A Few More Coins
The sky over Marrow’s Reach was the color of a bruised lung, leaking a persistent, icy drizzle that turned the soot of the foundries into a slick, black paste. It was the kind of cold that didn’t just sit on the skin; it crept into the marrow, a reminder that in this city, warmth was a luxury purchased by the minute. Lexi stood on the corner of Fourth and Iron, her boots leaking. Beside her, Donte was rattling his cup—a dented tin thing that had once held peaches but now held only the hopeful silence of the empty. He was nineteen, a year older than Lexi, but his eyes were already filmed with the dull gray of the resigned. “He’s coming through at noon,” Donte said, his voice raspy from a cough he’d been nursing since the first frost. “Dorsey. They say his carriage is plated in silver. They say he’s got bags of copper tenths to toss to the districts that cheer loudest.” Lexi looked down the street. Bunting, once red but now a faded, muddy pink, hung limply between the cramped ten...
