Page 129 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

Painter looked up, his heart leaping.

“Youbelievehim?” 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 bitof 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, theycanassess 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 anew 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.

She soon hit the invisible wall around her little town. Here the shroud had been painted to give the illusion of a landscape extending forever. Once she touched it, that wall warped and bent—letting her passthrough. For the first time in almost two thousand years, she physically left that pocket of land and entered the shroud proper.

The darkness was strangely transparent to her. (And she didn’t even have to burn tin.) Perhaps this was because she was made of its same substance. Once she was within it—hovering on a tree that was shrinking by the minute—she saw a dark and ruined landscape below. Nothing growing—just dark stone that had been hidden from the sun for millennia. Behind her, the town faded. She could see it retreating, a column with a dome on top. A piece of her broke when she realized even the sunlight she’d basked in and loved—even the sight of the daystar itself—had somehow been fake.

(She was wrong, by the way. The sunlight, actually, was real—the domes over the cities let sunlight through in one direction without allowing light back out the other way. So while what she felt was authentic, those of us surveying the world from above didn’t spot these prisons. In addition, the heat from the ground was real, created by the machine using a concentration of Invested essence.)

From this height, Yumi could make out other dome-topped columns in the distance. These too were transparent to her eyes, lights standing out like candles on a dark night. The prisons of the thirteen other yoki-hijo. And in the middle of it all, a brilliant larger light that she figured must be Torio City, the capital. Home of the festival. Seat of the queen.

Yumi was drifting away from it.

That was a much smaller problem than the fact that her tree was unraveling faster now—joining with the smoky blackness. Beneath her, dark shapes gathered. The scholars had not given up. Indeed, she flew like a banner out here, hard to miss. She started to drift downward as her tree continued to cease being a tree. She clung to it, eyes closed, resting her forehead against the wood.

Please. Please, spirits. Let it continue.

The bark beneath her forehead hardened. The tree stabilized in the air. Yumi opened her eyes, surprised—and embarrassed by that surprise. She’d prayed. The spirits had answered. It was just…she didn’t usually see them answer so quickly…

She started to fall again, the tree unraveling.

No!she thought. And again it recovered. Because…Because what I believe to be true is true,Yumi realized.This tree is created from the shroud. And by thinking of it as something else, I can force that to be the reality.

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