"Explain to me again why we're here," Neila said, stepping around a puddle of something that was definitely not water. "Because I'm fairly certain we're supposed to be looking for an idiot, not fondling cabbages."
"We're looking for him," Lucy said, not breaking stride. "This is where people come. If he's in the lower district, someone here has seen him."
"Absolutely flawless logic." Neila rolled her eyes.
Engines, glass, the hiss of a vent above a noodle shop. A woman somewhere two blocks over arguing with someone on a phone about a parking space.
Vert catalogued each of them, one by one, with patient curiosity.
Neila said. "You look insane."
"I am insane," Vert said.
"I asked you to be normal."
"Leave her alone," Lucy said. "She's never been outside before."
"She's been outside," Neila said.
"Outside the unit," Lucy clarified.
"Of course," Vert agreed. "But since the last time I've frolicked outside. The architecture is different. The smell is different. There are more dogs."
"There are more dogs," Lucy repeated, delighted.
"There are objectively more dogs," Vert said. "Domestication accelerated in the last two centuries. There is a graph."
"She read a graph," Neila muttered. "Wonderful. The Primordial Goddess of Greed read a graph."
"My greed for knowledge will never be satisfied, especially with the creation of something as wonderful as the internet."
"Walk faster."
They walked faster. Or rather, Neila walked faster, in the brisk clipped step of someone who would have preferred to be in a car going in the opposite direction. Lucy ambled.
Her empty sleeve was pinned up at the shoulder, neat, almost decorative, and she kept her remaining hand in her pocket like she was trying to keep it from getting any ideas.
Vert drifted between them. She was the smallest of the three by a considerable margin, and from a distance she could have passed for a child, if a child had ever been quite that gray.
She had been wrapped in one of Neila's spare coats. The coat was too big. The coat had been too big for Neila, too, on certain days, but no one had pointed that out, because no one wanted to be the one to point that out.
"Why are we doing this again?" Neila said.
"Because she asked," Lucy said.
"I didn't ask," Vert said.
"You said you wanted to see things."
"I said I wanted to know things."
"They're related verbs."
"They are not the same verb."
"Oh my god," Neila said. "You two are fucking idiots, I'm going to drown you both in a river."
"There's a river?" Vert asked.
"There's a river," Lucy said. "It's nice. We can go after."
"After what?"
"After we walk around," Lucy said.
"After we walk around for what reason."
"For no reason."
They passed a stall selling textiles, bolts of fabric in colors that ranged from tasteful to assaultive. Lucy paused to help an old woman who had dropped her shopping bag, gathering scattered oranges from the cobblestones with her remaining hand. The woman thanked her profusely. Lucy smiled and said it was nothing.
This happened three more times in the next twenty minutes.
Lucy helped a vendor restack crates that had fallen from a cart. She gave directions to a lost tourist.
Then there was a kid.
He was maybe six. He was sitting on a low brick wall outside a convenience store.
Lucy stopped walking.
Neila kept walking. Then Neila noticed Lucy was no longer beside her.
"Oh, here we go," Neila said.
She crouched beside a crying child and asked, in a voice that was genuinely gentle, what was wrong, and when the child pointed at a balloon snagged on an awning, Lucy retrieved it with a tendril of blood that she formed and dissolved so quickly no one noticed.
"Hi," Lucy said to the kid, crouching down. Her hair fell over one shoulder, dark blue, neat, and the kid looked at her the way kids always looked at her.
"Hi," the kid said. The composure was cracking around the edges of the word.
"Are you waiting for someone?"
"My mom went in to get something and she's been a long time and I think she forgot me."
"She didn't forget you."
"How do you know?"
"Because she's your mom."
"Some moms forget."
"Some moms," Lucy agreed, very seriously, "do forget. But most moms don't forget when they've gone into a store."
"How long is five minutes?"
"How long do you think you've been here?"
"Forever."
"Then it's probably been three."
The kid considered this. He sniffed.
"Can you stay?" he asked.
"Of course," Lucy said.
Neila, two paces back, made a small noise in her throat that was half a laugh and half a curse, both of them dry.
"We are not staying," she said.
"We're staying for three minutes."
"We are staying for zero minutes."
"Neila."
"What?"
"It's a child."
"It's a child whose mother is in a store."
"And he's scared."
"So what? It's not our problem, there are more important things to attend to, like finding the idiot."
Vert had drifted forward by then. She simply leaned her head slightly to one side, the way a bird considers a particularly interesting piece of glass, and looked at the kid, and the kid looked back at her without flinching, which most adults could not manage.
"You are very small," the kid told her.
"You are also very small," Vert said.
"I'm six."
"I am not."
"How old are you?"
"It is rude to ask."
"My mom says it's only rude to ask grown-ups."
"I am a grown up."
The kid thought about this. He looked at the street. He looked back at Vert.
"I think you're lying," he said.
"Am not."
The mother came out of the store, then, with a bag and an apology and the look of a woman who had been in line, and she scooped the kid up, and she thanked Lucy, and Lucy waved them off, and Lucy stood up, and Lucy brushed her knee off with her one hand.
"See? Three minutes."
"It was nine minutes," Neila said.
"It was three minutes of being useful and six minutes of you complaining."
"That's the same nine minutes, you're acting as if my complaining did anything to the space time continuum. It is mathematically the same nine minutes."
"It feels different."
"Different my ass."
Vert watched them. She did not say anything. She had filed Lucy away under something else, but she had not finished labeling the folder yet.
The second one was an old man with groceries.
The bag had split. The old man was now standing in a slow puddle of apples and one rolling can of something, and he was making the small dignified noises of someone trying very hard not to acknowledge it.
Lucy was on the apples before Neila could even sigh.
"Here, here, I've got it, no, no, sir, don't bend down, please, your back, let me-yes, just hold the bag like that, just- yeah, that's it, that's good-"
"M'am you don't have to help me, you only have one hand, don't trouble yourself this much," the man said politely.
"Snap," Lucy said.
"Oh."
"It's fine."
She started scooping apples into the crook of her remaining arm and using her chin, judiciously, as a stabilizing structure. The can went into a pocket. A loaf of bread went under the same arm.
"I can carry it home for you," she said. "If it's close."
"Oh, no, no, that's not necessary —"
"It's no trouble."
"My building's just there, I can —"
"I'm already holding it," Lucy said brightly, and started walking.
The old man, defeated, followed her.
Neila and Vert followed the old man.
"This is not what we came outside to do," Neila said. "I hate every part of this afternoon, we're wasting so much time doing useless side quests, we're not heroes Lucy."
By the time Lucy had delivered the apples, intervened in a small dispute between a delivery driver and a woman whose double-parked car was blocking him, given directions to a tourist couple who didn't speak the local language.
They had ended up on a bench.
The bench faced a small square with a fountain that wasn't running and a statue of someone Vert had probably known.
"I knew him," Vert confirmed, looking up at the statue. "He was shorter."
"It's a statue, it's stupid if you think that they're going to get him in scale," Neila said.
"He had a stammer. They've made him look very confident in the statue."
"Mhm."
"They never get the chins right, either."
"It's a fucking statue."
Lucy was watching a flock of pigeons across the square. She had the dreamy expression she got when she had successfully exhausted herself doing things for other people and was about to spend the next ten minutes pretending she wasn't tired.
Vert tilted her head and looked at Lucy.
Looked at her for a long time.
Long enough that Neila noticed.
"What," Neila said.
"I am observing."
"Observing what."
"Her."
"Why."
"Because she is interesting."
"She's not interesting. She's like a piece of plain white bread, the type of boring and flat main character you would see in movies meant to appeal to the general masses."
Vert said. "I very much doubt your observations."
Lucy felt the look land on her. Lucy did not turn her head. Lucy kept watching the pigeons. The smile she had been wearing for the last hour stayed on her face like a hat that didn't quite fit.
"What," Lucy said.
"Nothing," Vert said.
"You do that a lot," she said.
"Do what?"
"Help people. Random humans. Strangers who can't possibly offer you anything in return."
Lucy's expression flickered. "That's what helping means. You don't do it for a reward."
She turned a little on the bench. She had to turn her whole small body to do it, the coat was very large.
She faced Lucy, her gray eyes were not cruel but not soft either. They were the eyes of something that had watched several civilizations go.
"You help people," Vert said, "because you do not believe you are owed your own life."
The square was quiet.