Yumi and the Nightmare Painter(111)

She was gone moments later.

Yumi realized she hadn’t been able to ask for the thing she wanted most. To visit Torio City for the festival. That would be…

Hollow? Why would she suddenly feel that to be hollow? She’d been planning to ask for that trip for weeks. Yet now she couldn’t muster the effort to care.

She decided that perhaps she was abandoning her selfish streak. At long last, she might be becoming the yoki-hijo that Liyun had always wanted her to be.

She knelt to begin her prayers. Content that, with effort, she might finally be able to serve with her whole heart.





Painter sat on his floor, huddled in his blankets, staring at a stack of plates, cups, and utensils that Yumi had made a day before.

He pulled the blankets close because warmth felt right to him in a way it never had before. Because the last time someone had held these blankets, it had been her. Sitting with him. Watching the viewer and caring way too much about the lives of fictional people.

Maybe, he thought, I can get a hion expander and go striking out in the shroud. He could hunt for those walls that circled her towns. And…and do what? Be surrounded and killed by nightmares?

He didn’t even know what her towns were. Masaka had said those walls were impenetrable, but Painter had apparently been living half his time inside one. He was so far beyond his depth that he couldn’t see the surface.

The scholar had been right. Painter didn’t have any idea what was going on anymore.

Except that he had lost Yumi.

No. I won’t let it be forever. He stood up as an idea struck him. A very terrible idea. He followed it anyway and left the apartment, the sack of rocks over his shoulder and something special tucked into his pocket.

Nightmares often returned to the place where they’d last fed. Looking for another easy meal, perhaps. Or just working by instinct and following the same emotions that had led them to prey the time before. Painter gambled on this, and returned to the broken playground near the carnival.

Here he settled down to wait. Determined. And frightened, though more of what he might lose than of nightmares. So he was relieved when he saw something darkening the alley nearby.

He’d been right. He stood up, feeling exhausted as the nightmare flowed from the alley, slicing the ground with thick claws. It approached him, careful, perhaps remembering their last encounter.

“We first met before the swap happened,” he said to the thing. “Was that a coincidence, or were you looking for me even then?”

It reared up, blackness so deep it could only be imagined. Eyes of scraped-out hollow white. It reached for him.

“Liyun,” he whispered. Remembering the lupine form she’d taken during the confrontation with the scholars.

The thing froze, then crouched close to the ground.

“Have they taken your memory, Liyun?” he asked. “But why?”

The answer struck him immediately—remembered words of the scholars leading him to a single conclusion.

They were afraid of Yumi.

“Is that what is happening?” Painter said. “Are the towns some kind of…charade for her benefit? To keep her confused, or disoriented, or simply placid?”

The nightmare began to slink forward again. So Painter knelt and began to stack. As earlier, his stacks were impressive for him—though not nearly on Yumi’s level. But he felt proud as he placed the stones. And as he’d hoped, the nightmare that was Liyun stopped once more. Drill-hole eyes fixated on the stacks.

“I know,” he said, “I don’t have whatever power or endowment was given to Yumi. Yet I saw you recognize me before—even after someone had robbed you of your shape and your mind. A piece of you is still Liyun. Perhaps the deepest, most important piece. That’s what the scholar said. That you were allowed to be yourself again for a time. When with Yumi.”

The thing stepped forward, its eyes fixed on the stack.

“Remember, Liyun,” Painter whispered. “Remember.”

The beast—hulking, like a boulder of black smoke—reached out a claw toward the stack. But stopped before touching it.



“I remember,” it whispered in Liyun’s voice.

“Is she all right?” Painter asked, pained.

“She forgets,” the thing said. “As we all forget…”

“That,” Painter said, “is why I brought this.”

He took something from his pocket. A piece of paper, painted with a beginner’s skill. It depicted two hands, overlapping each other, above a sea of lights. Yumi’s memory, for him, of her.

He bowed before the beast that was Liyun. “Can you give this to her?”

“I will forget. I…”

“Liyun,” he said, intent. “Do you remember your duty?”

Those white holes fixated on him.

“Serve the yoki-hijo,” Painter whispered. “Protect her. Give her this.”

“I want to be a person again,” Liyun whispered. “So badly. It has been so long…”

“How…long?” Painter asked.

“Since before your people made cities,” the thing whispered. “Since the days when this land had a sun. Centuries.”

The weight of that hit Painter. Centuries.

Yes, it meant Yumi had been right. Kind of. They hadn’t been time traveling. But these people had somehow been trapped, unchanging, for seventeen hundred years.