She almost tried. But then she thought of a better way.
Painter’s way.
She ran for the place of ritual, passing right through the fence. The sound of claws on stone chased her farther, to where the scholars had once kept their tent. Chained behind that spot, to give the tent shade, were several trees.
Yumi leaped for the first of them and pulled out the pin holding its chain to the ground. With a cry, she held on tightly to the tree, her eyes squeezed closed. Anticipating the arrival of the nightmares and the feeling of their claws on her skin.
When it didn’t happen, she cracked her eyes and saw four dark shapes on the ground below. Looking up. Having arrived just a fraction too late for the second time in their lives.
* * *
Painter found his friends in their usual place at Design’s restaurant. He blessed his luck. This would have been a terrible night for them to go out for dumplings instead. He stumbled up to their table, then threw himself to his knees and bowed, his head touching the ground.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered.
Stunned silence.
“I know it’s late for apologies,” he continued. “I realize I hurt you deeply. I…didn’t want to do that. Hurting all of you was the last thing I wanted. I just couldn’t think, couldn’t process what had happened until it was too late. And I foolishly kept thinking if I could put it off, I would be able to find some way to prevent you from suffering the terrible loss that I felt.”
He continued kneeling, listening to them shuffle, a pair of maipon sticks clinking together as a bowl on the table shifted.
“I know you have no reason to believe me ever again,” he said. “You’re fully justified in ignoring me. But I’m trying to do better, and so I’m going to tell you the absolute truth. These last weeks, I’ve been interacting with nightmares. They have souls. They’re people somehow, from long ago.
“I thought things were going well, but now… Now we’re in danger. One of them told me, just a few minutes ago, that a hundred of its fellows are coming to Kilahito. To destroy it, like they did to Futinoro. Because of me, and what I know, an army of stable nightmares is on its way to the city right now, and the Dreamwatch won’t listen to me.
“I’ve lied to you in the past. I’ve hurt you. But this is not a lie. Nightmares will destroy everyone in this city unless we stop them. I’m begging for your help. So I don’t have to face them alone.”
He squeezed his eyes shut, head to the floor, tears dripping to stain the wood.
“You talked to a nightmare,” Akane said.
“Yes,” he whispered.
“And it said an army of other nightmares was coming to destroy Kilahito.”
“From the west,” Painter said. “It sounds ridiculous. But it’s true.”
Tense silence. Though other patrons continued to eat, it was like this one section of the room had been muffled. As if nothing there lived. As if he were still alone.
“Suppose we’d better go with you then,” Tojin said, and stood.
Painter looked up, his heart leaping.
“You believe him?” Izzy said, gesturing to Painter. “Really?”
Tojin shrugged. “What’s the worst that could happen, Izzy? If he’s wrong, we get a little embarrassed and have to come back and eat our noodles cold.” He looked at Painter. “If he’s right, and we don’t go, then what?” He took a deep breath, then offered a beefy hand to Painter.
Painter took it and was hauled to his feet.
“I agree,” Masaka said softly, from within her thick sweater-and-scarf shroud. “I think we should go. Just in case.”
“If there are a hundred nightmares,” Akane said, “then we won’t do much to stop them.”
“Takanda owes me a favor,” Tojin said. “We’ll bring him and his painters out to help. And Yuinshi always likes a good laugh—he’ll want to watch this. He can bring some more.”
“I suppose,” Akane said, “I could ask Ikonora to come as well. And she could probably gather a few… We won’t have a hundred painters. But maybe twenty or thirty.”
“Yes, please,” Painter said. He clutched Tojin’s hand. “Thank you.”
“The other night,” he said, “when the stable nightmare attacked…it turned away, for no reason, and fled. When it did, I thought for the briefest moment I saw you there.” Tojin smiled. “I realized my mind was playing tricks on me. Been thinking about it anyway, and it occurred to me that you’re the only one who ever took this life seriously.
“Maybe if I’d been a little more like you, I wouldn’t have fallen down and nearly been taken by that thing. I thought, maybe it’s all right to pretend you’re in the Dreamwatch, you know?” He shrugged. “There are worse lies to tell. Anyway, come on. Let’s see how many companions we can gather for you.”
One final bit of explanation. You might be wondering what the spirit did to Yumi and Painter.
Well, by building that Connection between them, it protected Yumi. For when she was in spiritual form, she was immune to the machine’s touch. （Much like the hion lines.） The spirit who Connected them hadn’t had a plan beyond this: the hope that Yumi, once protected, would be able to help. The spirit hadn’t actually expected Yumi and Painter to begin swapping—but when you play with things like Spiritual Connection, irregularities pop up.
This meddling by the spirit placed the machine in a predicament. Suddenly one of the yoki-hijo couldn’t have her mind erased. While machines can’t generally plan, they can assess a situation in all of its complexities and quickly devise a solution. The solution in this case? To keep the narrative going. To let Yumi “travel” to a new town each day and simply continue her life.
Thus, as she slept, it evaporated the previous town and created a new one using imprints left long ago on the shroud. At first, it thought creating a new town for her each day would be enough.
However, she refused to move on. She stayed in that second town for weeks, acting irregularly. The wrongness compounded, and the machine reassessed. Yumi was dangerous, and there was something distinctly odd about her behavior. So the machine called upon its most dedicated servants, the scholars: its creators. They had been kept apart from the soup of the shroud and held in reserve, their wills dominated but their minds left partially free, for just such a situation.
The scholars had been sent, therefore, as agents. They’d played a role like everyone else, reenacting things they’d done seventeen hundred years before. Showing off their machine prototype to the small towns. However, they’d come with a secondary mandate: to discover what was wrong in the town and to fix the problem, no matter what that required.
That brings us, finally, to the present. Where Yumi had a different problem. The tree she was flying on was made from the shroud.
That made sense to her. The buildings hadn’t been real, nor had the people. Why would the plants be real? It had all been a charade orchestrated to control her. Better if every element, then, could be controlled exactly.
As she rose higher in the air, the tree started to warp beneath her fingers. Wisps of smoke began to trail from it. Being created from the shroud, the tree was subject to her enemy’s control—which meant the machine could make its form vanish back into the shroud. Something it was starting to do, if more slowly than the machine would have liked.