“You’re as perfect as ever, Design,” he said. “I’m just having an…unusual few weeks.”
She settled in a chair beside his. “I’m not truly jealous,” she noted. “I’m kind of a god, to some people at least. Envy would be unbefitting of me. But when he gave me this form, Hoid said I was supposed to watch how humans interacted. How they paired off.”
“Why give you that instruction?” Painter asked.
“I have some wildly inaccurate ideas about the ways humans form bonds,” she said. “It’s endearing and amusing.”
He looked at her; she grinned back. And he wondered: was she actually some bizarre inhuman thing like she claimed? He would have scoffed at the idea, except for…well, everything lately.
Design nodded toward Yumi. “Why do you like her?”
“I don’t. We’re forced to work together.”
“Nikaro. Do you want to try that again, and make it sound persuasive or something? Because I’ve only had eyes for a few years, and even I can see straight through you.”
He leaned down, crossing his arms on the table and resting his head on them. He didn’t argue. What was the point?
“Can’t you feel it?” he whispered.
“What?”
“The heat,” he said. “It radiates from Yumi, like from the sun on her world.”
Design looked closely at him, narrowing her eyes. “Are you all right? She’s not on fire. You might be hallucinating.”
“It’s a metaphor, Design,” he said. “Yumi’s warm because she’s intense. She has given everything she has to become the best at what she does. Stacking rocks, an activity so bizarre it makes her more fascinating. Because there’s nobody else like her.”
“Wait,” Design said. “Weren’t you complaining the other day, down here, about how intense she is?”
“Yeah.” He smiled.
“You can’t like it and hate it all at once.”
“Your friend is right,” he said. “You do have some inaccurate ideas about mortals.”
“It’s endearing and amusing.”
He basked in that heat one last time. “I love that Yumi understands. She’s been there. She’s one of the only people I’ve met who knows how it feels to give yourself to art…”
“That sounds like a terrible reason for liking someone,” Design said.
“It’s the way we humans do things.”
“A stupid way,” Design said.
“How would you do it?”
“With a formula,” she said. “Find complementary sets of attributes that fit into a proper matrix.”
He shook his head, smiling. “I wish there were a formula, Design. If there were, I could fix this.”
She cocked her head. “…This?”
He nodded toward the table, to where Akane had put her arm around Yumi’s shoulders. “Yumi, dear,” Akane said, “we need to have a talk about your brother. And the things he’s done.”
“We know you look up to him,” Tojin said. “We don’t want to interfere…”
“I do,” Izzy said. “I absolutely want to interfere. You have to know. Your brother is a liar.”
Painter stood up, feeling strange that the motion didn’t push back the chair—he instead simply passed through it. He gave Design a smile.
It had been nice, these last few days. But he would find it liberating to be done. To know the door was closed. Not only with his old friends. But with Yumi.
That’s a lie, the honest part of him thought. This is ripping you apart.
No more than he deserved though. He trailed off, enjoying the extended leash Design had given him, and went wandering through the night.
“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.”