Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “You can turn it off in my settings,” she informed me helpfully, bringing up her menu to show me where the option was. “But it’s not recommended. If I can’t access your surface thoughts, how can I get you what you need before you need it? The guard is a perfect example. I felt your brain waves go crazy, so I decided to run interference while I waited to see if you’d need medical assistance. Fortunately, you did not need assistance, and now, thanks to me, you’re not about to be busted by the cops, either. All of this was made possible by my predictive brain wave technology, which, by the way, has been on for the last three years. Are you sure you want to turn it off?”

  I wasn’t prepared to make that decision yet, so I let the matter go. As she said, I’d had it on for years without a problem. It was probably only bothering me now because I kept doing things I didn’t like, which said more about me than it did about Sibyl.

  “Glad you can see reason,” Sibyl said when I closed the options tab. “Just give me a moment to let Mr. Guard down easy and we can get to work on that hand. Speaking of which, I can already tell you the security on most VCI systems is too high for a social AI such as myself to crack. Does Mr. Kos have an expert in mind already, or should I look one up for us?”

  Good question.

  “I’ve got a place,” Nik said when I asked him. “It’ll be expensive, but it’ll be done right.”

  My stomach sank at the word “expensive,” but what could I say? I didn’t know someone cheap to suggest as an alternative. I just hoped Nik’s contact was willing to negotiate a payment plan.

  I was still wobbly when we reached the car, so Nik got the door for me, which was unexpectedly thoughtful of him. I was still putting my seat belt on as he dropped into the driver’s seat, but he didn’t start the car. He just sat there with his hands on the wheel, staring down the orange-lit street with a distant, closed-off look on his face. I was starting to worry he’d gone catatonic again when he said, “Thank you.”

  “It was nothing,” I assured him. “I just wish I’d had the idea to appeal to the Empty Wind from Dr. Lyle’s side earlier. If I’d been faster on the ball, I wouldn’t have had to lie to Peter.” Which I would absolutely have to make amends for later. I was already planning where I would take the priest for an apology dinner the moment I had money again when Nik shook his head.

  “Not that,” he said. “I mean, it was a smart idea. Really smart, but that’s not what I…” He trailed off, scrubbing his gloved hands over his face. “What I’m trying to say is thank you,” he finished at last. “You know, for saving my life.”

  Now I was embarrassed. “It wasn’t a big deal,” I said, brushing my hair awkwardly behind my ears.

  “It was,” he insisted, his always-moving gray eyes perfectly still when he turned to look at me. “I’m no mage, but I still heard the Empty Wind’s voice speaking in my head. He was going to let you go. You could have run away and saved yourself, but you didn’t. You stayed.”

  “Of course I stayed,” I said with a huff. “What was I supposed to do? Let you die?”

  The heavy silence that followed told me that was exactly what Nik had expected, and that made me furious. “Oh, come on!” I yelled at him. “What kind of monster do you think I am?”

  “Not a monster,” he said. “Just a person. It’s only natural for people to look out for number one.”

  “Awful people, maybe,” I huffed. “But not everyone. You saved my life earlier.”

  “Only because I wanted a share of your score.”

  If Nik had jumped in front of a bullet for a share of a wrecked unit before he even knew what was inside, I’d eat my goggles. “Yeah, right,” I said, giving him a smirk. “Just admit it. You’re a nice guy.”

  Nik jerked back like I’d stung him. “I am not nice!”

  “Whatever you need to tell yourself.”

  “I’m not,” he insisted. “I just…”

  He trailed off with a frustrated huff, and I grinned in triumph. “Niiiiiiiice.”

  “Shut up,” he growled, starting the car. “And for the record, we’re even now. Let’s just go get that hand cracked so we can get paid.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, bringing up my map. “Where to?”

  “Somewhere not on a map.”

  I gave him a Really? look through the glowing interface of my AR, but Nik was already driving down the street, eyes firmly on the road as we left the morgue behind.

  ***

  Remember how I said there were places in the Underground where I didn’t go? That’s where we went.

  It was out in the boonies by Eight Mile Road, only a few blocks away from the DFZ’s northern border. Just across the line in Troy, Michigan, apartments were built right up to the border to house the millions of people who wanted to live within the security and laws of the United States while still enjoying the anything-goes freedoms of the DFZ. Naturally, then, the DFZ side of the border had metastasized into a maze of brothels, joy parlors, and drug dens. The whole place was a giant scam designed to separate naive suburbanites from their money. Everything was overpriced and of vastly lower quality compared to what you could get downtown, but behind the hard, candy-colored shell of cynical opportunism that coated the border was a real underworld that sold to the scammers, and that was where Nik took us.

  “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” I asked nervously as Nik turned down an alley behind a VR porn theater. “It seems kind of…dodgy.”

  “Then we’ll fit right in,” Nik said. “We’re hiring someone to hack into a hand. Even for the DFZ, that’s not exactly legitimate business.”

  Couldn’t argue with that logic, but knowing I was part of the problem didn’t make me any less jumpy as we turned into a gravel lot surrounded by razor wire. Nik passed a twenty to the old man sitting in a folding chair at the gate, which struck me as a lot. I didn’t pay that much for parking on the Skyways, much less way out here. When I mentioned it to Nik, though, he shook his head.

  “That’s not for parking. It’s for protection.”

  “Protection from what?” I asked, looking around at the lot, which, though surprisingly full, was definitely surrounded by a lot of nothing.

  “Bad luck,” Nik replied, pulling us into a space between two vans. “This area is owned by a gang. Which one changes depending on how the turf wars are going, but if you mind your own business and pay your fee, nothing will happen. Most of the time.”

  I cringed. “I’m surprised you’re leaving your car here. Isn’t it your baby?”

  “It’s a tool,” he said as he cut the engine. “If it’s not useful, what’s the point? But nothing’s going to happen to it. I paid my fee, and everyone here knows my car.”

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask why before I came to my senses. Between his strange relationship with Kauffman and how blasé he’d been about getting shot at, it was becoming more and more obvious that Cleaning wasn’t Nik’s only job. Not that I was complaining—Nik’s alternate skill set had been very useful so far—but it made me wonder what he’d done to make the exurb gangs respect his car.

  Not that there was anyone around to do so at the moment. Other than the guy who’d taken Nik’s money, the lot was empty. Of people, at least. There were plenty of surprisingly nice cars, but then, this was gangland. Gangers were famous for loving their cars. I’d actually been to one of their auto shows my first year in the city, back when I’d been super into all the “Oh, wow, look at all this stuff that’s illegal everywhere else!” DFZ tourist crap. But while the cars were quite nice, they were the only show around. I didn’t even see so much as a sketchy club in the surrounding buildings. Just cheap warehouse stores, fast food joints, coffin motels, and the back of the tacky vice strip that faced the border.

  “So where are we going?” I asked, gripping the bag that held Dr. Lyle’s hand with both of mine as Nik and I walked across the gravel lot. “You said you had an expert.”

  “I do,” Nik said. “And we’re here.”


  Unless Nik’s guy was an expert at rigging slot machines, I didn’t see what he’d be doing out here. I was opening my mouth to say as much when Nik opened a metal door in the back of the warehouse that formed the rear wall of the gravel lot and started to climb the cement stairwell inside.

  I followed hesitantly, grumbling under my breath. I’ve been to some pretty sketchy places as a Cleaner, but this was pinging my bad-idea-o-meter big time. Bad things happened in small, enclosed stairwells at the edge of town. It didn’t help that it smelled horrible, a mix of urine, old metal, and dead animal baking in the summer heat. Nik didn’t even seem to notice the reek. He just kept going, taking the stairs two at a time up, up, up until we reached the door to the roof.

  The moment he opened it, a blast of smoky, hot air and thumping music filled the stairwell. My first thought was a roof party, but I was thinking way too small, because when I stepped out after him, I found myself standing in the middle of an entire shopping district.

  High above the cheap vice at the edge of the DFZ was a second, suspended world of metal walkways and corrugated steel buildings clinging like neon-lit wasp nests from the bottom of the giant commuter highway that connected the Michigan suburbs to the DFZ. But these weren’t more tourist traps. Everything up here seemed to be targeted at the DFZ’s working criminal community. I’d never seen so many high-end gun vendors and esoteric magical supply stores in one place. Going by the blinking AR signs, they seemed to be selling real quality products for pretty reasonable prices, which explained the crowd. The rooftop we’d come out on was packed with people carrying guns every bit as nice as Nik’s, and it was just one island in a vast suspended network running down the underside of the highway for as far as I could see.

  “Whoa,” I said, stepping away from Nik to peer over the edge of the warehouse at the parking lot we’d just come from. “How did I miss this?” The music alone was loud enough to hear for blocks, let alone fifty feet down.

  “It’s warded,” Nik said casually, pointing at the air, which I could now see was indeed shimmering with the biggest look-away ward I’d ever encountered.

  I whistled in appreciation, glancing up the ramps at the packed nightclubs, bars, and noodle shops that were crammed in between the shops. This place beat the pants off my usual shopping destinations, which only made the fact that someone had spent so much magic and effort to hide it all the more surprising.

  “I don’t get it,” I said to Nik as we walked up the nearest ramp. “I could see hiding a place like this somewhere normal, but this is the DFZ. Everything’s legal here. Why would you want to keep such an awesome place secret from potential customers?”

  “Because not everything is legal,” he replied, pointing at a pawn shop that was pretty obviously a fence for stolen goods. “But the look-away isn’t for the cops. The people up here run very specialized businesses. The last thing they want is a bunch of suburban tourists taking pictures and driving away real customers.”

  If that was what they wanted, then it seemed to me they shouldn’t have set up shop above a tourist trap. That said, a lot of the suspended businesses had connections down to the roofs of the gaudy love palaces and theme-park-style opium dens below, which told me there was a symbiotic relationship going on here. They might not want the tourists, but the shysters who conned them were another breed of client entirely.

  “Welcome to the DFZ,” I said, shaking my head. “Criminals all the way down.”

  “It is called the ‘City of Commerce,’” Sibyl whispered in my ear. “The place where anything is possible.”

  “And everything is sticky,” I said with a grimace, pressing myself against the walkway’s metal railing to get away from the drunk who was puking over the other side. “Don’t think the ward’s going to stop that.”

  “Um, no,” Sibyl said, tilting one of my cameras down toward the ramp’s floor, which, now that we were off the warehouse roof, was just an iron grid suspended fifty feet above the street. “Watch your step.”

  I winced and scooted closer to Nik, following so tightly that it was a challenge not to step on his heels. “Where are we going again?”

  “Not much farther,” he said, pushing his way through the heavily armed crowd that was waiting to get into a strip club. “Stay close.”

  If I stayed any closer, he’d be giving me a piggyback ride, but I didn’t argue. Thanks to the narrow walkways, the place was dense. If we got separated, my chances of finding Nik again in the packed crowd were not good, especially since I didn’t have his phone number. That was an oversight I’d need to fix pronto, but before I could ask, Nik turned sharply, yanking open the door of a large shop so covered in overlapping advertisements, I couldn’t actually read any of them.

  I scurried after him, eyes wide for my first look at…wherever it was we were. After all that buildup, I was hoping for some kind of smoky VR den like you saw in the movies, but the place actually looked more like a tattoo parlor than anything else. There was a waiting area with red-velvet couches and an attractive pink-haired receptionist fending off customers who ran the gamut from nervous to bored to high out of their minds. Being a hanging box like everything else up here, the walls were corrugated steel and the roof was the cement bottom of the highway, but you couldn’t see any of that through the AR-projected posters of insanely attractive men and women flexing various artificial body parts, which was where I got my first clue as to what this place was. It was a mod parlor, a place that sold and installed cyberwear.

  Ever since the Second Mana Crash had tripled the relative magic of the world, the enhancements industry had been booming. When forty percent of the human population was born magical, the other sixty was under intense pressure to compensate, and most did so in the form of better-than-human augmentations. Cybernetics could make you see better, run faster, jump higher, and punch harder. They could improve your memory, your balance, your reflexes. They could also leave you crippled and brain dead if done improperly, which was why most countries had laws prohibiting the more dangerous procedures. But this was the DFZ. You could get your phone wired straight into your frontal lobe if you were willing to pay for it. Installers didn’t even have to have a medical license. Mod parlors like this were everywhere, offering superhuman improvements at a variety of price points depending on how picky you were about what went into your body.

  I wasn’t sure how nice this place was. The clientele in the waiting area looked like the usual mix of street thugs and blue-collar workers who liked a little something under the hood. But Nik walked right into the back with nothing more than a wave at the receptionist, so I could only assume they were good enough for what we needed them to do. I just hoped I could afford my half when the bill came.

  Clutching my bag with the hand inside, I followed Nik inside, scurrying through the projected waterfall curtain that separated the waiting area from the installation rooms, of which there were a surprising number. The few mod parlors I’d seen had had two or three rooms at most, but this place had over a dozen, including what looked like a full-sized hospital-grade operating theater for putting in the really tricky stuff like artificial spinal columns. Clearly, this place was way more serious than your average strip-mall cyberwear vendor. I’d never even heard of some of the augments displayed for sale on the walls. I was still gawking like a tourist when Nik suddenly turned a corner and opened a door into one of the private rooms.

  I followed tight on his heels, braced for some kind of crazy street-doc operating chamber, but the room wasn’t bloody or scary. It was actually quite nice, a little cubicle the size of a dentist’s office decorated with carpets and velvet-shaded floor lamps. There was an operating table, of course, and thick wall hangings to muffle the sound of drills, but otherwise the place looked more like a New Age massage parlor than an underground cyber clinic. If Nik had told me we were here to get our chakras aligned, I probably would have believed him if not for the woman organizing gleaming surgical steel tools on a rolling cart in the far corner.
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  While the rest of the room hadn’t fit my expectations for this place, she surpassed them. With her white lab coat tossed on over black leather pants and high-heeled boots, the woman looked like she’d been sent over from central casting to play a back-alley doctor in a government film about the dangers of illicit cyberwear. Her dark hair was long on one side and shaved close on the other, but aside from the red light gleaming on her ear where an earring would have been, I didn’t see any obvious modifications.

  And then she turned around.

  I must have jumped a foot. From the back, the woman had looked relatively normal, but her front told an entirely different story. She wasn’t even wearing a shirt under her lab coat. It was all just silver—beautiful, gleaming silver engraved with leaves and birds. The enhancement ran from the top of her neck into her low-slung pants. Maybe it went back to flesh after that, but for all I knew, she was silver down to her toes. The only part of her that still looked human was her head, but even that was suspect when I looked closer. Her brown skin was too perfect, her dark eyes too sharp, and there was that red light in her ear, blinking like a warning as she flashed us an absolutely straight, absolutely white grin.

  “Nikola!” she said in a voice that was as artificially perfect as the rest of her. “What are you doing back so soon? Don’t tell me you’ve already broken the new…” She trailed off when she spotted me, and her eyes lit up with a delight so sharp it was terrifying. “You brought a girl!”

  “She’s not a girl,” Nik snapped.

  I whirled on him. “Of course I’m a girl! What did you think I was?”

  “Not like that,” he corrected, his ears turning ever so slightly red. “Not like she means, I meant. That is…” He gave up after that, throwing a hand out toward the machine woman instead. “Opal, this is Rena. Rena, Opal.”

  “So pleased to meet you, Opal,” Rena purred, stalking across the carpet. “Are you getting something done today?”

  “No,” I said quickly, taking a step back.