Page 15 of Go Luck Yourself
Why does a little part of me whisper,You should go with him, maybe the both of you can convince her to come back?
Fuck. Fuck fuckfuck.
I rub the back of my neck and twist to the side of the room, wondering if I can slip away before Coal makes me talk about all this Dad-Mom crap—
Something green catches my eye at the base of the Merry Measure.
I cock my head. A tiny box is fixed to the bottom of the machine, blending in with the steampunk style, except for an indicator lightthat glows green. That’s what caught my eye, something green. But it wasn’t glowing—
I squat down, one hand on the floor for balance, and there—that’swhat I saw.
“What the hell?” I crawl forward and pluck the thing out of a crack between the Merry Measure and the marble floor.
Coal and Hex have noticed me now.
“Is that a—” Coal squints. “A clover?”
It is. Four perfect rounded leaves, bright, vivacious green.
“What the hell?” I ask again and look at the little box it was next to.
Marta follows my line of sight and whirls to Wren with a puzzled chirp.
“Did you authorize that?” she asks.
Wren drags her attention away from her tablet. When she sees what we’re all gathered around, her frown deepens. “No. Nicholas?”
Coal shakes his head. “Absolutely not.”
I stand up from my crouch, holding the clover. “What is going on?”
“That”—Coal points at the box—“looks like one of the devices that Dad sent to the other winter Holidays when he made them funnel some of their joy to us. It’s what allowed him to drain their magic into our Merry Measure.” He points higher, to a row of similar devices plugged in across the top. “We still have those connected to the other Holidays because we’re working out who gets what joy, and we’ll eventually use those devices to share a joy pool, but—thatone? That’s not one ofthose.Is it?”
Marta whirls back to the main screen with a horrified gasp, clicking on a few keys, shaking her head in tight, frantic jerks. “No, oh no—”
Coal, Hex, Wren, and I watch her through an invisible rising tide of warning.
“Our joy levels have been lowering.” Marta feverishly works controls. “What with us sending joy back to the Holidays we took it from. My team has been tracking it all, and recently, there were discrepancies I couldn’t account for. I attributed it to magic being used towrap up Christmas, or to bringing the other winter Holiday leaders here, or a dozen other things—I was going to do a deeper trace once things slowed down, and I…”
Marta stops, reads the screen for a beat, and her face pales.
She turns shame-filled eyes on Coal.
“It’s that device. It’s been draining small bits of magic. I—I should have seen it. It wasn’t there during my weekly check of the machine last Monday. But I should have investigated this as soon as the discrepancies emerged. I’m sorry, Prince Nicholas, I’m so—”
“Woah, woah.” Coal holds up his hand. “Just—hang on. No one’s blaming you, Marta.”
She wilts.
“So… someone tapped our joy meter?” My eyebrows tug together. The peace we’re working towards among the other winter Holidays is so new, so fragile—if one of them moved against us, we couldn’t exactlyblamethem for it, but it wouldn’t do anything to help us structure a fairer, more even spread of support.
Coal plants his hands on his hips and chuckles in a way that isn’t at all funny. “Fuck me running. Someone’s stealing Christmas’s magic. Isn’tthatjust karma?”
After some chaos, where Marta calls in the rest of her team to descend on the Merry Measure in a full top-to-bottom systems check, Coal, Hex, Wren, and I gather in the main office.
A fireplace and warm, dark wood accents make it cozy and atmospheric, but it’s onlyfeltlike those things since Coal took over. Now, he crosses the room and drops to sit behind the desk with ease, not realizing the monumentality of this moment, how this is his first time being intheoffice astheSanta.
To be fair, we’re all distracted.
