Page 58 of Jinxed

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’swhat 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 fingersgrow 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 wheresomething 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 havinga 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 fearis 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 definitelyshouldn’tbe doing that. But whoever wrote this program is good. Very, very good. It has a kind of... elegance to it that I haven’tseen 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 otherwisebeautifullines. 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 operatingsystem 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 Ithinkis a small sigh of awe. After about ten minutesof doing this, she lifts one of her braids into her mouth and begins chewing. That’s how I know things arereallyserious.

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 TRAITORsign. I don’t need to be looking atthatevery 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, returnedthere 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 leavea 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 offthe 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.

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