POV: painter
Summary
Painter sits in his apartment wrapped in Yumi's blankets, staring at the stack of plates and cups she had built the day before. He pulls the blankets close because warmth has begun to *feel right* to him in a way it never did before — because the last person to hold them was her. He turns the situation over and over and arrives nowhere. Rent a hion expander and walk into the shroud? He would be surrounded and killed. He does not even know what her towns *are*; Masaka said the walls were impenetrable, and he has apparently been living half his time inside one. He is in over his head — the scholar said as much — and the only thing he knows for sure is that he has lost her.
*No*, he decides. *I won't let it be forever.* He stands up to a very terrible idea, picks up his sack of stones, slips a folded square of paper into his pocket, and walks out.
He returns to the broken playground near the carnival — the place where Liyun's nightmare fed last time. The thing returns, slicing the ground with thick claws, careful, perhaps remembering their last encounter. *We first met before the swap happened*, he says aloud. *Was that a coincidence, or were you looking for me even then?* It rears up, eyes like scraped-out hollow white, and reaches for him.
*Liyun*, he whispers. The beast freezes, crouches close to the ground. *Have they taken your memory, Liyun?* He puts the pieces together — everything he has been told by the scholars rearranging itself in his head. They are afraid of Yumi. The towns are a charade for her benefit, a frame around her to keep her placid. He kneels and begins to stack — not at her level but well enough that the nightmare stops in her tracks, drill-hole eyes fixed on the stones. *I know I don't have whatever power or endowment was given to her. But a piece of you is still Liyun. The deepest piece. That's what the scholar said. That you were allowed to be yourself again when you were with her.* The beast steps closer. *Remember, Liyun. Remember.* The black claw reaches for the stack and stops just before touching. *I remember*, it whispers in her voice.
*Is she all right?* he asks, pained. *She forgets*, the thing says. *As we all forget.* He takes the paper from his pocket — a beginner's painting of two hands overlapping above a sea of lights, his memory, for her, of them — and bows to the monster that is Liyun. *Can you give this to her?* *I will forget. I…* *Liyun. Do you remember your duty?* The white pits fix on him. *Serve the yoki-hijo. Protect her. Give her this.* *I want to be a person again*, Liyun whispers. *So badly. It has been so long.*
*How long?* he asks. *Since before your people made cities*, she says. *Since the days when this land had a sun. Centuries.* The weight of it lands on him all at once. They had not been time-travelling — but Yumi's people had been held here unchanging for roughly seventeen hundred years. Her one missing day of memory was not a day; it was the same single day, lived and erased and lived again, for centuries upon centuries.
The nightmare pinches the painting between two delicate claws. *I have failed to kill you. But the machine will not make this mistake again. It will send one who does not know you, who cannot be influenced. With that one will come an army.* *What kind of army?* She speaks the name of a city — Futinoro — and tells him the truth of it. The spirits there had managed to contact the people. The machine ordered the city wiped out as a result, to prevent anyone from knowing. It sent dozens of her kind to do it. She herself was in the dream that did. He had always assumed Futinoro failed because painters failed. It had been an assault. *They're coming here?* *From the west*, she says. *A hundred nightmares. Strong as I am. Fed by the machine to make them dangerous and stable. Flee. Flee and pray to the spirits.* Her eyes linger on his stack a moment longer. Then she withdraws into the dark, his picture still pinched between her claws.