Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  There was no more talking after that. Nik and I sprinted forward in unison, jumping over the unconscious mage as we raced down the narrow—and now terrifyingly swaying—walkway. I heard a crash behind us as the door went down, and then a bullet whizzed past my ear.

  “Idiots!” Nik yelled as I ducked. “The bounty’s no good if we’re dead!”

  That was nice to know. Too bad nobody chasing us seemed to be paying attention to that little detail. But though the door was down and our cover with it, we’d made it to our destination.

  The elevated back alley we’d been following dead-ended at a suspended building that was as big as all the others around it combined. Like everything else we’d run past, it had a back exit, but unlike all the other doors that had opened into our faces, this one was locked.

  “Stand back,” Nik said, pointing his gun at the lock.

  I did as he said, covering my ears with my glowing hands as he pulled the trigger. But though the shot left a nice hole in the metal, the door didn’t budge when Nik yanked on it.

  “It’s magnetic,” Sibyl informed me in the very calm voice she always used during disasters. “Also, there are people closing in. I can’t see how many since you’ve thrown a coat over my cameras, but the vibrations feel like at least four.”

  It was five, actually, coming up fast. They must have taken Nik’s warning to heart, because they were no longer shooting at us, but they were big, and the first three were bulging with obvious cyberwear. Shoulders that huge simply did not occur in nature. But while there was no way I could have hammered all those guys the way I’d done the mage before they reached us, I didn’t have to. We were standing on a rickety metal railing that was barely holding stable as it was, and that was all the edge I needed.

  “Hold on to something!” I yelled at Nik, reaching up to grab the large, U-shaped metal walkway anchor where it had been hammered into the highway rumbling over our heads. “Here we go!”

  It was more difficult without my hands to guide me, but it’s amazing what you’re capable of when your life is on the line. I’d barely finished warning Nik before I had the crowbar formed in my mind. I kept shoving magic into it until our pursuers were only a few feet away, cramming the shape so full of power that my nose started to bleed. It was way more magic than I had any business handling, but like I said, I’ve been backlashed a lot. My soul was asbestos when it came to magic, and I just sucked it up, piling on the power until my ears rang and the world spun. Then, right before I passed out, I slammed the spell down, wrenching the crowbar-shaped magic between the metal girders holding up the walkway until the bolts snapped with a sound like gunshots, and the whole thing broke free.

  The magic left me like a thunderclap. I almost hurled when it was gone. The rush of its sudden absence felt like it was turning my stomach inside out. My grip was sliding as well, my numb fingers losing their hold on the anchored railing, the only part of the walkway that was still attached to the Skyway. The rest of it was falling toward the pavement fifty feet below, including the chunk under my feet. But just as I started to fall after it, something grabbed me around the waist and clenched down like a metal vise. I was still reeling from the sudden stop when Nik hauled me up.

  “Are you crazy?” he yelled in my face. He was hanging from the knob of the magnetic door we’d failed to open, pinning me to his body with his right arm, which felt as metal as his chest. I was idly wondering if that was because his arm was fake too or if he was just absurdly hard bodied when he forced my head back up. “Are you all right?”

  “I’ms fines,” I slurred. “Especially now they’re not shooting at us.”

  I finished with a shaky smile Nik did not return. He just cursed under his breath and started swinging us, using his body weight to rock us back and forth until he got high enough to kick a leg through the metal anchor I’d grabbed and then failed to hold onto. Once his knee was securely locked around the bottom of the U-shaped loop, he lifted me so I could grab on as well. When I had both arms looped around the metal, he let me go and swung himself as deftly as an acrobat, ending up perched with his hands on the anchor in the ceiling and his feet pressed against the metal wall of the building beside the door we’d been trying to open.

  “What kind of mage are you?” he grumbled as he walked himself sideways toward the still-closed magnetic door. “I’ve seen plenty of people throw magic around, but none of them ever made themselves bleed for it.”

  “The bleeding was not intentional,” I said, or thought I said. The ringing in my head was making it hard to keep track of words. “It was…I didn’t properly account for…force it would take to break through steel.”

  That halting explanation definitely wasn’t my greatest, but it seemed to satisfy Nik. Sibyl, however, was another matter entirely.

  “You didn’t ‘properly account’ for anything!” my AI screamed in my ear. “You didn’t even look at the metal! You just grabbed whatever was slightly less than the amount of power needed to kill yourself and used that! You are seriously going to turn your brain into mush if you keep pulling stunts like this!”

  I was feeling pretty punch drunk, but the fear that should have caused was lost in the euphoric glow of survival. I was beaming like an idiot when Nik finished kicking down the magnetic door. I was so drunk on the backlash, it didn’t even occur to me how crazy it was that he’d kicked down a steel door until after he’d yanked me through, grabbing my hand and dragging me down a very red, very posh-looking hallway lined with glossy wooden doors and moving pictures of astonishingly beautiful people wearing not a lot of clothing.

  “Where are we?” I asked, staring at the doors in confusion. “A hotel?”

  “It’s a brothel,” Nik replied, kicking the closest door shut again the second it started to open. “An expensive one, which is why we’re getting out of here fast.”

  It certainly looked expensive. Between the plush carpeting and the fancy wallpaper, you’d never suspect that this place was dangling from the bottom of the DFZ’s busiest highway. The people sticking their heads curiously out of the doors behind us weren’t quite to the caliber of human perfection my father had demanded back home, but they were the prettiest I’d seen in the DFZ. Good variety, too. There were men and women and others on the spectrum between. Some of them looked to have impressively inventive cyberwear, which struck me as really going the extra mile. As someone who’d grown up among hundreds of women vying for one man’s attention, I knew how much work it took to stand out, and I was professionally impressed. I was also—as I was beginning to realize from Nik’s increasingly tight grip on my hand—not nearly as stable on my feet as I’d thought.

  “Huh,” I said, reaching up to touch the blood that was still dripping from my nose. “Maybe I did turn my brain into mush.”

  “What was that?” Nik demanded.

  Before I could even try to explain, a dark shadow stepped in front of us, cutting off the red light from the room at the end of the long hall, which I’d just realized must have been the front parlor. A very big shadow that arranged itself into a very big man. He was dressed in a suit and wearing sunglasses indoors at night, the universal signs of an expensive security guard, but what really caught my attention was the glowing spellwork on the shirt he wore under his suit. Spellwork I actually recognized for once because those were the same markings that I had on my poncho.

  That sobered me up real quick. I blinked hard, clearing the fog from my head as I realized just how screwed we were. There was a giant man covered in anti-bullet wards standing between us and the doors out of here. We couldn’t turn around because I’d blown the bridge behind us, but the way forward was looking more and more like suicide as the security guard raised his hands—his glowing hands—and pointed them at us.

  In the part of my brain that wasn’t panicking, that made a lot of sense. You didn’t want to fire guns in a nice place like this. Magic was much less damaging to property, especially if you weren’t too picky about what you did to people�
�s insides. I didn’t know what kind of mage this guy was, but the magic condensing in his ham-sized fists already felt like it wasn’t going to be fun. When I tried to yank in some magic of my own so I could do something about that, though, all I got was a flash of pain.

  “I told you!” Sibyl yelled when I gasped. “You can’t keep doing this to yourself, Opal!”

  There was more to the lecture, but I didn’t hear it. I was too busy flipping back and forth between the fear that I’d broken my magic and the realization that we were running head first into our gruesome death, and I couldn’t do anything to stop it. But just as I was starting to panic in earnest, Nik lifted his arm and shot something.

  It wasn’t his gun. I knew the sound of Nik’s sleek pistol pretty well by now, and the near-silent whir that came this time was nothing like it. It was also too small. The little black object in Nik’s gloved fist barely extended past his fingers, but it dropped the big mage like a stone, sending him flailing to the carpet. I was still staring, dumbstruck, when Nik jerked his wrist to reel back in the two metal electrodes he’d shot into the mage’s stomach.

  “Taser,” he said before I could ask. “It’s cheap, so they always forget to ward against it. Screws magic up good. Now let’s go.”

  He didn’t have to tell me twice this time. We jumped together over the still-twitching mage and sprinted for the doors. Back in the brothel, a beautiful older woman in a very expensive dress was yelling for someone to stop us, but if anyone was listening, we’d already left them behind.

  I’d never run so fast in my life. We flew down the suspended walkway, bouncing off the drunks until we reached the ramp that led to the warehouse roof. I was so disoriented by this point I had no idea if this was the same warehouse we’d come up from originally or a different one entirely. The staircase reeked the same either way, but it didn’t matter much in the end, because we came out in sight of Nik’s car.

  And the half dozen tattooed, cybered men surrounding it.

  I skidded to a halt, sending Nik’s lead-filled jacket sliding over my face as my feet dug into the dusty gravel. I was about to wheel and start running again when Nik grabbed my arm.

  “Opal, wait!”

  I froze, looking over my shoulder just in time to see him smile. “They’re on our side.” His smile turned cocky. “I paid protection, remember?”

  There was no way twenty dollars bought all of that. That wasn’t how money worked. I was trying to explain this to Nik when he let me go and walked away, strolling over to his car as if this was totally normal. “Thank you, gentlemen,” he said as he unlocked his door. “I appreciate it.”

  “You pay, you get,” the nicest-dressed of the men replied, rolling his wide shoulders. Then he leaned in on Nik. “But don’t cause trouble here again. I own the streets and the parking, not the ramps, so it ain’t my business who breaks what. But the next time your lady feels like smashing something, take her to the arena.”

  He turned his glare on me, and I gulped.

  “She won’t do it again,” Nik promised, waving for me to get in the car. As I scurried to my seat, the nicely dressed man put out his hand again, rubbing his fingers together. With a look of physical pain, Nik reached into his wallet and pulled out another bill. A much bigger one.

  “Glad we could do business,” the man said, pocketing the money with a smile. “Have a good night, man we never saw.”

  “You too,” Nik grumbled, slamming his body into the driver’s seat. He revved the engine like he was trying to murder it, and we drove away with the headlights off, sliding into the quiet traffic behind the glittery tourist vice-land like a fish into the river.

  “You are very expensive,” he said through clenched teeth.

  “Look on the bright side,” I said, sliding his coat off my shoulders and tossing it into the backseat. “At least this bounty proves the thing we’re after is worth a lot.”

  “It had better be worth a mint,” Nik growled, glancing at his mirror. “Madame’s going to have my head for kicking in her back door and tasing her mage.”

  “Desperate times, desperate measures,” I said, looking out the window. “You’ll just have to find another brothel.”

  “I don’t go to brothels,” he snapped. “If you have to spend money on sex, you’re doing it wrong. But there’s a lot of people who do go to Madame’s, and they’re all going to be pissed at me.”

  “Sorry to inconvenience you by saving your life,” I grumbled. Then I snapped my head around. “Wait, why are you mad at me? You were the one who decided to go through her place!”

  “I’m not mad at you,” Nik said, tightening his hands on the steering wheel. “I’m just mad. This has turned into a fiasco. I got into Cleaning specifically so I could make money without this kind of trouble.”

  I could only shrug at that. “Gotta eat the risk to collect the reward.”

  Nik sighed as though I’d spoken a great truth, and then he reached back to grab something from behind my seat. “Here,” he said, dropping a first aid kit in my lap. “You’re bleeding.”

  I jumped and reached up to touch my face. He was right. I hadn’t noticed in all the life-or-death excitement, but I was still bleeding like crazy from my nose and ears. I’d only gotten a few drips on my shirt, which was a miracle, but I looked like an angry ghost when I checked myself in the visor mirror.

  “What did you do to yourself?” he asked as I started mopping my face clean with a square of gauze.

  “Went too hard,” I said, wincing as I scrubbed my tender ears. “But I don’t regret it. If I hadn’t dropped that walkway, we’d be heads on a platter for Kauffman right now.”

  “Kauffman wouldn’t kill us,” Nik said quickly. “He needs us alive to find out what we know.”

  “We’d still have lost,” I snapped. “Same difference.”

  “I don’t want to lose to Kauffman any more than you do,” he said. “But you almost died back there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “I didn’t almost die.”

  “You looked like you did,” Nik said quietly, giving me a look that made me very uncomfortable. “I’m not a mage, but I don’t think you should do that again.”

  “Yes!” Sibyl said triumphantly. “Listen to him!”

  “Fine, fine,” I said, slumping in my seat. “I won’t do it again.”

  At least not that hard. But it was now several hours into Tuesday morning, which meant I was a day closer to my deadline. Even if Rena was absolutely accurate about the hack taking eight hours, I no longer believed finding Dr. Lyle’s circle would be easy. If we’d had this much trouble just getting this far, the end was bound to be worse, but I couldn’t go back. I needed that money like I needed air, and I’d do anything it took to get it.

  “‘Anything’ is a lot, Opal,” Sibyl said nervously. “As your emotional support AI, I feel I should caution you against making these kinds of ultimatums. They’re not good for your—”

  I poked my finger through her mute button, sliding my goggles down to my neck so I could finish cleaning my face. I was scrubbing off the last of the blood with a sanitizing wipe when Nik cleared his throat.

  “So,” he said as I repacked his first aid kit. “We’ve got several hours before the hand is done. I’m going to go home and sleep. Where do you want me to drop you off? Do you have a safe house?”

  “Safe house?” I could barely afford my normal house. “Nope, sorry.”

  “A hotel you trust, then? Anywhere you can lie low for a few hours will work, because you can’t go home.”

  “I know that,” I said, frustrated. “I just haven’t had time to think of an alternative.”

  “I know some good places that don’t ask questions,” he offered.

  I was sure he did. I was also sure none of them were in my price range.

  Stomach sinking, I clicked the AR icon for my bank account, but no miracles had occurred. I still only had sixteen bucks. That was enough to buy dinner and breakfast if I wasn’t picky, but it wouldn’t cove
r even the cheapest coffin motel. I technically owned Dr. Lyle’s house right now, but going back there was an even stupider idea than going home. It also had no furniture and no door, not exactly a fun place to spend what was left of the night. I supposed I could have sold some of my stuff from the box in Nik’s trunk to cover it, but all the good auction places were closed right now, and I’d rather walk in circles until dawn than sell the last of my treasures to fix what was ultimately a temporary problem. In eight hours, we’d have the information from Dr. Lyle’s hand and be on the way to our prize. One third of a day, that was all I had to hold out for.

  “Just take me back to the Cleaners’ Office.”

  Nik frowned. “You sure? There’s nothing over there.”

  There was a neighborhood I knew and a bookstore that was open 24 hours and didn’t kick you out so long as you bought at least one cup of coffee. “It’ll be fine.”

  Nik sighed and changed lanes. Then, without warning, he changed back, pulling off the road into the parking lot of a fast food joint.

  The sudden switch in direction caused me to drop the first aid kit on the floor. “Geeze,” I said, leaning down to pick it up. “If you were hungry, you could have just said…”

  I trailed off when I saw Nik staring at me, his gray eyes hard. “You don’t have anywhere to go, do you?”

  I could have lied. Covering up has always been my default reaction, but after everything that had happened tonight, I just didn’t have it in me. Even if you didn’t count what I’d just done to my magic, I was a mess. I’d been awake for nearly twenty-four hours now. I hadn’t eaten, hadn’t showered, and my poncho’s anti-bullet ward was drained yet again. I was running on empty in every category, and fighting Nik to save my pride suddenly felt like a bridge too far.

  “Not really.”

  His glare turned irritated. “Why didn’t you just say so?”

  “Because I don’t want your pity,” I snapped, glaring back at him. “You might be some kind of Underground super-soldier of fortune, but I’m not. I’m just a Cleaner. I don’t have safe houses and gang connections, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take care of myself.”