Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ, #1)

by Rachel Aaron

The DFZ, the metropolis formerly known as Detroit, is the world’s most magical city with a population of nine million and zero public safety laws. That’s a lot of mages, cybernetically enhanced chrome heads, and mythical beasties who die, get into debt, and otherwise fail to pay their rent. When they can’t pay their bills, their stuff gets sold to the highest bidder to cover the tab.

My name is Opal Yong-ae, and I’m a Cleaner: a freelance mage with an art history degree who’s employed by the DFZ to sort through the mountains of magical junk people leave behind. It’s not a pretty job, or a safe one—there’s a reason I wear bite-proof gloves—but when you’re deep in debt in a lawless city where gods are real, dragons are traffic hazards, and buildings move around on their own, you don’t get to be picky about where your money comes from.

The Master Key was a sacred object and a Cleaner’s only real identification. It had been made for me by the Spirit of the City, and it could open any door in the DFZ if the city believed you had a right to be there.

Unlike every other city in the world, the Detroit Free Zone was alive. Literally alive, with her own soul, mind, opinions, and, occasionally, off-the-books real estate deals.

The cheap apartment block this unit was at the bottom of was located in one of the lowest points of the DFZ Underground, almost a hundred feet below the elevated bridges of the Skyways that divided the top half of the city—the part with sunlight, superscrapers, trendy restaurants, and luxury housing—from the Underground, a cavelike world of underpasses, neon, and cheap rent.

For me, magic had always been a feeling, a physical sensation I could trace with my fingers, like dipping my hand into a stream of water. If Thaumaturges used spellwork to build complex logic-gated irrigation systems, then I cast by splashing.

Being a Cleaner is all about being an optimist. No matter how many apartments full of dirty clothes and rat droppings you cleaned out, there was always that chance that the next one would be a treasure trove,

I owed a very nasty individual a lot of money, and he wasn’t flexible about payments. If I didn’t have the cash by Friday, bad things were going to happen.

In ancient times, the world had been very magical, even more magical than it was now. Then, for reasons only the Merlins knew, all that power had vanished. For nearly eleven centuries, roughly 1000 to 2035 CE, the world had been completely unmagical, a period we now called the Drought.

During that dark time, all of those magical treasures—the enchanted swords and religious relics and other venerated items of power crafted by ancient sorcerers and priests using techniques modern magic still didn’t fully understand—lost their power and became merely pretty things. Some were preserved, coveted by various cultures and collectors as sacred objects even if they didn’t actually work anymore, but countless more were lost to time.

We’d never know how many precious treasures had been destroyed by people who couldn’t tell the difference between an enchanted hammer of the gods and a hammer you used to build houses. Those objects that did survive regained their power just like everything else when magic ha...

Unlike other countries with their pesky safety regulations, anything you wanted to do to your body was perfectly legal here, even the really crazy stuff. Implants were cheap, too, since the DFZ also didn’t require a medical license to install or build cybernetics.

No one knew how many death gods there were exactly, but their presence meant that doing anything disrespectful to a dead body, especially stealing, was a very bad idea. Death gods weren’t forgiving as a rule, and here in the DFZ, the most magical city in the world, they were at their strongest.

Peter was a priest for one of those new death gods. Specifically, he’d dedicated himself to the Empty Wind, Spirit of the Forgotten Dead, which definitely included our guy.

“Spirits move in mysterious ways. I mean, for all we know, the delays are the point. She is the living incarnation of the city, and what’s more citylike than a traffic jam?”

“As a social support AI, it’s my job to assist in your mental health, and these fits of wild optimism that crumble into crushing despair when they run into reality are not good for you.

It had a nice location, too, taking up several elevated blocks just half a mile south of the Dragon Consulate where the Peacemaker, the dragon who claimed the DFZ as his territory, kept his lair. I wasn’t sure why the DFZ allowed any dragon, particularly one as famously eccentric as the Peacemaker, to claim her as his land, but there must have been some kind of history there, because she loved him. Her buildings were forever shifting around the multilevel Dragon Consulate to make sure the dragons had a clear flight path coming in.

Thanks to the Peacemaker’s Edict, which declared that no dragon could attack another within the city without facing the Peacemaker’s wrath, the DFZ had turned into a sort of dragon Switzerland. Clans that would kill each other on sight anywhere else in the world routinely met in the DFZ to talk. Not about peace—normal dragons never talked peace—but they talked a lot of business, which was probably why the DFZ gave them so much leeway. No one loved capitalism more than she did, and when you considered how much wealth the average dragon accumulated over their immortal life, courting them was just good sense.

You look homeless and you smell like death.”

There’s an opening right now in my department. I can get you set up today if you want. For the love of God, Opal, you have a graduate degree from the best magical arts institute in the world! You don’t have to dig through other people’s trash to make a living!”

It wasn’t neat or respectable, but I needed money more than I needed my pride right now. And anyway, I liked Cleaning. It was surprisingly fun digging through people’s lives, and sometimes I found great stuff. Heidi wouldn’t understand that, though. From the look on her face, she clearly thought I was little better than a rag picker, and the fact that I looked the part certainly wasn’t helping matters.

It also doesn’t look very practical. I don’t know how much a cockatrice egg costs these days, but this spell requires over two hundred thousand dollars in reagents, some of which are extremely morally questionable.”

What was the point of sucking up the pain of cutting everyone out of your life if you were just going to let them back in? But I couldn’t take the way Heidi was staring at me, especially not after she’d helped me when I’d done nothing to deserve it. I could always change my number again later, so I wrote it down for her, lying through my teeth when she made me swear to answer her calls.

Even if you’re right, and there is a pot of gold at the end of this wild goose chase, the DFZ is a hundred and ninety-four square miles that move around. The chance of you finding one mage’s circle in all of that is practically zero, and we don’t have the resources to waste trying.

But as sensible as her advice was, throwing away the notes felt too much like tossing a lotto ticket before the numbers were announced.

One of the hazards of living in a sentient city was that things were constantly moving around on you. It wasn’t quite as bad as they made it seem in the movies where characters went to sleep in one part of the city and woke up somewhere else entirely, but it wasn’t uncommon for blocks to relocate themselves every couple of months.

The DFZ loved reshuffling buildings that were entirely hers, so it wasn’t uncommon to have to drive to a different part of town every day just to go to the same place you always did.

DeSantos was the current king of the Cleaners. He had a ten-man team and a chain of secondhand stores to sell all the stuff they salvaged.

DeSantos was a born troll who loved to bid people up. It didn’t matter if he wanted a unit or not. If he thought you wanted it, he’d bid against you just for the pleasure of watching you squirm.

This was the real reason I didn’t like Nik. Cleaning wasn’t exactly a noble calling—we were scavengers who paid for the privilege of digging through other people’s trash in the hopes of finding enough treasure to make it worth the effort—but at least I didn’t kick people out of their homes for profit.

It was the best money you could make in this business hands down, but desperate as I was for cash, there were some lines you just didn’t cross, and apparently terrifying broke people out of their tiny closet homes was mine.

“But what are we looking for, exactly?” I took a deep breath as I stared at the remains of the destroyed life I’d bought for two thousand bucks. “Anything.”

I had no idea why the Dragon of Detroit cared about cockatrices, but if they were protected under his Edict, that made selling their eggs problematic. The Peacemaker couldn’t actually make laws since he only controlled the dragon population of the city, but he had a lot of monsters working for him and the goodwill of the DFZ herself. If he said “don’t do that,” it was very much in your best interest to listen.

“I don’t want him to break my stuff. I know it’s stupid and it’s not worth much, but…” I shook my head, pushing my goggles up so I could wipe my eyes. “It’s mine.” That was all I could say. Before I’d come to the DFZ, nothing had been mine. Everything had belonged to my father, including me.

I’d never doubted that my mother loved me. It was her judgment I didn’t trust. But unlike the designer clothes she still sent me every season (always one size too small, for “encouragement”), the poncho was actually useful, which was why it had survived long after I’d sold everything else. “It’s worth the money,” I said, pointing at the far-more-delicate ward lines that covered the poncho’s interior. “The outside focuses on external threats—bullets, dirt, blunt trauma, and so on—but the interior’s all about magical protection, including a burn command for separating material links.”

The world of spirits is not a kind or gentle place. It’s the source of all magic in the world, and the torrents of power there will shred a human soul in seconds if it’s not properly protected by the memories of those who knew them.

“It’s not superstition!” I cried. “The mortal spirits are real. You live in a moving city! How can you doubt this?”

“Welcome to the DFZ,” I said, shaking my head. “Criminals all the way down.” “It is called the ‘City of Commerce,’” Sibyl whispered in my ear. “The place where anything is possible.” “And everything is sticky,”

Ever since the Second Mana Crash had tripled the relative magic of the world, the enhancements industry had been booming. When forty percent of the human population was born magical, the other sixty was under intense pressure to compensate, and most did so in the form of better-than-human augmentations.

But now that he’d taken his bulky jacket off, it was impossible to ignore that Nik was, well, a guy. A very well-put-together guy, which was only to be expected given that parts of him had been literally put together. But the stupid fluttery parts of me didn’t seem to care that the solid shoulders and back muscles I could see through his T-shirt had been shaped with a band saw. They

“The Dragon of Korea isn’t my actual father. We all just pretend that he is. It’s part of his fantasy of playing head to a respectable family.” A fantasy I still—still—couldn’t seem to shake myself free of, even in my own mind.

“My mother belongs to Yong, and the first thing to know about dragons is they don’t share. It was all done by mail, the way you breed expensive cattle. He got samples from the best specimens he could find and then hired a lab to blend all the genetics into the best possible combination. The goal was to recreate my mother, except even better and with magic, but the reality was me.” I chuckled. “Huge disappointment, as you can see.”

We were all his playthings, but unlike everyone else in Yong’s household, I wasn’t okay with that. I refused to worship the ground he walked on, which was why Yong refused to let me go. It didn’t matter that I was a dog-faced girl who couldn’t dance or sing or master the magic he’d paid so much for me to be born with. I was the one human who didn’t act as if he was my moon, sun, and stars, and that stung his pride. He wouldn’t stop until he’d put me back in my place, which was why I had to win no matter what. I’d risked everything to get into this game. If I couldn’t play as dirty as he did, I’d never be free.

I’d never been to the Gnarls myself, but according to the papers I’d had to read for class, they were an ever-changing labyrinth where the physical and magical worlds had been squished together during the DFZ’s awakening as a spirit. They were locked in a state of constant magical flux, which meant that no matter how much magic you cast, no one would ever be able to trace it through all the background noise. It was the perfect hiding place, so much so that I felt like an idiot for not thinking of them earlier.

“Because I was willing to do anything to me!” I yelled. “I’m the one who’s trapped, but just because I’m willing to gnaw my arm off to get free doesn’t mean I’m willing to gnaw off someone else’s! If the cost of my freedom is selling babies into slavery, then it’s not freedom at all. I’m just trading one prison for another.

You’re about to sell something that money can’t buy. That’s a bad deal, Nik, and I’d be a worthless business partner if I let you take it.”

Clearly, the rumors about the city owing her local dragon big time were no joke. Then again, you didn’t get to be the dragon of the most magical city in the world if you weren’t something special.

“You’ve got a dragon curse on you. I wasn’t going to tell you since I didn’t want to mess up anyone’s plans, but the Dragon of Korea still hasn’t joined the Peacemaker’s Alliance, so he can choke on his tail for all I—”

“And it’s a bad-luck curse. Not one of those cheap jobs that makes you stub your toes all the time, either. This is the real deal, the kind that hits you where it hurts the most.” She grinned at me. “I bet you’ve had a really rotten year, haven’t you?”

You’ve always been a better Cleaner than I am, and I’ve always been jealous of your ability to look at a place and see the hidden money. Now you need someone to make bids who isn’t magically doomed, so what if we worked together? You can tell me which units are good buys, and I’ll handle all the actual transactions that your bad luck would hurt. That way, we can finally stop wasting cash bidding against each other. We’ll piss everyone else off, make a ton of money, and you can pay me back out of our earnings. Everyone wins! We’ll split everything sixty-forty. It’ll be great.”