On my first day in this city I was starving. I hacked fifteen coins out of a terminal, sold them for sixty crystal, and bought a slab of meat. The hunger dropped from ninety-nine to thirty-nine in one swallow, and I thought that was the whole engine of a life. Earn a little. Buy a little. Go again.

Tonight I got hungry, and I reached into my bag, and the thing I pulled out was a fish.

My fish. I caught it at the canal this afternoon, sitting on the edge with a line in the water, waiting the way the forest taught me to wait.

I ate it, and for the first time since I woke up here, the hunger went all the way to nothing. Not lower. Gone.

I did not buy it. I did not trade for it. I sat by the water and the water gave it to me.

I think that is a different engine. I think I like it better.