Tricks for Free

by Seanan McGuire

  “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.

  Sam recovered first. “So how do we fix this?”

  “Seed luck. I can spare a little. Annie . . .” Cylia squinted at me. “She can spare a little le
ss, maybe, but still, she can spare some. It’s the difference between a worm in her apple and no worm in her apple.”

  “Which is the bad one?” asked Sam.

  Cylia shrugged. “I don’t judge. Anyway, if we give you some seed luck, you should be able to start rebuilding it on your own. Hell, you may wind up luckier than you started, since you’ll be starting with mostly good luck.”

  Sam blinked. “What do you mean, ‘mostly’?”

  “No luck is pure.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m happy to give some luck to the cause of Sam not getting creamed by a bus. What I want to know is, why does not having luck stop him from shifting shape?”

  “Maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t. We’ll deal with that next.” Cylia licked her finger, leaned over the table, and wiped it on Sam’s bare arm. He made a disgusted noise, recoiling, and she answered it with a sunny smile. “Suck it up, buttercup. That’s some luck for you. Good luck, high-octane stuff. Enjoy.”

  “Did it have to come with spit?” Sam demanded.

  “Yes.” Cylia turned to me, licking her finger again. “Give me your arm.”

  Wrinkling my nose, I did as I was told. “Soap,” I said. “Soap and hot water and ew.”

  “You people are such babies,” said Cylia, and swiped her finger down my arm—or started to, anyway. Midway through the motion she froze, eyes widening and face paling, until she looked like something out of an amateur theater company’s haunted house.

  “Cylia?” I asked warily.

  She made a pained whimpering noise.

  Right. That’s the sort of thing that has never meant anything good. I yanked my arm back, breaking the connection between us. She slumped backward in her chair, breathing heavily through her nose.

  “Cylia?” I asked again. “You okay?”

  “Fuck me,” she said. Her voice was huskier than it had been before, pitched so low in her throat that it was almost a rumble. She reached for her glass of lemonade, hand shaking so badly that she nearly knocked it over in the process of getting a grip on it.

  Sam and I watched in silence as she lifted the glass, took a deep drink, and closed her eyes, her breathing slowly returning to normal. After more than a minute had passed, she put her glass down and opened her eyes, looking at us gravely.

  “It’s you,” she said, jerking her chin toward me. “You’re the reason he can’t shift back.”

  “What?” I asked, and “What?” Sam demanded, and neither of us moved, and I was so grateful for that that I could have cried. If he had jerked away from me, I would have understood the reasons—how could he not want to pull away, if his current condition was my fault? How could he want to be anywhere near me?—but I would never have been able to forget that it had happened. I would never be able to let it go.

  “Okay.” Cylia moved her first two fingers to her temples, rubbing briskly. “Okay. I . . . okay. Luck is not the only thing that exists and is invisible and intangible and moves around the world. You can’t bottle gravity. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said numbly.

  “But if you do things right, if you set things up correctly, you can steal gravity. Make it weaker in one spot because you’ve made it stronger somewhere else. It’s like moving luck, only harder, because luck is free-floating, while gravity is internally generated.”

  “I don’t think that’s how physics works,” I said.

  Cylia shot me a wry look. “Yeah, well, I didn’t get a degree from metaphor school, all right? I had the luck stuff prepared. Tav and I wanted kids someday, and we knew I’d have to be able to explain it to them. This is uncharted ground for all of us.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she said, with a quick shake of her head. “We’re sticking with luck and gravity, because I don’t feel like dealing with anything else. If you take all of someone’s luck, they’re screwed. They won’t make more. They’ll have to walk around luckless until enough of it sticks to them to give them a baseline again. If you take all of someone’s gravity, on the other hand, or even most of someone’s gravity, they’ll make more, and they’ll keep making more, which means you can harvest more. You can pull their gravity away again and again and again, because they’ll always generate another batch. It’s a renewable resource.”

  “What does this have to do with me not being able to switch back to human?” Sam demanded.

  “Someone’s harvesting her gravity.” Cylia switched her attention to him, which felt like nothing so much as mercy. She was giving me space to absorb what I was about to hear. “When you lost your luck, you lost your barrier against whatever’s funneling away her gravity—or something. I don’t know what they’re taking, but they’re taking something, and whatever it is, it’s similar enough to the energy you use to transform that when it felt you, it took that too. The good news is that it’s an energy you generate on your own. If you stop touching her, it’ll grow back.”

  “How long?” asked Sam gruffly.

  Cylia shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “Sam, let go of my ankle.” He turned to look at me, eyes going wide. I smiled wanly. “Your tail. It’s wrapped around my ankle. You need to let go. You’re still touching me.”

  “But . . .” He stopped, catching himself, and unwound his tail, whisking it out of my reach.

  I felt suddenly unmoored. I leaned away, pressing myself against the wall. If Sam hadn’t been between me and the rest of the kitchen, I would have gotten up and started pacing. “Cylia, why did you react like that when you touched my arm?”

  “Because whatever’s sapping your energy and his energy tried to take mine. Only I pulled back, and it didn’t know how to deal with it. It was tug-of-war with something I don’t know and couldn’t see, and I did not like it.” Cylia shook her head. “Not one damn bit. Whatever trouble you’re in this time, I don’t know where it came from and I don’t know how to fix it.”

  “But—”

  “I’m a jink. If you break your luck, I can help. If you press your luck, I can at the very least point and laugh before the great gray cloud of karma settles around your head and devours you whole. I don’t do weird unseen mystery energy-sucking bullshit, which is what this is.” Cylia leaned back in her chair, a little farther away from me. “You need help. Not from me.”

  “Wait.” Sam looked deeply frustrated. We both turned to him. He looked at me, then at Cylia. “I want to be sure I have this right. You’re saying someone . . . someone did something to Annie that makes her some sort of energy vampire?”

  “Yes, and no,” said Cylia. “She’s not the one who’s sapping energy, and she’s not keeping it either. She’s more like . . . like a funnel attached to a vacuum cleaner than the vacuum cleaner itself. All the energy is passing through her and going somewhere else.”

  “And losing my luck is why this started happening now when it wasn’t happening to me before?”

  Cylia nodded. “Luck is like the body’s ozone layer. It protects us from a lot of the ambient energies in the world. This . . . funnel, it’s inside Annie, under her luck, sapping her energy. It couldn’t reach you until your luck was gone. That’s part of why jinks are dangerous. If someone could take all the world’s luck away, we’d just be ghosts walking around in bodies we hadn’t figured out how to put down yet.”

  Ghosts . . . I sat up a little straighter. “Can ghosts see luck?”

  “Jink ghosts can,” said Cylia. “They are nasty when they decide to haunt somebody. Human ghosts can’t.”

  “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 . . .”