Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ, #1)

by Rachel Aaron

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. Collections tried their best to keep up, but they were only human. Sometimes rent was paid in ways that simply couldn’t be reported. When that happened, it didn’t matter how long a unit had been in collections. It would never open up. In the one and a half years that I’d been Cleaning, I’d gotten a locked unit only once, but you didn’t forget getting stiffed for two grand by the living goddess of your city.

I didn’t have crime stats for the place, so maybe I was prejudging it, but in my experience, anywhere that had more vending machines for guns than for soda wasn’t winning any safe-neighborhood awards.

“I bet he’s got something good in there. Mages are always loaded.” “Not always,” Sibyl said. “I mean, you’re a mage, and you’re broke.” “Leave me my hope,” I begged as I rose to my feet. “It’s been a really bad couple of months, so let’s just assume this apartment is piled high with priceless magical objects of high resale value.” “Whatever you need to tell yourself,” Sibyl said.

Magic didn’t follow actual physics any more than dreams did, but casting was all about understanding. The whole point of spellwork equations was to prove to yourself logically why something would work.

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. Time and ignorance. 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 had suddenly returned eighty years ago, but so many more were gone forever.

“At least this room’s not filled with boxes,” Sybil said cheerfully. “If I have to look up resale prices for one more stack of dusty old books that don’t have proper QR codes, I’m going to log myself out.”

Since the return of magic, the world had filled with gods. The first to rise had been Algonquin, Lady of the Great Lakes. The very night magic returned, she’d come out of her lakes in a tidal wave to punish humanity for polluting her waters. The resulting flood had devastated the entire Great Lakes region, but nowhere was hit harder than Detroit. Since it had been one of the greatest polluters, Algonquin’s hatred for the Motor City was special, and her wave had wiped it off the map. When she’d finished hammering it into the ground, Algonquin built a new city on Detroit’s ruins—the first Detroit Free Zone—and claimed it for herself. The United States of America didn’t even fight her over it. They were too busy dealing with the sudden return of mages and dragons and everything else to care about losing a troublesome, bankrupt city. For the next sixty years, Algonquin had ruled the DFZ like an empress, forging it into a magical nexus of unbridled human greed. But the magic wasn’t done coming back. The first night had been the most explosive, but the background magic kept creeping up slowly as the decades rolled on. Eventually, the ambient power got so high that it birthed a new god: the Spirit of the DFZ itself. The ensuing battle for control of the city had leveled Detroit yet again. In the end, Algonquin got booted back to her lakes, and the new goddess claimed control. That was twenty years ago. The DFZ had rebuilt herself bigger than ever in the years since, and she wasn’...

“But when I heard that the victim had been dead in his apartment for a month and no one noticed, I volunteered to take care of him.” He reached up to pet his rangy cat. “He seemed like our kind of fellow.” When he put it that way, it made sense. 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.

I’d thought the DFZ was just a crazy city with a mind of its own, but get down in the Underground where people are really desperate, and you see things. I didn’t worship the Empty Wind like Peter did, but I didn’t doubt for a moment that he was real, and spooky as that was, I was happy our dead guy had a god to care about him, since no one else seemed to.

Gods had long memories, which meant being nice to priests was always a good idea.

“You know, you really should just pay the extra ten dollars a month for the ad-free service,” Sibyl said when I’d gotten the cheerful jingles down to a not hearing-destroying level. “It would improve your mental state.” “If I could afford an extra ten bucks a month, my mental state wouldn’t need improving,”

I grew up moving between Seoul, LA, and Hong Kong, so I was used to giant buildings, but the ones in the DFZ were on an entirely different level. Some of the glass and steel spires were a full quarter mile around at the base, with peaks so tall they created their own rain shadows. Even modern steel-strengthening spellwork couldn’t account for how enormous they were, because these buildings hadn’t been built by human hands. They were the product of the spirit of the city, sprouted from the ground like trees by the DFZ herself. And apparently she wasn’t done. “Wow,” I breathed, pressing my face against the scratched-up window. Ahead of us to the left, on the route we normally would have taken, an entire section of the New I-75 flyover had lifted from its support beams and was slowly moving to the north, much to the fury of the cars stuck on top of it.

“What is the DFZ thinking? She’s not exactly known for taking her citizens’ convenience into account, but moving a major commuter highway on a Monday just feels like bad planning.” I shrugged. “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?”

“I’m just glad the truck’s AI was smart enough to route us around.” “Hooray for minimal competency,” Sibyl said dryly.

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. And they were always 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.

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. Being a municipal building, the Cleaner’s Office moved more than most. 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.

“You said yourself that the subbasement was probably a safe house,” Sibyl reminded me. “If that’s right, then it makes total sense that he’d run there after his door was kicked in.” I shook my head. “We don’t know if this happened before or after his death. Seeing how both of his units came up for auction on the same day, though, I bet the timing was close.” More than close. I was already putting the timeline together in my head. Something had made this man feel threatened, so he’d fled to his safe house. When the people who’d made him afraid realized he was gone, they’d smashed up his home. The only question left was why. “I bet it was money,” Sibyl said when I mentioned it. “Someone had to foot the bill for all those reagents, and kicking in doors is classic loan shark behavior.”

“Were they getting paid by the piece?” I asked, looking around at the furniture, or what was left of it. The living room had looked plain old trashed in the picture, but now that I was actually here, I could see that every stick of furniture had been carefully and methodically broken into segments no longer than an inch. The sofa looked like a pile of cotton confetti, and the glass coffee table had been smashed back into sand.

“I don’t understand,” Sibyl said, turning my cameras slowly to get a panorama of the destruction. “What kind of robber kicks in a door and then sits around breaking valuables into tiny pieces?” “None,” I said, pulling a fistful of magic into my hand and slapping it against my poncho to activate all of my personal wards. “This wasn’t a robbery. They were looking for something.” And I bet I knew what. I reached into my bag for the notes I was still carrying. Of everything in that basement apartment, these were what our poor dead mage had chosen to hide, which meant they were probably what the people who’d broken in here had been looking for. I had them now, though, and if there was something worth finding here, I was certain these notes were the key to it.

“Or we could leave,” Sibyl suggested. “There’s still time to cut our losses and bail.” “Why would we do that?” I demanded. “We just got a hint that this gamble might actually pay out! What happened to ‘Oh, Opal, we need to make money’?” “It got preempted by ‘Oh, Opal, we need to stay alive,’” my AI said nervously, darting my cameras toward the other rooms, which were also filled with meticulously broken furniture. “Does nothing about this make you think that perhaps we’re stepping into something we shouldn’t? People who do this to furniture are also capable of doing it to human bodies, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be deleted if you get yourself killed.”

Hopes sinking, I pulled off the lid, and then I groaned aloud. “Oh, come on.” It was full of papers. Yellow legal-pad papers this time, all folded in half and covered in the same janky, chicken-scratch handwriting I was starting to loathe. “This guy really needs a better filing system,” Sibyl said as I dumped the papers out into my lap.

“What does VCI mean?” “A lot of stuff,” my AI said, bringing up a depressingly long list of acronyms. “Venture Capital Investments, Vital Communications Infrastructure, Veterinary Council of Indiana. Take your pick.”

I cursed myself for an idiot. I should have listened to my instincts earlier. I should have listened to Sibyl and never bid in the first place. Now I was going to die on the floor of Dr. Lyle’s filthy townhouse, and I wasn’t even getting paid for it.

“I thought you didn’t even want to do this!” “I don’t,” Sibyl said. “But you’re not listening to me, so I figured the best thing I can do for you now is try to minimize the pain. It’s obvious Mr. Kos is no stranger to violence, but I just replayed that fight to take measurements, and dude is fast. I don’t know what he’s packing to get that kind of speed, but we couldn’t hire a bodyguard with moves like that for sixty percent of two hundred grand. And that’s assuming we recover anything of value. The way he’s worded things, you won’t have to pay him at all if you fail. Sixty percent of nothing is nothing, which is the only number that fits our budget right now. Having someone else along to split costs and stop bullets will make this idiocy a lot less scary and expensive. Obviously, the best choice would be to run away as fast as possible, but since you’re not going to do that, teaming up with Kos is the least terrible of the remaining options.” “You’re really selling it,” I muttered, glancing over my shoulder at Nik, who was staring at me like I’d gone crazy.

I was up against a wall. Not for as much as he’d insinuated, but ten thousand dollars might as well be a million when you need it and don’t have it, and I needed it bad.

“If you had a ride like this, why did you want to take my truck?” “Because then they’d shoot at your car, not mine,” he said,

“Wait,” I squeaked. “There’s no computer?” I pointed at the stick shift in the center console. “That’s a real gear shift? As in not just for show?” When he nodded, I made a choking sound. “We’re going to die.” “You know, people drove their own cars for over a hundred years, and the species somehow survived,” Nik said dryly. “Not all of them!” I cried. “Car accidents used to be the number-one cause of death before self-driving AIs took over. Next thing you’re going to tell me is it runs on gasoline.” Nik reached down to shift gears without a word, and my stomach dropped. “You’re kidding.” “You can’t run an electric car without a computer,” he said with a shrug. I stared at the dash in horrified wonder. “I can’t believe we’re actually driving around in a metal box powered by explosions. Where do you even get gasoline anymore?” “If it bothers you so much, you’re free to walk,” Nik growled, gripping the wheel. “No, no, no,” I said quickly, putting up my hands. “It’s a very nice antique. I was just surprised, that’s all.” “It’s not an antique,” he said sharply. “It’s a highly tuned, custom machine!” “Of course it is,” I said, though I couldn’t stop my smirk. “So does it have a name?” His silence was answer enough,

“It would be just my luck today if you got all excited about money and crashed us into a truck.” Nik looked terminally insulted. “I would never do that to my car,” he said,

“The cost of survival is doing things you don’t like,” he said coldly. “Suck it up or give up, but don’t sit on the fence and complain.

“How can I see you as anything but a child when you insist on acting like one?” she snapped, the sweetness vanishing from her voice to reveal the steel that was always waiting just underneath. “Your father has been exceedingly generous letting you roam for as long as he has, but enough is enough. Your failure is obvious to everyone. A better daughter, one worthy of being called Yong-ae, would have realized this and come home ages ago, but alas! I am cursed with an ungrateful, defiant sow of a child who is incapable of appreciating the great privilege she was bred into. Can you even comprehend the suffering your selfishness has caused?”

Holy shit, now I understand why Opal left and is desperate to stay away. If nothing elae, her mother is a verbally abusive bitch.

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”),

Make that mentally/emotionally, as well as verbally, abusive. Bitch.

“How can he be forgotten if he’s known?” “Knowing isn’t the same as remembering,” Peter explained, taking one more picture of the back of the ID before sliding the card into a manila folder marked “pending.” “We know who he was, but we don’t know know him. Not like family or a friend would. But this is still fantastic! Even a little remembrance can help keep a soul together on the other side. 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 as good as the love of a relative, but just the two of us knowing Dr. Lyle’s name can still be a shield for him in the swirling void.

“You brought a girl!” “She’s not a girl,” Nik snapped. I whirled on him. “Of course I’m a girl! What did you think I was?” “Not like that,” he corrected, his ears turning ever so slightly red. “Not like she means, I meant. That is…” He gave up after that, throwing a hand out toward the machine woman instead. “Opal, this is Rena. Rena, Opal.”

I should have given her the benefit of the doubt, but it had been a very long, very stressful day, and I wasn’t in a mood to be charitable to someone who felt comfortable insulting me to my face.

“What are you doing?” he hissed frantically. “I told you to stay in the room!” “You left me with a creepy lady!” I hissed back. “My choices were magic or hallway. Since she’s the one decoding our hand, I chose hallway. You can thank me later.” Nik didn’t look surprised. “Sorry about her,” he said.

I screamed. The man with the machete screamed. Someone outside screamed a demand to know what the hell was going on. The only one who didn’t make a sound was Nik. He simply lowered his gun and shot his attacker in the foot.

I heard a crash behind us as the door went down, and then a bullet whizzed past my ear. “Idiots!” Nik yelled as I ducked. “The bounty’s no good if we’re dead!” That was nice to know. Too bad nobody chasing us seemed to be paying attention to that little detail.

“You’ll just have to find another brothel.” “I don’t go to brothels,” he snapped. “If you have to spend money on sex, you’re doing it wrong.

“For college,” I said, nodding. “I got a graduate degree in magical art history from the Institute for Magical Arts. It was really expensive.” Nik dragged a hand over his face. “Let me make sure I’ve got this straight,” he said. “You’ve been risking your life and dodging bullets so you can get money to pay your dad back for college?” “Well, technically, I was Cleaning to get money to pay him back for college,” I said. “The bullets are a new development.

why are you fighting so hard for this? I mean, it can’t just be for the money.” “Why not?” Nik asked sharply. “Money’s the reason people do most things.” “Yeah, but not take a bullet.” “Depends on the bullet.” “Come on,” I said. “Me being crazy is one thing. I’ve got my freedom riding on this. But you can’t spend your money if you’re dead.”

“Good to know you’re all in on this.” “If you’re not going all in, why go at all?”

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 can’t believe you’re still going to trust that thing,” Nik said as I slid the goggles onto my head. “I don’t trust her,” I said, smiling in relief when my AR heads-up display appeared in front of my eyes again. “But I need her. She’s still my second brain, and it’s not like she can make things any worse. I’ve already been hung out to dry. What else is my dad going to do? Follow me around all day and trip me?” From the sour look on his face, it was clear Nik thought that was exactly what was going to happen and I was being an idiot for enabling it, which, to be fair, I was.

He had a messenger bag over his shoulder as well this time, and he walked straight past me to the wood-and-cinder block shelf to start filling it with all manner of things: nylon rope, zip-ties, boxes of ammo, blocks of something gray and clay-like that I really hoped wasn’t C4. Not that I’d say anything if it was. This job had jumped the shark on danger ages ago. If he wanted to bring explosives, the only thing I wanted to know was when to duck and cover.

“Okay, so everyone knows that all spirits have a domain, right?” I said, looking around the table to make sure they were following. “A domain is whatever they’re the spirit of, the place or concept that fuels all their power. For a spirit like Algonquin, it’s pretty obvious. She’s the Lady of the Great Lakes, so her domain is the lakes. It gets more complicated when you’re talking about conceptual entities such as the Empty Wind, but the general idea is always the same. Whether it’s a physical location or a concept like ‘the forgotten dead,’ every spirit has a core that binds them together, somewhere all the magic that makes them tick can pool together. But the DFZ is a little different. Like the Empty Wind, she’s a concept: the idea of a city where nothing’s illegal and anything is possible. But she’s also a physical place, which is the city we’re in right now. That duality means that the DFZ has both a physical domain and a conceptual one. Everyone following so far?” “I think so,” Nik said. “I just don’t understand why it matters.” “It matters because she’s a blend,” I said. “Spirits of the land are rooted in the land. With them, what you see is what you get. But the DFZ was born from humanity. She’s the sum of all our conceptions about what the DFZ is. That’s why she’s able to move buildings around like puzzle pieces instead of relying on geological forces like other physical spirits. She’s god of both the physical city and our ideal of the city. When you shove the phys...

“Can you drive?” “I’ve played driving games.” Mostly of the crash derby variety, but I understood the basic mechanics of physically piloting a car. You know, in theory. He grimaced. “I’ll stick to my two left hands. You freaked the first time you watched me drive through DFZ traffic without a computer. I don’t even want to be in the car when you try it yourself.”

“This is extortion,” Nik growled, snatching the ticket off the ground. “Why did mine cost so much more than yours?” “Because she paid more than you.” We both jumped. The voice was as creaky and old as the cathedral itself, but it wasn’t in my head like the Empty Wind’s had been. A few breathless seconds later, I realized it wasn’t a spirit at all. It belonged to a short, pale figure with a stooped back, stringy gray hair, gray skin, and white eyes that reminded me of a blind cave fish’s that blinked at me when the cathedral door opened. “Opal paid all that she had,” the person went on, their voice so old and scratchy, I couldn’t tell if they were a man or a woman, or if it even mattered. “Be glad the cathedral did not charge you the same, Nikola Kos.” Nik took a step back. “Right,” he said meekly. “Thank you for the discount, then.”

“Are there any rules we need to follow? Things we should know before we go in?” The priest burst out laughing. “Where do you think you are, girlie? You’re stepping into the heart of the DFZ! There’s no rules here, though if you want to survive, you’d do well to remember that the city is not, and never will be, your friend.”

“People think all kinds of things,” the priest said with a shrug. “Including that calling a city their home is a two-way street. But the DFZ doesn’t work that way. She’s not kind. Not moral or fair. She has no compassion, no sympathy for the plight of those who live within her. That’s not her fault. She doesn’t have the freedoms we mortals enjoy. Her mind, her soul, even her body does not belong to her. She is not an individual. She is a spirit, the soul of a living city. She can only be what we’ve made her. Do you understand?” I wasn’t sure that I did. I’d always thought of the DFZ as a whimsical god who did whatever she liked without caring how it affected the ants she crushed under her moving buildings. To hear Nameless say it, though, the city sounded almost pitiable. A prisoner of other people’s expectations. “What does she care about, then?” “Opportunity,” Nameless said, giving me a smile. “From the moment it rose from the soggy ruins of Old Detroit, the DFZ has been a city where anything is possible. A city of freedom where people can be as horrible or as wonderful as they wish with no authority standing in their way. It’s a place where everyone’s an outsider, anyone can start afresh, and nothing can be taken for granted. That is the DFZ. She’s not an easy god to love, but you must understand her at least a little, because you’re both still here.”