She hugged him then.
“I’m truly sorry,” he whispered, holding to her. “About everything I’ve done. Said. And the things I haven’t said most of all.”
“We know,” she said, pulling back. “I can’t speak for the others, but I forgive you, Nikaro. I know you didn’t want to hurt us.”
He smiled.
“Uh, guys?” Masaka said, hurrying over. “Have you ever seen it do that before?”
Painter turned.
The shroud was undulating. Agitating, frothing.
“Grab your things!” Painter shouted. “They’re coming!”
People scrambled to their feet, gaping. Stunned.
As the nightmares began to emerge.
* * *
Yumi knew, as she approached Torio City, that she needed to let the tree land.
She couldn’t defeat the machine while dealing with the nightmares who were still down there hunting her. She needed to confront them first. Instinct propelled her, but also good logic. Because she remembered something Design had told her.
Her tree floated down, unraveling as it lowered. As she landed, she stepped free, allowing it to vanish fully. Four ghastly figures stood before her, blocking the way into Torio City. All around was eternal night, barren stone veiled by a pervasive black smoke.
The four nightmares came for her and slammed their claws into her. Seeking to draw out her strength, to sap it, to freeze her.
But she was stronger than they were.
You could consume them.
As they tried to pull her strength away, she simply…refused.
“I am the one who the spirits chose,” she said, feeling their claws pass through her harmlessly. “I am the thing you had to lock up.”
They stumbled back from her, shrinking. As nightmares sometimes do when no longer feared.
“I am the one that nightmares fear,” she said, imagining them. Knowing them for what they were. Forcing the figures to coalesce into four spindly scholars. “And you shall bow to me.”
Color flooded them and they gasped, falling to the ground.
Yumi walked to the lead scholar, who sat up first, looking at her with frightened eyes. She didn’t attack him though. She sat before him in a pose of meditation.
“Tell me,” she said softly, “how to destroy the machine.”
“You…” He glanced toward his colleagues, who lay in a lump. “You can’t. I’m sorry.” He bowed his head and began to shake. “I’m sorry… Oh, what have we done? What have we done…”
“It’s all right,” Yumi said. “What has happened is in the past. I am the yoki-hijo. My word is law. You may rest, once this is through.”
“Thank you,” he said, taking her by the hand. “But you can’t stop it.”
“There is no need to protect the machine. You are free from its control. It cannot hurt you, no matter how much it wants to.”
“You don’t understand,” the scholar said. “It doesn’t want anything. It’s not alive.”
“But the way everyone has acted,” she said. “Something is controlling them.”
“That is because of the instructions we gave the machine,” he explained. “We built it to protect itself and to harvest energy from the spirits. These are not the machine’s wishes, any more than a tree wants to grow. But once it started drawing on us, on all of us…we defended it because…because we were then part of it somehow.”
She frowned, looking beyond him into the city. A shining, beautiful city full of buildings like towers, with fountains, trees, red roofs, and sculptures of dragons. Empty of people.
“It uses our souls as energy,” she said.
“Originally it did,” the scholar said. “Now it uses the spirits, which are trapped eternally to fuel the machine. Oh…what have we done?”
“Our people became but memories,” another of the scholars whispered, eyes down. “Their souls as smoke.”
“Our shame,” another said. “Our sorrow. Powered perpetually by the spirits now, the machine will never run out, never shut down on its own.”
“We must turn it off,” Yumi said.
The lead scholar shook his head. “It is shielded. Protected as per its core instructions. There is no plug or hion line to remove. It self-perpetuates, fed by thousands of eternal spirits. I’m sorry. I wish…wish we could have left you alone. It’s incredible that you made it this far.”
“But worthless in the end,” another scholar said. “It will wipe out the city of Kilahito now. Any trace of what happened with you and that boy will be annihilated.”
“No,” Yumi whispered, standing. “My world. My rules.”
She stepped forward and commanded her nightgown to change. Black smoke swirled and she emerged from it wearing the dress that Akane had bought her.
She strode past the scholars, and at long last—seventeen hundred years after the first time she asked Liyun for the privilege—entered Torio City.
And found rubble.
* * *
“Nikaro!” a shrill voice shouted.
He tore away from his current painting, leaving a nightmare on the ground, curled up in the shape of a sleeping cat. The painters had formed an irregular circle, shoulder to shoulder—but some faltered. Painter rushed across the center of the circle, to the side of a painter he barely recognized. She was breaking, trembling, turning away from the nightmares in a panic.
Painter stepped in and slammed the tip of his brush down, ignoring her canvas. With a powerful swirl, he created a flower on the ground itself—a lotus, floating, opening its many petals to the air like a fist unclenching.
The nightmare shrank into the shape, forced to conform to his will. But like every other nightmare they’d faced tonight, it didn’t evaporate away as usual.
In all honesty, the painters probably should have been slaughtered. But the machine was distracted by Yumi, and the nightmares were momentarily confused, surprised at the unexpected resistance. They prowled around the ring, looking to feed on the painters, but not rushing in a throng to attack. That didn’t make it easy on Painter and his team, as the nightmares were terrifying and mostly stable. But these minutes of confusion made resisting them possible.
Still, the humans were not prepared for such a fight as this. They had to ward away each nightmare that came close—had to face down stable monsters and not break. They painted with trembling hands, and kept stopping and staring, panicking. Painter had to watch for this, because he had a sense the sole thing keeping them alive was this unified front. This collective force of painting, not allowing any one nightmare to attack the circle and break it completely. Even as he finished his lotus, he noticed Izzy freezing in terror.
Painter shoved her aside and attacked her nightmare with a painting. “Hold the circle!” he shouted as he crafted a bird, seeing that in the shape of the nightmare. It looked a little like the great ravens he’d seen in Yumi’s world. “Keep painting! See how most of them mill around, distracted by our work. They cannot take us so long as we are painting! You’ve fought nightmares before. These are the same!”
But they weren’t. These were bigger, their forms more terrible. Those eyes like the hollow insides of bones. The scraping of claws on the ground. Worst of all, none of them vanished when painted. They shrank down, but smoldered there like embers—then started growing again once attention was no longer on them.