Page 133 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

It would change the world.

From the top of the steps, Yumi turned to gaze out through the shroud. In the distance glowed the points of light spaced around Torio City.

“It cannot defeat us like the others,” she whispered to herself. “Remember that.” She stepped inside the building.

The machine was there, dominating the interior like a fat mushroom overgrowing all its siblings. Fully thirty feet tall, with hundreds of legs, it piled stones on all sides in an eternal process—other legs knocking them over as it went. It would have long since broken down, but Investiture—the smoke—repaired each worn joint, replaced each cracked limb. It was, you might say, an undead machine.

Thousands of spirits surrounded it, just beyond the ring of stones. Shimmering entities of liquid light, blue and red in swirls. Imagine themlike frozen orbs of water, yet undulating, moving in a rhythm. Like an audience at a concert. Or a sermon.

Yumi steeled herself and stepped forward…before planting face-first into an invisible barrier right inside the doorway.

She pressed her hands against it, then looked through, trapped outside. This place was shielded, as the scholars had said.

“We can’t holdthese!” Tojin shouted, pulling Painter by the arm. “It’s not working! They recover after we paint them!”

Painter glanced toward the center of the circle, to where six of their colleagues now huddled with various dire wounds, bleeding out blood like ink on the ground. One woman wasn’t moving at all. Others groaned in pain.

Nightmares had flooded the street around them—a churning, seemingly endless mass of black punctuated by those sickly white eyes. Pressing in, shrinking the circle. Growing increasingly bold as they recovered from their momentary confusion.

The painters were running out of canvases. The ground was covered in ink, such that stepping was slick.

“What do we do?” Tojin asked, panicked. “Nikaro, what do wedo?”

“We paint.”

“But—”

“We paint!” Painter shouted. “Because if we do not, they get into the city. Without us, the people die.”

“The people ignore us!” another cried. “They turn off their lights. They sleep.”

“Because they can’t do anything else,” Painter shouted, starting hisnext painting. “We are the line between their fears and their flesh.We are the Dreamwatch now.”

“We are the Dreamwatch now,” Tojin said, raising his brush. “We are the Dreamwatch now!”

Others took up the cry as a particularly large nightmare loomed over the group. At least fifteen feet high, but familiar.

Yes.Familiar.

Lupine. Smoky shape like jagged edges of glass. Liyun was here…

Liyun. Painter’s eyes widened.

That was the answer.

Yumi knelt, defeated,at the invisible barrier surrounding the machine’s hall.

Rocks bounced off the shield when she tried to break it down. Her shouts did nothing.

All this way. For nothing.

Pain stabbed at her. But not her own. She frowned and stepped back outside to look…toward something?

Painter,she thought. She could feel him, faintly. The Connection had not been entirely severed.

He was frantic, fighting.

Nightmares will come. Endless nightmares. To destroy him, and all he knows. All that he might have told.

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