Minimum Wage Magic (DFZ, #1)

by Rachel Aaron

“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.

“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 reminded her,

You have not lived until you’ve watched a tricked-out chromehead with leg extenders trying to drink from a water fountain built for kindergarteners.

I swept my hand across the glaringly bright street. We were almost to the base of the 2R, and the crowds—and the commerce—had only gotten denser. Cars couldn’t even drive on the streets down here. It was just an ocean of people surrounded by a neon- and LED-lit canyon of closet casinos, souvenir shops, vending machine bars, single-use joy parlors, and card-operated VR brothels. There were pawn shops with human organs for sale in the windows and pet stores full of animals that were banned everywhere else in the world. There were fight bars, topless bars, drug bars, bars where you paid interesting people to pretend to be your friends. The whole place was a chaotic, unregulated, booze- and drug-soaked nightmare of greed, hedonism, and reckless ambition. It was simultaneously the worst of humanity and the height of human ingenuity and creativity as shopkeepers fought to one-up each other and corner the rich flow of gullible tourist money. If you said “DFZ” to someone who didn’t live here, this was exactly what they’d envision, and that made my heart pound with anticipation.