Page 90 of Yumi and the Nightmare Painter

“What?”

“Theheat,” he said. “It radiates from Yumi, like from the sun on her world.”

Design looked closely at him, narrowing her eyes. “Are you all right? She’s not on fire. You might be hallucinating.”

“It’s a metaphor, Design,” he said. “Yumi’swarmbecause she’sintense. She has given everything she has to become the best at what she does. Stacking rocks, an activity so bizarre it makes hermorefascinating. Because there’s nobody else like her.”

“Wait,” Design said. “Weren’t you complaining the other day, down here, about how intense she is?”

“Yeah.” He smiled.

“You can’t like it and hate it all at once.”

“Your friend is right,” he said. “You do have some inaccurate ideas about mortals.”

“It’s endearing and amusing.”

He basked in that heat one last time. “I love that Yumi understands. She’s been there. She’s one of the only people I’ve met who knows how it feels to give yourself to art…”

“That sounds like a terrible reason for liking someone,” Design said.

“It’s the way we humans do things.”

“A stupid way,” Design said.

“How would you do it?”

“With a formula,” she said. “Find complementary sets of attributes that fit into a proper matrix.”

He shook his head, smiling. “I wish there were a formula, Design. If there were, I could fix this.”

She cocked her head. “…This?”

He nodded toward the table, to where Akane had put her arm aroundYumi’s shoulders. “Yumi, dear,” Akane said, “we need to have a talk about your brother. And the things he’s done.”

“We know you look up to him,” Tojin said. “We don’t want to interfere…”

“I do,” Izzy said. “Iabsolutelywant to interfere. You have to know. Your brother is a liar.”

Painter stood up, feeling strange that the motion didn’t push back the chair—he instead simply passed through it. He gave Design a smile.

It had been nice, these last few days. But he would find it liberating to be done. To know the door was closed. Not only with his old friends. But with Yumi.

That’s a lie,the honest part of him thought.This is ripping you apart.

No more than he deserved though. He trailed off, enjoying the extended leash Design had given him, and went wandering through the night.

“I…know hesometimes tells untruths,” Yumi said to the group. “I’ve heard him speak them. I think they’re mostly just to avoid hurting people’s feelings. He’s more reliable than he seems.”

The others shared glances. Yumi didn’t know what to make of their behavior. Tojin wouldn’t meet her eyes, looking like he wanted to be anywhere but here. Akane kept her arm on Yumi’s shoulders, as if to give her support.

It was Izzy who started explaining first. Yumi had mostly taken the yellow-haired woman for frivolous, but now her voice was dead serious.

“Yumi,” she said, “do you know what the Dreamwatch are?”

“Sure,” Yumi replied. “They deal with stable nightmares.”

“They’re the elite painters,” Tojin said, hands clasped tightly before him, as if he were trying to squeeze juice from the air. “The best of the best. The finest artists; the most respected of our kind. Every painter dreams of joining them.”

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