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Half walking, half floating in the spirit of the cold spring, Yumi tries her newest theory on Painter: maybe the gap between them is not space but time. The two of them are unmistakably both human, the languages too similar to be unrelated, and his technology is so much further along than hers that one of them could be the other's distant past. Painter pushes back. The ground here is scalding, the sky too high, there is no shroud in his memory, and the plants on her side *float*. He'd remember that. She concedes the point in pieces and lets the bath turn into its usual easy banter — *noodle princess*, he tells her, *master of both realms* — and she splashes spirit water through him.

Beneath the teasing both of them feel the thing neither will say. What once was the most stressful moment of her life — being bare in front of him — has quietly become *normal*; she no longer notices that she is bare and he no longer stares, and the bath has turned into the most peaceful hour of her day. They are Connected and have been for weeks, but every other minute is taken up by what they ought to be doing. The cold spring is the one place they are simply *together*. Neither of them wants this to end. Neither of them dares say so. Yumi feels the old guilt arrive on cue: she is *yoki-hijo*. She is not allowed to want.

They dress and emerge to the shrine, where as of yesterday Painter has been taking portrait sitters from a small morning line — Liyun long since given up trying to stop him from doing it the wrong way. His portraits are simple, but with live models in front of him they are sharper than the bamboo, and the work has clearly become a meditation. Yumi kneels beside him and prays through her rituals for both of them, then moves on to meditation. None of her usual tricks land. Each time she sinks toward stillness she meets a flat unmoving sense of *dread* — not the stable nightmare, that is being hunted by the Dreamwatch now; something larger that her mind cannot name. Their time, she knows without being told, is running out.

She asks Painter, idly, what lies beyond the shroud. He has no idea. School only ever covered Nagadan and the dozen squabbling small nations around it; further than that the curriculum simply stopped. The seed of an idea begins forming behind the dread — that perhaps her land is *beyond* it — and as she sinks once more she finally breaks the dread open into a true emptiness. From outside that emptiness an idea is dropped into her, fully formed.

She opens her eyes; the hour has vanished. *I know what to do.*

The two of them leave the shrine for the place of ritual, Chaeyung and Hwanji hurrying behind. The town has started to feel familiar in a way Yumi is not sure how to hold — until she notices that the word *home* in her mind no longer conjures her wagon; it conjures Painter's cluttered apartment, lit by the hion. *Here she is the yoki-hijo. There she is Yumi.* The fear that this would happen has finally happened. She feels it as guilt, then as grief.

Passing the steamwell she sees a farmer coaxing his lifter — a buzzing thing, like a great insect — that keeps trying to fall before it climbs. The attendants, when she asks through Painter, finally give her the rumour they would never have offered unprompted: the scholars' creations don't work as well as a yoki-hijo's do. The eagerness of their answer reveals how long they've been waiting to be talked to.

At the place of ritual the machine chugs through its slow cycle out front, drawing a single spirit over a full day. Yumi folds her arms and glares at it. Painter gently warns her not to hate it just because it is technology; she agrees, just as gently, that disliking *this* machine in *this* situation is not the same as disliking progress.

Then her plan. Painter puts on the kneepads and selects a foundational stone — well — and sets it. As he reaches for the second, Yumi takes the *spirit* of the stone out of his hands, weighs it, sets it down in the air. *Match that.* He laughs and lays the real stone over the spirit one until the two align perfectly. That is how a student learns from a master, he says: imitate until you can keep up. They build, and build, and build. She lets him pick each stone; she shows him where its spirit wants to go; he matches. A dozen stacks rise around them, taller than anything he has built alone — twelve, fifteen, thirty stones balanced. Fingers brushing. Liyun watches from outside the fence in tears, convinced the spirits have given her yoki-hijo back. Maybe they have.

Then the machine starts cycling faster. The scholars argue and rush; the lead one, Gyundok, holds the boxy detector trained straight at Yumi. He *knows*. A spirit rises from the warm stone in front of her — and is immediately distorted, drawn out toward the machine like glop of liquid metal stretched on a string. She bows her head and *begs* it: tell me what you need. It pools toward her long enough to vibrate three words through her — heard by Painter too, both of them wide-eyed: *Please. Freedom. Please.* And then, when she begs again, *stop the machine.* It is pulled the rest of the way in. The scholars use it to forge a pair of repelling statues for lifting a house — smaller than the ones Yumi has made from the same kind of summons. Gyundok does not look triumphant. He looks afraid.

The pieces snap together. The machine is *keeping* a piece of every spirit it draws, and the gifts that come out are weaker for it. Whether it is hoarding Investiture for its own power source or for something worse, Yumi cannot yet tell. But the spirit asked her to stop it, and now she knows how.

*Yumi! You were right!* Painter says.

She had been right. After all the doubting. After all the weeks of telling herself her sense of wrongness was her own selfishness. About the machine. About the spirits. Right.