Page 85 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

She hadn’t expected it toshiftlike that. Turbulent. Undulating. Yet because of the lack of color, it was impossible to distinguish details. That gave it the appearance of something much farther away. An impossible visual.

“Do you ever get used to it?” she asked softly.

“You grow accustomed to it,” he said. “Like a persistent noise. In the same way, you occasionally notice it anew—and suddenly it’s alien again. Terrifying again. You have to get used to it all over. It’s almost like making friends with someone who keeps changing personalities. One who stares at you in a way that makes you think they’re eventually going to try to kill you…”

She ripped her gaze away from the shroud, instead looking along the buildings here. Whitewash covered the bricks of many portions—a plainly deliberate design choice, a wall of white to ward off the wall ofdarkness. And on many of those whitewashed portions were paintings. Large murals painted with the ink of a nightmare painter—monochromatic, but incredibly detailed in contrast and subtlety of shade.

“What are those?” she asked.

“Painters put them up when they feel like it,” he said. “One section per painter.”

“Where’s yours?”

He shook his head. He didn’t have one then? Perhaps no one would be impressed by another painting of bamboo.

They started their patrol, walking back from the shroud through the nearer rings of the city streets. Despite what she’d said earlier, he hadn’t made her spend the last weekonlyon bamboo. They’d talked about patrolling and about protocol for painters. So she understood what it was he did at night—how he watched for nightmare signs.

He still spotted the first sign before she did. “There,” he said, pointing ahead. To the corner of a wall by the street, about five feet up in the air. A smoking black spot marked the bricks there.

That high? She’d been watching the ground. They approached to find black smoke steaming off what appeared to be black tar—a piece of the shroud—covering a hand-size section of the corner. A sign that a nightmare had passed this way recently, brushing the building and leaving a trail.

“How did you spot that?” she hissed.

“Practice,” he said, “and luck.”

The less you have of the first, the more you need the second.

Though he’d taught her that the next step was to follow the trail, looking for other marks, he continued studying this one. Then he peered down the nearby alleyway.

“What?” she asked.

“This is a blatant mark,” he said. “Right on the street, obvious and bigger than most. Feels like another painter should have spotted this. Yet I can see the next mark on that fire escape right inside the alley. No painter.”

“So no one’s noticed this yet,” she said. “We’re first. What’s the problem?”

“No real problem,” he said. “It’s just that I had a horrifying thought. The foreman thinks I’m a slacker.”

“A what?”

“He thinks I haven’t been doing my job for months now, starting long before you arrived. That’s why he put me on suspension; me claiming I saw a stable nightmare was the final stroke in the painting he’d made of me in his head. Point is, he believes I’ve been slacking off, yet no one else ever reported any problems with this region…” He looked to Yumi, perhaps seeing her confusion.

“I’m worried,” Painter explained, “that the foremandidn’treplace me on this beat after suspending me. We’ve been short-staffed, and from his perspective, this beat is a quiet one. I’m worried he assumed other painters were covering the region, or that it’s a section nightmares don’t often visit, which allowed me to supposedly goof off instead of doing my job.”

“And if hedidn’tassign a replacement…”

“That would explain why the stable nightmare was never spotted,” Painter said. “Why it could spend weeks prowling the city and never be caught. Most nightmare painters patrol and watch for signs only near the rim of the city, because nightmares have to pass through there to get farther inward. If this nightmare always entered through my section of the perimeter, it could move through the entire city unchallenged.”

A disturbing thought indeed. He waved her along with him into the alley, though she couldn’t see the second sign he’d spotted. As they walked, she whispered to him carefully, “Painter? Why is it that the foreman assumed you haven’t been doing your job? Why is everyone so ready to assume you were lying?”

Painter glanced down. And her instinct was to reprimand him, toinsistthat he explain himselfimmediately. His reaction was an obvious sign of guilt.

Yet had that ever worked on him as well as it had on her, when Liyun had treated her that way?

Had it evertrulyworked on her? Demands, guilt, verbal punishment? She remembered days of exhaustion when all she’d wanted was a kind word, a teardrop’s worth of empathy.

Choice. She had achoice.

You don’t have to be like her,Yumi thought.You really don’t.

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