POV: painter
Summary
The narrator opens with a brief disquisition on what a carnival is — a thing that exists on every world he has ever visited, even ones lit by free-flowing hion lines, because what powers a carnival is not electricity but human excitement, the one truly renewable resource. The local Kilahito word for the fairground translates to *place of a million lights*; its workers are called *light keepers*. The one running tonight is busier than usual, timed to celebrate the imminent ship launch.
Painter walks the lanes alongside Yumi, dodging civilians who would otherwise pass straight through him. Yumi takes the gaudy chaos as something close to sacred. *It is like someone broke the sun itself into a million pieces and threw it in the air like confetti*. She has never played a game in her life. She has never owned anything for the pleasure of having it. Painter walks her past stalls and people while she watches, then explains as if to a child: a game is a fun challenge, a prize is a memento, carnival food gets worse with every bite and that is somehow part of the point. He puts pop'ems in her hand. Five minutes later she has finished the bag and looks nauseated and immediately asks for more.
She is terrible at games. She picks one — the box-toppling stall — and pays for ten throws on the principle that this one is the only challenge of skill rather than fortune. She misses the first few. Then she works out that one of the boxes is weighted at the base and knocks five stacks in a row, walks off with the largest possible prize — a pink dragon nearly as tall as she is — and politely advises the carnie to vary the weighted-box position. *I think I am a little too new to owning things to have an enormous pink dragon*, she tells Painter, and gives the dragon — named *Liyun Noodleface* at his irreverent suggestion — to the little girl gawking at it.
Painter guides her toward the tallest ride in the fairground, the Jotun Line. The conductor sees her painter's bag, waves her past the queue, *thank you for your service*, and gives her the two-person pod to herself — which is also room for Painter to slide in beside her. *The way they treated me because they thought I was a painter — is that common?* she asks. Painter admits the public is grateful to them in the same way they are grateful to anyone who keeps the nightmares away in the dark. Most painters are not virtuosos; almost anyone the school will take can be trained to trap a nightmare. But Yumi, gently, says he *is* a virtuoso, whatever the Dreamwatch decided. He answers: would it matter if he were? She thinks a moment, then tells him plainly what matters is that he has *stopped* painting; not whether he was accepted.
The pod inches up the post. Below them the carnival becomes pattern — flowing pathways, spinning rides like geometries, twinkling stalls. Painter finds an emotion he has not felt in years and identifies it as contentment. *Are you happy?* he asks her. *Yes*, she whispers. *How long has it been?* She cannot place it; just a vague memory of laughter and a home where the floor was not too hot. He can place his exactly: his birthday in the first year of upper school, about a month before the Dreamwatch test, a party where Masaka made him a hat — black, spiked, more helmet than hat — and called it a birthday gift. They stop at the pinnacle. Yumi rests her hand on the safety bar an inch from his. Painter slides his closer until something thrums between them, an electric warmth — the narrator notes that two little sparks, one magenta and one azure, briefly connect their skin where they almost touch.
Eventually the pod returns to ground level. They walk away from the carnival together, neither willing to break the silence. The streets grow quiet; the hion lines paint cobbles. Finally Yumi stops and digs the small sketchpad out of Painter's bag. She unscrews the ink jar — the right way, this time — kneels on the pavement, and paints what they have just experienced: a first-person view from the ride at the top, their two hands on the bar. Overlapping, this time. The painting is not a good painting. *But for a person who first picked up a brush twenty-three days ago, it was quite remarkable*. She tells him she has realised something. She will own nothing in this life; even the dress will stay behind when the spirits put her back in her own body. The painting is for him, to remember her by. He whispers what he had taught her earlier: a memento. To remember the day.
She also tells him, point-blank, that she does not think he is a liar. She thinks he wanted desperately to be the thing his friends needed, and the thing she needed, and lied because he could not bear to hurt people he loved. *That's not a liar. That's a dreamer.* A liar, she was taught, is someone who lies for personal gain; Painter has never been that. *Answers*, she tells him, *are not simple. They never were.*
He closes his eyes, taking that in like a held breath — and opens them to find Yumi stumbling backward, mouth open in silent terror. He spins to look behind them. A jagged blackness has detached itself from the alley wall: eleven feet tall, claws long enough to gouge the stone, eyes like white pits, mouth set with actual teeth. The stable nightmare is fully formed now. And it has not wandered out by accident; it has come looking for them.