by Rachel Aaron
“No I do not,” Sibyl snapped. “I think you’re letting your optimism run away with you again. Even if you’re right, and there is a pot of gold at the end of this wild goose chase, the DFZ is a hundred and ninety-four square miles that move around. The chance of you finding one mage’s circle in all of that is practically zero, and we don’t have the resources to waste trying. Need I remind you that if you don’t have ten thousand dollars by midnight on Friday, you’re going to be screwed? You bought me to give you good advice, so listen for once: forget this and let’s get back to the Cleaner office. If we hustle, we can still make it in time for the evening auction. There’s always more stuff up for sale at night. We’ll get a good unit, clean it fast, and turn a nice profit in time to go back tomorrow and do it all again. That’s how we’re going to make enough money to get through this. Not chasing wild cockatrices.”
She was right, of course. Sibyl was always right, which was why I’d downloaded her. But as sensible as her advice was, throwing away the notes felt too much like tossing a lotto ticket before the numbers were announced. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I tucked them back into my bag instead, ordering my AI to recall our truck before she could pull up a picture of eyes to roll at me.
***
One of the hazards of living in a sentient city was that things were constantly moving around on you. It wasn’t quite as bad as they made it seem in the movies where characters went to sleep in one part of the city and woke up somewhere else entirely, but it wasn’t uncommon for blocks to relocate themselves every couple of months. Being a municipal building, the Cleaner’s Office moved more than most. The DFZ loved reshuffling buildings that were entirely hers, so it wasn’t uncommon to have to drive to a different part of town every day just to go to the same place you always did.
Thankfully, the office was still in the same place it had been this morning: taking up the lion’s share of an Underground block a mile west of the big casinos by the river. The building was actually an old elementary school, one of those indestructible brick monsters from the 1950s that had survived two magical apocalypses. I had no idea why the DFZ had chosen something so old to be one of her personal buildings. She was relentlessly modern in everything else: demanding that all civic business be conducted online via smartphone and rebuilding Town Hall every six months so that it was always on the cutting edge of architecture. Whatever the reason, though, I liked it. The old school had a gravitas that the rest of the eternally moving city did not. I also found the fact that it still had all of its original fixtures hilarious. You have not lived until you’ve watched a tricked-out chromehead with leg extenders trying to drink from a water fountain built for kindergarteners. Of course, this also meant I had to put up with tiny toilets, but still: totally worth it.
The auctions were held in the old school auditorium. There were two per day: one at six a.m. and one at six p.m. Which one I went to depended on my schedule, but I almost never attended both. Hitting two auctions in one day was for volume buyers and crazy people, but apparently I fit the latter today, because here I was, and I could already tell it was going to be bad.
The room was packed. All the big Cleaners were here, including DeSantos, which sucked, because I’d thought he was still on vacation. DeSantos was the current king of the Cleaners. He had a ten-man team and a chain of secondhand stores to sell all the stuff they salvaged. He normally went for the big prizes: abandoned warehouses, closed shops, places with enough stuff to justify sending over a truck full of guys. This meant our interests didn’t usually overlap, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t hate going up against DeSantos because he was competition. I hated being in auctions with him because DeSantos was a born troll who loved to bid people up. It didn’t matter if he wanted a unit or not. If he thought you wanted it, he’d bid against you just for the pleasure of watching you squirm.
Thankfully, he seemed distracted tonight, sitting in the front row and waving his hands through an AR interface I couldn’t see like he was conducting an invisible orchestra. I took the seat directly behind him, hoping that if he couldn’t see me, he’d find someone else to pick on. I was arranging my goggles on top of my head so that Sibyl’s best camera was pointed at the stage when someone sat down in the folding chair next to mine.
My head whipped around, and I froze, stomach curling into a knot. Great. Just great. The one night I really needed to win something decent, and Nikola Kos was sitting next to me.
Other than DeSantos’s bullying, Nik was my biggest roadblock at auctions. He was a solo operator just like I was, which meant we tended to go for the same jobs: small units we could clean for good profit in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike me, though, Nik didn’t have five months of horrendous bad luck dragging him down, which meant if we ended up going head to head on an auction tonight, he was going to win. But while I resented his presence on a business level, what made me flinch away was simple self-preservation.
After three and a half years in the DFZ, I was used to scary people, but Nik was a special kind of intimidating. It was hard to say why, exactly. He wasn’t particularly tall or big, especially not compared to some of the other Cleaners who’d gone so overboard on the cyberwear and body augs they couldn’t sit in the folding chairs without crushing them. But while he didn’t have any obvious modifications or weapons I could see, there was something about Nik that put me on edge. Maybe it was the way his gray eyes never stopped moving, sizing up each person as they sat down like he expected to be attacked at any moment. Or maybe it was the way he always sat on the edge of his seat with his hands in the pockets of his black leather bomber jacket, despite the fact that it had to be ninety degrees in here.
Not that I could talk, of course. I was still wearing my warded poncho and sweating like a sponge because of it. But I’d rather faint from dehydration than take off my protections anywhere close to Nik Kos. Other than winning units I wanted, he’d never actually done anything to me, but I’d lived among predators long enough to recognize danger when it sat down next to me. I was about to move to another seat, DeSantos be damned, when Nik’s roving gray eyes landed on me.
“Look who’s back for more,” he said, glancing down to where my hands were clutching my bag, then to my goggles, then to my filthy boots before finally returning to my face. “I heard you got sold a coffin.”
“How’d you hear that?” I asked, because I hadn’t told anyone except Broker and Peter.
Nik shrugged. “Did you get your money back, or did Broker cut you a deal to preserve his ‘no refunds’ streak?”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked suspiciously.
He shrugged again. “Just trying to determine if you already picked the place over so I know not to bid on it when it comes back up for auction.” He flashed me a sharp smile. “So did you find anything good?”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “You think I’d be back here if I did?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Cleaning a unit takes no time if you don’t have to actually clean. You can grab the good stuff, auction it, have a nap, and come back for another round. That’s what I’d do.”
I sighed. That’s what I would’ve liked to do, but there was no way I was telling Nik about my day of failure, so I changed the subject instead. “Why are you back? Didn’t you win two jobs this morning?”
“I did,” he said. “But they were both evictions in closet communities. You know, the apartment buildings where all the units are six-by-six-foot boxes stacked on top of each other? Those things take no time to clean. I had everything wrapped up before lunch, so now I’m back for more.”
He said this as if it were a good day’s work, but the more he talked, the more I pulled back into my chair. This was the real reason I didn’t like Nik. Cleaning wasn’t exactly a noble calling—we were scavengers who paid for the privilege of digging through other people’s trash in the hopes of finding enough treasure to make it worth the effort—but at least I didn’t kick people out of their homes f
or profit.
A very good profit, admittedly. Unlike Cleaning, you didn’t have to bid on eviction jobs. The city paid a flat rate to clean out delinquent tenants, and you got to keep all their stuff in return for cleaning the apartment so it could be rented again. It was the best money you could make in this business hands down, but desperate as I was for cash, there were some lines you just didn’t cross, and apparently terrifying broke people out of their tiny closet homes was mine. I was trying to think up an excuse to get away from this conversation when Broker walked into the room.
I should point out that “Broker” was not Broker’s real name. No one who made his money selling people’s abandoned apartments to scavengers was stupid enough to give out anything that could be traced back to his real life. Even his face was anonymous, so perfected by plastic surgery that he looked more like a photo collage of menswear models than an actual person. He was the only full-time member of the Collections or Cleaning offices that any of us ever saw, and he made sure even that was a professional mask.
“Settle down, children, settle down,” he said as he hopped up onto the stage. “We’ve got a lot of units to get through tonight, so we’re going to do this fast. First up are evictions. I’ve got seven. Who wants them?”
I glanced hopefully at Nik. If he took another eviction job, that would remove my main competition. But my bad-luck streak must have still been running hot, because his hand stayed down. There were plenty of other heartless thugs who loved cash in the room, though, and the evictions went quick, moving us on to the real show: the Cleaner Auction.
Auctions were a pretty simple affair. Every unit up for bid had an address, square footage, and usually a picture taken from just outside the front door. Sometimes, if it was a really big place, you’d get a second picture from the back for scale, but normally those three bits were all the information you got. The trick to being a good Cleaner was knowing how to use them.
For example, tonight’s first auction was for a five-room penthouse in the Financial District. The posh address was enough to get the new guys salivating, but I wasn’t even tempted, because while the picture showed a lot of fancy-looking furniture, the paintings above them were mass-produced reproductions of the same ten super-famous modern works every wanna-look-rich jerk in the DFZ hung on his walls.
They weren’t even good reproductions. The printing on the copy of Fowley’s abstract masterpiece New Spirits hanging over the white leather sofa was so bad that I could see the artifacting from here. If the previous owner had been that sloppy about his art picks, the rest of his stuff was sure to be just as tacky and fake. I knew without even seeing them that the other four rooms would be packed with the same sort of cheaply made, overpriced junk, and while the downtown boutiques made bank selling that garbage to rich idiots who didn’t know better, it was hell to move, and you couldn’t resell it to save your life, which meant it was worthless. I wouldn’t have paid five hundred for that unit, much less the thousands the idiots in the back were shouting out. Nik and DeSantos kept their hands down as well, happy to let the competition waste their money.
After that was when things got really interesting. Broker hadn’t been kidding when he’d said it was a big list tonight. There was a whole slew of top-ticket items on the block, including an entire abandoned auto mechanic’s shop complete with equipment. DeSantos was the only bidder in the room with enough people to handle something that size, and he ended up winning it for a song, the lucky bastard. He lost the next big offering, a boarded-up shoe shop, to Melly, an eccentric old lady who was always snapping bulk cloth and clothing lots to fuel her upcycled fashion business, but not before bidding her right to the edge of profitability.
Thankfully, he seemed to calm down once we got to the midrange auctions. Given how nice the list had been so far, my hopes were sky high, but though there were a lot of units to choose from, I couldn’t find one I wanted. Everything in my price range was too old, too risky, too boring, too damaged, too something, and when I did spot something promising, it quickly got bid out of my reach. Then, when we were getting close to the end and the auditorium was starting to empty out as winners left to claim their units, a picture flashed up on the screen that made me sit bolt upright.
It was a townhouse in Magic Heights, one of the quiet little neighborhoods that moved around between the city’s three major magical universities. I’d lived there myself during my first year at IMA, before I’d moved in with Heidi, and it was one of my favorite places to Clean. It wasn’t as rich as the big developments by the river where all the corporate mages lived, but what it lacked in money, Magic Heights made up in good taste and eccentricity. I’d scored some of my best finds there, so I would have been interested no matter what, but what really caught my attention now was the complicated spellwork painted on the front door frame.
Spellwork I immediately recognized.
It took every bit of self-control I had not to leap out of my seat. The burned-out ward in the picture in front of me had the same spellwork as the notes in my bag. The DFZ was a huge city full of mages, but the chances of there being two who used the same eccentric mishmash of modern Thaumaturgy and ancient Alchemy seemed impossible. It had to be the same guy.
“Opal,” Sibyl whispered warningly. “Don’t.”
I ignored her, lifting my finger to tap my wallet icon. My AR wasn’t nearly as robust when I wore my goggles pushed up in my hair rather than properly seated on my face, but so long as the mana contacts inside the band were touching my body, I could still access the basics. Including my bank account, which was what I checked now, wincing when the number flashed up.
$2016.32
That was not a lot of money, especially not for a unit in Magic Heights. But through the haze of my excitement, I could vaguely hear Broker explaining that this was a smashed unit, which meant it had been robbed. That caught me by surprise. I’d been so focused on the spellwork, I hadn’t even noticed that the front door wasn’t just open, it was missing entirely, the wood kicked in until it had splintered into kindling. The rest of the place was similarly trashed. How trashed was impossible to say without seeing more, but every piece of furniture in the picture was broken.
That made my heart beat faster than ever. We didn’t get units until they’d been in Collections for at least thirty days. Robbers were far less patient, so we saw smashed places a lot. They always went for peanuts since presumably the thieves had already taken everything of value. But robbers didn’t pay attention to spellwork unless it was in their way, like a ward. Other circles, especially ones full of custom, esoteric spellwork they couldn’t read, might go unnoticed, which meant the circle from the notes in my bag—or, even better, the stuff used to power it—might still be there.
“Opal,” my AI growled. “Don’t you dare.”
But my hand was already in the air. “Two hundred.”
Broker looked at me like I was nuts. The rest of the room did too, and I started to sweat. Two hundred was my usual opening bid, so I’d said it out of habit, which was a very stupid thing to do in hindsight. Bids on smashed units usually started in the tens. By bidding in the hundreds, I’d just tipped my entire hand, and from the way he was smirking at me over his shoulder like a hyena, DeSantos knew it.
“Three hundred,” he called.
I clenched my fists. “Three fifty.”
“What are you doing?” Sibyl yelled in my ear. “The place is smashed! If anything was there, it’s long gone. You don’t have money to waste on this!”
“We have three fifty,” Broker said. “Do I hear three seventy-five?”
Still grinning at me, DeSantos raised his hand.
I glared back. “Four hundred.”
“Five hundred,” DeSantos said before I’d even finished.
“Six.”
“Seven.”
“One thousand!” I snarled, hoping that would cut him off. DeSantos might love trolling, but there was no way messing with me was fun enough to risk wasting a thousand dolla
rs on a robbed unit. Sure enough, the older man blew me a kiss and turned back around in his seat. It was just starting to hit me that I’d won when a new voice spoke from my left.
“Eleven hundred,” said Nik.
I whirled in my chair. “What?”
Nik’s sharp gray eyes met mine. “Eleven hundred,” he repeated calmly.
“Eleven hundred from Mr. Kos,” Broker said, getting excited at the prospect of a real bidding war. “Do I hear twelve?”
“Let him have it,” Sibyl whispered fiercely. “I swear, Opal, I will cut you off from your bank account if you say one more—”
I reached up and stabbed my finger through her mute button. “Twelve hundred.”
“Thirteen,” Nik said, leaning back in his chair.
“Fourteen.”
“Fifteen.”
“Two thousand!” I yelled, breath coming fast.
Even as I said it, I knew I was making a huge mistake. The chances of there being anything worth two grand in that apartment were slim to none. Even if they couldn’t read the spellwork, there was no way any self-respecting robber would miss two hundred thousand in casting reagents, or a cockatrice egg. This was stupid. I should have shut up and let Nik have the damn thing. At least that way I could’ve claimed I was just bleeding my competition. But I couldn’t. From the moment I’d seen the spellwork, I’d known—known—there was something good inside. It was the same instinct that had led me to all the treasures I’d ever found. It had also lost me tens of thousands of dollars over the last few months. As always, though, I couldn’t let it go. I was already bracing myself to go even higher when Nik shrugged in surrender.
“Two thousand going once,” Broker said. “Going twice.” There was a long pause, and then he clapped his hands together. “Sold to Miss Yong-ae for two thousand dollars!”