That wasn’t exactly a lie, but Julius shut the door before Marci could ask any more questions. Fortunately, her car was behaving itself. It started on the first try, and Marci grabbed the wheel straight out, skipping the autonav in favor of getting them out of the alley and away from the downed thugs as fast as possible.
When they’d put several blocks between themselves and the scene of the crime, she slowed to a more reasonable speed and slumped over the dash with a long sigh. “I’ll waive the fee for today, of course. I know it’s no proper thanks for saving my bacon, but it’s all I can afford right now.”
Julius thought of her horrid basement apartment and shook his head. “I can’t let you do that. You did the job I hired you for. I’m happy to pay.” Her full rate, he decided, just as soon as Ian paid him.
Instead of being happy, though, Marci’s jaw tightened. “Let me buy you dinner, at least. I know a good place.”
“It’s really okay.”
She turned to him with a cutting look. “Julius, you saved my life. You have to let me dosomething.”
“You’re going to keep working for me, right? That’s something.” Potentially a big something, because they still had to chase down Lark’s lead on Katya and her alligator shaman. Marci, however, did not look appeased.
“That doesn’t count!” she cried. “You can’t let me pay you back by doing work I was going to do anyway!”
Julius shifted uncomfortably. Honestly, he didn’t want Marci paying him back at all. Trading debts was what dragons did, but Julius had helped her because he’d wanted to, and it had felt like freedom. Given the chance, he’d do it all over again for that feeling alone. But that wasn’t a line of logic a human would understand, so Julius decided to give in. Just a little.
“I’ll accept dinner,” he said. “But only if you tell me what that was about.”
Marci suddenly looked much less eager. “You’re sure you want to know?”
Julius shrugged. “I don’t mean to pry into your business, but believe it or not, I don’t normally get into back-alley brawls with strange men.”
“Well, if anyone deserved breaking your ‘no slamming people into walls’ streak over, it would be Bixby’s idiots.”
“I only got half of them,” he reminded her. “You did the other. Credit where credit is due.”
Marci laughed. “If by ‘credit’ you mean ‘assault and battery charges,’ then I guess you’re right.” She shook her head and turned to flash him a warm smile. “You know, we make a pretty good team.”
Julius felt that smile all the way to his toes. By the time he’d recovered, she’d turned away to fiddle with her car’s GPS, muttering under her breath about skyways and satellite uplinks and idiots who built cities on top of other, perfectly good cities.
In the end, she gave up and drew the route by hand, laying down a path that took them into the city’s industrial south west. Julius had no idea what she was trying to get to down there, and he didn’t ask. He was too busy enjoying the novelty of the wordsweandteamto care about anything else as they sped away from the grim alley, following the river south as the moon began to rise.
***
Considering they were driving away from the lake and Algonquin’s tower and everything that was generally considered the heart of the DFZ, Julius had fully expected the city to get scarier, but it actually did just the opposite. The further they drove south along the river, the more corporate and uniform everything became. Instead of old buildings renovated into massive shopping centers, the Underground in this part of the city was filled with parking decks and massive housing units that, while nicer than the ones they’d just left by the casinos, were still bleak, utilitarian bricks of poured cement broken up only by railed walkways and tiny glass windows.
If you looked past that, though, the area actually reminded Julius far more of traditional suburbs than the DFZ Underground you saw in the movies. There were chain restaurants and coffee shops and shopping centers with parking decks full of mid-range cars and corporate buses shuttling people up to the massive offices on the skyways overhead. If it wasn’t for the fact that the whole place was basically a cement brick built under a giant bridge, it could have passed for anywhere in America once you overlooked the camera drones and armed private security patrols.
Since she’d driven them down here, Julius expected Marci to turn them into one of the huge chain restaurants, but she didn’t even look at them. She just kept driving until, eventually, they drove right out of the Underground and into the dense factory district that butted right up against it.
Before, when they’d driven out of the city, it had been all open space and plants and strange magic. This time, it was a very different landscape. In a deal that had brought dozens of multinational corporations to the DFZ, Algonquin had ceded the entire south western corner of her city to the new technology of magical fabrication. Even now, fifty years and two monetary overhauls later, the vast majority of the world’s magically integrated consumables—five sense projectors, the mana contacts on phones that made AR possible, even enchanted paper like the stuff Marci’s contract had been printed on—was still made in the massive factory complexes that had transformed what used to be the city of Dearborn, Michigan into a bleak landscape of monolithic, windowless buildings and canyon-like roads.
Huge as it all was, though, the factory park definitely didn’t seem like the sort of place you’d find a restaurant, and the longer Marci drove, the more uncomfortable Julius got. “Um,” he said at last. “Are you sure this is the right way?”
“Positive,” Marci replied. “I looked this place up on my way over before I had to chuck my phone. Best rating in the city.”
Julius didn’t see how a restaurant could survive out here, let alone be good, but he was even more curious about why she’d had to chuck her phone. He was dying to ask about a lot of things, actually, but he forced himself to wait. This job was already much more complicated than he’d anticipated, and as much as he wanted to push his lead on Katya, he wasn’t ready to charge recklessly forward without solving Marci’s puzzle first. Besides, he hadn’t eaten anything since he’d gotten off the plane this morning, and now that she’d reminded him about food, eating suddenly seemed much more important than following a tip that might well be the start of a wild goose chase. Or wild dragon chase, in this case.
Fortunately, he didn’t have to wait much longer. Despite the seemingly endless wall of identical industrial complexes, there were actually several smaller business squeezed in between the factories wherever there was room. Marci’s restaurant was one of these, a squat wooden shack built right up against the wall of a factory that made enchanted glass for AR displays. According to the back-lit sign, it was a BBQ joint. According to Julius’s nose, however, this place served greasy, sauce-covered heaven.
“We’re lucky it’s between shifts,” Marci said as they got out of the car. “I tried to come here yesterday, but the factories had just let out, and the line was around the block.”
Julius could see why. Despite the delectable smell drifting out its screen door, the inside of the restaurant was barely big enough to hold twenty people. It was empty now, though, and he took advantage of that to get them a prime booth in the corner that put his back to the wall and gave him a good view of the front door.
“Order whatever you want,” Marci said as she plopped down across from him. “Everything here is fantastic.”
Julius bit back a grin as he picked up the one page laminated menu. Marci had no idea the trouble she was inviting, telling a dragon to order whatever he wanted. Hungry as he was, though, he was determined not to use more of her clearly limited funds than was absolutely necessary to make her feel better. So when the waitress came out of the tiny kitchen to take their order, Julius kept it small, just two plates of pork, three sides, a half order of cheese fries, a basket of cornbread, and a banana pudding.
