Part-Time Gods

by Rachel Aaron

  “I buy anything,” Martin said, giving me a wink. “I don’t have enough room for the big stuff here, but my brother and I have a warehouse under the freeway that sells furniture exclusively. What you got?”

  I smirked and crooked my finger. “Quality.”

  He followed me delightedly, giving Nik a wide berth as we went outside to inspect the truck. As expected, Martin’s eyes lit up when he saw all the pricey crap my mom liked. With so many flea markets and the big auction houses, pawn shops usually got the scraps. A haul like mine was a rare event on his calendar, and I knew it.

  “I want three thousand for the whole thing.”

  “That’s crazy,” he said. “I can’t sell it for that much.”

  He could get five thousand easy, but you never opened a negotiation with what you actually wanted. “Twenty-eight hundred,” I countered, lifting my chin. “But I’ll drop it to twenty-five if you pay me in gold.”

  Martin did a double take. “Pay you in what?”

  “Gold,” I said again. “Watches, jewelry, coins. I don’t care so long as the weight’s there.”

  “Why do you want gold?” he asked, giving me a funny look. “Is this more of your witchcraft stuff?”

  Nik’s head whipped around. “Witchcraft? What year do you think this is? She’s a mage.”

  Martin snorted. “You haven’t seen the things she’s sold me.”

  I had sold him some pretty awesome stuff over the last few months. Stuff I absolutely intended to get back once my current state of magically induced poverty finally came to an end. “I’m just in a gold mood right now,” I said, giving him an innocent smile. “Twenty-five hundred. We’ll trade by weight.”

  “Two thousand and I’ll give you back your stuffed armadillo.”

  “It’s a pangolin, and no,” I said firmly, clenching my hands to keep them from reaching out for my armored darling. “Twenty-five hundred is fair and you know it. Do you want this stuff or not? Because we can go somewhere else.”

  Martin looked hungrily at the white-quilted bed frame. “Twenty-two hundred?”

  I pulled out my phone and started typing a command to Sibyl to close up the truck.

  “Okay, twenty-five!” Martin said angrily. “But you have to unload it.”

  I glanced at Nik, who shrugged. “Deal,” I said. “Where do you want it?”

  “Put it in the garage,” he said, pointing at the rolling door set in the rear wall of his shop. “I’ll go see if I can scrape together twenty-five hundred in gold.”

  “Pleasure doing business with you,” I said cheerfully as he shuffled inside, muttering under his breath about witches and gold and cursed furniture. When he was gone, I turned to find Nik glowering at me.

  “How much stuff have you pawned in the last five months?”

  “All of it?” I said with a shrug, walking up the ramp into the truck to grab a box. “Hard to say exactly. I pawned it off in bits and pieces whenever I needed to cover a bill. The stuff you helped me save was the last dregs. Trust me, my collection used to be amazing.”

  “Why didn’t you just sell it?” Nik asked, tromping up to grab my couch. “You would have gotten a lot more.”

  “Because I’m one of the people who wanted to get her stuff back someday,” I said grouchily. “If I’d sold, I probably could have made double, but it would have been bought by an actual collector, and then I’d never see it again. If I pawn it here, though, no one cares. Did you see the prices he’s charging? No one in this neighborhood is going to pay that much for a ‘stuffed armadillo.’” I smiled. “Way I see it, he’s paying me to store my stuff. And yeah, there’s a chance it’ll get sold before I can buy it back, but I’ll take the risk and the price cut if it means a chance to buy my treasures back.”

  And I would get them back. I’d scattered my collection to pawn shops all across the city to limit my losses in case another collector walked in one day and realized what he was looking at. Ironically, a lot of it was stuff I’d bought with my dad while he’d been teaching me how to auction. A mutual love of beautiful and interesting stuff was the only thing we’d had in common there at the end. He’d been so proud of me when I’d spotted the one actual antique in a sea of fakes, or when I’d scored what had looked like a dirty length of cloth at a salvage auction that turned out to be a previously unknown portrait by John Singer Sargent. That oil painting was still on display in the entrance hall of my dad’s art museum in Seoul. We both knew it wasn’t one of Sargent’s best and probably didn’t deserve the front billing, but my dad had refused to move it.

  It was stuff like that that used to give me hope. All through my first four years of undergrad, I’d thought Yong could be reasoned with if I could just find the right argument. Every time I tried, though, we ended up yelling at each other, until eventually I’d accepted that I was wrong. There was no reasoning with a tyrant who refused to change his mind.

  “Come on,” I said angrily, glaring at my mother’s over-priced ecru pillows and embroidered throws. “Let’s dump this junk and go.”

  Thanks to Nik’s ability to carry five boxes at a time and lift couches one-handed, it took us barely twenty minutes to empty the truck into the dirty garage. When we walked back into the shop, Martin had my gold all laid out on the counter. He’d even put it on a black velvet cloth, as if I actually cared about the craftsmanship of the watches and rings. I could already tell the Rolex was fake from the doorway, but the label didn’t matter. All I cared about was if the gold plating was legit. Fortunately, my goggles had a density sensor that was even better than the one on my phone. I normally used it for checking the thickness of doors and seeing what was on the other side of box piles, but the interface had a whole menu for testing metals. Gold, being so dense, showed up great, which was how I knew just how badly I was being cheated.

  “I said gold, not yellow-tinted aluminum,” I growled, tossing the watch back at him.

  Martin was completely unapologetic. “What do I look like, Dubai? Real gold’s hard to get here. Everything’s fake in the DFZ.”

  “Well, keep looking,” I ordered.

  He held up his phone. “I can trade you cryptos.”

  “No one wants your imaginary money.”

  “All money is imaginary,” he said stoically, then he ruined it by adding. “I can also give you real money.”

  I planted my finger on his counter hard enough to make the glass squeak. “I said gold.”

  “All right, all right, geeze. What are you, a dragon?” He bent down and came back up with a huge bucket of gold jewelry. “Find it yourself, you’re so picky.”

  I dug into the box greedily, holding up each ring, earring, chain, and tennis bracelet so my scanner could get a good shot. As Martin had warned, almost all of them were fakes, which made me feel very sorry for anyone who didn’t have a scanner, because this bastard was pricing them as if they were the real deal. Fortunately for me, twenty-five hundred dollars isn’t actually that much gold. Only seventy-eight grams according to the current market price Sibyl looked up for me. I had to piece it together bit by bit, but in the end, I got what I was looking for.

  “Thank you for doing business,” I said as I scraped my actual gold into a pile.

  “Yeah, yeah,” Martin said, clearly eager to be rid of me, but I wasn’t done yet. “Before I go,” I said, holding my ground when he tried to lead me to the door, “it said outside that you also buy gold here.”

  “So?” he said. “Every pawn shop does. Where do you think all that stuff you pocketed came from?”

  “Not gold jewelry,” I clarified. “Scrap gold. You know, bought by the ounce for the commodity price.”

  “Oh yeah, I do that, too,” he said. “Profit’s not as good as jewelry, so I haven’t been pushing it, but I buy gold and silver on the market, yeah.”

  “Great,” I said, shoving all the gold I’d just meticulously picked out back across his counter. “I want to sell this.”

  He stared at me for a good thirty second
s. “Are you serious?”

  “As a heart attack,” I said, staring right back at him. “And before you ask why I didn’t just ask for money in the first place, it’s complicated. You don’t want me to talk about it.”

  Martin shook his head and walked back to his register, muttering under his breath about why the DFZ attracted so many crazies. “How many grams did you weigh out?”

  “Seventy eight,” I told him, placing my gold on his digital scale so he could see.

  He double-checked the number and punched it in. “Okay, looks like the current price is thirty dollars per gram.”

  I shook my head. “That can’t be right. It was thirty-five when I looked it up a minute ago.”

  “Yeah, well, the market went down, see?” He turned his monitor around to show me the graph, which was indeed plunging toward the bottom of the screen. “Sorry, Ophelia. Your bad luck, eh?”

  I didn’t bother to correct him on my name this time. I just waved for him to finish the transaction before the price fell any lower. After the exchange fee, my total came to just under twenty-two hundred dollars. A terrible take for an entire apartment’s worth of brand-new furniture and luxury beauty products, but a lot better than I normally did.

  “It dropped a lot more this time,” Nik noted when we finally left the store. “I bet it’s because you exchanged so much.”

  “I was thinking the same thing,” I said as we walked to his car. “If the market drop depends on how much we’re selling, then we should make sure to sell as often as possible to limit how much we get screwed. It would suck to save up a hundred thousand in gold only to trade it in for fifty grand.”

  “You still made a profit, though!” Sibyl said encouragingly.

  “Hard not to make a profit selling stuff you got for free,” I quipped, checking my bank account. “But we’ve got enough to buy some good units tomorrow. Now we just need to do this a hundred and thirty-six more times in the next twenty days and we’re set.”

  “Oh sure, easy,” Nik said as he climbed into the driver’s seat. “So is there anything else you want to sell, or are you done?”

  I didn’t want to be done, but until the auction tomorrow morning, there wasn’t anything else for me to do. “I think I’m good for tonight.”

  “Great,” Nik said, cranking the engine. “I’m starving. Want to get dinner?”

  I was sorely tempted, but “getting dinner” with Nik meant him cooking, and I didn’t want to eat Nik’s food while I was also taking all his money.

  “No thanks.”

  He stared at me as if I was a pod person, which was fair since the real Opal never turned down food. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just tired.” Which was the goddamn truth. I was so exhausted I was about to fall asleep in his car, but Nik kept pushing.

  “Are you sick?” he asked, looking me up and down. “Wait, you’re not planning to eat that potato in your bag, are you? ’Cause we just sold your microwave and your convection oven.”

  “It’s not for eating!” I cried. “That’s my magic potato!”

  I knew how bad that sounded as soon as it came out of my mouth. Unfortunately, everything I could have said to explain it made even less sense. What was I supposed to tell him? That I’d gone on a journey of self-discovery through a never-ending forest and received a magical potato from a dead Shaman who was also a satellite body for the god of the DFZ? Even I thought that story sounded fishy, and I’d been there.

  “It’s complicated,” I said instead, pressing a hand over my tired eyes. “Can you just take me home, please?”

  Nik stared suspiciously at me for a good thirty seconds, and then he shook his head and cranked the car, sliding us into the evening traffic like a fish jumping back into a stream.

  ***

  “Okay, how much do we have?”

  We were sitting in the auditorium-turned-auction-room at the DFZ Cleaner’s headquarters. It was five fifty-five am on Monday, five minutes before the week’s first bids opened, and the place was packed. Nik had picked me up early so we could get good seats, but the front seats had already been taken when we’d arrived, so we’d had to settle for second row middle. It was still a good spot, but I knew from the crowd that bidding was going to be fierce.

  “Three thousand twenty-four dollars and eighty-seven cents,” Sibyl replied, covering my AR interface with the accounting spreadsheets she’d put together for me while I slept. “I went through all the records of your previous units, and your best average rate of return is when you buy a two-bedroom apartment on the first floor of a mid-sized building in a middle-class neighborhood for under a thousand dollars. I’d recommend getting three of those to maximize yield.”

  I sighed. “You know I don’t control what comes up for auction, right?”

  “Hey, I’m just telling you what the algorithms told me,” my AI said. “I ran ten thousand simulations using data from the past five months, and even applying the loss from selling at pawn shops and converting profits to gold, I estimate you have at least a forty percent chance of success. That’s not too bad! It’s just a simulation, of course. You’re the one who has to actually pull it off in meatspace. But if you avoid wasting your money on the long shots, you should have a slightly less than a coin flip’s chance of making your goal.”

  I would have preferred better than a coin flip, but forty percent wouldn’t take too much luck. “Thanks for the number crunch, Sib.”

  “Always a pleasure,” Sibyl replied warmly. “I know how happy good numbers make you!”

  They did. I’d say I was easy to please, but it was actually really hard to get good numbers these days.

  “So what’s the plan?” Nik asked, handing me back my cup of vending-machine coffee when I pushed my goggles off my face.

  “Same as always,” I said, ignoring the taste of cheap chemicals as I sipped my lukewarm beverage in a desperate quest for caffeine. “I’m still cursed, so you’re going to have to bid. I’ll tell you maxes like usual, but I want to buy a lot of units, so get ready to go crazy.”

  “How many units are we talking?” Nik asked. “There’s still only two of us.”

  “Trust me, I’ve got a plan,” I told him confidently, draining the last of my cup and pulling my goggles back down. “Just bid on everything I tell you.”

  Nik still looked suspicious when his face popped up on my goggles’ cameras, but Broker was already walking in, so we both turned to face the short stage with its ancient red velvet curtain.

  “Happy Monday, kiddos!” Broker said cheerfully, his surgically perfected face grinning as he took his place at the podium. “There’s a lot of you and a lot of units, so let’s do this quick-like.”

  He ran his fingers over the glass touchscreen on his podium, and an image popped up in my AR. It was also projected on the actual screen up on the stage, but my shot was much bigger, clearer, and—most important of all—ready to be digitally searched by Sibyl’s photo-recognition software.

  Not that it was necessary for this one. As always, Broker led with the big tickets, starting with an entire abandoned factory. No one raised their hand on that one. There was almost certainly profit hidden in there somewhere, but even the shot of the front showed a lot of broken windows, and who had time to dig through three hundred thousand square feet of broken factory equipment that had probably already been picked over by looters? Broker went all the way down to one dollar before shucking the factory into the shred pile, which was basically the end of it. If even Cleaners didn’t want a property, the DFZ considered it dead. Shreds were sometimes remodeled, but the city spirit usually just sucked them back down into the ground and replaced them with something new. That was the way of the DFZ: if you weren’t valuable, you were waste.

  Not always.

  I jumped a foot in my chair.

  “What?” Nik said, whipping around.

  “Nothing,” I lied, rubbing my temples as I tried to get the ghostly voice out of my head.

/>   I’m a spirit, not a ghost, the DFZ’s voice said huffily. Totally different phenomena.

  I don’t recall allowing you into my head, I thought back at her testily.

  “Yes you did,” Sibyl said defensively. “I showed you how to turn off surface thought reading in the options, but you said to leave it alone, so—”

  “Not you,” I told my AI.

  “Not me what?” Nik said.

  I shook my head and closed my eyes, trying to shut out the crowd I’d built up.

  Don’t worry, I’m not here all the time, the DFZ assured me. I just popped in to say that my offer is still open. Oh, and Dr. Kowalski wants you to practice your potato.

  I rolled my eyes. Great, now I had people badgering me to practice again.

  “I’m not badgering you,” Sibyl said, sounding hurt.

  Think of it as a friendly reminder, the DFZ said cheerfully. Next auction’s up, by the way.

  Broker was indeed putting the next unit on the screen, so I put the spirit’s voice out of my mind and focused on paying attention.

  The second place was an apartment on the Skyways. That should have made it stupid expensive by default, but the picture from the doorway showed a living room that was waist-deep in trash. I grinned at the disgusting spectacle. Hoarding always brought the price down, and I’d already spotted several good signs. Enough to make me lean over to Nik.

  “Go up to one thousand,” I whispered.

  He blinked at me. “Really? It’s a trash heap.”

  “A trash heap with a pile of takeout boxes from Le Palais,” I said smugly. “That place is three hundred bucks a plate.”

  Nik still didn’t look convinced, but he dutifully raised his hand for the hundred-dollar starting bid. There were a few other contenders, but everyone hated hoarded units, and we ended up winning it for eight hundred bucks.

  “Right on the money,” I said as the unit address flashed up on my screen next to our names. “Okay, next.”

  “Next?” Nik said. “You just bought a full day’s worth of work.”

  “Relax,” I said. “I told you, I’ve got a plan.”

  “Does it involve a bulldozer?”