Day 7. Strength 9.1. Stamina 8.1. Agility 7.0. Intelligence 8.0, same as the day I got it.
To run the experiment again I had to get to eight o'clock at night with Strength untouched.
Which sounds easy. It is not easy, when you work in a gym, for a woman who is teaching you for free.
I mopped. I did the racks and the chalk bowls and the six scoops. Hector came in at five on the dot and told me the mop water smelled like a pool, which I think was a compliment. Priya beat her own rowing time by four seconds and made me look at the screen to confirm it. Wendell told me about a guy he used to work with. I don't remember the point of the story and I'm not sure there was one.
And at seven Coach came in, and I started lying.
Not out loud. I just didn't go all the way.
She had me on floor press, light, high rep, working the same thing she'd been drilling into me all week. And I did every rep clean, because she'd have caught anything else in about a second. I just stopped four or five short every set. Left it in the tank. Came up off the bench breathing easy when I should have been breathing hard.
She let it go for about twenty minutes.
Then she said, "What are you doing."
"Sets of fifteen."
"You're doing sets of fifteen the way a man does sets of nine." She was leaning on the counter with her arms folded. "Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Are you sick."
"No."
"Then what."
And there it was. The whole thing sitting in my mouth. I have a trait that gives me stat points for exercise and a cap of two tenths a day and I have to save my strength allowance until tonight so I can measure something nobody on Earth has ever measured.
Try saying that out loud to anybody. Go ahead. Try it in a room with fluorescent lights and a rag bucket in it.
She'd have thought I was lying, or crazy, or fishing for something. And the one thing I had at Grindstone, the actual valuable thing, was that a person who used to be a C-rank looked at me like a person. I wasn't going to spend that.
"I'm just tired," I said.
Which was true and was not the answer and we both knew it.
Coach let the quiet go a second longer than was comfortable.
"Okay," she said, and went to go help Annette with something, and did not come back over for the rest of the morning.
That was worse than being yelled at. I'd have taken the yelling.
* * *
I got home at half past twelve and did agility, which was allowed, and stamina, which was allowed, and then spent seven hours not doing anything with my upper body while the house cooked.
Around four I sat at the kitchen table and read the legal pad for probably the fortieth time.
Around six I cleaned the kitchen, which I had not done in a while.
Around seven I started to get nervous, which is insane. It's push-ups. I was nervous about push-ups.
At eight I went out to the patio with my mom's purple mat and did it properly.
Coach's version. Hollow, ribs pulled down, elbows in at forty-five, everything locked from my heels to my neck so the whole body moved as one piece instead of four pieces arguing.
I got nineteen again. Same as the first time. There's something almost funny about that. The body is a very boring machine when you're honest with it.
Nineteen and then twenty was not available, not with anything, not if you'd offered me money. I came down on the twentieth and my chest touched the mat and that was the end of the transaction.
I rolled onto my back.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained strength training registered.
Strength +0.1
─────────────────────────────
And I lay there on the patio looking at it and felt, for about thirty seconds, crushed.
Because that's the same number.
Day 5, sloppy, garbage form, forty reps: Strength +0.1. Day 7, clean, perfect, nineteen reps: Strength +0.1.
Same. No bonus. No multiplier. The system doesn't care how pretty it is. I'd spent a week wondering and I'd burned a whole morning of Coach's good opinion to find out that technique buys me exactly nothing.
I got up and went inside and stood in front of the open refrigerator in the way that you do.
* * *
I stood there long enough that the fridge started beeping at me, and somewhere in that I understood what I'd actually found.
It came to me in the wrong order, by being wrong first, which is the only route I've got.
The thing that got through was: nineteen.
Nineteen reps. Not forty. The clean session cost me nineteen reps and the sloppy session cost me forty, and they paid the same.
Which means technique doesn't buy points.
It buys cost.
All week I'd thought the cap was the problem. Two tenths a day, fixed, can't beat it, days are the currency, I'd underlined it on the pad. Fine. True.
But if the reward is fixed, then the only variable left is what it takes out of me to collect it.
And that matters more than anything, because I'm not collecting it once. I have to collect it tomorrow. And the day after. And every single day for months, in four separate stats, while working a job, in a Phoenix summer, with nobody to cover for me if I break.
On Day 5, forty sloppy push-ups took everything I had and left me lying on the concrete. I did nothing else that night.
Tonight, nineteen clean ones hurt worse in the moment and then I got up off the mat and I was fine.
So I tested it. Ninety minutes later, at half past nine, I went back out and did a full lower-body circuit.
Stamina +0.1
And then at eleven, because days are the currency and there was still a tenth of Strength sitting on the table, I went out a third time and got back down on the mat.
Seventeen. Two fewer than at eight o'clock, every one of them Coach's version.
Strength +0.1
Two stats and a full strength allowance in one evening, off work half the size of what I'd been doing.
* * *
I wrote it on the pad that night in capitals.
THE SYSTEM PAYS FOR THE WORK BEING HARD. GOOD TECHNIQUE MAKES THE WORK HARD SOONER.
Everything between nineteen and forty on the old version was damage I'd been taking for free. I'd built my whole plan, and most of my personality, on working as hard as possible, against a number that was fixed. What I needed was to hit it at the lowest cost to my body, so I could come back tomorrow and do it again, and keep doing it for a year.
And the person who knows more about that than anyone in the state of Arizona is a woman with a bad knee who is currently not speaking to me.
* * *
I went in on Day 8 at four thirty instead of four forty, and mopped, and did the corners, and had the coffee on before Hector got there.
At seven Coach came in and put her bag down behind the counter and didn't look at me.
"Coach."
"Mm."
"Yesterday I wasn't tired."
She stopped and looked up.
"I can't tell you what it was," I said. "I want to. I can't yet. But I wasn't dogging it because I don't care, I was doing it on purpose for a reason, and it was a real reason, and it's done now and it's not going to happen again."
Coach Reyes didn't answer.
That pause went on. I was eighteen and I'd been alone in a house for two years and I had exactly one adult outside my own street who would notice if I stopped showing up, and I'd just told her I was keeping something from her and asked her to be fine with it.
"Everybody's got something," she said eventually. She pulled the clipboard off the wall. "Don't do it on my floor. If you need a morning, ask me for the morning and I'll give you the morning."
"Okay."
"Warm up. You're doing split squats and you're going to hate them."
I hated them.
* * *
That night I stood at the fridge with the pen and looked at the legal pad, and the boxed-in question was still there in my handwriting from Day 2, and it had been there for six days.
Can I train Intelligence? What counts?
Six days. At two tenths a day, that's one and two tenths points of Intelligence I have thrown directly into the ground because I don't know what the exercise is.
Nobody knows what the exercise is.
Nobody has ever had to know. For every other awakener on the planet, Intelligence is a number that gets handed to you at a level-up and is otherwise as fixed as your eye color. There's no gym for it. There's no Coach Reyes for it, because there's never once been a customer.
The fridge hummed. I didn't write anything for a minute.
Then I got a fresh page and wrote at the top:
THINGS THAT MIGHT COUNT AS EXERCISE FOR A BRAIN
And under it I wrote read a book, because I had to start somewhere, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing.