by Rachel Aaron
The words echoed in my ears as I watched the money vanish from my account. Broker had already moved on to the next auction, but I didn’t stick around to hear it. Whatever it was, I couldn’t afford it. But done was done, so I hauled myself out of my seat and slipped past Nik toward the door to go see what I’d just spent all my money on.
Chapter 3
I didn’t unmute Sibyl until I reached Magic Heights.
“Do I even need to say anything?” she said as I parked my truck across the street from my new unit.
I sighed and stepped out onto the sidewalk, which was lined with flowering dogwood trees despite the fact that it was the middle of July and the cement ceiling of the Skyways overhead blocked every photon of sunlight. Ah, the perks of living in a magical neighborhood. I missed them.
“You have to know how stupid that was,” my AI went on. “We’re supposed to be earning money, not wasting it!”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to say anything,” I grumbled, scanning the row of brick townhouses to find the one I’d won. “And it was a calculated risk.”
“There was nothing calculated about it!” she shouted, making my ears ring. “You got carried away, just like you always do, and now you’re screwed again. Just. Like. Always.”
“I don’t need this right now,” I said, reaching for her mute button again only to discover that it had vanished from my interface. “Sibyl!”
“No,” she said sharply. “You told me two weeks ago that if you didn’t get it together by this Friday, you were done for. You ordered me to make sure you didn’t go off track! But then, when I try to do my job, you go and mute me! How am I supposed to help you if you won’t help yourself?”
“I am helping myself!” I yelled, drawing strange looks from the pack of university students walking on the other side of the road. “You saw the other auctions. There was nothing! This is the best lead I’ve had in months. If I can get my hands on even a quarter of those reagents, I’ll have enough to make my debt payments and cover rent for the rest of the summer! That’s worth a gamble.”
“On a hundred, maybe,” Sibyl said. “But two thousand? That’s all the money you had left!”
“I know, I know, I know,” I said, scrubbing my hands through my sweaty hair. “I get it, okay? But done is done. The money’s gone, and I can’t bid on another auction until tomorrow morning. There’s no turning things around tonight, so let’s just go inside and see if we can make my money back.”
Sibyl made a sound so frustrated it would have made her emotional-development programmer cry, but she didn’t say another word. When I was certain she was done, I reached into the neck of my poncho and pulled out my master key, scurrying across the quiet street to the townhouse at the end of the row, my target.
It was a lot nicer than I’d anticipated. From the picture, I’d expected another basement apartment, but the address was for the entire townhouse. It was a corner unit, too. Sure, the western wall was built right up against the massive cement cliff of a Skyway support beam, which meant the whole place rattled whenever a big truck drove overhead, but it only had neighbors on one side. The street was quiet and tree-lined, too, all huge luxuries in the Underground. The pale-pink paint job on the brick exterior was a little odd, but overall it was a charming little house, which made no sense given everything else I’d seen today.
“I don’t get it,” I said, pushing open the chain-link gate that separated the townhouse’s postage-stamp yard from the sidewalk. “If he had a place like this, why did he die locked in that hole?”
“You said yourself that the subbasement was probably a safe house,” Sibyl reminded me. “If that’s right, then it makes total sense that he’d run there after his door was kicked in.”
I shook my head. “We don’t know if this happened before or after his death. Seeing how both of his units came up for auction on the same day, though, I bet the timing was close.”
More than close. I was already putting the timeline together in my head. Something had made this man feel threatened, so he’d fled to his safe house. When the people who’d made him afraid realized he was gone, they’d smashed up his home. The only question left was why.
“I bet it was money,” Sibyl said when I mentioned it. “Someone had to foot the bill for all those reagents, and kicking in doors is classic loan shark behavior.”
As usual, my AI had a good point, but as we climbed the cement steps to the townhome’s tiny porch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it. I’d Cleaned abandoned apartments for plenty of loan shark victims, and in my experience, debt collectors broke bones, not stuff. Stuff could be sold to pay back the loan, but whoever had broken into this place didn’t seem to care about stuff at all. A suspicion that became cold, hard fact when we reached the unit’s door.
“Wow,” I said.
The front door wasn’t just kicked off its hinges, it had been annihilated. There wasn’t even a splinter left for my master key to unlock. Just a few lines of yellow caution tape Collections had placed over the empty doorway to keep random people from wandering in. The spellwork I’d spotted on the door frame was still there, but now that I was standing on top of it, I could see that huge portions were burned black, probably from trying to stop whoever had busted their way in here. And then busted their way through everything else, if the living room was any indication.
“Were they getting paid by the piece?” I asked, looking around at the furniture, or what was left of it.
The living room had looked plain old trashed in the picture, but now that I was actually here, I could see that every stick of furniture had been carefully and methodically broken into segments no longer than an inch. The sofa looked like a pile of cotton confetti, and the glass coffee table had been smashed back into sand. The pictures on the walls—more museum photos of ancient alchemical artifacts, though much higher-quality ones than what I’d found in the basement apartment—had been bashed out of their frames and shredded into streamers. Even the built-in bookcases had been pried out of their nooks, the books methodically ripped in half, which was just obscene. Unlike the collection I’d gone through this morning, there’d been some nice stuff in here, and it was all ruined.
“I don’t understand,” Sibyl said, turning my cameras slowly to get a panorama of the destruction. “What kind of robber kicks in a door and then sits around breaking valuables into tiny pieces?”
“None,” I said, pulling a fistful of magic into my hand and slapping it against my poncho to activate all of my personal wards. “This wasn’t a robbery. They were looking for something.” And I bet I knew what.
I reached into my bag for the notes I was still carrying. Of everything in that basement apartment, these were what our poor dead mage had chosen to hide, which meant they were probably what the people who’d broken in here had been looking for. I had them now, though, and if there was something worth finding here, I was certain these notes were the key to it.
“All right, Sibyl,” I said, pointing at the line of chicken scratch Heidi had identified as the spell’s main variable. “Add this to your photo recognition library, and let’s see if we can’t find something interesting.”
“Or we could leave,” Sibyl suggested. “There’s still time to cut our losses and bail.”
“Why would we do that?” I demanded. “We just got a hint that this gamble might actually pay out! What happened to ‘Oh, Opal, we need to make money’?”
“It got preempted by ‘Oh, Opal, we need to stay alive,’” my AI said nervously, darting my cameras toward the other rooms, which were also filled with meticulously broken furniture. “Does nothing about this make you think that perhaps we’re stepping into something we shouldn’t? People who do this to furniture are also capable of doing it to human bodies, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be deleted if you get yourself killed.”
“It’ll be fine,” I assured her, scraping my boot across the floor. “Look at the dust. No one’s been here in weeks. Even if so
meone was watching, I’m just a Cleaner doing my job. Nothing suspicious at all. Now are you going to help me or not?”
Sibyl heaved a recorded sigh. “Hold it up.”
I fanned the pages of spellwork out in front of me and then held still while Sibyl took her pictures. When she’d finished scanning all the parts I wanted for photo recognition, I stuck the notes back into my bag and pulled my hood up so my wards protected my head. “I want all cameras on lookout,” I ordered, pulling on my rubber gloves. “I’ll do the Cleaning, you keep your eyes open.”
“Yes ma’am,” she said, turning my cameras to get a 360-degree view of the room. “But what are we looking for, exactly?”
I took a deep breath as I stared at the remains of the destroyed life I’d bought for two thousand bucks.
“Anything.”
***
“Anything” turned out to be not as much as I thought. The townhouse was smaller than it had looked from the outside—just two floors, and both of them were busted. Even the brooms in the pantry had been broken in half. I grabbed one anyway, using the bristles like a shovel to push the pulverized furniture into a pile while my cameras searched for some sign there’d ever been anything interesting here. But while our mage had clearly been a huge fan of putting spellwork on things, it was all basic utility stuff: an anti-mildew ward in the bathroom, a heating spell for his chair, that sort of thing. There was definitely no giant magical circle full of cockatrice eggs or giant treasure chest full of reagents. I didn’t let that get me down, though, because I’d seen the receipts. I knew he’d already bought everything he’d needed for that spell, which meant it had to be somewhere. If it wasn’t here in his smashed house, that greatly increased the odds of it being whole and together somewhere else. I just had to find out where.
“Is there anything left in the house’s computer?” I asked Sibyl when we’d turned over every bit of wreckage. “A saved locations file, rent payments for another address, anything like that?”
“Nada,” my AI said. “I got into the home network while you were still climbing the front steps, but everything was already wiped. That’s typical, though. I mean, when have we ever Cleaned a place that’s had old data lying around?”
“Fair point,” I said grumpily, leaning against the kitchen wall, which for some inexplicable reason was painted bright canary yellow.
“We could try asking the neighbors,” Sibyl suggested. “This much destruction must have been loud. I bet someone heard it.”
I snorted. “This is the DFZ Underground. No one hears anything.” At least not for free. If I’d had cash to spare, I probably could have gotten someone to talk, but I’d spent too much on this already, and I was beginning to worry I’d never get it back. I was wracking my brain to think of a new angle when something made me freeze.
It was hard to say what. I hadn’t seen or heard anything specific, but something had caught my body’s attention, and I’d learned to pay attention to things like that.
“What’s wrong?” Sibyl asked.
I waved my hand to bring up my AR keyboard. Not sure, I typed.
What do you want to do? she typed back, which I appreciated even though no one could hear her voice but me.
I moved closer to the kitchen window, pulling magic into my hands as I went, just in case. Get me a shot of the street.
My cameras whirred in reply, and I leaned forward just enough to slip the lens mounted on the edge of my goggles past the window frame. Even with my night-vision filter, though, I didn’t see anything. Just the tree-lined street out front, which was just as picturesque as it had been when I’d come in, though a bit rowdier since this was a college neighborhood and it was closing in on nine o’clock, prime party time.
Releasing the magic I’d gathered, I stepped away from the window, careful to stay out of line of sight. It was probably nothing, but I’d come by my paranoia honestly, and I’d learned to trust it. If I felt like something was wrong, something almost always was, which meant it was time to pick up the pace.
“Change of plans,” I said, kneeling on the floor. “We’re going to try some magic.”
“Are you sure?” Sibyl asked nervously. “Not to bring you down, but your spellwork is…not the best. Not that you’re not fantastic when it comes to blowing stuff up on the fly, but—”
“It’s okay, you don’t have to sweet-talk me,” I said, digging around in my bag for the tiny nubbin of casting chalk I carried specifically for times like this. “I’ve had twenty years of the best experts money can buy telling me in excruciating detail exactly how much my spellwork sucks. I know it’s not my strong suit, but there are some things you just can’t do by throwing a bunch of magic around. It’s all right, though. Even I can manage something like this.” Especially if the alternative was leaving empty-handed. “Just go online and look me up a tracing spell. A simple one, please.”
Sibyl had a whole list up before I’d finished my request, which would have been impressive if I hadn’t known how easy they were to find. Tracing spells were grade school-level magic. All you needed was a piece of whatever you were looking for—a splinter, a crumb, a hair—and the spell would do the rest. There were limits, of course. Distance, importance of the object being used as a link, and whether the thing you were looking for was inside a ward or not were all factors. But finding spells were famously flexible and, most importantly for me, forgiving. I just hoped there was something here for me to find.
“All right,” I said, tapping on the spell whose description looked the closest to what I wanted to do. “Let’s give this a try.”
I swept my arm across the kitchen floor to create a clean spot and drew a circle on the tile with my chalk. I hadn’t done this in a while, so my first few were more like ovals, but that was why I used casting chalk and not markers. Every time it came out wrong, I just erased the line and tried again, drawing and redrawing until, at last, I had a more or less perfect circle.
I copied the spellwork next, blatantly stealing from the example spell Sibyl had looked up for me. But while that covered the basics, nothing could help with the hardest part: modifying the spellwork to fit my custom search parameters.
“What are you even going to search for?” Sibyl asked.
I rustled the stack of notes at her, and my AI made a choking sound. “That’s not going to work.”
“Why not?” I asked, dropping the pages into the middle of the circle I’d just drawn. “He wrote all this stuff himself. Why can’t I use it to find more?”
“That’s not the problem,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll find tons of custom spellwork, because this house is filled with the stuff. But unless you’re looking for his anti-soap scum charm, it’s not going to do you any good.”
“Ah,” I said with a grin. “But all of those charms are broken. I’m going to use this to find something that isn’t.”
“And do what with it?”
I hadn’t figured that part out yet, but I was getting desperate. If I couldn’t turn up something good here, then I’d spent all of my money on nothing. That was enough to inspire some serious creative thinking, and soon I had the spell modified for what I thought would lead to what I wanted. The only way to know for sure was to test it, though, so I reached out and grabbed the ambient magic floating through the house, shoving power by the fistful into the circle I’d drawn on the kitchen floor until the spellwork was glowing like phosphorus. When I couldn’t push any more in, I took a deep breath and removed my gloves, placing my bare fingers on the chalk circle that was now vibrating with magic.
“Please work,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “Please—”
The circle pulsed with enough power to knock me on my ass. When I scrambled up again, every bit of still-functional spellwork in the house was glowing like neon.
“Huh,” I said, grinning at the lights that now surrounded me on all sides. “What do you know? It worked!”
“Only because the spellwork you stole was foolproof,” Sibyl chided, her
voice staticky thanks to the mud-thick magic that now filled the house. “You always put too much power in!”
I shrugged. “Go big or go home.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t blow the whole place sky high,” my AI went on. “It’s a good thing you’re used to a lot of magic, or you’d be bleeding like a stuck pig right now.”
I was bleeding a little from my nose, but Sibyl hadn’t noticed yet, so I saw no reason to tell her. I was too busy scouring the house for any spellwork I hadn’t noticed earlier.
As Sibyl had predicted, there were a lot of false positives. Pretty much everywhere you could put spellwork, our mage had crammed it in. But I’d combed through the house pretty thoroughly by this point, so I was able to quickly dismiss the stuff I’d already seen. I was looking for something new, something I hadn’t seen in my earlier searching, and a few minutes later, I found it.
“Gotcha!”
It was in the pantry, buried under a bunch of boxes of instant potatoes the people who’d been through this place had torn apart and left in a pile. But underneath the white flakes and green flecks of freeze-dried parsley, something was shining. A lot of something, and that gave me hope.
I grabbed my broom, sweeping the potato flakes out into the kitchen to reveal the pantry’s floor. But the glowing spellwork wasn’t on the tiles. It was under them, the blaze of my finding spell shining up through the cracks in the mortar.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” I said excitedly, reaching for my pocketknife. I was grinning so hard my face hurt when the blade slid easily between the clay tiles, popping one up to reveal a hidden space below the floor. And shoved into that space was a warded box exactly like the one I’d found under the dead mage’s bed.
“Huh,” Sibyl said. “I guess I owe you an apology.”
“You owe me a lot more than that,” I said joyfully as I grabbed my tongs out of my bag, because I was not going to get bitten this time. “I want to hear you saying I was right for a week when I pay off all my…”
