“You’ll be fried chicken,” Sibyl said smugly. “I’m backed up to the cloud.”
I rolled my eyes and crouched down, pressing my plastic-covered head against the door so the cameras in my goggles could get a good shot of the spellwork at my feet. “Any clue what it does?”
“Nope,” she said after the picture scanned. “Zero matches returned from all spellwork libraries. Looks like a custom job.”
I grinned inside my mask. Custom spellwork was the hallmark of a serious mage. Probably an unsavory one since he was hiding down here, but unsavory magic sold even better than legitimate stuff, and Cleaners couldn’t afford to be picky.
“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. “But what do you want to do about the ward? This door’s the only way in according to the blueprints.”
I frowned at the symbols by my feet. Deciphering spellwork had never been my strong suit, but this stuff looked like arcane chicken scratch. I couldn’t even spot the variables that would tell me if this was just an alarm ward or something that would cut your head off if you crossed it. It felt strong, though. Now that I was standing right next to it, I could feel the ward’s magic humming even through the soupy ambient power of the DFZ. Whatever this thing did, it did it hard, which meant my best move was to avoid it entirely.
“Right,” I said, stepping back. “Let’s try the crowbar.”
The crowbar was a spell of my own invention. Unlike the deadbeat owner of the apartment I was attempting to loot, I wasn’t a Thaumaturge who treated magic like a mathematical equation to be solved. I knew enough spellwork to get by—since it followed logical rules that could be written down, Thaumaturgy was the easiest form of magic to teach, which meant it was the one that every mage learned in school—but I could never wrap my head around the higher logic needed to be actually good.
For me, magic had always been a feeling, a physical sensation I could trace with my fingers, like dipping my hand into a stream of water. If Thaumaturges used spellwork to build complex logic-gated irrigation systems, then I cast by splashing. As my tutors had lectured me countless times, it was a fast, reckless way to use magic (or, if they were being less polite, lazy and dangerous). To me, though, it had always been the only way that felt right. I still appreciated quality Thaumaturgy—my poncho was proof of that; the thing was covered in top-tier corporate spellwork—but when it came to casting for myself, all those rules and variables just got in the way. It was a lot simpler to do everything freehand, which was what I did right now, reaching out to grab two big fistfuls of the DFZ’s ambient magic.
As always, touching the city’s magic in the Underground felt like dipping my fingers into oil-slicked water. Noisy water. The magic down here was full of car horns and voices and the rumble of engines mixed with the smell of greasy street food and wet pavement. Even the texture was different than the magic up on the Skyways: syrupy and thick, like trying to hold motor oil between your fingers.
Such thick, slippery power would have been a nightmare to push through spellwork, but when it came to my slapdash casting, the viscosity actually made things easier. I didn’t even bother with a casting circle. I just kept pouring the power back and forth between my cupped hands, adding to it in fistfuls until the magic in my hands felt greater than the magic radiating from the ward on the door.
This turned out to be slightly more than I could safely hold, so I picked up the pace, squeezing the oozing magic between my hands until it was more or less the shape I wanted: a dense bar with a hook at one end, exactly like a real crowbar. The form was entirely for me. Magic didn’t follow actual physics any more than dreams did, but casting was all about understanding. The whole point of spellwork equations was to prove to yourself logically why something would work. Since I’d never fully understood any spellwork, that method had never worked for me, but I knew what a crowbar did. I knew how to jam one into a door and wedge it open, so that was what I did now, jamming my magic between the ward and the door frame until the whole thing snapped with an explosive crack.
“Whoa!” Sibyl said as I jumped away from the splintering wood. “That’s one way to do it.”
“At least we don’t have to worry about the other locks now,” I said, nodding at the door, which had snapped in half from the pressure.
“I know, right?” my AI agreed. “Who needs proper casting? Brute force wins again!”
“Hey, I do better when I stick to what I’m good at,” I said defensively. Then my face split into a grin as I turned the laserlike beams of my headlamps toward the room I’d just revealed. “Let’s see what we’ve got!”
Being a Cleaner is all about being an optimist. No matter how many apartments full of dirty clothes and rat droppings you cleaned out, there was always that chance that the next one would be a treasure trove, and like I said, I had a good feeling about this place. I dove at what was left of the door like a kid jumping into a pool on the first day of summer, knocking the broken wood out of my way as if it were brittle glass. The more I cleared out, the more excited I became, because the ward on the doorframe was even better than I’d expected. I couldn’t see the individual markings anymore now that I’d broken them, but I knew from the burn mark they’d left in the wood that that thing had been seriously powerful. I’d popped it fairly easily, but I broke into apartments (legally) for a living. A more standard mage, one who cared about fancy stuff like preserving spellwork or being quiet, would have tried to unlock it and probably gotten themselves fried as a result.
Fried and recorded. Now that the door was gone, I could see all kinds of wires running along the ceiling behind it. The entire front foyer of the apartment was rigged with cameras, sensors, and a tripwire leading to a bucket of cement that had been rigged to drop from the top of the coat closet door. If I’d come in normally, that thing would have crushed my head, which only made me more excited. Whoever had lived down here had clearly been hiding something good. The only question was had he taken it with him when he’d skipped town without paying his rent?
Going by what I could see from the doorway, my guess was no. It didn’t look like anyone had ever taken anything out of here. Once you got past the traps at the front, the entire apartment was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes. There were a few canyonlike paths that ran between the stacks, but otherwise the whole place appeared to be little more than a glorified storage locker.
My heart began to flutter at the sight. Other than actually scoring a major find, this was my favorite part of being a Cleaner. Pulling out my wire cutters, I disarmed the entryway, cutting the tripwires and the power feeds to the sensors. When I was certain I wouldn’t get crushed, shot, or garroted by anything automated, I crept inside, stepping into the canyon of boxes like an explorer entering a pharaoh’s tomb. That was exactly how I felt, too. Like I was Indiana Jones—the good one from the original classic movies, not the ghastly seventeen-film reboot they did in the 2040s. I was about to dig into the first pile to see what I’d scored when the smell hit me.