Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “It’s the stuff on the shelves, right?”

  I nodded, unable to speak. He nodded back and started carefully but quickly packing my things into the box with a Cleaner’s efficiency. I stood there watching him for a good minute and a half before it hit me that if I wasn’t being an idiot before, I was definitely being one now.

  “I’ll do my room,” I said in a rush, grabbing a black trash bag from the box I kept in my closet before sprinting for my bedroom door. “Prioritize the ceramics. If it doesn’t fit in that box, just leave it.”

  “I can get it all,” Nik said confidently. “I do this all the time.”

  I could have hugged him right then. If I hadn’t wasted so much time already, I would have fallen at his feet and thanked him from the bottom of my heart. It was such a small kindness, just a few extra minutes, but while plenty of people had been kind to me in my life, no one had done it for as little as Nik had just now. I wouldn’t have done it. I was already furious with myself over how selfish I was being. It was just junk, the unsellable dregs of a collection that had only taken me a year to put together. The only reason it mattered was because of my weird attachment issues. If Kauffman already had guys lined up in case we rejected his offer, I might have just gotten us killed over trinkets. Nik had to know that, and yet here he was, working to save my stuff without complaint or condemnation.

  I had no words for it. “Thank you” felt too shallow and cheap to attach to the big, formless emotions boiling inside me, so I said nothing at all. I just kept working, throwing whatever clothes and toiletries would fit into my trash bag as fast as I could.

  ***

  We had the whole place done in ten minutes.

  “What did I tell you?” Nik said as he put the box containing the final bits of my collection and my trash bag full of clothes and toiletries into the trunk of his car. “Cleaner efficiency.”

  “Thank you,” I said, repeating the words even though I knew they weren’t enough because really, what else could I say? “Thank you so much.”

  Nik shrugged and took the preprinted magic circle I used to recharge my poncho from my hands. We’d finished before it had, but we’d already wasted too much time, so I’d declared my wards good enough and grabbed the whole thing, pulling the protective poncho over my head while Nik crammed the soft-ribbed spellwork-covered circle into his trunk and shut the lid. “Is that all?”

  “It’s everything I care about.” My apartment wasn’t empty, but I could buy more cheap furniture and packs of instant noodles. The stuff I couldn’t replace—my salvaged block of limestone fronting engraved with nineteenth-century Masonic imagery, my ammonite fossil where you could see the full Golden Ratio spiral, my brass letter opener shaped like a crane that might have been a limited-edition Crane Paper Company retirement gift from the 1920s—was all safely stowed in Nick’s trunk, and I couldn’t thank him enough.

  “Thank you,” I said again. “Really, thank you.”

  “It’s fine,” he said, looking as awkward as I felt. “You’re welcome. Now let’s go. I don’t want to push our luck any further than we already have.”

  I nodded and dove into the car, remembering to take my shoes off at the last minute even though I was wearing my reasonably clean sneakers rather than my Cleaning boots. I was still fastening my seat belt when Nik hit the gas, shooting us out of the quiet parking lot like a bullet. He turned the moment he hit the street, almost fishtailing the car as he swung around and gunned it up the ramp toward the Skyways.

  “Wait,” I said as he pushed us faster. “Why are we going up? I thought the morgue was in the Underground.” And while you could get there through the Skyways, the tolls were ridiculous.

  “We’re not going to the morgue,” Nik said, eyes pinned on his rear-view mirror as he wove us through the late-night traffic. “If Kauffman didn’t smash a team through your window the moment he got to the parking lot, it’s probably because he decided it would be easier to follow us to the prize instead, which means I’m not going anywhere important until I’m certain I’ve lost any tails. When I know we’re not being followed, we’ll pull over, check the car for bugs, and then drive some more. Then we can head to where we’re actually going.”

  I smiled at him, impressed. “Good thinking.”

  Nik shrugged, a move I now recognized as his default for when he didn’t know what to say. Fortunately, I did. “We should cover our magical trail, too,” I said, pulling off my poncho so I could turn it inside out. “Kauffman’s a good mage. I caught his bugged business card, but if he got something off me—like a hair from my apartment—he could use it to cast a finding spell that will track us anywhere. The only way to stop him is to cut the connection ahead of time.”

  Nik nodded. “Sounds good. How do we do that?”

  “With this.” I held up the inside of my poncho. “I didn’t buy this thing for Cleaning. It’s actually a security garment meant for protecting high-value targets: CEOs, foreign dignitaries, that sort of thing. My mom bought it for me when I first moved to the DFZ.”

  “Then she must love you a lot,” Nik said. “I’ve seen those in catalogs. They’re stupid expensive.”

  I’d never doubted that my mother loved me. It was her judgment I didn’t trust. But unlike the designer clothes she still sent me every season (always one size too small, for “encouragement”), the poncho was actually useful, which was why it had survived long after I’d sold everything else. “It’s worth the money,” I said, pointing at the far-more-delicate ward lines that covered the poncho’s interior. “The outside focuses on external threats—bullets, dirt, blunt trauma, and so on—but the interior’s all about magical protection, including a burn command for separating material links.”

  I just had to remember how to use it.

  “Sibyl,” I said, pulling my goggles back down over my face.

  My AI’s icon fluttered. “Oh, are you speaking to me again?”

  “I wasn’t ever not speaking to you.”

  “That’s not what it felt like to me.”

  I rolled my eyes at her grumpy tone. “I thought AIs weren’t supposed to hold grudges.”

  “I wasn’t holding a grudge,” she said defensively. “I was giving you your space. You always get snippy after you talk to your mother.”

  I couldn’t deny that one, so I just moved on. “I need you to look up the manual for my poncho. I can’t remember the activation sequence for the material links disposal system.”

  “Here you go,” she said, bringing up the diagram. “I highlighted the hand gestures since I know you have trouble with those.”

  I smiled at her thoughtfulness. This was why computer assistants were awesome. They knew you better than you knew yourself. “Thank you,” I said, wiggling into the inside-out poncho. The rough plastic exterior felt awful against my bare shoulders, like a combination tarp and trash bag, but at least I didn’t have to bear it for long. Even without a full charge, I could feel the magic through the spellwork as I followed the diagrammed instructions my AI had projected in the air in front of me.

  “Clear!”

  A pulse of magic filled the car, making Nik jump. “A little warning next time!” he snapped, gripping the wheel. “I almost rear-ended someone.”

  “Sorry.” I coughed, waving the smoke away from my flushed face. “Didn’t realize it was going to do that.”

  I’d never used this particular feature of my poncho before. I honestly had no idea how the material link disposal spell functioned since the whole point of owning a high-end piece of magical equipment was so I didn’t have to learn how to do all this stuff myself, but my entire body felt sunburned, which I assumed meant it had worked. According to the manual, the burn-off wouldn’t save me from a really strong link like blood, but all the minor connections such as hair, skin, recently worn clothing, treasured objects, and so forth should have been neutralized.

  “I’ll do you next when we pull over to check for bugs,” I told Nik, pulling the poncho off my head aga
in.

  “No thank you,” Nik said, cringing. “Kauffman doesn’t know where I live, and I didn’t get close enough for him to grab anything, so I’ll pass.”

  “You should still do it,” I said. “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Better anything than what just happened to you,” he said with a shudder, shaking his head. “If it felt that awful from the outside, I don’t ever want to be inside.”

  I hadn’t thought it was that bad, but then, I’m a horrible mage. I’d backlashed myself with magic so many times I didn’t even feel it anymore. Now that I thought about it, I remembered that this kind of internal magic was always way scarier for non-mages who weren’t used to having their souls moved around on the regular. No wonder Nik didn’t want to do it.

  “Your choice,” I said, draping the poncho over my lap since we weren’t being shot at right now and I wanted to savor life outside a plastic bag for a while. “How long are we going to drive?”

  “Until I’m convinced there’s no one following us.”

  “Do you need me to navigate?”

  He shook his head. “Don’t need to know where you’re going if your only destination is away.”

  I shrugged and leaned back in his seat, determined to rest if he didn’t want assistance. Now that I’d stopped moving, it was starting to hit me how tired I was. Tired and hungry. According to the clock at the corner of my augmented-reality vision, it was after eleven. I’d gotten up at five to get a good spot at the morning Cleaning auction, and I’d been going nonstop ever since, which meant I’d missed lunch and dinner. My stomach clenched at the reminder, but I couldn’t do anything about it. I’d left my supply of Cup Noodles back at my apartment, and I was flat broke. Even vending machine sandwiches were out of my budget right now if I wanted to have any money left for tomorrow, so I told my stomach to STFU and leaned my head against the window of Nik’s car, looking up at the night sky as we came out on the Skyways to see if I could spot the moon. Living Underground, I almost never got to see it. But my bad luck must still have been going strong, because the night was overcast, leaving me staring at yet another ceiling as the low clouds rolled between the brightly lit columns of the superscrapers.

  ***

  After an hour of driving in circles and a very thorough check for bugs at what had to be the last petroleum pump in the DFZ, Nik finally deemed us free of tails, which meant we could move on to our actual destination: the city morgue. Today’s events notwithstanding, I didn’t normally encounter dead bodies, so I’d never actually been there before. I wasn’t sure what I was expecting, but the giant industrial warehouse Nik pulled us up beside definitely wasn’t it.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked, squinting out the window at the brightly lit white walls. “It looks like an auto plant.”

  “It has to be big,” Nik said as he cut the engine. “There’s ten million people between the Underground and the Skyways. Even when you account for all the ones who die in hospitals and get processed there, that’s still a lot of dead bodies.”

  I’d never really thought about it. I supposed it was comforting to know that even in the capitalistic dystopia of the DFZ, bodies weren’t left to rot in the street. The industrial scale of the facility still gave me the creeps, though, especially once I noticed the giant smokestacks rising up through a special hole in the Skyways above.

  “So what’s the plan?” I asked, tearing my eyes away from what had to be the biggest crematorium in North America.

  “Same as before: get to the body,” Nik replied, leaning down so he could peer at the morgue’s towering wall through my window. “There are thousands of corpses in there. We’ll never find our mage in that haystack, so you’re going to go into the office and ask Peter where he put him. Once we get the slab number, we can sneak into the main building and get the hand.”

  By which he meant steal.

  “Are you sure we have to do this?” I asked nervously. “There has to be some other way of accessing the information in that hand that doesn’t involve taking from the Forgotten Dead.”

  “I already told you there isn’t,” Nik said sharply. “You’re the one who said the location info was hard-coded into the VCI. If you’re right, then there’s no way to hack into that without literally sticking a wire into the inputs, so unless you want to bring a hacker into the morgue, we need that cyberwear.”

  I winced, fingers twisting in my lap, and Nik sighed. “Look,” he said, dragging a gloved hand through his short-cropped dark hair. “I’ll do the actual snitch if you don’t want to, but you’re the only one who can get the info out of Peter. If I show up out of nowhere and start asking for slab numbers, he’ll know something’s up, but you’re the one who found the body. You’ve got all kinds of reasons why you’d need to see it again. Just pick one and get in there. Most death priests are night owls, but it’s getting close to one a.m. If we don’t do this quick, Peter will go home, and we’ll be stuck until tomorrow.”

  I sank deeper into my seat with every word. He was right, of course. I’d already made up my mind that I had to do this for the money, but now that I was actually here, it felt utterly wrong. I also had no idea how I was actually going to convince Peter to lead me to the body. Nik said I had all kinds of reasons, but all the ones that came to my head sounded like transparent ploys. I was going through Dr. Lyle’s notes again to see if there was anything that could give me a legitimate reason for needing to see his body again when I found his expired ID.

  And got my idea.

  “I’ll be back,” I said, putting my shoes on before sliding out of the car. “Wait here.”

  Nik nodded and settled into the driver’s seat, watching me like a falcon as I walked down the street and up the stairs to what I hoped was the morgue’s front office.

  ***

  The inside of the DFZ’s clearing house for dead bodies turned out to be a lot more mundane than you’d expect. With its beige walls, fluorescent lights, and cheap blue carpeting, it actually looked more like a traditional government building than anything else I’d seen in this crazy city. The front steps led me up to a pair of double doors that opened into a receiving area, where a bored security guard asked me what I wanted. This was the point at which I suddenly realized I didn’t actually know Peter’s last name. Fortunately, despite his prominence in the DFZ, the Empty Wind didn’t actually have a lot of full-time priests. The guard knew exactly who I was talking about, and a few minutes later, I was walking down the fluorescent-lit hall with a temporary visitor’s stamp on my hand, counting the endless identical doors until I reached the one the guard had told me to knock on.

  “Opal!” Peter said, his face surprised when he opened his door and saw me standing outside like a guilty kid. “What are you doing here?”

  “I had a question for you,” I said, trying not to fidget. “Can I come in?”

  Peter stepped back at once, holding the door for me. His office was surprisingly large and even more surprisingly normal. I’d been half expecting altars of bones, but his large desk was covered in a perfectly ordinary mix of publicly projected AR and good old-fashioned paper. He had several lamps to soften the harsh overhead light and a few potted plants to make the place feel a bit less like a windowless box. There was even a cat tower in the corner, where Peter’s orange tomcat was lounging on his back, watching me with curious yellow eyes as I sheepishly scuttled inside.

  “Sorry to bother you,” I said as Peter shut the door behind me.

  “No bother at all,” he replied, pointing at one of the two padded chairs in front of his desk. “I’m happy to have the company. I don’t exactly get a lot of visitors.”

  I could see how someone whose clients were alone by default wouldn’t have a lot of foot traffic.

  “There,” Peter said, sitting down in his own comfortably worn office chair. “Now, what can I do for you?”

  He finished with a warm smile, which made me feel absolutely awful. Unlike mine, Peter’s job was a noble callin
g, and here I was trying to take advantage of it. But while there was no sugarcoating the fact that I’d come here as a thief, I did have something legitimate to share with him, and I clung to that shred of decency with all I had.

  “Actually, I have something for you,” I said, holding out Dr. Lyle’s ID.

  He took it curiously. “Who’s this?”

  “The man you removed from the apartment this morning,” I replied. “He was Dr. Theodore Lyle, a professor of Thaumaturgy, or at least a former one.”

  An exultant grin spread over Peter’s face. “Where did you find this?”

  “In the unit,” I said, which wasn’t technically a lie. I had found it while Cleaning, just not in the place I was implying.

  “Thank you so much for bringing this to me,” he said, putting the ID on his desk so he could take a picture of it with his phone. “It will help enormously.”

  “Glad to hear it,” I said, trying not to sound too excited as I moved on to my real object. “So now that we know who he is, he’s no longer one of the Forgotten Dead, right?”

  Peter shook his head. “That’s for the Empty Wind to decide. I just do the grunt work.”

  “But we know who he is now,” I argued. “How can he be forgotten if he’s known?”

  “Knowing isn’t the same as remembering,” Peter explained, taking one more picture of the back of the ID before sliding the card into a manila folder marked “pending.” “We know who he was, but we don’t know know him. Not like family or a friend would. But this is still fantastic! Even a little remembrance can help keep a soul together on the other side. The world of spirits is not a kind or gentle place. It’s the source of all magic in the world, and the torrents of power there will shred a human soul in seconds if it’s not properly protected by the memories of those who knew them. It’s not as good as the love of a relative, but just the two of us knowing Dr. Lyle’s name can still be a shield for him in the swirling void. It’ll also make Collections’ job a lot easier when they search for his next of kin.” He beamed at me. “You did a very good thing bringing this to me, Opal. The dead and I thank you.”