The alarm went off at four forty-five and I had to walk across the room to shut it up, which was the whole point of putting it there, and I stood by the dresser in the dark hating the guy who'd set it.
Then I went out back.
Ninety-one degrees. At a quarter to five in the morning. This city doesn't cool off in July so much as briefly stop yelling at you.
But it was dark, and the concrete had given back most of what it was holding, and there's that one hour before the sun clears the Superstitions where Phoenix is almost decent. Flat grey light, doves already going, the whole valley quiet in a way it isn't again until about midnight.
My legs were wrecked from the night before. Every step down off the porch was a negotiation.
Yesterday I learned that strength and stamina cost me a tenth of a point per session. Today's question was the one I'd been avoiding, because I didn't like either answer.
Agility. 6. My worst number, four full points off the target, and the one I've never been able to move. Two years of trying and it's still a 6. Not because I slacked on it. Because that's what I'm shaped like.
If the trait couldn't move agility, then the ceiling on my entire life was slow guy who can lift things, and I was about to find that out.
I got the jump rope out of the garage.
Jump rope is the most honest exercise there is. You can't cheat it and you can't fake it, because the rope tells on you immediately and out loud. Either you got over it or you didn't, and everybody inside of forty feet can hear which one.
Three sets of a hundred. I do it in a pattern I picked up off a video a few years back. Right foot twice, left foot twice, then alternating, then start over. Makes your feet be somewhere specific instead of just bouncing.
First set I caught the rope on my ankle at thirty-one and again at seventy. Stiff, sloppy, half asleep.
Second set was cleaner.
Third set I went through all hundred without a break, and by the end my calves were screaming and the rope was slapping the concrete in this quick steady rhythm echoing off the block wall, and somewhere two yards over a dog had started barking at me about it.
I stopped. Bent over with my hands on my knees.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained agility training registered.
Agility +0.1
─────────────────────────────
I said something out loud that I'm not going to write down, at five fifteen in the morning, in my own backyard, with my whole chest.
It works on agility.
It works on the one I was born bad at. There's nothing on that screen the trait won't touch. Whatever I am at the bottom of all this, it isn't fixed and it isn't decided and it isn't what I'm shaped like. It's just where I'm standing at the moment.
I went and got the ladder.
The agility ladder is a rope-and-webbing thing you flatten out on the ground, ten squares, and then you run patterns through it. Two feet in the box, two feet out, down and back. It looks completely ridiculous. Football players and boxers have been doing it for a hundred years because it works.
I did fifty lengths.
Somewhere in the thirties the sun came up over the wall and the temperature started climbing in real time, five degrees in twenty minutes, the way it does here. By fifty I couldn't feel the difference between my feet and the ground.
I sat down on the patio step with my forearms on my knees and waited for the screen.
It came.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained agility training registered.
Agility +0.1
Notice: F-Class trait limitation. Each stat may be increased by a maximum of 0.2 points per day.
─────────────────────────────
I read it three times.
Then I got up and did the ladder again, all fifty, in the sun at a hundred degrees with my legs already gone, out of pure spite, because I wanted the system to tell me no to my face.
Nothing. No screen. Not even a no. Just the doves, and me standing in the backyard with my heart going and sweat running off my chin onto the webbing.
So I did the jump rope. Two hundred straight through, ugly the whole way.
Nothing.
I sat down on the step and put my head in my hands.
* * *
Here's what that notice actually means. Took me until the shower to work all the way through it.
It doesn't mean I can't get strong. It means I had the whole thing backwards.
I'd been thinking, okay, I've got no money and no allies and no class letter and no plan, but I have one thing nobody else on earth has, which is that I will out-work anybody. I'll do six sessions a day. I'll do ten. I'll out-suffer the entire awakened world.
No I won't. Two tenths and the well's dry until tomorrow. The tenth push-up and the four hundredth are worth exactly the same thing once you've hit the number, which is nothing.
Working hard isn't the resource here. Days are.
And I've got a fixed number of those before the money's gone.
Do the arithmetic and it comes out clean and ugly.
Strength is at 8 and needs to be 10. That's two points, so ten days.
Stamina's at 7. Three points. Fifteen days.
Agility's at 6. Four points. Twenty days.
The cap is per stat. They run at the same time, so I don't add those up, I take the worst one.
Twenty days. Twenty days of two hard sessions in every stat, no misses, no sick days, no days where the heat wins or I just don't feel like it. And I come out the other end at 10/10/10 and get to walk into the easiest portal in the county as something other than a corpse that hasn't happened yet.
Twenty days is nothing. Twenty days is July.
The other half of it took a minute longer. A missed day isn't a setback now, it's a theft, and it's permanent. You can't do 0.4 tomorrow to make it up. The day goes in the ground and it doesn't come back out.
I stood in the shower and felt the whole thing turn over from despair into something that at least had edges on it.
Fine. Twenty days. I can count to twenty.
* * *
Made eggs and toast and put the news on, which I only ever do for the portal ticker at the bottom.
They led with it. A break overnight out past Buckeye. A portal had ripened all the way to red inside a factory that shut down in 2011, and nobody knew it was there. No fence, no sign, no number to call, because nobody had been inside that building in fourteen years.
They cut to a guildmaster in a polo shirt talking about response times. They cut to the parking lot with the lights going. Said the word fatalities and then went to weather.
I stood there with the spatula in my hand.
That's what people outside it don't get. The monitored ones aren't 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.
Careful. Everybody always said careful.
I turned the TV off.
* * *
Then I sat down at the kitchen table with the laptop and registered as a dungeon diver.
I'd been able to do that for about eighteen hours and hadn't. I'd been telling myself it was because I was busy.
The Association's site is aggressively boring, the kind of government-adjacent web design 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.
Then I picked F, and typed Exercise in the box next to it, and hit submit. That was it. No warning popup, no are you sure. Nobody at the Association cares even a little. Anybody with an awakened trait can register, there's no minimum, and they'll take an F the same as they'd take an S because the form doesn't know the difference and nobody's ever needed it to.
Which is sort of the shape of the whole thing, I'm starting to realize. Nobody stops you. There's no door with a guard on it. It's that 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 genuinely 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, color-coded, with a ripening estimate next to each one.
I tapped the orange. 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.
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 is 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.
Twenty days, I thought. Twenty days and I'm going in there.
I put the phone down and went to write the day on the legal pad, and that's when the other thing hit me, and I stood in the kitchen holding the pen for a while.
The cap is per stat. Strength, stamina, agility, all separate, all running at once, 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. There's a gym on every corner in this city full of people doing it right now for reasons that have nothing to do with portals.
Nobody knows how to train the fourth one. Nobody's ever had to, because nobody's ever had a body where it would do anything.
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 out, two tenths a day, every day, because I don't know what a rep looks like.
I wrote it on the pad and drew a box around it.
Can I train Intelligence?
What counts?