Ha-Jin painted.
Ray found this out at 06:00 on a Sunday when he arrived for an unscheduled training session and found the training bay's back room a storage space he'd never had reason to open unlocked and full of canvases. Watercolor, mostly, on surfaces made from repurposed materials because actual art supplies were a seven-tier luxury item in a fortress citadel. She had found ways. There were eighteen completed pieces and they were all landscapes.
Not the landscape of Vega Citadel. Not the mountain she could see from the north windows. The landscapes were of places that didn't exist in accessible form anymore Ray recognized some of them from photographs he'd seen in archive files. Seoul. A section of the Milanese lakefront. A fishing village on the coast of what had been Spain.
She found him looking at them when she arrived twenty minutes later.
He expected anger. She had the bearing of someone who protected their private things by not having private things who had reduced herself to function and discipline and technical excellence so completely that there was nowhere for anyone to look inside.
She said nothing for a moment. Then:
"I grew up hearing about those places. My grandmother's stories."
"They're good."
"They help me remember that there was something before the Strand. That the world had texture. Weight. History that had nothing to do with any of this."
Ray looked at a painting of what appeared to be a small harbor in morning light. The paint had been applied in layers, careful and patient, the same quality of attention she brought to the training floor.
"After the breach last week. The students in the education block."
"Yes."
"There was a boy in the front of the group. He was designing cities."
"I heard. Dayo."
"He designs cities for after. For when this is over. As if he's certain it ends and people need to live somewhere in the after."
Ha-Jin looked at him.
"And you don't think it ends."
"I think it ends. I'm not always certain which way."
She was quiet for a moment.
"I paint because I am certain which way."
"Certain we win?"
"Certain there were things worth winning back."
She picked up the painting of the harbor and put it back where it had been, and then she came back to the training floor, and they worked for two hours, and she corrected his left side four more times and praised him once, and that was the whole morning.
But he didn't forget the harbor.