Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “But—”

  “Did you miss the part where this is our ticket?” Nik snapped. “VCI is a machine language. It doesn’t even support wireless access because why would you want to risk someone being able to hack your limbs? If those notes are right and our mage hid the location in his VCI code, then the only way to access it is to get that hand.”

  It all made sense when he said it that way, but this whole thing still made me extremely uncomfortable.

  “Look,” Nik went on. “You said Peter was the one who picked up the body, right? Just tell him you need to see it again. He’ll let you do it.”

  I gaped at him. “He’s a priest of the Empty Wind! Why would he let me see a body he’s already committed to his god?”

  “Because you’re a pretty girl who doesn’t treat him like garbage,” Nik replied without missing a beat. “He’d probably let you waltz out with a whole bag full of corpses if you asked nicely enough.”

  Now he was just being insulting. “Peter is a public servant,” I said angrily. “He’s also a decent guy who believes wholeheartedly in what he’s doing. He would never be so irresponsible! He’s not like—”

  Nik flicked his eyes in my direction. “Not like who? Me?”

  That had been what I was about to say, but it no longer seemed fair. “Not like us,” I finished instead. “We’re talking about stealing a dead guy’s hand so we can sell off his last great work. Work that technically belongs to his next of kin, I might add.”

  “If he’s claimed by the Forgotten Dead, then he has no next of kin,” Nik said. “At least none who care.”

  “Then we’re stealing from a spirit, which is even worse.”

  “Do you want the money or not?” Nik demanded as we pulled up to a stoplight.

  I sighed. Want was the wrong word. I needed that money, and Nik knew it.

  “The cost of survival is doing things you don’t like,” he said coldly. “Suck it up or give up, but don’t sit on the fence and complain. It does nothing but waste time. Now are you going to bail, or are we going to the morgue?”

  I should have told him no. The me of five months ago would have, but having your back against a wall does funny things to your better judgment, and in the end, all I could do was nod. “Peter’s still not going to let me see the body, though.”

  A smile ghosted over Nik’s face. “I think you’ll be surprised,” he said as the light turned green. “And if he does turn you away, we can always just steal it. I’ve broken into the morgue before. It’s not exactly well defended.”

  “Why did you break into the—” I stopped myself with a sharp shake of my head. “Never mind, I don’t want to know. But if we’re going to anger a death god, at least take me home first so I can recharge my wards.” Because if I was going to steal from the Empty Wind, I needed every edge I could get.

  “Why can’t you just recharge them here?” Nik asked. “You’re a mage, right?”

  “Yeah, but these aren’t my wards,” I said, pointing at my spellworked poncho. “This is corporate-level protection. I can’t refill that freehand. I need to use the circle they came with from the dealer.”

  Nik frowned. “I thought mages did all their own spellwork.”

  “Some do,” I huffed. “But just because you’re born magical doesn’t mean you have to make a career out of it. I wanted to study art, not spend eight years of my life earning a doctorate in Socratic Thaumaturgy, which is what I’d need to make something this complicated on my own. There’s no point, anyway. Why kill myself reinventing the wheel when I can buy wards written by a whole lab full of professionals and backed with years of testing?”

  “No need to get defensive,” Nik said. “I was just asking.”

  I was not being defensive. I was just sick of people assuming that being a mage meant I’d mastered every aspect of the art. Being born with the ability to move magic didn’t mean you were good at it any more than being tall meant you were good at basketball, and it wasn’t as though I hadn’t tried. My whole childhood had been nothing but spells blowing up in my face while various highly paid professionals shook their heads in dismay. Frankly, I found the make-it-up-as-you-go, slapdash magery I’d picked up since I started Cleaning a lot more useful than the “correct” forms I’d been taught back home. So long as I could crack safes and knock open doors, I saw no problem with my way of using magic.

  “Until you slip up and burn yourself out,” Sibyl whispered.

  I yanked my goggles off my head. Despite having access to my surface-level brain waves through the mana contacts that powered my AR, Sibyl wasn’t supposed to actually be able to read my thoughts. At times like this, though, I wasn’t entirely sure that was true. I was fiddling with her sensitivity settings to make myself feel better when I caught Nik looking at me.

  “You have an AI, don’t you?”

  “Of course,” I said, moving my eyes around to remind myself what the world looked like without an augmented-reality overlay. “Doesn’t everyone?”

  “I don’t,” Nik said proudly. “AIs are expensive and invasive. They don’t do anything except talk when you’re trying to listen and look up things you could have looked up yourself.”

  “Wow, curmudgeon much?” I said. “AIs are great. I use mine for everything.”

  That was not an exaggeration. Sibyl took care of every aspect of my life. She kept my calendar, upgraded my security, managed my contacts, and paid my bills on time. She even kept track of all the local grocery stores’ final sale notifications, which was the only reason I still had food in my apartment. She could be a little much sometimes, but if I didn’t have her, I was pretty sure I’d be curled up naked and starving in a ball on my bathroom floor by the end of the week. She was my keeper. Literally, sometimes.

  “She’s a liability,” Nik said when I explained this to him. “Any convenience AIs offer is outweighed by the fact that they can be hacked. Why would I entrust my bank account and real-time location data to something someone else can access?”

  “Because life sucks without them,” I said, exasperated. “Why are you such a Luddite?”

  “A what?”

  “Someone who hates technology,” I explained, and then I smirked. “See, if you’d had an AI, it could have looked that up for you.”

  “I have no problem admitting when I don’t know something,” Nik said flatly. “And I don’t hate technology. It’s the loss of control that I resent. I don’t think it’s weird to not want a car that can drive itself off a bridge or a voice in my head that someone else could talk through.”

  It sounded almost reasonable when he put it that way, but seriously, how did he live without AI? How was it even possible to drive in the DFZ without a computer to check the ever-changing roads and redirect you? I couldn’t imagine it. Fortunately, Nik seemed to be navigating the cloud of self-driving cars surrounding us just fine, and so long as he wasn’t actively getting me killed, I supposed his paranoia was none of my business. The spirits knew I had enough paranoid hang-ups of my own, so who was I to judge?

  “It’s your life, I guess,” I said, leaning back in my seat. “So long as you can get me to my house without driving us off a bridge, I have no complaints.”

  “I think I can manage that much,” Nik said, though his voice was so dry I couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. “We’ll swing by your place, get you what you need, and then head for the morgue. Now, where do you live?”

  Speaking of paranoid hang-ups, I had a slight panic attack when I realized I was going to have to tell this man where I slept. I almost told him to forget it and head to the morgue, but I felt naked without my wards, and it wasn’t like I could get myself in more trouble. I was in this mess up to my chin already, so I sucked it up and gave Nik my address, which he punched into a cheap plastic phone that looked like one of the ones they sold out of vending machines to kids whose real phones had been confiscated. The chintzy little thing barely even had a touch screen, but it wasn’t so terrible that it lacked a map. The
lag was a bit annoying, but we managed, snaking through the Underground’s neon-lit streets to the sound of the cheap GPS’s emotionless voice telling us where to turn.

  ***

  My current apartment was a one-bedroom walk-up on the top floor of an old converted motel.

  It was a pretty nice building by Underground standards. It was a little old—not Old Detroit old, but still more than forty years—but it was solid brick, which was a lot prettier and better insulated than the cheap cement block Dr. Lyle’s subbasement had been at the bottom of. The only downside was that since it had been a motel, it was still located right next to the busiest Skyway ramp for this area, which meant I basically had a highway going right past my window. I kept hoping the DFZ would move it, but in the year I’d lived here, she never had. Still, I couldn’t complain too much. Loud as it was, the road noise kept the rent affordable on what would otherwise have been a very expensive apartment in one of the safest parts of town.

  The former city of Hamtramck was where all the big private security firms had their offices. The whole place was full of rent-a-cops, which did wonders for keeping the crime rate down. That was a big deal for me given how much nice stuff I’d picked up in my early days of Cleaning. Of course, I’d had to sell most of it recently to make ends meet, but I still appreciated having a parking lot full of security cars, even if it did mean I had to sleep with earplugs and a pillow over my head.

  I hopped out the moment we pulled into the loading area, grabbing my boots out of the back and shoving my feet into them so I wouldn’t have to walk up in my socks. Feet protected, I slung my bag over my shoulder and leaned down to look at Nik through the open door. “Wait here. I’ll be right back.”

  “Aren’t I coming up with you?” he asked, giving me—and the bag on my shoulder that contained all of our leads—a suspicious look.

  “No.”

  His suspicious scowl deepened. “Why not?”

  Because I didn’t want him to know which of the fifty units was mine. “Because my place is a mess.”

  Nik set his jaw stubbornly, and I rolled my eyes. “Please, I’m not going to bolt. First, I don’t have a car right now, and second, even if I did try to run, you know where I’m going.”

  “If you’re not going to run, why are you taking everything with you?”

  I gave him a stubborn look of my own. “To make sure you don’t run.”

  A normal person would have been offended by my blatant lack of trust, but Nick was a Cleaner like me. “Reasonable enough,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “Ten minutes. Don’t be late.”

  “What’s the rush?” I asked. “We’re going to visit a body in the morgue. It’s not like he’s going to run away.” I checked my phone. “It’s also ten o’clock at night. Peter probably won’t even be there.”

  “He’ll be there,” Nik said with a certainty I found highly suspicious. “Ten minutes. Go.”

  Too tired to argue, I just shook my head and shut the door, starting up the worn stairs toward the building’s second floor.

  Since this was a converted motel, all of the hallways were open to the air. My apartment was on the western corner of the third floor, right under the Skyways where the on-ramp curved around. I knew Nik couldn’t see my door from where I’d told him to park, but I still took the long way around, just in case. When I unlocked my door, I was doubly glad I hadn’t invited Nik up. I’d been lying when I’d said my place was a wreck, but that didn’t mean it didn’t still look awful.

  It hadn’t always been this way. Before my luck had gone suddenly and indomitably downhill, my place had looked great. I’d been at the top of my Cleaning game, and my apartment had been a treasure trove of all the weird and wonderful stuff I’d found along the way. There’d been nothing truly spectacular—even back then, I’d needed the money too badly not to sell the really valuable stuff—but I’d still managed to acquire a very respectable collection. My walls had been covered in original paintings from up-and-coming DFZ artists, and my front window had featured an entire two-paned stained-glass panel I’d salvaged from one of the Old Detroit cathedrals. I’d had fossils, some nice fired glass vases, and a taxidermy tank badger the size of a Labrador beside my TV.

  Anything and everything I’d found interesting I’d kept, turning what would otherwise have been a ho-hum one-bedroom efficiency into my very own gallery of curiosities. I’d been in the middle of installing track lighting to really take the place to the next level when I’d slammed into the wall.

  Now, five miserable, bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping months later, my shelves were nearly bare. One by one, all my treasures had gone to auction so I could make my debt payments. I still had a few things—my absolute favorite and most irreplaceable pieces, plus all the interesting but not-actually-valuable stuff that wouldn’t sell anyway—but the little that remained only served to make the gaps look bigger. My furniture was too cheap to resell, so my place wasn’t completely empty, but I wasn’t sure that was a good thing. A mattress on the floor was sad in its own way, but at least it had no pretensions. When I stepped through my door now, all I could see was how much I’d lost, and that almost hurt more than having nothing at all.

  “Home sweet home,” Sibyl said, her voice tinny and distant from my goggles as I dropped them, and my bag, on the coffee table. “Are you going to put me back on now?”

  “Not before I brush my hair,” I said, closing the cheap lace curtains over my front picture window. What I really wanted was a shower, but there was no way I could squeeze one of those in and recharge my wards in the ten minutes Nik had given me.

  “Aw, come on,” Sibyl said, her voice ringing loud and clear as she took over the speaker function on the cell phone in my pocket. “You’re not mad because I told you to pair up with Mr. Kos, are you? I was just being realistic.”

  “I’m not mad,” I said, walking into my tiny bathroom to wash my face. “It’s just frustrating when you act like you know everything.”

  “That’s what the ‘I’ in ‘AI’ is for,” Sibyl said cheerfully. “It’s my job to think of everything so you don’t have to. But if it’s hurting your self-esteem, I can tone it down. I’m here for your mental well-being, never forget.”

  “How could I?” I asked, patting my face dry before reaching for my brush to attempt an emergency rescue on my poor hair. “You remind me constantly.”

  “Just making sure you remember how useful I—” Sibyl cut off with a beep as my phone buzzed against my thigh. “Hey, you’ve got an incoming call from Heidi Varner! Should I put her through?”

  I had to think about that one. On the one hand, I’d just told Heidi I’d stop ignoring her calls. On the other, I’d already decided to cut off contact. That said, it had only been a few hours since I’d seen her, which meant ignoring her now felt extra rude. There was also the chance she might have more to tell me now that I knew Dr. Lyle’s name. They’d been at different schools, but he was still a professor who specialized in Alchemical Thaumaturgy. Even in a city as big as the DFZ, that had to be a small pond. Definitely worth the risk, especially since it meant I wouldn’t have to be the world’s worst friend again quite so soon.

  “Okay, I’ll take it,” I said, smiling at my pale, tired reflection in the mirror as I began teasing out the complicated system of braids and bobby pins that kept the majority of my long black hair more or less safely bundled at the back of my head. “Put her on speaker.”

  The phone clicked as Sibyl patched the call through. “Hey, Heidi,” I said when I heard the connection pick up. “Forget something?”

  There was a long pause, and then a woman who was definitely not Heidi began speaking in Korean.

  “Please hold for a call from Lady Yong-ae.”

  My stomach dropped so fast I was almost sick. “Sibyl!” I cried. “Cut the—”

  “Opal.”

  I closed my eyes. Even on a staticky, hijacked connection, no one could say my name as sweetly, or as terrifyingly, as my mother could.

&
nbsp; “Why are you calling from Heidi’s number?” I demanded in English.

  “Because you never answer when I call you from my own,” she replied in Korean, which was nothing but a power move. She spoke English—and French and Japanese and German and Chinese—better than I did. Korean was for family matters, which meant this was not a happy call. Not that I’d ever gotten one of those.

  “I hear you’re going to miss your debt payment,” my mother continued. “That’s very irresponsible of you.”

  “Where did you hear that?” I demanded, sticking to English because I could do that now that I was on the other side of the world.

  “Mother’s intuition.”

  “That’s not a real thing.”

  “But I’m still right,” she said confidently. “Aren’t I?”

  My answer was a long sigh as I slumped against the sink. “I’m not late yet,” I said stubbornly. “It’s only Monday. The money’s not due until Friday.”

  “It’s already Tuesday here,” she reminded me. “Your father—”

  “I’ll make the payment,” I said through clenched teeth. “Tell Father he can mind his own business.”

  “But you are his business,” she reminded me. “You made yourself his business when you made this about money.”

  My father had been up in my business way before actual money had gotten involved, but I didn’t bother to point that out. As always, my mother had an uncanny knack for turning complicated situations into simple faults, usually mine. Still, it was hard to argue that she was wrong considering my father was the one I owed all this money to.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way, you know,” she said, her voice so sweet that I almost fell for it even though I knew better. “Your father doesn’t care about the money. Such amounts are trivial to one as great as he. He just wants you to come back home where you belong. It’s obvious your little experiment in independence is a failure. You’re living in the Underground, working as a maid—”

  “Cleaner, Mom,” I said. “I’m a Cleaner. It’s an entirely different job.”