What I Had Paid

I had gone looking for the contract before I ever came to the shelf.

That is the part of the story I have to be honest about, because I have told it more gracefully in other rooms. In the graceful version, I stumbled upon the mission by chance, and fate carried me to the edge of the clouds like a leaf on a current. In the true version, I went out on purpose, alone, with a plan I was ashamed of, and I paid for the mission with almost everything I owned.

There was a small hoard of Reliquary Marks that I had been keeping. I want you to picture how a plant hoards, because it is not how a miser hoards. A plant does not count its coin. It stores. It takes what light there is, slowly, greedily, in the dark, and it tells nobody. That was how I had gathered those Marks: a little at a time, and always privately, with the vague stubborn instinct that a day would come when I needed a great deal at once, and would have no one to borrow from.

The mission cost far more than they could bear.

I do not mean that I paid all of it. I mean that I paid what my small hoard could sustain, and then a little beyond it, and the little beyond it was borrowed against a future I had not yet earned. The soul who sold me the contract was very kind about it. He did not press. But I watched the numbers settle and understood that if I did not come back from this, I would owe a debt for which there would be no one left to collect.

I was, in short, spending everything on a single throw of the dice.

And I did it in secret. That was the shame at the heart of the matter, and I turn it over even now.

There were three of them, then, in my life, and I will not describe them to you yet, because I cannot do it justice in passing and I do not wish to try. Ilyrisse. Vaelira. Iris. Three names, three ways of being looked at, three separate silences to be afraid of. I did not tell any of them.

I did not tell Ilyrisse, because she would have listened, and her listening has a way of making a bad plan feel reasonable right up until the moment it collapses. I did not tell Vaelira, because she would have shouted, and I would have deserved it, and I did not have the strength that day to be shouted at and still go. And I did not tell Iris.

I want to laugh when I write that.

Iris knows. That is not a figure of speech; it is a description of what she is. Iris knows what has happened, what is happening, and, she once admitted to me in a rare moment of candor, a good deal more of what will happen than she cares to say. Hiding a secret from Iris is like hiding from the weather. It is a courtesy you pay to yourself. I told myself I was sparing her the sight of me being foolish. I told myself that if I kept the plan small enough, and quiet enough, and buried deep enough, it might slip beneath the notice of something that has never, in the whole history of the Between, been surprised.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I believed it, the way a child believes that closing its eyes makes it invisible.

She watched, of course. I understood that later. She watched every step I took toward that shelf, and she let me take them.

I will tell you what I think that was, though I have never asked her to confirm it. I think that being surprised by something is a kind of gift, and that there is nothing in the world that Iris wants more than to be given one. And I think she let me go because she could see that the surprise, this time, was going to be a good one, or at least a true one.

But I did not know that, then. I only knew that I had a secret, and that it was heavy, and that I carried it out of the crystal halls one grey morning like a stolen coal, cupped in both hands, pressing it against my ribs and hoping that no one would notice the glow.

I suppose I should explain about missions, because I have said very little about them, and you will need them for what comes next.

Every soul that comes to the Between arrives with a shadow attached, and the shadow is called a mission. It is not a job, and it is not a punishment. It is a piece of the life the soul left behind, something that clung when the rest fell away: a shape, a habit, a fear, a race, a debt to the world. Missions are born from the past. A soul that was a sailor might carry the mission to cross a certain water. A soul that was a mother might carry the mission to find a child who is no longer anywhere. And a soul that was something older or stranger, something with a body and a sky that do not appear in any catalogue, might carry a mission so shaped by that lost world that no one else could ever have invented it.

Souls sell these missions. That is the economy of the Between, or the visible half of it, the half that runs on Reliquary Marks and contracts and seals. You buy the mission of another soul. You take on the weight of a life that was never yours. If you complete it, the mission pays, and the pay is whatever the original life had left unfinished, given to you in exchange for finishing it.

It is not a kind market. It is not an unkind one either. It is a market of the dead, and the dead have a great deal of unfinished business, and they would like it to be taken care of by someone.

The mission I bought was called Leap of Faith.

I did not think much about it before I chose it. That is the other truth I have to confess. Given what I carried in my mind at the time, the small, hot, ridiculous thing I had been carrying for longer than I would ever have admitted to anyone, I needed exactly that mission, and I needed it so badly that I did not stop to ask what it would cost me beyond the Marks. I heard the name and something in me said: yes. That one. It has to be that one.

You may ask what I was carrying. I will tell you, but not yet. There is a place in the story where it belongs, and if I told you now it would only sound like a complaint. It is a small thing. It is the smallest thing in the world. It is the reason I nearly died.

For now I will say only that I sat on that shelf, with my hands on my knees and my heart empty of everything except a kind of luminous dread, and I remembered the day I had gone looking for the man who owned the mission. And I remembered that the most peculiar part of the whole affair had not been the price, or the secrecy, or even the name.

It had been the man himself.