Page 65 of Tricks for Free

“So Mary wouldn’t have noticed Sam’s luck going away,” I said. “It could have disappeared last night.”

“No, it couldn’t have,” said Cylia.

This time, Sam and I turned to look at her. She shrugged.

“He’s too clean, or was, until I flicked some of my own luck onto him. Whatever took his luck took it all, and took it within the last few hours. After that, it would only have been a matter of time before the energy that fuels his transformations ran out, if he was touching you.”

Sam had been touching me all day, from the time we got to Lowryland until he’d swept those kids out of the path of yet another collapse. I was starting to think Lowryland had an infrastructure problem. . . .

Or maybe it had a luck problem.

“Do inanimate things have luck?” I asked.

“I told you, it’s like dust. It sticks to everything. You’d think a table wouldn’t have much cause for being lucky, but everything wants to exist. Everything wants to be treated well, to be remembered, to endure, even if the wanting isn’t what we’d recognize as conscious. This glass isn’t alive.” She held up her drink. “That doesn’t mean breaking would be good for it. So on some level, the glass ‘wants’ to be unbroken. If it has good luck, when I drop it, it’ll land on the carpet—and if it misses and hits the linoleum, and I have good luck, I won’t step on any of the shards.”

“Luck is a lot more complicated than I expected it to be,” I complained.

Cylia gave me a look that was half sympathetic, half entertained. “We tell jink kids luck is like math. You start by learning to add the good and subtract the bad, and then you learn how to keep the sums from ever getting too negative or too positive, and then you start doing calculus.”

“I should introduce you to my cousin Sarah,” I said, slumping in my chair. “She thinks the world is made of math, too.”

“Because it is,” said Cylia. “Yes, things have luck. Why?”

“We’ve been having weird equipment failures at Lowryland lately,” I said. “There was the parade that Fern and I told you about. There was the deep fryer that blew. And the reason Sam shifted forms was to save some kids from getting squished when one of the fake trees collapsed. Those things are supposed to be unbreakable. If something’s messing with the luck . . .”

“Pulling enough luck off of the inanimate could make it vulnerable,” said Cylia thoughtfully. “Or it could be the sinkhole effect.”

“Please don’t use fancy terms like you think we’re supposed to know them,” said Sam sourly. “I just met you. I’m not hugely comfortable with any of this, and I really don’t want to need a phrasebook to know what the hell you’re talking about.”

Cylia sighed, putting her glass down. “Okay. Something stripped all your luck away. We’re agreed on that, right?”

“Yes,” I said, before Sam could say anything else. He was in a bad mood, and I couldn’t blame him. I was in a pretty rotten mood myself. But I’d known Cylia long enough to trust her, and he hadn’t. Right now, that was making all the difference in the world.

I missed the feeling of his tail around my ankle and his hand in mine. I would have felt a little less unmoored, I thought, if something had been holding me down. I also missed the fire in my fingers. If anything should have brought it surging back, it was this . . . but it wasn’t coming because it wasn’t there. Because someone had been stealing it away from me.

If that someone was Colin, or anyone else from his little magical nursery school, I was going to show him that there was more than one way to set somebody on fire.

“When luck is removed, it creates . . . Zeus, I don’t have the words for this shit. It creates a blank spot. And for a little while, the shock of the removal will keep that blank spot blank. Hence you still being effectively a null-luck zone when you got here. Your body hadn’t had the time to recover and start gathering luck again. With me?”

“Sure,” said Sam. “Why the fuck not?”

Cylia didn’t look like she appreciated his answer, but she pressed on. I silently vowed to buy her ice cream or something. “Once the shock wears off, the system will panic and begin gathering luck from any place that it can find it.”

“Which means bad luck, right?” I asked.

“Yes and no.”

For a moment, Sam and I were united in glaring at her. Cylia grimaced.

“I told you this was complicated,” she said. “Look, if you’re talking free-range luck, the bad kind is infinitely more common, and hence infinitely easier to find. But someone who has no luck won’t just suck up the free-range stuff, they’ll start pulling it off things that can’t fight back. Inanimate things.”

“Hang on,” I said. “So what you’re saying is that if what happened to Sam has happened to other people, and those people went to Lowryland, they might have pulled the luck off of parts of the Park trying to rebuild their own?”

“If they stayed long enough, yes.” Cylia looked grim. “Which would mean those things would start gathering free-range luck, since they’d lack the self-awareness to go looking for intentional replacement luck, and they’d wind up with a big load of badness.”

I rubbed my face with one hand. “I need to go.”

“Where?” asked Sam. “I still can’t transform.”