Page 132 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“You don’t understand,” the scholar said. “It doesn’twantanything. It’s not alive.”

“But the way everyone has acted,” she said. “Somethingiscontrolling them.”

“That is because of the instructionswegave 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 treewantsto 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 wedone?”

“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.”

“Wemustturn 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 shrillvoice 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 iteasyon Painter and his team, as the nightmares were terrifying and mostly stable. But these minutes of confusion made resisting thempossible.

Still, the humans werenotprepared for such a fight as this. They had to ward away each nightmare that came close—had to face downstable 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.

Paintings alone weren’t enough to hold these. His one consolation was that instead of continuing in through the city, the monsters had surrounded the circle. For now, Kilahito was safe. But as Painter finished helping Izzy, a scream rose from across the circle. He spun to find Nanakai—a painter in her forties—falling in a flash of blood as a nightmare seized upon her nervousness and pushed forward, attacking.

Two others grabbed her as she stammered on the ground, staring with horror at the gouges across her side and arm. Painter had to leap over her and hold the line, but he needed to capture three nightmares at once. And so, without thinking, he defaulted to bamboo. Simple bamboo.

In that moment, it was actually what he needed. It froze all three nightmares briefly, long enough for someone else to step in and help.

He couldn’t stop the entire army himself. He couldn’t stop them atall, not permanently. It was only a matter of time.

Rubble. The beautifulcity she’d seen outside was an illusion, a veneer painted on the surface of the wall protecting the place. Perhaps that was how it had once looked, hundreds of years ago.

Now Yumi walked amid fallen stones and crumbling walls. Roofs had long since decayed away. Turned out she couldn’t visit Torio City itself. Only its grave.

One structure remained at the very center of the city. Yumi imagined it as a grand exhibit hall, with banners out front for the festival of the spirits. Where the scholars had unveiled their amazing new project: a machine that could summon spirits and provide a new form of energy. Hion.

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