Tricks for Free (InCryptid #7)

“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.

All the adults died. There was too much bad luck, too much backlash, and not a single one of them was able to get lucky enough to run.

“One of the reasons people don’t always like jinks, no matter how hard we try to be good neighbors, is because we can see luck, which means we can move it. Say I looked at Annie and thought ‘wow, she has so much good luck, she doesn’t need all of that,’ and thought I could make better choices with her luck than she could. I could take it.” Cylia shrugged. “If I were being kind, I could take a little bit, and luck isn’t only dollars: it’s pennies, too. If I steal a penny from every person I see over the course of a day, I’ll wind up with plenty, and none of them will notice the difference. An ethical jink will never damage the community around them.”

“What about an unethical one?” asked Sam.

“An unethical jink could rip away every scrap of good luck you have and leave you with nothing but bad,” said Cylia. “Like attracts like, which means more bad luck would come, and you’d probably catch that bus you were running for when it ran you over.”

“So are you saying an unethical jink stole Sam’s luck?” I asked.

“I wish I were,” said Cylia. “We could deal with that. Look, if I took your good luck, I’d leave the bad behind, and vice-versa. If I tried to take both, at the same time, it would be more than I could hold. I’d start bleeding back onto you. It is impossible for a jink to take all your luck, good and bad, at the same time—and even if a team decided to play some sort of fucked-up luck con on you, there’d be dust on you by the time they were done. Luck is a natural force of the universe, like gravity. It’s everywhere. It’s in the air. And you, my friend, have been scrubbed as clean as . . . I don’t even know. As clean as something very, very clean.”

“Okay, hang on,” I said carefully, while Sam was still gaping at her. “Can we fix this? Because not having any luck sounds like a bad thing.”

“It’s not a bad thing. It’s not a good thing. It’s a perfectly neutral thing, which is why it’s going to turn into a bad thing.”

Now both of us looked at her blankly. Cylia sighed.

“Okay. Say you open a door that has a fifty-fifty chance of triggering a booby-trap. Good luck, it doesn’t happen. Bad luck, it does. Well, Sam is currently a third variable. He opens the door, nothing happens, not because he got lucky, but because the trap has somehow failed to register his presence. Which sounds like good luck, sure . . . until someone with mostly bad luck comes into the building and all the traps go off at once. Or someone with mostly good luck comes into the building and the trap goes off, with Sam between it and its potential target. He’s not even an inanimate object right now. He’s a null spot. Other peoples’ luck is going to use that.”

“My head hurts,” complained Sam. “How does this explain why I can’t change back to looking human?”

“I have no idea, but I’m betting it has something to do with your luck being gone,” said Cylia. “Good luck would have shielded you from the negative effects of whatever you were exposed to. Bad luck would have made you shift back to your normal form at the worst possible time. The fact that you were able to get out of Lowryland without an angry mob in close pursuit tells me that it’s not a matter of the second.”

“I changed to keep a couple of kids from getting hurt, and then I realized I was stuck,” said Sam slowly. “I don’t know that anyone saw me.”

“Neutral situation,” said Cylia.

“Okay,” I said. “So why is this a bad thing?”

“Because we don’t know why it happened, for one,” said Cylia. “Because it’s not natural. Everyone has luck, like everyone has gravity. Suddenly losing one of the basic concepts of the universe? Probably not a good thing. Most of all, because right now, he’s clean, but luck collects on everything, and bad luck is more common, as a free-floating element, than good luck. People hoard good luck and do their best to let go of the bad. So statistically, whatever luck he rebuilds from here is more likely to be the bad kind. If you hadn’t come to see me, I’d say he would have been a total bad luck bear inside of the week.”

I stared at her.