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Design leads Yumi and Painter back through the noodle shop kitchen — every burner steaming, the assistant cook drafted out to take orders — into a small back room papered ceiling-to-floor in long flowing sequences of *numbers* that loop and circle until Yumi cannot tell where one ends and the next begins. Design sighs at her own art happily and ducks out to fetch their other help.

She returns with Masaka in tow. Painter is on his feet — *I knew it. I knew she wasn't human.* Design introduces her properly: *Chinikdakordich, the sixtieth horde of the Natricatich strain.* Masaka pulls further into her sweater. *We prefer the name Masaka,* she says softly. *We're being human. We're getting very good at it.* And, almost in tears: she has bred this face for years to make it a single seamless piece of skin, the trick being to avoid visible seams, the makeup and high collars covering the rest. Yumi steels herself, decides on kindness, tells her she's a very cute young woman. Masaka beams and hands her a flower-handled hooked knife — *very good at cracking shells. And prying out the insides.* The flowers on the handle are very cute.

*Don't tell anyone what we are*, she pleads. *We are tired of people being scared of us. We are tired of wars.* Yumi promises. Then asks for the help they came for. Masaka has, Design confirms, scouted Painter's world the way a horde always scouts a new planet — hordelings spread across the landscape. Most of it beyond the cities is wasteland under raw Investiture. But there are *walls* — circular barriers of solidified shroud rising into the atmosphere — that her scouts cannot pass through. About a dozen small ones and one vast one a few miles from Kilahito. *Like fortifications.* Painter is on his feet: *Towns. Those circles are your towns.* Yumi refuses the implication — thousands of people live in her kingdom; nobody has ever stumbled into an invisible wall in the sky. The hidden cover-up is impossible. Painter concedes, then bets her the biggest bowl of noodles she can eat that overlaying Masaka's map on a map of her lands will give them the correlation. Masaka, without seeming to find a woman talking to herself the least bit unusual, sketches the map on the page — circles for each walled region, Kilahito at the edge for reference, a scale at the bottom that the horde guarantees to be more accurate than any surveyor's instrument could give. Painter kneels and palm-measures it, then announces he is going to memorise the drawing to redraw on his side.

Yumi wanders out to the main room while he works, taking advantage of the leash. Design is back at the bar finally meeting her customers. The clique is in their usual booth. It might be the last time Yumi ever stands among ordinary people instead of being the collected hopes of an entire kingdom; she lets herself go over. Tojin flexes his neck muscles for her; *your head looks small by comparison*, she tells him, then blushes. He grins. Akane is being talked at by Izzy about a late drama episode in which Sir Ashinata turns out not to have left after all — set up before his brother died, by people who hate the honour of ronin. *I'm writing a book on the relevance of dramas for mental health*, Izzy announces. *Old news, she is going to be a viewer critic instead. It's going to make her famous.*

Then Tojin starts in. The whole *brother* excuse — *Yumi*'s brother, Nikaro, could have invited her at any time and only did when he wanted someone to do his work for him; Akane is surprised he never tried to send her to school in his place either. Yumi leaps to her feet. *You do not know Nikaro.* She lays him out for them whole: the excruciation of wanting to fix something and not knowing how; the weight of being responsible for everyone else's joy; what it does to a person to feel that their entire value sits in what they can do for the people they love. Painter did not lie to hurt them. He did not lie because he was *enjoying himself*. On the day the Dreamwatch rejected him he lost everything — every dream, every hope, the love of his work — and losing *them* on top of that was the worst of all.

*He should have told us*, Akane says.

*He should have. He agrees. I agree. You agree.* The rage drains out of her like the last jet of a drowsy steamwell. He cannot change what he did. He is trying very hard. They do not have to forget; she only wishes that instead of constant wisecracks they could try to understand. She bows to the table the most formal bow she knows, as if to the spirits themselves, and thanks them for the kindness they have shown her. Then asks them to spare some of it for someone who needs it more.

Painter is just out of the kitchen as she crosses to him. *I've lost my appetite. You're right. It's time to end this.*