by Rachel Aaron
Nik hunched his shoulders and kept walking, leaving me scrambling behind him.
I decided to stop asking him nosy questions after that. Rentfree was plenty interesting without antagonizing my partner, anyway. Like most famous places in the Underground, the first few blocks were pure tourist trap. Everything was brightly lit with flashing signs promoting every form of entertainment, from booze to food to sex to spas where you could relax in a sensory deprivation tank.
The main difference I noticed between Rentfree and the more traditional tourist areas like the Second Renaissance Center was that all the vendors and promoters here got right in your face. Not in my face, thankfully, since Nik was walking practically on my heels with his hand on the gun in his shoulder holster, which was in plain sight since he’d given me his coat, but it was definitely a high-pressure atmosphere. Even if they were too intimidated to come right up to me, though, we definitely drew a lot of attention, probably because I actually looked like I had money for once. Nik’s bomber jacket was pretty big on me, but it didn’t hide my skirt or heels. We looked like a slumming rich lady and her bodyguard, which wasn’t a bad look when you were trying to sell a bunch of designer clothes, but it definitely wasn’t subtle. Nik was clearly ticked at the attention, but I actually liked the stares. It kept people from walking into me, which meant I could spend more time gawking at the scenery.
I’d been wrong before. This was way better than it looked on television. Cameras simply couldn’t capture the depth of the city-made crevasse we were walking over on a thin crust of road that didn’t even count as a bridge. It was more like an asphalt jungle vine. Around us on all sides, crazily tilted buildings stood like cliffs, their window-speckled faces rising nearly a hundred feet to the vault of the Skyways and falling for what had to be thousands of feet into the pit. The insane structures were stacked like cargo containers, but they moved like Jenga blocks, sliding in and out of the stack with a low, continuous rumble. A whole office complex actually vanished while I watched, leaving a giant hole in the wall of buildings that was eventually plugged a few minutes later by a brick tenement.
None of the buildings seemed to have power natively. Instead, a vast network of extension cords and power lines covered their faces like cobwebs, the thin orange, white, and black lines running into every window to power what had to be hundreds of thousands of residences. Even without the burden of rent, I had no idea how anyone could live in buildings that moved so constantly, but there were clearly a lot of them. Everywhere I looked, people had crammed themselves in to the empty apartments and offices, sometimes running rope ladders out the windows to create highways across the constantly moving building-canyon wall.
It was pretty crazy, but I was also pleased to see that Rentfree wasn’t actually all homeless tent camps. The TV shows loved to play up the squalor and suffering, but some of the rooms I could see through the windows below had TVs and couches just like any other working-class apartment. This was especially true as you looked further down the pit toward the large circular structure taking up most of the bottom far, far below.
“What’s that?” I asked Nik, leaning over the wire some kind soul had strung across the edge of the bridge to stop tourists from plummeting to their deaths. “It looks like a stadium.”
“That’s the Gameskeeper’s Arena,” Nik replied, keeping a firm hand on my coat collar. “They have big fights there for people to gamble on. Other than the Night Lot, it’s the reason most outsiders come to Rentfree.”
My eyes went wide. I’d heard of the arena—or, at least, I’d seen the ads for all the fights you could pay to watch on demand with live betting—but I hadn’t realized it was so big. Big and popular. Now that I was looking for it, I noticed that most of the tourist groups were actually headed toward a wall of hacked-together freight elevators where promoters were waving signs advertising a fight between some dude and what appeared to be a tank covered in chainsaws.
“Looks like quite the show.”
“It draws a crowd of suckers,” Nik said, pulling on my collar as if he was tugging on a leash. “Can you please step away from the edge now? It’s a long fall, and you’re still drunk.”
I sighed and let him pull me back, reminding myself that I could sightsee anytime. Tonight I was on a mission, and our target was rapidly approaching.
As its name suggested, the Night Lot was in a parking lot. A seven-story deck, to be precise. Like everything else here, it was covered in DIY electrical lines and absolutely jam-packed with people. It also smelled amazing. As we got closer, I saw why. The entire first level was packed with food trucks selling food so fried it could have been cardboard and you’d never have known. Since this was Rentfree, it probably was cardboard, but damn if it didn’t smell good. I was seriously considering getting something just to try when Nik grabbed my arm and pulled me back on target.
“What’s the plan?”
Turning away from the delicious carts with a sigh, I pulled out my phone to check my price list. “We’ll start by getting a baseline,” I told him, digging into my trash bag of fashion for the three almost identical little black dresses I’d chosen to be my controls. “I’m going to sell these and average the prices to get a solid idea for where my sales fall compared to the expected price. Once I’ve got a control number, I’m going to try and sell something for as much as I can possibly get. I want to really go all out and give the curse a push. I’d also like you to try selling some stuff for me to see if that changes the numbers. Finally, I’m going to give you some things to sell with the understanding that you’ll be keeping the money for yourself.”
Nik frowned. “Why?”
“I want to see if the curse affects all transactions involving me or just the ones I profit from,” I explained. “I’m trying to figure out if the spell is sophisticated enough to understand intent or if it just latches on to anything I come in contact with. Either way, we should find out something we can work with.”
“Sounds good,” Nik said, taking my bag for me. “Lead the way.”
I grinned my thanks at him and took off, walking up the ramp as fast as my heels allowed toward the parking-deck-turned-market’s second floor, where I could already see a ton of used-clothes vendors lined up in what had been the handicapped spots.
Since the first three dresses were specifically meant to be my control, I sold them without haggling and got the expected meager results. Not a single one went for anything close to its listed value online, but I wasn’t too disappointed yet. After all, this was a flea market. Everyone here was out to make a deal at someone else’s expense. For my first real try, I picked my target much more carefully, selecting a middle-aged Chinese man whose booth was plastered with posters of impossibly gorgeous K-, J-, and C-pop idols. The song playing over his speakers was in Cantonese, too, which I was way better at than Mandarin, so I took a chance and stepped up.
“Hello, sir,” I greeted him in the same language, fluttering my eyelashes gratuitously. “You have amazing taste in music! Do you have good taste in other things as well?”
Thank God I was drunk. I never could have managed a line like that sober, but it worked like a charm. The shopkeeper immediately abandoned the pack of teenagers he’d been eying suspiciously and came over to smile at me. We had a quick, flirtatious chat about boy bands, and then I started asking how much he’d be willing to pay for a lacy skirt that was the closest thing to sexy my mother had put in my wardrobe. I’d thought it was going really well, but the price he came back with made me do a double take.
“Are you serious?” I said, abandoning the overly girly tone I’d been laying down like tar. “That’s less than half what it’s worth!”
“Because it has a stain,” the vendor said apologetically, turning the skirt over to show me a small black spot I swear hadn’t been there when I’d put it in the bag. “I’m doing you a favor, baby.”
I set my jaw hard. I didn’t even know what that stain was, but there was no way it was coming out of the pale
-pink lace. I poured the charm on even harder to try and salvage the situation, but the man wouldn’t budge. In the end, I had to take what he offered, glumly shoving the money into my wallet as I stomped away.
“That was bullshit,” I hissed at Nik once the crowds had swallowed us again. “I know that stain wasn’t there before!”
“If you say so,” he said, watching the people who elbowed past us warily. “I couldn’t understand a word. How many languages do you speak, anyway?”
“Korean, English, and Cantonese fluently, Mandarin and Japanese conversationally, and French terribly.” That last one was all my mom. She’d considered it refined for a young lady to speak French. I’d considered it torture.
Nik looked impressed. “How’d you learn all those?”
“My dad traveled a lot. His primary stronghold is in Seoul, but he visits the U.S. and Hong Kong for several months each year to oversee his various business interests. As his mortals, it was our job to tag along, so my mom made sure I could speak everything well enough not to embarrass him.”
“You were taught by your mom?” he asked, seeming genuinely curious. “What about school?”
“What about it?” I said bitterly. “I was Yong’s Opal. His possession, not his actual child. You don’t send a rock to school.”
“But you had to have something,” Nik pressed, moving closer to me so the impatient crowd couldn’t push us apart. “How else do you know so much?”
I shrugged. “I had tutors for magic, but my mother was in charge of my education. Of course, since I was being raised to serve a dragon, ‘education’ meant etiquette, dragon politics, and how to identify, pronounce, and evaluate luxury goods. All the actually useful stuff like math and history I had to teach myself.”
“You taught yourself?” Nik repeated, flabbergasted.
“The internet is a wondrous invention,” I said reverently.
He still looked shocked. “How did you get into college?!”
“Enough money can get you anywhere,” I replied with a self-deprecating smile. “Dad bought me into the best liberal arts school in Seoul, which is funny because he was dead set against me going at first. My mom was the one who actually sold the idea. She convinced the Great Yong that I’d be less rebellious if he gave me a bit of freedom.”
And wow, had that backfired. My parents had gambled that I’d get to college, freak out at all the new people and responsibilities, and scurry back home to never leave again. Instead, I’d lost my virginity to a K-drama star, thrown a raging party that had trashed my new Gangnam apartment, and gone on an unplanned vacation to Egypt all in the first week. I’d had an absolute blast, in other words, at least until my dad had showed up to drag me home. It was all a bit rich-kid-crazy in hindsight, but that’s what happens when you keep someone locked up in a dragon hoard for their entire childhood.
“So did you and your dad ever get along?” Nik asked. “Not to prod a sore spot, but it sounds like you’ve always been at each other’s throats.”
“Not always,” I said. “We got along great when I was little. Then I grew up and realized ‘puppy’ wasn’t a compliment.”
Just thinking about that made me a little sad. It was hard to believe given our current state, but there’d been a time not so long ago when I’d loved my dad with all my heart. Loved him like the daughter they all pretended I was, because I hadn’t been pretending. Unfortunately, he had been. Once I figured out I was just a source of entertainment, a novelty he toyed with to distract himself from the ennui of immortality, nothing had ever been the same.
“Let’s just keep going,” I muttered, pulling the next item—a powder-blue ostrich-leather jacket—out of my bag. “You want to try selling?”
“Sure,” Nik said, plucking the ridiculously delicate garment from my fingers. “So long as I don’t have to bat my eyes at anyone.”
“It might help.”
He shook his head and walked over to the next stand, leaving me bobbing hopefully behind him as he started to haggle.
***
The night only went downhill from there.
Since I hated all of it equally, I’d brought my entire wardrobe, almost fifty items in total. The stuff I sold on my own went even worse than expected, which was infuriating because I was schmoozing my damn heart out. But no matter how much I flirted and wheedled and guilted the vendors, not a single item from my stack went for more than fifty percent of its estimated value. The worst part, though, was that I never lost that fifty percent in the same way.
Of the twenty-odd items I sold solo—all to different vendors—every single one flopped in its own unique fashion. One shirt had a manufacturing defect I hadn’t noticed until the vendor pointed it out. My pair of black suede designer heels looked too similar to its pirated knockoff, so the vendor had refused to believe they were authentic. A guy bumped into me while eating a plate of mystery fry and got grease all over a pair of rose suede pants. One of the big tables already had five identical cream blouses that weren’t selling, which meant none of the other vendors wanted to buy mine. On and on and on. Each failure was for a different, infuriatingly vague reason, but the end result was always the same: I was making half of what I should, and nothing I did seemed to change it.
Nik did slightly better. He suffered from the same seemingly random spread of unrelated problems, but his losses only came to about forty-five percent. Interestingly, it stayed forty-five percent whether he was selling things for me or for himself, which suggested that my mere presence was enough to bring down profits. We’d kind of figured that out already from the few times I’d tried to help Nik sell our Cleaning salvage, which was why he now went to the auction houses alone, but it was morbidly fascinating to actually observe the curse in action. Fascinating and incredibly, incredibly frustrating.
“I just don’t understand,” I said for what had to be the thousandth time. “Every time, it’s something different! It’s like there’s no rhyme or reason at all, but that can’t actually be the case. Even curses have to have rules, something that tells the magic to do X in case of Y. But I can’t find any consistency at all! It’s like he just bribed the universe to make my life fifty percent more miserable!”
Nik nodded absently, but he wasn’t really listening anymore. He was too busy looking over his shoulder, his face set in a permanent scowl as he scanned the crowd behind us, which wasn’t nearly as thick as it had been when we’d arrived. It was after midnight now, and even in the Night Lot, people were heading home. The main ramp through the converted parking deck, which had been so packed an hour earlier that going up it had felt like we were salmon swimming upstream, was now empty enough for us to walk comfortably side by side as we made our way back down to the ground floor.
The vendors were packing up as well, boxing their goods into locked containers to haul back home for safekeeping until tomorrow’s market. Those items that couldn’t be easily moved were being marked down for rapid sale. One seller actually slashed the price on a retro Kenmore fridge right as I walked past. The moment I saw the new price, my instincts started screaming at me to buy it. Classics like that were hot collectors’ items, and I knew a guy who’d pay top dollar for that particular shade of lemon yellow. It was easy money dangling right in front of me, but I didn’t dare reach for it. Now that it had bitten me so many times in a row, I could actually feel my dad’s curse slithering over my magic. It was the lightest touch, no more than a shadow, but it was there and waiting. Waiting to do what, I had no idea. I also had no idea how to make it stop.
“Argh!” I groaned, stomping ahead so I wouldn’t have to see someone else buy what should have been my fridge. “This is so stupid! How do I avoid a curse that dooms me differently every time?”
“Maybe it’s the selling itself that’s the problem?” Nik said, catching up with me. “You haven’t tried making money in other ways. What about a salary? If I just paid you a flat rate every month, could the curse take that? Would it find a way to make me stop paying you?”<
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“I don’t know,” I said, looking up at him. “Would you do that?”
“If it got around the curse, absolutely,” Nik said with a scowl. “I’m taking a forty-five percent hit from this too, don’t forget.”
I winced. “Sorry.”
“I’m not blaming you,” he said quickly. “But if I could stop losing half my money for no damn reason, that’d be great. I mean, just think how much we’d be making if we weren’t losing a huge chunk of our cash every time.”
“Believe me, I’ve thought about it,” I said, scrubbing my fingers through my hair, which was now more sweaty than glossy. It was beastly hot in here even with the cold breeze blowing up from the depths, and Nik’s heavy coat was absolutely roasting me. I’d also sobered up enough now to move on to the hangover portion of the night, which was definitely not helping matters.
“We could try the salary thing,” I said, moving my hands down to rub my pounding head. “But I don’t know if it would work. I don’t know anything. That’s why I’m so mad. All of these transactions were supposed to reveal the limits of the curse’s power, but all I actually managed to do was sell a closet full of brand-new, never-worn, next-season haute couture for used-T-shirt prices!”
“I thought this wasn’t about the money,” Nik said.
“That doesn’t mean I’m happy about losing it!” I cried, pressing my fingers into my eyes. It was either that or bawl in pure frustration. “The only thing I learned for sure tonight is that the curse is screwing us both even harder than I realized. We’re both going to go bankrupt at this rate.”
I paused there to let Nik say that he wasn’t going to go bankrupt and everything was going to be okay like he had earlier today. He didn’t say a word this time, though, which made me feel even worse. I was about to suggest we just go home before I got any more depressed when Nik grabbed my arm.
“What if money wasn’t involved at all?”
I frowned at him, not following.
“Your curse takes fifty percent of all the money you make, right?” Nik said, his gray eyes flashing excitedly. “But what if you were trading for something that wasn’t money?”