POV: painter
Summary
Painter watches Yumi arrange her new outfits in heaps on the floor of his flat and tries to explain that food at a noodle shop is not a thing other people feed you with — and is startled by how plausibly she fits in the room, in the simple change of clothing alone. He shows her the closet, which delights her; he is amused, then a little sobered, by her admission that she has never set foot in another person's home. Pressing his case, he tells her she should not come along: every minute around Akane and her friends raises the odds the lie unravels, and questions she cannot answer will get him thinking she is mad or has killed him. Yumi counters that this is exactly the reason lies are bad and that they should simply tell Liyun and the foreman the truth again, more convincingly. Painter points out how badly that has worked before. She lowers her eyes — and goes anyway. He is yanked down the stairs after her, gracelessly leashed.
Akane meets them downstairs in painter-casual clothes and walks Yumi around the corner to the Noodle Pupil, with Painter following sullenly behind. Akane hangs her painter's bag off the copper coatrack-statue at the door and steers Yumi toward the clique's usual back booth, where Painter's former school crowd is already gathered. He notes, with a sour amusement, that the easy way back into this circle turned out to be becoming invisible. Akane presents Yumi with a flourish: behold, Nikaro's little sister.
There are three at the table besides Akane. Tojin sits backward on his chair, sleeves rolled to display forearms, working a grip exerciser in alternating hands while he eats — exactly, Painter mutters to Yumi, the kind of guy who exercises at the table for an audience. Masaka is huddled small with a sketchpad over her knees and a scarf pulled to her chin, glaring out from under her bangs; school rumour had her doing court-mandated painter training after stabbing someone in lower school, and Yumi takes an unconscious step back from her stare. The third is Izzy, a thin girl in a sweatshirt who proffers her hand in greeting — Painter has to coach Yumi through the bow — and then immediately opens a thick reference book to read Yumi's fortune by dramascope, her invented system of looking up birth-year-and-month against drama episode guides. Painter feeds Yumi a fake birthday; Izzy consults her book and pronounces it the wedding episode of two favourite characters, which makes today excellent for promises. Tojin snickers; Izzy declares the dramascope a legitimate ancient art and recruits Masaka in advance as her future bodyguard. Yumi looks bewildered. Akane tells her cheerfully not to worry: Izzy is special.
Standing there listening to the familiar back-and-forth, Painter feels a painful nostalgia — and then, all at once, the recognition that it is for something he has lost rather than for these people as they are. The food arrives. There is nothing on the bar for him. He turns and walks off to an empty stool at the bar, as far as the tether will let him get, and sits facing away from the group.
Yumi joins him a few minutes later, sent up to order her own food. He talks her through it — small mild pork with salt, no add-ons — and Masaka sends over a sketch of a cute bunny with cavernous, world- swallowing eyes captioned with Yumi's name. Painter tells her, cautiously, that this means Masaka likes her. Yumi settles onto the stool beside him and says quietly that he was right; she should not have come. She is not a person, she says, but a concept — a thing owned by society — and she would do her duties better as a machine, like the viewer in his room. The freedoms she has tasted in his world are dangerous because she still has to go back. He surprises himself by telling her, gently, that perhaps the spirits sent her here as a reward, so that she could enjoy these things for once. She almost believes him; then her smile falters and she admits the spirit that came to her was hurting and needed something, which makes this no reward whatever else it is. He reaches instinctively to take her hand — she looks like she could use one to hold — and stops because he cannot, and blushes for the thought of it.
A bowl clatters to the floor behind them. Design is standing in the kitchen doorway, slack-jawed, staring directly at Painter in his ghost form. *Nikaro?* she says. *Are you dead?*