The God of Ruin’s Pocket Change

CHAPTER 3: The Copper Sun

The skewer in my hand felt heavier than a planet.

It was a thin, rusted rod of iron, bowing slightly under the weight of the charred rodent, but my arm was trembling. The heat radiating from the meat seeped into my cold, wet palm. It was a greasy, aggressive warmth that made my stomach contract in a violent spasm of anticipation.

Eat it, my body screamed. Tear it apart. Swallow the bones.

I clamped my jaw shut. The saliva flooding my mouth tasted acidic.

"Not yet," I whispered to myself, my voice lost in the roar of the Sector Z rain. "We are civilized. We pay for services rendered."

I looked at the vendor, Old Man Jori.

He was watching me with a mixture of boredom and predatory amusement. His cybernetic eye whirred, the aperture contracting and expanding like the breathing of a tiny, mechanical insect. He held out his hand—a palm that looked like cracked leather stained with engine oil and soot.

"Five credits," Jori grunted. He spat to the side, a glob of something black hitting the mud. "And don't tell me you left your wallet in your other yacht, pretty boy."

I didn't have credits. I didn't have a digital interface or a bio-link. I didn't have a barcode stamped on my forehead like the walking corpses shuffling past us on the street.

I shifted the skewer to my left hand, ignoring the searing heat that threatened to blister my skin, and shoved my right hand into the pouch of my hoodie.

It felt pathetic. A few hours ago, this pocket contained the deed to a nebula. Now? It contained lint and paper.

My fingers brushed against the bills first. The linen texture of the Ten Dollar Bill. The crisp edge of the Five.

I hesitated.

In my old life, value was relative. A star cost more than a planet. A soul cost more than a star. But down here? What was the exchange rate for a dead vermin cooked over a barrel of toxic waste?

Five credits, he had said.

If I gave him the Five Dollar bill... that felt excessive. It was paper. It was fragile. It might dissolve in the rain.

But then I remembered the coins.

I dug deeper, past the bills, into the seam of the pocket. My fingernail scraped against metal.

I pinched it. It was small. Round. Smooth on the edges.

I pulled it out, keeping my fist closed to shield it from the relentless, acidic rain.

I brought my hand up to eye level and opened my fingers just a crack.

A Penny.

Abraham Lincoln’s profile stared back at me, looking stoic and utterly unimpressed by my current predicament. It was brown. Dull. Scratched near the rim.

One cent.

A wave of shame washed over me, hot and prickly. It started at the back of my neck and crawled down my spine.

I was about to hand a starving old man the smallest, most insulting denomination of currency in existence. A coin that mortals used to throw into fountains because they couldn't be bothered to carry the weight. A coin that was literally worth less than the zinc it was stamped on.

"I..." My throat clicked. I couldn't meet Jori's organic eye. I looked at his boots, mismatched chunks of rubber held together with silver duct tape. "I don't have credits."

Jori’s face hardened. His hand dropped to the heavy cleaver resting on the edge of the barrel.

"Then give me back the meat, soft-skin," he snarled. "Before I carve it out of your stomach."

"No," I said quickly, clutching the skewer tighter to my chest. The thought of losing the food made my knees buckle. "I have... currency. Physical currency."

Jori paused. His mechanical eye stopped whirring.

"Physical?" he asked. He looked skeptical, his lip curling. "Like plastic chips? Scrip? I don't take casino tokens."

"Metal," I whispered.

I held my fist over his open palm.

I was terrified. Not of the cleaver, but of the laughter. I was waiting for him to look at the penny, realize I was handing him garbage, and mock me. I was waiting for the crushing realization that I was truly, completely worthless in this world.

"I hope this is acceptable," I mumbled, the words tasting like bile. "It's... it's all I have for small change."

I opened my hand.

Gravity took over.

The coin fell. It tumbled through the wet, grey air, catching the sickly light of the neon signs above.

It hit Jori’s palm.

It didn't make a dull thud like plastic or the hollow rattle of aluminum. It made a clear, ringing sound. The sound of density. The sound of something real.

I flinched, waiting for the insult.

"I know it's small," I started to apologize, staring at my wet sneakers. "I know it's barely anything. If you want the skewer back, I understand, just please let me finish the bite I—"

The roar of the traffic seemed to dampen. The hiss of the rain faded into a background hum.

I looked up.

Old Man Jori wasn't looking at me. He wasn't reaching for his cleaver. He wasn't laughing.

He was staring at his hand.

In the center of his grimy, oil-stained palm, the penny sat.

It was wet now. The rain had washed away a smudge of my pocket lint, revealing the surface.

And it was shining.

It burned against his skin. It caught the reflection of the blue chemical fire from the barrel and twisted it into a warm, orange glow. It looked like a drop of the sun had solidified and fallen into the mud.

"Copper," Jori whispered.

The word didn't sound like a material. It sounded like the name of a lost lover. Or a prayer.

He brought his hand closer to his face. His mechanical eye extended, the lens telescoping out with a soft sound. A beam of red scanning light swept over the coin.

I shifted my weight nervously. The smell of the rat meat was driving me insane, but I couldn't eat. Not until I knew he wasn't going to kill me for underpaying.

"It's just a penny," I said, feeling the heat rise in my cheeks. "One cent. I know it's not much. I'm sorry. I'm... I'm really broke right now."

Jori didn't hear me.

His organic eye was wide, unblinking. It was watering. A single tear leaked out and tracked a path through the soot on his cheek.

"Solid," he breathed. His voice shook. "Unrefined. Non-composite. 97.5 percent zinc core... 2.5 percent pure copper plating. Pre-Collapse minting."

He looked up at me.

The expression on his face terrified me.

It wasn't anger. It wasn't mockery.

It was fear.

It was the kind of fear a man feels when he walks around a corner and comes face-to-face with a biblical angel. It was a terror born of seeing something that simply should not exist.

"You..." Jori swallowed hard. His Adam's apple bobbed in his scrawny neck. "You're paying with this?"

"Is it... is it not enough?" I asked, my heart sinking. "I can give you the rat back. I haven't licked it yet."

Jori made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sob.

"Not enough?" he wheezed.

He closed his fingers over the penny. He squeezed it so tight his knuckles turned white beneath the dirt. He pulled his hand to his chest, curling his body around it protectively.

"Boy," he gasped. "Do you know what copper goes for on the exchange? Real copper? Conductive? Pure?"

I shook my head. "It's one cent."

"It's a thousand credits," Jori whispered.

I blinked. The rain dripped off my eyelashes.

"What?"

"A thousand," Jori hissed, looking around frantically to see if anyone was listening. "Maybe twelve hundred if I melt it down. If I sell it raw to the Tech-Lords? This... this is a circuit board for a mech. This is shielding for a reactor. This is pure."

He looked at the stall. The rusted tin roof. The barrel of toxic waste. The pile of dead rats.

"This is my life," he said. "This is three years of rent. This is clean water. This is a filter for my lungs."

I stood there, holding my skewer of burnt vermin, the rain dripping off the end of my nose.

I tried to process the math.

One penny. One cent. One-hundredth of a dollar.

Equal to a thousand credits?

I looked at the pocket where the Five Dollar bill sat. If a penny was a thousand...

My mind reeled. I felt a sudden vertigo, deeper and more disorienting than the fall from the Celestial Realm. The ground seemed to tilt beneath my feet.

"Keep it," I said. My voice sounded distant to my own ears. "Keep the change."

Jori looked at me. He looked at my white hoodie, glowing in the gloom. He looked at my clean, unscarred face.

"Who are you?" he whispered. "You ain't from the Golden Zone. They don't have this. They use digital. They use plastic chips."

He took a step back, clutching the penny to his heart.

"I'm from... upstairs," I said vaguely, pointing a finger at the smog-choked sky.

Jori followed my finger. He looked at the clouds. Then he looked back at the copper sun burning in his hand.

He started to shake.

"The Copper Man," he whispered.

I took a bite of the rat.

I had to. I needed to do something to break the tension. I needed to ground myself.

My teeth tore into the charred meat.

It was vile.

It tasted of sulfur, burnt hair, and fear. The texture was stringy, like chewing on a rubber band that had been soaked in gasoline. Grease coated my tongue, thick and rancid.

I gagged. I forced myself to swallow. The meat slid down my throat like a hot stone, hitting my empty stomach with a heavy, wet thud.

But as the nausea rose, so did the energy.

I felt a spark. Tiny. Insignificant compared to my old power. But it was there. My knees stopped shaking. The cold rain felt a little less biting.

I looked at Jori.

"The seasoning needs work," I said, wiping grease from my lip. "It tastes like you cooked it over a tire fire."

Jori didn't respond. He was staring at the penny again. He was rocking back and forth on his heels.

"One thousand," he muttered. "One thousand. I can buy a coat. A real coat. Without holes."

The people on the street were stopping.

The behavior of a street vendor draws attention. Usually, Jori was shouting, spitting, or chasing rats. Seeing him silent, curled over his own hand, weeping... it broke the rhythm of the street.

A scavenger in a plastic poncho slowed down. A woman carrying a bag of scrap metal paused.

"Hey, Jori," the scavenger called out. "You having a stroke, old man? Or did the toxic fumes finally melt your brain?"

Jori didn't answer. He just opened his hand, just a crack, to peek at the treasure.

A beam of copper light escaped his fingers.

It cut through the grey gloom like a laser.

The scavenger froze. The woman dropped her bag of scrap. 

They saw the color. They saw the shine.

They knew what it was. In a world of rust and grey alloy, copper was gold. It was platinum. It was a material that bridged the gap between the gutter and the sky.

The air in the street shifted.

Before, it had been the heavy, wet atmosphere of misery. Now, it was electric. It crackled with sudden, sharp greed.

I chewed my rat.

"Uh oh," I mumbled with my mouth full.

Jori looked up. He saw the scavenger staring at his hand. He saw the woman’s eyes widen.

Panic seized him.

"Mine!" Jori shrieked.

He sounded like a banshee. He clamped his other hand over the penny, double-locking it against his chest.

"He gave it to me!" Jori yelled, pointing a trembling finger at me. "The White Ghost! He paid! It's legal tender!"

Every head on the street turned toward me.

I stood there, tall, white, and glowing, holding a half-eaten rat on a stick.

I swallowed hard.

"I just wanted lunch," I said to the crowd.

But nobody was looking at my lunch. They were looking at my pockets. They were looking at the way my hoodie didn't have a single stain on it. They were looking at me like I was a piñata stuffed with diamonds.

I took another bite of the rat.

"This," I thought, as the taste of burnt fur filled my mouth, "is going to be a problem."