the back door, folding his arms and frowning. All his attention was focused on me, to the point that he didn’t notice when the curtain behind him twitched aside.
I nodded. “The Covenant bought it for him when they assigned him to Buckley Township to keep an eye on my grandmother and her family. There were four of them when he arrived in Michigan: Grandma, her father, and his parents. Three generations crammed into one big farmhouse. We still own that one, too, but we rent it out to a nice human family, and they don’t like it when we show up without warning them first. I guess they’re afraid of being evicted.”
“Or possibly being shot,” said Cylia, voice still groggy with the remnants of her nap. She slid off the top bunk and dropped down to the trailer floor. “We’ve stopped.”
“The engine did an awful thing, and James thinks it might be dead,” I said. “Sam was just going out to see whether he could grease monkey his way to a solution.” I stopped and grimaced. “Sam, I’m sorry, that wasn’t an intentional pun, it just sort of . . . slipped out.”
“Uh-huh. See if I wash my hands after replacing the transmission.” Sam finally opened the back door and stepped outside.
“You will. You hate being dirty even more than I do,” I called back before he could close the door.
The last thing I heard from the outside was his scoff. Then the door slammed shut, and I turned back to Cylia.
“You didn’t tell us to be on the lookout for a bad luck event,” I said.
“Because we weren’t in debt,” she countered. “Sometimes things just happen, even when you’re traveling with a jink.”
Cylia Mackie looks perfectly human: tall, blonde, and slender, with cheekbones that could cut glass and freckles on her nose. It’s parallel evolution. She’s a primate, sure, but her species branched from humanity a long damn time ago. Jinks can sense, see, and manipulate luck, treating it like a pool they use to manipulate the probability of the world around them. Smart jinks, like Cylia, try to keep things as balanced as possible, only spending their good luck when they have enough that the backlash won’t be immediate and fatal. Her husband, Tav, died when he got the balance wrong, suffering a massive heart attack right in front of her.
Having Cylia along on our trip had been a godsend so far. Because of her, we’d been able to acquire our precious travel trailer, avoid speed traps, and not get food poisoning from the gas station sushi. All little pieces of good luck that could have happened to anyone, but which had consistently been happening to us since we left Maine.
Of course, that could easily mean that we were due for something catastrophic. Breaking down in Buckley certainly qualified.
“This isn’t on me,” she said. “If we’d had this much bad luck attached to us, I would have warned you. I wouldn’t have done anything to prevent it, but I wouldn’t have let it be a surprise, either.” She folded her arms and glowered at me. “Antimony Price, I thought we were past the point of mistrusting each other without a damn good reason.”
“Sorry, Cylia,” I said, shamefaced. She was right. After facing down the evil cabal controlling one of the country’s biggest theme parks and going toe-to-toe with the crossroads, we had reached a point where trusting each other needed to be the default, and not some sort of aberration. “It just came out of nowhere.”
“And you’re used to me controlling the luck, I got it,” said Cylia. She turned back to the sleeping nook, tugging the curtains open wider until the light from the rest of the trailer penetrated the artificial gloom. “Fern! Wakey-wakey!”
A small, sleepy sound of protest came from the darkest corner of the bed right before a dainty hand shot out, grabbed the curtain, and yanked it shut again. Cylia laughed. I grinned.
The fifth member of our little expedition, Fern, is a sylph, capable of controlling her personal density to such a degree that she can either float or punch holes in insufficiently solid floors. Despite being a dainty little thing, we’ve clocked her as weighing up to six hundred pounds when she wants to, all thanks to tweaking her own mass. The laws of physics are not invited to a lot of sylph parties, nor would they attend if they were.
Sylphs are relatively harmless, density parlor tricks notwithstanding. Unlike the fūri and the