by Rachel Aaron
“You mean like barter?”
Nik nodded rapidly. “Say you swapped a thousand-dollar fridge for a thousand-dollar TV. How would the curse ruin that value? Would it cut the TV in half?”
“I….I have no idea,” I said. Then my face split into a grin. “Let’s try it.”
Nik grinned back at me, and we both turned on our heels, racing through the throngs of drunks yelling rowdily for kebabs, funnel cakes, and jalapeño corn dogs in the fleet of food trucks that had taken up permanent residence on the Night Lot’s bottom level. When we got back to the regular shops on the upper floors, though, I realized in dismay that I had nothing left to trade.
“I got it,” Nik said, pulling out his wallet before I could even tell him what was wrong.
“Are you sure?” I asked nervously. “I’ve already cost you a lot.”
“Exactly, I’m invested now,” he said. “I want to see if this works just as much as you do. Now, what do you want to barter?”
After much discussion and looking over of tables, we settled on a thirty-dollar chef’s knife. It was new in the box and the sort of thing that was always in demand, so I figured we had a good shot at convincing someone to trade for it. It was also a pretty good deal and something Nik needed anyway, so if we ended up getting stuck with it, it was no big loss. Under any normal circumstances, I would have called it a super-safe bet, but I’d been losing money on safe bets all night, so my heart was still hammering as I carried my new knife up one floor to a fresh set of vendors and started trying for a trade.
I struck out at the first booth. I didn’t know if that was the curse or if the lady who ran it just didn’t like my face, because I’d barely opened my mouth before she waved me away. The second table I tried was a guy who, ironically, specialized in dragon collectibles. He had books signed by Bethesda, Queen of the Heartstriker Clan, and a whole ton of DFZ-branded dragon swag at much cheaper prices than the Dragon Consulate’s gift shop. There were posters of the White Witch and all her hot sisters, morbidly themed sauces that supposedly went well on humans, even a selection of shiny disks he claimed were dragon scales. They were not dragon scales, of course. I wasn’t sure what they were actually made of, but no dragon was stupid enough to leave pieces of themselves lying around for mortals to find, especially not at those prices.
But while the scales were definitely a scam, the rest looked pretty legit. Dragon stuff was always a reliable seller, especially in the dragon-heavy DFZ. Like most of the vendors here, he sold a lot of other stuff as well, and so I made him a pitch to see if he was interested in my knife. To my surprise, he bit, and I ended up walking away with a stack of thirty-year-old dragon wanted posters issued by Algonquin’s former Anti-Dragon Task Force. One was even signed by the famous dragon hunter Vann Jeger, which made it historically significant.
Total online retail value: forty-five dollars.
“Holy shit,” I whispered when Sibyl came back with the number. “Holy shit.” I looked up at Nik. “I made money.”
“You made money,” he agreed, grinning from ear to ear.
“I made money!” I cried, squealing so loud the whole crowd turned to glare at me, but I was too busy hugging Nik and jumping up and down to care. “It worked! It actually worked! We did it! We broke the—”
I froze, stopping so short I banged my forehead on Nik’s metal chest. “Wait, no, it didn’t work.”
“What are you talking about?” Nik demanded. “You just made a profit for the first time in months.”
“No, I went sideways,” I said, shaking the pile of posters at him. “This isn’t profit, it’s just more stuff. I can’t pay my dad in posters, and if I try to sell these, I’m only going to get twenty-two dollars and fifty cents, not forty-five. That’s less than the knife, which means I still lost money.”
“You could try to trade the posters for something even more valuable,” Nik suggested.
“That won’t work either,” I said despairingly. “I got lucky and found a good deal, but I can’t count on that happening every time. Even if I was the queen of hustle, I’d have to trade everything I got up to at least twice its original value just to counter the fifty percent the curse will take whenever I finally do cash out, and that’s just not going to happen. It’s not going to work.”
Nik’s face fell back into a scowl, and I suddenly felt like a jerk for yanking the rug out from under him, which was stupid because I was the one who’d fallen on her face. I’d really thought for a second there that I’d beaten this, but while it was nice to see something work for once, there was just no way I could barter my way past a fifty percent knockback on every single—
I froze, eyes going wide. “Wait,” I said, clutching my posters. “Wait, wait, wait.”
Nik crossed his arms patiently over his chest while I turned in a circle, scanning all the tables until I found one with the display I wanted. Hugging my precious win to my chest, I scuttled over to a booth where a heavily made-up lady was hawking makeup, secondhand jewelry, and hair accessories. It took a lot of looking, but eventually I found an unmatched earring in her discount bin that Sibyl’s density scanner confirmed was what I was looking for. It took even longer to convince the lady to trade it to me, but I was in full-on saleswoman mode now, playing up the historical and monetary value of my posters to the Skyways. In the end, my passion for the DFZ’s short but bizarre history won through, and I walked away with the earring clutched in my hot little hands. When I showed my prize to Nik, though, he looked unimpressed.
“What are you going to do with one earring?” he asked, scowling at the gleaming gold stud in my hand. “It’s not even interesting. It’s just a ball.”
“A ball of fourteen-karat gold,” I told him smugly, turning the stud over so he could see the microscopic 14k stamped on the back. “Assuming it weighs at least two grams, that’s one gram of actual gold once you subtract the weight of the other metals they added to make it hard enough to work as jewelry. And at the current market rate, one gram of gold is worth…” I paused to let Sibyl look it up. “Thirty-eight dollars.”
“Okay,” Nik said, looking far more interested now. “That’s less than the posters but more than the knife, so we’re still good.”
“We’re way better than good,” I said, my voice quivering with anticipation. “Don’t you see? You were right. The curse only seems to kick me when I’m trying to earn money, as in legal currency. But gold isn’t money. It’s a commodity, so it wasn’t affected, but it does have a set value. This isn’t like selling clothes or cheese boards or other random objects where we have to take whatever people are willing to pay. There’s literally a price per gram that the whole world agrees on. That price goes up and down with the gold markets, of course, but it’s not the sort of thing one person can change.”
I shook the little earring pinched in my fingers. “According to the current listed gold price, this stud is worth at least thirty-eight dollars. By the rules of the curse we’ve observed tonight, that means I should only be able to sell it for fifty percent of that, or about nineteen dollars. But since it’s gold, the only way it can sell for that little is if the price of all gold drops by fifty percent, which would be a total market crash.”
Nik recoiled in horror. “Can your curse do that?”
“I don’t know!” I said excitedly. “That’s the question. Which is stronger: my dad’s magic or an international commodities market? I honestly have no idea what’s going to happen, but I saw a cash-for-gold guy one level up, so I’m going to find out.”
With that, I whirled around and started running up the ramp. Nik followed right on my high heels, keeping pace easily since I was hobbled by my bad footwear choices. My feet were actually killing me by this point, but that didn’t slow me down at all as I rushed toward the stall I’d noticed earlier this evening, sending up a prayer to anyone listening that it was still open.
For once, luck was on my side. I got to the enclosed booth marked CA$H 4 GOLD just as the man inside was low
ering his security shutter.
“Wait!” I cried, sticking my hand under the metal lattice just before it closed. “I want to make a sale!”
I must have looked too crazy to deny, because the thin, birdlike man inside heaved a long-suffering sigh and rolled the shutter back up. “What you got?”
I showed him my tiny earring, and his face grew even more disgusted. “Really?”
“Your sign says ‘Cash for gold,’” I told him pointedly, placing my other arm on the counter as well so he couldn’t slam the shutter back down on me. “It doesn’t specify a minimum.”
“You do know it’s two minutes to closing, right?” he griped. Then he spotted Nik standing behind me. “But I guess I can squeeze you in.”
I beamed at the skinny man as he sat back down on his stool and pulled out his phone, which had exactly the same type of density scanner that mine did. Once he’d confirmed the earring was, indeed, made of actual gold, he popped it onto his digital scale.
“Two grams at fourteen k,” he muttered, turning the scale’s screen so I could see it too. “That’s one point one seven grams of pure gold. At the current market price, that’s…”
He looked over his shoulder at the enclosed booth’s back wall, where a large, blindingly bright LCD displayed a real-time graph of the gold market with the current price shown prominently at the top. When he’d first put the earring on the scale, the glowing numbers had been the same ones Sibyl had shown me earlier: $38.02 per gram. The moment the clerk mentioned paying me, though, the sign went crazy.
The vendor nearly fell off his stool at the sight. He steadied himself with a curse, sweat rolling down his cheeks as the graph of the gold market started to plunge. I held my breath as well, watching the numbers go down, down, down. For five terrifying seconds, the glowing line plummeted like a falling arrow. Then, fast as it had begun, the crash stopped, and the graph stabilized, wobbling up and down before finally coming to a rest at $36.10.
“Holy crapola,” the guy said, wiping his face with a paper napkin from the stack beside him. “That was a five percent drop!” He turned back to me with a shaky breath. “Did you stomp on a bunch of graves on your way over or something?”
“No more than usual,” I said, nodding at the sign. “So is that the price you’re going to give me? Because the market was higher when I first came in.”
The man’s pinched face scrunched even tighter, and he pointed over his shoulder at the handwritten sign taped above the fancy LCD one, which read THE MARKET IS ALWAYS RIGHT.
“Okay,” I said, putting up my hands. “Thirty-six bucks it is.”
Muttering sourly under his breath, the clerk opened his cash drawer to start counting out my payment, which came to only thirty-two dollars once he’d taken his fee. Not that I cared. I grabbed those thirty-two bucks like they were the goddamn Holy Grail, shuffling the bills in my shaking hands as I pulled out the three tens and handed them to Nik.
“There’s for the knife,” I said. Then I held up the remaining two crumpled bills. My beautiful, precious, glorious two dollars of profit. “And here’s for me.”
Nik grinned wide. I grinned back, and then I started to laugh. The guy in the gold booth looked at me as if I was nuts, but this was worth a little crazy. I’d just made two dollars. A sum greater than zero! It wasn’t much even by my low standards, but the number didn’t matter. The fact that those two dollars existed was the lever I could use to crack open the whole damn world. I was still cackling about that when my phone started vibrating wildly in my hand.
Too wildly happy to be properly cautious, I answered the call without thinking, lifting the flat slab of electronics to my ear as I answered in a sing-song voice.
“Yello!”
“What did you just do?”
My blood ran cold. The voice over my speakers was growling and warped, but I’d know it anywhere. That was my dad’s voice, and he was furious. Just hearing the echo of his anger through the phone was enough to make me cower like he was right in front of me. My next instinct was to apologize and beg forgiveness, anything to make him stop snarling. The “sorry” was already on the tip of my tongue before my brain finally wrangled my terror into submission, and I came back to my senses.
“I don’t know, Dad,” I said angrily. “What did I do?”
The Great Yong hesitated, then he blew out a breath so hard I swore I could smell the smoke over the phone. “Don’t do it again.”
“Why not?” I demanded, my heart pounding wildly. I’d never had one up on my dad before, and the thrill of even this small victory was enough to set my whole body afire. “Did you feel it? Did I hit?”
The growling grew louder. “Don’t play this game with me, Opal.”
“You started it,” I reminded him. “Everything was nice and fair until you decided to cheat.”
“Don’t you dare turn this back around on me,” he snarled, his voice so angry I hoped he wasn’t near anything flammable. “This entire situation is your fault. The debt was your idea.”
“Because it was the only way to make you let me go!” I yelled at him. “You’re the one who put me in this corner. If you don’t like what I’m doing, feel free to stop.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” Yong said dismissively. “This changes nothing.”
“I think it does,” I said, my face splitting back into a grin. “You called me, remember? You just tipped your hand, so I’d say this changes a lot.”
My dad’s response to that was a frustrated hiss and a change of subject, which made me smile even harder. “Why are you pushing so hard? You’re fighting for a life you don’t even want.”
“You don’t know what I want.”
“I know you can’t actually want to be a Cleaner,” he said, his voice disgusted. “Working with a criminal and digging through garbage in that pit of a city. That’s no future for you.”
“You don’t get to say that,” I snapped. “It’s not like you care enough to actually find out anything about me. You don’t even know what sort of furniture I like!”
“You think I’d go through this much trouble if I didn’t care?” he snapped back. “You are my Opal! I created you, raised you, taught you, and protected you. No one treasures you more than I do!”
“I’m not a rock!” I yelled at him. “I’m a person!”
“Enough!” Yong roared. “I’m done indulging you.”
“You’re not indulging me in anything,” I reminded him nastily. “I’m winning. I figured out how to beat your little curse, and I’m going to pay you back so hard no one will ever be able to say you own me again.”
“We’ll see about that,” my father growled. “The terms of your loan are now changed. I want your entire balance paid in full by the end of the month.”
My heart leapt into my throat. “You can’t do that.”
“It was my magnanimity that allowed you to make payments in the first place,” he said haughtily. “But you’ve made it clear how little you value my gifts, so I see no reason to keep granting them. Of course, if you come home, you won’t have to pay a thing. Or you can keep flinging yourself at the wall until you fail. Your choice, but one way or another, you will return to me, Opal. End of discussion.”
“That’s not how discussions work!” I cried, but he’d already hung up, leaving me heaving at my end-call screen. “Asshole!”
“That sounded like it went well,” Nik said dryly.
“Screw this!” I yelled, shoving my phone back into my bag. “Let’s go make some money. I’m going to shove that debt down his damn throat!”
“Whoa,” Nik said, grabbing my shoulders. “Opal, it’s one in the morning.”
I jerked out of his hold. “So? This is the DFZ. There’s always work.”
“Not the kind you want to do,” he said, giving me a knowing look. “I understand you want to get a jump on this, but we’ve been going hard since dawn. You’ll have a much better chance of actually making this work if you rest.”
“Li
sten to the man!” Sibyl cried from my bag. “He speaks sense!”
I knew that, but that didn’t mean I liked hearing it. The only thing I wanted right now was a briefcase full of gold to wing at my dad’s stupid face. But while the spirit was definitely willing, the flesh was having issues. I was hungover, my feet felt like two branding irons, and my stomach was churning from all the alcohol and fried meat. Even my sprained magic was acting up again, which was unfair because I’d been so careful not to use it. But reality had never cared much about fair, and the cold, hard truth of the situation was that I was a wreck who needed to sit down before she fell down.
Nik knew it, too. He didn’t even have to say anything. He just offered me his arm. The gesture was both gentlemanly and condescending, but I knew Nik well enough by now to understand he didn’t mean to be either. It was pure practicality. Now that the drunken tunnel vision of conquering my curse had faded, I was rapidly shriveling into a husk of a human being. I needed sleep and water and to never drink that much beer again. I also needed a prop to keep from falling on my face, and his steady arm would do nicely.
“Sorry to be a burden,” I muttered as I latched onto him with both hands.
“You’re not a burden.”
Given that he was currently supporting half my weight, that was demonstrably untrue, but I was too tired to bicker over semantics. I was just relieved to take the load off my feet after a full night of running around in these stupid heels. I couldn’t believe I used to wear these torture devices every day. Shaking my head at the memory, I leaned harder on Nik as we hobbled down the ramp. We’d almost made it to the door when something hard and reeking of pot smoke and unwashed laundry slammed hard into my side. I grunted at the impact, and then I was shoved out of the way as a woman—the source of the smell—lunged out of the crowd to wrap her arms around Nik.
Chapter 4