Jinxed

by Amy McCulloch

  I lean down to pick it up. Jinx is right – this is interesting, and I could definitely put it to use in my lab at home. I drop it into my backpack. Once we get on a roll, sweeping up and examining the wreckage for useful things, it becomes much more fun. A bit like panning for gold. Besides, I’m able to get a much better sense of the arena. The floor seems to be made of a smooth substance that doesn’t scratch despite the metallic claws and talons of the creatures. Then there are the five rings set out at intervals around the arena – where Tobias, Gemma and the others were standing. I guess in order to make it fair – and safe – they keep the players in one place.

  Finally, once everything is about as tidy as I can stand to make it, I put away the brooms, mops and cleaning supplies and let my curiosity take over. I take a stand in one of the circles, planting my feet on top of two tiny silver dots, which I presume are place markers. I just want to feel what it’s like to be one of the battlers – if just for a moment.

  But, as I’m quickly learning, nothing at Profectus is there by accident.

  Immediately the silver pads beneath my feet heat up, and I become encased in a projection that shows me the different areas of the battlefield – including the side of the doughnut that is invisible to me. My view automatically swerves so that I can see from Jinx’s point of view – and above him, like a bird’s eye, if I turn my head slightly.

  >>We’re connected!

  ‘Oh my gosh, you can feel this too?’

  >>Absolutely. It must be how you would send me commands. You know. If I listened to that sort of thing.

  I roll my eyes. ‘You would have to listen to me in a Baku Battle. What if something was coming behind you?’

  >>Trust me, I would have much better instincts on that front than you.

  As if to prove his point, he ripples his back, arching it so his tail flicks. At the same time, he lights up every one of his sensors, so it looks like moonlight sparkling off waves on an ink-black ocean. ‘Show off,’ I say, sticking my tongue out.

  I play around a bit with the hologram, moving the field of vision this way and that, and watching as Jinx’s stats light up on the screen. It’s an impressive bit of kit – and the fact that you can’t tell it exists until you are inside the circle is even more impressive. The silver disks must not only be pressure points, but must form part of the leash connection.

  I wish I could toy around with it all night, but I can see in the corner that the time is already flashing five p.m. School’s been out for an hour and a half – I’m sure most of the training sessions have finished already. Mom will be wondering where I’ve got to.

  With reluctance, I step off the silver pads, and the hologram drops. I pick my backpack off the floor with a grunt, weighed down by the bits and pieces I’ve collected from the arena. Lots to sort out in the cave tonight.

  I wave my hand in front of the door and it opens. I step through. But Jinx doesn’t follow. I spin around on my heels as the door slides shut on me. ‘Jinx!!’ I cry out, slamming my fists on to the door. ‘Dammit, Jinx, why didn’t you come?’ I push on the door, then press my hand on the keypad, but it flashes up a series of red lights at me: CODE INVALID.

  I groan. I stand on my tiptoes, looking through the small window into the room. I see Jinx’s tail dash across the floor – he’s not at all worried about being separated from me. Instead, I see him look back over his shoulder, catch my eye, and then disappear through a different sliding door on the opposite side.

  I slam my fist one more time, shouting his name. But it’s no use. He’s gone. Now I have to find him in a maze of hallways, laboratories and classrooms, some blocked off by security that I have no idea how to navigate. So much for being able to make a quick getaway home.

  My last glance through the window confirms that Jinx is no longer there – the arena is now dark and, thanks to me, clean. I take a mental note of which door he went through, so that I can make my way round in that direction. He can’t go far – I’m certain that he wouldn’t run away from me for good. Bakus don’t do that. But maybe this one does, says an uncomfortable voice in the back of my mind. I can’t risk it. I have to find him.

  I dig around for a pen inside my bag (Mom insisted I bring one, though I haven’t written anything down in ages) and jot down a rough map of the arena on my palm: the door where I am, and where Jinx has gone. It’s lame, but the best idea I can think of in the moment. Then I dash back along the hallway, to the stairs that I walked down with Mr Baird. There’s a couple of other doors leading from the stairwell, and – confusingly – both lead in the direction that I want to go. There’s nothing – no signage or even door numbers – to indicate which would be my best option, so I go for the closest. I yank at it, but it won’t budge. There’s no lock pad or even keyhole that I can see – maybe it only opens one way?

  I run around to the other door, which pushes open easily. ‘Jinx?’ I call out tentatively. Nothing. I need to keep following the hallways around to the left in order to make sure that I’m following the circle around – and not heading further out into one of the numerous wings.

  I keep moving, occasionally coming up against locked doors or dead-ends. I try every handle in desperation, pushing against every window in case there’s an alternative way through. I’ve moved beyond the surgically white hallways of the science wing, into a part of the Academy that has a more relaxed vibe – with beanbag chairs for resting in, and did I spot a ping-pong table? It looks like one of the visions of perfect corporate life that I’ve seen in old movies and television shows. Mentally I try and bring up a picture of what I know the school to be like – maybe this is where the kids who board stay? It would be a pretty cool place to live. But there’s no one around.

  I come across a huge lounge-type room, with oversized armchairs, two elaborate fireplaces and inspirational messages printed on to the walls in foiled type that catches the low light. The lights turn on as I enter, and I brace for some sort of alarm – but nothing happens.

  I catch a glimpse of Jinx in the far corner of the room. Just the end of his slinky tail, but it’s enough. ‘Wait for me!’ I cry out. I sprint across the hall, jumping over a low-lying coffee table and trying not to slip on the brightly coloured rugs.

  Jinx is halfway through an open door when I take a flying leap and finally manage to grab him, by sliding into him on the knees of my woollen uniform. I’m thankful I didn’t decide to wear the kilt after all – I would have serious rubber burns on my legs otherwise. ‘Gotcha!’ I laugh, grabbing him tightly around the stomach. Thankfully, he doesn’t struggle.

  But that’s when I realize I’m not alone in the darkened room. A pair of heavy boots enters my sightline, their wearer breathing heavily.

  ‘Get. Out. Now.’

  ‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?’ TOBIAS stands over me, his hands on his hips, his voice dripping with icy-cold anger – and an undercurrent of something else. Fear? But that can’t be right – I’m no threat to him.

  At any rate, I’m taken aback by his tone. I scramble backwards towards the door, accidentally loosening my grip, and Jinx takes advantage to shoot out of my arms.

  I close my eyes for a second, cursing him. My back hits against the door frame in my haste to put as much space between me and Tobias as possible. ‘I . . . I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just following Jinx trying to find a way out of here . . .’ I don’t want him to know that I don’t have control of what my baku does.

  He presses his fingers against the bridge of his nose. ‘Finished detention?’

  I nod.

  ‘You’re new here – you wouldn’t know – but these rooms are supposed to be totally private, that’s all.’ Tobias shifts his body to try and intercept Jinx. As he moves, I catch sight of his eagle baku on the ground, inert. My curiosity piques, and Tobias – realizing his mistake – rushes to block my view again. He’s breathing heavily and colour is rising in his cheeks.

  He wants me out of there.

  But I can see Jinx’s eyes glowin
g in the darkness of the far corner, and he doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to go anywhere.

  ‘Come on, Jinx,’ I whisper to him, but Jinx grooms his tail, ignoring me. Inwardly, I groan. I’m going to have to walk across the room to collect him.

  I swallow then take a step in, keeping as close to the edge of the room as possible. ‘I’ll get my baku and then I’ll leave you alone,’ I force myself to say. Maybe boys are like animals. If you talk softly, they won’t get so spooked.

  To my frustration, Jinx leaps out of the way.

  ‘God, what’s that thing’s problem?’ Tobias says. ‘You need to get it looked at by one of the vets.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I snap back. ‘Yours is the one with the problem.’ As the words fall out of my mouth, I can see straight away that I’m right – it really does have a problem. Even though it didn’t look as if the eagle had received much damage during the Baku Battle, there are some serious dents and broken wires.

  His jaw tightens. ‘Yeah, don’t you think I know that?’

  I can’t help it: now I’m really curious. I leave the comfort of the edge of the room and creep towards the broken eagle. He’s lying on the ground, as if powered down and nothing is wrong, but every so often he twitches his neck, almost like an involuntary spasm. There’s been an obvious attempt at a repair: some pretty shoddy soldering work is visible, at odds with the rest of the creature’s beautifully crafted engineering. I wrinkle my nose, unable to hide my disgust at the workmanship. ‘Who did this?’

  ‘Kai,’ Tobias says. He folds one arm over his chest and rubs at his eyes with his other hand. He walks over so that he’s standing on the opposite side of the eagle to me. ‘During our team session today. I picked him for the team because he’s supposed to be the best companioneer in his class, but he’s never fixed anything as complicated as my eagle.’

  ‘Why not take it to a Moncha vet?’ I ask.

  He scoffs. ‘You don’t get it yet, do you? With Profectus, with the Baku Battles, the whole point is that we have to do everything ourselves. Or, as a team, anyway. I could maybe take it to one of the teachers, but we’ll be handicapped in the battle. They have punishments that they can dole out – like the black marks – or they have bonuses they can give for good behaviour too – like revive chips that will give a baku an extra boost if it’s injured. We get points deducted from our total if we pay for professional help. It’s meant to be challenging. The idea is to get to the very end without asking for help – just applying the knowledge that we’ve learned at the Academy. Kai was supposed to be good, but I think Nathan was the one who was really good at the hardware stuff. He probably set me up to fail.’

  ‘Nathan sounds like an ass,’ I say.

  Tobias laughs, but the sound is laced with bitterness that makes me cringe a little inside. ‘That ass is not only my brother, but an ass with a great job interning for Monica Chan.’

  I raise an eyebrow. ‘Well. Now I’m jealous of an ass – never thought I’d say that.’ Thankfully, I get a chuckle from Tobias, breaking some of the thick tension that’s been building in the room ever since I interrupted him. I take the moment to look around the room. It’s not quite as well equipped as my cave back home, but it has a few supplies. I don’t think the damage to Tobias’s eagle is terminal, at any rate. I can already see one major connection that I know is wrong.

  ‘Hey, what are you doing?’ Tobias sounds alarmed.

  ‘Oh!’ I snap my hand away from the eagle. I’d moved in to start fixing it without even asking. ‘I’m so sorry . . . I just think if we moved this connection over, and wound it back underneath this part, he would have a lot more freedom of movement again and wouldn’t be so twitchy?’

  Tobias frowns, then walks over to where I am standing. I move aside to show him what I mean and – since he doesn’t seem to protest any more, I reach over to the eagle and show him exactly what I want to do. The eagle’s metallic feathers are soft under my touch, and the brutal work that Kai did is a travesty to the craft.

  ‘You think?’ he asks, scepticism lacing his tone – but I’m not sure it’s my words that are giving him pause, or the fact that they are coming from a puny first year.

  ‘Oh, for sure.’

  He raises an eyebrow at my confidence, and I feel a blush rising in my cheeks. I focus back on the eagle’s twisted metal, trying not to think about Tobias’s moss-green eyes staring at me. Or the fact that he’s so close, I can feel his breath on my neck. Heat radiates off his body like an engine, and if I’m not careful, that blush is going to cover more than just my cheeks. I have a tendency to go full-blown tomato-red right from my hairline down my neck and across my chest – not a good look, and it tends to give everything away about how I’m feeling.

  ‘The best thing for me to do is just show you,’ I say, trying to inject more confidence in my voice than I feel.

  I sense he’s about to protest again, so I change my tack. ‘Look, how long have you been working on this?’

  ‘Since school let out,’ he says, with a conceding shrug. ‘The team left about fifteen minutes ago. And if my eagle’s not fixed by tomorrow . . . I might have to withdraw. I can’t believe it’s all gone so wrong, and school has barely begun.’

  Now that he’s not looking at me, I take a moment to look at him. He is so serious, a deep frownline criss-crossing his otherwise perfectly smooth forehead. Neither of us have turned on any lights, and his skin is so dark in the half-light, it reflects almost blue. ‘So you were just going to stand here all night staring at it?’

  ‘Look, I’ve had two years of training and studying to do exactly this, okay? I just don’t want to get it wrong.’

  ‘But you’ve tried everything you can think of.’

  His jaw tightens. ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what’s the harm in letting me have a go? Give me half an hour. I promise I won’t do anything that you can’t reverse.’

  He throws his hands up in the air. ‘Okay, Miss Confident. You try and do what we couldn’t.’

  I bite my lower lip and nod. Jinx rubs up against my leg – typical that when I don’t feel like leaving, he comes to me of his own accord. He crawls up my leg, coming to rest on my shoulder.

  >>Woah. He’s beat up pretty bad.

  ‘That’s for sure,’ I mutter.

  ‘What was that?’ asks Tobias.

  I cringe. I’ve already become so used to Jinx’s voice in my head that I forget it’s a bug in his code that I have to fix. ‘Sorry, just talking to myself.’

  ‘Oh great, I’ve got a potential psychopath on my team,’ he says, but I notice that he doesn’t actually ask me to stop what I’m doing. Instead, he watches my hands intently, as if he’s interested in seeing what happens next. The thought of Tobias watching me sends a shiver down my spine. ‘Any chance we can turn the lights on?’ I ask. The lights might mean he can see my blush – but I’m hoping the more clinical, less – ahem – romantic, atmosphere might help me to concentrate. Plus I can hardly see what I’m working with.

  Tobias shakes his head. ‘We’re not exactly supposed to be in here this late. And besides, the lights are on a timer. Energy saving or something.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I say, followed by a short, sharp exhale as I take stock. ‘Jinx, turn on your light.’ He rolls his tail over and turns on his flashlight. At least that helps me. ‘This okay?’ I ask Tobias, who nods.

  I use Jinx’s camera to take pictures of the damage, and set him to scan the internet for the original schematics for the eagle baku. He finds them within seconds, and he projects the blueprint on to the eagle’s back. I take my safety glasses from out of my jacket pocket (I’m such a nerd that I carry them around with me), and crouch down closer to the eagle. Kai has botched one of the main connections between the motherboard and the circuit that controls the eagle’s head and neck movements. I wrinkle my nose. ‘I hope he didn’t damage the electronics with what he did,’ I say. ‘Why didn’t he use the correct schematic to fix it?’

  Now it’s Tobias�
�s turn to look confused. ‘What do you mean? My eagle is a level 5 baku – unique and customized to me. There aren’t any typical schematics for this.’

  ‘Then what . . .’ I stop talking before yet another one of Jinx’s secrets is revealed.

  >>Told you I have my ways.

  Shut it, you.

  Out loud, I say: ‘Oh, right. I mean – I’m just looking at a schema for one of the other bird bakus, and you can see that he’s soldered this wire to the wrong connection. You’re never going to get proper movement that way. Not only that but it looks like he’s used old solder here.’ Instead of the connection being shiny and smooth, it was dull grey. ‘That won’t conduct electricity well. If I clean it off and replace it, it will be a lot more conductive. Let’s move him up on to the table.’ I get Jinx to switch to layer a level 3 bird baku’s schema over the top of the eagle’s connections, to disguise how clever he’d been. From that point, it’s easy to show Tobias exactly what I mean.

  ‘Um, hang on a second. That’s so cool – how did you get your baku to do that? Cat bakus don’t have projectors on their tails.’

  ‘Well, that bit’s easy. I just added in the projector from an old rodent baku that I found.’

  Tobias scans my face, but the open admiration on his is what makes me blush again. ‘You’re telling me you customized this baku?’ he says.

  ‘Well, yeah . . .’

  ‘Maybe Kai isn’t the best companioneer on the team after all . . .’

  For the next hour, Tobias and I work together, stripping wires and melting solder, and I end up using a little compressed air to clean up the dirty work surface that Kai has left me. Thankfully he didn’t heat up the PCB too much, so it isn’t damaged. I also use a good old-fashioned hammer to help sort out some of the dents and welts in the eagle’s casing – it seems such a shame for such a beautiful creature to look anything less than perfect. The whole time, Jinx projects different measurements at me – from the perfect pressure to apply to a dent, to whether the connections are working properly – so that I can test my theories even before Tobias leashes him up to full power. Once the neck twitch is sorted, I give the rest of the baku a quick look over – mostly so that I can admire the beautiful tech. It’s truly a masterpiece. To make a baku that can fly as smoothly as this eagle, each component is feather-light, dusted with solar nanoparticles that draw power from the sunlight.