A portal had ripened all the way to red inside a factory out past Buckeye, and nobody had known it was there.
That was the story. The factory shut down in 2011. Nobody had put a fence around anything, because nobody had been inside that building in thirteen years. Some time in the night the things on its bottom level came up through the floor and out through the loading doors and into a road with houses on the other side of it.
They had dashcam footage, and they kept playing it. Night, a two-lane road, headlights. Something low and pale came across the road in front of the car, fast, too many legs and moving wrong, the way a dropped glove would move if it were alive. The car swerved and the picture went sideways and the clip started over. They played it four times while I stood there. Then a guildmaster in a polo shirt in front of the lights: "Our first party was on site in under forty minutes, which, given the conditions," and they cut away from him to the parking lot, where there were shapes under sheets, and a reporter said fatalities, and then they went to weather.
I stood there in the kitchen with the spatula in my hand.
My eggs were on the counter going cold, two of them on a paper towel, and the toast had popped up a while ago and nobody had come for it. The news went to a car commercial. I didn't move to turn it off yet. I was waiting for them to go back to the parking lot, and they didn't, and I was glad and I hated that I was glad.
The monitored ones aren't supposed to be the problem. The blue one behind the video store on Cave Creek has a fence and a sign and some county inspector who drives past it four times a year. The ones that kill people are the ones ripening quietly somewhere nobody looks.
My parents went into a monitored portal. Registered, inspected, D-rank, well inside their grade, the boring kind. They filed the dive plan. They did every single thing right.
I turned the TV off. I could still see the thing crossing the road.
* * *
Somebody knocked on the front door.
Nobody knocks on my front door. I stood in the hall for a second before I opened it, and it was Mrs. Ferreira, in her house shoes, holding a plate with foil over it.
"Chorizo and egg," she said. "You saw the news."
"Yeah."
She came in past me, which she hadn't done in a long time, and put the plate on the kitchen table, and saw the legal pad on the fridge and read it. I watched her read it. She got to SHIELD and her mouth went flat.
"Your mother used to call me," she said, still looking at the fridge. "When there was a break on the news. Every time, wherever they were. Before I'd even seen it. Rosa, it's not us, we're fine, it's not ours." She took the foil off the plate and folded it in four, very neatly. "So I wouldn't sit here and worry. Every time."
I didn't know that.
"I saw it this morning and I picked up the phone," she said. "Two years. I still pick up the phone."
I didn't say anything. There wasn't anything that would have been the right size.
She was smaller in my kitchen than she is over the wall. I'd never noticed that. Over the wall she's a head and a coffee mug and a voice. In here she was a woman in a faded blue housecoat with her hair still flat on one side from the pillow, standing where my mom used to stand to read whatever was on the fridge, with her thumbnail running along the fold in the foil.
She put the folded foil down on the table.
"You're going to do this," she said. It wasn't really a question. "Go in those."
"In twenty days."
"Okay." She nodded, once, at the fridge. "Then you eat first. And you do it the way they did. The papers, the plans, all of it, so somebody always knows where you are."
"I will."
"Say it like you mean it, Miles."
"I'll do the papers," I said. "I promise."
She looked over at the counter, at the two eggs on the paper towel and the toast standing up in the toaster.
"That's breakfast?"
"That was breakfast."
"Throw it out. Eat mine while it's hot." She pushed the plate an inch toward the chair, like the chair might argue. "You can't lift a shield on two eggs, mijo. I don't know anything about it and I know that."
She patted my arm twice on the way out, and I heard her house shoes go down the walk.
* * *
So I sat down at the kitchen table with the plate and the laptop and registered as a dungeon diver.
I'd been able to do that for about twenty hours and hadn't. I'd been telling myself it was because I was busy.
The Association's site is boring the way government-adjacent sites are, where every button is a slightly different blue. I made an account. Name, date of birth, address, last four of my social.
Then a dropdown. TRAIT CLASS.
I sat there with the cursor on it for a stupid amount of time.
The chorizo was next to the laptop. I ate some of it with a fork while the cursor blinked, and it was good, it was really good, salty and greasy and hot, and it didn't help with the dropdown at all.
Then I picked F, and typed Exercise in the box next to it, and hit submit. No warning popup, no are you sure. Anybody with an awakened trait can register. There's no minimum. They'll take an F the same as an S, because the form doesn't know the difference and nobody's ever needed it to.
Nobody stops you. Everybody already knows how it ends for you, so they've stopped bothering to say it out loud.
MILES NORTH — DIVER, UNRANKED — REGISTERED.
I downloaded the app, and the map loaded, and I forgot to be bitter for a minute, because it's something to look at.
The whole valley lit up with pins. Dozens of them. Blue, green, a few yellow up in the north county, one orange out past Apache Junction with a red banner over it about an active clearing contract. Every portal in a hundred miles, live and color-coded, with a ripening estimate next to each one. There was no pin out past Buckeye. Nobody had ever put one there.
I tapped the orange one. Insufficient clearance. Detailed information is available for portals at or below your registered class.
Right. You get to see what you're rated for, and I'm rated for the bottom.
So I filtered to F.
Two near me.
The first one's eleven miles out, in a wash on the far side of the 51. F-rank, Insect. The app notes that it's "not recommended for solo entry by unlevelled divers," which I take to mean this is where people die on their first day.
The second one is four point six miles from my front door, behind a self-storage place on Bell Road. It's been blue for nine years. Inspected quarterly. It's the single most boring hole in the ground in the state of Arizona.
F-rank. Slime.
I zoomed in on it until the pin filled the whole screen.
The satellite view under it was a gravel lot and the long flat roofs of the units, white in the sun, and behind them a little square of chain-link around nothing you could see from up there. Somebody's car was parked in the shot, blurred out. I sat and stared at that square of fence until the screen dimmed, and tapped it awake, and kept staring.
Twenty days, I thought. Twenty days and I'm going in there.
* * *
I got up to write the day on the legal pad, and that's when the other thing hit me, and I stood at the fridge holding the pen for a while.
The cap is per stat. Strength, Stamina, Agility, all separate, all running at the same time, all capped on their own.
There are four stats on my screen.
Everybody on earth knows how to train three of them. There are ten thousand books about it, and a gym on every corner.
The fourth one, school does for you, sort of, up to eighteen, whether you like it or not. After the crystal nobody's ever tried, because for everybody else it doesn't move. Nobody knows what counts. Is it a page of homework? A chess game? An hour of anything hard?
But it's sitting right there on my status screen with a number next to it, same as the rest.
Intelligence: 8.
And I'm throwing it away, two tenths a day, every day, because I don't know what a rep looks like.
I wrote it on the pad under SHIELD, and drew a box around it.
Can I train Intelligence?
What counts?