“So what work do you do in this place?” my father asked as I lovingly stowed my phone.
“My official title is ‘Appraiser,’” I told him, reaching up to turn on my LED headlamp. “But I don’t like it because I never actually appraise anything. I’m really more of a curator. My job is to go through all of the random stuff the DFZ has collected over the years and tell her what’s worth keeping and what isn’t.”
Yong still looked lost. “Why would she need you for that?”
“Because she can’t do it herself,” I said, exasperated. “The DFZ is a place, not a person. She’s fantastic at understanding city things—roads, traffic flow, zoning, and so forth—but that still leaves a ton of really important stuff that she has no idea about. For example…”
I waved my hand at the blocks of silent buildings around us, some of which were covered in decades of dust. “Notice how there’s no scrap metal here, or old cars? That’s because the DFZ already knows what to do with those. Ditto for recyclables, old lumber, broken cement, et cetera. Anything that has a fixed resale value she’s already on top of, but there’s plenty of material in a city that doesn’t fit that criteria. Antiques, art, historical pieces: anything whose worth is measured in human interest rather than price-per-ounce. She knows it’s valuable because she sees people valuing it, but the hows and whys of that value are completely beyond her ability to comprehend.”
That was the part of priesthood that had taken me the longest to understand. Because she was capable of talking and acting normally, it was easy to think of the DFZ as just a really powerful person, but she wasn’t. She was a spirit, the magical embodiment of a concept. She’d been shaped by human perception—what we thought the DFZ was—but she wasn’t actually one of us. Since she was a city with all the human social interactions that implied, she was better at pretending than most spirits, but that’s all it was: pretending. At the end of the day, the DFZ was as much a slave to her concept as the Spirit of the Forgotten Dead. She couldn’t leave her city, couldn’t understand things that didn’t have to do with it, and didn’t particularly care. The only reason she hadn’t recycled everything down here into raw materials for new buildings already was because it went against the DFZ’s thrifty nature to destroy anything that might have value whether she understood that value or not.
I understood it, though. That understanding was why the DFZ wanted me as her priestess so badly. It wasn’t just my magical potential or the fact that I wasn’t a sociopath, which was apparently uncommon enough to be notable. I was valuable because, unlike her, I actually understood why people had treasured this stuff and these places. I could see that the amazing Art Deco facade on the front of that collapsing bank was beautiful and rare and worth way more than the granite blocks that made it up. I knew which pieces of colored glass were Tiffany and which were beer bottles. She’d saved this stuff for years because she knew it was worth more than the sum of its part, but she’d never been able to tell more than that until me. I solved a problem the DFZ couldn’t solve on her own, and so, true to her nature as a city of capitalism, she’d hired me on the spot, given me a quota, and put me to work.
And I loved it. Working here was all the best, treasure-huntery parts of being a Cleaner with none of the actual cleaning, bidding, or risk of opening a door and getting a shotgun in your face. In addition to the blocks of buildings—all of which were too run-down to be usable but still possessed enough potential architectural, cultural, or historical significance that the DFZ hadn’t felt comfortable junking them for parts—there was an aircraft-hangar-sized warehouse one block over that was jammed to the rafters with all the random stuff people lost, hid, or threw away.
Some of it was legit trash, some were consumer goods that, though interesting, weren’t actually rare or valuable, but a surprising amount was actual treasure. In just the last two months, I’d discovered hundreds of museum-quality pieces, including several that appeared to have been looted from the old Detroit Institute of Art. I’d found paintings, I’d found historical artifacts, I’d even found an entire wall from Diego Rivera’s lost Mural to Industry! It was hands down the best treasure hunting of my life. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I was owned by a god and making no actual money, just putting off a debt I couldn’t pay, I could have done this forever.
Unfortunately, my father didn’t seem to understand at all when I explained this to him. He’d never understood my fascination with Cleaning either, though, so I wasn’t sure why I’d bothered. For the millionth time, I wished Nik was with me. He would have understood the wonder of this place. Also, it would have been really nice to have someone made of metal to hide under when the rickety old buildings I poked through every day started dropping pieces. Mostly, though, I missed his company. Working alone was, well, lonely, and for someone who’d ghosted on all her friends and made a new life in a city famous for lonely people, I handled that surprisingly badly.
“All right,” I said, reaching through my dad to mark my arrival on
