“Two thousand going once,” Broker said. “Going twice.” There was a long pause, and then he clapped his hands together. “Sold to Miss Yong-ae for two thousand dollars!”
The words echoed in my ears as I watched the money vanish from my account. Broker had already moved on to the next auction, but I didn’t stick around to hear it. Whatever it was, I couldn’t afford it. But done was done, so I hauled myself out of my seat and slipped past Nik toward the door to go see what I’d just spent all my money on.
Chapter 3
I didn’t unmute Sibyl until I reached Magic Heights.
“Do I even need to say anything?” she said as I parked my truck across the street from my new unit.
I sighed and stepped out onto the sidewalk, which was lined with flowering dogwood trees despite the fact that it was the middle of July and the cement ceiling of the Skyways overhead blocked every photon of sunlight. Ah, the perks of living in a magical neighborhood. I missed them.
“You have to know how stupid that was,” my AI went on. “We’re supposed to be earning money, not wasting it!”
“I thought you said you weren’t going to say anything,” I grumbled, scanning the row of brick townhouses to find the one I’d won. “And it was a calculated risk.”
“There was nothing calculated about it!” she shouted, making my ears ring. “You got carried away, just like you always do, and now you’re screwed again. Just. Like. Always.”
“I don’t need this right now,” I said, reaching for her mute button again only to discover that it had vanished from my interface. “Sibyl!”
“No,” she said sharply. “You told me two weeks ago that if you didn’t get it together by this Friday, you were done for. You ordered me to make sure you didn’t go off track! But then, when I try to do my job, you go and mute me! How am I supposed to help you if you won’t help yourself?”
“I am helping myself!” I yelled, drawing strange looks from the pack of university students walking on the other side of the road. “You saw the other auctions. There was nothing! This is the best lead I’ve had in months. If I can get my hands on even a quarter of those reagents, I’ll have enough to make my debt payments and cover rent for the rest of the summer! That’s worth a gamble.”
“On a hundred, maybe,” Sibyl said. “But two thousand? That’s all the money you had left!”
“I know, I know, I know,” I said, scrubbing my hands through my sweaty hair. “I get it, okay? But done is done. The money’s gone, and I can’t bid on another auction until tomorrow morning. There’s no turning things around tonight, so let’s just go inside and see if we can make my money back.”
Sibyl made a sound so frustrated it would have made her emotional-development programmer cry, but she didn’t say another word. When I was certain she was done, I reached into the neck of my poncho and pulled out my master key, scurrying across the quiet street to the townhouse at the end of the row, my target.
It was a lot nicer than I’d anticipated. From the picture, I’d expected another basement apartment, but the address was for the entire townhouse. It was a corner unit, too. Sure, the western wall was built right up against the massive cement cliff of a Skyway support beam, which meant the whole place rattled whenever a big truck drove overhead, but it only had neighbors on one side. The street was quiet and tree-lined, too, all huge luxuries in the Underground. The pale-pink paint job on the brick exterior was a little odd, but overall it was a charming little house, which made no sense given everything else I’d seen today.
“I don’t get it,” I said, pushing open the chain-link gate that separated the townhouse’s postage-stamp yard from the sidewalk. “If he had a place like this, why did he die locked in that hole?”
“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.”
As usual, my AI had a good point, but as we climbed the cement steps to the townhome’s tiny porch, I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to it. I’d Cleaned abandoned apartments for plenty of loan shark victims, and in my experience, debt collectors broke bones, not stuff. Stuff could be sold to pay back the loan, but whoever had broken into this place didn’t seem to care about stuff at all. A suspicion that became cold, hard fact when we reached the unit’s door.
“Wow,” I said.
The front door wasn’t just kicked off its hinges, it had been annihilated. There wasn’t even a splinter left for my master key to unlock. Just a few lines of yellow caution tape Collections had placed over the empty doorway to keep random people from wandering in. The spellwork I’d spotted on the door frame was still there, but now that I was standing on top of it, I could see that huge portions were burned black, probably from trying to stop whoever had busted their way in here. And then busted their way through everything else, if the living room was any indication.
“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. The pictures on the walls—more museum photos of ancient alchemical artifacts, though much higher-quality ones than what I’d found in the basement apartment—had been bashed out of their frames and shredded into streamers. Even the built-in bookcases had been pried out of their nooks, the books methodically ripped in half, which was just obscene. Unlike the collection I’d gone through this morning, there’d been some nice stuff in here, and it was all ruined.
“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.