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.