by Rachel Aaron
Schooling my face to hide my excitement, I leaned in to whisper in Nik’s ear, holding up my coffee to shield my lips from DeSantos, who was sitting right behind us specifically to vulture tip-offs. “We have to get this. Sky’s the limit.”
Not long ago, saying that about an apartment this shabby would have gotten me a serious side-eye, but after three weeks of frantic buying, Nik and I were a well-oiled machine. He didn’t even ask what I’d seen. He just raised his hand, face carefully neutral as he put in a bid so reasonable no one could ever suspect it.
The ploy worked like a charm. We won the unit outright with zero competition. The moment Broker said “Sold” and the unit’s info appeared in my inbox, I was out of my chair like a shot.
“Where are you going?” Nik hissed. “The auction’s only half over!”
“We don’t need that other stuff,” I whispered back, grabbing his arm to tug him up with me. “This is the big score!”
“What big score?” DeSantos asked, leaning on the back of my abandoned chair.
I flipped him off and yanked harder on Nik’s arm. Shrugging apologetically at Broker, who was giving us a stern “settle down” glare, Nik rose from his seat and followed me out of the auditorium. “What did you see?” he asked when we reached the hall.
“I’ll tell you when we get there,” I said, hurrying toward the fire door that opened into the former school’s tiny parking lot. “I don’t want someone to overhear and steal it.”
“That has literally never happened.”
He was right, but my lips stayed shut. This was the big break I’d been waiting for. I wasn’t taking any chances. I didn’t even finish my coffees, just dumped them in the trash can by the door as we walked into the parking lot.
Thankfully, our new apartment wasn’t far. It was actually just a few blocks from Nik’s place. The ugly cement brick of a building it was nestled in looked exactly like Nik’s, too. Honestly, I’d never understand why a living city who could create anything she wanted made so many ugly apartments, but I guess you had to have something for everyone, and this place was certainly cheap. It didn’t even have an elevator, just a metal stairwell that ran up the outside of the building all the way to the top floor just below the Skyways, where our unit was located.
“Video log for wherever this place is,” I said, activating my cameras with a flick of my hand as I jogged down the dimly lit hall. “Receipt number…”
“12297,” Sibyl supplied.
“12297,” I repeated, yanking my Master Key out from under my cheap baggy shirt. “Cleaner IDs: Nikola Kos and Opal Yong-ae. I verify. Proceeding with resident notification.”
I lifted my fist and banged on the door. When no one answered in the next five seconds, I stuck my key in the lock. It slid in beautifully, and I breathed a sigh of relief.
“Going in!”
I opened the door and rushed inside. Nik came in right behind me, hand on his gun, which felt both unnecessary and entirely justified, because I’d come into this place like a SWAT team on a bust. For all my excitement, though, it looked exactly like it had in the picture. Just a sad little two-room apartment that smelled of instant noodles and mold. And there on the shelf in front of me, glittering like a forbidden idol in the harsh white glare of the naked bulb in the ceiling light, was my prize.
“Gotcha!” I cried, snatching the dragon statue off the shelf.
I knew it was the real deal the moment I touched it. Old bronze made in the traditional way had an entirely different feel from the modern metal. Holding it up to the light, I could see the tick marks where some long-dead artist had pressed the shiny metal into the dragon’s eyes and mouth, forming each tiny tooth to a perfect, needle-sharp point. The scales on his snaking, wingless body were likewise works of art, and the craftsmanship on the flowing mane that ringed his head was so well done it looked like real hair. It was a thing of absolute beauty, and any other time, it would have been the new crown jewel of my collection. Today, though, it was something even better: my ticket to freedom.
“I’m guessing that’s an expensive statue?” Nik said as I clutched the thing with shaking hands.
“Oh yeah,” I said, flashing him a victorious grin before turning my attention back to the task at hand. “Sibyl, call Ainsley.”
Nik scowled. “Who’s Ainsley?”
I was about to launch into a gushing monologue about obsessive collectors and their famously fat wallets, but my soon-to-be buyer was a lot faster off the block than I expected. Sibyl had barely started the call before Ainsley picked up.
“I hope this is important,” he said, his refined voice irritated. “I’m in the middle of dinner.”
I replied by sending him a picture of the shiny dragon in my hands. There was a pregnant pause, and when he spoke again, his voice was entirely different.
“How much?”
“A hundred thousand,” I said without missing a beat. “And I want it in gold.”
I was fully expecting him to balk at that. It wasn’t a crazy price given the age of the artifact and his professed rabid desire, but it was definitely high. You always started high, though. It set the right tone, and it gave you somewhere to come down from without going too low. I was still building my negotiation strategy in my head when Ainsley said, “Done.”
I blinked. “Wait, really?”
“I don’t bother haggling over such small sums,” he said haughtily, reminding me sharply of my dad. “Will Swiss bank–issued bullion work, or do you want another format?”
“Bullion is fine,” I said when I’d recovered from my shock. “Where do you want to meet?”
He sent me the address of a merchant bank in the Financial District that specialized in high-touch wealthy clients. I told him we’d be there in thirty minutes and hung up, lowering my phone to stare blankly through the apartment’s tiny window.
One hundred thousand. I’d just sold a statue for one hundred thousand dollars in gold. Even if the curse found a way to take a chunk out of that, I’d still have way more than the forty thousand I needed to reach three hundred grand and pay off my dad, which meant…
“I did it.”
I turned to Nik, who was staring at me as if he wasn’t sure if I was going to scream or faint. To be fair, in that moment, I could have done both. “I did it!”
His lips quirked in a smile. “You did it.”
I did scream then, a high-pitched wail of pure delight as I threw myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck as I jumped up and down. “I did it! I did it! I paid him off! IdiditIdiditIdiditI—”
“It’s not done until the money’s in his hands,” Nik said, though I noticed he didn’t peel me off him. “Let’s go get that gold.”
I nodded frantically, racing for the door so fast my foot slipped. I caught myself at the last second, clutching the dragon I’d just nearly crushed to my chest. Oh no, I thought with a snarl. The curse wasn’t getting me now. Not when I was so close.
Panting, I grabbed one of the stained bath towels off the floor of the abandoned apartment and wrapped it around my precious prize. When it was swaddled like an infant, I walked into the hall, taking every step as if it were my last while Nik led the way down the stairs to the parking deck.
***
The drive to the bank was the most harrowing of my life. Nothing actually went wrong. There were no near misses or even bad traffic, but knowing the universe had been magically bribed to bring me down was a killer for paranoia. I spent the whole ride in Nik’s back seat clutching my statue the way you saw refugee mothers holding their babies in pictures on charity brochures.
Nik wasn’t immune, either. When we reached the Financial District, he didn’t even cruise to find the cheapest parking. He just turned us into the first deck we passed, paying the exorbitant fee without so much as a grumble.
As its name implied, the Financial District was one of the ritziest parts of the Skyways. It was also one of the tallest. There were more superscrapers here than anywhere else i
n the city, turning the streets into a maze of canyons that channeled the wind off nearby Lake St. Clair into hurricane-force gales. This wasn’t normally a problem, since no one who frequented the Financial District would be caught dead on foot outside, but it made getting to the meeting spot hairy.
By the time we reached the elegant paved square lined with fountains and corporate art where Ainsley had said he’d be waiting, I looked like a crazed homeless lady who’d just escaped a wind tunnel, and Nik…well, he still looked like Nik, which was pretty intimidating. All the snappy Skyways office workers waiting in line at the trendy coffee carts gave us a wide berth as we walked past, and the doormen working the front entrance of the merchant bank preemptively signaled for backup. If I hadn’t been so preoccupied, I would have been insulted. Right now, though, I don’t think I’d have noticed if a dragon had landed on top of me. I only had eyes for the dark-skinned man in the designer suit and classy AR sunglasses—which he was still wearing despite the long shadows of the buildings and the approaching evening—sitting on the edge of the fountain with a briefcase in his lap.
“Miss Yong-ae!” he said cheerfully when he spotted us. “Delighted to finally meet you in person. Do you have it?”
I wasn’t here for pleasantries, so I just nodded and unwrapped the towel, showing him the goods as if I was one of those evil antique dealers in an Indiana Jones movie. The whole thing was so sketchy I was amazed security wasn’t coming over, but the guys watching the door hadn’t budged. That might have been because Ainsley had already paid them off, but I suspected the real reason was because this was the DFZ. Even up here on the Skyways, suspicious stuff happened all the time, especially with super-rich people. This little trade-off probably didn’t even register on their weird-shit-o-meter, for which I was very grateful. What we were doing wasn’t illegal, but I was so twitchy right now I didn’t trust myself not to be stupid. I just wanted to get my money before I got hit by a meteor or killed by an out-of-control bus or whatever other heavy-handed tool the universe came up with to ruin it all.
“Oh my,” Ainsley said when he saw the dragon. “And it’s the real thing?”
“As real as the one you showed me this afternoon,” I said, trying desperately not to sound as nervous as I felt. “I can’t give you a certificate of authenticity or anything, but we can go to an independent appraiser if you really—”
“No, no, I believe you,” he said, grinning wide. “It looks perfect. I’ll take it.”
He reached out to grab the statue, but I snatched it back. “Payment first.”
“Of course,” he said, holding out the briefcase. I couldn’t grab it since I was still clutching the statue, so I nodded at Nik, who took it instead, setting it down on the edge of the fountain as he clicked open the top to reveal the most beautiful glittering pile of gold bars I’d ever seen outside a dragon’s hoard.
“Sorry it’s so heavy,” Ainsley said. “You don’t normally get a whole briefcase for a hundred thousand, but the price of gold’s been crashing for weeks now, so the bank clerks had to pack it tight.”
I didn’t know what kind of person complained that their briefcase full of gold was too heavy, but it wasn’t me. I was already hovering at Nik’s shoulder as he lifted the first layer of certified one-ounce bars so we could see how many were actually in the case.
“That’s a hundred thousand,” Sibyl said cheerfully when her photo-recognition software had checked all the serial numbers. “At least it was five minutes ago. Gold market’s falling fast.”
“How fast?”
“Let’s just say that if you want the stuff in that briefcase to be more than a pretty paperweight, you’d better start running.”
I nodded and turned back to Ainsley. “Here,” I said, practically shoving the dragon at him. “It’ll look great next to your other one.”
“We have several, actually,” he replied with a smile that was slightly too sharp. “Pleasure doing business with you, Dragon’s Opal.”
I didn’t even say goodbye. I just grabbed the briefcase in one hand, grabbed Nik with the other, and marched straight across the square to the merchant bank.
“I’m here to make a transaction,” I said when the security guards stepped in front of me. “You guys cash gold, right?”
The two men looked at each other, and I held my breath. They’d just watched me get a briefcase full of gold, though, so even though I looked crazy, they let me inside, opening the bank’s sleek tinted doors with a whoosh to reveal a posh marble foyer full of frantic people.
Too harried to care, I pushed through the chaos to the nearest teller, who was sitting behind a beautiful old-fashioned wooden bank window surrounded with shiny brass fittings. The thin, balding man was fidgeting at his desk like a nervous bird, his long, spindly fingers shooting through a complicated AR interface only he could see.
“Excuse me,” I said, placing the heavy briefcase on his counter with a thunk. “I’d like to cash this gold and transfer the money to my account.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” the man replied, his voice so polite I was certain he hadn’t actually looked at me yet. “We’re having a bit of an issue at the moment. If you don’t mind waiting a—”
“I do mind,” I said sharply. “I know gold is crashing, which is why I need this cashed now.”
That got his attention. “Madam,” he said, much less politely this time. “It’s not just gold. Gold merely started the panic. All the markets are in free fall now, and I’m very busy dealing with concerns from actual clients.”
“It was one of your clients who gave me this,” I snapped, opening the case of gold so he could see. His eyes went wide when he saw the glittering pile, and I took my chance. “Come on, Andy,” I pleaded, glancing at his fancy name tag. “I just got the most important payment of my life, but it’s going to be worth nothing if you don’t cash me out. I know the bank doesn’t want to take on more gold while it’s falling, but it always goes up again. This is your chance to buy at the bottom.”
He still didn’t look convinced, and I gave him my best sad eyes. “Please,” I pleaded. “A hundred thousand is nothing to a big place like this, but it’s everything to me. Help me out, and I’ll write you an amazing customer service review.”
The teller sighed and reached for the briefcase. “You’d better mention me by name.”
“Absolutely,” I promised as he started transferring the shiny one-ounce bars one by one to his desk.
It was a harrowing wait while he weighed and recorded golden brick. By the time he’d done the whole briefcase, the price of gold was dire. But unlike all the other places I’d been to this month, this wasn’t a shady Ca$h 4 Gold operation or a pawn shop. It was a legit commercial bank with branches in other countries that actually had consumer protection laws, which meant I got paid the price gold was when he started my transaction, not the one ten minutes later when he finally finished weighing everything.
That turned out to be a difference of several thousand dollars, most of which was eaten up by the merchant bank’s multiple and exorbitant fees for transferring money to my cheap online bank. There were so many hidden gotchas, I didn’t even know the final amount until I saw it appear in the account app at the top of my AR. When it finally updated, the sight almost made me faint.
“You okay?” Nik asked, putting a hand on my back when I wobbled.
I nodded, then shook my head, reaching out a trembling hand to poke my fingers through the glowing number floating in the air in front of me.
Total Funds: $323,924.53
“I made it,” I whispered, my voice so hoarse I hardly recognized it. “I got to three hundred thousand.”
I’d actually gotten a lot more. Even with gold in free fall, that briefcase had been way in excess of what I’d needed to pay my dad. Considering how many units Nik and I had raided, and how much rent I was about to owe, I needed it all, but I was too shocked to think that far ahead. The only fact my poor, exhausted, over-caffeinated brain could proce
ss right now was that after years of fighting tooth and nail, fleeing my home and moving to a terrifying city I knew nothing about, and working myself to a husk, I’d finally done it. I’d won.
The joy that came next was so sharp it hurt. Other emotions followed, coming at me so fast, I couldn’t process them all. I wanted to laugh and sob at the same time. In the end I did both, burying my face in Nik’s shirt as the whole confused mess rolled through me.
He let me do it. It had to be embarrassing, holding me in the middle of that fancy bank lobby while everyone watched. I was embarrassed for him, but when I tried to pull away, he didn’t let me go. He just stood there with his human arm draped over my shoulders, whispering that it was okay. He never specified what was okay, but it didn’t matter. The fact that he was there—had been there the whole time, through all my craziness—was the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me.
That thought set me off all over again. I probably could have stood there hysterically laugh-crying the rest of the night, but every time I looked up, that three hundred thousand was staring me in the face, reminding me it wasn’t over yet. Nothing was final until I actually paid my dad. I could have done it with a transfer right now, but I didn’t trust sending the funds remotely while my curse was still in play, and I wanted to see his face. He thought he’d beaten me. He thought he’d won like he always did, but not this time. This time, this one time, I was victorious, and I was going to shove that money down his scaly dragon throat.
“I have to get to Canada,” I said, pushing away from Nik’s chest.
“Why Canada?”
“My dad’s staying across the river in Windsor to avoid the Peacekeeper,” I explained as we finally left the frantic merchant bank. “I have to go pay him before something else happens.”
