Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  Finally, when his face had relaxed into normal-looking slumber and my own internal problems had built too high to ignore, I rose silently to my feet. Placing his keys on the table where he could see them, I let myself out, using the small lock on the interior door handle to seal the apartment behind me as I made my way back up the stairs to the parking lot, where Sibyl already had an autocab waiting.

  Chapter 5

  The first thing I did when I got in the tiny, two-seat autocab was dig the card Peter had given me out of my wallet and show it to the camera. This early in the morning, the only taxis working were the old, cruddy ones, so it took a few tries before the image recognition kicked in, but eventually the destination light turned green and we puttered off. Since the card used coordinates rather than a street address, I had no idea where I was going. That wasn’t too unusual—street numbers didn’t mean much in a city that moved around whenever she chose—but there was normally at least a designation saying if we were going up or down. The only thing listed on this card was a string of numbers, though, so I was completely in the dark until the cab drove me out from under the Skyways into the open-air neighborhood still known as University Heights.

  University Heights was one of those weird throwback parts of the DFZ. The university was long gone, as were most of the houses, but the neighborhood still retained its old Detroit name because, unlike the rest of the city, it had never been redeveloped. There were no high-efficiency apartment blocks, no superscrapers or elevated highways. Just the brick skeletons of collapsing houses listing in the shadow of the forest that had grown out of lawns left neglected for the last eighty years.

  It was a peaceful, quiet, postapocalyptic mystery of a place. As one of the last stretches of land left where you could stand on the ground and see the sky, it should have been the hottest real estate in the city, but the DFZ refused to build anything out here. She also refused to open the land up to development by anyone else—quite violently, sometimes—and so far as I’d heard, no one knew why.

  When I’d studied up on the history of the DFZ before I’d moved here, I’d read that this area used to be called Reclamation Land, a safe refuge for nature spirits who sympathized with Algonquin’s antihuman, antidragon zealotry. Back when the city was still ruled by the Lady of the Great Lakes, no human had been allowed to set foot in this place, but that was twenty years ago. Algonquin had long since been kicked back to her lakes by the Spirit of the DFZ, and the vengeful spirits she’d gathered were gone. Without their influence, University Heights should have been no different from any other neighborhood. At least, that was what I thought until I stepped out of the cab.

  The moment my foot hit the cracked pavement, a tremor went through my body. My ability to move magic might have been broken, but I could still feel it just fine, and hoo boy, there was a lot. It wasn’t the usual soft, slightly greasy magic of the Underground either, or the slick corporate stuff you got up on the Skyways. This magic was thick and woodsy, a cool, wet, wild sort of power you normally never felt in cities. It was so different, so strange, that I was amazed I’d never heard about the phenomenon before. Since there was no development in this area, I’d never had cause to visit as a Cleaner, but it felt like an oversight that I’d never been sent out here as a student.

  On second thought, though, maybe it wasn’t so strange. The DFZ had more magical universities than any other city in the world, but they were all Thaumaturgical institutions. Even the Institute for Magical Arts insisted on spellwork for everything, and the entire purpose of spellwork was to translate bumpy, variable natural magic into stable, homogeneous power. That was hard enough to pull off in a city where the ambient magic levels could vary between blocks. In a place this wild, though, homogenization was virtually impossible. You’d need a heavy-duty circle just to get the power here stable enough for spellwork to process, which was a lot of work considering there was plenty of perfectly fine, normal magic just a few hundred feet away.

  But while no one seemed to be tapping Reclamation Land’s weird power, it was being monitored. There were magical sample collection sites and sensors scattered all over the dead-end road where the cab dropped me off. But while there were machines aplenty, there were no people here at all. Granted, it was pretty late at night—or early in the morning—but the emptiness still felt creepy. The DFZ was one of the world’s densest cities. Even with the population divided between the Skyways and the Underground, there was always someone around. Here, though, there was nothing. Just the chirping of crickets in the muggy summer air and the soft whir of the cab’s electric engine as it drove itself away, leaving me standing alone in the dark at the edge of the woods.

  Swallowing a little, I pulled my goggles back down over my face so I could use my night vision. When my AR came up, though, the feed was staticky and slow to respond, as if the mana-contacts weren’t making proper contact with my skin, which couldn’t be true. Between my goggles and the receiver tucked into my left ear, Sibyl had seven contact points to access my natural internal magic and create the images I saw as AR or access my surface thoughts. The contacts on my goggles were the new adaptable sort, too, capable of connecting anywhere along the band whether I was wearing them properly or not. It should have been impossible for my goggles not to create perfect AR so long as they were in physical contact with my body, and yet the lines remained.

  “Don’t ask me,” Sibyl said when I pointed this out. “Everything’s working fine. It’s this place. The magic here is disruptive.”

  I frowned and looked again at the card Peter had given me. According to my map—which was updated by the city in real time—the Shaman’s office should have been directly ahead, but there was no more road. The dot on my map was simply off in the woods, which looked like a mistake. The coordinates system was usually pretty accurate, though, and if there was anyone who was going to live in Reclamation Land, it would be a Shamanic soul healer.

  I just hoped they were open. It was now nearly three in the morning, not exactly normal business hours, but the card in my hand said the place was “open 24/7 to the right people.” I didn’t know what that meant, but the growing wrongness inside me definitely felt like an emergency, and I had nowhere else to go. It wasn’t even about cost for once. If I went to the ER at a real hospital, my dad would find out for sure, and then there’d be no amount of deals or honor that would keep him from swooping in and snapping me up. This was the only lead I had that I didn’t think my dad would find out about, so I sucked it up and walked into the woods, hoping against hope that I wouldn’t end up covered in ticks.

  Ten minutes of hiking later, I realized I should have been more worried about my feet. My heels were utterly incompatible with Reclamation Land’s soft, loamy forest floor. Eventually, I just took them off and went barefoot, carrying my muddy heels in one hand as I padded cautiously across the pine needles. My AR quit working entirely shortly after that. My phone still had signal, which meant Sibyl could send me messages and update my map on the LCD screen so I didn’t get lost, but anything that depended on interaction with my internal magic to work—my AI’s thought processing, my interfaces, my goggles’ eye-tracking software and adaptive filters, even the bridge program that connected the tiny computer in my earbud to my phone’s much more powerful processor—was completely out of commission. The whole thing was crazy. Mana-contacts were the oldest form of magic/technology integration, almost as old as modern magic itself. They were in every device, and they were so famously stable that hospitals used them for monitoring. They didn’t just “short out.” Whatever was here apparently didn’t know that, though, because all my equipment was scrambled.

  “This can’t be happening,” I muttered, pulling out my now-useless earpiece.

  “What’s that?” Sibyl said from my speakers. “I’m audio only right now, so you’ll have to speak up.”

  I shook my head and dropped my earbud into my bag, looking back over my shoulder at the forest behind me, which was now as dark as the woods in fro
nt. The ambient light from the city behind me had already vanished, which felt way too fast to me. My phone’s light also looked oddly dull. The normally blinding LED flash barely illuminated the leaf litter under my naked feet here, forcing me to go even slower as I wove my way between the trees, which were rapidly getting larger. As the trunks grew thicker, the magic floating around them swelled, filling the air until I felt like I was having to physically push my way forward.

  It was like nothing I’d ever experienced before. If I’d still been able to move magic, I wouldn’t even have had to reach out to cast here. This magic was so thick it was pushing into me, so much so that I was starting to feel crushed. It was pretty terrifying in my current condition, but according to the map on my phone, I was almost at the coordinates. The Shaman’s office should have been right in front of me, but I didn’t see any lights or paths or signs. Just dark woods stretching endlessly in all directions and the stars glittering between the branches overhead. An astonishing number of stars, actually, considering how close we were to the city.

  By this point, it was obvious to me that this was no normal magical hot spot. Whatever was going on here, there was serious power at play. Ironically, that actually made me feel better about my current mission. I’d been worried Peter had sent me to see a quack, but anyone who could work in the middle of this much magic had to be the real deal. What kind of deal, or if it was one I even wanted, was yet to be determined, but the potential alone was enough to keep me going far past where any reasonable person would have turned back.

  At least the journey gave me time to think about what had happened with Nik. Not that that was necessarily better than the existential fear of being trapped in an apparently endless magical forest, but there was only so much you could worry about concerning woods that never changed. Long walks always made me broody, and stupid as it was considering how many other problems I had on my plate, the incident with Nik would not get out of my head. Not the threats-to-my-life parts, either. That was something a sensible person would worry about. This was me, and my stupid brain was obsessed over what had happened in his apartment parking lot.

  I pressed my fingers to my lips. I could remember every second of that kiss with vivid clarity, but my feelings about it were a chaos that careened wildly between two camps.

  The first was good old-fashioned giddiness. Nik had kissed me! Not that I’d never been kissed before, but the boys who’d done so either hadn’t known who my dad was (and generally vanished the moment they found out) or they’d done it because of my dad in the hope that seducing the Dragon’s Opal would land them money or fame or whatever else they thought a dragon could provide for them. The ambitious guys usually lasted even less time than the ones who got scared off because I didn’t take kindly to being used, but Nik was a new category. He knew who my dad was, how broke I was, and what a hot mess my life was, but he’d kissed me anyway.

  Or, at least, he’d kissed me while he was drunk.

  This was where my brain took a nosedive into the second camp, which was doom. I was screwed. Nik had kissed me while drunk, and now things were going to get super awkward, because that was what always happened after spontaneously drunken kisses. What if he’d only done it because he was smashed? What if he woke up tomorrow and regretted it? What if he didn’t regret it?

  That was the one that actually scared me the most, and not because I didn’t like Nik. Now that I was free to think about it, I could admit I’d developed a pretty massive crush on him over the last week, and why not? Nik was hot, reliable, hardworking, honest, we got along, and he didn’t judge me for having a very screwed-up family situation. That was a way better start than most of the guys I’d dated, but Nik wasn’t someone I’d met online or a friend or even just a business partner. He was the rope keeping me out of the abyss. Even with the gold hack I’d discovered, there was no way I could earn enough to pay back my entire debt before the end of the month by myself. I didn’t know if it was possible even with his help, but I absolutely could not do it on my own. I needed Nik, and that made this kiss a huge problem, because no guy I’d kissed had ever stuck around.

  That was not hyperbole. My record with men was an unbroken line going straight down. I knew that fear of my dad had run off a lot of them back in Korea, but even after I moved to the DFZ, where I could hide the fact that I was that Opal Yong-ae, I’d never had a relationship that lasted longer than two weeks. I didn’t know if it was the guys or me, if I was too demanding or too weird or too focused on earning money, but as Sibyl had so adroitly pointed out during my dinner with Peter, the pattern was clear: Opal likes boy, boy leaves. And while it might have been unfair to lump Nik in with all the others since he was so different, I couldn’t afford to take a chance right now. Until my debt was paid, I needed everything to be smooth and drama free, which definitely didn’t include reckless, magic-drunk kisses after life-threatening events.

  But done was done. There was nothing for it now but to cross my fingers and hope Nik had been so drunk he wouldn’t remember. That made me sad to think about—again, back to Camp One—but it’d be better for everyone if that sudden, remarkable, glorious kiss lived on only in my fantasies. For now, I had to focus on the real world, where I was still lost in an endless forest with blistered feet and broken magic. Even my cell phone was starting to give out. My map didn’t seem to be updating anymore, and Sibyl hadn’t piped in with helpful commentary in a suspiciously long time. I was seriously contemplating saying screw it and turning around when I spotted a light in the distance.

  It was a lantern. Not an electric one either, but an old-fashioned glass-and-oil job with a bright, clear flame shining like gold in the dark forest directly ahead of me.

  Hopes rising, I ran forward, ignoring the pine needles poking my bruised feet as I charged toward the only sign of progress I’d found yet. But while I was clearly covering ground, the lantern I was running toward didn’t get any bigger. Like the spot on my no-longer-functioning map, it never seemed to get closer no matter how fast I went. It was like one of those awful stress dreams where you run and run and never get anywhere. After fifteen more minutes, I was ninety percent convinced that I’d fallen asleep on the cab ride over and this was a dream. It was the only logical explanation I could think of for what was happening, but I still didn’t stop.

  I should have. If this was a dream, I needed to wake up and get out of the cab before the meter sucked down what was left of my bank account. If it wasn’t a dream, well, that was even worse. The walk before I spotted the lamp had been suspiciously long, but journeys through the woods at night always felt longer when you didn’t know where you were going. This, however, was undeniable. Unlike the dot on my map, which was never a sure thing in a moving city, I could see that the lamp was not moving despite all my running, and I’d read enough folklore to know that forests in which you walked and walked and never got anywhere were generally not places you wanted to be. People scoffed when I applied fairy-tale logic to real life, but folk stories were how our ancestors passed on important magical knowledge in a world where magic had ceased to exist. Now that the drought was over and magic had come back, those tales were all relevant again.

  That was what I’d argued in my graduate thesis, anyway. I didn’t think I’d actually stumbled into an enchanted forest—this was central Michigan, not medieval Europe—but woods that went on forever were a persistent trope across multiple cultures. The fact that so many different people told the same story suggested such forests had once been a common occurrence. I didn’t know why there’d be one at the edge of the DFZ, but given the crazy magic filling the air like syrup, I didn’t find it unbelievable. But I was now very concerned with how I was going to get out.

  Panting, I quit running and looked around. The idea was to get my bearings, but I was no longer certain which direction I’d come from, and the forest behind me was even darker and more foreboding than the woods ahead. At least that way had a light. Of course, that light might be a lure to get me to ke
ep walking forever until I died—another common trope in these sorts of stories—but turning back felt like giving up, and I’d had enough failure for one night. If this was a trap, I was already neck deep in it, but if I was going to die stupidly tonight, I was determined to do it while moving forward. With that, I set my jaw and started walking again, stomping my dirty, bruised feet determinedly over the roots and pine needles until, all of a sudden, I was there.

  I stopped with a jerk. There’d been no transition, no warning. The woods had simply ended, leaving me standing in a clearing beneath a wide, clear sky colored green with the first light of dawn. In front of me was a two-story brick house that looked like all the others in the University District, except this one wasn’t ancient or collapsing. It was actually in beautiful repair, with gleaming white mortar, some really lovely decorative masonry patterns in the brickwork on the second story, brilliantly colored stained-glass windows, a deep-brown clay roof that didn’t look to have a single broken tile, and a granite foundation that ran straight as a pin all the way around. It was an absolutely beautiful example of classic Old Detroit residential architecture from the time when “a man’s home is his castle” had been taken absolutely literally. There was even a little tower sticking up out of the roof in the back, complete with a conical roof and a tiny window where a princess could have sat like a piece of prime merchandise.

  But while the house was textbook Gothic Revival, the landscape surrounding it looked like a mad botanist’s horticultural experiment gone out of control. Every foot of open ground between the house and the forest was jam-packed with plants that had all been meticulously labeled. Other than the signs, though, there was no discernible order. The whole thing was a jumble of greens and flowers, bushes and trees, gourds and berries. You had vegetables next to ornamentals next to fruit trees next to patches of what I would have called weeds if they hadn’t been just as beautifully labeled as everything else.