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While Yumi is inside the scholars' tent, Painter climbs into one of the chained shade trees behind it and uses the wait to test his theory about Torio's plants. Out on a branch he weighs the tree down; pressed cheek-to-bark against the trunk, his arms barely meeting around it, he becomes nearly weightless and the tree floats again. The chain is heavy but the trunk holds it lightly. These plants have almost no roots — just vestigial curls of finger, well adapted to a ground too hot to root in — and the closer he stays to the trunk, the stronger the lifting effect becomes.

Yumi bursts through the canvas and runs. The scholars have *somehow* seen her. Painter drops to a lower branch in time for the obvious bad plan to occur to him. He unhooks the chain, gestures her up, and gives the one-sentence instruction: *We go up.* Sunjun is already coming around the tent with his detector pointed at them, but by the time the scholars notice the tree is lifting the roots are already out of reach. The tree drifts slowly, less dramatic and more torpid than Painter had imagined his daring escape, but the south wind nudges them toward the orchard where no pursuer will be able to tell where they came down.

Forty or fifty feet up they reach the bottom layer of the floating-plant sky — lily pads with flowers sprouting from their centres, bushes spreading limbs wide to catch thermals, dandelion-like florets dancing in the eddies of their passage, a sudden eruption of butterflies from a nearby bush. The leaves up here are wet with humid air evaporated off the hot stone below; that, Painter realises, is why the plants rise. A faint mist of pure water settles on his skin. The fragmented sunlight catches the dew on every leaf so that each plant seems to be wearing wedding jewellery, and Yumi — farther out on her branch, hair rippling in the wind, leaning close to inspect a butterfly that cannot see her — looks as though she is part of the painting. She catches him staring. He tells her, finding the right words for once, that he only stares at things too beautiful for his eyes to take in at once. She assumes he means the landscape. He does not correct her. *If I'm to lose everything*, she whispers, looking up at his world burning bright in the sky, *I'm glad I saw this first.*

Twenty minutes later Liyun finds Painter kneeling at the orchard shrine as the very picture of innocence — only mildly sweaty, a twig or two in his hair, his tobok a little askew. *Someone suspicious has been skulking through the city*, she remarks. *Hooliganism, indeed.* She does not press it. The machine is finally working. She is taking him to see.

The villagers part for him at the place of ritual, where the scholars' four-foot apparatus is now slowly building four straight stacks at a time. One topples and is cleared with three arms; another rebuilds in the same place. Yumi, bristling, points out that the stacks are pedestrian and that Painter can absolutely beat them on quality. He enters the ring and works. His first stack falls at seven. The next at six. He slams his fist into the ground and barely notices the heat; Yumi tells him to breathe, to meditate, to start over. Hours pass. He puts down a ten, then a nine, then a twelve all in a row, and starts a fourth — and feels something tug, faintly, on a cord between himself and the land. He tugs back. Something peeks out of the stone nearby and vanishes when he looks.

A glowing ball of spirit then surfaces from the ground halfway between him and the machine. It hesitates, looks (with no eyes) toward the clanking apparatus, stretches that way and swims to the scholars, who pluck it up before Painter can react. *No*, Yumi cries. *They stole it from us.* The lead scholar — Gyundok, pencil-headed and triumphant — lifts the spirit before the crowd and demonstrates its transformation into a useful object via printed inputs. Liyun's voice cuts through the cheer: a competent yoki-hijo can summon half a dozen spirits in a day; a master can manage dozens; the machine just took all day to draw *one*. Gyundok does not flinch. There are only sixteen yoki-hijo at most, he answers, and at present only fourteen — months and years between visits to a village. One machine in every village, working all day, will fill every need.

Painter sits slumped on the hot stone with his fingers raw inside his gloves. Yumi tells him he did well; she suspects the spirit was drawn by both of them at once, since it surfaced between the two performers rather than beside the machine. Practice, she insists, more practice. Painter drinks from Hwanji's canteen and gets back to it. He does not draw another that day — Yumi's own gap between first and second spirits was months, after all — but the nibble of success is enough to keep him going.