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Yumi is terrified. She was not trained to teach another yoki-hijo — this is not what the spirits chose her for, and the chance she is going to ruin it climbs as the day grinds on. Painter is a stubborn student: he drops stones, lectures her on art-as-contemplation, perches on a boulder she keeps ordering him off of, and asks the kind of questions she was told off for asking when she was small. She tells him to pay attention and not daydream; he asks how he is supposed to *feel* a stone without thinking about where it came from and how the light falls on its sides. *None of that is relevant*, she tells him. He mutters *stupid* under his breath and means it. Hour after hour like that, with no visible progress.

Liyun watches almost the entire day from outside the fence of the place of ritual, her composure slipping into something darker. Yumi has spent enough years with that face to read it: Liyun is thinking about something drastic. In an emergency a yoki-hijo can be removed from duty entirely — *executors* called, the summoning of spirits done in a prison environment. The chance of explaining the truth and being believed is, Painter was right, exactly zero. Push too hard and Liyun will simply send for help. When Painter eventually wears out at eight hours and stumbles back to the wagon, Yumi whispers to Liyun in a voice Painter cannot hear: *please don't send for the executors*. Painter, from the wagon, asks what she just said. She tells him nothing — and then —

— she is back in Kilahito, dropped into the heap of blankets on Painter's floor with the surreal sense of a body that has slept through hours it did not pass. She suggests he try grabbing the *souls* of other clothes the way she handles the clothing she is wearing when she's a ghost on Torio, then strides toward Painter's extraordinary shower with focus — and ruins her resolve by sighing at the perfect temperature of the water as soon as she steps in. She turns the knob to uncomfortably cold and stands shivering through her prayers as penance, then dries off, brushes her hair alone (a small ache: Chaeyung would have been pulling out snarls; Hwanji would have been humming), and notes uneasily how the painter attendants only run a brush through her borrowed body two or three times before declaring her presentable, which is not her hundred strokes at all.

She steps out into the colder main room in a towel — *it's just Painter* — and finds him dressed in something other than the permanent pyjamas: stiff trousers, a simple shirt under a second untucked shirt, looking sloppy in a managed way. He explains he couldn't grab the clothes at first, then cleared his mind and thought only about one specific article, and was able to pull a copy. *Its soul*, she says, delighted: he meditated. He refuses to call it that — but the trick works, and she announces today's exchange: he will teach her to paint.

He resists. Painting is dangerous, the stable nightmare is far beyond her, this is foolish. She points out that she cannot let the nightmare roam — it is going to hurt people. He doesn't answer. A knock at the door interrupts them: she answers timidly, but it is only a large envelope taped outside. She reads the letter aloud to him and watches his usual flippancy go quiet: a letter of suspension from the foreman, a month without pay for lying about his work, the foreman having gone himself to the address and found no monster there. To the other painters it will be described as medical leave, he tells her, on first offences. A second offence, or a sustained failure to do his rounds, would cost him the apartment.

*Then we will fix it*, Yumi says — and he agrees to train her, but only for an ordinary nightmare in self-defence; the plan is to find proof of the stable nightmare and lead someone else to it. He walks her to a large trunk by his bed, full of brushes some nearly as tall as a person, jars of dark ink, and pristine canvases used only on duty. She is to practise on paper. Then she spots, in the shadows at the bottom of the trunk, a black portfolio tied with a cord. She reaches for it. He shouts no, lunges to grab her hand to stop her — and his hand passes through hers, the Connection between them erupting again as transcendent warmth that washes away the cold for a long pulsing heartbeat before he withdraws. *You can't touch that portfolio. Ever. My world, my rules.* She nods.

He shows her how to paint bamboo — a single stroke that uses the way the brush runs out of ink, dark at the top, lighter through the middle, a small blot at the bottom. He repeats it, exactly the same way, again and again. Bamboo, he says, is the easy form — memorise the pattern and produce something passable with almost no effort. She likes how structured it sounds, but cannot help noting that this is not what he told her about art at the place of ritual yesterday. He looks at the soul-paper in front of him, which then dissolves to smoke, and tells her to never mind that and to draw a thousand bamboos. She does. Her hand cramps and her knees ache; she does not ask for a break. He sits on the bed staring through her and the work he is supposed to be supervising. Eventually a knock at the door: Akane this time, with the idea of dinner together, refusing to let Yumi hide alone all day. Painter hisses through the door that Yumi is studying — the upper-school entrance tests are coming up — and Akane, satisfied with the lie, promises to bring noodles by later and leaves.

Yumi returns to the paper and gets, in total, three hundred and sixty-three. *Master?* he says, laughing, when she insists she would have kept going until she collapsed if he asked it. He tests her by suggesting they practise painting upside-down with a finger up her nose; she almost tries it, then decides she will not establish that precedent. She announces a break and goes to the window for air, and when she opens it she discovers something extraordinary: rain that pools on a street instead of hissing away, a smell to the air she has never known before, people below carrying bright umbrellas through violet and blue hion-light. She is mesmerised long enough to notice, almost without noticing, the pooling darkness in an alley across the way — nothing visible inside it, just shadow. The wind sharpens; the rain bites. She shuts the window and turns back to her six hundred and thirty-seven remaining bamboos. Had she lingered, the narrator notes, she might have seen the living darkness brush the bricks with too-real substance and leave wisps of smoke curling upward as though from a candle just snuffed.