Page 104 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

The landing.

That wastonight?

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.

“Extending our hion lines now toward the surface,” the explorer said. That was what had carried them all this way—a pair of mobile hion lines connected back to their planet, capable of letting a space vessel travel like a train, constantly powered, pushed by the lines. How they strengthened the lines enough to stretch all that way was beyond Painter.

“Have you,” he whispered to Yumi, “ever visited the oceans on your planet?”

“The what?” she said. “I don’t know that word.”

“Water,” he said. “Enormous bodies of water, like the cold spring, but huge. We have a few of them here—our cities run to the edges of them.” One of those oceans could take an entiredayto cross, he’d heard, using a hion-line boat.

“Water like that would boil away,” she said. “There aren’t enough high grounds for more than the occasional cool spring. Unless…maybe it’s out beyond the searing stones? In the cold wastes, up high?”

He felt a mounting worry as they watched the explorers in the cockpit guide their vessel. He listened to their observations, heard the rattling of the ship as it rode the hion lines all the way to the ground and finally touched down.

The door opened. And the camera turned, in the hands of an explorer, to show the view outside. There, curious beings were coming up to inspect the vessel. Limber, tall, with four arms, the explorers described them as having chalk-white skin. They most certainlyweren’thuman.

Though you might have guessed this, Painter was stunned. Yumi wasn’t from the star.

She never had been.

“Maybe it’s timetravel,” Yumi said, half walking, half floating as she paced in the cold spring. Strange how she’d begun finding the cool water refreshing instead of shocking.

“Time travel?” Painter said, skeptical where he sat in the cold spring with arms out along the stones, resting back, toes peeking from the water.

“You have an advanced level of technology,” she said, ticking things off on her fingers. “While we are just beginning to build machines, you have ones that can travel to thestars. Our languages are close. Even without the strange gift of the spirits that lets us understand one another, I can see it in the familiar way your writing looks. We are both human. Maybe we’re from thesameplanet during differenttimes.”

“Yumi,” he said, beads of water glistening on his bare chest, “this isnotmy planet. The ground is scalding, the sky is too high, and there’s no shroud. Your plantsfloat. I think I’d know if plants floated on my world.”

“It could be thedistantpast,” she said. “A lot can change over time, Painter. We should at least consider the possibility.”

He frowned, but nodded. She paced back the other direction, water chill as it washed across her thighs and waist with each too-light step. Her theory frightened her. If she was right, the distance between her and Painter would change from incredible toimpossible. Another world was daunting. Another time…

He met her eyes, and seemed to be thinking the same thing. Perhaps there was another possibility, and she tried to send her mind that way instead. How bizarre that she’d come to relish this time in the cold spring—the renewing water, mixed with the familiar sun and its comfortable warmth. The quiet time alone with Painter. That should have been unremarkable, with how Connected they were, but it felt like every other moment was filled with things they should be doing.

Or…she admitted to herself…maybe that sense of anxiety at other times was just her. Feeling guilty for not being of use when Painter would have preferred to simply relax.

Either way, the bath was a peaceful time for her. Hair wet against her back, the tips trailing in the water behind her, skin prickling as the top half of her dried while her legs remained in the water—which somehow felt warm by contrast. The most surreal part—the part that only struck her when she stopped to think about it—was how natural it felt.

The last few days, she’d hardly considered the fact that she was bare. Painter seemed to react the same way, no longer staring, no longer embarrassed. He merely floated comfortably, thoughtful as he gazed at the sky and the spinning flowers high above. What had once been the single most stressful moment of her entire life was now just…normal.

“Maybe we’re still from different planets,” Painter said, “but they’re farther apart. Design is from somewhere else. You could be too.”

“Maybe,” she said, trailing her fingers in the water as she walked.“But Design said she thought that was unlikely. If you think about it, we decided on a whim that we were from two different planets.”

“I was looking at the star when the strange event happened.”

“Which was completely coincidental. If you’d been looking at a bowl of noodles, would that imply that I came from the land of the noodle people?”

“That’s aperfectexplanation for you.” He raised a finger. “Stiff and rigid until you soak her in water.”

---