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Yumi tries to defend her brother at the noodle house table. He sometimes tells small untruths to spare people's feelings, she allows; he is more reliable than he seems. The others trade glances over her head. Tojin cannot meet her eyes; Akane keeps a steadying arm on her shoulders. It is Izzy — usually frivolous, suddenly grave — who opens the actual case against him. *Do you know what the Dreamwatch are?*

They explain it: the elite painters, the warriors, the best of the best, the few that every painter dreams of becoming. Each Dreamwatcher gets a hand-picked team called *companions*. A year into upper school, Nikaro auditioned for the Dreamwatch — and afterwards told the clique he had been accepted. He promised they would be his companions. He spent the entire next year pretending to leave class early to train with the Dreamwatch. Tojin told his family. They all did. And at the end of the year they discovered the truth: he had never been accepted at all. The half-days he had "trained" he had spent in the school library, sitting at a table, not even reading. Just sitting. Just staring.

Masaka whispers it; Izzy punches a chair; Tojin hunches and clenches his hands. Akane tells Yumi gently that this is why no one can take the stable nightmare story seriously — it is just another lie to make himself look important. Izzy swears that if there were a real stable nightmare it would have attacked already. Tojin tallies the days: twenty-seven, Yumi corrects. Over two weeks. *He's going to a café somewhere, staring at the wall, letting you dream while he just sits there.*

Yumi cannot find the words she wants. She tries one that ought to puncture the case anyway: if the Dreamwatch only take the best artists, why did the clique ever believe he would qualify in the first place? The others fall silent. Akane answers her: Nikaro is the single most talented artist she has ever met. He had been painting since he could hold a brush. He had dedicated his life to that school. The rest of them had stumbled into painting on a whim and aptitude; he was the one whose acceptance had felt inevitable. The Dreamwatch must have seen something they didn't.

Overwhelmed, Yumi excuses herself. She flees back to the apartment, kneels at the trunk, tosses aside the painting supplies, and pulls out the black portfolio Painter forbade her to touch. She rips the cord open — and finds wonder. Dozens of pieces. Streets that come alive. Faces with glittering eyes. Architecture that makes her feel small; flowers that make her feel a giant. He has somehow drawn black ink into a thousand shades that read as colour, motion, light, emotion in the slope of a distant figure's posture. They are masterpieces, buried in a trunk under a stack of spare brushes.

*I knew it would go poorly*, Painter says, in the doorway. He does not rebuke her for the portfolio. He had been planning to walk the city until dawn; instead he came to get this over with. He tells her the whole story. He had known the lie was going to detonate eventually. Every day since, he had asked himself why he had not just said the simple sentence. The audition feedback had been *poor style, bad grasp of perspective* — and his own deepest cruelty was that even now he could not see his own flaws, could not understand why he had been rejected. He had gone back to the clique to tell them; the test had happened to fall on Akane's birthday, and he had not been able to crush the hope in their eyes after his own had just been crushed. He let them assume he had passed. The next day there were end-of-year tests. After that, it just kept going. *I was not thinking straight,* he tells her. *It was a tumour. Not on my lungs. On my soul.*

He kneels beside the portfolio and begins methodically packing the souls of the pictures back inside, one by one. Yumi asks why he does not still paint like this. He explains: he had thought he was the kind of artist who creates whether anyone is watching or not. The truth was the opposite. He had loved showing the new pieces to Akane and the others, loved the praise too. Without them, there was no point. He admits he was willing to do the same to Yumi — let her believe he was a hero, knowing she would eventually find out. *At least it only took you a couple of weeks.* Tears, ghostly tears she touches with one finger and finds wet, slide down his cheek as he tells her he can do one thing right, at least: leave her alone.

*Nikaro, look at me.* She walks around him to the doorway and holds out her hand. They are not painter or yoki-hijo tonight. They are going to do *one thing* together — something with no nightmares, no spirits, no machines, no betrayals. She has been denied trips to the big city her whole life. Will he deny her too? He hesitates. *I could never*, he says softly, and mentions the carnival running to celebrate the ship launch. *You don't know what a carnival is.* *Are you coming?* she answers. He nods. *Then I don't particularly care what it is.*