I decided, on what I believe was the seventh or eighth day, that she needed to see something of the world beyond the empty stretch of stone where I'd found her — not because I thought she was ready for it in any complete sense, but because I had begun to understand that some things cannot be taught in stillness. Some things require exposure. You cannot explain a market to someone; you have to stand them in the middle of one and let the noise and motion and strangeness of it work on them directly, the way you cannot fully explain warmth to something that has never felt cold.
The nearest settlement of any real size was most of a day's walk from where I had found her, a modest trading town that had grown up, as so many of the smaller settlements do, along one of the ancient trade corridors that connect the greater skylines to each other — nothing as grand as the towering syndicate-cities the wealthiest souls had raised, but real enough, alive enough with the particular bustle that only gathers where enough souls have decided, independently, that this specific stretch of gray stone is worth staying near.
She walked the whole distance beside me without complaint, though I noticed, more than once, the way her attention would catch and hold on things I had long since stopped noticing myself — the particular texture of wind moving across open stone, the shift of light through the thin, high haze that passes for cloud cover here. I had grown so used to the Between's landscape that I had stopped truly seeing it, the way anyone stops seeing a thing they pass every day. Walking beside her, I found myself seeing it again, secondhand, through the raw, unfiltered attention of someone encountering it for what might as well have been the first time.
The market announced itself the way markets always do here, long before you can see it — a low murmur of voices rising out of the quiet, the specific texture of many souls existing in close proximity, something the vast empty stretches of the Between almost never offer. I felt her tense beside me as we came over the final rise and the town spread out below us: stalls built from scavenged stone and reclaimed metal, souls moving between them in numbers I don't think she had ever, in her entire existence, encountered all at once, the low steady hum of dozens of separate transactions happening simultaneously.
"It's all right," I told her, the words themselves probably meaningless to her still, but the tone, I had learned, always landed. "Stay close. I'll show you."
We came down into it slowly, and I watched her take in the sheer volume of it — the noise, the density of bodies, the specific chaos of a place built entirely around the exchange of things — with an expression I could not read on a face that had no features to read, but which nonetheless communicated, somehow, in the register I had learned to receive from her, something between overwhelm and a kind of wide, wordless wonder.
I brought her, first, to the edge of the market rather than its center, to a modest stall selling produce — the strange, faintly luminous vegetables that grow, against all reasonable expectation, in a handful of the rare pockets across the Between where soil holds enough residual Something-charge to support something living. I had traded here before. The woman who kept this particular stall had a warmth to her that I trusted, and I wanted Flora's first real exposure to commerce to happen somewhere gentle.
Her name was Perenna, and she had died, she'd told me once, an old woman who had spent her whole life tending an actual garden in an actual world, and had found, on arriving here, that growing things again — even things that couldn't quite be eaten, not really, not in any way that mattered to a body that no longer strictly needed feeding — was the closest thing to peace she had found in this whole gray afterlife. She grew her modest, glowing rows of vegetables in a plot behind her stall with the same patient, unhurried devotion she must have brought to her garden in life, and she sold them not because anyone truly needed to eat, but because the ritual of the exchange itself — the growing, the offering, the small human warmth of a transaction completed with care — mattered to her more than the coin it earned.
"Eremos," she said, warm, when she saw me approaching, her voice carrying the particular texture of someone who has decided, deliberately, to be kind in a world that gives her no obligation to be. Her attention shifted, then, to the silhouette beside me, and I watched her take in — with far more grace than I had managed, on that first hillside — exactly what she was looking at. Perenna had a way of seeing people clearly, quickly, that I had always admired and never quite managed myself. "And who's this."
"A friend," I said, which was not quite true yet, though it would become true soon enough that the lie barely counted as one. "She's new. Very new. I'm teaching her the world."
Perenna's attention lingered on Flora for a long moment — not with pity, and not with the wary caution some souls show toward the obviously lost, but with something gentler, something that looked, in retrospect, almost like recognition of her own kind. "Well," she said, finally, turning back to her stall and beginning, without being asked, to arrange a small selection of her produce into a neat row along the stall's edge. "Then let's teach her something worth knowing."
She explained it to Flora as much as to me, though Flora could not yet follow the words — narrating, patient and unhurried, the way this whole small economy worked: how Nothing itself, bound by an ancient Contract struck with a soul entrepreneurial enough to make herself indispensable, appraised every object traded in the Between and set upon it a fair, impartial value, so that no soul need trust a stranger's honesty to know what a thing was worth; how sellers were free to ask more than that value, or less, or exactly that value, and buyers were free to haggle or accept, and how the coin earned from all of it — Reliquary Marks, everyone called it, though Perenna admitted with a small laugh that she'd never learned why — could be traded again, endlessly, for anything else a soul might want, anywhere in the Between.
"Why bother," I asked her, because I had wondered this myself for a long time and never quite asked, "trading between souls at all, instead of everyone simply selling straight to the system for the appraised price?"
Perenna smiled, the particular smile of someone who has thought about this exact question many times and found an answer she genuinely likes. "Because the system doesn't smile at you when it hands you your coin," she said. "It doesn't remember your name. It doesn't hold back the best of the harvest for the soul who always comes on Fourthday, the way I do for you, Eremos, don't think I haven't noticed. Souls don't trade with each other for the coin. Coin's the excuse. We trade with each other because it's one of the only things left, in a world like this, that still requires two people to actually see each other."
I felt Flora's attention on Perenna throughout all of this, fixed and total in a way I had rarely seen from her — not, I think, because she understood the specifics of what was being explained, but because something in the rhythm of it, the warmth of it, the sheer human generosity radiating off a woman explaining her whole small world to a stranger simply because the stranger was standing in front of her, had reached something in Flora that words alone had not yet managed to reach.
Perenna selected one of the small, faintly glowing vegetables from her row — something round and soft-skinned, the color of dusk — and held it out, not to me, but directly to Flora. "For you," she said, simply, gently, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to hand a gift to someone who could not yet understand what a gift was.
Flora looked at it — I could tell, by the slight shift in her attention, the faint reorientation of her whole silhouette toward the offered object — for a long moment before, slowly, tentatively, she reached out and closed her hand around it, the motion still clumsy, still new, but unmistakably, entirely hers.
"There," Perenna said, satisfied, the way you might be satisfied watching any small good thing land exactly where it was meant to. "First trade. Cost you nothing, dear. That's how the good ones start, sometimes."
I paid Perenna, quietly, for the vegetable myself once Flora's attention had moved elsewhere, because I did not think it right that a woman as generous as her should absorb the cost of every kindness she offered, and she let me, with a small, knowing look that told me she understood exactly why I insisted.
I did not know, that day, watching Flora turn the small glowing vegetable over and over in her hands with the same rapt, wondering attention she'd given the sun on that first hillside, that I was watching the beginning of something that would eventually bring Perenna herself into the wide, slow orbit of the family I was building without ever quite deciding to build it — that years from then, a different conversation, a different kindness, would fold her into the same warm circle Flora now stood at the edge of. I only knew, in that moment, that I had chosen the right place to begin.