldn’t meet her eyes, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here. Akane kept her arm on Yumi’s shoulders, as if to give her support.
It was Izzy who started explaining first. Yumi had mostly taken the yellow-haired woman for frivolous, but now her voice was dead serious.
“Yumi,” she said, “do you know what the Dreamwatch are?”
“Sure,” Yumi replied. “They deal with stable nightmares.”
“They’re the elite painters,” Tojin said, hands clasped tightly before him, as if he were trying to squeeze juice from the air. “The best of the best. The finest artists; the most respected of our kind. Every painter dreams of joining them.”
“They’re the actual warriors,” Akane said. “The rest of us, we’re like…the house dress you wear at home, while they’re the ball gown.
Understand?”
“That makes no sense,” Masaka said.
“I understand,” Yumi said. “But why does this matter?”
“Your brother,” Izzy said. “He wanted to be in the Dreamwatch.
Badly. Too badly.”
Yumi cocked her head.
“He lied,” Izzy said. “Back in school, he told us he’d gotten in.
Tryouts were a year into our two years of training. He told us he’d been selected—and he managed to convince our professors somehow, although they should have known who got in and who didn’t. Nikaro left class half the day to ‘train’ with the Dreamwatch.”
“We were going to be his crew,” Tojin said softly. “Each member of the Dreamwatch gets a team, called companions. Nikaro promised us that we’d be his. It…would have changed a lot. Not just money. But… I mean, I told my family.”
“We all did,” Akane said, squeezing Yumi’s shoulder.
“I’m extremely confused,” Yumi confessed.
“One year into our training,” Izzy said, “Painter tried out for the Dreamwatch and told us he’d been accepted. He spent the entire next year pretending to go train with them, giving us promises, making us hope. Then…at the end of the year…”
“We found out,” Masaka whispered, “that he’d been lying the entire time. He hadn’t been going to special classes. He’d been going to the library and just…sitting there. Not even reading or studying. Just sitting. Staring at the wall.”
“A whole year,” Tojin said, wringing his hands.
“That (lowly) man,” Izzy said, punching the chair with a clenched fist. “Sitting in the library. He shouldn’t have graduated at all.
Unfortunately, they needed painters, and he was capable.”
“A capable liar at least,” Tojin said. “Should have sent him to the law school after an extended con like that.”
Yumi felt her stomach wrench. She…thought she was following this. But it didn’t make sense. “Why would he just sit there? Maybe he made it into the Dreamwatch, but then washed out at the end?”
“Nope!” Izzy said. “He didn’t get accepted at all. He lied to us for an entire year.”
“Broke our hearts,” Tojin said softly. “We found him there in the library, after finally getting smart and realizing he’d never introduced us to any of the other Dreamwatch recruits. We confirmed it with the administration. He never. Got. In.”
Yumi looked up and met each of their eyes in turn, except Tojin’s— he was staring at the table, seeming concurrently angry and
embarrassed.
“I was going to be famous,” Izzy said.
“It’s not even that,” Akane said. “It’s that… Yumi, it’s hard to explain how it felt. After all that time. To find out…”
“I can understand what it’s like,” Yumi said, “to uncover profound, extended deception by someone you love. I’m so sorry he caused you that agony.”
“Nikaro is unreliable, Yumi,” Akane said softly. “He’s done his job this last year since graduation, but…well, you need to know. This story he tells about the stable nightmare? It’s just a way to make
himself look important.”
“What if it’s not, though?” Yumi asked.
What if it was?
She…had no proof he’d ever seen such a thing.
“It’s absolutely a lie,” Izzy said. At her side, Masaka nodded firmly.
“If he’d really seen a stable nightmare, it would have attacked by now.
They don’t skulk and hide once they’ve formed. They start murdering.”
“It’s proof,” Tojin said. “He said he saw one…what? Two weeks
ago?”
“Twenty-seven days,” Yumi whispered.
“Right,” Tojin said, with a nod. “Over two weeks. It would have attacked by now.”
“He goes out at night, doesn’t he?” Izzy said. “He tells you that he’s hunting it, right? He encouraged you to take his patrol because he was so busy tracking a super dangerous nightmare? Well, I promise you. He’s going to some café somewhere. Staring at the wall. Letting you dream while he just sits there.”
The table fell silent. Yumi could practically feel their sense of betrayal. Their frustration, anger. Even hatred? And who could blame them?
She wanted to defend him. She couldn’t find the words. They were ephemeral, like a prayer she had heard only once.
“What I don’t get,” she eventually said, “is why you thought he would even make it into this Dreamwatch. You said they only take the best artists, right?”
“The best of the best,” Masaka whispered.
“So why would you think they’d take Nikaro?” Yumi said. “I mean, he’s capable, but…surely the Dreamwatch wants someone who can do something more than paint bamboo or the occasional face from a few quick lines.”
The others frowned, and Akane pulled back, looking at Yumi with a frown.
“Huh,” Izzy said. “I assumed his family would know. Something else
he lied about, I guess.”
“What?” Yumi said.
“Yumi,” Akane replied, “Nikaro is the single most talented artist I’ve ever met. He’s amazing.”
“The rest of us,” Tojin said, “we came to painter school on a whim.
We showed some aptitude, took a class or two, and got selected.
Nikaro? He’d dedicated his life to getting into that school—to doing this job. He showed us things he’d done as a child. He’d been painting from the day he could hold a brush.”
“I believed him,” Akane said. “After seeing what he could do…I absolutely believed, and still do. He said he’d given everything, every day of his life, to learning how to paint so he could join the Dreamwatch. That’s why we believed him. When we met him, it seemed inevitable he’d get in.”
“The Dreamwatch must have seen something we didn’t,” Tojin said.
“Still seems strange they rejected him. But who knows. Maybe he didn’t even go to the audition? Wouldn’t be the biggest lie he’s told.”
“Yeah,” Izzy said, “or maybe they can just smell a liar. The Dreamwatch are about protecting people’s dreams—not crushing them. Nikaro would eventually have wandered off and let someone get eaten by a nightmare because he found a neat wall to stare at.”
Yumi took it all in, feeling overwhelmed. A stack of stones gone way too high, and teetering with every shift in the breeze. “Excuse me,” she said. “I…need some time.”
She fled, and they let her. Minutes later, she tore into Painter’s apartment and rushed to the trunk at the foot of his futon. She tossed aside the supplies and pulled out the portfolio at the bottom. She’d promised not to open it. But what was a promise made to someone
like him?
She ripped it open.
And found wonder inside.
Gorgeous paintings of startling skill. She gasped, putting a hand to her lips. Dozens and dozens of amazing pieces, incredible in their variety. Streets that seemed to come alive. People with glittering eyes, smiling from the page. Architecture that made her feel small.
Then intricately detailed pictures of flowers that made her feel she was a giant.
He could somehow make the ink flow through a thousand different shades to give a feeling of color. An impression of liveliness. A semblance of motion. Frozen pieces of time, committed to the page, with even the distant people in the background conveying emotion with the slope of their posture and the shades of the light around them.
Here, buried at the bottom of a trunk, were masterpieces.
“I knew it would go poorly,” Painter’s voice said from behind.
Yumi jumped, spinning to find him standing in the doorway. She blushed, caught right in the act, but he didn’t say anything about her violation of his privacy. He merely leaned against the frame of the open door, his eyes distant.
“I was going to go walk the city tonight,” he said, “but then I realized where you’d come. So I thought it best to just get it over with, you know?”
“I…” What did she say? She didn’t know how to ask someone to pass the salt. She couldn’t handle this.
“I knew it would go poorly with the others,” he repeated. “That it would blow up on me, back in school? I knew. I recognized the anger they’d feel when they found out. How my lies would ruin and break everything. I knew. Over the months, I’ve wondered: Is it better?
Better that I understood what I was doing? Or would it have been better if I’d somehow done it by accident?”
“Why?” Yumi finally whispered. “Why didn’t you just tell them that you didn’t get accepted to the Dreamwatch?”
“Why, why, why…” He slumped against the doorframe. “I’ve asked that every day. Why didn’t I just say something?” He looked away, out the window, his gaze vacant. “When we first met and they saw my art, it was the first time anyone had ever been excited by what I could do.
My parents didn’t want a painter. It’s a low-class job. They hated that all I wanted was ink and a page…”
He shrugged. “I met Akane first; you know how she is. I soon had a whole group of friends, adopted right in. And they gushed over what I could do. They cared about it. We spent that entire first year planning.
Talking about what we’d do in the Dreamwatch—me as the central soldier, them as my companions. Everything was pinned on me getting in.”
He looked at her, his eyes glistening. “Then…I didn’t make it. Not good enough. Poor style. Bad grasp of perspective. Even still, I can’t see my flaws. I can’t understand why. I’m so bad at art that I can’t even see why I got rejected. It crushed me, Yumi. It destroyed me.
“I went to the others. I knew I needed to tell them. I knew it. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Everything would have been different if I’d simply said it. But I had just been ripped apart, and I saw the hope in their eyes,
and I couldn’t crush it. I couldn’t do to them what had just been done
to me. I…I couldn’t.”
“So you lied to them? Making it worse?”
“I know!” he said, throwing his hands into the air, standing up and stalking into the room. “I thought that I’d tell them the next day. The test happened to be on Akane’s birthday. Why ruin the party with bad news, I thought. So I let them assume I’d passed. Didn’t say it, but didn’t really say anything.
“After that though, there were end-of-year tests, and I didn’t want to distract everyone. Then…it just kind of continued. I believe… something was truly wrong with me back then. I moved through a haze those first few weeks, my hopes lying around me with slit throats, my emotions a cloud as dark as the shroud.
“I remember genuinely thinking that maybe I could simply keep it going. There was a desperate edge to those thoughts, a terror that I didn’t want to confront. Couldn’t confront? I wasn’t thinking straight, Yumi. It wasn’t normal, what I did. But I just had to keep it going.
Watching it grow. A tumor. Not on my lungs or my throat. But on my soul.”
He stepped over to her and knelt beside the portfolio. He methodically, gingerly, began taking the souls of the various pictures and packing them back in.
“What about these?” she said. “You don’t paint like this anymore?
Why not? You don’t need to be in the Dreamwatch to do art.”
“You know,” he said softly, “they say true artists create, even if nobody is watching? They’re truly driven. I thought that was me. For years. Funny, eh? Me. I got to school and found an audience, then realized that it’s so, so much more satisfying to create for someone.
“Shows how much of an artist I actually am. Akane and the others were my audience. I loved showing them the new pieces I made. I loved the joy, the delight, the…the praise too, I guess. But then I just…lost it all.” He bowed his head, pausing as one of the souls of the pictures evaporated in his fingers. “I had friends for the first time.
For a little while.”
He gestured at the pictures then, pleading. So, reluctantly, she put them away.
“There’s no point anymore,” he said. “No point to any of it. No matter how much I pretend and tell myself I’m something important.”
He smiled at her. “I was willing to do it again to you. I jumped right into the lie. Willing to let you believe I was some hero, even though you’d inevitably find out. At least it only took you a couple weeks!”
She looked up to him, and her heart broke to see the tears on his cheeks. Phantom, ghostly tears. She reached up and hesitated right before touching him, then put a finger to the tear—wetting her finger.
He glanced away. “Well,” he said, wiping his eyes, “this is who those spirits stuck you with. I wonder what got into them. Shall we… I don’t know.” He sighed, then walked toward the door. “I’ll leave you
alone. I can do that right, at least.”
“Painter,” she said. “Nikaro.”
He stopped near the door, shoulders slumping. He…expected a rebuke, she realized. The kind that would set even the stones ablaze.
He deserved one, didn’t he? She’d been warned against lies, and this was a monumental one. The biggest she’d heard of—except the one told her by the very person who had taught her to never lie.
What a mess it all was. Emotions swirled in her, like quartz in a stone cut in half. Frustration at him on one side. Agony for him on the other.
She’d tasted friendship in the others. And she realized in that moment that she would lose them too. When this was all over. She’d never see Akane or Tojin again.
“Nikaro, look at me,” she said, standing up.
He turned around, and she stepped up to him, close. Dangerously
close.
“Let’s go out,” she said softly.
“…Out?”
“Go out.” She waved her hand toward the window. “Let’s do something. Just us. Something that doesn’t involve nightmares, or spirits, or machines, or betrayals. Let’s just…just go. For one night.”
“You know what I am, Yumi,” he said. “What I’ve done. We have to confront that. Deal with it.”
“Do we?” she asked, her voice growing small. “Do we really have to?”
“Ignoring my problems is what got me into this situation.”
“What are we ignoring?” she said. “I heard what you said. I heard what they said. I know.” She met his eyes. “I know. We’ve confronted
it. There. Done. Let’s go out.”
“But—”
“Maybe I don’t want to be responsible tonight! Maybe I don’t want to have to be the one who solves problems. Please?”
He held her eyes. Then he turned away, ashamed.
“We’re going,” she said anyway. She walked around him to the hallway, then held out her hand. “Come on. Tonight we’re not a painter or a yoki-hijo. Tonight we’re just people. I’ve wanted for years to visit the big city back home, and I was always denied. Will you deny me too, Nikaro? Would you break my heart like that?”
Finally, wonderfully, he stepped forward. “I could never,” he said softly. “I guess…there is that carnival running to celebrate the trip to
the star.”
“Great. We’ll go there.”
“You don’t know what a carnival is.”
“Are you coming with me?”
He hesitated, then nodded.
“Then,” she said, “I don’t particularly care what it is.”
