Simon looked down at his own pocket, still disbelieving. The glow was already gone, but he knew exactly what it had been — he'd seen it a hundred times before, usually followed by an annoying beep right before the screen went dark forever.
"It's just the battery," he said, pulling out the phone. "The last signal before it dies completely. It's nothing—"
He didn't get to finish the sentence. Corin had already reached across the table, fast, and before Simon could react the phone had passed from his fingers to hers.
"Hey—"
"One second," Corin said, without looking up. She turned it over in her hands, flipped it, ran a finger across the smooth black screen as if expecting it to react again. She brought it to her ear, the way you'd hold a seashell to listen for the sea, then gave it a light shake. Nothing. "What is this? Glass? Metal? I've never seen anything that glowed like that and then just shut itself off."
Simon watched her study that dead object with an almost religious attention, and it was in that moment — watching the slow disappointment surface on her face as the phone kept doing nothing — that he understood something simple and bitter: to her, now that it no longer lit up, that rectangle of glass and plastic meant absolutely nothing. A dead curiosity. An object with no purpose, in a world that apparently had no electricity, no signal, nothing needed to make it work.
"You can turn it over all you want," Simon said, with a crooked smile that didn't reach his eyes. "It won't do anything else. What you just saw was probably its last breath before dying for good."
Corin set it down on the table, more gently than Simon expected, and pushed it back toward him with one finger. "Nothing to be done, then," she said, but her voice no longer held the calculating urgency from before — only a curiosity that was already fading along with the object. "How much do you want for it, anyway? Even just for parts. The glass looks strange, might interest some craftsman."
"A hundred and fifty dollars," Simon said, before he'd even thought about it — the kind of dry, automatic quip that came out of him when he was exhausted, half serious and half not.
Corin blinked. "Dollars?"
"Yeah. Dollars. Money."
"I've never heard that word in my life," she said, and she seemed sincere, not like she was joking. "Do you prefer Crowns or Infernal Marks? Because if you're trying to squeeze something valuable out of me for a dead piece of glass, I'm warning you now that I don't—"
"Wait, wait," Simon said, raising a hand. "What are Crowns? And Marks?"
Corin looked at him the way you look at someone who's just asked if water is wet. "The coins," she said slowly, as if speaking to a child, or maybe to someone playing a joke on her in very bad taste. "Money. The stuff you buy things with. The Crown is what half the continent uses, minted in Cajin — Aureus, Shield, or Penny, depending on the denomination. Marks are Gorgaroth stuff, the Demons' currency, they burn your hands if you try to spend them with dishonest intent, so honest people usually accept them more readily than the Crown itself, strange as that sounds."
Simon stayed silent for a moment longer than he meant to, trying to fit that sentence into anything he'd ever learned about economics, about banks, about anything. It didn't fit. There was no way it fit.
"I have no idea what you're talking about," he said finally, in the flat voice of someone who's temporarily given up trying to understand everything. "I don't have Crowns. I don't have Marks. I have no idea what it means for a coin to burn your hands if you're dishonest. Where I come from, money is just pieces of paper with numbers on them, or more often numbers on a screen you don't even see, and no coin punishes you for anything, no matter how much of a piece of shit you are."
Corin opened her mouth to reply — probably with something sarcastic, judging by her expression — but at that moment a figure approached their table, interrupting everything with the ease of someone who does it a hundred times a night.
He was a short, round man, with a stained apron and a tray balanced on one calloused hand. He set down in front of Simon a wooden tankard full of some dark liquid, without either of them having ordered it.
"On the house, for the one with the face of someone who needs it," the innkeeper said, with a grin that showed a missing tooth, and then turned to Corin, who without a word pulled out three small dark metal coins and slid them onto the tray.
Simon looked at them for a moment — they didn't look like real copper, not quite, they had a dull sheen and a weight he could sense just by looking, as if the metal itself were different from anything he'd ever touched — and he understood, with a kind of resigned exhaustion, that these had nothing whatsoever to do with anything he'd ever had in his pocket. Not cents. Not loose euros. Nothing.
"Money," the innkeeper said, as if by way of explanation, before moving off toward another table calling loudly for him.
Simon looked down at the tankard in front of him, then back up at Corin. "Is it... water? Tea?"
"Drink it and find out," she said, and there was now a shadow of amusement in her voice that hadn't been there a minute earlier.
Simon, more out of desperation than trust, brought the tankard to his lips and took a long sip.
The taste exploded in his throat a second later, bitter and strong, with an aftertaste that burned slightly as it went down — it wasn't water, wasn't tea, it was something alcoholic, strong, decidedly stronger than any beer he'd ever had in his life. He coughed, sputtering a little, and set the tankard down harder than he meant to.
"Christ," he said, voice hoarse. "What is this, gasoline?"
Corin burst out laughing — the first real laugh Simon had heard from her, short and genuine, different from the calculating tone she'd used up to that point. "That's dark ale from the Hearth. Strong, sure, but not strong enough to kill a healthy adult. Unless you've got the stomach of a newborn."
"I didn't know it was alcoholic," Simon said, throat still burning, but something in him — small, almost ridiculous considering everything that had happened — loosened a little. It wasn't relief. It was just, for an instant, something stupid and human: the plain surprise of a wrong taste in his mouth, instead of the huge, incomprehensible surprise of everything else.
"Well, now you know," Corin said, still with the trace of a smile. Then, turning more serious, she crossed her arms on the table. "So. No Crowns, no Marks, no idea how money works here, a dead piece of glass you call a 'phone,' and clothes that look sewn by a lunatic. Simon, whoever you are, you're not just lost. You're lost in a way I've never seen before, and I've seen plenty of lost people."
Simon ran a hand over his face, feeling the weight of the whole night — or the day, or whatever that light outside was — press behind his eyes like an oncoming migraine. "Great," he said, with a dry bitterness. "I'm the world champion of lost. Congrats to me."
"I didn't mean—"
"No, it's fine," he said, raising a hand. "It's fine. At least it's clear and simple: I don't have any money worth anything here, I don't have anything you could sell, and I probably don't even have a place to spend the night. Add it to the list, go ahead. The day's already given it its best shot."
Corin looked at him for a moment without answering, and for the first time something appeared in her expression that was neither calculation nor amusement — something closer, perhaps, to an honest assessment of just how deeply unlucky the man sitting across from her was.
"Look," she said finally, more quietly. "I'm not saying I'm adopting you, but—"
The inn door burst open with a sharp bang that made half the room jump, slamming against the wall with a violence that silenced the conversations closest to the entrance at once.
In the doorway, a tall figure stood outlined against the light of the outside dusk, breathing heavily like someone who's been running, a metal badge pinned to his chest catching the faint light of the lanterns inside.
The arm rose, a finger pointed straight at their table — at Simon.
"Hey, you!" the voice shouted, the same one that had shouted on the pier a little earlier, the same one that had sent Renn's delegation into total chaos in a matter of seconds. "You ran off from the pier before I could grab you!"