The Once King

by Rachel Aaron

  It was a spell.

  My face split into an enormous grin. Moving at the speed of greed, I dropped to my stomach and wiggled under the bed, using my headlamps to spot the culprit: a warded box tucked into the gap where the bed’s leg met the wall. Not stupid enough to get bitten a second time, I reached into my bag and pulled out my tongs, using the rubber-coated grips to grab the box and ease it out into the light.

  What came out was a metal container slightly larger than a shoebox and absolutely covered in the same bizarre chicken-scratch custom spellwork as the front door. Some of the markings were still glowing from where the spell had zapped me, but unlike the ward on the front door, which could have done who knew what, even I could see this was a security spell. Complicated, powerful, but still just a safe at the end of the day, and if there was anything I’d learned from a year and a half in this business, it was how to crack a safe.

  “Oh, yeah!” I said as I pulled magic into my hands. “Come on, loot box!”

  Since Peter was here, I had to keep my magic toned down, which meant it took me five minutes to crush the first lock and a full ten to crack the next. By the time I reached the final one, Peter had our dead guy wrapped in a dignified sheet on the stretcher. He was clearing a path through the living room to the front door when the warded box in my lap finally clicked open.

  Completely forgetting my earlier lesson about sticking parts of myself where they shouldn’t be, I tore the lid open and shoved my hand inside, grabbing for whatever magical treasure had to be in there. Given this guy’s obsession with ancient magic, I was hoping for something really good: a legit alchemical relic, ancient spellwork tablets, old enchanted glass.

  What I got was a stack of paper.

  “What?!” I cried, turning the box upside down to dump the pile of perfectly normal, not-even-ancient paper into my lap. “You’ve to be kidding me!”

  They were notes. Notes for what I couldn’t say since they were written in the same gobbledygook custom spellwork as everything else, but they looked like plans for something complicated. There were tons of size and time calculations written in the margins, along with dollar amounts that made my eyes go wide. I was trying to figure out if they were costs or expected earnings when I found the stack of receipts.

  I didn’t actually recognize what they were at first. I mean, who still used physical receipts? But our dead guy’s love of paper must have extended beyond books, because he’d printed and kept hundreds of receipts going back more than a year. Some were for startling amounts, and even more interesting, they were all for magical reagents.

  In the old days, back when the local ambient power had been too thin to just pull whatever magic you needed out of the air, mages had been forced to use external sources to power their spells, usually the body parts of magical animals. These days, there was so much magic floating around that that sort of thing wasn’t necessary unless you were after a very specific magical flavor or property, but this mage must have been doing something crazy, because he had receipts for stuff I hadn’t even heard of. Very expensive stuff.

  “Sibyl,” I said quietly, fanning the stack of receipts in front of my cameras. “What’s the total on these?”

  “Two hundred eighty-three thousand nine hundred and forty dollars and twenty-seven cents,” my AI replied immediately. “It would have been less, but he got rush shipping on a lot of stuff.”

  That was a number to make my eyes go wide. “What was he doing with it all?” I whispered. “I mean, why pay this much for power when you live in a city that’s drowning in free magic?”

  “No clue,” Sibyl said. “But if he’d done it anywhere else, it would have been illegal.” She placed a red arrow on my heads-up display, drawing my attention to a receipt in the middle of the pile. “This one’s for a unicorn horn, which only comes off with the unicorn’s head. I don’t have to tell you how heavily protected unicorns are. They’re not even endangered, but humans go crazy anytime one gets hurt. If we weren’t in the DFZ, just having this paper could get you in trouble.”

  “Maybe that’s why he was here,” I said thoughtfully. The current DFZ wasn’t quite as laissez-faire as it had been under Algonquin’s rule—the spirit of the lakes had famously cared more for fish than for people, and her lack of laws had shown it—but the modern Detroit Free Zone still lived up to its name. Practically everything short of murder, theft, and slavery was legal here, including, apparently, unicorn poaching. Still. “This has to be worth something,” I said firmly. “You don’t spend this much on reagents and not get something good out of the spell.”

  “Well, whatever he was doing, he didn’t do it here,” Sibyl pointed out. “There isn’t enough room in this apartment for even the starting ritual circle he drew on page one.”

  That was a good point. “You know,” I said, looking around the tiny bedroom, which was well stocked with general supplies like clothes but curiously light on personal items. “I don’t think he actually lived here. I think this was a place he ran to in emergencies. You know, like a safe house.”

  “That would explain all of the security,” Sibyl agreed. “And the cruddy location. No one ever seems to hide in nice places.”

  I nodded, paging through the spell notes again. Even accounting for my terrible skill at reading spellwork, they still looked depressingly like a madman’s manifesto. Every page was written out to the margins, and there were doodles of weird creatures with chicken heads and snake tails surrounded by arrows and exclamation points. But nutty as the notes looked, they were all I had. There was no way I was hauling a thousand pounds of books up those slimy, mold-covered stairs for a measly hundred bucks. If the spell laid out on these pages wasn’t worth money, I’d wasted my entire morning and three hundred bucks on this hole.

  “Sibyl, does Heidi Varner still work at the Institute for Magical Arts?”

  “According to her social media, she does,” my AI replied. “Do you want me to send her a message?”

  “No,” I said quickly. I hadn’t used any of my social media accounts in a year, and I wasn’t about to reopen that can of worms for a long shot like this. But where I’d focused primarily on the art and history parts of my magical art history degree, Heidi was a trained Thaumaturge with a specialization in ancient alchemy. She also owed me for not telling her boyfriend about the time she got drunk and kissed another guy in college.

  “I’ll just pay her a visit,” I said. “Are her office hours still the same?”

  “Same as when you left, according to IMA’s website,” Sibyl reported. “But are you sure you want to go? Not that I’d ever read your private mail, but the subject lines of the messages she’s sent you over the last year and a half seem pretty angry.”

  I was sure they did, which was why I’d never looked at them. But desperate times, desperate measures. If there was a chance the spell outlined in these notes was worth anything close to the cost of its reagents, then visiting Heidi was a risk I was willing to take. I was overdue for a change of luck. Maybe our mage had ordered all that stuff but died before he’d gotten the chance to actually cast the spell. For all I knew, there was $283,940.27 worth of reagents just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for me to come and pick it up.

  “I guess it could happen,” Sibyl said when I mentioned this. “It’s not likely, but—”

  “I know, I know,” I said as I tucked the pages into my bag. “Just pull the truck around, would you?”

  My AI heaved a long, recorded sigh. “Calling it now.”

  “Thank you, Sibyl,” I said, walking down the path Peter had cleared through the living room to see if he needed any help getting the dead body up to the street.

  Chapter 2

  Most established Cleaners owned their own trucks, which made sense when you considered that we basically moved houses for a living. But owning a vehicle of any sort was stupid expensive in the DFZ, so I’d opted for the much cheaper route of leasing from one of the car subscription services. Better still, in a rare st
roke of foresight, I’d prepaid for the entire year back in January when I’d had money to burn. I’d also bought a fancy intelligent rice maker and an augmented-reality TV, both of which I’d had to turn around and sell months ago to make my rent.

  But the car thing at least I’d gotten right. Subscription vehicles weren’t fancy, fast, or particularly safe—the small pickup I’d been given this time was missing its bumper and looked like it was made entirely from recycled plastic—but it cost less than half what owning my own vehicle would have, and I got to use it for up to two hundred hours a month. Sometimes more if no one else had it booked.

  I didn’t even have to drive. Once Sibyl activated it, the truck’s AI piloted itself. The cab didn’t even have a steering console, just a flat plastic dash with a cheap touch screen featuring a badly animated dog asking where I wanted to go in a cheerful, childish voice.

  “Institute for Magical Arts,” I said as I shut the chintzy door.

  “Right away, Miss Yong-ae,” the truck replied. “Would you like to upgrade your ride today? We have over five hundred entertainment options from the hottest new—”

  “No,” I said, cutting off the upsell. “Also: No. No. No. I decline the insurance option. And No.”

  “Yes ma’am,” the vehicle said when its cheap AI finally finished processing all of my answers. “We should reach your destination in thirty-nine minutes. Until then, please enjoy these messages from our corporate partners!”

  I scrambled for the volume, frantically mashing my finger against the down arrow on the touch screen as ads started blasting at deafening levels from the tinny speakers.

  “You know, you really should just pay the extra ten dollars a month for the ad-free service,” Sibyl said when I’d gotten the cheerful jingles down to a not hearing-destroying level. “It would improve your mental state.”

  “If I could afford an extra ten bucks a month, my mental state wouldn’t need improving,” I reminded her, flopping into the cheap plastic seat as the truck backed itself out of the alley. “But why did it say it’s going to be forty minutes? It shouldn’t take more than twenty to get to the IMA campus from here.”

  “There’s a lot of activity in our way,” Sibyl said, bringing up a map of the city, which was covered in bright-red warning icons. “Looks like the DFZ’s doing some moving of her own.”

  That turned out to be a very accurate description. Everything looked relatively normal in the Underground—just the usual cheap apartment blocks, discount stores, and neon-lit vending machine bars selling the standard assortment of canned liquor—but when we turned up the ramp to the Skyways, it was like entering a whole other world.

  The first thing that hit me was the sunlight. I cringed like a bad movie vampire when we came out of the tunnel into the upper city. Even through the smog, the summer afternoon was so blue and bright it scarcely looked real. I was so used to being under bridges that I’d almost forgotten how big the summer clouds could be, but even they were dwarfed by the city’s superscrapers.

  I grew up moving between Seoul, LA, and Hong Kong, so I was used to giant buildings, but the ones in the DFZ were on an entirely different level. Some of the glass and steel spires were a full quarter mile around at the base, with peaks so tall they created their own rain shadows. Even modern steel-strengthening spellwork couldn’t account for how enormous they were, because these buildings hadn’t been built by human hands. They were the product of the spirit of the city, sprouted from the ground like trees by the DFZ herself. And apparently she wasn’t done.

  “Wow,” I breathed, pressing my face against the scratched-up window.

  Ahead of us to the left, on the route we normally would have taken, an entire section of the New I-75 flyover had lifted from its support beams and was slowly moving to the north, much to the fury of the cars stuck on top of it. The angry blaring of horns was even louder than the advertisements still yakking through my speakers, but they were still nothing compared to the stomach-churning scrape of steel on stone from the new building that was rising from the ground where the highway had been.

  Even after three and a half years in the DFZ, the sight was a shock. I gawked like a tourist, watching wide-eyed as ribbons of steel rebar shot up from the exposed Underground like seedlings racing toward the sunlight. Cement followed more slowly, creeping up the metal as the new building constructed itself in front of my eyes. Given that the top of it was already visible above the Skyways, there had to be multiple floors already constructed in the Underground below that I wasn’t seeing, not to mention foundations. I hadn’t noticed a thing when I’d driven through that area this morning, though, which meant the DFZ had done all of that during the time I’d been stuck in the dead guy’s apartment. God or no, that struck me as quite impressive, and I whistled in appreciation.

  “I wonder what kind of building it’ll be.”

  “Given the area of the base, it’s either another superscraper or a stadium,” Sibyl replied. “Not that we need either. This area’s too crowded as it is.”

  I chuckled. “I think the city knows what she’s doing.”

  “Well, I just wish she’d wait until after rush hour to do it,” my AI grumped, bringing up the map again, which was updated in real time by the DFZ City Council, the only municipal service the city provided for free. “Look at this mess!”

  It was pretty dire. According to the warnings, I-75 had been on the move for the last forty-five minutes. All the side streets near the new building had been cut off as well on both the Skyways and Underground levels, and the resulting chaos had turned this entire section of the city into a parking lot.

  “Good thing we’re going south,” I said, looking sympathetically at the cars stranded on top of the moving bridge. “That thing doesn’t look like it’s coming down anytime soon.”

  “There’s no estimated end time listed on the traffic report,” Sibyl confirmed, her voice disgusted. “What is the DFZ thinking? She’s not exactly known for taking her citizens’ convenience into account, but moving a major commuter highway on a Monday just feels like bad planning.”

  I shrugged. “Spirits move in mysterious ways. I mean, for all we know, the delays are the point. She is the living incarnation of the city, and what’s more citylike than a traffic jam?” I smiled at the interstate, which was now a good fifty feet above the already elevated Skyways and still rising. “I’m just glad the truck’s AI was smart enough to route us around.”

  “Hooray for minimal competency,” Sibyl said dryly. “On the bright side, though, this means there should be a lot of Cleaning jobs coming up in the next few months. Historical data shows that there’s always a surge in vacancies after the DFZ does something big like this.”

  “It’s never comfortable to be reminded that you’re an ant in a god’s world,” I agreed, staring up at the two enormous superscrapers that were tilting sideways to make way for the new building, sending entire floors full of office furniture sliding in the process. “I just hope I’m still around to take advantage of it.”

  Normally, this was where Sibyl would insist things weren’t that bad, but her protocol against lying was stronger than her directive to cheer me up, and we both knew the truth. It was right there on the wallet icon at the top of my heads-up AR display. After a year of doing really well as a Cleaner, I’d hit a dry streak nothing seemed able to break. Today’s fiasco was just the latest in a long line of absolutely horrid luck. If I hadn’t been a mage and able to check these things for myself, I’d have sworn that I was cursed. Every time I looked, though, there was nothing. It was just plain old bad luck, statistical clustering, which meant it had to break soon. No one could be this unlucky forever. Whether I could hold out long enough to reach the other side, though, was another issue entirely.

  “Maybe we’ll get lucky and these’ll turn out to be a brilliant translation of some lost alchemical text,” I said, pulling the dead mage’s mysterious notes out of my bag. “Heidi’s a sucker for that stuff, and her department has seriou
s corporate funding. We could still make bank.”

  “If that mage was capable of anything worth ‘bank,’ he wouldn’t have been living on frozen burritos in a basement apartment,” my AI pointed out.

  I rolled my eyes. “Thanks for the vote of confidence.”

  “I just don’t want you getting your hopes too high,” Sibyl said. “As a social support AI, it’s my job to assist in your mental health, and these fits of wild optimism that crumble into crushing despair when they run into reality are not good for you. I think it would be much healthier for you to drop the notes in Heidi’s box and go home for a shower before the evening auction. I don’t have a nose, but I’m pretty sure you smell like dead guy.”

  That was undoubtedly true, but the thought of abandoning the notes—my only score from today’s disgusting, backbreaking work—in a cubby at the history department’s unorganized office was too much to bear. “Not a chance,” I said firmly. “We’re going inside. If these notes are worth something, I want to know today.”

  “Suit yourself,” Sibyl said. “I’m just saying there’s a strong likelihood this whole thing is a waste of time.”

  “Better to waste time than money,” I said stubbornly. “Time I’ve got.” Until Friday, at least.

  We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Thankfully, the traffic disruption from the moving highway was mostly confined to the northern half of downtown. Midtown, where the IMA campus was, was moving just fine. Once we got out of the glut, we made good time, cruising down the cheap toll lanes until we reached the turnoff for the institute just as the ride meter ticked to thirty-nine minutes, exactly as predicted.