POV: yumi
Summary
A week after the village demonstration, Yumi watches the most shocking thing of her life: two characters in Seasons of Regret kissing on Painter's viewer. *Can they show that?* Sir Ashinata, the wandering warrior, and Lady Hinobi finally admit their forbidden love — and then he leaves, for ever, ronin to the end of the credits. Yumi is outraged. They waited an entire week and now he is *walking away*? She demands to know why anyone would write that ending; Painter, wiping his own eye, says some endings are right even when they hurt, and tomorrow will be a different arc. She refuses to accept it.
She has discovered that the futon is not, in fact, an altar; she has also discovered cooking. The bowl of noodle soup she serves Painter via spirit-spoon contains more salt than soup. *It said salt liberally*, she says. *I didn't know what that meant.* He suggests she ask. Asking, it turns out, is itself a skill she does not yet possess. She dumps the bowl and announces that her painting practice has, by his own assessment, mastered bamboo and there is no point continuing — they should go out tonight and look for the stable nightmare. *You're not ready*, he says, and admits with a shrug that he has been stalling, half-hoping someone else might catch it. *Have you been stalling?* she demands. He more or less has. The Dreamwatch should have come by now, would be on the news. The silence troubles him.
She packs sturdy clothes — leggings, a short jacket with metal clasps, almost armoured — and the department's emergency bell, a metal contraption with two biscuit-shaped chambers. Painter suggests three separate times that they go home. She refuses. He waits past shift start so they will not pass the other painters leaving on patrol, and they walk out toward the perimeter.
The perimeter buildings are nearly windowless and walled like a fortification. Past their last line Yumi gets her first close look at the shroud — turbulent, undulating, blacker than night and quietly looking back — and her nerve fails to walk up to it. She turns instead to the whitewashed walls and the painters' murals running along them, each painter given a section. Painter's, when she asks, is not displayed. They start their patrol along the inner streets.
Painter spots the first nightmare sign before she does, five feet up on a corner — a hand-sized smear of smoking black tar. The mark is *blatant*, he says, but there is no other painter in this alley and there should be by now. He says aloud the thing he has been avoiding: his suspension was never backfilled. Foreman Sukishi presumed his quiet beat was either covered by overlapping patrols or one that simply did not draw nightmares; meanwhile the stable nightmare could have entered through his unwatched section and moved freely through the city. He waves Yumi into the alley.
They climb the fire escape. As they climb, she asks, quietly, why everyone is so quick to assume he was lying. Painter looks down — and her trained instinct is to push the way Liyun would have pushed her. She remembers the days when all she wanted from her warden was a single kind word. *You don't have to be like her*, she thinks. So she says, instead, *It's all right. I know you're trying.* He breathes out and tells her, in the half-dark, about how the teachers at school taught about passion and the theory of art and never about what to do when neither were available and you had to do the job anyway. He fell into a rut. Bamboo banishes nightmares fine. The foreman read the rut as slacking, and was waiting for an excuse. *I'm not the person anyone wanted*, Painter tells her. *But I'm trying.*
They reach the second-storey landing and find the sign: smoke clinging to a corner. *Like blood that evaporates*, Yumi says. She asks why nightmares never seem to leave footprints; he says he does not know — they have never figured it out. *Maybe it has to happen accidentally*, she offers. *Like me through that wall.* He nods, thoughtful.
She asks whether the stable one has actually killed anyone in all those weeks. He cannot answer. He has seen children bleed after nightmare attacks; he has seen photographs of cities destroyed by one stable nightmare that called others to it — *they think* — but the most recent such city is decades old and the survivors could explain almost nothing. *Maybe what you know is wrong*, she says, gentle. *I thought I understood my life too.* He has no answer for that either.
Painter insists on scouting the upper window himself — he is the ghost this time — and tells her to ready the bell. Yumi waits gripping it as the bag strap cuts into her shoulder and tries to breathe in and out. He comes back: not the stable nightmare, but a nightmare of some kind feeding on the elderly woman in the room. She asks what happens if they leave it. *It might stray, get caught elsewhere.* *And if it doesn't?* She presses past him up the stairs.
Inside the window, an arachnoid bulk perches on the headboard — fifteen feet across when its smoke-legs extend — with pinprick-white eyes fixed on the sleeping woman it has caged. Painter coaches Yumi to breathe, get her ink out quietly, paint while it feeds — but her hands shake too much to unscrew the jar. The nightmare turns. Not toward her. Toward *him*. *You can see me?* Painter says. *I guess if Design can do it…* His voice trails off as he begins to disintegrate. His essence coalesces into twin vortices of smoke: one blue, one magenta. Hion. The nightmare is feeding on him directly, the way it would on a sleeping mind. Yumi screams. He had told her not to. The scream works anyway: the nightmare flees through the opposite wall and Painter snaps back into shape. The old woman wakes; Yumi tells her she was simply being checked on, and got startled. Down in the alley, drawn by the noise, Akane and Tojin are looking up.