“Why not?” I asked. “It’s not as if he’s going to complain, and I have a deadline.”
A hard one. I owed a very nasty individual a lot of money, and he wasn’t flexible about payments. If I didn’t have the cash by Friday, bad things were going to happen.
“At least we have a lot to work with,” I said, pointing at the wall of boxes. “There’s so much here, some of it has to be good.”
“By what logic?” Sibyl asked.
None, I admitted silently, but my AI already knew she was right, so I didn’t bother bumming myself out by admitting the truth aloud. I just grabbed a box off the top of the pile and started ripping it open, peeling off the packing tape with a silent prayer to the living soul of the DFZ that something good was going to come out.
***
Suffice it to say, my prayers were not answered. Two hours later—a hundred and twenty disgusting, sweaty, putrid minutes of digging through dusty boxes in a dead man’s living room while said corpse was rotting not ten feet away—I had exactly zero to show for it. The best I could say was that at least it was interesting. Most of the boxes turned out to be full of scholarly books about ancient magical methodologies. Primarily different styles of alchemy, but there were several boxes on ancient Egyptian sorcery, plus a whole stack of books about extinct magical animals. Clearly, whoever our dead man had been, he’d been a fan of historical magic.
I could relate. Before my life had gone to hell, I’d gotten my master’s degree in magical art history and anthropology, which was a long-winded way of saying I studied old magical stuff left behind by ancient cultures. There was a surprising amount of it. In ancient times, the world had been very magical, even more magical than it was now. Then, for reasons only the Merlins knew, all that power had vanished.
For nearly eleven centuries, roughly 1000 to 2035 CE, the world had been completely unmagical, a period we now called the Drought. During that dark time, all of those magical treasures—the enchanted swords and religious relics and other venerated items of power crafted by ancient sorcerers and priests using techniques modern magic still didn’t fully understand—lost their power and became merely pretty things. Some were preserved, coveted by various cultures and collectors as sacred objects even if they didn’t actually work anymore, but countless more were lost to time.
Time and ignorance. We’d never know how many precious treasures had been destroyed by people who couldn’t tell the difference between an enchanted hammer of the gods and a hammer you used to build houses. Those objects that did survive regained their power just like everything else when magic had suddenly returned eighty years ago, but so many more were gone forever.
Clearly, I wasn’t the only one who found that heartbreaking. Our dead guy didn’t have any actual relics, much to my dismay, but he had a truly impressive collection of archival photo prints. There were some very detailed pictures of ancient Persian alchemical tools in the boxes that even I hadn’t seen before. They were all mass-produced prints, which meant they weren’t worth the paper they were printed on, but it was still a lovely collection, and I ended up slipping several photos into my bag for myself.
But while I couldn’t fault the dead man’s taste, books and photos didn’t sell. After opening every single one of the three hundred and twenty boxes crammed into the basement apartment’s tiny living room, I estimated the entire collection at around a hundred bucks, which was two hundred short of what I needed just to break even. There was nothing in the bathroom, either, so I was forced to move on to the only room I hadn’t touched yet.
The bedroom.
“Excuse me,” I said to the dead man as I squeezed inside. “Just here to look around.”
It was a stupid thing to say and more than a bit macabre, but dead or not, barging into someone’s bedroom felt unspeakably rude. Rude and cold, because after two hours of digging through his collection, I felt like I knew the guy. He was a fellow historian, or at least an enthusiastic collector, and that deserved respect. Not “I’m not going to dig through your drawers looking for hidden lockboxes” levels of respect, but I felt I should acknowledge his presence at least.
“What do you think he died of?” I asked Sibyl as I started going through the stuff on top of his bureau. “The front door was intact, so I don’t think he was killed in a robbery.”
“I bet it was something internal,” my AI replied, zooming my cameras in on the corpse’s face, which was black and sunken with decomposition. “There’s no obvious evidence of—”
“Could you not?” I snapped, yanking the cameras back. “This is creepy enough without you going for the close-up!”
“I was just answering your question,” Sibyl said defensively. “As I was trying to say, there’s no obvious evidence of violence. No blood splatters or bullet holes or anything like that. Add in the way he collapsed face forward on the ground, and a health crisis seem most likely. Stroke, heart attack, aneurysm, something like that.”
I glanced at the mini fridge in the corner, which was sitting with its door wide open to reveal the melted—but otherwise completely undecayed—stack of microwave burritos inside. “Going by what he ate, my money’s on heart attack.” I shook my head. “Poor bastard.”
“At least this room’s not filled with boxes,” Sybil said cheerfully. “If I have to look up resale prices for one more stack of dusty old books that don’t have proper QR codes, I’m going to log myself out.”
I was likewise sick of digging through outdated scholarly paperbacks, but the relative emptiness of this room meant that my chances of earning out on this unit were lower than they’d ever been. Biting my lip, I glanced over my shoulder at the dead guy. It was hard to tell since his clothes were so stained with decomposition, but he didn’t look rich. He had none of the flashy jewelry or talismans you normally saw on underworld mages. He wasn’t even wearing warded clothes. Other than being dead, the only actually remarkable thing about him was the fact that he had a cybernetic hand.
That wasn’t unusual in the DFZ. Unlike other countries with their pesky safety regulations, anything you wanted to do to your body was perfectly legal here, even the really crazy stuff. Implants were cheap, too, since the DFZ also didn’t require a medical license to install or build cybernetics. Hell, I’d seen homeless guys with camera eyes, but you didn’t usually see augs on mages since cybernetics interfered with the flow of magic through the body.
Given the custom wards on his door and his obsession with ancient magic, I would’ve thought this guy would rather go handless than give up some of his magic to a machine, but clearly that wasn’t the case. Who knew? Maybe he liked having a piece of him that was better than human more than he cared about absolute magical efficiency. Either way, that hand was worth a pretty penny. It didn’t look like a high-end model, but you could always sell cybernetics. That said, Broker had only okayed me to loot the unit. He hadn’t given me carte blanche to steal from the dead. No one could, not anymore.
Since the return of magic, the world had filled with gods. The first to rise had been Algonquin, Lady of the Great Lakes. The very night magic returned, she’d come out of her lakes in a tidal wave to punish humanity for polluting her waters. The resulting flood had devastated the entire Great Lakes region, but nowhere was hit harder than Detroit. Since it had been one of the greatest polluters, Algonquin’s hatred for the Motor City was special, and her wave had wiped it off the map. When she’d finished hammering it into the ground, Algonquin built a new city on Detroit’s ruins—the first Detroit Free Zone—and claimed it for herself. The United States of America didn’t even fight her over it. They were too busy dealing with the sudden return of mages and dragons and everything else to care about losing a troublesome, bankrupt city.