POV: painter
Summary
Painter follows the wisp-trail through narrower and narrower streets of Kilahito's outer rings, the hion thinning to lines barely thicker than twine, rain tapping at his head. He loses the trail twice, backtracks, and is on his way home when he glances through a slit of a window he had skipped over the first time. The nightmare is inside.
Two things stop him cold. The first is that the family on the frameless mattress is real — parents the thing has ignored, and between them a child of perhaps four clutching a worn pillow with sewn-on eyes for a toy. The second is the nightmare itself. There is almost no smoke leaking from it. It is tall enough that its sinuous neck has to bend against the ceiling; its legs articulate the wrong way; its face is lupine and has, impossibly, eyes — chalk-white sockets dropped into a face that nightmares are not supposed to have. He realises why this one was so hard to track. It is nearly stable — within a feeding or two of being a fully solid horror of the kind that, only thirty years earlier, had razed Futinoro. This is above his pay grade. He should walk to the foreman and have the Dreamwatch sent for. Most painters would.
The child, eyes squeezed shut, sniffles. The nightmare runs a clawed finger down his cheek and draws blood, tenderly. Painter sets his bag on the wet pavement and starts unpacking — silently, no noise, no waking the parents, no screaming or the thing will attack and people will die. His fingers slip on the ink jar; it shatters on the ground; he dips his brush in the puddle instead. The nightmare reaches through the wall toward him, catches briefly on its own unfamiliar substance — long enough for him to get his umbrella up and the canvas under it. He starts with bamboo by reflex, then knows it will not be enough. He throws the canvas aside, pulls out his last one, and for the first time since the monotony set in he sees a nightmare not as a horror but as what it could be if it weren't a horror — and paints, against everything he has been warned, the child's mother. Stark brow. Thin lips. The curve of cheeks. Just enough, just human enough, to be terrible to the not-quite-stable thing on the other side of the wall. It flees down the alley before he can finish.
He drops the brush. The danger to him is over; the danger to the city isn't. A nearly-stabilised nightmare that knows enough to flee is more dangerous than one that fights. He turns to the window to find the child awake and staring, and his attempt at a reassuring smile produces an immediate scream that, in turn, produces a hesitant father at the window. Painter tells him, numb, what was happening to his son. He passes on the official lines — send the family to relatives in another city, nightmares can't track that far, there is a fund — and braces for the demand to know why he hadn't been good enough to bind the thing instead of merely scaring it. Instead the father drops to his knees and thanks him. It throws Painter off so badly that he stammers a piece of boilerplate about being only a working painter doing his job, gathers his sopping kit, and walks out into the morning shift, looking over his shoulder like a man who has had a stone fall past his head.
He turns toward the foreman's office to file the report, then finds his feet suddenly clay, his head a boulder. He needs sleep. The nightmare won't return to the city tonight — it will run for the shroud to regenerate and slip back in the next evening. He can report it then. He barely registers the climb up to his apartment or the four tries it takes to get the key in, but once he has his pajamas on the family-and-funds guilt stops him: he is not just tired, he has been drained. He throws his window open for air, leans out, and hears a rushing — like water. He looks up at the star. Something comes out of the sky and hits him. Everything goes black.
He blinks awake hot, garish light in his face. The cloth he is wearing is a bright red-and-blue formal nightdress he has never owned. Beside him on the floor lies a young woman the narrator names as Yumi. She opens her eyes. Then screams.