“No, but they’ve got…something.”History, Tally realized. In the city, she’d owned lots of things–practically anything she wanted came out of the wall. But city things were disposable and replacebale, as interchangeable as the T-shirt, jacket, and skirt combinations of dorm uniforms. Here, in the Smoke, objects grew old, carrying their histories with them in dings and scratches and tatters.
This passage uses language description, expression description and environment description to show that things here are different from those in the city, and things here have their own history. The smoky environment description further renders a mysterious atmosphere.