Bone Market

They called it the Bone Market because what people brought to trade had the look and weight of bones: stripped ribs of hulls, rings of corroded piping, the pale, pitted plates of panels dug from wrecks no one else would pry open. It was not a name anyone used with tenderness. It was a name like a warning. Etta Solan had learned, before she learned to read maintenance schematics, to read the market by smell and sound; a new squeal of metal at a stall meant someone had found a hinge worth a ration, a child's shout meant barter struck a rare accord, and the low, careful voices under the awnings meant deals kept secret between families.

Dawn arrived like a rumor, a thin smear of pale on the horizon where the dome sat like a sunless pearl. Even from the market the dome's curve showed, a seam of glass and alloy that caught the ghost light of the sky and kept it from the rest of the coast. Guards moved along its base in measured patrols; their silhouettes were familiar enough that only strangers watched them and measured the distance between comfort and appetite. Etta tightened the straps of the pack on her back and let her boots find the familiar grooves in the packed earth. Her hands still smelled of grease and the bitter oil someone used to clean instruments; the trade had been good. A length of bent rail, a coil of copper with a scorched end: enough to buy a week of nutrient paste and a spool of sealant for the grow-box.

She slipped through stalls with the ease of someone who had spent half a life threading through crowds and avoiding trouble. Faces opened and closed like shutters: old men who conserved speech the way they conserved water, women who traded stories as easily as screws. Etta stopped at the booth run by Tam, a thin man with a laugh that had the habit of arriving late. Tam lifted a cloth to let her see the seedling trays beneath, and his eyes brightened when she handed him the rail.

"You scavenge miracles today," he said, not unkind, as he weighed the rail with a balance worn smooth by use. The few coins they still trusted—tin strips punched and stamped by a hundred trades—changed hands and another small debt was erased. Etta watched Tam tuck the metal into a crate labeled for the communal grow-house. The crate had a slat with a chalk tally. Little things stacked into safety. Whatever else you could not buy with rations—time, patience, hands—could be balanced by the warm, sweating work of the community.