Page 23 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Nikaro!” a voice shouted outside. “You answer this door!”

“Great,” the hero said (lowly). “It’s the foreman. Yumi…you’re going to have to answer that.”

“What?” she said, her voice going shrill.

“I can’t touch things,” he said, proving it by waving his hand through a table beside the strange altar he’d been lying on when they awoke. He then seemed to notice her confusion. “This is my room in my world, Yumi. Like I was in yours?”

“Your…world?” she said. “You live in the land of frozen souls? The land of the sky?”

“Yeah, kind of.”

“Are we dead?” she whispered.

“I…don’t think so. But if the foreman is forced to break in here, he might strangle one of us…”

The door pounded once more. “I can hear you talking in there!” the terrible voice shouted. Some kind of demon, perhaps half person, half animal. Yumi stepped back, and only then realized what she was wearing. Some kind of loose trousers and a buttoned shirt, made of a thick but soft material.

She gasped. You could see the exactshapeof her— That and the curve of her—

“Yumi,” the hero said. “Look at me. Are you all right?”

“No!” she said. She glanced around again, and as her eyes adjusted to the darkness—it must be night here, but what was that strange light?—she picked out things she hadn’t seen earlier. Wadded-up clothing on the floor. Unwashed bowls in piles on a counter. Refuse.

The hero…was a slob?

Well, of course he wasn’t. Heroes didn’t clean up after themselves. Servants did that. So his servants had grown lax in his absence. Thiswasa small room. Surely this wasn’t his sole quarters. She leaned toward the window and glanced outside. There she saw a dauntingly dark sky. No stars at all. A grimnothingup above that felt eager to swallow her. But she was in some kind of large building.

A palace? It was certainly bigger than any building she’d ever been in before. Yet the street waslinedwith them. A dozen or more palaces in a row! Taller than steamwell eruptions. How did these buildings get so big—ten stories—without collapsing? How did they live without heat from the ground?

It’s the land of the heroes,she thought.Rules are different here.It was colder and darker than she’d imagined, but at least sheprobablywasn’t dead.

The door thundered again.

“Go,” the hero said. “Answer it and get rid of him.”

“I can’t answer the door like this.” She gestured to her outfit. “The clothing outlines my form! It’s so immodest!”

“Yumi, we werejusttaking a bath.”

“In the service of the spirits,” she said, increasingly frantic. “Ritual cleansing. That’scompletely different!”

“He’ll see you as me,” the hero said. “Don’t you understand? Everyone looked at me and saw you. Now I’m the one that’s incorporeal. They won’t seeyoubeing immodest.”

It was…a valid point. So, trying to control her anxiety, shoving aside her famishing hunger, she stepped to the door and eased it open. Doingthat for herself would have been a novelty if the situation were different. Now she barely gave it a thought as she found a giant of a white-haired older man on the other side. He wore thick trousers and a buttoned shirt made of some material she didn’t recognize.

He froze immediately, fixating on her. “What the…?” He looked past her into the little room. “Well, slap me silly,” he muttered. “Would never have expected to find a girl answering Nikaro’s door…”

Yumi stiffened.

He saw her.

He sawher?

Painter groaned behind her. But this foreman seemed unable to see him, for he focused again only on Yumi. “Where is he?”

“Tell him I’m sick!” Painter said, sounding panicked.

“He’s sick!” she said quickly, then felt a stab of anguish at the untruth. Liyun would be disappointed in her.

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