Use

“What is it?”

“It’s pretty.”

“I like the girl. Looks a bit like Kara, you think?”

Kara glanced up at her name. She had been rummaging through old junk scattered across the superstore car park, desperate to find something of worth. The sky was already bleeding its blue and they had little to their names beyond the usual knives and empty guns. Though she was confident in her own ability to survive a one-sided scrap, she wasn’t alone anymore. She gathered herself up, feeling every long day and bitter fight reverberate along her nerves, and made her way over to the gaggle of children.

“Find something useful, then?” The littlest one, Caroline, closed her fist around the item sheepishly. Her older brother, a sandy-haired boy called Caleb, forced the small fingers open and handed it over.

“What is it?” He asked. Kara twirled the small circle of metal, unexpectedly pleased by the heft. There was something very nostalgic about it all.

“It’s a coin,” she answered. She watched Caroline’s lips trace the word over and over, trying to make a connection.

“What’s that?” Demanded Lily, the last of the trio. She towered over the other two, nearly over Kara herself, and now tried to use that advantage to steal the coin back. Kara just laughed as she palmed the coin, slipping it into her other hand as the children watched, mesmerized.

“This is how they used to trade. You have a gun, I give you some coins, we’re both happy.”

Still trying to get a better look, Caleb asked, “Does it do something?”

“It’s doing it.”

Lily rested a hand on her hip, looking distinctly unimpressed. “Why wouldn’t I just use the gun to get the coin back?”

Kara tsk’ed. “No one would trade with you anymore then, would they?”

“I don’t get it,” Caroline admitted quietly, twisting her fingers up in the fabric of her shirt. Kara considered the problem. She herself had only been sixteen when the bombs dropped; it wasn’t as though she had a degree in economics. She only knew what little she did from odd jobs performed around the neighborhood. For one brief moment, she thought fondly of girl scout fundraisers and paper routes and a summer spent sweeping floors at a pet daycare center. They were all smouldering ruins now, of course, if they even had embers to smoulder. She flipped the coin back and forth across her knuckles, marveling at how this silly skill had transcended lifetimes.

“Think of it this way,” she began, sitting and smiling as the children sat beside her. They formed an imperfect circle, like the damaged silver trim of the coin. “Collecting clean water is dangerous, dirty work, but everyone needs water, don’t they?” Nods rippled through the circle. “But everyone also needs food, and everyone also needs protection. You can have people all work together, of course, and rely on trust, like families-”

“Like us,” piped up Caroline, though she immediately seemed to regret the intrusion. Her lips pursed as if she’d swallowed a lemon whole, and her eyes darted to and fro. Kara smiled gently, hating the tightness in the girl’s shoulders, the wariness in her bright eyes.

“Like us,” she agreed. “But we know that trust is sometimes hard, and that’s why coins existed. You could work all day collecting water and get, let’s say, five coins. When you give a coin to a person for food, they know how much those coins are worth, the trouble you went through to get them. And they get coins, and other people get coins, and so when they handed coins back and forth, it was a sense of community. It was supposed to be that everyone didn’t have to find water, and food, and shelter, and protection. Everyone would do their part so that everyone could have something.” The children watched as she resumed flipping the coin across the back of her hand, sometimes quickly, sometimes slowly.

“Who made the coins? Who decided who should find water or how much that mattered?” Lily, naturally, her nose furrowed like a thoughtful rabbit’s. Kara tossed the little circle up and watched the dwindling daylight flicker across its face. It was dirty, of course, and badly injured, but somehow seized the sun just well enough. When she caught it on the back of her forearm, Kara pointed at the profile etched in gold.

“The same people who decided to drop bombs,” she answered. Lily took the opportunity to snatch the coin, holding it close to her face as if to seek out every detail. She frowned at Kara thoughtfully.

“Could we still get water with it? We’re running low.”

Kara huffed out a laugh. “No, ’fraid not. The thing’s useless as currency. Although…” She trailed off, glancing first at the small camp they’d made beneath the store’s awning and then at the darkening horizon. “Melt it down,” she decided, her joints crackling like a fire as she stood. “One extra bullet might buy us one extra day.”