Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “Okay,” I said, looking at Nik. “Ready?”

  “I’ve been ready for the last five minutes,” he said irritably. “I just don’t know how to get out of here.” He nodded at Nameless. “You seem friendly with the talcum-powder priest. Ask how we get to the Gnarls.”

  “Actually, you’re already there,” Nameless said while I sputtered. “The Gnarls are why the Wandering Cathedral wanders. If you want to reach them, just turn around and walk out. The ticket you bought is good for one round trip, so don’t lose it, or you’ll never come back.”

  “Good to know,” Nik said, putting his ticket in his jeans pocket as he walked back to the door. “Opal?”

  Shoving my ticket into my pocket as well, I hurried after him. “Thank you for your help!”

  “Just doing my job,” Nameless said, leaning back on their couch. “But do feel free to leave a tip on your way out if you enjoyed the service.”

  I was definitely going to tip big the moment I got money. This had been very educational. “Helpful” was still up in the air, but at least I no longer felt like I was flying blind as I followed Nik out the door and into an absolutely wild world.

  Chapter 12

  I was wrong. I was not prepared for the Gnarls. I shrieked the moment I stepped through the door, grabbing on to Nik as if my life depended on it. Which it did, because we were upside down.

  Thank God Nik had faster reactions than I did. He took one look at the swirling abyss we were falling into and grabbed the wall, anchoring us in place as the floor became the ceiling and my feet lost contact with the ground. I flipped twice before he yanked me back onto something firm. When I finally pried my eyes open again, I was standing on the arch at the top of the cathedral’s doorway, staring out into the strangest landscape I’d ever seen.

  The only word I could think of to describe it was “suspended.” We were standing at the entrance of the Wandering Cathedral, which was floating in the space between two terrifying extremes. Below us, in the place I’d thought of as “up” when I’d stepped out of the cathedral, was the terrifying abyss Nik had saved me from falling into. Above us, off the steps of the upside-down cathedral, were the roots of the city itself.

  “Wow,” I whispered, clutching even more tightly onto Nik’s coat.

  The bottom of the DFZ was suspended above us like a chandelier. From this angle, there was no dirt at all. I could see every pipe and tunnel and basement in the city all tangled together like the roots of a tree or the wires of a machine. It was hard to say which it resembled more closely, because the city above us was both: manufactured and organic, inanimate and animate, dead and alive. It was cement that moved like water and trees that stood firm as anchors. Both seemed equally important, because the bottom of the city above us was moving quite a lot, pivoting around the solid points like muscles around a joint. Just in the time I stood there gawking, I saw two roads and a support beam slide beneath a building to push it up, adding a few floors to the bottom. At the same time, the foundations of Highway 94 wiggled a bit to the left, adjusting a hard curve ever so slightly wider while the buildings on either side leaned away to make room.

  “Wow!” I said again, my face breaking into an awestruck grin. “Look at that! It’s like we’re in the DFZ’s backstage.”

  “Yes, yes, it’s very impressive,” Nik said quickly. “But how do we get down?”

  Considering “down” was an endless abyss, that struck me as a funny question, but we had to go somewhere. The cathedral we were clinging to was basically an asteroid slowly revolving through the emptiness between two worlds. Not exactly a great starting spot for a search.

  “What does your hand say?”

  Nik scowled at his right-left hand, which I’d only just now realized was still resting on my waist from when he’d grabbed me earlier. I was no longer in danger of falling, but he didn’t seem to be in a hurry to move it, tapping his fingers softly against my bunched-up poncho as he considered my question.

  “It’s actually calmed down a lot since we got in here,” he said at last, leaning out slowly to get a better look at the nothing below us. “It’s not jumping around anymore. It’s just pointing down.”

  Down was not a direction I wanted to go. “Great,” I moaned. “Dr. Lyle dropped his spell into the abyss.”

  “It’s not all abyss,” Nik said, leaning further over the edge. “Look.”

  I did not want to look. I wasn’t normally afraid of heights, but clinging to a cathedral floating above an endless void was definitely extenuating circumstances. Now that I was no longer jacked up on the fear of plummeting to my death, I could feel the magic rising out of the void in waves. It was as thick as cement and stronger than anything I’d ever felt on the surface. The only thing I could compare it to was dragon fire, and I’d only had the misfortune of feeling that once. But that fire had been brief and directed. This magic was everywhere at once, a waterfall of power pouring up from the abyss toward the city. Even with the cathedral blocking some of it, the power of the magic roaring by was enough to rattle my soul inside my body like a nut in its shell, and Nik wanted me to stick my head over the edge?

  Just the thought made my stomach lurch. If I hadn’t paid so dearly for them, I would have vomited up every pancake I’d eaten. But I had, so I didn’t, gallantly keeping my breakfast down as I took off my goggles and held them out over the edge to see what Nik was talking about.

  Even secondhand through my cameras, the void was all I could see at first. There was just so much of it, an endless swirling darkness that was bigger than the sky. Bigger than anything I’d ever seen. Just trying to fit it all in my head made me feel like something was going to break, so I stopped attempting and focused instead on finding something that wasn’t boundless nothing.

  That went much better. It took a while, but once I started ignoring the void, other things began to take shape, and I realized that Nik was right. There was stuff down there: roads and bridges, buildings, city parks with playgrounds in them. Whole portions of the DFZ were floating in the space between the city and the abyss like lost puzzle pieces. They looked like independent islands, free-floating objects similar to the cathedral we were clinging to. The longer I stared, though, the more I realized that wasn’t entirely true. There was a cloud of smaller debris connecting the larger masses, a root-like network of old pipes and steel rebar that formed a definite, if very twisty, path.

  “I see why it’s called the Gnarls now,” I said, returning my goggles to the top of my head. “Think we can get down there?”

  “We’ll have to,” Nik said, releasing his grip on my waist at last to point his right-left hand at a particularly dense cluster of discarded landmasses. “It’s that way.”

  “You sure?”

  “I have no idea, but the hand is absolutely positive. The thing we’re looking for is two point three kilometers in that direction.”

  I gave him a puzzled look. “Breaking out the metric now?”

  “It’s not my fault,” he said angrily, shaking Dr. Lyle’s hand. “It’s this stupid thing. It wants me to be precise, and it thinks metric is the superior system.”

  “Well, to be fair, it is,” I agreed. “But I thought that hand didn’t have an interface you could communicate with?”

  “So did I,” Nik growled. “But apparently it doesn’t need words to make its opinion known now that we’re used to each other.”

  I couldn’t help myself. “So you’re saying you can talk to the hand?”

  The look Nik gave me then was absolutely scalding, but I didn’t regret a thing. No matter how serious the situation, a good pun is never a waste. It certainly cheered me up, which was good, because I’d been clinging to Nik like a wet napkin this whole time. If we were going to make any distance, much less 2.3 kilometers, I needed to get myself together.

  “Okay,” I said, releasing my death grip on Nik’s jacket. “Let’s do this.”

  It took almost half an hour to figure out how we were going to get down. To my
enormous surprise, Sibyl’s signal wasn’t bad down here. In hindsight, it made sense that wireless internet would be part of the DFZ’s heart—she was a modern city, after all—but it didn’t actually help our situation. I found plenty of guides online, but they all turned out to be useless since the Gnarls were apparently different every time you went in.

  That wasn’t too out there considering we were inside the magical heart of the god of an ever-moving city, but it meant there was no easy solution to our current predicament. After a bit of watching, though, we noticed that the Wandering Cathedral had its own path through the chaos, almost like an orbit. It wasn’t much, but with Sibyl’s ability to keep track of multiple relative positions and a lot of patience, I was able to chart a course.

  After that, it was just a matter of waiting for the right moment. We spent the time climbing down (or up) the cathedral’s ornate face to the bell tower, which was much closer to the floating islands below (above) us. We sat there for a while, watching the islands moving like clouds above the void. Then, when one of the biggest pieces of disconnected highway was directly below us, we jumped, falling together through the chaos.

  Much, much later than I’d anticipated, we landed on the pavement. I didn’t actually break my leg, but from the horrifying crunch my knee made, it was a near thing.

  “Ow,” I groaned, sinking to the ground. “That was a lot farther than I thought.”

  “I just hope we can get back,” Nik said, holding out his actual left hand, the one that wasn’t cybernetic, to help me up. “Jumping’s a lot harder than falling.”

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we get there,” I said, hauling myself to my feet. “Now, which way do we go?”

  Nik pointed to his right without hesitation, and we set off, walking down the stretch of floating highway as though it were a normal road, not a slowly rotating plane of asphalt hanging in air over an abyss that was pouring itself up toward the city like an upside-down magical version of Victoria Falls.

  “You know,” I said, staring at the void that was now above us again thanks to relative orientation, “when they said the Gnarls were the overlap between the DFZ’s physical and magical domains, I didn’t think the truth would be quite so literal. I’m pretty sure that’s the actual Sea of Magic above our heads. As in the realm of spirits, source of all magic, and the place our souls go when we die.”

  “I don’t want to think about dying right now,” Nik replied, keeping his eyes firmly on the asphalt. “I just want to get what we’re here for and get out of this madhouse.”

  “I wonder what would happen if we fell into it,” I went on. “I’ve always heard that humans can’t take the other side. The magic is too intense, so our souls get ripped to shreds. We’re still technically inside the DFZ, though, so do you think we can actually fall out? Like, is there a bottom we’re not seeing, or would we just plummet endlessly until the magic dissolved our—”

  “Opal,” Nik said sharply, his face pale and tight. “Not helping.”

  I apologized at once, but the questions stuck with me. It wasn’t every day you found yourself face to face with the literal Great Beyond. The Sea of Magic was where all the magic in the world originated and eventually returned to, including the magic inside of us. The soul of every person who’d ever died was somewhere in that darkness. Staring at it, I was glad that Peter had committed Dr. Lyle to the Empty Wind. Spending the rest of eternity tumbling with other forgotten souls on a grave-cold wind didn’t exactly sound like a party, but what did I know? I’d never been dead. At least he had someone who cared watching over him. That had to be better than falling into that void alone.

  True to their name, the Gnarls were incredibly confusing. Everything was always spinning, and the connecting lines of pipes and cement never seemed to lead where you thought they would. Even with Nik’s unerring sense of direction, we had to backtrack a lot, a frustrating complication that was only made worse by Nik’s habit of constantly looking over his shoulder.

  “Would you stop?” I pleaded, pointing at the broken archipelago of spinning oak trees we were currently trying to navigate through. “This is complicated enough without you constantly throwing off my sense of which direction is forward.”

  “Sorry,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. “It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Nothing,” he said with a sigh. “This place messes with me is all. I keep getting the feeling that we’re being followed.”

  He said that like he was embarrassed about it, but I’d always trusted my instincts, and Nik had saved my bacon enough times recently that I was developing a near-religious faith in his. If he said someone was following us, I absolutely believed it. When I turned to search, though, all I saw was the empty corkscrew of pipes and wires we’d followed to get here.

  Scowling, I pulled my goggles down from my head. “Sibyl—”

  “Don’t ask me,” my AI grumbled as my augmented-reality filled with error icons. “This place is a nightmare. I’ve still got internet somehow, but there’s no GPS, and the magic’s so thick it’s messing with my electronics. I feel like one giant glitch.”

  “Sorry,” I said automatically, walking back to the last bend we’d turned. “But this isn’t complicated. I just need you to play back the last few minutes of footage from my rear cameras. Anything you’ve got will be—”

  I stopped. I couldn’t say what had set it off, but I had that prickly feeling on the back of my neck again, the one that meant I was being watched. It was the same feeling I’d had yesterday, the one that had come seconds before my anti-bullet ward had caught the shot aimed at my head.

  That was enough for me. I hit the deck without thinking twice, diving face first into the piebald grass of the small patch of park we’d been walking through. Above me, I heard Nik curse and draw his gun, which would have been a good move if we’d been looking in the right direction. But we weren’t. Our eyes were level with the chunk of grassy field we’d been walking across, but the threat came from above—something we discovered the hard way when it landed right on top of us.

  “Oof,” I grunted as something heavy and wearing boots landed on my back. Nik’s sound of surprise was a lot more profane as he was knocked to the ground beside me, gun wrenched out of his hand by a very large man in the distinctive black body armor of a professional mercenary. I had no idea which company the small logo on his arm was for—I only paid attention to body armor when I was trying to resell it—but I recognized a pro when he was shoving my face into the dirt. Considering we had bounties on our heads, the fact that we’d been jumped by mercs wasn’t actually what surprised me. My big question was how had they found us here? Fortunately—or unfortunately, as it turned out—I didn’t have to be curious for long.

  “Well, well, Mr. Kos,” said a familiar voice. “You certainly lived up to your reputation this time.”

  I groaned, grinding my face into the grass. Of course. Of course. Who else could it be? I didn’t even know why I’d bothered to wonder as I craned my neck back to see Kauffman standing on a chunk of floating cement above us. The only thing I still didn’t understand was “How?”

  Kauffman reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic baggie holding a tissue stained a dull, coppery red. “You should be more careful where you bleed, Miss Yong-ae,” he said, his normally dazzling smile spreading into something much more sinister. “You did a good job burning off your material links, but it’s all for nothing if you’re going to drip bits of yourself all over the Heights.” He tsked at me. “Absolutely amateur.”

  The truth of those words burned like a hot poker in my gut. How could I have been so stupid? I’d been bleeding like a faucet after I’d blasted that scaffolding last night. Of course I’d dripped something on the ground, which meant I’d basically handed Kauffman a leash and invited him to yank it. Blood was the strongest of all material links. You could trace a person from anywhere in the world with it, including, apparently, through the Gnarls. That wasn’
t the only way Kauffman had outmaged me, either. While he was gloating, I noticed that the floating cement chunk he was standing on was covered in spellworked circles.

  Now I really felt like an idiot. Kauffman and his hired muscle hadn’t just floated over our heads by accident. He’d used spellwork to catch the magic that was roaring up from the void and tie it to the rock he was standing on. No wonder he’d been able to catch up with us! He’d turned that hunk of cement into his own private sailboat. While we’d been wandering the Gnarls, he’d been flying wherever he liked, riding the constant roar of magic like a sailor at sea.

  If it hadn’t screwed us so epically, I would have been impressed by his inventiveness, but I mostly just wished I’d thought of it first. Now we were sunk, stuck on our stomachs with four mercs on our backs and Kauffman floating over us smirking like he was the Spirit of Bad Winners.

  “I don’t suppose the offer to buy us out is still on the table?” Nik asked, turning his face against the boot the merc on top of him was pressing into his cheek.

  Kauffman shook his head. “I’m afraid that ship has sailed, old friend. The only deal I can offer you now is the chance to get out of this alive. Now.” His eyes flicked to me. “Let me speak to Dr. Lyle.”

  Nik and I shared a confused look. “What?”

  “Let me speak to Dr. Lyle,” Kauffman repeated, his voice growing frustrated. “I know you have to be in communication with him, because it’s the only way you can know where you’re going. Coordinates don’t work in this place. The only way to find a fixed point down here is with a beacon spell, and that’s tied to Dr. Lyle’s magic. I know this because he showed me how he was planning to do it right before he bolted with our employer’s investment, so stop playing stupid and let me talk to him. If he agrees to guide me to the ritual location, we’ll have no more reason to quarrel. I’ll tell my men to stop hunting for his safe house, our employer will recoup his investment, and you get to avoid having a bullet put through your skull. Everybody gets what they want. Now hand him over.”