POV: painter
Summary
Painter and Yumi lay the time-travel theory out on the bar at the noodle shop and Design flatly disproves it: travel into the past is impossible — *nobody, not even a Shard, can do that* — and she can show them the math. *Shard?* Painter asks. *Yeah, we're not going to get into that.* When Yumi insists on proof, Design disappears under the counter and comes back up with a soul-reading fabrial dredged out of Hoid's luggage — *the guy needs a sorting system* — and clamps Yumi's hand onto the glass plate. Hoid narrates his objections in parentheticals from wherever his frozen body is propped: *I have a sorting system. It's called my brain. I do not make up words.*
The fabrial's needles go haywire. Yumi, it turns out, is *Returned-level* Invested. *No, more. Elantrian-level.* The device wasn't built for someone glowing like a bonfire, and Design is openly delighted — leans in, idly suggests Yumi might *explode* when she dies. Neither of them has the context to chase any of that. Design explains what she can in a quick rush: everything is Investiture — matter, energy, soul, the same substance in different shapes; nightmares are pure raw Investiture, and that is why a painter's *perception* can bend their shape; the nightmares should probably be afraid of Yumi. They are not.
She finds more. A small clean cut in Yumi's spiritweb — about a day of memory excised, scar still visible. Yumi guesses correctly: the stable nightmare's claws, gone incorporeal in her chest at the playground. Memories in heavily Invested beings spread through the whole soul, Design adds; it's why a Cognitive Shadow remembers what its body did.
Painter's turn: a perfectly ordinary mortal soul's worth of Investiture, as expected for this planet, Splinters and shroud notwithstanding. He has *not* been time-travelling and is *not* Connected to another world. Neither of them is. *You're from this planet, both of you. I can see that easily.* But Yumi has *far* fewer Connections to people than Design would expect — *never seen a person with so few* — and beyond those, thirteen odd thematic Connection- lines running off in one direction: *that way*, west, toward the portion of the shroud Painter patrols. Yumi is on her feet. *Thirteen?* The other living yoki-hijo of her generation number exactly thirteen, plus her. *Where are they.* Design can't tell.
Yumi is out the door. Painter catches up as she emerges from the outer ring of warehouses to the road that circles Kilahito and walks straight toward the shroud. She sinks to her knees in front of it, shaken: she was not thinking — she was *feeling*. She knew one of those girls as a child, before Liyun separated them on the grounds that the attachment was unhealthy. In the years since she has never met another yoki-hijo — not once, not in passing. *How did you deal with the loneliness?* she asks. *Painting*, he says. *Until you don't have anyone to show it to.* Then, gently: *Good job today.* She idly picks up a few pebbles and starts stacking — one tower, two, three.
The shroud retreats. A neat bowed curve, ten feet across, where she is stacking. Painter recognises it: the shroud reacts to her stacks the same way it reacts to hion — *that's how it responds to the lines. That's how we survive.* She speeds up, building with both hands, tower after tower, until the dark begins to froth and split. Right down the centre, a face — a yoki-hijo in a bright tobok reaching with a soundless scream — before the shroud surges forward, swallows her, and bulges out at the three of them. Even Design, who claims to be unable to feel fear, scuttles back to a whitewashed wall.
Design's read: it might just be a nightmare taking the shape Yumi was thinking about — don't trust anything born of shroud material. Painter agrees this is a distraction. They came out here to figure out the machine. He still wants to walk in and smash it with a rock — what are four spindly academics going to do? Yumi wants information first. Maps. *How sure are you the whole world is under the shroud?* Design admits she is not very sure at all. She has no maps — but she knows someone who has surveyed every inch of Painter's world from the ground up.