“Very cute,” Yumi repeated.
“Don’t tell anyone what we are, please,” Masaka said. “We are tired of people being scared of us. We are tired of wars. We like painting. Please.”
“I…won’t tell anyone,” Yumi said. “But please, we need help. You…know about what’s out in the darkness?”
“No horde,” Design said, holding up a finger, “settles on a planet without knowing everything about the terrain. I’ll bet she’s been sending out…um, scouts. Little scouts. To investigate the entire place.”
Masaka looked out at the kitchens, then shut the door. “Is it important?” she asked Yumi. “As important as Design said?”
“Yes,” Yumi said. “I think it really is.”
Masaka took a deep breath. “We… I am not so paranoid as others, Design. I am trying to be human. To avoid the conflicts. But I have sent hordelings out. Most of the landscape beyond the cities is wasteland, enveloped in this strange Investiture. Like the slag castoffs of half-refined souls. But there are places we cannot go.”
“Cannot go?” Yumi asked, looking at Painter. “What do you mean?”
“Hard places,” Masaka explained. “Walls in the blackness, where the Investiture has become solid. Rising up high in the sky, into the atmosphere. Like columns. One vast one a few miles away. Other small ones, circles all of them, like…fortifications.”
“Around towns?” Painter asked, standing up, then waving for Yumi to say it—which she did.
“No way to tell,” Masaka said. “I can’t get through.” She wilted. “I am young. I am not so…eager as some of my kind. I don’t have the knowledge, have not gathered the power, to deal with things like this. I came here to hide.”
“It might be enough,” Yumi said, “if you draw out a little map of it, maybe? Where these places are?”
Masaka nodded, and Design went to fetch some paper.
“Towns,” Painter repeated, stepping up beside Yumi. “Those circles she found. They’re your towns!”
“It’s impossible,” Yumi said. “I’d know if I’d been living in little enclaves inside a vast darkness. We can see all the way to the horizon!”
“The shroud can look like anything,” he said. “Design said it could fool us. And you yourself said that people from your lands rarely travel between villages because of the heat of the stone in between. So it could all be some kind of strange cover-up.”
“And you really think,” she replied, “that of the thousands upon thousands of people who live in my kingdom, none would stroll out and find one of these barriers? That a flyer would never smack into an invisible wall in the sky? You think this could have been hidden from all of us for such a long time?”
“I…” He winced at the implausibility of it all. “Yeah, all right. But I would bet you the biggest bowl of noodles you can eat that if we overlap Masaka’s map with a map of your lands, we’re going to find a correlation.”
Masaka had watched all of this with interest, but didn’t seem to find a woman talking to herself to be all that odd. When Design returned with a paper, Masaka knelt down with a fine brush and sketched out a large circle near one edge of it.
“Kilahito,” she said, pointing to the circle. “Where we are now.” She drew another circle of similar size across the page. “The largest of the impassable zones.” Then she drew out several other smaller circles, about a dozen. Yes…those could be the size of towns. “The other ones.”
“How accurate,” Yumi said, “are these distances you’ve drawn?”
“Hordes have incredible spatial awareness,” Design said. “Comes from having bodies that can spread out to the size of a nation. Her guess will be more accurate than most people’s instrument-measured surveys.”
“Here is a scale,” Masaka said, drawing a line at the bottom with some numbers on it. “It is exact.”
Painter knelt and studied the painting in detail, then measured the distances using his palm and fingers, something he’d taught Yumi to do for measuring parts of a painting.
“You ready to sleep?” he asked her.
“I’d prefer to eat first,” she said. “I never did get dinner.”
He nodded. “I’m going to memorize this drawing. See if I can reproduce it exactly. Shouldn’t take me too long. After that we can get back to your land and fix this once and for all.”
Yumi nodded in return and wandered out to the main room, taking advantage of the longer leash. Design, having put off her customers too long, came out and took charge of the restaurant. So Yumi sat at the counter, watching Masaka join the rest of the painters. They noticed Yumi and waved.
Fix this once and for all.
It might be…the last time she saw these people. Her last chance to be a normal person rather than the collected hopes and needs of an entire people. And so she let herself leave the bar, then trail across the room to the others.
“Yumi, Yumi,” Tojin said. “Look at this.” He flexed, stretching his…neck muscles? She hadn’t ever even thought about the fact that people had muscles in their necks. “What do you think?”
“Your head,” she said, “looks small by comparison.” She blushed immediately, as that felt rude.
Tojin, however, grinned widely. “Thanks!”
Akane sat nearby, gazing at the ceiling as Izzy kept talking. About dramas, of course. “So it turns out,” she was saying, “he didn’t leave. He thought he had to because he was being threatened by his evil brother.”
Yumi’s breath caught.
“His brother,” Akane said, “that you just told me was dead.”
“He is dead!” Izzy said. “He set it all up before he died! Using people who hate the honor of ronin.”
“So…” Yumi whispered, “Sir Ashinata came back?”
“There was an extra episode,” Izzy said, “that they didn’t tell us about.” She raised a finger. “This proves my theory of the importance of dramas. I’m writing a book on their relevance for improving mental health.”
Tojin frowned. “What about…drama-horoscope-figgldygrak—whatsit?”
“Old news,” Izzy said. “I’m going to be a viewer critic instead. It’s going to make me famous.”
Nearby, Masaka had settled into her seat. And though she didn’t say much, Yumi could see her contentment. She understood that. Being an outsider, then finding a place. Being alone, then finding friends.
“I wish,” Yumi said, trying to hold back the tears, “that I’d been able to meet you all sooner.”
“It’s your brother’s fault,” Tojin said. “He could have invited you at any point. Only did it when he wanted someone to try doing his work for him.”
Yumi felt a sudden, burning anger.
“I’m surprised,” Akane said, “that he didn’t try to recruit her to go to his classes for him in school. Considering that all he wanted to do was take time off. He—”