Moonshine

by Jasmine Gower

  “However, if any of what I have said in regards to your participation in this company interests you, understand that I cannot say more here. Any questions you have will be answered, but it will have to occur elsewhere. Should you be willing to follow me to another location, I will tell you whatever else you wish to know.”

  Daisy narrowed her eyes at him. “Where?”

  “The warehouse.”

  She recalled the blade hidden in his cane and his purposefully unsubtle threats about “breaches to confidentiality.” Alarmed as she was to discover that her place of employment was some kind of front for one of Ashland society’s most despised groups – even if she herself belonged to such a category – a part of her trusted Mr Swarz, too. Enough that she believed him when he promised that she could walk away from the situation unharmed.

  But the thing was, she wasn’t sure that she wanted to walk away. It wasn’t just that she didn’t want to lose her job – there was something to gain in all this, too. And it wasn’t like a Modern Girl to flee from an opportunity just because it came with a shadow of danger.

  “All right, Mr Swarz. Let’s go to the warehouse and talk.”

  He blew a soft huff from his nose and surprised her with a tiny smile. “Very well. Please follow me.” She expected him to lead her outside, but instead he went to that locked door in the back corner of the lobby. He removed another key from his pocket and unlocked and opened the narrow portal, revealing a solid darkness beyond. Daisy could only see far enough into the space to spy two steps leading downward, and beyond that it was pure blackness.

  “Could you please step inside?” Mr Swarz asked, moving aside to give her room to enter. “Just on the top landing. I will tell you when it’s safe to move.” Daisy did as she was told, realizing that while Mr Swarz promised her safety if she didn’t choose to prod further into the matter of the company’s business, he did not make the same guarantee if she did. Once she was settled in the spot where he told her to stand, Mr Swarz followed, awkwardly crowding himself onto that same landing. He closed the door behind them, leaving them at the top of the stairs in complete dark.

  She heard a series of smacks against a hard, flat surface, and soon a glimmer of light appeared to her left. The snaking strokes of a glowing glyph appeared on the wall, tracing into a geometric pattern of pointed peaks and straight, descending lines. It was about the size of her palm, and the white light it emitted was enough to reveal the next few steps downward. Other glyphs began forming further down the stairway, filling the entire passage with glowing light all the way to another door at the base of the long descent.

  “All right, it’s safe now.” Mr Swarz gestured for Daisy to continue down the stairs. She did so, finding no additional surprises as she walked down. She did glance back at Mr Swarz once to find him rubbing at one of his temples with a gloved hand, his other hand steadied against the wall as he descended, moving slow and deliberate without his cane. He had left his vial of mana in his office, and it seemed that even a spell so simple as turning on a few lights was enough to disorient him a bit. Daisy didn’t remark on it – Mr Swarz was a grown man who could take care of himself.

  Stopping at the second door, Daisy waited as her employer unlocked it. “This is the warehouse,” he said, as he pushed the door open. “Of course, that’s mostly a euphemistic misnomer that we use in public.”

  “So then the ‘warehouse’ is…?” But Daisy didn’t need to finish the question once she stepped into the space.

  Mr Swarz hit a button that switched on the room’s electric lights along the ceiling. Dark, lacquered floorboards were under her feet, but throughout the wide room were imported carpets laid out under billiard and card tables. There was a low stage just to her left, occupied by a rickety piano and some large string instruments. Along the wall to her right was a polished oak bar lined with empty stools, with a doorway into a dark room beyond. On the far wall was a closed door inlaid with stained glass, but no light emitted from within. The whole place was vacant and silent – a subterranean bar, closed for the morning.

  “This way,” Mr Swarz said, moving past the stage and to yet another door on the far side of the room. “I want to show you something.” She followed, eyeing velvet drapes hung over the wall behind the stage as she passed. Beyond this new door, Mr Swarz led her down a short stone hallway to a dark room, illuminated only by…

  She choked down a gasp. Shelves along the wall were filled with glass bottles or in some cases entire gallon jars of faintly glowing blue liquid. From the luminescence, she could see a set of giant, cylindrical vats in the center of the room. Other implements covered tables pushed against the walls of the mysterious chamber.

  She stepped into the room, the blue glow bouncing off the folds of her dress and gleaming off the oil and little hairs on her arms. Mr Swarz activated more glyphs in here, brightening the room until every clinical tool and questionable container in the space was clear as crystal. She turned to him, understanding at last what sort of job she had landed for herself.

  “You brew mana. Stripes Management is just a front for… this.”

  Mr Swarz nodded. “Yes. We call ourselves a document management firm to explain our expenses for taxes and to third party partners. In actuality, Stripes is a collective operation of magic supplemental productions, including our ‘house’ here, Pinstripes. We are speakeasy operators, bootleggers, and moonshiners.”

  “But that’s illegal.” Daisy nearly slapped her hands over her own mouth after blurting out such an obvious observation.

  Mr Swarz’s brow wrinkled at the pointless accusation. “Correct. That’s why the secrecy is so necessary.” He turned away from her. “I suppose it is still not too late for you to turn away, if you wished. Of course you understand that were you ever to breathe a word of this to anyone, we would have to take measures to deal with that matter.”

  Daisy didn’t intend to tattle on Stripes regardless of his threats. She had her own hide to keep from getting skinned, which is why she considered – for a just a moment – taking Mr Swarz up on his offer and just walking out on the operation entirely. It would be safer, certainly, to go back to browsing newspaper ads for job listings.

  But a Modern Girl was daring, and she wasn’t entirely without curiosity to go chasing down some of these rabbit holes.

  “You said you wanted to know more about my magic?” She took off the pendant as Mr Swarz turned back to her, holding it out for him to see. “If your little chicken trinket upstairs is anything like this, it doesn’t require mana. You should already understand that what I do has nothing to do with your moonshining.”

  Mr Swarz stepped closer to examine the bronze necklace, reaching out to feel its surface under his gloved fingertips. “It does, though. You must be aware that methodical magic is one of the more widely practiced forms in Ashland – what the fearmongers refer to when they speak of magic in general, as though it were all the same. Our methods come with a price, and our society has learned to recognize this and hamstring us by outlawing the currency we use to pay that price. Your way bypasses all of that. It would be of great interest to the magic community to have not only a loophole in the issue of mana, but one that our society’s legal system would not immediately notice given its focus on methodical magic, and therefore would be unable to regulate.”

  Daisy withdrew her hand, pulling the pendant away from him, awed by his short-sightedness. “You think my magic doesn’t have a price, too?”

  Mr Swarz recoiled at her quiet admonition, but he quickly collected himself, settling back into his mask of steely professionalism. “Discussions like this are exactly what I would most like to see in a continuing work relationship with you. I believe you and I have much we could teach each other. I will not retaliate if you choose to leave, provided you keep reasonably quiet about what I’ve revealed to you today, but I must know soon: will you stay on?”

  Daisy stalled, meeting his stare as she considered. In school, she had never had many friends, not
even in the early years. A part of it was the magic – it was just about then that the mundanes were starting to get up in arms about magicians, and her grandmother warned her to be careful with who she trusted. Aside from Grandma Sparrow, this was the first occasion that Daisy was able to look another in the eye and find a common interest in magic. Money was a worthwhile reward to be gained from a career, but she was young and still carving out her place in the world. An ally she could trust with her secrets might be more valuable than all the dollar bills in Soot City.

  She slipped the necklace back on and held out her hand. “Mr Swarz, you have my continued service.” The corners of his lips turned up at just the slightest angle, and he took her hand in his.

  Chapter 4

  Northeast Soot City was known sometimes as the Grime District and sometimes the Crime District. Ming Wei, born and raised there, never thought of it as much more than just another neighborhood, but neither description was wholly wrong, either. Built into a corner of the city founded on craggy volcanic outcrops, the dramatic cliff faces and steep hills tended to gather ashfall in a manner that flatter portions of Soot City did not. The city dismissed upkeep of the northeast as a futile and costly effort, so the place was a sooty mess and housing was cheap as a result. That drew in the desperate, and the desperate tended to cultivate less-than-legal habits. Ming had grown up in that life, but it wasn’t as though the bigwigs in downtown and northwest were so above it all.

  The prim figure of Councilwoman Daphne Linden stood stark in the lamplight of Ming’s crowded, dim office in a dilapidated building next door to an abandoned corner market. Linden wore an ironed royal blue suit piece, including a shin-length pencil skirt over dark brown tights. Her dark blonde hair was lightly curled and hung to her shoulders, framing a face of makeup carefully painted to hide the wrinkles of natural age and stress around her eyes and lips. A proper city official, laughably out of place in the slums of the as of yet untouched neighborhoods of the northeast quadrant. Perhaps the bigger joke, though, was that she was far from the first to come through Ming’s door. It was quite the regular thing to see politicians with enemies who needed to be dealt with, and Ming had been doing that sort of dealing for years.

  It had never been something she intended, not in the beginning. As a teenaged kid, short and stout without being properly muscular, she had been present to witness her brother fall into some trouble with money. He owed to the wrong people, and they sent a debt collector to come calling one day. As far as toughs went, he wasn’t much. Ming had taken him down with a cleaver from their kitchen. Her brother, fool that he was, bragged to his friends about his baby sister’s ruthless ability, and soon other foolish young men in the neighborhood came to her when they needed help out of money problems or when they wanted to cause those problems to someone else. More powerful clients began noticing her accomplishments, and many recognized the advantages she had over the big, bulky musclemen that most ne’er-do-wells bothered to hire.

  She was small, plain, and tomboyish. She didn’t dress or conduct herself as women were expected to, which gave everyone around her the sense that they were right to ignore her existence as a fellow human. Insulting, but it was to her benefit when she needed to drive a blade or a bullet into someone.

  It was a useful persona, and she cultivated it into what it was now – a woman nearing thirty in a dusty trench coat hiding away in a poorly-lit shack on the Bad End of Town. Just another face in the crowd – hard to see coming, harder to trace once her task was done.

  The woman standing before her was a bit less subtle. Ming recognized her name from the newspapers. Councilwoman Linden had won her seat on a vicious anti-magician platform. Now, re-elections were merely weeks away, and the biggest threat to her seat was some bureaucrat from the city’s Office of Education, previously a professor of the hard sciences. While most were not openly pro-magic, scientists and engineers were known to have something of a soft spot for the magicians, and this challenging candidate was expected, at the very least, to cater indirectly to magicians by taking a stance of leniency and focusing on “progress,” a buzzword magician sympathizers responded well to. It might have been enough to tip the votes in his direction where it would otherwise be rather evenly split between himself and Linden on economy and infrastructure.

  Ming would have never expected that Linden’s counter-strategy would involve a hired hit, but then Ming never did quite understand the politicians that came crawling through her door. Even more shocking was Linden’s requested target, though.

  “It doesn’t matter who,” the councilwoman said. “Just find one, and take them down. Make a show of it. Remind my constituents what they voted me into office to protect them from.”

  Ming kept silent following the demand. She had built something of a network of fellow slum crawlers over the years, but she didn’t know any magicians – none who were open about it with her, at least – or have any idea who to go to if she needed to hunt one down. There was reason to hesitate at the thought of going toe-to-toe with someone who could produce fire and lightning from their mind, however.

  “If you’re asking for a hit on a magician, that’s going to run you a steep fee. I won’t put myself at that much risk for pebbles.”

  “I have the cash, but I can sweeten the pot with something more valuable.” Linden paused, and Ming could see her running mental calculations about how best to pose herself for this apparently delicious reveal. In the end, she decided to just keep standing aloofly, spine erect. “I have a dear friend who works for the Springwell Trust Bank. He’s been sharing with me details on properties that the bank has marked as places of interest for commercial development.”

  It took a second of mental translation for Ming to get what she meant. Her buddy at the bank was trying to cash in on gentrification. “So?”

  Linden reached into the pocket of her blazer and removed a folded piece of paper. “Correct me if I’m wrong – is your homestead not in this zoning area?”

  Ming sat up straighter as Linden unfolded the paper on her desk. On Springwell Trust Bank letterhead, it listed a number of addresses, though no names of their occupants. Had Linden somehow figured out Ming’s home address? Ming was too careful for that, unless Linden had somehow tracked down her brother, Yun. But how could she have even managed that? Maybe she was just bluffing, taking a guess that a hitwoman would live in the Crime District.

  Even if Linden were bluffing, Ming did indeed see her address on that bank memo. She did her best to hide any concern. “All due respect, Councilwoman, I’m not telling you a damn thing about my homestead. Especially if you don’t intend to get to the point about how this relates to this magician hunt that you want.”

  Linden took back the memo and folded it up. “Just an observation: anyone living in those addresses who doesn’t own their property is likely to soon receive a notice from Springwell Trust that they are buying them out of their leases. A clever renter who wants to preserve their residence would be sure to pay off whatever is left of their lease before the bank finds a corporation willing to pay them more for the land.”

  Ming’s house had been in her family since her grandmother had “bought” it over fifty years ago, when Ashland was only a few years into being a codified nation and banks were buying up land to lend out as rent-to-own deals. Neither Grandma An nor her daughter nor Ming could afford to make big payments on the lease every month, so the property was still not entirely paid off even three generations in, but Ming was close. She had been thinking she could get it all paid up by the time she was in her mid-thirties, but if corporations began waving their cash at the bank before then, Ming wouldn’t have that time. She would still receive compensation from the bank for whatever was left on the lease, of course, but that was little enough now, and she would lose the house she had lived in her entire life.

  Still, she couldn’t show Linden that she had successfully stoked fear in her. “I’m sure they would. But we were talking about how much you would be willing t
o pay for a magician’s head.”

  Linden offered a number, and Ming scrambled to remember how much was left on her lease. Even before she could recall, she asked for more. By the time Linden came up with a second offer, Ming remembered how much she needed and rounded up to account for the cost of the job itself. She asked for more again. They went back and forth with negotiations until Ming agreed to a price, not bothering with her usual shtick in such conversations of pretending like she was giving the client a great deal – Linden was too slimy to fall for that.

  “Very well, Councilwoman, you got it. I’ll need half payment upfront.”

  Linden nodded stiffly. “Of course. My assistant will deliver it tomorrow. And I expect your discretion in this matter, Roxana.”

  Linden was probably clever enough to understand that the name Ming operated under was nothing more than a nom de plume. If she didn’t have Ming’s real name, Ming could probably expect that she didn’t have her exact address, either, but the possibility still left Ming feeling like ants crawled under her skin. “I wouldn’t still be alive if I was in the habit of tattling on my clients, never mind still in business. Silence comes part and parcel with my services.”

  Linden grinned, and it was a chilling sight to behold. It was one thing for people like Ming, doing what they had to in order to get by. A crow sometimes has to steal a bit of meat from another animal’s kill, but people like Linden – like most of Ming’s clientele these days – were more like eagles up in their aeries, killing not to eat but to keep the other birds too weak and starved to try crowding into the nest. If Ming had the luxury of a moral code, she would have exposed every politician that had ever come through her door. As it was, like most people in the slums, her primary concern was putting food in her pantry and keeping a roof over her head, and these were the people with the money.