Ari took in the implications of what she had just heard. Worlds like this – that suggested that there were more of them. More doorways into the unknown. It also suggested that the woman she was speaking to probably wasn't an Earther – not that it made much of a difference, but Ari knew she'd been right to believe that she wasn't the only person stuck on the station who didn't come from Earth or its local space.
She smiled again, and shook her head. 'I can't let you give the money to me,' she explained. 'I appreciate the offer, but it wouldn't be fair contract. We could trade, but I don't have much on me, and I don't know the rates. It-' Ari gave her a little shrug. 'It was only a trinket, nothing important. I can come back another day, if it matters, after I've been to the upstation exchange.' Surely a station had to have one of those, and if it wasn't operational she could do the exchange herself, take what she needed and leave her tokens behind, keep everything above board.
Arilanna was being very cautious on the station. Even the food she took was just tinned goods from clearly-abandoned shops. She wasn't going to invite accusations of stealing from stationers. It was a touchy subject, along certain trade routes. Stealing was against the code, emergency requisitioning with promise to pay wasn't, and some spacers took advantage. Ari thought this was wrong, but she was also aware that the kind of spacers who went for that loose interpretation really wouldn't care what a second-shift astrogator had to say about it. On this station? Ari had to be above reproach. She'd heard that the stationers didn't use money between themselves, but that made matters more complicated, not less.