by Rachel Aaron
“How did you end up in that situation?”
“Just sort of fell into it,” he said, eyes locked on his hands again. “My mom was a chiphead who spent all her time lying in flop houses plugged into whatever VR fantasy she could afford. I couldn’t wake her up most of the time, so it was learn to fend for myself or starve.”
I stared at him in shock. “That’s horrible.”
Nik shrugged. “It was pretty common for the neighborhood.”
“That doesn’t make it right,” I said angrily. “How old were you?”
“For which part?” he asked. “It was that way for all I can remember. I’m not actually sure if I really am twenty-eight. That’s just my best guess. I was basically alone for most of my childhood.”
He said this as if it was nothing, just a normal sort of hardship, but I couldn’t even imagine. “How did you survive?”
“Stealing mostly,” Nik said casually. “Sometimes people would give me food when they wanted me to do something, but mostly I just took what I could. There’s always food in the DFZ if you’re not too picky.”
I nodded numbly.
“That’s why I’m so picky about my food now,” he went on. “I don’t ever want to have to eat trash again. Really, though, it could have been worse. Rentfree moves so much there’s always somewhere to hide, so I never got scooped up by traffickers or sold into one of the kill arenas. I got tall early and learned to use a gun, which helped me get my first real job. Things just kind of snowballed from there.”
I looked down at my hands in my lap as I tried to process all of that. I’d always known the DFZ was a city of personal tragedies. You didn’t get to be that reckless with your capitalism without someone getting wrecked. There was a whole genre of movies about the mean streets of places like Rentfree. I’d been a sucker for all of them, but watching a sob story and sitting across from someone who’d actually lived one were two very different experiences. I had nothing in my life I could relate to Nik’s hardship, nothing I could give. Saying “sorry” felt like a cop-out, but I was sorry. Heartbreakingly, tragically sorry for everything that had happened to him. The idea of Nik as a kid trying desperately to wake up his blissed-out mother because he was hungry made me want to sob, but that felt selfish when Nik wasn’t reacting at all.
It would have been easier if he had broken down. At least then I could have comforted him. But he’d told me all of this the same way he told me salvage prices had dropped again: just repeating unhappy facts. I couldn’t be calm, though. It must have shown, too, because Nik sighed.
“I didn’t tell you all this to make you feel sorry for me,” he said bitterly. “I know you thought I was a criminal when we first met, and you weren’t wrong. I got into Cleaning because I was tired of getting shot at, and I was running out of body parts to replace, but as you saw last night, you never really get out. I’ve got so many people who want revenge on me that I can’t keep track of them all. Staying out of Rentfree and moving to a new apartment every few months avoids most of the trouble, but I can’t dodge it all. What happened on that parking deck was bigger than it should have been because I got reckless, but it wasn’t that unusual, and it’ll probably happen again. You shouldn’t have to deal with that.”
I shook my head. “It’s not—”
“You’re here to make money, not take a bullet because of some shit I did years ago,” Nik said, finally lifting his head to look at me again. “This was my screwup. I should have told you what you were in for at the beginning, but I didn’t want to scare you away, and I thought I could handle it. I couldn’t, though, and I can’t guarantee it won’t happen again, so if you want out, now’s the time.”
A chill crept over me. “Why would I want out?”
“I don’t know,” he said angrily, glaring at his fisted hands. “Maybe because you don’t want to get shot at for stupid crap?”
“I get you shot at, too,” I reminded him. “We got jumped by a whole merc team in the Gnarls just last week because of me.”
“That’s different.”
“How is it different?”
“Because I knew it was going to happen!” he yelled at me. “Kauffman’s a fixer, and I’ve worked with him before. I knew what we were in for better than you did! Everything I’ve done with you I’ve done eyes open, but this is different. I didn’t lie to your face, but there’s so much I didn’t tell you that I might as well have. If someone gave me a job and told me as little about the potential dangers as I’ve told you, I’d have killed them!”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I said, getting angry too now. “You keep trying to make me jump, but I’m not doing it, Nik. Maybe it was wrong of you not to tell me the risks, but I totally understand why you hid them, and I don’t care! You told me yesterday when I was feeding you these same lines that it was your choice to stay. Well, shoe’s on the other foot. You can give me all the logic you want, but I’m not going to leave you. If you want to end our partnership, you’re going to have to be the one who stands up and walks out, because I’m not budging.”
To prove my point, I crossed my arms over my chest and sat back in my chair with my feet flat on the ground, daring him to try and move me. For his part, Nik just stared at me as if I was crazy, and then he dropped his head into his hands.
“Why are you being so stubborn?” he whispered.
“Because I need you.”
I regretted the words the moment they were out of my mouth. They sounded so cold and transactional, like I was only here because of my debt. But at least Nik was looking at me again, so I kept going.
“You’re the only one I trust to help me,” I went on, angling for brutal honesty since tact was dead and buried. “You want to talk about lies? I didn’t tell you my dad was a dragon. You had to find out the hard way, but you didn’t abandon me. Even when you found out I was cursed, you still stayed and helped bail me out. I can’t replace that. I appreciate everything you’ve told me, and I understand why it took you so long, but none of it changes what you are to me. You’re my hope. You’re my ally and my trusted partner in a city where those things are very rare. We’ve got an amazing thing going here, and if you think I’m going to let some chromed-out idiots ruin that for me, you’re insane.”
That might have been a bit too much honesty. Nik certainly looked stunned, and then he let out a long breath.
“Okay.”
“Okay what?” I asked nervously.
“Okay, I’m insane,” he said, flashing me a helpless smile.
“Well is it a temporary madness? Because I don’t want to have to go through this again.”
He laughed at that. I laughed, too. Not because I thought any of this was funny—it had been terrifying—but because I was so relieved. “So we’re good now?”
“We’re good,” Nik said, rubbing a nervous hand through his damp hair. “Sorry I made such a big deal about it, but in my defense, most people freak out over being shot.”
I snorted. “What part of our interactions made you think I have a normal reaction to anything?”
“None,” he admitted. Then his smile grew warm. “After all, you didn’t leave.”
I froze, mind whirling back to last night when I’d been sitting in this exact spot except on the floor instead of a chair, holding his hand to show him I was still here. “I thought you didn’t remember that?”
“I remember the roof,” he said. “When those guys jumped us, you didn’t leave me behind.”
“Oh,” I said, slumping over in my chair. Then I snapped right back up. “Of course I didn’t leave you! What kind of person would just run off and leave you to die?”
“Most of them,” he said, completely seriously.
I harrumphed. “You must know some shitty people.”
“That’s why I’m happy to be partnered with you,” he said, that warm smile still on his face.
I actually leaned into it before I caught myself and jerked away. Stupid, stupid. I’d been handed a
Hail Mary by Nik’s loss of memory, but it was all for nothing if I screwed up my end by getting mushy. Fortunately, I knew just the thing to keep myself safely distracted. Or obsessed, depending on how you looked at it.
“So,” I said, rising from my chair. “If we’re back to normal…” I paused until he nodded. “I have a new proposition for you.”
He arched an eyebrow. “Proposition for what?”
“Work,” I said, pulling out my phone to show him the price of gold, which had rebounded slightly from the dip I’d caused last night. “We know how to get around my dad’s curse now, but I’ve still got to make three hundred thousand dollars by the end of the month.”
“Wait,” Nik said, eyes wide. “Three hundred thousand? By the end of the month? Why?”
I blinked at him. “Because my dad threw a fit when he called and demanded I pay the full amount. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No!”
“Oh,” I said, frowning. “Sorry. Anyway, them’s the breaks. But I know we can do it.”
“By what logic?” Nik demanded. “DeSantos can’t pull that kind of money in a month, and he’s got a ten-man crew. I didn’t even get paid that much when I was working freelance.”
Wow. Apparently hiring someone to kill people you didn’t like was a lot cheaper than I’d thought. But that was neither here nor there. “I’ve got a plan,” I told him. “It’ll take a lot of work and no small amount of luck, but if we hit the morning and evening auctions every day, it should be doable. Just. Unfortunately, if we keep dividing our income fifty-fifty—”
“I see the problem.” Nik said. “You need to change the profit split.”
“Just for this month,” I promised. “Here’s my deal: if you let me keep all our earnings for the next three weeks, I’ll give you all my money I make for the next three months minus what I need for rent and food. Everything over what I need for survival will be yours to keep, and since I’ll be uncursed by then, it should be a lot.”
Nik scowled, thinking that over. I held my breath, waiting. I was giving him a hell of a deal, but giving up a month’s worth of income was a pretty big ask. I didn’t even know if Nik had that much ready money on hand, but pulling this off was already one hell of a push. If I had to split profits even a little, the chances of making my goal by the deadline were pretty much zero. I was about to sweeten the deal by telling him he could keep all the money if we didn’t make it since I wouldn’t need it trapped in Korea when Nik suddenly nodded.
“Deal.”
“You sure?”
“Absolutely.” He flashed me a greedy smile. “I saw how much money you were making before the curse, and I know how much you make now. With this bargain, I’ll be giving up fifty percent of your worst-performing weeks for nearly a hundred percent on twelve of your best. That’s a three hundred percent return on investment.”
“And you’re sure you can make it for a month?” I asked nervously. “Because I’m going to need everything.”
“I’m fine. I’ve made plenty of months on no income before.”
He said that casually, but the reminder of his poverty-stricken childhood still made my heart go out to him. Even at my hungriest, I’d always known in the back of my head that I could run back to my dad if things got unbearable. Nik hadn’t had a safety net like that. He hadn’t had anyone.
“Can I ask you a personal question?”
“Depends on the question,” he said. “But go for it.”
“You said you grew up alone on the streets of Rentfree,” I said quietly. “But how did you do it? I get that you found jobs, but in between that, how did you go for weeks on end with no money?”
Nik shrugged. “This and that. A lot of it was learning how not to spend money so I’d have cash to cover the lean times. Also, if I got really desperate, I could always find work at the arena.”
“The arena?” I frowned. “You mean that big place at the bottom of the pit?”
He nodded. “The guy who owns it, the Gameskeeper, will give anyone a job if they ask. He’s the biggest employer in the neighborhood. Everyone in Rentfree’s worked for him at some point, though not always in the same way.”
That sounded like a decent, community-minded thing to do, but something in the way Nik said it made me wince. “What kind of work does he have people do?”
“Stuff you gotta be desperate to take,” Nik said grimly. “He’s the one who taught me that some jobs aren’t worth the money.”
The fingers on his mechanical right hand closed into a fist as he finished. The curious idiot in me was dying to ask if this “Gameskeeper” was the guy he’d said he’d never work for again when he’d turned down Kauffman’s final offer on the cockatrices, but this was definitely not the time. I had Nik on my side and a very limited span of days to put my plans into motion, which meant it was time to get to work.
“So,” I said, flashing him a smile. “Ready to make some money?”
“I’d hoped for more sleep,” Nik said, leaning back on the couch. “But you’re the boss this month, so what do you have in mind?”
My body ached at the word “sleep,” but I fiercely ignored it. I could sleep when this was over. Right now, time was money, and everything was against us.
“Next Cleaning auction isn’t until tomorrow morning,” I said, waving my hand over my phone’s screen. “But Sunday afternoons are prime shopping time, and I’ve still got an apartment full of brand-new, overpriced furniture I don’t want.”
Nik gave me a skeptical look. “You can only empty that apartment so many times, you know.”
“I know,” I said. “But you work with what you’ve got.”
“Fair enough,” he said, standing up. “Better get moving, then. I’ll drive, you get the truck.”
“Already on it,” I said, ordering Sibyl to scramble our last moving truck rental of the month and to find out where we could get more trucks on the cheap, because we were going to need a lot.
Chapter 7
We grabbed everything in my apartment. Ev. Re. Thing. We took the furniture, the pillows, the appliances. We grabbed all the makeup and the toiletries, the vanity and the hairbrushes. We got the curtains and the paintings and the bulbs out of the recessed lights. Nik showed me how to remove countertops, so we ripped the granite out, too, as well as the plates, silverware, and the fancy laser faucet my mom had stuck in my kitchen sink.
In the end, the only parts of my new apartment that didn’t get shoved into the truck were the hardwood flooring (only because it would have been more work than it was worth), my mattress (I needed somewhere to sleep), and the dry food in my pantry (supplies). Everything else we hauled away to sell, though not to the flea market this time. Selling to individual vendors was usually the best money, but as I’d found last night, most tables didn’t keep gold on hand, and I didn’t want to have to run every single item in the truck through a web of barter until I found one that did. If I was going to use this trick to pay my whole debt, I needed a scalable solution. Somewhere with a lot of gold on hand and an insatiable appetite for secondhand goods, which is how Nik and I ended up rolling to a stop in front of a squat brick building with iron bars in the windows and a blindingly bright sign that read Martin’s Tailor and Pawn.
“A pawn shop?” Nik said, looking at the flashing neon in disgust. “Seriously? Are you trying to get ripped off?”
“No, I want to be paid in gold,” I said, getting out of his car. “Pawn shops always have gold. And yeah, they’ll try to cheat you hard, but when you consider I’d be making fifty percent less at places that only pay in cash, getting ripped off for ten to twenty suddenly isn’t so bad. Also, they’re everywhere. The DFZ Underground has more pawn shops than banks and credit unions combined, so if we buy up all the gold at one place, we can just move on. It’s perfect!”
“It’s embarrassing,” Nik snapped. “We’re Cleaners. Professionals. Pawn shops cater to the desperate and idiots who don’t know any better.”
“Or people who want to
be able to get their stuff back someday,” I said defensively, motioning for Sibyl to pull our moving truck into the side alley. “Are you coming in or not?”
Nik rolled his eyes and climbed out of the car, shoving his gloved hands into his pockets as he followed me through the jingle-belled door into a shop filled with the usual DFZ Underground assortment. There were guns on the wall and jewelry in long glass cases. A double-layered rack in the middle displayed all manner of scandalous clothing, and there was a cabinet in the back corner filled with hookahs and pipes in every shape, color, and suggestive theme. There were more practical items, too, like power tools and winter coats, but nothing really stood out. Honestly, the only things in the shop that were worth a second look were the items on the shelf behind the register.
Now these were good. First in line was a taxidermy pangolin that still had most of its scales. Next to that was a religious icon painted on a folding wood panel depicting the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. That wasn’t too unusual—Sebastian was a very popular saint—but this painting was remarkable because he actually looked like he was dying, not just sitting there being hunky with a few arrows jabbed artistically into his rippling abs. Next up was a pair of opera glasses decorated with scenes from Swan Lake that had been used at the Bolshoi Theatre before the first Russian revolution. That was a really good piece, actually. So rare to find one that wasn’t cracked. I was rising up on my toes to get a better look when a middle-aged man with a bald head, a protruding gut, and a bushy beard came out of the curtained back room.
“Ophelia!” he cried, holding out his arms when he spotted me. “It’s been an age! Are you here to pay up and get your stuff back?”
“It’s Opal, and hey, Martin,” I said, ignoring Nik’s startled look. “I’m here to sell today. You still buying furniture?”
