Marci’s face pulled into a snarl, but before she could rip into Justin as she so clearly wanted to, the dragon jumped into the storm drain and vanished. A few seconds later, a loud splash echoed up the pipe as he hit the water below.
“Drop’s only about twelve feet,” he called. “Hop on down.”
By this point, the look on Marci’s face had gone from deadly to deathly. “I can’t hop that.”
“Neither can I,” Julius said, pointing at the metal ladder that was bolted to the side of the drain pipe. “There.”
The sight of the slimy rungs only made Marci’s eyes go wider, and for a second, Julius was sure she was going to bolt. Instead, she took a deep breath of the stale, Underground air and sat down on the drain’s edge, slowly feeling out the ladder with her feet. Too slowly for Justin, apparently.
“Get a move on, woman!” he bellowed up the pipe.
“I’ll move when I’m ready!” she bellowed back, clutching the ladder for dear life.
“I’m very sorry about him,” Julius said quickly. “He doesn’t mean anything by it. My brother’s just a jerk sometimes.”
“Only sometimes?” Marci grumbled, glaring down the pipe at Justin’s head like she wanted to drop something heavy on it.
In the end, though, they made it down, landing safely in a cement spillway that was much larger than Julius had expected. The ceiling was high enough that even Justin could stand up straight, and since it was the end of summer, the water flow was barely more than a trickle, leaving plenty of dry space on the sides to walk. But despite the roomy proportions and the Lady of the Lakes’ strict water regulations, it was still a storm drain. The runoff water might have been relatively cleaner than in other cities, but it still stank, and every surface was covered in bugs and black slime mold glistening wetly in the light of the LED flashlight Marci had pulled out of her bag.
“Lovely,” she said, using the light to send the bugs skittering before training the beam on Justin’s back, already twenty feet ahead of them down the tunnel. “Does that man even know the meaning of the word patience?”
“If he does, I’ve never seen it,” Julius said, catching Marci when her foot slipped on the spillway’s slick floor. She flashed him a quick smile that made him feel slightly less guilty about getting her involved in all this and started carefully making her way after Justin.
“You know,” she said, stepping high over a puddle where the trickle of water had caught and pooled on a knot of trash, “there’s no guarantee we’ll be able to get into whatever this place is from down here. If I was living in the storm water system, I’d consider the below-ground entrances much more dangerous than the street level and ward them accordingly, if I didn’t just brick them over.”
Julius nudged a rat skeleton out of their way. “Are the things down here really that bad?”
“Not all of them,” Marci replied. “But think of it like this. The DFZ is full of magic, and magic attracts magical creatures. That wouldn’t be so bad if the DFZ Underground wasn’t also one of the world’s densest human populations, but it is, which means all those magical animals are competing with people for space. Usually, this is where the government would step in and balance things out, but this is the Detroit Free Zone. Animal control is an outsourced, free market system, just like everything else.”
“You mean the bounties?”
She nodded. “People pay the Animal Control office, and they pay freelancers per head—small amounts for minor annoyances, and big pay outs for the really dangerous stuff. It’s not actually a bad system most of the time, but the whole thing breaks down when you get into areas where the cost and trouble of killing the animal is more than the price you get for its head.”
“I see,” Julius said. “So the hunters don’t come down here because it’s too much risk for the reward, and as a result, the pipes have become a safe haven for magical nuisance animals.”
“Bingo. It’s like roaches running under your fridge because they don’t want to get stepped on. Only these roaches are enormous, man-eating, and sometimes fire-breathing.”
He grimaced. “What a lovely picture.”
“Welcome to the DFZ!” Marci said with a laugh, hopping over a particularly smelly pile of washed up plastic bags.
Julius was digging out his phone to look for pictures of the sort of stuff they could expect down here when the slime-coated pipe they’d been following suddenly merged into a much larger spillway that was actually filled with water. Fortunately, some long-dead contractor had thought to build a metal walkway into the wall above the waterline. Justin was already on it, perched on the edge of the rusting metal like a giant, overly aggressive bird. He pulled Marci up one-handed when she came into arm’s reach, and then did the same for Julius, plucking him off the ground as easily as he’d pull a weed.
“We have a problem,” he announced once they were both safely above the water. “The mages we’re after should be straight ahead.”
“And?” Julius prompted.
His brother’s answer was to point further down the way they’d been walking, which, thanks to the T-intersection of the pipes, meant he was now pointing straight at a cement wall.
“Oh,” Julius said. “Thatisa problem.”
“I’d cut through it,” Justin said. “But it looks load-bearing, and you two are kind of squishy. We need to find another way around.”
Julius sighed and glanced down at his phone, but the AR display came up blank. Apparently, even the DFZ’s municipal wireless couldn’t reach all the way down here, and GPS completely useless when there was twelve feet of pavement and dirt between you and the satellite signal. In any case, the map would have only shown roads, not the water system below them. Julius was about to use this as an excuse to tell his brother they should call the whole thing off and go knock on the front door like he’d originally suggested when Marci spoke up.
“I have an idea.”
Justin and Julius both turned to see her digging through her bag.
