by Rachel Aaron
“We’re not going to make three hundred grand in three weeks if we stick to the same old routine,” I reminded him. “Just keep bidding. I got this.”
Nik scowled, clearly unhappy. I let him grump, mostly because I had nothing to say that would cheer him up. But uncomfortable as it was, I was committed, eyes locked on the screen as the next unit popped up.
We ended up buying four units before our money ran out, all apartments, and, with the exception of the first, all in the Underground. Nik’s posture got tighter with every new property I picked up, but he was a good Cleaner, so he didn’t say anything until we got back to the car.
“Are you out of your damn mind?” he demanded the moment the doors closed. “Why did you buy four units at one auction? They do these things twice a day! Were you afraid they were going to run out or something? Because we can’t clean that many in one day.”
“I know,” I said, pulling my goggles off my head. “But it’s okay, because we’re not going to clean them. We’re going to raid them.”
Nik looked shocked. Then his face grew angry. “Are you shitting me?”
“It’s the only way,” I argued, pulling up the sheets Sibyl had prepared for my phone. “I woke up extra early this morning to look at the numbers, and they’re clear. If we actually Clean every unit we buy, we’re never going to make it in time. Not unless we hit a jackpot unit. We can’t count on that, though, so my plan is to buy as many units as possible, pillage them for valuables, and leave the actual cleaning for later.”
“We can’t do that.”
“Sure we can,” I said. “I mean, technically, we don’t have to clean them at all. We just won four leases. The DFZ doesn’t care what we do with the places so long as the rent’s being paid.”
“And who’s going to pay all that rent?” Nik demanded, and then his eyes went wide. “Wait, is this what you meant when you said you’d give me all your cash for the next three months except rent? Are you planning on sticking me with hundreds of apartments you already pillaged for valuables?”
“No!” I cried, horrified. “I’d never do you like that! This month is just the big push. Once I’ve paid my dad off, I’ll get all those places Cleaned and back into the system before next month’s rent comes due.”
“But what about this month?” Nik asked. “Who’s going to pay when everything ticks over on the thirty-first? You won’t have the money. That’s the same day you have to pay off your dad.”
“It’ll be fine,” I said stubbornly. “We’ll just put all the units in my name only, and I’ll let them go into Collections. My credit’s already in the toilet, so it won’t matter if I default on a few hundred rent payments. And if I make sure they’re all move-in ready before they get repossessed, I won’t technically be in violation of my Cleaning agreement with the city. Even if I do get in trouble, your name won’t be on the leases, so you’ll be safe.”
I thought that covered everything nicely, but Nik was shaking his head. “This is a bad idea, Opal. You’re abusing the Cleaning system. If the other Cleaners find out you’re raiding, they’ll never let you win another unit.”
“I’ll burn that bridge when I get there,” I grumbled, slumping in my seat. “I’m not doing this because I want to. My back’s against the wall here, and this is the only way I’ve found to get out. I’ll make it work.”
“I hope you do,” Nik said, turning around in his seat to look over his shoulder as he put the car in reverse. “Because you’re screwed if you don’t.”
I was a lot more than screwed if that happened, but there was no point worrying about failure now. I’d cry when I crashed and burned. Until then, I was going to focus on flying as high and fast as possible. That was my mantra as I pulled up the first address on my map, reading the directions to Nik as we started our trek across the DFZ’s nightmarish morning traffic.
***
It’s amazing how fast you can go through an apartment when you don’t have to worry about cleaning up after yourself. On a typical day, Nik and I could process two mid-sized apartments before we broke for dinner. This time, we did all four by two in the afternoon.
We went through the units like thieves, ripping out drawers, emptying closets, throwing stuff on the ground when it wasn’t what we wanted. Even with our new not caring, the hoarded unit still took the longest, but my instinct about it had been right on the money. Like most Skyways hoarders, the lady who’d owned this place had had a shopping problem. We found tons of electronics, clothes, and glassware all new in box with tags mixed in with the trash. Some of the stuff had never even made it out of the shopping bags, which made it all the easier to toss into the bin for resale.
We had to go to three pawn shops to sell it all. It took forever since I had to check every piece of gold, but by five o’clock, we’d cleared it all, bringing in a gross profit of six thousand dollars.
“Not enough,” I grumbled, poking at the spreadsheet floating in the AR in front of me. “That’s only three thousand once you subtract what we spent on the units. I need to be making fifteen thousand in actual profit per day if I’m going to reach three hundred thousand in twenty days.”
“Nineteen now,” Sibyl said.
I shot her icon a nasty look.
“It’s still double your money,” Nik said, showing my supposedly emotionally sensitive AI how to actually be encouraging. “That’s damn good, and now you’ve got six thousand to spend on the evening auction. If we can pull this off again, you’ll end the day at twelve grand. Still not enough, but it’s a good direction.”
It was, but, “I thought you hated this plan?”
“Oh, I still think raiding’s a terrible idea,” Nik said as he pulled us out. “But it’s pretty nice not to have to actually clean stuff for once. We’re basically just doing the fun treasure-hunting part of the job. If it wasn’t for the giant pile of work we’re building up, I could do this all day.” He smiled, then his eyes went hard as they flicked to me. “I’m not helping you Clean all that crap we threw on the ground when this is over, though.”
“Wasn’t even going to ask,” I assured him. “This is all on me.”
And wow, was I not looking forward to that. Nik and I had trashed all four places digging for salables, and now we were headed to the evening auction to pick up even more. It was starting to hit me just how much work I was piling up for myself at the end of this, and that was on top of my promise to Clean with Nik for the next three months to pay him back. I was going to have to work days and nights just to get it all done, assuming getting it all done was even possible. We were piling up units way faster than I could process them, but if I won an apartment at auction only to let it go right back into collections two months later still not Cleaned, I’d be in violation of my agreement with the city. I could lose my Cleaning license and my Master Key, which meant I’d lose my livelihood.
“You could hire someone to help,” Sibyl suggested. “It’ll be expensive, but this was always an emergency scramble. Better to go into debt again than lose your only source of income.”
I didn’t even want to think about it.
“Really, though, right now you should be more concerned with the price of gold,” my AI went on. “I’ve been keeping an eye on it since you made your first transaction, and it looks like the market doesn’t just drop when you sell. It also goes down whenever gold comes into your possession. It’s like the curse knows what you’re about to do and is bracing for impact. At this rate, gold will be worth less than dirt by the end of the month.”
“So long as people pay me in equivalent value, I don’t care,” I said. “Gold tanking is actually great for me. If the market’s in free fall, vendors will start throwing gold at me to unload their supply before it becomes even more worthless.” I pursed my lips in thought. “I should start asking for more.”
“You need to find a way to make it faster first,” Nik suggested. “You want to buy more units, but it took us three hours just to sell the haul from these. We can’t
scale up if we’re losing a fourth of our day to pawn shops.”
“What if we save all our selling for Sunday?” I suggested. “We’ll still need to sell some stuff to get capital for buying units, but we can stash the rest in my apartment since it’s empty now. Or in any of the units we’re not using since we’ve still got them all. It’ll be a risk with gold dropping, but it’s only going down a few percentage points at a time, and only when I have or sell gold. Our time’s worth more than that right now. If we save all our selling for the day when there are no auctions, we’ll be much more efficient.”
“Worth a try,” Nik said. “We’ll hit up the evening auction, eat dinner, and then get back to work. When we’re done grabbing the valuables, we’ll sell enough to get money for tomorrow and stash the rest in your place. Sound good?”
It sounded like an eighteen-hour day. Nik worked those on the regular, but he was half machine. I was all human. A very, very tired human, but I didn’t dare complain. This was my idea, so I wiped the look of horror off my face. “Sounds like a plan.”
He nodded and focused on the road, leaving me frantically researching new pawn shops to make sure we hit the best ones in the most efficient manner.
***
And so it went for a week. We woke up, auctioned, raided, sold just enough to cover the next auction, and then did it all again. By the third day, I didn’t know why I’d bothered to keep my mattress. I lived on coffee and energy shots, ignoring Sibyl’s increasingly pointed remarks about what this schedule was doing to my health. When I did sleep, I slept on Nik’s couch so we wouldn’t have to waste time on the drive to pick me up.
I gave up finding my own food around day four and just ate whatever Nik put in front of me. I showered when I remembered and bought new clothes out of the vending machines whenever mine got too ripped or dirty because disposables were easier than taking the half-hour necessary to purchase something actually decent or do laundry.
Honestly, I was amazed Nik put up with it. Sure he was going to get paid a lot if we made it through this, but I’d basically turned from a functional human to a dirty little goblin squatting in his living room. I still didn’t know if his attraction to me that night in the parking lot had been a real thing or just a drunken impulse, but if Nik had liked me before, I didn’t think it was possible he could keep those feelings alive after this, because I was a mess. One night, I actually fell asleep in my chair while eating. Literally facedown in my plate. I only woke up when Nik lifted me out of the seat to carry me to the couch. I apologized profusely, of course, but he claimed he didn’t mind. He just sat there untangling my hair—which I hadn’t brushed since my dinner with Peter, just washed and put back up in a ponytail—until I passed out again, which took about fifteen seconds.
Like I said, total mess.
Really, the only thing I did during this time aside from work, sleep, and crash the gold market was practice my magic. I would have skipped that too if I could, but the DFZ had apparently taken my agreement to consider her offer as an open invitation to hang out in my head. Between her and Sibyl, I was guilted into practicing multiple times a day, typically whenever I needed magic to bust through a ward on one of the units we were shaking down for valuables. The moment I reached for my power, the DFZ popped up to play telephone between me and Dr. Kowalski, relaying my new mentor’s annoyingly detailed instructions as I struggled to learn how to grab only one potato’s worth of magic.
It was so hard. I’d never actually realized just how much magic my typical handful contained until I tried to fit it into a tuber. Apparently I’d been grabbing bathtubs of the stuff my whole life, which explained a lot. Learning to limit myself to only one potato’s worth was like trying to change how I breathed. It took serious effort just to be aware of something that had always been subconscious. Effort I did not appreciate considering how overworked I was already, especially since I had to do it in front of Nik.
I’m sure he thought I was crazy. Whenever we encountered a magically sealed safe, we’d have to stand there for twenty minutes while I clutched my potato and acted like I’d never cast magic before. It got to the point where I started actively trying to move the magic in my mind to block the DFZ’s voice just so we could get through things faster, which was how I learned that you don’t play those games with a god. The moment I tried, she locked me inside the day’s first unit—a horrifying closet of an apartment tucked up under the new M-8—until I apologized and dropped my barrier.
But while I absolutely hated the infringement on my very limited time, I had to admit it was working. Despite using it constantly, my magic stopped hurting almost immediately, probably because I was no longer stretching it to the absolute limit every time I cast. I still shorted out spellwork, but it no longer exploded on me, and the backlashes stopped all together, which was a miracle. I’d never gone this long without popping myself in the face with my own magic. If I hadn’t been so exhausted, I’m sure I would have felt amazing.
I was very much looking forward to enjoying that once everything was over, actually. For now, though, it was work. Work, work, work, and more work. I’d almost forgotten what the sun looked like when I got a sudden, unexpected, and extremely unwelcome visit from my mother.
In hindsight, I should have seen it coming. I didn’t go back to my apartment anymore except to drop things off, but we were at the Cleaning auctions every day like clockwork, and that was where she caught me. I walked in to find her sitting in the front row, no security detail, no servants, nothing. Just my mom wearing one of her typical six-figure white dresses that she somehow managed to make look pure and elegant rather than boring, which was how they always looked on me.
It was a testament to her power that no one was sitting next to her despite the fact that she was unbelievably beautiful and alone in a prime seat. There was nothing about her that screamed DRAGON, STAY BACK, but no one seemed to want to get close. Even I was a bit intimidated as I walked up to ask what the hell she was doing here. When she turned to look at me, though, that was when I really got my shock.
“Holy crap, Mom,” I whispered, sitting down next to her. “What’s wrong?”
My whole life, I’d never seen my mother be anything but perfect. Perfectly mad, perfectly smug, perfectly victorious, but always perfect. The woman sitting in front of me now, though, looked like she’d gotten even less sleep than I had. There were dark circles under her eyes that even the best makeup couldn’t hide, and her face was pinched with worry, making her look a decade closer to her actual age.
“Mom,” I said again, in Korean this time as I reached out to grab her cold hands. “What happened?”
“Daughter,” she said in the same language, looking warily at the room full of Cleaners watching us as if we were the drama of the century. “Is there somewhere we could talk?”
Normally, I would have suspected a trap. This time, though, I just nodded and helped her up, linking my arm through hers as I led her out of the auditorium. Nik caught my eye at the door, but I just shook my head, motioning for him to get us seats as I led my mom down the former elementary school’s yellow-tiled hall toward the bathrooms.
“Okay,” I said when we were safely locked inside the women’s restroom. “What the hell is going on?”
“Language,” my mother said, but the scold was clearly reflexive. My mom looked like she was about to cry, and while we weren’t on the best terms right now, I was still human, and she was still my mother.
“Mom, tell me what’s wrong,” I pleaded. “What are you doing here? Did Dad make you come?”
“No,” she said, pulling a handkerchief from her purse to dab her eyes. “He thinks I’m on my way to the airport to fly back to Seoul. He doesn’t know that I’m—”
She cut off, crushing the lace handkerchief in her fist as she stared at me with a terrifying look in her eyes. “Opal, you have to stop.”
“Stop what?”
“I don’t know,” she said angrily. “Your father won’t tell me, but
whatever you’re doing, you have to stop right now. You’re killing him!”
I jerked back in alarm. That sounded hysterical, except my mother didn’t get hysterical.
“Ever since the day I redid your apartment, something’s been wrong with him,” she went on, speaking so fast I had trouble keeping up. “He hides it well, but I know him, Opal! I can see he’s getting weaker, and I think it has to do with you. You have to stop!”
I stared at her in shock for several seconds. Then I got mad. “I have to stop?” I cried. “He’s the one who put a curse on me! If he doesn’t like what I’m doing with it, he’s free to remove it at any time.”
“You know it’s not that simple!” my mother shouted, her face truly afraid. “He is the Dragon of Korea! His weakness makes us all less safe, including you! You’re free to be angry with him all you like on your own time, but this affects us all. His enemies were already circling, but now White Snake herself is in the DFZ!”
I pressed my mouth tight. White Snake was my father’s younger sister, only surviving relative, and most persistent annoyance. She was also an even greater enemy of the Peacemaker’s than Dad. “What’s she doing here?”
“Oh, some excuse about considering the Peacemaker’s offer of mutual accord,” my mother said furiously. “It’s all lies, of course. The Peacemaker forces all of his dragons to swear they won’t kill each other, and killing your father is the only way she’ll ever get what she wants. But the Great Yong is no fool. He’s wisely kept to the house since he arrived, so I don’t think she knows about his condition. Still, her presence here means no good for anyone.”
That was definitely true. White Snake was everything I accused Dad of being, only without the moderately redeeming feature of Yong’s honor and sense of fairness. If she was in the DFZ, my mother was absolutely right to panic. I just didn’t see how any of this was my fault.
“Again,” I growled. “Not. My. Problem. If Dad doesn’t want to deal with his sister, he can go home. He can remove my curse. He can do any number of things to repair the situation. Why should I take a hit to fix his shit? He’s the damn dragon!”
