“You moved out of our apartment in the middle of the night!” she yelled at me. “The only reason I knew you were working as a Cleaner is because your mother called to see if I could talk you out of it. Which I couldn’t because you never answered any of my messages!”
I winced. Maybe coming back here hadn’t been such a good idea after all. “I’m sorry, I just—”
“Sorry?” Heidi yelled, slamming her hands on her desk. “It’s a little late for sorry!”
The raw anger in her voice was a shock. I’d known Heidi for years, but I’d never seen her get this emotional. To be honest, I hadn’t realized she’d cared so much, which made me feel like a jerk. In my defense, I’d had a lot going on at the time, but that didn’t take the sting out of seeing her stare at me like I’d stabbed her in the back.
“Why, Opal?” she said, her voice cracking. “I was your roommate. I thought I was your friend. Why did you leave without saying goodbye?”
“I wasn’t doing it to be mean,” I said, pulling off my goggles so that I could look at her properly. “And you are my friend, I just…I needed a clean break, that’s all.”
“A clean break from what?” Heidi demanded. “Were you in trouble?”
I’d actually done it to get myself out of trouble, but I couldn’t tell Heidi that. I’d lied to her enough back when we’d been roommates, which was one of the main reasons I’d left. I was tired of lying all the time. Tired of doing the dance that was necessary to keep everyone else safe. Tired of being me.
A pretty gem of little value.
“I had to go,” I said, hardening my voice. “I can’t tell you more than that, but trust me when I say that it was for the best. I wouldn’t have bothered you now, but I really need to know what this spellwork—”
“Please, bother me!” Heidi begged, reaching out to grab my dirty hands. “What part of ‘I am your friend’ do you not understand? If you’re in trouble, let me help. I’m still living in our old apartment. You can move back in anytime you want. Or don’t, I don’t care, just please let me help you! I can’t stand to see you like this. You look homeless and you smell like death.”
“Told you,” Sibyl whispered in my earpiece.
I muted her with a flick of my finger and focused on Heidi. “Thank you for the offer. It means a lot to me, it really does, but I can’t.”
Heidi’s brown eyes narrowed. “It’s your dad, isn’t it?”
I stopped cold. “No,” I said after way too long.
“You’re not nearly as good a liar as you think you are,” she said, crossing her arms. “Look, I know you and your dad don’t get along. Given the way you used to yell into your phone, I’m pretty sure the whole building knew. But if he’s the reason you ran away, I swear I won’t tell him you’re back. Just come home. Whatever you’re running from, we’ll work it out together. I can even give you a job. There’s an opening right now in my department. I can get you set up today if you want. For the love of God, Opal, you have a graduate degree from the best magical arts institute in the world! You don’t have to dig through other people’s trash to make a living!”
I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t tempted. After my last five months, moving back into Heidi’s sun-drenched apartment on the Skyways sounded like paradise. But if she knew about my dad, then she was already in too deep. I’d left precisely so he couldn’t use people like her against me. If I took her offer now, I’d be playing right into his hands.
“I can’t.”
“Opal!”
“No,” I said, clenching my hands into fists. “I’m sorry about the way I left. I didn’t mean to make you worry. I just had a lot of stuff I had to deal with on my own, and this was the only way I could do it.”
“By becoming a Cleaner?” she cried. “How does that help anything?”
It had helped a lot, actually. Unlike respectable art historians, no one cared what Cleaners did. They came and went as they pleased, and they made their own money. Much better money than an entry-level job at IMA paid, current bad luck notwithstanding. It wasn’t neat or respectable, but I needed money more than I needed my pride right now. And anyway, I liked Cleaning. It was surprisingly fun digging through people’s lives, and sometimes I found great stuff. Heidi wouldn’t understand that, though. From the look on her face, she clearly thought I was little better than a rag picker, and the fact that I looked the part certainly wasn’t helping matters.
“I appreciate the job offer. Really, I do, but I’m not coming back.” I held up my dirty poncho. “It’s not pretty, but this is my life now, and I’m happy with that. Honest.”
Heidi did not look convinced, but at least she didn’t keep arguing. “So does that mean you’ll answer when I message you now?”
“Sure,” I lied. There was no way I could stay in contact with her. Not until my debt was paid and I was in the clear. But for all her talk about me being a bad liar, she must have bought it, because for the first time since I’d come in, Heidi smiled at me.
“How are you so stubborn?” she muttered, sinking into her office chair.
“Talent,” I said, smiling back. “So can you help me or not?”
She sighed. “What do you need?”
I pulled out the folded notes I’d found in the warded box under the mage’s bed. “Can you look at these and tell me what they are? The forms look alchemical to me, but deciphering ancient spellwork is your area of expertise, not mine.”
“You always were more of a brute-force-o-mancer,” Heidi agreed, wrinkling her nose as she plucked the papers from my hand. “Do I want to know why these smell like dead animal?”
I shook my head, and she sighed, thumbing through the sheets as if she was grading papers. “They’re plans for a ritual,” she said after a few minutes.
I nodded excitedly. “A ritual for what?”
“Something big,” she said, sounding interested now despite herself. “The main structure involves multiple overlapping circles, which is an influence of modern Thaumaturgy, but the core spellwork is absolutely alchemical. Primarily the Islamic forms, but there’s lots of stuff stolen from the Ancient Greeks as well.” She glanced at me. “Where did you find these again?”
“In an amateur historian’s apartment,” I said, tactfully leaving out the bit where said amateur historian had been lying dead right next to them. “I’m trying to determine if they’re valuable.”
“They’re certainly unique,” Heidi said, laying the pages out on her desk in a grid so she could see all of them at once. “Historically, alchemy was all about transformation—turning one thing into another. Usually lead into gold, but there’s no mention of gold here.”
That was disappointing. Gold always sold. “So what was he trying to do?”
“I’m not sure,” Heidi said, squinting at the papers. “It looks as though he’s using the transformational nature of alchemy as a tool to make something, but I can’t see…Ah ha!” She stabbed her finger down on a particularly doodle-covered page. “Here it is. I had to find the central variable. This is a ritual to make a cockatrice egg.”