Page 62 of Tricks for Free

“It’s gone,” said Cylia, around her fingers. She pulled them out of her mouth, scowling, and said, “Your luck is gone.”

“That’s what you said in the car,” said Sam. “You didn’t explain what it meant then, and you’re not explaining what it means now.”

“I mean . . . oh, hell.” Cylia scowled for a moment before she said, “Neither of you is a jink, so neither of you can see luck. That means there’s going to be a certain amount of ‘take my word for it’ in what I’m about to say. Can you do that for me?”

“We can try,” I said.

“Okay. This sort of thing goes better when you have something to do with your hands. Follow me.” She turned and walked into the kitchen, where a card table was shoved up against the wall. There were three folding chairs already waiting there. Had this been anyone but Cylia, I might have thought she’d planned our visit. As it was, I knew that she’d just gotten lucky.

I settled with my back to the wall. Sam sat in the chair on the long edge of the table. After a moment, he scooted it around so that he was next to me, both of us crammed into a space that was barely big enough for one. I patted his knee reassuringly, and he responded by wrapping his tail around my ankle, holding me in place, keeping me where he was. I made no attempt to pull away.

Cylia went to the fridge and returned with a Tupperware pitcher filled with distressingly pink liquid and three matching glasses. “Hibiscus lemonade,” she said, putting the glasses down and filling them. “Drink. The sugar will help.”

“Can I get that in writing to show my grandmother?” Sam asked, taking one of the glasses. “She likes to say that having a grandson who can literally climb on the ceiling justifies keeping the sugar levels low in our house.”

“The sugar will help you regenerate your luck,” Cylia said. “I can’t speak to hyperactivity.”

“Oh.”

I took one of the glasses. The lemonade was tooth-achingly sweet, but tasty all the same. “What do you mean, the sugar will help regenerate his luck?”

“All right.” Cylia sat. “This is where we get into things that you’re going to have to take my word for, because you literally don’t have the senses to understand them.”

“Huh?” said Sam.

“Jinks and mara—their cousins—have an extra organ in their brains,” I said. “It’s sort of like the electroreceptor organs you find in sharks. It lets them see things that are invisible to the rest of us.”

“Like luck?” asked Sam dubiously. “That doesn’t sound like a real thing.”

“If everything that didn’t sound real would have the decency to stop existing, the world would be reduced to what could be reasonably detected by a jellyfish, and I wouldn’t need to pay my water bill,” said Cylia. “Jinks see luck. It’s everywhere, on everything. It . . . accretes like dust, sticking to whatever it touches until it rubs off, or gets used up, or blows away. Luck isn’t a thing you earn. It’s a thing you have.”

“Isn’t that distracting?” asked Sam.

“Is color vision distracting? Because there are people who don’t have that, and they probably think the rest of us are weird, the way we run around seeing red and green all the time. How about depth perception? Or any of the other things that vision can do? I was born seeing the luck, and so it’s normal to me. If you took it away, that would become distracting.” Cylia laughed uncomfortably. “Right now, you’re distracting. Looking at you is like looking at . . . like looking at a hole. There’s no good, there’s no bad, there’s no nothing.”

“How does that happen?” I asked.

“Before I can go into that, you need to understand a little more about how luck works,” said Cylia. “Like I said, it sticks to you. Like attracts like, luck attracts luck, so someone whose innate luck is mostly good will get more good luck, and someone whose innate luck is mostly bad will get more bad luck. It isn’t fair, but there it is. Babies are born with a thin sheen of their mother’s luck on them. In jink communities, it’s customary to visit an expectant mother every day and take away any bad luck that’s managed to stick to her, so the baby can have the best seed luck possible. It doesn’t always work. If the community’s overall luck has turned bad, the best they can do is try to minimize the damage.”

“Where does luck go?” asked Sam.

“You spend it,” said Cylia. “Everyone does. It’s a little more intentional for jinks, because we know what we’re doing, but everyone does it. Say you’re running for the bus, and you know you should be late, but you’re hoping, so hard, that something will have slowed the bus down just a few seconds, so that you can catch it before it pulls away. If you have enough good luck banked up, it may burn off, and there’s your bus. Lucky you.”

“So why isn’t everyone winning the lottery every day?” asked Sam.

I liked this. He was asking questions; he was involved. Better yet, I, as the sole human at this table, wasn’t the one asking things that could be viewed as potentially invasive. Being a cryptozoologist is like being a zoologist crossed with an anthropologist, and knowing that there’s always a chance your subjects will get offended and kick you out for something that seemed like it should have been perfectly innocuous.

Nothing is perfectly innocuous once a multi-century genocide gets involved. Nor should it be.

“Because when you burn good luck, the amount of good luck you have goes down, which makes it more likely that bad luck will come to fill the gap, and because people who aren’t jinks burn luck without meaning to,” said Cylia. “If you followed me for a week, you’d think I wasn’t a very lucky person. I don’t get the good parking or find the mislabeled pack of top sirloin in the discount bin. I don’t score amazing dresses in just my size on the clearance rack. The little lucks that haunt normal life don’t haunt mine, because I don’t choose them. I save what I have, and I use it when I know that I have enough good luck to cover what I want and keep me from turning into a bad luck magnet.”

“Huh,” said Sam. “I . . . okay, I think I followed that. You only spend a dollar when you know you have five more.”

“Basically,” said Cylia. “Actually, that’s a great way of looking at it. Most people don’t know how much money they have in their pockets. If they find a dollar, they spend it. Jinks know how much we’ve got. We can make good choices about when to save and when to spend. And sometimes we spend even knowing it’s going to get us hurt. Sometimes we say ‘I have a lot of good luck, I’m going to spend it all at once, I’m going to break the world.’”

This time, I didn’t say anything because I knew all too well what she was talking about.

My family picks up allies and claims them as relatives, in part because there are so few of us, and in part because making someone an honorary aunt or uncle marks them as ours—as protected—to the rest of the world. My Uncle Al in Las Vegas is like that. He’s originally from a jink community that got hit by a Covenant purge. The adults spent every scrap of good luck they had managed to save over the course of their lifetimes in the cause of getting the kids out of there safely. All the kids got away. All the kids found new homes, new lives, and a second chance.