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Yumi paces Painter's flat in her sleeping clothes the morning after the scholars arrive, denouncing the stacking machine as abomination and blasphemy. A dead thing cannot summon the spirits — and if it could, the act would be a deception, an insult. Painter watches with amused detachment from the altar and then, when she demands his disagreement, supplies it: he finds it poignant that the woman who once said she would be better at stacking if she were a machine is now horrified that a machine has arrived to do exactly that. She forbids him to find irony in the situation; only in his world, she clarifies, where his rules apply. She paces, trying to corral the feelings the machine has unleashed. A machine to replace her. If it worked, no more yoki-hijo — no more girls walled in by the invisible expectations she has carried her whole life. The thought lands like a blow. *Would it be so bad if no one had to bear that honour?*

She catches herself and converts the doubt into orthodoxy: this must be why the spirits called her, to stop the abomination. Painter points out that her own world is less primitive than she thinks she is being patronising about — the precise stitches in her new clothes, the shower she loves, the viewer on the wall, all the work of machines that did not in fact cause his people to wither. The argument goes nowhere it has not gone before. Yumi showers, dresses, takes up brush and ink, and bows deeply to him as "Master Teacher" — partly out of mischief, partly because teasing him is the rare freedom she has discovered she enjoys.

The bamboo lesson does not last. A knock at the door — a *knock*, when in her life people simply enter — produces the entire clique on the threshold: Akane in painter casuals, Tojin with his sleeves up, Masaka in turtleneck and too much eyeliner, and Izzy long-limbed beside them, all declaring an *intervention*. Akane explains that this is Ashday, the half-day they trade with the third department, and the new girl is studying too hard and must come out for food. Painter mutters at her back to send them away. Yumi looks for Liyun to disapprove — there is no Liyun — and agrees, in a tiny voice. She changes into a proper dress, lets Painter hand her a fistful of his money, and is steered back to the Noodle Pupil after panicking at the suggestion of anywhere else.

Seated at the table she has been at once before, Yumi orders a broth she has never had — if she is to be terrified, she may as well pile the terror on — and lets Painter drift off to the bar when Design waves him over. Alone for the first time among near-strangers, she experiences what she has been forbidden her whole life: ordinary conversation, close up. The clique talk over each other about vacations, wages, the foreman, in a tangle of interlocking jokes she dares not enter. To make sense of it she focuses on Tojin, whom Painter has described as a relentless flexer. Tojin indeed leaps up the moment a table of larger men sits down nearby — Gaino and his lifter friends — and proudly compares lat-press numbers with his shirt off until Izzy shouts that he is *breaking the new girl*. He apologises so sincerely that Yumi revises her theory: the muscles are not for women, and not for war either. They are an end in themselves — *our bodies are the most incredible tools ever*, he says — and Akane watches him with a fondness Yumi recognises as something other than appetite.

The table is also where Yumi discovers that nobody believes in stable nightmares. She lets slip that her "brother" is hunting one; Akane rolls her eyes, Tojin looks down, Izzy laughs outright. Yumi feels a small, unfamiliar indignance on Painter's behalf. The subject pivots — by general agreement nobody wants to discuss him long — to a newspaper Izzy produces about the launch of a ship that will ride hion up through the shroud and across to the bright neighbouring world. She is firm that the aliens, when met, will be hot. Masaka leans in to hiss confirmation. Yumi excuses herself to the bar.

There she finds Design stretching a glowing cord between her fingers — the bond between her and Painter, visible as light. She is lengthening it, Design explains: the cord is one of the Connections every person spins to everything they have known, and this one happens to be load-bearing. She can give them several blocks of leash without risking the bond. Yumi is quietly sad to know the tether she sometimes resented can be longer now. She asks Painter about Izzy's ship; Painter hits himself in the face. The destination is obvious. It is her world. Design confirms most worlds have suns and that ground heat is, as cosmic features go, extremely unusual; her people's pre-arrival survey targeted the bright planet rather than the shrouded one. Hoid has a device somewhere in their luggage that can sense long-range Connections; she will dig it out.

Yumi revises her theory in real time: the swap and the launch are linked. Perhaps the spirits are anxious about both at once. Painter nods, slowly, and smiles in a way she does not entirely trust. He claims they finally agree on something. When pressed he refuses to elaborate. *I'll show you*, he says. *Tomorrow.*