by Rachel Aaron
“So that’s why you stalked me?” I asked, incredulous. “Because you were curious?”
“That and I wanted to be in position in case whatever it was turned out to be more than you could handle,” he said, a sly smile creeping across his face. “Which it did.”
As he spoke, the chill in my spine grew into a full-body freeze. “You want a share, don’t you?”
“Damn straight I want a share,” Nik said, looking down at me as if I was a goose who’d just laid a golden egg. “Considering I saved your life, I think half is fair.”
“Half?” I cried. “That’s robbery! You don’t even know what it is.”
“I know it’s good enough to make you wager two thousand bucks at a time when you’re desperate for cash,” he said with a shrug. “You think I haven’t noticed how hard you’ve been bidding these last few months? Something’s got you up against the wall, and given how much I’ve seen you turn units around for, I bet you’re up against it for a lot.”
My jaw tightened in fury. “If you knew that, why’d you bid me up?”
“Because I’m in this for the money just like you are,” he said, looking me straight in the eyes. “I didn’t know what you saw in this place, but I knew you wouldn’t have gone after it so hard if you didn’t think you were going to make your money back in spades. Your instinct for these things has always been top notch. If you thought there was money here, that was good enough for me.”
That was the closest thing to a compliment I’d ever heard come out of Nik’s mouth. If it hadn’t cost me so much, I would have been flattered. Right now, though, his blind faith in my professional skill was highly inconvenient. “How do you know I’m not here for personal reasons?”
“Because I’m not an idiot,” Nik said, looking around at the trashed house. “No one breaks up a place this thoroughly and hires thugs to watch it unless there’s serious money on the line. You clearly think so too, or you wouldn’t have let me bid you up so high. Now I know, and I want in.” He turned back to me, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sixty-forty split, in my favor.”
I gaped at him. “You just said fifty-fifty!”
“That was before you tried to wiggle out of it,” he said, reaching down to pat his black-gloved hand against the gun I now knew he carried under his jacket. “This is clearly a much more dangerous job than you’re used to, and there’s the matter of the guy in the window who got away. The idiot you saved might be too grateful to talk, but the runner definitely will. That means it’s just a matter of time before whoever paid for this knows you found something. If you want to keep it, you’re going to need me, and sixty-forty is a lot better than seventy-thirty, which will be my next offer if you keep trying to freeze me out.”
I glared murder at him. “This is extortion.”
Nik shrugged. “That’s not illegal in the DFZ.”
“He’s right,” Sibyl whispered in my ear.
“Shut up,” I snapped. Nik gave me a funny look, and I sighed. “Not you.”
“If you’re serious about continuing this job, you should take him up on his offer,” Sibyl went on. “We could use the help.”
I held up my finger and stepped away, cupping my hand around the microphone at the base of my goggles so Nik wouldn’t hear me. “I thought you didn’t even want to do this!”
“I don’t,” Sibyl said. “But you’re not listening to me, so I figured the best thing I can do for you now is try to minimize the pain. It’s obvious Mr. Kos is no stranger to violence, but I just replayed that fight to take measurements, and dude is fast. I don’t know what he’s packing to get that kind of speed, but we couldn’t hire a bodyguard with moves like that for sixty percent of two hundred grand. And that’s assuming we recover anything of value. The way he’s worded things, you won’t have to pay him at all if you fail. Sixty percent of nothing is nothing, which is the only number that fits our budget right now. Having someone else along to split costs and stop bullets will make this idiocy a lot less scary and expensive. Obviously, the best choice would be to run away as fast as possible, but since you’re not going to do that, teaming up with Kos is the least terrible of the remaining options.”
“You’re really selling it,” I muttered, glancing over my shoulder at Nik, who was staring at me like I’d gone crazy.
I couldn’t say that he was wrong. If this had happened to me a year ago, I’d have already been running for the hills just like Sibyl wanted me to. I definitely wouldn’t have been planning how to get into even more trouble, but Nik had made a lot of good points about the cost of watching this place. You didn’t pay people to keep an eye on a robbed house if you didn’t think there was something still inside. Clearly, whoever had smashed up the dearly departed Dr. Lyle’s home thought his work was more than just chicken-scratch theories. Maybe a lot more. I didn’t know the going rate for cheap thugs, but I had the feeling that anyone who went this far wasn’t interested in cashing in on a pile of mail-order reagents.
The fact that Nik had noticed all of this earned my respect even more than his quick hand with a gun, but what really made up my mind about the situation was the other thing he’d gotten right. I was up against a wall. Not for as much as he’d insinuated, but ten thousand dollars might as well be a million when you need it and don’t have it, and I needed it bad. If Nik wanted to help me get it, who was I to say no?
“All right,” I said, turning back around. “We’ve got a deal.”
“Great,” he said. “I want to know everything, but not here. Whoever put eyes on this place is probably already on their way over, which means we need to be somewhere else. Do you have a car?”
When I nodded, he started hustling me toward the front door. “Then let’s go.”
With a final look at the trashed, bloody living room, I tightened my grip on my bag where I’d hidden the notes and marched out, Nik following on my heels like a deadly, unwanted shadow.
Chapter 4
“I’m never going to actually finish a Cleaning job, am I?” I muttered as I walked down the stairs.
“Hey, the contract just says you have to clean the unit. It doesn’t specify when,” Sibyl said helpfully. “So long as you have Dr. Lyle’s place ready for a new tenant before the end of the month, you won’t have to pay rent on it. You can just come back and finish cleaning it out next week when things calm down.”
Or hire someone to do it for me when I hit it big, I thought to myself. Now that we were away from the blood and the bullet holes, it was starting to hit me just how much money we might be trailing. Forget making my payments. If this went big, I might be able to pay off my entire loan balance, which meant I’d be free. Actually free, for the first time in my life. I was getting all giddy at the thought when I spotted my truck.
“Oh, come on!”
The tires were slashed. All four of them. Someone had knifed huge gouges in the rubber right down to the wheel well, which meant there’d be no patching them. And since I’d waived the insurance option, there’d be no free repair service either.
“Guess they didn’t want you to be able to get away if you ran,” Nik said, poking his finger through the sliced rubber.
If that was true, then I was seriously regretting letting that bleeding guy go. “This day cannot get any worse,” I moaned, putting my face in my hands.
“No fixing it now,” Nik said. “You want to call for a tow?”
I couldn’t afford a tow any more than I could afford to pay the fee the rental company was going to charge me for four new tires. My face must have showed it, too, because Nik rubbed the back of his neck awkwardly.
“This is a reasonably safe neighborhood,” he said, looking up and down the street, which was filled with happy drunken college students moving between house parties. “It probably won’t get stripped if you leave it until later.”
That was not as reassuring as he probably meant it to be. It also didn’t help. “But how am I going to get around?” I asked. “That’s my only car.”
/> Nik scowled. Then, wincing as though the words caused him physical pain, he said, “We can take mine.”
My head shot up in surprise, which was silly. Of course Nik had a car. How else could he have followed me here? I couldn’t remember seeing it before, though, which suddenly struck me as crazy. We’d been parking in the same lot for a year and a half. I knew every other career Cleaner’s car, so why didn’t I know Nik’s? I was about to ask if he used a rental service too when he walked two spaces down the street and stopped in front of a sleek black sports car I’d assumed belonged to one of the Magic Heights trust fund kids.
“Wait,” I said as he opened the door. “That’s your car?”
“Yes,” he said, pulling off his Cleaner boots to reveal a second pair of tight-laced combat boots underneath. “And I don’t like dirt in it, so take off your shoes before you get in.”
I did as he asked, though I didn’t have a second set of shoes under my boots, so I had to get in wearing only my socks. “If you had a ride like this, why did you want to take my truck?”
“Because then they’d shoot at your car, not mine,” he said, plucking my filthy—and now slightly bloody—boots out of my hands and bundling them in a plastic bag before setting them down on the floor of his pristine back seat.
I didn’t appreciate Nik’s willingness to use my car as a sacrifice, but it was hard not to see his logic when I was sinking into buttery leather upholstery. I didn’t know as much about cars as I did about art prints, but I knew expensive when I felt it, and Nik’s car was nice. It was a manual, too, as in he drove it himself. I wasn’t aware people even knew how to do that anymore, but Nik grabbed the wheel like it was second nature and started the quiet engine.
“You must have Cleaned a lot more than I realized to afford something like this,” I said as he pulled us into the street. “Or have I been vastly underestimating Eviction payouts?”
“A bit of both,” he said as we merged into traffic. “But it’s mostly that I don’t waste money on things that don’t matter.”
I smirked. “A flashy sports car counts as a necessity?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding slightly irritated. “Because it’s not flashy. It’s black, and it’s quiet. It is a sports car, but that’s only because I needed the bigger engine. This car’s fast enough to catch anything I need to catch and outrun anything that’s trying to catch me. The manual steering and transmission mean it does exactly what I tell it when I tell it with no computer to be compromised. It’s a quality tool that helps me do my job. Those are worth investing in.”
He glanced over to see if I was appreciating his practicality, but I’d gone stiff in my bucket seat. “Wait,” I squeaked. “There’s no computer?” I pointed at the stick shift in the center console. “That’s a real gear shift? As in not just for show?” When he nodded, I made a choking sound. “We’re going to die.”
“You know, people drove their own cars for over a hundred years, and the species somehow survived,” Nik said dryly.
“Not all of them!” I cried. “Car accidents used to be the number-one cause of death before self-driving AIs took over. Next thing you’re going to tell me is it runs on gasoline.”
Nik reached down to shift gears without a word, and my stomach dropped. “You’re kidding.”
“You can’t run an electric car without a computer,” he said with a shrug.
I stared at the dash in horrified wonder. “I can’t believe we’re actually driving around in a metal box powered by explosions. Where do you even get gasoline anymore?”
“If it bothers you so much, you’re free to walk,” Nik growled, gripping the wheel.
“No, no, no,” I said quickly, putting up my hands. “It’s a very nice antique. I was just surprised, that’s all.”
“It’s not an antique,” he said sharply. “It’s a highly tuned, custom machine!”
“Of course it is,” I said, though I couldn’t stop my smirk. “So does it have a name?”
His silence was answer enough, and I smiled wider, piling my poncho’s folds into my lap so I wouldn’t get dust on his darling, whatever her name was. “Where are we going?”
“You tell me,” Nik said, keeping his eyes on the road. “You’re the one who spent two thousand bucks on a house full of diced furniture.”
Good point. “Okay,” I said, pointing at a fast food joint across the street. “Pull over there.”
“Why?” Nik asked.
“Because I don’t want you distracted while you’re holding my life in your hands,” I said. “It would be just my luck today if you got all excited about money and crashed us into a truck.”
Nik looked terminally insulted. “I would never do that to my car,” he said, but he did as I asked, turning us into the crowded drive-thru line. I was half-hoping he’d stay there—I hadn’t had dinner yet, and this place looked cheap enough to be in my remaining budget—but he pulled through the traffic and parked in an empty spot at the back by the dumpsters.
“There,” he said, cutting off the engine and turning around in his seat so that he was facing me. “Now tell me how we’re making our money.”
With a final, hesitant breath, I told him. It was a little surreal talking out loud about the subbasement and finding Dr. Lyle’s body. Even though I was just reporting what I’d seen, it felt as if I was telling a story that had happened to someone else. It also sounded a lot crazier than it had in my head. The more I tried to explain the notes and what I thought they were, the more I realized how desperate and cockamamie this must seem from the outside. To his credit, though, Nik didn’t interrupt. He didn’t even roll his eyes. He just listened quietly until I reached current events, tapping his gloved fingers quietly against his knees.
“So you think these reagents haven’t been used?” he asked when I finally stopped talking.
“Actually, I’m hoping they have,” I said, pulling out Dr. Lyle’s ritual notes. “Two hundred grand in magical materials would be a fantastic score for us, but it’s nothing by criminal standards. Like you said, it takes serious money to hire thugs to bust up a house and then sit around watching it for thirty days. If someone cared enough to foot the bill for all of that, then I bet this ritual is worth a lot more than the sum of its parts.”
Nik scratched his chin thoughtfully. “Your expert said the ritual was for a cockatrice egg, right? How much are those worth?”
“Technically nothing,” Sibyl answered, though her voice was only in my ear. “Due to their complex breeding practice, they’re highly endangered. Not that the protected species list means anything in the DFZ, but they were also added to the Peacemaker’s Edict last year, which makes things complicated.”
It did indeed. I had no idea why the Dragon of Detroit cared about cockatrices, but if they were protected under his Edict, that made selling their eggs problematic. The Peacemaker couldn’t actually make laws since he only controlled the dragon population of the city, but he had a lot of monsters working for him and the goodwill of the DFZ herself. If he said “don’t do that,” it was very much in your best interest to listen. That said, selling cockatrice eggs wasn’t actually illegal, and if there was anything I’d learned living in the DFZ, it was that anything that could be sold would be.
“If they’re troublesome to sell, that just means you can charge more,” I told Sibyl. “Someone has to be buying. Why would you use all of those expensive reagents to make something that had no market value?”
“Because it’s the only way you can get one?” my AI guessed. “The last recorded sale I see for a cockatrice egg was over a year ago for fifty thousand dollars. Obviously, I don’t have access to private transactions, so it’s possible there’s a vast underground cockatrice breeding industry I’m unaware of, but it looks like they’re just super rare.”
I frowned. Considering what had gone into making them, fifty thousand sounded low to me. If they really were as rare as my AI suggested, though, it was possible that the price had gone up. We also didn’
t know how many eggs the ritual created. Fifty grand might not be enough to justify paying thugs to watch a house for a month, but multiply that by a dozen and you had a whole different ballgame.
“Sounds legit to me,” Nik said after I’d explained all of this. “So how do we find these eggs?”
“That’s the tricky part,” I said, pulling out the second stack of papers I’d found in the pantry and shuffling the yellow legal-pad sheets until I found the one containing the final to-do list Dr. Lyle had made before he’d passed away. “See here?” I said, pointing at the last two crossed-out items, the ones that said Move final reagents to ritual location and Parse coords to VCI. “I think ‘coords’ is short for coordinates. I don’t know about VCI, but if we can figure out how the coordinates are parsed to it, I bet we can use them to find the ritual location.”
“VCI, huh?” Nik’s scowl deepened. “This dead mage, did he have any body augs? Fake eyes, integrated computer systems, anything like that?”
I nodded rapidly. “He had a cybernetic hand. I thought it was weird because cybernetics mess with magic, but I definitely saw it.” It was the only part of him that hadn’t rotted. “Why do you ask?”
“Because VCI stands for Vivere Code Index,” he said, cranking the engine. “It’s the base computer language that controls all cyberwear, at least the nonproprietary stuff.”
My eyes went wide. “You think he hid the location in his hand?”
“Safest place there is,” Nik said, turning around in his seat to back us out. “Where’s the body now?”
“The morgue, I suppose,” I said, biting my lip. “But it’s already been committed to the Empty Wind.”
“Then we’ll just take it back.”
I stared at him in horror. “But that’s stealing from the dead!”
“Who said anything about stealing?” he asked as we rejoined the flow of traffic. “We’re just going to borrow it for a while. It’s not like he’s using it anymore.”