The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

1.1 -- Contracts for Breakfast

Iris likes to walk. I don't think most people would guess that about her -- there's something in the way she carries herself that makes you assume she'd rather float everywhere, or simply appear where she wants to be, the way some of the older, stranger souls do once they've been around long enough to stop bothering with distance. But she likes walking. She says it's one of the only things this world gives you for free that actually takes time to enjoy, and I've never had a good enough reason to argue with her about it, mostly because I like walking too, and mostly because arguing with Iris about anything is a losing proposition dressed up as a conversation.

We were out that morning doing what we usually do when neither of us has a Mission and neither of us feels like sitting still: looking for Contracts. Food Contracts, specifically -- the small, unglamorous kind that most souls with any comfort to their lives end up trading eventually, because food is one of the very few things from a Mission's reward pool that actually travels. You can carry a taste back with you. You can't carry warmth, not really, not the way you can carry a piece of fruit or bread or whatever a soul managed to conjure or grow or win during their brief hour of having a real body again. So there's a whole quiet little economy built around it -- souls trading spare rewards for other spare rewards, nothing as formal as the big syndicates that deal in Marks and Fragments, just neighbors being neighbors, more or less, in a world that doesn't really have neighborhoods.

"You always let them see how much you want it," Iris said, not for the first time, watching me practically bounce on my heels while a soul a little further down the path finished haggling with someone else entirely. "That's why they always ask for more than the thing's worth."

"I don't do that."

"You did it three minutes ago. You made a face like Eremos does when someone hands him a Time Fragment."

"I don't know what face that is."

"You will, someday, when you see it happen. It's a very specific kind of face." She said this the way she says almost everything, unhurried, a little amused, like she already knew how the rest of the sentence was going to land before she finished saying it. I've stopped trying to figure out how she always seems to know things before they happen. I used to think it was just that she paid more attention than most people. I still think that, mostly. It's simpler than the alternative, and I don't have a better explanation, so I've let it be that.

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1.2 -- Six Contracts and a Complaint

The first soul we found was an older woman -- older in bearing, not in the sense that any of us actually age here -- who traded dried, preserved fruit for gossip. Actual gossip. She wanted to know who'd been seen where, who'd traded what to whom, whether it was true that one of the big syndicates further toward the market district had lost a Contract dispute badly enough to owe out three Fragments at once. Iris supplied this with the same unbothered fluency she supplies everything, and the woman handed over more fruit than the trade probably called for, delighted, already turning to tell someone else the moment we walked away.

"You made that up," I said. "The bit about the three Fragments."

"I made up none of it," Iris said. "I simply know things."

"You always know things."

"It's one of my finer qualities." She said this completely straight-faced, and I laughed anyway, because that's mostly what happens when Iris says something like that -- you laugh, and you're never entirely sure if you're laughing with her or because she wanted you to, and either way it doesn't really matter.

The second soul wanted help carrying something -- a large, awkward crate of grain he'd won off a Mission and had no way to move alone -- and gave us more of it than the help probably deserved once the crate was safely wherever he wanted it. The third didn't want anything at all beyond company; she simply liked talking to Iris, the way a lot of people simply like talking to Iris, and pressed a small parcel of something sweet into her hands before we left, waving off any protest.

"You didn't even ask her for anything," I said, once we were out of earshot.

"I didn't need to."

"That doesn't seem fair. To the ones who do need to ask."

Iris considered this, or looked like she was considering it, which with her isn't always the same thing. "Life isn't fair," she said, "but it can still be kind, sometimes, in the same breath. I don't think those cancel each other out the way people assume they do."

I didn't have anything smart to say back to that, so I just carried the parcel, and we kept walking, and by the time we'd gathered everything we'd come out for, my arms were full and I was in a genuinely excellent mood, the specific kind of mood that comes from a morning spent doing something small and easy with someone you like.

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