Chapter Text
It was all stupid.
The world was a jagged, ugly mess of neon and grime, and Jinx’s boots scuffed against the cold metal of the walkway with a rhythmic, hollow thud-thud-thud. She had no destination, only the suffocating pressure of Zaun echoing in the cavern of her skull. Everything was shitty now that Silco was gone.
The Chembarons were scavengers, warring over a crown made of trash, and the air itself felt heavy with the weight of their own failures. Zaun was drowning because of her. Because she had pulled the trigger.
Because she was a creature made of broken parts and bad timing.
Because you mess everything up.
Because you’re a jinx.
The internal whispers grew into a cacophony, a screeching feedback loop that blurred her vision—until a sudden, heavy weight slammed into her shoulders.
Jinx hit the ground with a sharp "oof," her knees banging against the stone. Her pink eyes flared, shimmering with a sudden, violent heat as she rolled onto her back, her hand already twitching toward her hip. The hell? What kind of idiot—her thoughts stalled.
Practically sitting on top of Jinx, a small, brown-haired child was frantically scooting backward, the soles of their oversized boots squeaking against the grime.
It was just a kid. A tiny, trembling thing with amber eyes wide enough to swallow the world. Jinx’s gaze drifted upward, tracing the child’s path toward a broken pipe overhead, but her focus was yanked back down by three heavy, synchronized thuds.
The Chembaron lackeys landed with the grace of lead weights, their expensive canes clattering and their tiny, tinted glasses reflecting the dim green smog. Jinx’s lip curled in a silent snarl; these guys were far more annoying than a fallen brat. They sneered, stepping forward as the child let out a sharp, hitching breath and flinched—not away from Jinx, but toward her. The girl’s small frame shook as she crouched low, eyes darting between the men and the cloaked stranger. The lead baron chuckled, a dry, wheezing sound that grated like sandpaper, until Jinx’s hood slid back.
The silence that followed was thick. The shimmer in her irises pulsed, a neon warning sign that turned their sneers into frozen masks of terror. They didn’t get to stay afraid for long, for the sound of Jinx’s pistol was the only warning before three staccato cracks tore through the air. The bodies hit the floor with a series of wet, heavy thunks, blood pooling into the grooves of the metal floor. Jinx exhaled a steady plume of pink smoke from the barrel, her eyes drifting back to the kid. The child was huddled with hands clamped over their ears so hard their knuckles were white, but as the echoes died, their hands slowly dropped. Amber eyes stared at the corpses, then up at Jinx, reflecting a terrifying mix of awe and trauma.
“You feel it?” Jinx asked, her voice an absentminded hum as she lazily pointed the gun toward the girl. She wasn't aiming; she was just dancing with the danger of it, watching the barrel catch the dim light. The kid flinched, their small legs brushing against Jinx’s as they scrambled to maintain a sliver of space. “That buzzing behind your eyes. " Jinx continued, swaying the weapon in a slow, hypnotic arc. “Because you know, in a moment it could all… poow!” She tapped the cold metal of the gun against her own temple, a small, jagged huff of laughter escaping her throat. “Best feeling in the world, kid.”
The child remained deathly silent, but their gaze shifted. They looked toward the wall, where dozens of wanted posters were plastered—Jinx’s face, rendered in crude ink, stared back a hundred times over.
Jinx followed the gaze and let out a long, theatrical sigh. “Yep, that’s me,” she muttered. She stood up with a jerky, mechanical motion, reaching down to grab the child’s fallen headgear. As she held it, she paused, her thumb brushing over the rugged, dented surface. It was a miner’s hat—sturdy, utilitarian, and a relic of a life spent in the deep pressure of the mines. A small, strange weight settled in her chest as she tossed it back onto the kid’s head, the brim lopsided over their messy hair.
“You ever need to curse a sibling, family, society…” Jinx turned, snapping a sharp finger gun toward the wall of her own crimes. “My card!”
The child didn't make a sound, only watching with a wide, unblinking yellow gaze as Jinx turned her back. She felt the silence behind her like a physical weight. With a practiced flick, she pulled her hood back over her blue braids and began to walk away, the neon shadows swallowing her silhouette as she disappeared back into the mouth of the undercity.
Well, Jinx wouldn’t say she disappeared for long.
She had been hoping the kid would have forgotten about her by now, or at least have had the basic, common-sense survival instincts to run in the opposite direction. But the occasional, rhythmic pitter-patter of small, oversized boots echoing against the damp iron of the walkways continuously proved her wrong. The sound was faint, buried beneath the distant, low thrum of Zaun’s industrial underbelly, but to Jinx’s hyper-vigilant ears, it might as well have been a drumbeat.
She had made it maybe three streets away from the trash-heap room before the persistence of the noise finally wore through her frayed nerves. Twisting on her heel with a sharp, mechanical jerk, her long blue braid whipped through the green-tinted street. Her neon-pink eyes locked instantly onto a small, ragged silhouette that clumsily ducked behind the rusted edge of a corrugated metal wall.
“I can see you, ya know!” Jinx called out, her voice a sing-song, jagged edge that cut through the humid air. She threw her arms out wide, tilting her head as she scanned the immediate shadows, her internal radar checking for any twitching ears or snooping Enforcer scum. “Not a very good stalker! Zero out of ten! Pathetic!”
For a long, heavy beat, nothing happened. Then, a pair of large, unblinking amber eyes peeked back out from around the corner. The child stared straight at her, completely unbothered by the harsh volume of Jinx’s voice. In fact, the girl’s head tilted to the side, her small brow raising in a silent, strangely deadpan look of defiance that caught Jinx entirely off guard. It wasn't the terrified cringe Jinx was used to getting from people. It was just... curiosity.
Great. A dumb, broken kid, Jinx thought, a wave of dismissive exhaustion washing over her. The internal whispers in her head started to buzz, mocking her. Look at you, making friends with the trash. She rolled her eyes hard, scoffing into the empty air as she turned her back on the child. “Whatever. Shoo. Scram. Go find a different curse to follow,” she muttered, kicking a loose pipe fitting as she walked away.
But the kid didn't shoo. And it was quite obvious to see.
By the time Jinx reached the dusty makeshift aim-training hideout—a hollowed-out cavern of forgotten brass valves and hanging chains—the pitter-patter had returned. Jinx dropped her heavy tool sack onto the metal floor with a loud, clattering crash.
Behind her, a small, hollow grunt echoed.
Jinx whirled around. The girl was standing right at the entrance of the hideout. Her lopsided miner’s hat was slipping down over one ear, and as her eyes adjusted to the dim, flickering light of the workshop, a slow, half-nervous but utterly awestruck smirk spread across her dirt-smudged face. She wasn't looking at the dangers of the undercity; she was looking at Jinx like she was some kind of neon god.
Jinx stared at her, her fingers twitching against her thighs. Part of her wanted to scream, to wave her pistol around until the kid ran away crying, but another part—the cold, dangerously hollow part that had been starving for a single friendly glance since Silco’s breath left his body—just slumped.
"I don't really care," she told herself bitterly.
Not my problem.
“Fine. Do you want to watch? Watch,” Jinx huffed, turning back to the workbench.
For the next two hours, the hideout was filled with the harsh, grating sounds of metal scraping metal. Jinx was building a replacement mechanical arm, a heavy, shimmer-fueled contraption she planned to give to Sevika. As she worked, she tried to fill the suffocating silence with her usual manic small talk, tossing rhetorical questions over her shoulder.
“You think the claw should have spikes, or is that too cliché? I think Sevika likes clichés. She’s old. Old people like old things,” Jinx chuckled, her hands sliding over the brass plating.
The kid didn't answer. Not a single word. Jinx paused, a heavy wrench in her hand, and glanced back. The girl was leaning over the edge of the table, her face inches from the hot solder, completely hypnotized by the sparks. Jinx narrowed her eyes, noticing something strange. Whenever Jinx spoke while facing away, the kid didn't even flinch or look up. But the moment Jinx turned around, the kid’s eyes immediately locked onto her mouth, her tiny head nodding along with a fierce, hyper-focused intensity.
She isn't ignoring me, Jinx realized, her internal dialogue shifting into a rare, quiet clarity. She can't really hear me. Jinx remembered the heavy, dented miner’s hat. The heavy iron boots. Her eyes drifted to the child's small, scarred hands, calloused and stained with coal dust. A child laborer. An orphan forced into the deep, deafening pressure of the chem-mines, where the constant roar of the excavators blasted your eardrums until you couldn't hear anything softer than a gunshot unless you were looking right at the person's lips. Those dead barons she had shot earlier hadn't just been random middle managers. They were mine operators, the cruel overseers who ran the deafening pits.
A weird, heavy lump formed in Jinx’s throat. She hated it. She hated feeling things.
Snapping out of her thoughts, Jinx slammed a screwdriver onto the table, making a loud clang that finally made the kid jump. Jinx pointed a finger sharply at the girl’s nose, then pointed toward the entrance, making a chewing motion with her jaw. “Food,” Jinx said, realizing her own subtle hunger. “Go steal some. For both of us. Move it, shadow!”
The kid’s eyes brightened. She gave a sharp, affirmative nod, let out a tiny, puffing sound of determination through her nose, and scrambled out into the lanes.
The brass of the newly finished mechanical arm was still warm to the touch when the atmosphere inside the hideout fractured. It didn’t start with a bang. It started with a heavy, pressurized hiss—a low, rhythmic thrum-thrum-thrum that vibrated straight through the floorboards and deep into the marrow of Jinx’s bones.
Then came the smoke.
It wasn't the lazy, sulfurous smog of the fissures. It was The Grey. A thick, chemical fog, unnatural and suffocating, that poured over the threshold of the workshop like a slow-moving, toxic wave.
No, no, no. Jinx’s mind instantly short-circuited, the voices in her head shifting from their usual petty bickering into a unified, piercing shriek. Not now. Not when the shadow is gone. Her fingers, slick with grease and solder, moved entirely on survival instinct. She snatched the wrapped, heavy bulk of Sevika’s pneumatic arm, slinging the leather straps across her chest before scrambling blindly upward. Her boots found purchase on a rusted pipe, then a crossbeam, her body twisting with feral agility as she pulled herself into the dark, shadowed rafters above the main floor.
She pressed her back against the cold iron of a structural pillar, her breathing shallow, her pink eyes wildly scanning the roiling fog below. How? The question tore through her brain like shrapnel. How did they find this place? I hid the tripwires. I masked the vents. No one knows this corner of the vents. No one.
The answers arrived in the form of heavy, armored boots breaking through the mist.
From her perch, Jinx watched the unmistakable silhouettes of Piltover’s Enforcer tactical squads materialize in the workshop. They moved with a rigid, clinical precision that turned her stomach. But it wasn't the standard guardsmen. Her gaze tracked the leader of the pack—a figure clad in heavy, gold-trimmed plating that caught the dim light of the furnace.
Jinx’s breath hitched. A violent, physical shock surged straight down her spine, freezing the air in her lungs.
Above the high, reinforced collar of the armor, a shock of bright, pink hair caught the light.
Vi.
The world slowed down until it was nothing but the agonizingly loud thump of Jinx’s own heart beating against her ribs. Thump. Thump. Thump. The shock mutated instantly, twisting into a deep, gut-wrenching betrayal that felt like a physical blade piercing her chest.
Jinx sat there, arms setting the mechanical appendage beside her. It took her a moment, but Jinx grabbed her handgun. Her hands began to shake violently, the cold steel of her hextech pistol rattling against her knuckles. A hot, stinging moisture flooded her eyes, blurring the gold armor below into a smear of mocking light.
It wasn't the chemical sting of The Grey making her cry. It was the crushing, suffocating realization that her sister was down there. Wearing the very same uniform that had marched across the bridge. The uniform that had torn their family apart. The uniform of the monsters.
She’s one of them. She chose them. She’s hunting me.
With a ragged, silent sob, Jinx raised her handgun, her vision fracturing through a film of tears. She lined up the iron sights right with the back of that pink head. Her arm trembled so hard the barrel danced in erratic circles. Pull it. Just pull it. Make her disappear like she disappeared from you. But she couldn't. Her finger froze on the trigger, rigid as stone.
A single, heavy tear spilled over Jinx’s lower eyelid, slipping down her cheek and falling through the space between the rafters. It dropped down, down, through the haze, landing with a tiny, microscopic splat right onto the glass of the goggles Vi was looking at.
Below, the pink-haired Enforcer sharply snapped her head upward, her gaze locking instantly onto the rafters.
Fuck.
Jinx threw herself backward, her spine slamming into a solid piece of old wooden bracing as she hid behind the pillar. Her chest heaved, her breath coming in short, panicked gasps that she tried to smother with her bare hand.
The voices in her head were screaming now, a deafening wall of sound—She saw you! She’s coming! Little sister, clumsy Powder, always ruining everything! She couldn't stay. She couldn't look at that armor for another second without throwing up.
Wailing into the dark—a raw, wordless sound of pure despair—Jinx grabbed the wrapped-up present and turned and tore through the ventilation shafts behind her. She didn't look back. She crawled, scraped, and threw her body through the narrow iron tunnels, her mind a roaring thunderstorm of panic.
She hit the exit of the shaft and dropped into the lower lanes, running completely blind, her vision choked by tears and the lingering ghosts of her past.
But Jinx didn’t make it far into the street.
The moment her boots hit the damp cobblestones of the lower alley, a heavy, mechanical fist swung from the shadows, colliding squarely with her jaw. The impact sounded like a hammer hitting a sack of wet coal. Jinx was lifted off her feet, her head spinning as she crashed hard onto the grimy ground, the wrapped mechanical arm clattering beside her.
She hissed, the metallic taste of blood instantly coating her tongue. With a feral snarl, she spun around on her back, her arm whipping out to raise her gun—
A heavy, iron-toed boot kicked her charging gun. It clattering on the cobble a couple of feet away. Jinx growled, a low, animalistic sound of rage rising from her throat as she tried to pull back, but a pair of rough, burly hands grabbed her by her shoulders.
She was violently hoisted up and slammed against the brick wall behind her. The impact sent a web of fine, splintering cracks through the decaying mortar.
Jinx tilted her chin down, her pink eyes narrowing through the strands of her messy blue hair. Sitting on pipe near her was Smeech. The chem-baron looked more like an oversized, ugly rat than ever, green shimmer fumes rising into the air.
"Baby Blue," Smeech sneered, a greasy, self-satisfied grin spreading across his wrinkled face.
He rolled his transport closer, his mechanical legs hissing with hydraulic steam as his two massive goons kept Jinx pinned flat against the wall. Jinx kicked out wildly, her boots scraping uselessly against their shin guards. "Right through their fingers... You must be part eel!"
While Jinx struggled against the weight on her shoulders, a third lackey stepped into her space. With a rough, disrespectful shove against her chest, his heavy fingers searched her belt, ripping away her weapons. He found her custom grenade—the glitter-bomb distraction she had modified earlier—and carelessly tossed it into the gutter behind him.
"That just means I can up my finder's fee," Smeech chuckled, tapping his cane against the stones. "There’s always a deal to be struck in the lanes."
Jinx ground her teeth, her muscles straining to the point of snapping. But the three men had her completely locked down, their shimmer-powered cybernetic appendages providing a crushing, immovable strength.
"Nuh-uh-uh," Smeech chided, raising a skeletal finger as Jinx bared her teeth to bite the goon holding her arm. "They want you alive."
With a sharp whir, the rat-faced baron extended his mechanical legs, his frame towering upward until he was looking down at her from a predatory height. "But don’t think I won’t skewer out those peepers."
To emphasize the point, his index finger suddenly shifted, the metal tip sharpening into a needle-thin, lethal spike that stopped barely an inch away from her left pupil. Jinx’s eye involuntarily dilated, the cold reflection of the blade dancing in her pink iris.
"Draw back your long-range types," Smeech whispered, leaning in until Jinx could smell the sour stench of cheap liquor and oil on his breath. "Me? I’m the kind of guy who likes to get in close."
Jinx opened her mouth to spit a venomous retort, to scream a manic insult—but nothing came out. Her throat felt completely dry, blocked by the lingering, suffocating image of Vi in that gold armor. Her internal monologue was stuck on a loop of her sister’s face, leaving her physically paralyzed, her jaw trembling slightly.
Smeech noticed. A cruel, mocking laugh bubbled in his throat. "Never thought I’d catch you blubbering. Wonder if Silco ever saw you like this."
The mention of the name acted like a spark to oil. The paralysis shattered. Jinx tilted her head slightly, her voice returning with a cold, quiet venom that cut straight through the ambient drone of the alley.
"Twice," she murmured.
She deliberately twitched her head forward, her eye moving closer to the sharp point of Smeech’s mechanical finger, defying him to blink first.
"When he met me..." Jinx whispered, her pink eyes unfocusing for a split second as a memory flashed before snapping back to lock onto Smeech’s with terrifying intensity. "...and when I killed him."
Smeech sharply drew his finger back, his spectacles sliding down his nose as his eyes widened in genuine surprise. "You?"
"It’s always me," Jinx said, a dark, jagged smirk slowly pulling at the corner of her lips. She could feel the goons' grips tightening on her arms, but she didn't care. She leaned her face forward, invading Smeech’s space. "Whether I’m pulling the pin or not... everyone who gets close to me dies."
She shifted her head, her lips brushing the coarse fur of Smeech’s oversized ear as she lowered her voice to a chilling, sing-song whisper.
"Wanna know the real kicker? You’re the kind of guy who likes to get in close."
Smeech let out a sharp, uneasy huff, violently backing his transport away as if he had just touched a hot stove. "Wrap her up," he barked to his men, his bravado momentarily rattled. "Before she loses the rest of her mind."
The goon to her right growled, raising a massive, heavy fist to deliver a rough, concussive blow to the side of her head to knock her out. Jinx braced for the impact, staring directly into his eyes—
BANG.
A sharp, deafening gunshot rang through the narrow alleyway. The goon’s heavy brass hat suddenly flew off his head, spinning through the air with a metallic whine before clattering into the puddles.
Jinx’s head whipped around in perfect synchronization with the others. A massive, manic smirk broke across her face.
Walking slowly through the green-tinted smog at the mouth of the alley, casual as a stroll in a park, was Sevika. In her right organic hand, she was lazily holding Jinx’s own smoking handgun.
The goons instantly hopped off Jinx, completely forgetting about her as they shifted their heavy, shimmer-powered focus onto the newly arrived threat. Jinx stumbled forward for a fraction of a second, her knees weak from the pressure, before quickly regaining her footing.
More shots rang out. Sevika fired three times in rapid succession, but Smeech was already moving. The multiple mechanical arms attached to his transport whipped upward, the specialized brass plating deflecting each bullet with a series of bright, ringing sparks.
Jinx didn't waste the distraction. She slid across the wet cobblestones, her hands scrambling through the muck until her fingers wrapped around the leather bindings of the arm she had built. The pink shimmer within her veins flared, giving her a sudden burst of adrenaline. With a heavy grunt, she launched the massive hunk of metal through the air toward Sevika, shouting, "Trade ya!"
Sevika caught the heavy brass arm with her right hand, simultaneously tossing Jinx’s pistol back across the alley.
Jinx caught her gun in a seamless, practiced motion. Without even looking, she twisted her torso and fired a single, perfect shot directly into the chest of the goon who had been sneaking up behind her. He hit the ground like a sack of bricks.
Across the clearing, Sevika was staring down at the bizarre, over-engineered contraption Jinx had thrown at her. Her heavy brow furrowed in a deeply judgmental, highly confused look as she took in the spikes, the pneumatic levers, and the glowing purple shimmer lines. She looked up at Jinx as if to ask, What the hell is this nightmare?
Jinx just gave a loose, manic shrug, her pink eyes flashing. “It fits! Just put it on, old lady!”
Sevika grunted, shoving her stump into the socket of the new prosthetic. The internal gears immediately caught with a terrifying, heavy CLACK, the pneumatic pistons hissing to life with a roar of pure power.
Jinx turned her attention back to the third goon, who was lunging at her with those over-the-top shimmer prosthetics. The hyper-speed of the Shimmer coursing through her system made the world feel slow again; she effortlessly danced backward, dodging every clumsy swing of his hands with inches to spare.
Suddenly, a small object came whistling through the air from the side of the alley. It was the custom glitter-bomb distraction that the goon had tossed into the gutter earlier. It struck the lackey square in the side of the temple, bouncing off before detonating a few feet above his head in a loud, flashing pop of bright purple sparks and nonlethal flash powder.
The goon grunted in utter confusion, raising his hands to shield his eyes, expecting a lethal explosion that never came.
He didn't get to be confused for long. Jinx stepped behind him, raised her barrel, and put a single bullet right through his skull. He collapsed into the mud with a wet thud.
Jinx lowered her smoking gun, her chest heaving as the manic energy slowly began to settle. Her pink eyes drifted over to the dark corner of the alley, tracking the precise trajectory of where that glitter bomb had just been thrown from.
Jinx’s heart did a strange, erratic flutter. She followed me through that? Jinx didn't have time to think. She caught the kid’s eye, lifted her pistol, and playfully mimicked the recoil with a jerky, exaggerated shake of her arm. Behind the barrel, the child’s shoulders dropped, a silent, breathy chuckle escaping her lips as she smirked in response.
Jinx turned back around to watch Sevika, hearing the kid walk up beside her.
For the rest of the brutal brawl, Jinx and the child stood practically side-by-side in the shadows of the alley. The girl’s amber gaze flickered back and forth with a terrifying speed—watching Jinx motion with her hands how the pneumatic levers of the contraption were supposed to fire and then watching Sevika execute the exact movements.
Soon enough, Sevika was slamming the heavy brass claw into Smeech’s face.
"Whoa!" Jinx shouted, ducking.
In the rush to avoid the toxic spray, the kid scrambled sideways, her shoulder accidentally bumping hard into Jinx’s hip. The girl instantly froze, her head snapping up, her expression turning slightly nervous as if she expected Jinx to recoil or strike her like the mean mine operators used to do.
But Jinx didn't pull away. She stayed right there, her hip resting against the kid’s shoulder. A small, unbidden smirk touched the corner of Jinx’s mouth, a strange warmth blooming in her chest that she couldn't explain and didn't know how to fight. She let out a sharp, genuine chuckle at the green sparks fading in the rain, noticing out of the corner of her eye that the child was staring up at the roof, her face completely bathed in the neon-green glow, utterly amazed.
The echoes of the explosion died down, leaving only the sound of heavy breathing and dripping water. Sevika stepped over Smeech’s twitching torso, her sharp gaze staring down at the mess.
“Fancy meeting you here,” Jinx said, her voice dropping into a casual, brittle cadence as she walked over, her eyes tracking the green fluid sizzling on the metal.
“Moron never could keep his damn mouth shut,” Sevika sneered, kicking Smeech’s cane into the gutter. She followed Jinx’s gaze down to the bleeding, corrupted body.
A few inches away, the kid had already crouched down, completely unfazed by the gore. She had found an old, rusted trowel in the dirt and was idly poking at Smeech’s glowing green shoulder, her face twisted into a look of pure clinical curiosity.
“You could’ve just let me eat it,” Jinx muttered, her internal voices whispering chaotic nonsense as she watched the kid poke the corpse.
“Haven’t I done you enough favors?” Sevika grunted, wiping a streak of green blood from her face.
Jinx gave a loose, hollow huff of a chuckle.
“I didn’t ask you for this,” Sevika muttered, her tone darkening as she raised her new mechanical arm, testing the heavy, shifting gears that Jinx had meticulously calibrated. The metal gleamed with a dangerous, unstable precision.
Jinx shrugged, her pink eyes shifting back to the child, who was now trying to scrape a glowing smear of shimmer off the trowel with her thumb. “It was something I could fix.”
Sevika stopped moving the arm. She turned, her heavy gaze boring straight into Jinx’s face, reading the frantic, dangerous energy humming just beneath her skin. “You got that look in your eye again,” Sevika said, her voice dropping to a low, cautious rumble. “What are you planning?”
The silence stretched between them, heavy and suffocating. Jinx’s face slowly stilled, the manic energy draining away, leaving her expression cold, hollow, and terrifyingly focused. “To finish what’s left of my family.”
Sevika’s eyes widened just a fraction. “Vi?”
Jinx didn't speak. She just blinked, a slow, deliberate movement of her eyelids, and Sevika understood everything. The truce was over. The war was coming.
But before Sevika could say anything else, a small sound broke the tension. The kid had stood back up, the trowel tucked into her belt. Her large, beady amber eyes locked onto Sevika, her small brow furrowing deeply as she sensed the sudden, violent shift in the air. She took a tiny step closer to Jinx’s leg, her posture wary, her eyes narrowing at the massive fighter as if calculating whether she needed to fight her.
Sevika stared at the tiny, defensive creature, then looked up at Jinx, her lip curling in a mix of confusion and irritation. “So... you gonna tell me what’s up with the kid?” Sevika gestured vaguely with her chin toward the ragged child. “You picking up strays now?”
The child’s brows furrowed even more, her eyes rapidly switching from Sevika’s face to Jinx’s mouth, trying desperately to catch the words through the dull ringing in her ears.
Jinx stared down at the kid for a long, agonizing minute. The girl’s lopsided miner’s hat was practically touching her jacket, and that weird, itchy, grounding feeling twisted tightly in Jinx’s stomach again. It was an anchor she didn't ask for, a shadow she couldn't shake.
Shrugging carelessly, Jinx slipped her hands into her pockets, her fingers wrapping around the cold steel of her pistol as a defensive, brittle grin forced its way back onto her face.
"Oh, this?" Jinx holstered her gun with a flashy, dramatic spin, leaning down slightly to poke the brim of the kid’s lopsided miner’s hat, watching the way the kid immediately glared up at her with that fierce, silent attitude. "This is my new shadow, Sevika! Pretty sleek design, right? Excellent soundproofing—doesn't say a single word. I think it’s a defective model, honestly, but hey, the price was right!"
The child blinked, her eyes tracking Jinx’s lips before her face twisted into a look of utter, comedic confusion. She obviously knew she was being mocked. She raised her eyebrows in a flat, deadpan expression, letting out a sharp, tiny scoff through her nose.
“Looks like a street rat,” Sevika grunted, crossing her arms. “Where’d she come from?”
"From the sky!" Jinx threw her hands up in the air, mimicking an explosion, her blue braid whipping wildly around her shoulders. "Boom! Just falling from the ceiling like overgrown dust bunnies. One minute I'm having a perfectly normal, lovely conversation with the voices in my head, and the next—splat! Kid-shaped rain. Followed by old stinky mine bosses."
The child shifted her weight, a tiny, breathy huff of amusement escaping her nose. She didn't know what the story was, but watching Jinx flail her arms around was entertaining enough, her amber eyes shining with a quiet, stubborn warmth as she looked back up at her.
"Why don't you just wave her off?" Sevika grunted, her voice flat and scraping against the quiet of the lanes. "The kid doesn't have much self-preservation if it’s sticking around you."
Jinx’s fingers twitched inside her pockets, her thumb automatically dragging over the fabric as she stared at the rough, dented brim of the miner’s hat. She can't leave, the voice in her head whispered, loud and frantic. If she leaves, it’s just the ghosts again. The realization hit her like a bad Shimmer trip—she barely knew what this little thing was. They had met maybe four hours ago when the piping decided to spit a human being onto her shoulders, but the kid’s small, quiet presence had filled a cold, empty pocket in Jinx’s chest that she hadn't realized was aching.
She needed an excuse. A practical one. Something that made sense to someone as cynical as Sevika.
A jagged, theatrical grin split Jinx’s face, her voice jumping into that high, singsong register she used whenever the truth felt too heavy to carry. "Oh, please! You think I want a sidekick, Sevika? I told her! I said, "Shoo! Scram!" Go find something to do with your freedom!' But look at her!"
Jinx dropped her hands, gesturing wildly at the silent child, her laughter sounding sharp and brittle in the narrow, rain-slicked space. "She’s like a... a giant, mutated leech! A stray sewer rat! I think she’s broken, honestly. She doesn't have an off switch. I ran down three streets, and bam—still there. I think she’s tracking my scent. Do I smell like sugar? I think I smell like gunpowder."
She lightly nudged the small shape beside her with her elbow. The child, catching the movement, instantly mirrored the gesture, giving Jinx a small, matching nudge back, her lips twisting into a subtle, knowing smirk as the two of them exchanged a quiet, brief huff of laughter in the dark.
Sevika looked away, letting out a heavy breath. The kid wasn't important anyway; she was just another piece of Zaunite scrap. She turned her sharp gaze back to Jinx. “You got a plan or what, Jinx?”
The child nudged her arm, bringing out half a piece of warm bread. Jinx’s eyes widened for a split second before quickly biting and swallowing the bread. The kid let out a hum; Jinx returned it.
She looked back up, realizing Sevika was talking to her.
Jinx’s smirk returned, a dangerous, flashing thing. She leaned down, her lips brushing the edge of the kid’s lopsided hat as she whispered loudly, "Yup, follow me…ex-one-arm!"