Jinx Unchained

Epilogue

Epilogue

Sometimes, being the smartest girl in the world was a real pain in the ass. Zoe sighed as she sat up and stretched her arms above her head, feeling several parts of her spine shift and pop when they were finally eased from having been hunched over her desk for the past several hours.

She smiled to herself. Smartest girl in the world had a nice ring to it, though she wasn't completely sure whether it was true or not. She supposed somewhere there might be someone smarter than her, but she'd for sure never met them. Well, except her dad, of course. He was absolutely the smartest man in the world, but then again he'd have to be since he was the one teaching her. But other thirteen-year-olds? Not a chance.

Thinking of her dad made her realize how much she missed him. She looked around the office, his office, on the fourth floor of the Shikine Communications building in Okazaki, and everywhere she looked, she saw signs of his touch. Pictures of him and both her moms on his desk, several pictures of him and Auntie Malea, and finally many more pictures of herself. She smiled at that. He'd taken her absolute best pictures to showcase here, and he always made sure to ask her if a picture was okay before he'd take it with him. They ran the gamut of her life so far, with several pictures of her as a toddler, all the way up to one he'd brought from her last birthday, where she'd smiled widely right before Auntie Malea and Auntie Vi had smeared her face with pieces of cake. Sadly he'd snapped the picture half a second too soon to capture that moment, but she still had a beautiful smile, so she liked the picture anyway.

Her eyes strayed across the office, coming to rest on the cluttered workbench in the corner, where he'd randomly just invent things—at least, so it would seem to anyone who didn't know him like she did. She knew he was just turning the knowledge the Gray had given him into practical applications, but to anyone else, it would for sure look like he was just coming up with things on the spot. The staff of his company were all in awe of how he could invent things to solve their most difficult problems seemingly in a heartbeat.

In the other corner was a large couch along with several comfortable chairs where he could have informal meetings with some of the staff, and—often to her moms' annoyance—where he'd sometimes just sleep if he had a late night at the office, and she'd already been sent to bed. She'd told him many times she'd happily still come get him, but all three of her parents would just put their foot down and say that bedtime was bedtime. She grumped. It was so ridiculous! She was thirteen! She knew at least three kids her age in Hoshino and the Placidium who were allowed to stay up much later than she was!

The rest of the office was mostly filled with plants and pieces of art that she'd picked for him. She had no real understanding of art—being the smartest girl in the world didn't really help with that, she'd found quickly—but whenever she really liked something, he bought it and either put it in his office or, if her moms agreed to it, somewhere in their recently expanded house.

The fact he always had to ask made her grin—for as much as her dad was the smartest man in the world, and the fact he ran a company that employed over five-hundred people, he didn't have much authority back at home. Either one of her moms would merely need to raise an eyebrow at him, and he'd quickly back off whatever idea he might have had. She'd even asked him about that once, and he'd grinned at her and said she'd understand once she had someone she loved. It honestly all seemed like a major bother to her, though she'd begun to look at several boys—and especially girls—in a different light lately.

Finishing off the office along the wall behind her was a map of the world, or at least most of it, with red pins in it showcasing how far her dad's communications network now reached. Pretty much all of Ionia was covered, all the way from Hirana Monastery in the far Northeast to the island of Galrin in the south, and the lands of the Navori in the west.