It felt callous to be so excited. As stressful as watching Nik fight for his life in an arena was bound to be, though, this was my first afternoon off in eight weeks. I’d lost two and a half hours already, like hell was I wasting another second. I ate the kale salad Dr. Kowalski had made for me as fast as physically possible and bolted, racing back to my apartment to change out of my jeans and into…well, another pair of jeans since DFZ-provided work wear was all I had right now.
My bedroom door was closed when I arrived. After what Dr. K had said about renovations, I didn’t dare open it. Fortunately, the DFZ had moved the door to my bathroom to the living room, so I wasn’t cut off from my necessities. I washed up and started digging through my plastic drawers to find the pair of jeans that looked the least like I was wearing two denim sacks on my legs. I didn’t exactly have a lot to choose from, but after thirty minutes of trying things on, I’d identified the nicest version of my usual uniform of thick jeans, plain T-shirt, and work boots. Not exactly fashionable, but I had no idea what you wore to a death arena. For all I knew, this was the look.
In the end, it didn’t even matter. I could have gone naked and no one would have known thanks to the giant magical security poncho I dug out of my closet. I shook out the dust and tossed it over my shoulders, covering myself from neck to calf in voluminous spellworked plastic sheeting that, while even less stylish than my jeans, at least had the benefit of looking expensive.
My father nodded approvingly when he saw it. “Nice to know you kept something we gave you.”
“I’m not that petty,” I said, petting my poncho lovingly. “This baby has saved my bacon more times than I can count. I didn’t need it when I was working in the DFZ’s controlled areas, but like hell am I going into an Underground arena without covering my butt. And most of the rest of my body.”
“The poncho does make it much more likely that you’ll get pickpocketed, though,” Sibyl said in my earpiece. “Expensive protections imply you’ve got something worth stealing.”
“They’re welcome to try,” I said haughtily, sliding my goggles down over my eyes so I’d have the full benefit of my AR and cameras. “I’m a priestess of the DFZ. So long as we’re inside the city, anything they steal will just end up right back in my pocket.”
“You sure about that?”
I wasn’t, but the DFZ had told me numerous times she took care of her own. To be honest, I almost wanted someone to try. I wasn’t the desperate, slapdash mage I’d been before. If someone put a gun in my face this time, I’d slam it right back into theirs.
“I love the confidence,” Sibyl said, flashing a map of Rentfree into my AR field. “But we’re going into the part of the Underground with the highest homicide rate in the western hemisphere, so maybe tone down the violent urges?”
The map she was showing me did look alarmingly red. “Is this up to date?”
“Everything’s up to date!” my AI said delightedly. “Once you okayed my internet usage, I patched and updated everything that could be patched or updated. We are once more fully compliant and backed up to the cloud, baby!”
“Good for us,” I said, reaching out to grab my doorknob. “Ready?”
“Depends,” my father said. “Are you talking to me or one of the voices in your head?”
I shrugged. “It was a general query. But since you didn’t say you weren’t…”
I turned the knob and pushed my door open, holding a location rather than an image in my head since I didn’t actually have a picture for where I wanted to go. It was the most open-ended request I’d ever used for this spell, but after last night’s adventures and opening a door straight into Nik’s car, I was feeling much more confident about my city-bending abilities. Sure enough, my door opened straight into Rentfree. Onto the main entry bridge specifically, which was a surprise but really shouldn’t have been since the bridge suspended over the chasm was exactly what I’d pictured in my mind.
Stupid choice in hindsight since there were no doors on the bridge, but it was the part of Rentfree I’d remembered best. And anyway, it had worked! Despite all impossibility, my door opened directly out of the back of one of the welded iron struts that kept the suspended stretch of asphalt from plummeting into the abyss. Below us, the pit of Rentfree stretched down even deeper than I remembered, its steep walls made of stacked buildings grinding slowly against each other like rotors in a giant machine.
My father must not have expected the sudden verticality, because he grabbed the metal cable that served as the bridge’s railing with a jerk, nearly falling over the edge when his smoke hand passed right through it. “Where is this place?” he asked when he’d scrambled back to my side.
“The bottom of the Underground,” I replied, looking around at the pedestrian bridge my spell had plopped us in the middle of. “And it’s packed.”
Rentfree had been busy when Nik and I had come here for the Night Lot, but that was nothing on what I saw now. The bridge was so crammed with people, I feared for its structural safety even more than usual. The teeming crowd looked to
