Page 29 of Jinxed
‘Come on, Jinx,’ I whisper to him, but Jinx grooms his tail, ignoring me. Inwardly, I groan. I’mgoing 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 needto 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 reallydoeshave 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 knowthat?’
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’sbeautifully 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 inhis 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 wholepointis 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 theycan 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’smeantto 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. Kaiwas 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 ofan 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 notquiteas 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 majorconnection that Iknowis 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 overto 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 changemy 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 frownlinecriss-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.’
Hisjaw 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.
