Defeated, embarrassed—but not destroyed—it vanished into the night.
Painter fell to his knees, overwhelmed, the paintbrush finally burning away in his fingers. Behind him, Akane reached Tojin, helping him sit up. The two of them stared out after the nightmare, baffled as to what had driven it off.
Painter looked with a wan smile toward Yumi. Then at last he seemed to notice that she wasn’t moving.
“Yumi!” he said, but his voice sounded distant, like she was…was deep underwater…
She tried to reply, but her teeth only chattered together. Her body shivered and spasmed, and her vision was fading—darkness at the sides creeping in further.
“Yumi!” Painter’s anxious face above her. “What’s wrong?”
“So…cold…” she whispered, her breath puffing.
He knelt above her, panicked, holding up his hands.
The darkness closed in.
Painter seized her in an embrace.
His essence mingled with hers. His self and her self mashed into one. A shocking, intoxicating, sensual concoction.
Heat detonated within Yumi, a dying fire suddenly given air. It surged through her. His heat. Their heat. She gasped with the force of a drowning woman and went rigid.
Painter pulled back, his face streaked with sweat. She caught herself before falling to the ground again, then kept breathing in deep gasps, no longer frozen. Together they sat there, trembling, until Akane and Tojin arrived to help her stand.
Perhaps now they would believe.
An hour later they sat in the noodle shop again, Painter at his own table nearby, watching the others in their nervous huddle. They constantly asked Yumi if she was all right, as if the answer would change moment to moment.
She did seem all right. At least she wasn’t dying of the cold any longer. The others had tried to take her to the hospital, but she’d insisted she wanted something warm to eat. And a warm place to sit.
So they’d come here, and she was on her second bowl of broth for the night—spiced and heated to boiling. How she could eat that without burning herself baffled him, but then again, people from her planet had an odd relationship with heat.
Painter felt tired. That thing had drawn something from him, and holding Yumi had done the same. Fortunately, it didn’t feel like anything permanent. Hollow fatigue, like he hadn’t gotten enough sleep. Never before while in spirit form had he felt drowsy.
He was trying to figure out why the shop was so crowded at this hour, beyond its usual complement of painters. But before he hit on the answer, Tojin arrived and rushed over to the others. They were all there—Masaka and Izzy having been called from their patrols.
“The foreman believed me,” he told them. “Particularly after I showed him what had happened to the playground. The Dreamwatch has been summoned. There is a contingent of them in Jito; they’ll be here within a few hours.”
“That is wonderful,” Akane said （highly）。 “They’ll deal with it, Yumi. They’ll find it.”
“Sorry,” Tojin said, settling in next to Akane, “for not believing you earlier.”
Yumi met Painter’s eyes. Mission accomplished. The stable nightmare would soon be dealt with. If that was why the spirits had paired them, then their job was done.
“We’re to go three per patrol,” Tojin continued, “until the thing is caught. We’re also not to tell anyone.”
“I hate that part,” Masaka muttered. “The city’s people deserve to know.”
“You just relish the idea of telling them,” Izzy said, poking her in the arm. “Because it’s horrific.”
“I hate horrific things,” Masaka said.
“You think nightmares are cute.”
“They can be,” she said. “They can be anything.”
Akane glanced at Yumi. “You all right, Yumi?”
“Yes,” Yumi said softly. “Better, now that I have something warm in me.”
“That was brave of you,” Akane said, “to go out to try to prove that your brother wasn’t a liar. But it was also exceedingly stupid. You realize that now, don’t you?”
Yumi nodded.
“He ran, didn’t he?” Izzy asked. “When he saw it weeks ago? He ran away to another city. That’s why we haven’t seen him lately; why he went ‘on leave.’？”
“No,” Yumi said, fire in her eyes, her objection vigorous enough to make Painter smile through the fatigue. “I saw him earlier today. You’re all wrong about him. So very wrong.”
He blessed her for that, but also didn’t miss how the others shared looks. She would never persuade them. That didn’t hurt as much as it once had. After all, he still wasn’t certain if she’d persuaded him or not.
These last few weeks spending time—invisibly, yes, but actual time—with his old friends had reminded him how much he’d enjoyed being with them. He acknowledged how his bitterness had poisoned his mind, like mold on a painting, ruining the true details. He’d been uncharitable in his descriptions to Yumi. Painfully so.
The truth was, these were wonderful people. He appreciated the way Akane kept them all together, like the glue of a collage. So careful never to let anyone feel left behind. He found it endearing, the way Tojin was so enthusiastic about his bodybuilding but also shy about it. Painter even liked how he could never figure out if Masaka was genuinely interested in the macabre, or somehow just oblivious.
He even appreciated Izzy and her…Izzy-ness. They might not be his friends anymore. But he could be their friend. In secret. If he let go of that awful bitterness.
Design came bustling over, hands on her hips. “I’m going to find out,” she said to them, “what you’re hiding from me.”
“Sorry, Design,” Akane said sweetly. “Painter business. It’s the rules.”
“Rules don’t apply to me,” Design said. “I’m not a person. Or truly alive.” She shook her head. “Well, sorry about the crowd. Though it is to be expected.”
“Expected?” Tojin asked.
“Because of the broadcast?” Design said, cocking her head. “The landing? The spaceship? Have you forgotten that your people are about to make first contact? Officially at least. Noodle shop owners with nice butts don’t count, apparently.”
The landing.
That was tonight?
Painter turned, seeing the crowd with new eyes. People chattered with an air of excitement, waiting for Design to turn on the restaurant’s hion viewer—which she did shortly after leaving their table. Painter rose and stared at the lines of light behind the glass—hung high on the wall so everyone could see. The hion began to shake, then formed into the shape of the lead explorer in his command chair—broadcast all the way from the space bus near the star.
“We’ve completed our orbit of the planet,” the lead explorer said. “It matches the visual inspections via telescope. We get no radio signals, even this close, but our surveys indicate settlements. There are very few land masses though. It seems like these people might spend most of their lives sailing the oceans, for we see many boats.”
Boats?
Yumi stepped up to Painter, her eyes wide as they watched.