Trade Is Everything Now
Money stops working almost at once. Nobody announces it. Cards fail, registers go dark, and cash holds its value for about as long as it takes someone to realize that nobody behind the counter has anything to sell. After that, the city has to work out a new way to decide what things are worth. In The Severed City, it does that in the open spaces between buildings.
The Market on Amsterdam
A market takes over a corner lot on Amsterdam Avenue, where a little community garden and a few benches used to be. On a good day a dozen traders set up there. They build shelters from tarps and garbage bags stretched over frames of scrap wood. There’s a clothes seller, a man working out of a shopping cart with cans of food, and a woman with medicine laid out on a beach towel, every bottle tagged by hand with what it is. An old man sells batteries one at a time.
It’s a neighborhood market, friendly and familiar. It sells food, clothes and household things. Nobody sells guns or anything for them.
What Things Are Worth
Clothes go for food. Tools go for water. Medicine goes for almost anything. Prices never get written down. They exist for a moment between two people who each need something the other has.
Natalie understands this faster than most. She walks into the market with a canvas bag and her best going out clothes, a black dress, a green dress with a slit, two pairs of heels and a sequin top. A man at the market is collecting party clothes. Natalie doesn’t know why, and she doesn’t ask. She walks home with a bottle of tequila and the satisfaction of a person who thinks she got the better deal.
Winter Changes the Math
As the temperature drops, the value of everything that holds heat climbs. Blankets, coats, hats, gloves, long underwear. At some stalls warmth is worth more than food, because a person can go hungry far longer than they can go cold. The market shifts because the need shifts, and the stalls change to match it.
The Bike Mafia
Someone figures out that the Citi Bike docks can be broken open. Someone else figures out that all of the bikes can be taken and rented back. One can of food buys half an hour on a bike. Two cans buy an hour. It sounds ridiculous until you remember how far forty blocks feels on foot in a city with no transport at all. Natalie calls them the Bike Mafia. They never bother to name themselves.
Farther South
The market on Amsterdam has limits. When Kimberly goes down the line asking for ammunition, every vendor gives her the same answer. Nobody here sells it. They point her south, where the trading posts are bigger and rougher.
At the plaza at Lincoln Center, an older man behind a folding table explains how it works now. Food still comes through the markets. Bullets don’t come back once they’re gone. Two MREs won’t buy eight rounds. He wants something he can sell for more, or he wants a gun. Kimberly has to decide what she’s willing to give up.
Why I Built It This Way
A trade economy shows you what a society fears. In this city the fears are cold, sickness, and being unarmed in the wrong place. Everything else is negotiable. When you read the market scenes, watch what people refuse to sell. That tells you more than what they’ll trade.
The Severed City is out now on Amazon. If you haven’t started it yet, read the prologue first. You can meet the people who trade, hide and survive here on The Characters page.
