by Rachel Aaron
"What do you think he died of?" I asked Sibyl as I started going through the stuff on top of his bureau. "The front door was intact, so I don't think he was killed in a robbery."
"I bet it was something internal," my AI replied, zooming my cameras in on the corpse's face, which was black and sunken with decomposition. "There's no obvious evidence of--"
"Could you not?" I snapped, yanking the cameras back. "This is creepy enough without you going for the close-up!"
"I was just answering your question," Sibyl said defensively. "As I was trying to say, there's no obvious evidence of violence. No blood splatters or bullet holes or anything like that. Add in the way he collapsed face forward on the ground, and a health crisis seem most likely. Stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, something like that."
I glanced at the mini fridge in the corner, which was sitting with its door wide open to reveal the melted--but otherwise completely undecayed--stack of microwave burritos inside. "Going by what he ate, my money's on heart attack." I shook my head. "Poor bastard."
"At least this room's not filled with boxes," Sybil said cheerfully. "If I have to look up resale prices for one more stack of dusty old books that don't have proper QR codes, I'm going to log myself out."
I was likewise sick of digging through outdated scholarly paperbacks, but the relative emptiness of this room meant that my chances of earning out on this unit were lower than they'd ever been. Biting my lip, I glanced over my shoulder at the dead guy. It was hard to tell since his clothes were so stained with decomposition, but he didn't look rich. He had none of the flashy jewelry or talismans you normally saw on underworld mages. He wasn't even wearing warded clothes. Other than being dead, the only actually remarkable thing about him was the fact that he had a cybernetic hand.
That wasn't unusual in the DFZ. Unlike other countries with their pesky safety regulations, anything you wanted to do to your body was perfectly legal here, even the really crazy stuff. Implants were cheap, too, since the DFZ also didn't require a medical license to install or build cybernetics. Hell, I'd seen homeless guys with camera eyes, but you didn't usually see augs on mages since cybernetics interfered with the flow of magic through the body.
Given the custom wards on his door and his obsession with ancient magic, I would've thought this guy would rather go handless than give up some of his magic to a machine, but clearly that wasn't the case. Who knew? Maybe he liked having a piece of him that was better than human more than he cared about absolute magical efficiency. Either way, that hand was worth a pretty penny. It didn't look like a high-end model, but you could always sell cybernetics. That said, Broker had only okayed me to loot the unit. He hadn't given me carte blanche to steal from the dead. No one could, not anymore.
Since the return of magic, the world had filled with gods. The first to rise had been Algonquin, Lady of the Great Lakes. The very night magic returned, she'd come out of her lakes in a tidal wave to punish humanity for polluting her waters. The resulting flood had devastated the entire Great Lakes region, but nowhere was hit harder than Detroit. Since it had been one of the greatest polluters, Algonquin's hatred for the Motor City was special, and her wave had wiped it off the map. When she'd finished hammering it into the ground, Algonquin built a new city on Detroit's ruins--the first Detroit Free Zone--and claimed it for herself. The United States of America didn't even fight her over it. They were too busy dealing with the sudden return of mages and dragons and everything else to care about losing a troublesome, bankrupt city.
For the next sixty years, Algonquin had ruled the DFZ like an empress, forging it into a magical nexus of unbridled human greed. But the magic wasn't done coming back. The first night had been the most explosive, but the background magic kept creeping up slowly as the decades rolled on. Eventually, the ambient power got so high that it birthed a new god: the Spirit of the DFZ itself.
The ensuing battle for control of the city had leveled Detroit yet again. In the end, Algonquin got booted back to her lakes, and the new goddess claimed control. That was twenty years ago. The DFZ had rebuilt herself bigger than ever in the years since, and she wasn't alone. The tipping point of rising power that had created her--now known as the Second Crash--brought many other gods as well. Some were old, like Algonquin, and some were new, like the DFZ, but they were all powerful, and an inordinate number of them were gods of death.
No one knew how many death gods there were exactly, but their presence meant that doing anything disrespectful to a dead body, especially stealing, was a very bad idea. Death gods weren't forgiving as a rule, and here in the DFZ, the most magical city in the world, they were at their strongest. That cybernetic hand might be worth a thousand at auction, but the curse I'd get for taking it would cost me a lot more, so I left the hand where it lay and focused on digging through the dead man's underwear drawer, hoping against hope that he'd hidden something of value beneath all his tighty whities. I'd just moved on to his shirts when I heard someone say my name.
I nearly jumped out of my skin. Thankfully, Sibyl was on it, swirling my cameras to give me eyes in the back of my head just in time to see a young black man with a rather sketchy-looking tomcat on his shoulder walk through the bedroom door.
"Peter!" I gasped, clutching my poor chest. "Don't do that to me!"
"Sorry, Opal," he said apologetically. "I tried to knock, but the front door was gone." A smirk spread over his face. "Not that I should have expected anything less, seeing it was you."
"Hey, I don't always take the door off," I said grumpily, eyeing the folding stretcher he was carrying under his left arm. "But what are you doing here? Broker said he was sending a disposal detail."
"He called in for one," Peter said. "But when I heard that the victim had been dead in his apartment for a month and no one noticed, I volunteered to take care of him." He reached up to pet his rangy cat. "He seemed like our kind of fellow."
When he put it that way, it made sense. Peter was a priest for one of those new death gods. Specifically, he'd dedicated himself to the Empty Wind, Spirit of the Forgotten Dead, which definitely included our guy.
"Do you need help getting him out?"
"I can manage, thanks," Peter said, leaning over to let his cat jump down. "Once we commit the body, he'll get a lot easier to move. The Empty Wind takes care of his own."
From anyone else, that would have been a cryptic thing to say, but Peter made it sound like a blessing. That was how he always talked, though. He came to the Cleaner auctions sometimes to buy up units he claimed belonged to the Forgotten Dead. Auctions were always a circus, but even when everyone else was shouting, Peter never raised his voice. He didn't have to. The moment he bid, everyone else shut up. Broker claimed it was all superstition and rallied us to bid higher, but he made his living taking a cut off the top of our auctions. He also didn't understand. I hadn't either before I'd started Cleaning. I'd thought the DFZ was just a crazy city with a mind of its own, but get down in the Underground where people are really desperate, and you see things. I didn't worship the Empty Wind like Peter did, but I didn't doubt for a moment that he was real, and spooky as that was, I was happy our dead guy had a god to care about him, since no one else seemed to.
"I'll just keep going, then," I said, turning back to the drawers. "Let me know if you need help."
"I will," Peter said. "Thank you, Opal."
There was power in those words. Gods had long memories, which meant being nice to priests was always a good idea. I would have helped him anyway, though, because I liked Peter. Priesthood aside, he was a genuinely good guy. Those were a rare commodity anywhere, but they were nigh unheard of in the DFZ. That made me eager to stay in his good graces, even if it meant hauling a dead guy up two flights of stairs.
Thankfully, it didn't come to that. Peter didn't ask for anything. He just knelt beside the dead man, whispering promises of eternal remembrance in his calm, deep voice while I dug through the drawers. It was so peaceful, I didn't even flinch when a grave-cold wind ro
se from nowhere, sweeping the heavy, putrid air out of the apartment. I was still appreciating the cool when I heard Peter unfold his stretcher and start loading the body.
That broke the spell real quick. Turns out, month-old corpses make horrible noises when you move them. Frantic to distract myself from the nightmare soundtrack going on behind me, I picked up the pace, shoving my hand below the bed, the only place in the apartment I hadn't searched yet. I was groping blindly through the dust bunnies when something sharp stabbed into my finger.
"Ow!"
"What?" Peter said, stretcher clattering to the ground.
"Nothing, nothing," I said, yanking my arm back to cradle my smarting fingers. "Just being an idiot."
A total idiot. I'd been so eager to take my mind off the goopy biology behind me that I'd broken the number-one rule of Cleaning: never put your hand where you can't see it. Luckily, I still had all my fingers, but the first two were burning like they'd been bitten by a wasp rat. If my gloves hadn't been so thick, I would have suspected there was an actual critter under there, but not only was the rubber still whole, my skin looked fine when I yanked my glove off, which meant it wasn't an animal that had bitten me.
It was a spell.
My face split into an enormous grin. Moving at the speed of greed, I dropped to my stomach and wiggled under the bed, using my headlamps to spot the culprit: a warded box tucked into the gap where the bed's leg met the wall. Not stupid enough to get bitten a second time, I reached into my bag and pulled out my tongs, using the rubber-coated grips to grab the box and ease it out into the light.
What came out was a metal container slightly larger than a shoebox and absolutely covered in the same bizarre chicken-scratch custom spellwork as the front door. Some of the markings were still glowing from where the spell had zapped me, but unlike the ward on the front door, which could have done who knew what, even I could see this was a security spell. Complicated, powerful, but still just a safe at the end of the day, and if there was anything I'd learned from a year and a half in this business, it was how to crack a safe.
"Oh, yeah!" I said as I pulled magic into my hands. "Come on, loot box!"
Since Peter was here, I had to keep my magic toned down, which meant it took me five minutes to crush the first lock and a full ten to crack the next. By the time I reached the final one, Peter had our dead guy wrapped in a dignified sheet on the stretcher. He was clearing a path through the living room to the front door when the warded box in my lap finally clicked open.
Completely forgetting my earlier lesson about sticking parts of myself where they shouldn't be, I tore the lid open and shoved my hand inside, grabbing for whatever magical treasure had to be in there. Given this guy's obsession with ancient magic, I was hoping for something really good: a legit alchemical relic, ancient spellwork tablets, old enchanted glass.
What I got was a stack of paper.
"What?!" I cried, turning the box upside down to dump the pile of perfectly normal, not-even-ancient paper into my lap. "You've to be kidding me!"
They were notes. Notes for what I couldn't say since they were written in the same gobbledygook custom spellwork as everything else, but they looked like plans for something complicated. There were tons of size and time calculations written in the margins, along with dollar amounts that made my eyes go wide. I was trying to figure out if they were costs or expected earnings when I found the stack of receipts.
I didn't actually recognize what they were at first. I mean, who still used physical receipts? But our dead guy's love of paper must have extended beyond books, because he'd printed and kept hundreds of receipts going back more than a year. Some were for startling amounts, and even more interesting, they were all for magical reagents.
In the old days, back when the local ambient power had been too thin to just pull whatever magic you needed out of the air, mages had been forced to use external sources to power their spells, usually the body parts of magical animals. These days, there was so much magic floating around that that sort of thing wasn't necessary unless you were after a very specific magical flavor or property, but this mage must have been doing something crazy, because he had receipts for stuff I hadn't even heard of. Very expensive stuff.
"Sibyl," I said quietly, fanning the stack of receipts in front of my cameras. "What's the total on these?"
"Two hundred eighty-three thousand nine hundred and forty dollars and twenty-seven cents," my AI replied immediately. "It would have been less, but he got rush shipping on a lot of stuff."
That was a number to make my eyes go wide. "What was he doing with it all?" I whispered. "I mean, why pay this much for power when you live in a city that's drowning in free magic?"
"No clue," Sibyl said. "But if he'd done it anywhere else, it would have been illegal." She placed a red arrow on my heads-up display, drawing my attention to a receipt in the middle of the pile. "This one's for a unicorn horn, which only comes off with the unicorn's head. I don't have to tell you how heavily protected unicorns are. They're not even endangered, but humans go crazy anytime one gets hurt. If we weren't in the DFZ, just having this paper could get you in trouble."
"Maybe that's why he was here," I said thoughtfully. The current DFZ wasn't quite as laissez-faire as it had been under Algonquin's rule--the spirit of the lakes had famously cared more for fish than for people, and her lack of laws had shown it--but the modern Detroit Free Zone still lived up to its name. Practically everything short of murder, theft, and slavery was legal here, including, apparently, unicorn poaching. Still. "This has to be worth something," I said firmly. "You don't spend this much on reagents and not get something good out of the spell."
"Well, whatever he was doing, he didn't do it here," Sibyl pointed out. "There isn't enough room in this apartment for even the starting ritual circle he drew on page one."
That was a good point. "You know," I said, looking around the tiny bedroom, which was well stocked with general supplies like clothes but curiously light on personal items. "I don't think he actually lived here. I think this was a place he ran to in emergencies. You know, like a safe house."
"That would explain all of the security," Sibyl agreed. "And the cruddy location. No one ever seems to hide in nice places."
I nodded, paging through the spell notes again. Even accounting for my terrible skill at reading spellwork, they still looked depressingly like a madman's manifesto. Every page was written out to the margins, and there were doodles of weird creatures with chicken heads and snake tails surrounded by arrows and exclamation points. But nutty as the notes looked, they were all I had. There was no way I was hauling a thousand pounds of books up those slimy, mold-covered stairs for a measly hundred bucks. If the spell laid out on these pages wasn't worth money, I'd wasted my entire morning and three hundred bucks on this hole.
"Sibyl, does Heidi Varner still work at the Institute for Magical Arts?"
"According to her social media, she does," my AI replied. "Do you want me to send her a message?"
"No," I said quickly. I hadn't used any of my social media accounts in a year, and I wasn't about to reopen that can of worms for a long shot like this. But where I'd focused primarily on the art and history parts of my magical art history degree, Heidi was a trained Thaumaturge with a specialization in ancient alchemy. She also owed me for not telling her boyfriend about the time she got drunk and kissed another guy in college.
"I'll just pay her a visit," I said. "Are her office hours still the same?"
"Same as when you left, according to IMA's website," Sibyl reported. "But are you sure you want to go? Not that I'd ever read your private mail, but the subject lines of the messages she's sent you over the last year and a half seem pretty angry."
I was sure they did, which was why I'd never looked at them. But desperate times, desperate measures. If there was a chance the spell outlined in these notes was worth anything close to the cost of its reagents, then visiting Heidi was a risk I was willing to take. I was overdue for a
change of luck. Maybe our mage had ordered all that stuff but died before he'd gotten the chance to actually cast the spell. For all I knew, there was $283,940.27 worth of reagents just sitting in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for me to come and pick it up.
"I guess it could happen," Sibyl said when I mentioned this. "It's not likely, but--"
"I know, I know," I said as I tucked the pages into my bag. "Just pull the truck around, would you?"
My AI heaved a long, recorded sigh. "Calling it now."
"Thank you, Sibyl," I said, walking down the path Peter had cleared through the living room to see if he needed any help getting the dead body up to the street.
Chapter 2
Most established Cleaners owned their own trucks, which made sense when you considered that we basically moved houses for a living. But owning a vehicle of any sort was stupid expensive in the DFZ, so I'd opted for the much cheaper route of leasing from one of the car subscription services. Better still, in a rare stroke of foresight, I'd prepaid for the entire year back in January when I'd had money to burn. I'd also bought a fancy intelligent rice maker and an augmented-reality TV, both of which I'd had to turn around and sell months ago to make my rent.
But the car thing at least I'd gotten right. Subscription vehicles weren't fancy, fast, or particularly safe--the small pickup I'd been given this time was missing its bumper and looked like it was made entirely from recycled plastic--but it cost less than half what owning my own vehicle would have, and I got to use it for up to two hundred hours a month. Sometimes more if no one else had it booked.
I didn't even have to drive. Once Sibyl activated it, the truck's AI piloted itself. The cab didn't even have a steering console, just a flat plastic dash with a cheap touch screen featuring a badly animated dog asking where I wanted to go in a cheerful, childish voice.
