“You’re surprised?” he said, gesturing. “Really?” He shook his head, then began soaping up to start the actual bathing part of, well, bathing.
She considered, and soon felt foolish for her sudden impulse to violate rules. What would she have done if she’d been alone? Run through the town insulting people? Stare at each and every person instead of lowering her eyes? A part of her was tickled at the thought.
“What if,” Painter said, “we figured out what those scholars are doing in that tent of theirs?”
“What?” Yumi rose and took some soap. “By asking them?”
“Um, no, Yumi.” He smiled. “We would not ask.”
“What would we do, then?”
“Sneak into their tent,” he said, making sneaking motions with his fingers. “See what we can learn about their equipment. Maybe sabotage it.”
She felt her jaw drop, gritty soap powder trickling through her fingers.
He noticed, pausing, and looked toward her. “What?”
“Painter,” she said. “That would be illegal!”
“You wanted to do something transgressive!”
“Like getting dressed, then running out and hopping up and down in full sight of people in the town!” She wilted, thinking about how embarrassing that would be. “Maybe behind a fan or two.”
“The spirits want us to accomplish something,” he said. “And you’re right—it’s probably not you learning how to eat by yourself. You still think our task has to do with that machine?”
She nodded, dunked to rinse off soap, then rose. “I do.”
“Then we need information,” he said. “So…”
She stepped closer to him in the water, then found herself grinning, hands held close to her chin, elbows tight against her sides. “Let’s do it.” After all, it was probably the will of the spirits. “But how? We’ll be spotted for certain.”
This would be a test. Surely if actively breaking the law didn’t anger the spirits, then…well, nothing short of outright insulting them would do so.
“It’s a good thing everyone leaves us alone for several hours a day, isn’t it?” Painter glanced at her and smiled. “In a place nobody can approach, and where they’ve even helpfully cleared away the casual workers who might catch us sneaking out. Convenient, eh?”
She nodded, conflicted by how eager she felt. She could barely wait the time it took to wash off—going through the ritual soaps at blinding speed—and get dressed. Painter didn’t seem nervous at all as Chaeyung and Hwanji led them down the path into the orchard, among the drifting trees, to the elevated shrine. But he ignored the painting supplies today, kneeling until Chaeyung and Hwanji were out of sight.
Then he looked to Yumi, who nodded eagerly, her heart—well, she didn’t have one in this form, but she felt like she did—racing and her hands trembling. This was going to be so wrong!
The first thing Painter did was pick up his clogs, take off his stockings, then wrap the cloth around the wood. “Can’t do much sneaking if I make a clop each time I step.”
“Wow,” Yumi said. “You know a lot about this.”
He blushed. “It happens a lot in the dramas. There, people generally remove their shoes entirely. I thought maybe I should do this instead, to avoid screaming from pain at every step.”
He tried on the clogs and found them significantly muffled with the cloth around them. （If you’re trying to judge the heat of the ground in Torio, the stone in their settlements wasn’t nearly hot enough to set cloth aflame. It could burn you if you left your skin touching it for an extended period, but except at hotspots a casual brush wouldn’t do damage.）
He nodded to her, then hopped down off the shrine. She hesitated. This was the moment. Was she really going to do this? After a lifetime of training in proper behavior?
She squeezed her eyes closed and followed him, cracking one eye, then the other. Painter hadn’t noticed her worry—he’d moved over to one of the larger trees and was pushing it with his finger, making it drift around on its chain.
“How do these trees float again?” he said.
“On thermals.”
He nudged another tree with his finger. “They’re so light. Even if they’re floating, I shouldn’t be able to move them around this easily.” He touched one, then hopped back, looking at his hand.
“What?” she asked.
“I felt lighter when I touched it,” he said, trying once more. Then he wrapped both arms around a trunk. “That’s so surreal. I feel like a balloon.”
“A what?”
“I’ll show you sometime,” he said, stepping back away from the tree. “The trees might float on thermals, Yumi, but they somehow make themselves lighter first.”
（He was right. If you’ve been wondering how they work, this is a big clue. Plants on Yumi’s world don’t really defy physics so much as they sneak past while physics is distracted by a nice drama on the viewer. Probably something involving pendulums. Physics loves those things.）
Feeling an increasing sense of transgressive elation, Yumi followed Painter among the lazy trees, which opened and closed pathways as they drifted on their chains. She quickly realized that she had no sense of how the village was laid out, aside from the steamwell at the center, the hills with the cold spring off to the west, and the orchard to the south. Painter, however, seemed to have a better feel for it. Perhaps that was the sort of skill you picked up when you didn’t always have someone to lead you everywhere you needed to be.
He managed to avoid sections where workers were harvesting nuts from the trees. Then he led Yumi to the edge of the orchard, near the eastern side of the town—close to the place of ritual. Here he crouched beside a tree.
Though he’d gotten them close, the tent the scholars had set up was still a good fifty yards away. Over hot stone, past the fence around the place of ritual. A set of three large trees had been chained to the ground near the rear of the scholars’ tent to provide shade. That would give cover once they approached—but first they had to cross fifty yards of open ground.
Painter gazed down at the day’s ritual tobok. The dress was bright yellow and red. “These stand out rather a lot, don’t they?” he asked.
“That’s deliberately the point,” Yumi said.
He nodded. Then pulled his dress off.
Yumi gasped. Not for the common reason—they did bathe together every day. In addition, there were three more layers underneath. But those were undergarments.
“What are you doing?” she demanded as he shucked the second layer of skirt too. “Stop!”
He grinned and gestured to the final layer of clothing: thin silken trousers you might find reminiscent of pantaloons, dyed light brown, and a loose green overshirt. Also silken, shimmering, and way too revealing of his figure. Underneath that was the wrap around his chest, and that was it.
She silently prayed he wouldn’t go any further.
“This,” he said, “is remarkably similar to what men wear around here.”
“Except not,” she said. “Their outfits are completely different.”