POV: painter
Summary
An hour after the stable nightmare flees, Painter is at his usual nearby table in the noodle shop, watching the clique fuss in a nervous huddle around Yumi. They keep asking if she is all right, as if the answer might change between bowls. She seems all right — she has refused the hospital and is on her second bowl of spiced broth, served hot enough to scald anyone not from her planet. Painter himself is tired in a way he has not been since the swap; the nightmare drew something off him, and the embrace that saved Yumi drew off the rest. A hollow drowsiness, but not anything permanent.
Tojin hurries up to the table with the report. The foreman believed him — particularly after a walk past the torn-up playground — and the Dreamwatch is being summoned: a contingent posted in Jito will be in Kilahito within a few hours. Until the nightmare is caught, painters work in threes; and, on standing Dreamwatch protocol, the public is not to be told. Masaka objects: the city deserves to know. Izzy teases her for relishing the chance to tell anyone anything horrific.
Akane checks on Yumi again. She grants that going out was brave; she also frames it, gently, as exceedingly stupid — and asks her to confirm she understands that now. Yumi nods. Izzy then supplies the obvious explanation for why Nikaro has not been seen lately: when he saw the stable nightmare weeks ago, he must have *run*. Fled to another city. *No*, Yumi says, with enough heat that Painter, two tables over, smiles tiredly. *I saw him earlier today. You're all wrong about him. So very wrong.*
He blesses her for it, and watches the looks the others trade over her head, and admits to himself that she will never persuade them. That truth does not hurt the way it once would have. The hour of watching the clique from outside has reminded him how much he had actually liked being inside it. He sees now that his bitterness has been a mould on the painting of who they really are — he has been describing them to Yumi too unkindly for weeks. Akane keeps everyone together, careful never to let anyone feel left behind; Tojin is shy about his bodybuilding the way someone genuinely earnest is always shy; Masaka he honestly cannot tell whether she is sincere or oblivious; even Izzy he can appreciate, in her own Izzy-ness. They may not be his friends any more. But he can be theirs. In secret. If he lets go of the bitterness.
Design bustles up to the clique's table to complain that painter business is being kept from her in her own shop — *rules do not apply to me, I'm not a person or truly alive* — and apologises for the unusually large crowd tonight, which she is surprised the painters have not noticed. The broadcast. Tonight is the landing. Painter turns and sees the room with new eyes: ordinary people packed in, chattering about whether their kind will turn out to be alone in the universe. Design flips on the wall viewer and the hion resolves into the lead explorer in his command chair, broadcasting all the way from the ship in orbit around the bright planet.
*We've completed our orbit*, the explorer reports. The visual survey matches the long-range telescopes. There are no radio signals, even this close — but there are settlements. There are very few land masses, however, and the surface is overwhelmingly *water*; these people, whoever they are, seem to spend most of their lives sailing. They see many, many boats. Yumi crosses over to Painter at the viewer. Painter asks, quietly, whether she has ever visited the oceans on her world. She does not recognise the word. *Water*, he says — large bodies of standing water, the kind their cities back home are built around the edges of. She tells him, plainly, that water like that would boil away on her world: standing water is only the occasional cool spring high above the searing stones. They both go quiet.
The ship extends its pair of mobile hion lines down through the atmosphere — the rails it has ridden all this way, somehow strong enough to stretch between planets — and lands. The door opens. The camera turns outward in an explorer's hand to show what is coming up to meet them. The locals are limber and tall. They have four arms. The explorers describe them as having chalk-white skin. They are most certainly not human. The narrator confirms what Painter has already guessed in his gut: Yumi is not from the star. She never was.