‘Moncha have lost something. Something big. And everyone is on the lookout for it.’
Unease stirs my stomach.
‘Including BRIGHTSPRK,’ he says. Then his eyes darken. ‘We had some intel from deep inside Moncha’s companioneering division that someone was working on a new baku. A baku that stood against everything that bakus were originally created for – rather than trying to create a perfect companion, someone was trying to create a baku that was fully autonomous. That made its own decisions, that had dreams and desires and goals. In other words . . . a baku that was independent. Alive. Its own creature.’
I frown, although heat rises at the base of my neck. It all sounds too familiar. An autonomous baku. I know a thing or two about that, and I’m starting to realize why I’m here. I force my fingers not to tighten their grip on Jinx, even though I want to hug him tight and take him far, far away from here. ‘That doesn’t make any sense,’ I say, trying to sound casual. ‘That would totally defeat the point of having a baku.’
‘Maybe.’ Mr Baird’s eyes don’t leave mine for even an instant. ‘But you’ve shown aptitude for companioneering – sometimes, it’s not just about something you should make, but what you can make. Pushing the envelope. It seemed like this rogue companioneer had really done it. We tried to get as much intel as possible, but even from those of us well positioned inside Moncha Corp, there was no way to get close without raising major red flags.’
‘Then one day, a few months ago, we got lucky. We had communication from the companioneer in question – although we never found out their real name. They wanted help getting out – but getting past the super sensitive anti-intellectual property-theft barriers around Monchaville was going to be tough. They felt as if they were under imminent attack. At that time, I was working for the security division of Moncha, so I arranged for a barrier to be down at the right time and a car to be outside waiting to pick them up. But we weren’t quick enough. We watched them take the person down just on the border of the old ravine. We never heard from them again. We don’t know who they are, if they’re alive or dead. We don’t know if the baku made it out, or if it was recaptured and decommissioned. But when we saw Moncha security combing the ravine the next day, we assumed that meant they hadn’t recovered the baku. We sent a team down there as well, but they found nothing. Maybe because it had already been found.’
I swallow, hard. ‘Mr Baird, I don’t know anything about that. It sounds like . . . it sounds like science fiction. I don’t know about any rogue bakus. I don’t know why my entrance into Profectus got all messed up, but I had great stats coming in, perfect grades – well, you should know, Tobias picked me for his team!’
Mr Baird studies me thoughtfully, his hand stroking the base of his stubbly chin. Maybe being a double agent is the reason behind his scruffy appearance. The lines around his eyes tighten, as if he has aged by coming into the building and taking off his ‘Moncha’ employee mask. ‘No, there’s no doubt that you deserve to be at Profectus. Any school would be lucky to have you – and you will go on to do great things one day, anyone can see that. Moncha are lucky. You are a very loyal person, Lacey, I can see that. Just think about what I’m saying. You and your baku have an unusually strong connection. There are people on the lookout for unusual bakus. If Carter suspects that there’s something more to Jinx than meets the eye . . . then I’m worried you could be in grave danger. I’ve been trying to keep an eye on you but things keep happening out of my control – like your selection on to Tobias’s team, the wild card entry . . . that are drawing attention to you and your baku.’
I shake my head and prepare another lie. ‘I sent Jinx intentionally into the ring. He wasn’t disobeying orders. I promise.’
‘Good. Because if by chance that isn’t true, and in fact Jinx isn’t what you say he is, then you might need my help. You won’t ignore that, will you?’
Now I can’t help it. I hug Jinx tighter to my body, my grip vicelike around him. ‘I promise,’ I say. ‘But Mr Baird, I swear to you – Jinx is totally and utterly normal.’
I EXIT THE WAREHOUSE, JINX IN MY ARMS, feeling sick to my stomach. I take a deep breath, searching from side to side, and it takes everything I have not to break into a sprint. Mr Baird offered me a car back, but I’d rather make my own way. I don’t want to have anything more to do with BRIGHTSPRK. The rain, at least, has let up – but the sidewalks are slick. I edge my way along until I reach a streetcar stop.
As I wait, I get plenty of time to think about Mr Baird’s story.
A baku that’s independent. Autonomous. That can make their own decisions.
Jinx is the rogue baku.
That means people are looking for him.
Powerful people. I could be in danger – and so could he.
I knew Jinx was different. I’d tried so hard to cover it up, laughing off Jinx’s quirks and taking responsibility for commands I didn’t make. But if Mr Baird suspects enough to blow his cover, or if Carter acts on his intuition . . . that means others can’t be far behind. Others who might take Jinx by force.
No one knows for sure, I remind myself. I don’t think Mr Baird would have let me go so easily if he was certain.
I can’t hang around here any longer. I need to get home. I can’t use Jinx to get myself a cab because of the black mark, so I spend a fruitless twenty minutes attempting to flag one down the old-fashioned way. Eventually a driver picks me up – I think out of nostalgia – or maybe pity. Paying for it is going to use up the last of my meagre savings, but it will be worth it.
When I get home, I sprint through the building, not even stopping for Darwin, the porter, who yells out my name as I pass. The elevator doors are shutting as I round the corner, and I manage to nip in just in time. I need to see Mom. I need to tell her everything – come clean to her about Jinx.
But what if she wants to turn Jinx in . . .
I’m not sure that I could do it.
The keys fumble in my hand as I attempt to get into the apartment.
‘Mom? Mom, are you home?’ I cry out when I’m finally in. There’s no answer. I try to think back to whether this is one of her late shift days, but I can’t remember.
It doesn’t take me long to search the small apartment, my grip still as tight as ever on Jinx, refusing to let him go. There’s no one there.
My heart almost leaps out of my chest as a loud ringing bursts through the silence. It takes me a moment to place it, but then I realize that it’s our house phone. I run to the wall that it’s hanging on, blowing off a cover of dust and moving piles of envelopes stuffed behind the receiver – we almost never use it since our bakus are automatically linked to the building’s communications.
‘Hello?’ I say tentatively.
‘Lacey?’
I breathe a sigh of relief at the familiar sound of Darwin’s voice. ‘Yes, it’s me,’ I say.
‘Okay, glad I caught you – for some reason I couldn’t get through to your baku?’
I stare down at the lifeless form of Jinx in my arms. ‘Yeah, he’s out of action at the moment – long story.’
There’s a pause on the other end of the line. Bakus are never supposed to be out of action. But then Darwin is used to strange things from me, and he moves past it smoothly. ‘You ran upstairs so fast, I couldn’t tell you. Some of your friends arrived a little while ago. You had them on your pre-approved meeting list so they should be down in the basement. Also, if you have the chance, my baku has been playing up—’
What? My mind is racing. My friends are here? How is that possible? I thought they hated me. But maybe there’s still a chance to redeem myself . . .
I don’t even listen to Darwin as he rambles on about needing me to fix his baku. I don’t have time for repairs right now. I mumble something about coming to see him later, then hang up the phone and race back to the elevators.
The basement is deathly quiet when I reach it – not even the sounds of Paul tinkering away. A feeling of foreboding descends
on me. What if this is a trap? What if Carter is here, only pretending to be my friend? I try and reassure myself. Darwin has met Team Tobias. He wouldn’t let in just anyone.
But when I walk past the parked cars and around the corner to the lockers, my heart sinks. There’s no one there. But there is evidence that they’ve only just recently left. On the wall across from the locker, written in giant spray-painted letters, is the word TRAITOR.
I guess they haven’t forgiven me after all. I sink down to the ground, my back against the door to my locker, tears welling in my eyes. Everything is falling apart, and I don’t have the skills to repair it.
I need help. I might not have my teammates to rely on. But there’s one person who I know I can rely on.
I need Zora. Whether she likes it or not.
‘SO SAY THIS TO ME ONE MORE TIME.’
I swallow, and even though I want nothing more than to stare at the ground, I lift up my chin and look Zora straight in the eyes. We’re down in the locker, and she is perched up on the stool by the old computer screen and I am sitting cross-legged on the floor. ‘I don’t know how Jinx works. He’s not really mine.’
‘You stole him.’
‘I didn’t steal him! I . . . I found him. And then I fixed him.’
‘But he doesn’t belong to you.’
I pause for a moment, then shake my head. ‘No.’
‘I don’t get it,’ she says, slowly shaking her head as well. ‘It shouldn’t be possible. You can’t just take someone else’s baku and claim it as your own.’ Then, her voice catches in the back of her throat and comes out sounding small. ‘I knew something was up. Why didn’t you tell me?’
That’s what’s really bothering her. And me.
‘I don’t know . . . I guess I was afraid. At first, I was so focused on getting him ready so that I could go to Profectus. But, gradually . . . I fell in love with him, Zora. I was scared he’d be taken away from me if anyone knew the truth. I figured if no one knew, then maybe I could keep him for ever.’
She obviously can see the hurt in my eyes, because she leans over and grabs my hand. ‘If whoever they are knew that Jinx was here, how would you still have him?’ she muses. ‘They would surely just come and take him.’
‘That’s true,’ I say. ‘And maybe he isn’t special at all. Maybe I’m just imagining that he’s the rogue baku.’
‘Your teacher’s story is pretty far-fetched. I mean, he works for BRIGHTSPRK, right? How can you trust him?’
‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But Jinx is different. We communicate differently. I hear his voice in my head and . . .’
‘Wait, hold up.’ Zora flips her hands out in front of her to stop me. ‘Like telepathically?’
‘Something like that.’
Her jaw drops and it takes her a moment to recover.
‘And he does things without me asking,’ I continue.
‘Can you show me?’
I point miserably to the black mark on his paw. ‘Not until the morning,’ I say, with a frown.
‘Well, how about we take a look? Maybe we can find something in the code to help us understand. Otherwise, I think you’re going to have to report this. If this is undocumented tech – like the telepathic thing – it could be dangerous.’
My mouth turns dry at the thought of turning Jinx in. Who knows what they would do to him? Mr Baird was under the impression they wanted to destroy him.
I can’t let that happen. I know that the connection between us is real. He is my baku. My companion. No one will be able to convince me otherwise.
Almost on instinct, my hand strokes the top of his head.
It takes me a beat, but then my eyes widen in surprise. ‘Wait? You want to help me look at the code.’
Zora wriggles in her seat, and I can see Linus anxiously pacing across the tops of her shoulders. ‘Just this once.’
I jump up to my feet and throw my arms around her. ‘Thank you, thank you, thank you!’
She laughs until I pull away. Then, two tiny lines appear on her forehead as she frowns. ‘Have you looked at it all?’
I nod, then pull at the edge of my collar. ‘Yeah, but I can’t say I understood a lot of it. It’s more your expertise, you know?’
‘That’s for sure.’
I put my hands on her shoulders and look at her dead in the eye. ‘You’re one of the best coders I’ve ever met, Zora. You’d kick anyone’s butt at Profectus if that’s what you wanted to do.’
She nods, but her frown lines don’t disappear. I know that I won’t be able to talk her into believing in herself – she’ll just have to see it for herself to remember. I give her Jinx, and we leash him up to the old monitor. Zora strikes a few keys with more hesitation than I’m used to from her, touching them lightly as if they were made of glass. But gradually, her fingers grow in confidence, striking them faster and faster, a pianist gaining momentum on a piece. Then she’s flying, bypassing the computer’s old operating system and opening up a program that allows her to infiltrate Jinx’s inner workings. With a few taps of her fingers, she flings the code on to the screens around us, until we are almost immersed on all sides by lines of green text on a black background. This is the Zora that I am used to, her bottom lip jutted out in concentration, her dark eyes scanning every line, trying to make sense of what she’s seeing. She can take it in much faster than I can – her brain reads code as easily as a book – or, like a musician, she can take in all the lines of music and hear the entire piece. She can also see exactly where things are going wrong, or where something is different.
Syncopated.
Off beat.
She leans back on the stool, almost so far that I’m worried she’s going to topple off. I stand behind her just in case. She lets out a low whistle. ‘Oh my God, Lacey.’
‘What? What is it?’ I’m trying to scan the code as fast as I can, but it’s moving too quickly for me, too complex. I look at the screen and my eyes want to cross. I much prefer having a mechanical problem to fix, a tool in my hand.
‘I haven’t seen anything like this before.’ Her fingers slow down, occasionally tapping out small sequences as she attempts to go deeper into Jinx’s operating system. I shift in my seat. Suddenly, it feels like a violation – Jinx has seemed so real to me, it feels like we are performing brain surgery, not just looking at his code. My biggest fear is that we might damage some vital part of him.
‘There are some lines of code here . . .’ She lifts her hand up to the screen: ‘. . . that keep jumping around. Look!’ Almost as we’re watching, the code moves from one portion of the screen to another. ‘It definitely shouldn’t be doing that. But whoever wrote this program is good. Very, very good. It has a kind of . . . elegance to it that I haven’t seen in a long time. Ah!’
‘What?’
‘See this?’ She points to a line of code. At first, I can’t see what’s caught her interest in it. But if I squint, I can tell that the letters and numbers look slightly different than the ones around it. ‘So obvious, right?’ She looks over her shoulder at me.
I raise an eyebrow at her. ‘Obvious?’
She lets out an exaggerated sigh at my coding incompetence. I grin back and squeeze her shoulders. ‘I wondered why there were these big chunks of ugly, blocky code in the midst of all these otherwise beautiful lines. They’re totally out of place – I can’t believe you can’t see them, I mean, it’s like a bunch of weeds growing in a row of neat roses.’
‘I sort of see . . .’ I say, while squinting.
‘That’s the black mark. It’s written to infect the operating system while it’s attached and stops any of the programs from functioning. There’s no way to get this off?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Huh. Okay, well I’ll try to read around it.’ She stares intensely at the code, occasionally stopping to zoom in on particular sections. Every now and then she scoffs at one of the lines, or makes a sound that I think is a small sigh of awe. After about ten minutes of
doing this, she lifts one of her braids into her mouth and begins chewing. That’s how I know things are really serious.
Even though I’m afraid of what she might find, it swells my heart to see her acting like this. It means the old Zora I once knew is still there.
I distract myself by tiding up some of the boxes around the locker, and start to scrub down some of the paint from the TRAITOR sign. I don’t need to be looking at that every time I come down here to work. Plus, people might start asking questions. Zora already tried, but I can’t break the Profectus NDA to tell her about Baku Battles and my teammates.
I pull down a few boxes and something else tumbles off a high shelf. The box from the Moncha Store. The poor scarab beetle baku is still encased in his packaging, returned there after Zora worked on him. He has no one to love him. He thought he was going to be leashed, but he never was.
For some reason, guilt gnaws at my stomach.
Zora sits up straighter on the stool, and that attracts my attention. I put the beetle box back up on the shelf. ‘What is it? Did you find something?’
‘I’m not sure . . .’
‘What exactly are you looking for?’ I ask.
‘Coders often leave a signature – it’s pretty hard not to write something as extensive as this and not leave bits of yourself behind. And although there would have been a team of people at Moncha writing this, I think I see enough hallmarks of a single person here . . . this doesn’t feel like an “on the books” kind of project. Hang on . . .’
She types furiously, but all I can see now is that code is dropping off the screens, falling rapidly, droplets in a furious rain storm. In its place is blankness. ‘What’s happening?’ I ask.
‘There’s . . . something . . . another . . . layer . . .’
Briefly something flashes up on the screen, another layer of code, but instead of written in bright green, it’s a flash of bright gold, like sparks of a firework. Then, just as fast as it appeared, it goes.
‘Dammit!’ Zora slams her hand down on the keyboard, but the screens in front of us are dark. Zora is breathing hard, as if she’s just finished sprinting around a track as opposed to sitting in a chair, typing. Her brow is covered in sweat. She hasn’t finished typing though. She keeps trying to draw back the regular code, but nothing happens. The screens remain blank.
Jinxed Page 18
