“You’re sure,” he whispered to her, letting Liyun get ahead so the woman wouldn’t hear, “you saw hion lines?”
“Absolutely,” Yumi whispered back. “What does it mean?”
“Your people must be close to discovering how to harness hion,” he said. “You’re on the cusp of the industrial revolution. Things are about to change in your world, Yumi.”
“Will it get dark,” she whispered, “like on your world?”
“You mean the shroud? No, that existed before we discovered hion. Rather, before we learned how to harness it. Those were…difficult days. People wandering through the smoke, living only near bursts of light rising from the ground where plants could grow…”
He shivered, thinking about how it must have been. Traveling through the shroud via train was bad enough. Walking through it? Living in it? True, nightmares hadn’t been as common back then, but still.
“I have a history book in my school things somewhere,” he said to Yumi. “You can read it when you’re in my body. It will explain what might be coming for your people.”
“What was that, Chosen One?” Liyun said.
“Just a prayer,” Painter said, realizing he’d let his voice stray from a whisper.
Outside the orchard, they picked up Chaeyung and Hwanji—and for once Painter crossed the town without being gawked at. Everyone was gathered at the place of ritual. As he approached, they made way for him, letting him step up near the tent. Here, the scholars had deposited their four-foot-wide machine amid a large number of stones. These were generally smaller than the ones in the place of ritual, but the mechanical thing was moving with eerily smooth motions, making four separate stacks of rocks at once.
“We can beat that,” Yumi said. “Look at how pedestrian those stacks are! Straight up and down.”
Painter was intimidated anyway—even as the machine accidentally knocked over one stack and had to clear it away with three arms before starting again. Yumi might have been able to beat it, but his stacks were nowhere near as good as these.
Still, bolstered by her determination, he stepped into the place of ritual and set to work. He was surprised to find he welcomed the activity of stacking. A lot had happened in the last day, and this return to something normal comforted him. Which says a lot about the human ability to redefine what the word “normal” means.
He soon worked up a sweat—but his stack fell at the seventh stone. The next one only made it to six. He growled and slammed his fist into the ground, barely noticing its heat.
“Relax,” Yumi said. “Meditate a moment. You can’t stack if your hands are shaking.”
He fought down his annoyance. She was right. He took a few deep breaths, then started over.
Hours passed, but most of the townspeople didn’t leave. They seemed to sense something was happening here as Painter managed a stack of ten, then a stack of nine, then a stack of twelve all in a row. Leaving those three in a line, he started into a fourth one, wiping his hands on his skirt to dry them before placing rocks one after another—more bold this time.
And he felt something. Didn’t he? A Connection to the land itself? It felt silly to try to express it, but something pulled on him. Tugging directly on his emotions; as he worked, he tugged back.
Something peeked out of the ground nearby. It vanished as he glanced toward it, but Yumi gasped, then clasped her hands before her, grinning like a maniac. She waved for him to continue, then apparently remembered her duty as a coach and encouraged him to breathe. To be calm.
That wasn’t so easy, as the crowd was beginning to get louder, people murmuring and chattering. Painter launched into his eighth stack—remarkably without any of the others having fallen. He could almost visualize this one before he placed the stones. He’d make it the tallest of them all. He had the rocks, and knew how they’d fit together. He could make his tower appear to lean, but really be sturdy because of the weight of this rock here…
He felt that tugging again.
It was actually working.
It was all real.
An ethereal ball of light seeped up from the ground near the fence, roughly halfway between him and the machine. It glowed like a large glob of liquid metal, softly shimmering with the colors of hion.
Painter placed another rock, struggling to remain calm. The spirit lingered, then turned as if looking toward the clanking machine—though the spirit had no eyes. Part of it stretched in that direction, then the rest followed, like elastic snapping together. As the parts melded, it soared along the stone ground like it was swimming. It passed among the startled people who, their attention on the machine, hadn’t noticed it first appearing.
It swam right up to the scholars.
“No!” Yumi cried, standing. “No, they stole it from us!”
Painter turned, letting his current rock slip. The tower toppled, destabilizing one of the others, which collapsed as well. Outside the fence, the townspeople cheered as one of the scholars picked up the glowing spirit, then raised it in his hands. People crowded around, cutting off Painter’s view of what happened next.
“And now!” The man’s voice drifted to where Painter slouched on the ground, barely noticing the heat from below. “See how we can make this spirit transform into a useful object via the pictures we present as simple inputs. Behold! It is done!”
“That took all day!” a voice shouted. Liyun? “Your machine will never replace the yoki-hijo. A competent girl can draw a half dozen spirits in a day! A master can sometimes get dozens!”
“And how many yoki-hijo are there?” the scholar shouted back. “Sixteen at most! We currently have only fourteen. How long did the people of this town wait between visits of the yoki-hijo? Months? Years? These machines can be placed in every town and village, working all day.”
Liyun didn’t reply.
“You will see!” the scholar said. “We’ll remain here calling spirits until every need of every resident is filled.”
Painter—exhausted, his fingers raw even inside his gloves—turned to Yumi.
“You did well,” she told him.
“Not well enough. Yumi, I don’t think I drew that spirit. I think the machine did.”
“No,” she said, firm. Then she hesitated and spoke a little less certainly. “It was maybe both of you. Spirits always come up right next to me when I’m performing, while that one was between you and the scholars.”
“So the machine works,” Painter said. “It drew the spirit.”
“What you did worked as well, Painter,” she said, kneeling beside him. “It was already obvious the machine works. They wouldn’t have brought it here if it weren’t capable of attracting a spirit. But its stacks are mediocre, barely viable. You can beat it, Painter, do better than it can. Get a spirit for us to talk to, to question.”
He looked around at the many rocks. “More practice?” he said with a sigh.
She nodded.
In response, he took a drink from the canteen Hwanji brought him, shook the stiffness out of his hands, then got back to it. Though he didn’t draw another spirit that day—and he knew it had been months between the first time Yumi had done it and her second—at least it was a nibble at success.