POV: yumi
Summary
Yumi wakes on the floor of an unfamiliar room and concludes she must have died — the hion glow through the window is too cold to be sunlight, the floor is chilly under her bare feet, and someone or something is hammering on the door. Hope returns when she realises the hero is sprawled on his "altar" (a futon) nearby. He is incorporeal now and tells her, in increasingly panicked whispers, that this is his world, his apartment in Kilahito, and that she is going to have to answer the door because he cannot. Yumi grasps that she is wearing his thick, baggy sleepclothes, panics about how clearly they outline her form, and is talked into it by Painter's reminder that anyone outside will look at her and see him.
The visitor is the foreman, who freezes at the sight of a girl answering Nikaro's door. Yumi launches into a yoki-hijo's formal apology to the gigantic white-haired being, then — at Painter's frantic prompting — relays a lie that he is sick and out of bed and a more important truth that he has seen a stable nightmare and the Dreamwatch should be sent for. She bows her forehead to the floor in vow of it, the foreman tromps off, and Painter sags with relief that his shift, at least, is covered.
Across the hallway a door opens and Akane steps out in the kind of cropped clothing that strikes Yumi as a goddess in deshabille. Painter, mortified at the picture of a girl in his pajamas answering his door, hisses at Yumi to claim she is his sister; Yumi repeats the lie and cringes for divine retribution that never arrives. Akane relaxes, introduces herself, and asks if she is visiting for the first time. Yumi then disastrously volunteers — based on Painter's earlier hero boasts about all the women he has known — that Akane must be one of her brother's concubines, and bows to her in the proper deference owed an important hero's consort. Akane's face cools to fury, she informs Yumi that her brother has trouble conquering a bowl of noodles, and stalks away down the corridor.
Yumi closes the door, puts her back to it, and asks the question. Is he actually a hero? Painter cannot quite meet her eyes; he is, he admits, a good — well, capable — painter, and she had said she needed someone, and he had figured. Yumi's chest tightens. The spirits had not, then, sent her a hero. She had assumed and he had let her assume. She drags every bowl and plate from his counters down to the low table on the cold floor and stacks them: not a child's tower but a real stacker's arrangement, bowls balanced on edges with maipon sticks for stilts, sturdy under its own apparent impossibility. She waits to feel the spirits visit. They do not. Only her stomach answers, ravenous from going days on someone else's nutrition.
She eats raw rice cakes from his cupboard while he watches, awed by the stack. The building trembles as a bus passes and the whole construction collapses straight down. Painter wonders aloud how much time he lost and turns on the hion viewer in his wall — soft purple and blue lines vibrating into the figures of two actors mid-drama, an episode of *Times of the Night* that tells him it is Samday evening. Yumi, who has never been allowed a play, sits transfixed by the small projected people made of unbroken line. The story is about a man who wakes without memory of who he is, picking through false friends and true; she finds, to her shame, that she connects to him. When the episode ends on a cliffhanger she gasps that it cannot end there. Painter tells her it always does that. A second program starts up; she reaches out and snaps the viewer off before it can pull her in further. The spirits, she reminds herself, need her.
She asks what was unusual about the night he was taken. Painter tells her about the stable nightmare he encountered — nearly fully corporeal, rare, and dangerous — and how the Dreamwatch he has just summoned are warriors who fight such things. Maybe, he says, the spirits sent them together so they can meet the Dreamwatch when they arrive. He is not sure why the spirits would route their own crisis through his world, and he says so. Yumi nods, only half-hearing — she is suddenly, crushingly tired. She curls up in the blanket on the cold floor and is asleep before she can answer.
She wakes to warmth at her back and her hand passing through the floor when she tries to push herself up. Beside her, Painter sits up in one of her sleeping gowns, sunlight streaming through the window, and groans that they are going to have to do something about the bathing problem.