Day 17. Strength 10.5. Stamina 9.5. Agility 8.4. Intelligence 8.5.
Those are the numbers I finished Day 13 with.
Three days. Six tenths of Strength, six tenths of Stamina, six tenths of Agility, six tenths of Intelligence, gone in the ground and not coming back. Two point four points of a person, thrown away because a woman with a cane told me to go home. Two and a half if you want it exact, because I'd already lost a tenth of Intelligence on the Thursday by being too tired to hold two numbers at once. I did want it exact. I always want it exact.
Agility was the one that hurt. On Day 13 I was nine days from ten. On Day 17 I was eight days from ten, which sounds like progress and isn't, because those eight days now finish on Day 24 instead of Day 21. Three days lost, three days later. The arithmetic on this one is not complicated and that is the worst thing about it.
I spent Friday night furious about it and Saturday selling a truck and letting two men put a compressor in. Sunday I mostly slept, which was humiliating, because I hadn't meant to and it happened anyway. I lay down at two in the afternoon intending to close my eyes for twenty minutes and woke up at seven.
And then Monday morning at four fifteen I got out of bed before the alarm.
I hadn't done that in two weeks. Every morning of those two weeks had been a fight with a phone across the room.
I mopped the floor and did the corners and had the coffee on by four fifty, ten minutes ahead, and Hector said, "You're chipper," in a tone that suggested it was a flaw.
Everything was easier. All of it. Every session that day took less out of me than the same session the week before. The push-ups went from nineteen to twenty-four before I failed, and I got up off the mat afterward like I'd carried in groceries. The ladder work stopped feeling like wading. And that night, on the second Intelligence set, I held four partial products all the way through the carry on the first attempt, something I had never once managed on a first attempt.
Eight sessions. Eight notifications. Done by half past nine instead of half past eleven.
I'd lost nearly two and a half points to those three days, and I got most of a week of quality back for them, and I have never in my life enjoyed being wrong less than I enjoyed being wrong about that.
I told Coach the numbers were better, without telling her what the numbers were.
She said, "Mm," and did not look up, and I am fairly sure she enjoyed it enormously.
* * *
"Right," she said at nine. "Come in the back."
The back of Grindstone is a storeroom with a water heater in it and a lot of things nobody's thrown out. Mats, a busted rower, boxes of t-shirts from a fun run in 2014.
And against the wall, under a moving blanket, a rack of gear.
Not display gear. Used gear. Six or seven shields in a row, a couple of blunted training swords, a spear with the head taped, two mauls, a set of forearm guards with the padding coming out of one.
"You kept it," I said.
"I kept some of it." She pulled the blanket the rest of the way off and stood looking at the rack the way you look at a photograph. "The good stuff went when I needed the money. This is what nobody wanted."
She took down a shield and handed it to me and I nearly dropped it on my foot.
It's a kite shield, steel-rimmed, and standing on the floor it came up past my knee, and it weighed more than everything I have ever picked up on purpose. Coach watched me get my other hand under it.
"Eleven pounds," she said.
"It feels like forty."
"It feels like forty because you're holding it out in front of you like a serving tray, and eleven pounds at arm's length is not eleven pounds, it's a lever with eleven pounds on the end of it." She tapped my elbow. "In. Against the ribs. The shield doesn't live out there. It lives here, and you move your feet to put it where it needs to be."
That was the first correction. There were about four hundred more.
* * *
Here is the drill, and you can work out how bad I was from it.
Coach stood six feet away with a length of foam pipe insulation. Her job was to tap me wherever she wanted, shoulder, hip, head, knee, at whatever speed she felt like. My job was to have the shield there first.
Not block it. Have the shield there first.
Eleven pounds. A woman in her fifties with a cane in her other hand and one knee that doesn't bend.
You may be wondering how that went. She hit me eighty times in four minutes.
Somewhere around the twentieth I started lunging at it, reaching, swinging the shield out to meet the pipe, and that made it worse, because a shield swung out is a shield that isn't anywhere else, and she just started going where it wasn't.
Around forty I got winded, which is insane, and my grip started to go, and the rim came down and cracked me on the shin hard enough that I still have the mark.
At eighty she stopped and said, "What did you do wrong."
"Everything."
"That's a coward's answer. Say one thing."
I stood there breathing and honestly could not produce one thing. I had no idea. I had been inside it for four minutes and I could not tell you a single specific error, which tells you how little of it I was taking in.
"You watched the pipe," Coach said.
"I'm supposed to watch the pipe."
"You watched the pipe, which means you found out where it was going at the same time it got there. Watch my shoulder. Watch my hips. The pipe is the last thing that knows where the pipe is going." She sat down on an overturned crate, which is how I know the knee had had enough. "Again tomorrow. Twenty minutes a day, every day, for the rest of your life."
* * *
"You've got the wrong idea about what that is," she said, nodding at the shield. "You think it's for stopping things."
"It's a shield."
"It's a wall. Everybody in the room has to go around a wall." She leaned forward with her forearms on her good knee. "A slime can't get past you. Fine. That's the boring half. The useful half is that the thing behind you has four seconds to breathe, and the thing in front of you has to be standing in that spot, where you put it, instead of somewhere you'd hate.
"You don't block a fight. You shape it. A good shield decides where the fight happens. Everybody else just fights wherever it broke out."
I sat down on the mat with my arms shaking from eleven pounds and thought about a legal pad on a fridge in the first week of all this, and the word SHIELD with two lines under it, written by an eighteen-year-old who had picked it for the dumbest possible correct reason, which was that he was slow and did not want to die.
I'd chosen it as a way of surviving. She was telling me it's a way of running the room.
* * *
We did twenty minutes a day after that. Day 18 she hit me sixty-some times instead of eighty. It still ended with me on the mat.
Two other things from that week.
The first is that on Day 18 I asked her, as casually as I could manage, how long she'd had the gear in the back, and she said "a while," and that was the entire yield of about nine hours of me working up to the question. The punch card is in the drawer in my kitchen under the takeout menus. Twelve holes. I have taken it out probably thirty times.
The second is that at the end of Tuesday's twenty minutes, Coach said:
"You can't keep using that one."
"Why not?"
"Because it's mine, it doesn't fit you, and in about two weeks you're going to want to take a shield somewhere I can't come." She started wrapping the pipe insulation back around itself. "It's the wrong size anyway. That's a D-rank kite for a woman with a 31 in Strength. You need something you can hold up for six hours at a 10."
"I don't have money for a shield."
"No," she agreed. "You don't."
She got her cane off the crate.
"There's a place on Grand," she said. "Ask for Marguerite. Tell her I sent you and don't let her talk you into a buckler with a broken enarme, she's done it to three people I know."
"What's an enarme?"
Coach Reyes regarded me over the top of her glasses.
"Yeah," she said. "Go tomorrow. She opens at eight."