“You can make those?” I asked. Cockatrices were one of the many mythical animals that had reappeared when the magic came back. I didn’t know much about them, but it seemed to me that cockatrice eggs would come from other cockatrices, not from alchemy.
“Cockatrice eggs were a vital ingredient in many Indo-European alchemy transformations,” Heidi explained. “You see them mentioned all the time in historical texts, but due to their organic nature, very few are still in existence. Other than the ones laid by actual cockatrices, of course. But it takes an egg laid by a rooster and incubated by a toad to make a cockatrice naturally, which obviously doesn’t happen very often, so most ancient alchemists just made their own. Unfortunately, the process for creating them was either so secret or so obvious, no one wrote it down. At least, we’ve never found a recipe.”
My heart began to beat faster. “Does that mean these notes are valuable?”
“Not to my department,” Heidi said. “I’m a magical historian, and while this little project is interesting, it’s not historical. 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.” She shrugged. “I’m sorry, Opal. It’s an interesting piece of spellwork, but it’s not valuable. It’s not old enough or groundbreaking enough to be academically relevant, and I can’t believe anyone would go through the trouble of gathering this many reagents just to make a cockatrice egg.”
My soaring hopes fell with every word she spoke, but I wasn’t ready to give up yet. “But do you think it would work?” I pressed. “If all the reagents were present and the spell was cast as written, do you think it would actually make an egg?”
Heidi shrugged. “Probably? I mean, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t work, but you can never tell with a spell until you actually cast it. Just speaking for myself, though, if I had those reagents sitting around, I’d sell them. Or turn them in to the proper authorities. Or even keep them for my own experiments. I certainly wouldn’t waste them on this. Even if you love cockatrices, this spell is simply too expensive to be practical.”
I heaved a long sigh. “Well, I guess that’s that,” I said, standing up. “Thanks for looking at least.”
“Any time,” Heidi said, scraping the notes back into a neat stack and handing them to me. “But do think about my offer. I’m sure Cleaning isn’t actually as dangerous as the TV shows make it look, but you graduated with honors from IMA. You’re better than this. Your skills are being wasted on this garbage. You are being wasted, and I hate seeing that.” She gave me a plaintive look. “Can I have your new number at least? Just in case I find a job that can tempt you away from Cleaning?”
I really didn’t want to. 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.
By the time I finally left her office, I felt utterly defeated. Not only were the notes I’d pinned my hopes on apparently worthless, I’d been thoroughly reminded of my status as the world’s worst friend. Definitely not my best day, and for all her claims of being a socially sensitive AI, Sibyl wasn’t helping.
“I told you this was a waste of time,” she said as we climbed the stark white modern stairs back to the ground floor. “You should toss those stupid notes in the trash before they cost us any more.”
“Not yet,” I said stubbornly. “Some of those reagent receipts were dated less than a week before he went delinquent on his rent.” I put up my hand to shield my eyes as we emerged from the basement into the late-afternoon sunlight. “That means he had to have bought them right before he died. You don’t pay that much for a spell without trying it. I bet he’d either just cast it or was about to when he died. Either way, somewhere in this city, there’s an unclaimed magical circle with a cockatrice egg or two hundred thousand in reagents inside it, and we’re the only ones who know. That’s worth keeping a line on, don’t you think?”
“No I do not,” Sibyl snapped. “I think you’re letting your optimism run away with you again. 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. Need I remind you that if you don’t have ten thousand dollars by midnight on Friday, you’re going to be screwed? You bought me to give you good advice, so listen for once: forget this and let’s get back to the Cleaner office. If we hustle, we can still make it in time for the evening auction. There’s always more stuff up for sale at night. We’ll get a good unit, clean it fast, and turn a nice profit in time to go back tomorrow and do it all again. That’s how we’re going to make enough money to get through this. Not chasing wild cockatrices.”
She was right, of course. Sibyl was always right, which was why I’d downloaded her. But as sensible as her advice was, throwing away the notes felt too much like tossing a lotto ticket before the numbers were announced. I just couldn’t bring myself to do it, so I tucked them back into my bag instead, ordering my AI to recall our truck before she could pull up a picture of eyes to roll at me.
***
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.
Thankfully, the office was still in the same place it had been this morning: taking up the lion’s share of an Underground block a mile west of the big casinos by the river. The building was actually an old elementary school, one of those indestructible brick monsters from the 1950s that had survived two magical apocalypses. I had no idea why the DFZ had chosen something so old to be one of her personal buildings. She was relentlessly modern in everything else: demanding that all civic business be conducted online via smartphone and rebuilding Town Hall every six months so that it was always on the cutting edge of architecture. Whatever the reason, though, I liked it. The old school had a gravitas that the rest of the eternally moving city did not. I also found the fact that it still had all of its original fixtures hilarious. 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. Of course, this also meant I had to put up with tiny toilets, but still: totally worth it.