The story in three lines. Lan and Inkling arrive in the market at Sardis, where a girl helps her mother sell wool, and every payment in lumps of pale gold is weighed. A trader re-weighs every lump on his own scale and they argue all morning, and lumps cut to the same size can still be light. Lan asks whose scale a stranger would trust, and Inkling asks whether a weighed lump could carry the market weigher's lion mark. The trader counts lion lumps instead of weighing them.

One question to ask. "Why did the trader keep weighing the lumps?" Then: "Why does nobody weigh our coins at the shop?"

One thing to do at the table. Look closely at a few coins. Find the pictures and words stamped on them, and the number that says what each one is worth. Talk about who makes coins, and why people trust them.

The grown-up layer. The idea is a trusted standard: a mark from someone everyone trusts lets strangers trade without checking everything again. The first coins, made in Lydia about 2,600 years ago, were lumps of electrum in set weights, many stamped with a lion. The Honest Page says real coins were struck in a workshop, probably for the king, and that coins also began in other places. This is a story about fair trade, not chance. This time Inkling names it too soon and it buzzes. The third word under DOOR and OPEN grows: W, I, then D.