Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ Book 1)

by Rachel Aaron

  “Can you access the info?”

  “I don’t know,” he muttered, looking horribly confused. “Give me something to write with.”

  I blinked, confused. “You mean like a pen?”

  “I think I’ve got one,” Rena said, digging into her bag. “Here.”

  Nik took the cheap ballpoint and pressed it against his paper napkin. He started to write a second later, but I knew from the way his hand jerked that Nik wasn’t the one controlling it. Nik’s movements were always precise, like a finely tuned machine. These were small and janky, writing a series of numbers across the paper napkin in the same chicken-scratch cursive I’d seen in all of Dr. Lyle’s notes.

  “Nice trick,” Rena said when he lifted the pen at last. “What does it mean?”

  “I have no idea,” Nik said. “The hand wrote that, not me.”

  I scowled at the numbers. They looked familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on where I’d seen the pattern before.

  “I know!” Sibyl said in my ear, her voice desperate to prove that she was still useful. “Those are three-dimensional coordinates.”

  “They’re coordinates,” I said out loud so the rest of the people at the table would know what was up.

  “Coordinates to what?” Nik asked.

  “A location in the city,” Sibyl said, bringing up a map of the DFZ. “Here.”

  She lit up the spot in question, and I shook my head. “That can’t be right.”

  “What can’t be right?” Rena asked eagerly, getting into it. “Where is it?”

  Since Rena had AR, I had Sibyl put the map up in our shared space. Nik still wouldn’t be able to see it, but at least I’d only have to explain this insanity to one person. “The point is straight down,” I said, flicking my fingers to scroll the map down until I reached the red dot marking the spot. “Almost a mile underground. There’s nothing that goes that deep in the DFZ. You’d hit the water table.”

  Nik took all of that in with a stoic frown. Then he winced. “Wait,” he said, moving his new hand—or, more accurately, letting the hand move him—back to the paper, where he wrote down a second string of numbers in the same chicken-scratch cursive. “How about that?”

  Sibyl put the numbers in as soon as they appeared. Sure enough, it was another set of coordinates, but it didn’t fix the problem. “It’s still underground,” I moaned, sliding the map down even further this time. “Just in a different place.”

  “Can you try again?” Rena asked.

  “No,” Nik said, sounding as frustrated as I felt. “I wasn’t giving it a second try before. The pressure just moved, and then the numbers were different.”

  “Pressure?” I asked. “What kind of pressure?”

  Nik shook his head. “I’m not sure how else to describe it. The hand’s a hand. It feels weird because it’s not mine, but it doesn’t move unless I tell it to. Even when I’m holding it still, though, there’s a pressure in the palm that keeps shifting, like string on a balloon.”

  “Or a needle in a compass,” Rena said excitedly. “That hand’s not built to plug into an artificial brain enhancement, so it doesn’t have a complex input array. It still has to communicate the information somehow, though, and pressure-point feedback is a classic. I bet it’s pointing you at those coordinates!”

  “Well, if that’s what it’s supposed to do, then it’s broken,” Nik said angrily, clutching his new hand. “Stupid thing keeps jerking around.”

  “Maybe it’s not jerking around,” I said, staring at my map. “Maybe the thing it’s pointing at is moving.”

  “That’s impossible,” Rena said. “Even the DFZ doesn’t move that fast.”

  “The DFZ doesn’t,” I agreed. “But the Gnarls do.”

  Nik arched a skeptical eyebrow in my direction. Rena was less polite. “Don’t be so gullible,” she scolded. “The Gnarls are an urban legend. The whole thing was made up to sell overpriced maps to tourists.”

  “No, they’re not,” I said sharply. “They’re a real phenomenon.”

  I couldn’t fault them for their skepticism. The Gnarls did sound pretty sketchy, and knowledge of them was horribly abused by the tourism companies. But while almost all of the stories about a secret network of ever-changing tunnels below the sewers were false, the Gnarls were a concept that was firmly rooted in spirit theory, which also happened to be the only magical theory class I’d actually done well in.

  “Okay, so everyone knows that all spirits have a domain, right?” I said, looking around the table to make sure they were following. “A domain is whatever they’re the spirit of, the place or concept that fuels all their power. For a spirit like Algonquin, it’s pretty obvious. She’s the Lady of the Great Lakes, so her domain is the lakes. It gets more complicated when you’re talking about conceptual entities such as the Empty Wind, but the general idea is always the same. Whether it’s a physical location or a concept like ‘the forgotten dead,’ every spirit has a core that binds them together, somewhere all the magic that makes them tick can pool together. But the DFZ is a little different. Like the Empty Wind, she’s a concept: the idea of a city where nothing’s illegal and anything is possible. But she’s also a physical place, which is the city we’re in right now. That duality means that the DFZ has both a physical domain and a conceptual one. Everyone following so far?”

  “I think so,” Nik said. “I just don’t understand why it matters.”

  “It matters because she’s a blend,” I said. “Spirits of the land are rooted in the land. With them, what you see is what you get. But the DFZ was born from humanity. She’s the sum of all our conceptions about what the DFZ is. That’s why she’s able to move buildings around like puzzle pieces instead of relying on geological forces like other physical spirits. She’s god of both the physical city and our ideal of the city. When you shove the physical and the conceptual together, you get an area of overlap, and that place is the Gnarls. The University of Michigan has three whole labs dedicated to studying the phenomenon. It’s totally legit.”

  And a fantastic place to hide a ritual. I’d never been to the Gnarls myself, but according to the papers I’d had to read for class, they were an ever-changing labyrinth where the physical and magical worlds had been squished together during the DFZ’s awakening as a spirit. They were locked in a state of constant magical flux, which meant that no matter how much magic you cast, no one would ever be able to trace it through all the background noise. It was the perfect hiding place, so much so that I felt like an idiot for not thinking of them earlier.

  “This is great,” I said, looking at Nik. “Normally the Gnarls are unnavigable, but your new hand points to where we want to go. That must be how Dr. Lyle didn’t lose his ritual site every time the Gnarls moved. He put a compass in his hand!”

  “That would explain the weird spellwork I found on the inside,” Rena said, nodding sagely.

  I stared at her. “There was spellwork inside it? Why didn’t you mention that earlier?!”

  “Because it’s very common in cyberwear that belonged to a mage,” she said with a shrug. “Every spell slinger with a fake limb tries to jimmy that thing with spellwork to improve the magical throughput. I thought this was just a really bad attempt, but a compass makes way more sense.”

  “So I just follow this pressure,” Nik said, staring at Dr. Lyle’s hand as if he was afraid it was going to start punching him. “And this thing will take us to what we’re searching for?”

  “That’s my theory,” I said, nodding.

  “Great,” he said, sliding over in the booth until he was bumping into me. “Let’s go.”

  He was clearly in an enormous hurry. So was I, but I couldn’t go just yet. “Please let me finish my pancakes first,” I begged. “I already paid for them.”

  Nik gave me a scathing look, but he settled back into the booth, waving at me to go ahead.

  I ate in a fury. Honestly, I was already full to the point of discomfort, but I’d spent the last of my money on the
se, and there was no way Nik would allow a to-go box full of pancakes covered in syrup into his car. They went into my stomach or they’d go into the trash, so I ate until I was bursting, shoveling pancakes into my mouth until the smell of syrup started to make me nauseous. Only then did I stop, dropping my head against the cushy back of the bench with a groan.

  “That was impressive,” Nik said. “Horrific, but impressive.”

  “Do you want the last few bites?” I asked, nodding at the final half a pancake swimming in the syrup of its fallen brothers.

  “No,” he said firmly. “After that, I don’t think I ever want to see a pancake again.”

  I was also okay with never seeing, smelling, or even hearing the word “pancake” again, which I took as a sign I’d gotten my money’s worth. Satisfied that I’d spent my last dollars in a fit of excess truly worthy of the DFZ, I hauled myself up and started waddling toward the door with Nik hot on my heels.

  Chapter 11

  The next thing we had to do was figure out how to get into the Gnarls.

  It wasn’t a simple question. Like the name suggested, everything about the Gnarls was tricky. According to the Thaumaturgical research papers Sibyl looked up for me, the entrance to the Gnarls moved to a different spot in the city every few minutes. According to the forums for conspiracy theorists who’d turned finding the Gnarls into a competitive sport, though, those locations tended to repeat. The closest one was only a few miles away, so that was the address I gave Nik as we got into the car.

  And discovered a new problem.

  “Ah, come on,” he growled, baring his teeth as he attempted to grip his steering wheel with both of his left hands.

  I bit my lip. “Do you want me to drive?”

  Nik shot me a look so blistering I swear I lost skin.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I said, cringing back into my seat. “It was just an offer.”

  “A ridiculous one,” he muttered. Then his gray eyes snapped back to me. “Can you drive?”

  “I’ve played driving games.” Mostly of the crash derby variety, but I understood the basic mechanics of physically piloting a car. You know, in theory.

  He grimaced. “I’ll stick to my two left hands. You freaked the first time you watched me drive through DFZ traffic without a computer. I don’t even want to be in the car when you try it yourself.”

  Couldn’t argue there. “Is there another way I can help?”

  “Yes,” he said, placing his right-left hand on the stick shift. “Be patient.”

  I was patient as a saint. I sat in my seat without a word for ten full minutes while Nik figured himself out. Finally, after he’d adjusted his hands for what had to be the millionth time, Nik started the engine and pulled us out, driving us very, very cautiously into the wreath of roads that surrounded the diner.

  According to the internet, the closest entrance to the Gnarls was beneath the Second Renaissance Center, a fourteen-tower complex that was part office building, part convention center, and part corporate hotel. It was also the busiest tourist district in the city at the heart of the downtown portion of the riverfront. Naturally, then, parking was hell. We ended up in an auto-sorted magazine deck four blocks away from our destination, much to Nik’s chagrin, but there was no other choice. Unless we wanted to circle for hours stalking the ten spots where street parking was allowed, magazine decks were the only option in this part of the city.

  As the name suggested, they worked just like magazines, except instead of being packed with bullets, they were packed with cars. You drove your vehicle onto a metal plate, and the machinery picked it up and stuffed it into a metal chute full of other cars on plates. When you wanted it back, you put your ticket into the machine and waited for the magazine to cycle back around to your car.

  I didn’t blame Nik for hating it. It was a rough-and-tumble way to park with no way to get your car back quickly if you needed it. If his new hand hadn’t been tugging on him so hard, he probably would have demanded we go somewhere else. But I could see the twitches in the synthetic muscles on the back of his hand going crazy, which I took as a good sign.

  “We have to be getting close,” I said, securing the strap for my messenger bag with Dr. Lyle’s notes across my chest beneath my poncho.

  “I just don’t understand why it would be here,” Nik grumbled, slinging on his own bag full of combat supplies, which now included his right hand. “This place is a zoo, nothing but overpriced tourist nonsense. I thought the Gnarls were supposed to be the DFZ’s heart. Why would she choose to open it here?”

  That was a good question. The Second Renaissance—or 2R, according to the souvenir T-shirt carts that lined the sidewalk—was classic DFZ tourist trap at its most exuberant. It was still divided between the Skyways and Underground, but there were more connecting escalators, stairways, and elevators in these few blocks than anywhere else in the city. The convention complex even had a big ground-level entrance with a courtyard so guests could experience the famous DFZ Underground without technically having to leave the hotel. The Skyways above were full of boutique stores and fancy restaurants with expense account pricing, while Underground blocks surrounding the center looked like they’d come right out of a movie set.

  There were no cheap concrete squares here. This was what was known as a Free-build Zone, a place where people could build their own buildings instead of renting space in whatever DFZ decided to push out of the ground. Since these zones only seemed to be in super-hot areas, the result was always pure capitalist insanity, and the 2R was no different. We walked past structures made of shipping containers that had been welded together and buildings that had been built out over the street, turning the sidewalk into a tunnel in an effort to expand their floor space. There were buildings built to look like they’d come from Old Detroit, complete with fake damage and painted-on weathering, and buildings that were nothing but stairs leading to single-person-wide alleyways filled with even more shops. One block had abandoned even the pretense of structures and simply built scaffolding so they could stack as many street carts onto the lot as possible, using giant AR projectors to beam advertisements down into the river of customers that was constantly flowing by.

  “This can’t be right,” Nik said angrily, swatting at the dancing images of souvenir plastic beer steins projected from the cart suspended on steel cables above our heads. “This place is so far down the rabbit hole it’s practically a parody. It’s not the real DFZ.”

  “Who are we to say what’s the real DFZ?” I asked, grabbing onto his arm to keep from getting squished against the wall of European tourists eagerly taking pictures to our left. “Spirits are defined by their domains, remember? You’re right when you say this place is solid stereotype, but I think that’s exactly why the Gnarls open here. I mean, just look at it.”

  I swept my hand across the glaringly bright street. We were almost to the base of the 2R, and the crowds—and the commerce—had only gotten denser. Cars couldn’t even drive on the streets down here. It was just an ocean of people surrounded by a neon- and LED-lit canyon of closet casinos, souvenir shops, vending machine bars, single-use joy parlors, and card-operated VR brothels. There were pawn shops with human organs for sale in the windows and pet stores full of animals that were banned everywhere else in the world. There were fight bars, topless bars, drug bars, bars where you paid interesting people to pretend to be your friends. The whole place was a chaotic, unregulated, booze- and drug-soaked nightmare of greed, hedonism, and reckless ambition. It was simultaneously the worst of humanity and the height of human ingenuity and creativity as shopkeepers fought to one-up each other and corner the rich flow of gullible tourist money. If you said “DFZ” to someone who didn’t live here, this was exactly what they’d envision, and that made my heart pound with anticipation.

  “This has to be it,” I said, pulling up my map and zooming in as far as I could. “Sibyl, show me the entrance locations.”

  A smattering of red dots appeared across my augmented visio
n. “Here’s all the ones reported in the last two months,” my AI said, flipping my map into 3D to show depth. “They’re almost all below your current position, though. You’ll have to find a way down.”

  That wasn’t hard. There was a giant flashing “down” arrow right next to us with a sign promising even more shops on the lower levels. I wasn’t aware this street had a lower level, but given that there were shops suspended on cables above my head, nothing surprised me anymore.

  “Come on,” I said, tugging on Nik’s armored jacket. “Let’s go down.”

  Keeping his actual left hand in his false pocket where his gun was, Nik helped me push through the gawking crowd to the stairwell, which turned out to be a storm drain someone had ripped the cement cap off and replaced with a spiral staircase lined with flashing string lights. With no small amount of trepidation, I made my way down, pausing to put on my Cleaning gloves before I grabbed the sticky-looking railing.

  Unsurprisingly given the entrance, we came out in the storm water system. Or, rather, what had been the storm water system. Someone had bricked over the upstream pipe to divert the runoff into another drain, leaving the ten-foot-diameter pipe running below this street dry enough to convert into an underground mall. The pipe itself was just the main drag. Individual shops had dug further, cutting through the pipe’s cement wall and into the dirt behind it to create spacious caves. It was mostly gambling, sex shops, and bars, but there were plenty of normal restaurants, too, along with barber shops, nail salons, dry cleaners, and capsule hotels.

  That last part surprised me. After the terrifying stairwell, I’d expected the stuff down here to be extra salacious. Now that I thought about it, though, the choice was actually pretty practical. When nothing was illegal, it made sense to put the really shocking stuff right out in front for maximum impact. The rest of it—the normal everyday stores and services—was swept down to the cheaper real estate. This was probably where the shopkeepers who ran all the craziness up top went for lunch and drinks after work. The base layer of the 2R’s commercial ecosystem.