Ustari Cycle 00,5 - Fixer (3 page)

“I’m
already
soaking,” Mags whispered unhappily, and I had to swallow a smile of pure love.

We followed him into the gloom and the damp, back into the maze of man-made canyons and the stinging rain. I wondered what was in each of these containers, where it was headed, how much of it had been brought in by mages like Heller—or more powerful than Heller—using a Cantrip here and a Ward there to slip something past everyone. I was slowly coming to understand there were more
ustari
in the world than I’d ever realized. I’d spent years searching them out. When I’d found Hiram, when I’d stumbled on him stealing pastries and other small things with a pinprick of blood and some whispers, I thought I’d found something rare. But they were everywhere, now that I knew how to look. Like rats, but in disguise.

We emerged into the wide, flat dock area, where a dirty-looking ship roughly the size of Texas and boiling over with the multicolored containers waited. Big cranes swung what looked like complex bridges over to the boat, where they were lowered in slow, graceful increments until they settled on top of a container and clamps snapped into place along the edges. Then they swung gently up and away, lugging it like a brick into the air. A weird-looking truck with dozens of wheels that made it look like an insect sat parallel to the ship, and one of the containers was being lowered precisely onto its back.

Charlie produced a handheld device with a cloudy screen and worked the buttons. “Your Mr. Heller’s container is third in line after this. It’s gonna be a few minutes, like I said.”

I nodded. My hair was soaked and my feet felt damp. But I just stood there and nodded, because I was Lem Vonnegan, tough guy. Who liked to get into poker games with other Tricksters without realizing it; who thought he was the only bright boy in the world who’d ever imagined using simple, dumb tricks to fleece people out of money.

I’d been spending too much time with Mags. I was getting his stupid all over me.

Charlie looked back at me, expecting us to head back to shelter, but I ignored him until he gave up and settled in for the wait.

Watching the containers be unloaded was hypnotic. It was like some huge, real-life video game—the containers monumental blocks, a giant claw trying to snare them from the pile. One, two, more of the big metal boxes were clamped onto by the big crane and gently lowered onto the waiting tractor and motored off. The industry on display, old-fashioned and honest and accomplished without a single cut or drop of blood, was exhausting. I imagined working this hard and didn’t like it. Three
saganustari
, one cut above Hiram in skill and willingness to bleed people to death, could have unloaded the boat in minutes. And they would have needed nothing more than a few people to bleed dry in order to do it.

I’d once asked Hiram how he found volunteers for the bleeds. He just laughed, so I should have known right then. Four weeks later, I was out of his house.

“Here she comes.”

It looked like every other container. It was yellow with orange edges, as a guide for the crane operator, with black lettering peppered all over it.

“Lem,” Mags whispered.

I glanced at him without moving my head. I was getting to know Mags’s body language a little. He was like the Eskimos in that he had a thousand expressions, all of which meant the same things, like
hungry
or
confused
. This one looked more like
scared
.

“There’s something wrong here,” he said in a whisper loud enough for everyone to hear.

I nodded and looked back at the container. Nothing about it looked unusual at all, but I was filled with a sense of heavy foreboding. As it hovered framed against the gray sky, I tracked it as it rose up and up and then sank down and down, and my heart pounded, my stomach turned. I’d had the same feeling once or twice when I was looking at something with a spell cast on it. Like I could sense the magic but not
see
it. Hiram had told me it took training to see Runes and Wards and the like; he’d taught me a “witchlight” for the time being, which lit up magical things in an eerie glow like a black light. I remembered being amazed by how much of the world had been marked by magic.

I stared at the container as it hung, suspended in the air.

A moment later a vehicle approached the loading area. It wasn’t the bizarre tractor that had collected the previous containers. This was a full-on tractor trailer, a truck ready for the highways.

“Mr. Heller made arrangements,” Charlie said. “Got a crew and everything. See, they’re standing ready to pull the pins and get it secured to the bed.”

There were four big guys in orange overalls standing ready, smoking cigarettes and talking among themselves. Heller had a fucking empire rolling here. The swelling ball of anxiety in my belly got a little bigger with each breath, but I couldn’t justify it. I watched Heller’s container slowly lower to the truck bed, and as the four men in orange stepped forward to work on it, I started walking. “Mags, with me,” I said.

“Not cool!” Charlie shouted, leaping in front of me and slapping his hand against my chest. “It’s—”

Mags took hold of his arm and with an almost casual yank sent him skidding face-first across the wet concrete. As we walked, Mags stared back at Charlie, his unibrow menacing, and I reflected that there were advantages to having him around. I hadn’t had to exert myself in a long time. As I walked, I tugged at my coat sleeve, blinking rain out of my eyes.

“I’ll do it, Lem,” Mags said, twisting his torso to remove his own jacket.

“The fuck you will,” I snapped. “You bleed one drop and you can go fuck yourself.”

“No, I—”

“We
talked
about this, Magsie,” I said. “We fucking
talked
about it.”

“I know, I just thought—”

“Do me a favor and
don’t
.”

Mags had been just as horrified as I was at the whores Hiram had hired to bleed. But Mags was as afraid of Hiram as he was afraid of everything, and he’d forgotten most of it by the next day, requiring me to remind him every time: If he cast off someone else’s blood, we were not friends anymore. You could get Mags to do just about anything by simply threatening to not be his friend anymore.

I gritted my teeth, took my little toothbrush razor, and slashed my arm just deep enough. Blood and pain burst out of the wound.

“Back up!” I shouted at the four guys. Three of them stopped to look at me. The fourth guy, who appeared to have eaten a fifth guy earlier in the day, turned to me, his face scummed with beard, his nose flat and crooked from about a dozen punches.

“Who the fuck are you?” he asked in a thick accent.

I thought about that for a step. “I’m the Fixer,” I said. I put five Words in my head. They weren’t complex.

Scum Beard hesitated as I walked past him. I didn’t know if Heller had used the word
Fixer
to him or if it was the sheet of blood coursing down my arm. The gas in the air was easy to sense, a sizzling band of instantly fading energy, there and gone.

“Step the fuck back, buddy.”

I saw Scum Beard in my peripheral vision. Pulling at the gauzy threads of gas like Hiram had taught me, I spat out my five Words, felt the bitter drain of the spell using me as kindling, and didn’t bother to turn and watch him punch backwards with a grunt of pain, hitting the slick concrete and rolling into a ball. I didn’t watch him lay there moaning, either.

I looked at one of the others. “I said: Back up.”

They backed up. I was getting used to that look when people saw magic for the first time. Hiram had repeated the lesson over and over again: We survived by staying in the shadows.
Ustari
couldn’t survive if the whole world came after us. As powerful as some Archmages were, as easily as we tricked everyone around us, if the whole straight world came after us in force, we’d be plowed under. The old saying:
You can’t cast your way past a bullet
. I felt exposed. I felt eyes on me, and I wanted nothing more than to get out of there. But I had thirty thousand dollars hanging around my neck. And something was tickling me with the idea that I wasn’t going to be paying off that debt anytime soon.

Stepping close, I worked the wound on my hand open again. They always healed up, shallow and burning, but closed. Somehow when you pulled the gas out of yourself you healed up halfway, although a lot of times you still got an infection, angry and red. Tearing the thin scab open, a fresh wave of warm, thick gas hit the air: myself, dwindling away.

I stood there for a moment, running my eyes over the surface of the container, somehow seeming smaller and more manageable up close. And there, along the top and the bottom, almost lost among the black lettering, small holes about the size of a dime each.

I remembered, twenty years before, my father. Coming home with that box with holes all along the top and the bottom, and I remembered thinking there was a puppy inside. Or a kitten. Dad had gotten me a puppy or a kitten. Or a turtle. Dad had gotten me
something
and it was alive and therefore needed air holes. For days I waited patiently for Dad to give me whatever it was. The box never moved, and I eyed it covetously from the kitchen table, where Mom served us meals in silence and Dad sat stewing in hangover fumes, renewed daily. And I worried that he wasn’t feeding it, whatever it was, that he wasn’t taking care of it. And so one night I crept downstairs in the dark and went into the kitchen and opened the box. And inside was a scrap of newspaper acting as a lining, and absolutely nothing else.

That was Dad. Drunk all the time, he did shit that made no sense and forgot about it five minutes later. My childhood was littered with bullshit like that: rides out to the middle of nowhere, being told to pack a bag at three in the morning, all of it resolving to nothing. I remembered the box because of the moment of hope it had given me, and I remembered those air holes, and they had looked exactly like these.

I stepped back and gestured at one of the other guys in orange. “Open it up.”

The three guys still standing exchanged looks, then turned to look at the first one, back on his feet. I noticed Charlie had disappeared. The first guy studied me uncertainly for a moment, obviously unsure. Then shook his head while rubbing it with one hand. “We got orders,” he said. “We got clear instructions: Do not fucking open anything.”

I nodded and smiled, mumbling softly. When using a Charm, it was best to do some of the heavy lifting by being nonthreatening. The Charm itself was six syllables, my own invention, and it settled on Baldy like syrup, smoothing out his face and slumping his shoulders.

“Come on,” I said, still smiling. “Let’s just take a peek.”

Baldy smiled, a twitchy thing that flickered, died, and then bloomed on his face. In an instant he became a teddy bear, shy and gentle. He nodded, then looked past me. “It’s all right, boys, we’re just gonna take a look.”

The other two looked at each other again, then stepped back, wanting nothing to do with it. Rain was getting inside the collar of my coat and making its freezing way down my back, and my hands had gone numb and stiff even though it didn’t seem that cold out, overall. Baldy followed me around to the rear of the truck. The container looked pretty solidly on there, like every other truck you saw on the highway. Baldy pulled a set of cutters from his pocket and cut off two metallic-looking tags from the locks, then worked the levers and pulled the doors open.

For a second, it was impossible to see inside. As gloomy as the day was, it was darker still inside the container. The rain created a screen between my eyes and everything else, and so it wasn’t until they started moving that I realized the box was full of people.

They were dark-skinned and wearing rags, packed in so tight they were just leaning against each other, exhausted, barely alive. Baldy muttered a curse and stepped back, dropping the cutters. I stared into the gloomy interior of the space. At first I felt nothing. Then a tiny voice spoke in my head, faint and unpleasant, asking,
What does an
ustari
need with dozens of people?

And the answer came involuntarily:
Blood.

Someone had hired Heller to get them a lot of fucking gas for some bitchin’ Ritual. And Heller had sent me in to make sure anything that went wrong, got fixed.

“Fucking
hell
,” I whispered, looking down at my shoes. I reminded myself:
We are not good people.

If I fucked it up, Heller was coming after me. If I let it slide, sixty-odd assholes who’d done nothing as far as I knew were going to be bled like pigs. Not for the first time, I wished I’d started drinking much, much earlier in the day. Or, perhaps, died in my sleep.

“Close it up,” I said roughly. “Can you replace those tags?”

Baldy didn’t reply right away. “Maybe. It’ll cost.”

“Close it up,” I said. “And fuck the tags, I’m broke.”

I looked up and Mags was there, peering into the container. “Aw,
man
,” he breathed.

The rain pelted us, wearing us down.

As Baldy started swinging the doors shut, I felt rather than saw Mags turn towards me. I cut him off. “We can’t afford to help them, Magsie.”

“Oh.”

I reached up and pushed rain out of my hair, slicking it back. I stood there feeling my heart pound, knowing that seconds were ticking by and I was running out of room to maneuver. I felt each dollar on my shoulders, strangling me, crushing me.

I looked at Mags. He was still staring at the container like he could still see the people inside through the metal. For a split second I hated him, resented this. This was not my problem. These people were not my problem. I hadn’t kidnapped them, I hadn’t paid for them. And if it hadn’t been for Mags and the spotlight of pure, unadulterated fucking goodness he beamed around like a goddamn weapon, I’d have shepherded this steel box from point A to point B and gotten back to zero. Which was where my life was now, struggling to get back to zero.