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Yumi makes Painter spend eleven days picking up rocks and trying to judge their weight and balance — and only their weight and balance — before she will let him move on. It is a new kind of boredom for him, the despotic boredom of a place that treats *free time* as a sin and *leisure* as something only the rich are allowed. The sun makes it worse, the heat coming up from the ground at the same time as it presses down from above; he begins to suspect the sun burns the willpower of those beneath it as its actual fuel. On the eleventh day, even after promising he can move on, she makes him do another warm-up of weighing, this time with his eyes closed. He cheats — he had a look at the stones earlier — and so when she asks him to describe one he can also list the cling of shadow in its dimples and the line of quartz running through it like a waist. She is silent for a moment. That, she says, is immaterial to stacking. He yawns and tells her to go ahead and waste another week if she likes, while the spirits that may be in pain wait on her.

The barb visibly stings — he does not understand why — and after a breath she finally gives him the next phase: low stacks, focused on stability. *The base needs to be the sturdiest part*, she says, and demonstrates with the soul of one stone on another, flat to flat. He squats with kneepads (he has burned himself more than once on the rock) and aligns centres of gravity. The first stack holds. A second rock. A third. *Oh no*, he says, half-laughing — and gets five up before the sixth topples the lot. *I can't believe your training actually worked.* She stares at the stack as if she might cry. *I actually trained you*, she says, eager and astonished. He gets six on the next attempt and asks when the spirits arrive; she breaks the news gently — thirty stones per stack, twenty stacks in a pattern, *consistently* drawing them takes years and her own first spirit came after two weeks but the second took another four months.

The remaining hours go faster than either day so far. Yumi drops out of strict-proctor mode into something closer to a sister teaching her brother, demonstrating rather than ordering. She cannot keep one of her own soul-stacks up longer than a couple of minutes — they dissolve back into smoke — but watching her build a tower of ten stones, lips pursed and eyes focused but her posture relaxed, Painter sees what she means about art. She scoops the stones instead of seizing them, places them on short edges with pieces cantilevered out, accounts for the irregularity of each one until the finished tower has the unexpected-but-immediately-right rhythm of a key change in a symphony. She is, he thinks, part of the art herself. Then the bottom stone of her stack vanishes and the tower fountains into black smoke; she sits back on her heels and lets out a long eulogy of a sigh.

Watching that sigh, Painter understands, all at once, that her passion for this work is the same passion he himself used to feel — and that the loneliness in a group, the shame, the whispers that say you are not worthy of attention or love, are not uniquely his at all. He recognises them in her face without needing to touch her. She glances up; he fumbles his own stack and collapses it. She offers a suggestion about putting the heaviest stone on the bottom, and he nods and tries again, hoping she did not catch him staring. He wonders how the last week has been for her — forced to chaperone his failures rather than doing the work she loves. He tries to see the stones the way she does and finds it harder, not easier, when he looks at them through her eyes. He goes back to piling flat ones.

The townspeople are gathering outside, but not for him. Something is happening: noise, a larger floating wagon than Yumi's pulled in by the spirit-craft. Liyun has vanished somewhere. Painter heaves to his feet, stiff from the day, and pushes out through the fence; Chaeyung and Hwanji chase after him with raised fans to shield him from the crowd's view, and he keeps pushing them away until they fall back. The villagers part for him. *We aren't to leave the place of ritual*, Yumi hisses, dragged after him. He knows what a crowd like this looks like, however; it usually means a nightmare.

It is not. The wagon has deposited four men in tall winged hats — a fashion that resembles, Painter thinks, small chairs — and a cluster of attendants in plain black caps. Scholars, Yumi says, putting a hand to her lips: from the university in Torio City, whom she has always wanted to see. The pudgy mayor is bowing in the highest, most ornamental forms — the linguistic register the historical dramas reserve for kings — as the lead scholar offers blessing to a town that has heard, even in Torio City, of its unfortunate plight. Behind the four, the assistants haul a metal construction the size of a wardrobe down from the wagon, ringed with long radial rods like an oversized spider.

The tallest scholar opens with the painful preamble: the yoki-hijo is of course a revered institution, but humans are limited in their capacity, and it is inefficient that the society should depend on them — so the Institute of Mechanical Solutions, with the queen's blessing, has built a solution. He gestures grandly toward the machine; everything clicks for Painter before the assistants have finished pouring out a pile of demonstration stones. The scholar holds his pose; one of his assistants hurries up to whisper in his ear. Harsh whispers, animated gestures. The scholar turns back to the crowd: the demonstration, of course, will follow after a proper rest from their journey. The mayor bows and asks, hopefully, demonstration of what. A machine, the scholar says, smiling, *for stacking stones*.