Last Bastion

by Rachel Aaron

  "Institute for Magical Arts," I said as I shut the chintzy door.

  "Right away, Miss Yong-ae," the truck replied. "Would you like to upgrade your ride today? We have over five hundred entertainment options from the hottest new--"

  "No," I said, cutting off the upsell. "Also: No. No. No. I decline the insurance option. And No."

  "Yes ma'am," the vehicle said when its cheap AI finally finished processing all of my answers. "We should reach your destination in thirty-nine minutes. Until then, please enjoy these messages from our corporate partners!"

  I scrambled for the volume, frantically mashing my finger against the down arrow on the touch screen as ads started blasting at deafening levels from the tinny speakers.

  "You know, you really should just pay the extra ten dollars a month for the ad-free service," Sibyl said when I'd gotten the cheerful jingles down to a not hearing-destroying level. "It would improve your mental state."

  "If I could afford an extra ten bucks a month, my mental state wouldn't need improving," I reminded her, flopping into the cheap plastic seat as the truck backed itself out of the alley. "But why did it say it's going to be forty minutes? It shouldn't take more than twenty to get to the IMA campus from here."

  "There's a lot of activity in our way," Sibyl said, bringing up a map of the city, which was covered in bright-red warning icons. "Looks like the DFZ's doing some moving of her own."

  That turned out to be a very accurate description. Everything looked relatively normal in the Underground--just the usual cheap apartment blocks, discount stores, and neon-lit vending machine bars selling the standard assortment of canned liquor--but when we turned up the ramp to the Skyways, it was like entering a whole other world.

  The first thing that hit me was the sunlight. I cringed like a bad movie vampire when we came out of the tunnel into the upper city. Even through the smog, the summer afternoon was so blue and bright it scarcely looked real. I was so used to being under bridges that I'd almost forgotten how big the summer clouds could be, but even they were dwarfed by the city's superscrapers.

  I grew up moving between Seoul, LA, and Hong Kong, so I was used to giant buildings, but the ones in the DFZ were on an entirely different level. Some of the glass and steel spires were a full quarter mile around at the base, with peaks so tall they created their own rain shadows. Even modern steel-strengthening spellwork couldn't account for how enormous they were, because these buildings hadn't been built by human hands. They were the product of the spirit of the city, sprouted from the ground like trees by the DFZ herself. And apparently she wasn't done.

  "Wow," I breathed, pressing my face against the scratched-up window.

  Ahead of us to the left, on the route we normally would have taken, an entire section of the New I-75 flyover had lifted from its support beams and was slowly moving to the north, much to the fury of the cars stuck on top of it. The angry blaring of horns was even louder than the advertisements still yakking through my speakers, but they were still nothing compared to the stomach-churning scrape of steel on stone from the new building that was rising from the ground where the highway had been.

  Even after three and a half years in the DFZ, the sight was a shock. I gawked like a tourist, watching wide-eyed as ribbons of steel rebar shot up from the exposed Underground like seedlings racing toward the sunlight. Cement followed more slowly, creeping up the metal as the new building constructed itself in front of my eyes. Given that the top of it was already visible above the Skyways, there had to be multiple floors already constructed in the Underground below that I wasn't seeing, not to mention foundations. I hadn't noticed a thing when I'd driven through that area this morning, though, which meant the DFZ had done all of that during the time I'd been stuck in the dead guy's apartment. God or no, that struck me as quite impressive, and I whistled in appreciation.

  "I wonder what kind of building it'll be."

  "Given the area of the base, it's either another superscraper or a stadium," Sibyl replied. "Not that we need either. This area's too crowded as it is."

  I chuckled. "I think the city knows what she's doing."

  "Well, I just wish she'd wait until after rush hour to do it," my AI grumped, bringing up the map again, which was updated in real time by the DFZ City Council, the only municipal service the city provided for free. "Look at this mess!"

  It was pretty dire. According to the warnings, I-75 had been on the move for the last forty-five minutes. All the side streets near the new building had been cut off as well on both the Skyways and Underground levels, and the resulting chaos had turned this entire section of the city into a parking lot.

  "Good thing we're going south," I said, looking sympathetically at the cars stranded on top of the moving bridge. "That thing doesn't look like it's coming down anytime soon."

  "There's no estimated end time listed on the traffic report," Sibyl confirmed, her voice disgusted. "What is the DFZ thinking? She's not exactly known for taking her citizens' convenience into account, but moving a major commuter highway on a Monday just feels like bad planning."

  I shrugged. "Spirits move in mysterious ways. I mean, for all we know, the delays are the point. She is the living incarnation of the city, and what's more citylike than a traffic jam?" I smiled at the interstate, which was now a good fifty feet above the already elevated Skyways and still rising. "I'm just glad the truck's AI was smart enough to route us around."

  "Hooray for minimal competency," Sibyl said dryly. "On the bright side, though, this means there should be a lot of Cleaning jobs coming up in the next few months. Historical data shows that there's always a surge in vacancies after the DFZ does something big like this."

  "It's never comfortable to be reminded that you're an ant in a god's world," I agreed, staring up at the two enormous superscrapers that were tilting sideways to make way for the new building, sending entire floors full of office furniture sliding in the process. "I just hope I'm still around to take advantage of it."

  Normally, this was where Sibyl would insist things weren't that bad, but her protocol against lying was stronger than her directive to cheer me up, and we both knew the truth. It was right there on the wallet icon at the top of my heads-up AR display. After a year of doing really well as a Cleaner, I'd hit a dry streak nothing seemed able to break. Today's fiasco was just the latest in a long line of absolutely horrid luck. If I hadn't been a mage and able to check these things for myself, I'd have sworn that I was cursed. Every time I looked, though, there was nothing. It was just plain old bad luck, statistical clustering, which meant it had to break soon. No one could be this unlucky forever. Whether I could hold out long enough to reach the other side, though, was another issue entirely.

  "Maybe we'll get lucky and these'll turn out to be a brilliant translation of some lost alchemical text," I said, pulling the dead mage's mysterious notes out of my bag. "Heidi's a sucker for that stuff, and her department has serious corporate funding. We could still make bank."

  "If that mage was capable of anything worth 'bank,' he wouldn't have been living on frozen burritos in a basement apartment," my AI pointed out.

  I rolled my eyes. "Thanks for the vote of confidence."

  "I just don't want you getting your hopes too high," Sibyl said. "As a social support AI, it's my job to assist in your mental health, and these fits of wild optimism that crumble into crushing despair when they run into reality are not good for you. I think it would be much healthier for you to drop the notes in Heidi's box and go home for a shower before the evening auction. I don't have a nose, but I'm pretty sure you smell like dead guy."

  That was undoubtedly true, but the thought of abandoning the notes--my only score from today's disgusting, backbreaking work--in a cubby at the history department's unorganized office was too much to bear. "Not a chance," I said firmly. "We're going inside. If these notes are worth something, I want to know today."

  "Suit yourself," Sibyl said. "I'm just saying there's a strong likelihood this whole thing
is a waste of time."

  "Better to waste time than money," I said stubbornly. "Time I've got." Until Friday, at least.

  We spent the rest of the ride in silence. Thankfully, the traffic disruption from the moving highway was mostly confined to the northern half of downtown. Midtown, where the IMA campus was, was moving just fine. Once we got out of the glut, we made good time, cruising down the cheap toll lanes until we reached the turnoff for the institute just as the ride meter ticked to thirty-nine minutes, exactly as predicted.

  "Haven't been here in a while," I said, self-consciously brushing the grime off my warded poncho as I stepped onto the pristine white cement of IMA's new visitor pavilion. "I like the new duck pond."

  "I think it's supposed to be a reflecting pool," Sibyl said. "The ducks are just swimming in it."

  "Then I hope they're ready to sell their souls to pay tuition," I joked, looking around at the perfect green lawn and artistically scattered white buildings that made up IMA's main campus. "You go into debt just for breathing around here."

  Like everything else that was worth real money, IMA was up on the Skyways. It had a nice location, too, taking up several elevated blocks just half a mile south of the Dragon Consulate where the Peacemaker, the dragon who claimed the DFZ as his territory, kept his lair. I wasn't sure why the DFZ allowed any dragon, particularly one as famously eccentric as the Peacemaker, to claim her as his land, but there must have been some kind of history there, because she loved him. Her buildings were forever shifting around the multilevel Dragon Consulate to make sure the dragons had a clear flight path coming in.

  And they were always coming in. Thanks to the Peacemaker's Edict, which declared that no dragon could attack another within the city without facing the Peacemaker's wrath, the DFZ had turned into a sort of dragon Switzerland. Clans that would kill each other on sight anywhere else in the world routinely met in the DFZ to talk. Not about peace--normal dragons never talked peace--but they talked a lot of business, which was probably why the DFZ gave them so much leeway. No one loved capitalism more than she did, and when you considered how much wealth the average dragon accumulated over their immortal life, courting them was just good sense.

  It was also good for IMA. Being so close to the Dragon Consulate, and the spectacle of the giant dragons that constantly flew through the sky surrounding it, gave the school an edge that other magical arts universities simply could not top. Add in the fact that they'd converted their entire Skyway campus into a lavish park complete with water features, semi-tropical gardens, and buildings that looked like modern art installations, and the whole place just reeked of exclusivity and money.

  Of the three major magical colleges in the DFZ, the Institute for Magical Arts was the most expensive by an order of magnitude. While MIT-Thaumaturgical and the New Wayne College of Magic had to pour their efforts into industrial spellwork research to court corporate funding, IMA dedicated itself to the "art" part of magical arts with graduate programs in expressive casting, illusionary sculpture, magical theatre, and, my specialty, magical art history. It was the best magic-focused liberal arts school in the world, which meant it was trust fund kids all the way down. I'd fit right in when I'd first arrived almost four years ago. Now I felt like a homeless bum who'd wondered onto campus by accident.

  At least I could still look like I knew where I was going. The campus had changed a lot since I'd finished my master's degree a year and a half ago, but the path to the art history department was still drilled into my memory. Once I figured out how to get out of the fancy new visitor's area, I walked straight there, ordering my truck to circle the block a few times so I wouldn't have to pay for parking while I cut across the bright-green grass lawn toward the perfect white cube that was IMA's historical arts building.

  As a lowly doctoral student, Heidi's office was in the basement. It was a very nice basement with reactive lighting and fake LED windows displaying real-time footage of famous landscapes, but it was still a bunch of closet-sized offices crammed into an underground hallway. I didn't remember which one was Heidi's anymore--it had been more than a year--but I didn't need to. Her door was still covered in the same history jokes and pictures of her and her golden retriever as I remembered. It opened the moment I knocked, revealing a startlingly tall blond woman with tanned skin, a healthy, athletic glow, and cheekbones that could cut glass.

  "Opal!" Heidi cried, rushing forward to hug me before I could warn her about my wards. "Ugh," she said a moment later, snatching her arms back. "What are you wearing? It feels like a trash bag."

  "Anti-dirt wards," I explained, pointing at my poncho. "And anti a lot of other stuff, which is why it feels so slippery. That and the fact that it is actually made of plastic."

  Heidi looked horrified. "Why are you wearing that horrible thing?" she asked, stepping back to let me inside. "You're not still working as a Cleaner, are you?"

  I shrugged and took a seat on the minimalist metal stool in front of her neatly organized desk. "It's not so bad."

  "Really?" she asked, shutting the door behind me. "Because you look terrible."

  I rolled my eyes. "Thanks."

  "I'm serious," Heidi snapped, walking back to her desk. "You're thin, and I don't mean that as a compliment."

  "It's been a rough few months," I admitted, reaching into my bag. "But I'm working on turning it around. That's why I'm here, actually. I need a favor. I found these on a job, and--"

  "Stop," Heidi said angrily. "Just stop right there. What do you think you're doing?"

  I blinked at her. "Asking for help?"

  "Help?" she said, her perfect face growing furious. "Opal, you vanished! You got your degree, and then you disappeared!"

  "I didn't disappear," I said defensively. "I was still here in the DFZ. I just needed a change of--"

  "You moved out of our apartment in the middle of the night!" she yelled at me. "The only reason I knew you were working as a Cleaner is because your mother called to see if I could talk you out of it. Which I couldn't because you never answered any of my messages!"

  I winced. Maybe coming back here hadn't been such a good idea after all. "I'm sorry, I just--"

  "Sorry?" Heidi yelled, slamming her hands on her desk. "It's a little late for sorry!"

  The raw anger in her voice was a shock. I'd known Heidi for years, but I'd never seen her get this emotional. To be honest, I hadn't realized she'd cared so much, which made me feel like a jerk. In my defense, I'd had a lot going on at the time, but that didn't take the sting out of seeing her stare at me like I'd stabbed her in the back.

  "Why, Opal?" she said, her voice cracking. "I was your roommate. I thought I was your friend. Why did you leave without saying goodbye?"

  "I wasn't doing it to be mean," I said, pulling off my goggles so that I could look at her properly. "And you are my friend, I just...I needed a clean break, that's all."

  "A clean break from what?" Heidi demanded. "Were you in trouble?"

  I'd actually done it to get myself out of trouble, but I couldn't tell Heidi that. I'd lied to her enough back when we'd been roommates, which was one of the main reasons I'd left. I was tired of lying all the time. Tired of doing the dance that was necessary to keep everyone else safe. Tired of being me.

  A pretty gem of little value.

  "I had to go," I said, hardening my voice. "I can't tell you more than that, but trust me when I say that it was for the best. I wouldn't have bothered you now, but I really need to know what this spellwork--"

  "Please, bother me!" Heidi begged, reaching out to grab my dirty hands. "What part of 'I am your friend' do you not understand? If you're in trouble, let me help. I'm still living in our old apartment. You can move back in anytime you want. Or don't, I don't care, just please let me help you! I can't stand to see you like this. You look homeless and you smell like death."

  "Told you," Sibyl whispered in my earpiece.

  I muted her with a flick of my finger and focused on Heidi. "Thank you for the offer. It mea
ns a lot to me, it really does, but I can't."

  Heidi's brown eyes narrowed. "It's your dad, isn't it?"

  I stopped cold. "No," I said after way too long.

  "You're not nearly as good a liar as you think you are," she said, crossing her arms. "Look, I know you and your dad don't get along. Given the way you used to yell into your phone, I'm pretty sure the whole building knew. But if he's the reason you ran away, I swear I won't tell him you're back. Just come home. Whatever you're running from, we'll work it out together. I can even give you a job. There's an opening right now in my department. I can get you set up today if you want. For the love of God, Opal, you have a graduate degree from the best magical arts institute in the world! You don't have to dig through other people's trash to make a living!"

  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't tempted. After my last five months, moving back into Heidi's sun-drenched apartment on the Skyways sounded like paradise. But if she knew about my dad, then she was already in too deep. I'd left precisely so he couldn't use people like her against me. If I took her offer now, I'd be playing right into his hands.

  "I can't."

  "Opal!"

  "No," I said, clenching my hands into fists. "I'm sorry about the way I left. I didn't mean to make you worry. I just had a lot of stuff I had to deal with on my own, and this was the only way I could do it."

  "By becoming a Cleaner?" she cried. "How does that help anything?"

  It had helped a lot, actually. Unlike respectable art historians, no one cared what Cleaners did. They came and went as they pleased, and they made their own money. Much better money than an entry-level job at IMA paid, current bad luck notwithstanding. It wasn't neat or respectable, but I needed money more than I needed my pride right now. And anyway, I liked Cleaning. It was surprisingly fun digging through people's lives, and sometimes I found great stuff. Heidi wouldn't understand that, though. From the look on her face, she clearly thought I was little better than a rag picker, and the fact that I looked the part certainly wasn't helping matters.