“You can’t just ‘get to work,’” my father argued. “You said the DFZ wouldn’t tolerate you being tardy, but you’ve already checked in. You should be fine, so let’s make a plan.”
“You’re free to plan all you want,” I said, setting off down the dark street in what I considered my “lucky” direction. “But I’m not getting a god on my case for you. I have quotas to meet.”
Yong made an insulted sound and hurried after me. “Isn’t your job to find culturally valuable objects? How can she put quotas on art?”
I also thought the quotas were stupid, but, “She doesn’t understand, remember?” I said defensively. “And the quotas aren’t about flogging value out of me. She just likes to know I’m not slacking around down here.” The DFZ hated slacking.
“Sounds like you work in a salt mine,” my dad huffed. “But very well. What’s the minimum you have to produce before we can get back to more important matters?”
“You mean you?” I said, rolling my eyes. “You do remember that we’re inside a god, right? One that saved us both? You might want to think twice before you talk out loud about how much more important your interests are than hers.”
“Gods can take care of themselves,” Yong said dismissively. “And my needs are obviously more pressing than sorting through a bunch of rotting buildings that have been here for years.”
Some of the stuff down here was pretty old, but that wasn’t the point. “I don’t work for you,” I snapped, stopping to glare at him. “The only reason I let you come down here is because we’re stuck together, but contrary to what you clearly believe, you are not entitled to my time. Now shut up and let me do my job, or I’m going to tie you to the lamppost to wait for me like a dog.”
My dad’s response to that was a long, put-upon sigh that made me want to strangle him, but he didn’t yell, which was a surprising and welcome change. It was no secret that my dad brought out the worst in me, but that was usually because he could never let a conversation pass without asserting his dominance. But the dynamic was different now. My dad was no longer huge or powerful compared to me. He was weak and dependent, which meant I no longer had to care.
That was an amazingly freeing realization. I’d never had the luxury of just not caring what my dad thought or did before. I was still struggling to wrap my brain around the concept when my dad cleared his throat.
“If your god will punish you for not working, then that’s what you have to do,” he said in a voice that was clearly straining to remain calm. “But the task will go faster if we do it together, so what does the DFZ require?”
I still didn’t like the unspoken implication that I would help him once I was done here, but that was a fair observation. Having my dad work with me would be a lot less trouble than arguing with him for the next eight hours, and there was no one more knowledgeable when it came to antiques. I’d learned some stuff at school, but most of what I used on a daily basis came from my father. If nothing else, having him around to double-check my finds would save me a lot of research time on the ancient library computer the DFZ had installed in the warehouse for reference purposes.
“I have to check three blocks worth of structures and mark them as either renovate or tear down,” I said, pointing at the dark buildings we were walking past. “Every room has to be checked, because you never know what’s hiding behind a boring front. One time I found an entire Prohibition speakeasy hidden inside a basement! It had an Art Deco ballroom with a full orchestra stand and a fifty-foot bar lit with real Schonbek crystal light fixtures! The rest of the building was a teardown, but I had the DFZ move the entire basement as-was into the warehouse. We’re just waiting on the University of Chicago to send us some experts on the time period so we can restore the club to its former glory.”
It was going to be magnificent too. The wood paneling was cracked, and the gilding on the bar had long since worn off, but I could tell that with a little TLC, that place was going to be a window into a lost world. Finding it had felt like walking into a pharaoh’s tomb. Just thinking about it was getting me excited all over again when my dad asked, “Why?”
I blinked at him in confusion. “Why what?”
“Why are you renovating an old speakeasy?” my father asked. “I can understand restoring valuable antiques, and beautifully renovated historic buildings always fetch high rent, but what does the DFZ care about recreating a historically accurate Prohibition Era drinking club? What’s she going to do with it, charge admission?”
I looked down at my feet, because I didn’t know. The DFZ had hired me to sort through all of this because she couldn’t do it herself, but so far as I could tell, she had no actual plans for anything I’d found. Whenever I brought the subject up—suggested building a museum or loaning the things I’d found to somewhere that already had a similar collection—the DFZ was completely uninterested. She didn’t even seem to care about selling it. All that mattered to her was that nothing valuable was thrown away, which was good, but still left me feeling lackluster about what we were doing here. I mean, what was the point of saving all this stuff if you didn’t show it off?
Unfortunately, it wasn’t my choice to make. That was the downside of this job: everything I found here belonged to the DFZ, not me. Until my
