Chapter 1
The apartment looked like a fallout shelter.
It was in a sub-subbasement, twenty feet below street level down a wobbly flight of metal stairs so steep they were practically a ladder. The light at the bottom was burned out, of course, so the landing was pitch black. Also mysteriously wet. No idea how, since we hadn’t had any rain in Detroit for a month, but these are the sort of lovely things you discover when you win a cheap bid.
“Gonna be one of those jobs, I see,” I said, pulling my rubber gloves out of my bag.
“At least it’s not big,” Sibyl chirped in my ear, her computerized voice cheerful as always. “The building’s custodian AI says the apartment’s a one bedroom. I bet we can fit the whole thing in one truck.”
“That’s good,” I said. “’Cause one truck is all I have.”
I dug out my poncho next, grimacing as I pulled the slick, protective material over my sweat-dampened ponytail. Even down in the Underground where the sun never shone, the temperature was already in the upper eighties, and it wasn’t even 9 a.m. Not good weather for covering yourself in plastic. But unlike my jeans and long-sleeved work shirt, my poncho was warded, and I’d learned the hard way that drowning in sweat was preferable to walking into someone’s No Trespassing curse without protection.
“All right,” I said, cinching the hood of my poncho tight under my chin so that I was draped head to toe in spellworked plastic. “Light ’er up.”
The words were barely out of my mouth when the LEDs on the side of my AR goggles lit up like miniature suns, filling the dank stairwell with blazing white light. It was so bright that I missed the little red recording icon that came on next in the corner of my augmented-reality vision. Thankfully, AIs never forgot protocol.
“This is the video log for Unit 4B, Building 92, Detroit Free Zone Underground Block 14,” Sibyl recited. “Purchase Date: Monday, July 22, 2115. Receipt #144528. Cleaner ID: Opal Yong-ae. Do you verify?”
“This is Opal Yong-ae, and I verify,” I replied dutifully, hitting the button to flip to my interior camera for a shot of my sweat-streaked face beneath my protective gear. “Proceeding with occupant notification.”
CYA out of the way, I slung my work bag around to my back and reached out to knock on the door, trying not to think too hard about the way the furry black spots on the paint squished under my gloves. “Cleaner,” I announced loudly, thanking my lucky stars that I’d had the presence of mind to put on my rebreather before I’d climbed down into all this mold. “If you’re inside, open up.”
There was no reply. There was never a reply, but I always asked, because the one time I didn’t, I just knew I’d open the door and find some junkie staring me down with a shotgun. Speaking of, I grabbed a fistful of local magic from the air and slapped it against my poncho to activate the antibullet wards. Just in case.
“Unit has no reply,” I told my recorder. “Proceeding with reclamation.”
“Ready when you are,” Sibyl said, flagging the point in the video so that if someone tried to contest this job in arbitration later, I could point to the exact moment at which I stated my intent.
“This is Opal Yong-ae,” I told the almost certainly empty apartment. “Subcontractor for Detroit Free Zone Habitation Management. You’re thirty days behind on your rent and have not responded to multiple contact attempts from Collections. Therefore, by the terms of your rental agreement with the city, this apartment and all possessions therein are now property of the DFZ.”
By which I meant property of me. When people skip town without paying their rent, the city takes their stuff to pay the bill. No bureaucrat wants to deal with sorting through someone else’s abandoned junk, though, so they send the unit to auction, where it’s bought by someone like me. I’m a Cleaner. I buy delinquent apartments in the hopes of selling what’s inside for a profit. Sometimes I scored big. Other times—almost every time, recently—I paid for the privilege of shoveling trash.
Thankfully, on this particular unit, the bar for profit was practically on the ground. I’d gotten the whole thing for three hundred bucks, basically free, and despite the mold, I already had a good feeling about it. Just as in the picture that had convinced me to bid on the place, I could see the telltale marks of a ward beneath the dirt on the scuffed edges of the front door’s frame. Wards were expensive, and expensive security meant good stuff.
“All right,” I said when the silence on the other side of the door had stretched longer than the required thirty seconds. “Let’s crack it open and see what we’ve got.”
The red light vanished from my heads-up display as Sibyl stopped recording. I gave it a few seconds to be sure, and then I dug my gloved hand into the neck of my poncho to pull out the key I wore around my neck like a crucifix. 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.
That last bit was the tricky part. 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. Thankfully, this was not going to be one of those days. The moment I touched my master key to the lock, the bright silver teeth rearranged themselves like water and slid right in, popping the deadbolt with a satisfying click.
The rest of the locks were another matter.
“Wow, this guy was paranoid,” Sibyl said, bringing up density scanner results at the corner of my right eye. “I’m seeing four more deadbolts, two chains inside, and a rod in the floor.”
“Don’t forget the ward,” I added, poking at the spellwork I could just barely see painted across the rusted metal doorjamb with the steel toe of my boot. “Not that I blame him. Look at where he lived.”
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. Parts of the Underground were nicer than others. I, for example, lived in a perfectly respectable walk-up over in Hamtramck, or what had been Hamtramck before Detroit had been destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then rebuilt again. This wasn’t one of the nice bits, though. It wasn’t the worst, but it was as bad as I went voluntarily. 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.
“These should crack easy enough, though,” I said, shining my lights into the gap between the door and the frame to get a better look at the locks. “The ward’s the real problem. If we don’t get rid of that, we’ll be fried chicken.”