Page 8 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“Another bamboo?” Foreman Sukishi said, sliding the top canvas from Painter’s bag.

“Bamboo works,” Painter said. “Why change if it works?”

“It’s lazy,” Sukishi replied.

Painter shrugged. The small room where he turned in his paintings after his shift was lit by a hanging chandelier. If you touch opposite lines of hion to either side of a piece of metal, you can make it heat up. From there, you’re barely a little sideways skip away from the incandescent bulb. As I said, not everything in the city was teal or magenta—though the hion overhead outside obviated a need for streetlights of any other color.

Sukishi marked a tally by Painter’s name in the ledger. There wasn’t a strict quota—everyone knew that encountering nightmares was random, and there were more than enough painters. On average, you’d find one nightmare a night—but sometimes you went days without seeing a single one.

They still kept track. Too long without a painting to turn in, and questions would be asked. Now, the more lazy among you might notice a hole in this system. In theory, the rigorous training required to become a painter was supposed to weed out the sort of person who would paint random things without actually encountering any nightmares. But therewasa reason Sukishi hesitated and narrowed his eyes at Painter after retrieving the second canvas and revealing asecondbamboo painting.

“Bamboo works,” Painter repeated.

“You need to look at theshapeof the nightmare,” Sukishi said. “You need to match your drawing tothat, changing the natural form of the nightmare into something innocent, nonthreatening. You should only be drawing bamboo if the nightmares you encounterlooklike bamboo.”

“They did.”

Sukishi glared at him, and the old man had an impressive glare. Some facial expressions, like miso, require aging to hit their potency.

Painter feigned indifference, taking his wages for the day and stepping out onto the street. He slung his bag over his shoulder—with his tools and remaining canvases—and went searching for some dinner.

The Noodle Pupil was the sort of corner restaurant where you could make noise. A place where you weren’t afraid to slurp as you sucked down your dinner, where your table’s laughter wasn’t embarrassing because it mixed like paint with that coming from the next one over. Though less busy on the “night” shift than during the “day,” it was somehow loud even when it was quiet.

Painter hovered outside the place like a mote of dust in the light, seeking somewhere to land. The younger painters from his class congregated here with the sort of frequency that earned them their own unspoken booths and tables. A double line of hion outlined the broad picture window in the front, glowing, making it appear like a futuristic screen. Those same lines rose like vines above the window, spelling out the name in teal and magenta, with a giant bowl of noodles on top.

(Technically, I was a part owner of that noodle shop. What? Renowned interdimensional storytellers can’t invest in a little real estate now and then?)

Painter stood on the street, absorbing the laughter like a tree soaking up the light of hion. Eventually he lowered his head and ducked inside, looping his large shoulder bag on one of the prongs of the coatrack without looking. Fifteen other painters occupied the place, congregated around three tables. Akane’s place was in the back, where she was adjusting her hair. Tojin knelt low beside a nearby table, solemnly adjudicating a noodle-eating contest between two other young men.

Painter sat at the bar. He was, after all, a solitary defense against the miasma outside the city. A lone warrior. He preferred eating by himself, obviously. He wouldn’t have stopped in, save for his tragic mortality. Even solemn, edgy warriors against darkness needed noodles now and then.

The restaurant’s manager flitted over behind the bar, then folded her arms and kind of hunched as she stood, mimicking his pose. Finally he looked up.

“Hey, Design,” he said. “Um…can I have the usual?”

“Your usual is so usual!” she said. “Do you want to know a secret? If you order something new, I’ll write it down and wrap it up, then put it in your noodles. But I’ll also tell you what it is, because the paper will get soggy in the noodles, and you won’t be able to read it.”

“Uh…” Painter said. “The usual. Please?”

“Politeness,” she said, pointing at him, “accepted.”

Design…did not do a good job acting human. I take no blame, as she repeatedly refused my counsel on the matter. At least her disguise was holding up. People did wonder why the strange noodle-shop woman had long white hair, despite appearing to be in her early twenties. She wore tight dresses, and many of the painters had crushes on her. She insisted, you see, that I make her disguise particularly striking.

Or, well, I should say it in her words: “Make me pretty so they’ll be extra disturbed if my face ever unravels. And give me voluptuous curves, because they remind me of a graphed cosine. And also because boobs look fun.”

It wasn’t anactualbody—we all kind of learned our lesson on that—but rather a complicated wireframe Lightweaving with force projections attached directly to her cognitive element as it manifested in the physical realm. But as I was getting pretty good at the technical side of all this, you can pretend it functioned the same as flesh and blood.

I’ll admit to some pride regarding the way Painter’s eyes followed Design as she walked over to begin preparing his meal. Granted, he did overdo it—his eyes lingered on her the entire time she worked. Don’t judge him too harshly. He was nineteen, and I’m a uniquely talented artist.

Design soon returned with his bowl of noodles, which she set into a circular nook carved into the wood. The hion lines—one connected to either end of the bar—ran heat through the element at the bottom of the bowl to keep the broth warm on chill Kilahito nights.

From behind, laughter and chanting picked up as the noodle competition progressed. Painter, in turn, broke his maipon sticks apart and ate slowly, in a dignified way, as befitted one of his imaginary station.

“Design,” he said, trying not to slurp too loud. “Is…what I’m doing important?”

“Of course it is,” she said, lounging down across the bar from him. “If you all didn’teatthe noodles, I think I’d run out of places to store them.”

“No,” he said, waving to his bag where it hung from one arm of the restaurant’s curiously shaped coatrack. “I mean being a nightmare painter. It’s an important job, right?”

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