The auctions were held in the old school auditorium. There were two per day: one at six a.m. and one at six p.m. Which one I went to depended on my schedule, but I almost never attended both. Hitting two auctions in one day was for volume buyers and crazy people, but apparently I fit the latter today, because here I was, and I could already tell it was going to be bad.
The room was packed. All the big Cleaners were here, including DeSantos, which sucked, because I’d thought he was still on vacation. 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. He normally went for the big prizes: abandoned warehouses, closed shops, places with enough stuff to justify sending over a truck full of guys. This meant our interests didn’t usually overlap, but that didn’t matter. I didn’t hate going up against DeSantos because he was competition. I hated being in auctions with him because 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.
Thankfully, he seemed distracted tonight, sitting in the front row and waving his hands through an AR interface I couldn’t see like he was conducting an invisible orchestra. I took the seat directly behind him, hoping that if he couldn’t see me, he’d find someone else to pick on. I was arranging my goggles on top of my head so that Sibyl’s best camera was pointed at the stage when someone sat down in the folding chair next to mine.
My head whipped around, and I froze, stomach curling into a knot. Great. Just great. The one night I really needed to win something decent, and Nikola Kos was sitting next to me.
Other than DeSantos’s bullying, Nik was my biggest roadblock at auctions. He was a solo operator just like I was, which meant we tended to go for the same jobs: small units we could clean for good profit in a reasonable amount of time. Unlike me, though, Nik didn’t have five months of horrendous bad luck dragging him down, which meant if we ended up going head to head on an auction tonight, he was going to win. But while I resented his presence on a business level, what made me flinch away was simple self-preservation.
After three and a half years in the DFZ, I was used to scary people, but Nik was a special kind of intimidating. It was hard to say why, exactly. He wasn’t particularly tall or big, especially not compared to some of the other Cleaners who’d gone so overboard on the cyberwear and body augs they couldn’t sit in the folding chairs without crushing them. But while he didn’t have any obvious modifications or weapons I could see, there was something about Nik that put me on edge. Maybe it was the way his gray eyes never stopped moving, sizing up each person as they sat down like he expected to be attacked at any moment. Or maybe it was the way he always sat on the edge of his seat with his hands in the pockets of his black leather bomber jacket, despite the fact that it had to be ninety degrees in here.
Not that I could talk, of course. I was still wearing my warded poncho and sweating like a sponge because of it. But I’d rather faint from dehydration than take off my protections anywhere close to Nik Kos. Other than winning units I wanted, he’d never actually done anything to me, but I’d lived among predators long enough to recognize danger when it sat down next to me. I was about to move to another seat, DeSantos be damned, when Nik’s roving gray eyes landed on me.
“Look who’s back for more,” he said, glancing down to where my hands were clutching my bag, then to my goggles, then to my filthy boots before finally returning to my face. “I heard you got sold a coffin.”
“How’d you hear that?” I asked, because I hadn’t told anyone except Broker and Peter.
Nik shrugged. “Did you get your money back, or did Broker cut you a deal to preserve his ‘no refunds’ streak?”
“Why do you want to know?” I asked suspiciously.
He shrugged again. “Just trying to determine if you already picked the place over so I know not to bid on it when it comes back up for auction.” He flashed me a sharp smile. “So did you find anything good?”
Now it was my turn to shrug. “You think I’d be back here if I did?”
“Yes,” he said without hesitation. “Cleaning a unit takes no time if you don’t have to actually clean. You can grab the good stuff, auction it, have a nap, and come back for another round. That’s what I’d do.”
I sighed. That’s what I would’ve liked to do, but there was no way I was telling Nik about my day of failure, so I changed the subject instead. “Why are you back? Didn’t you win two jobs this morning?”
“I did,” he said. “But they were both evictions in closet communities. You know, the apartment buildings where all the units are six-by-six-foot boxes stacked on top of each other? Those things take no time to clean. I had everything wrapped up before lunch, so now I’m back for more.”
He said this as if it were a good day’s work, but the more he talked, the more I pulled back into my chair. 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.
A very good profit, admittedly. Unlike Cleaning, you didn’t have to bid on eviction jobs. The city paid a flat rate to clean out delinquent tenants, and you got to keep all their stuff in return for cleaning the apartment so it could be rented again. 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. I was trying to think up an excuse to get away from this conversation when Broker walked into the room.
I should point out that “Broker” was not Broker’s real name. No one who made his money selling people’s abandoned apartments to scavengers was stupid enough to give out anything that could be traced back to his real life. Even his face was anonymous, so perfected by plastic surgery that he looked more like a photo collage of menswear models than an actual person. He was the only full-time member of the Collections or Cleaning offices that any of us ever saw, and he made sure even that was a professional mask.
“Settle down, children, settle down,” he said as he hopped up onto the stage. “We’ve got a lot of units to get through tonight, so we’re going to do this fast. First up are evictions. I’ve got seven. Who wants them?”
I glanced hopefully at Nik. If he took another eviction job, that would remove my main competition. But my bad-luck streak must have still been running hot, because his hand stayed down. There were plenty of other heartless thugs who loved cash in the room, though, and the evictions went quick, moving us on to the real show: the Cleaner Auction.
Auctions were a pretty simple affair. Every unit up for bid had an address, square footage, and usually a picture taken from just outside the front door. Sometimes, if it was a really big place, you’d get a second picture from the back for scale, but normally those three bits were all the information you got. The trick to being a good Cleaner was knowing how to use them.
For example, tonight’s first auction was for a five-room penthouse in the Financial District. The posh address was enough to get the new guys salivating, but I wasn’t even tempted, because while the picture showed a lot of fancy-looking furniture, the paintings above them were mass-produced reproductions of the same ten super-famous modern works every wanna-look-rich jerk in the DFZ hung on his walls.