Day 19. Strength 10.9. Stamina 9.9. Agility 8.8. Intelligence 8.9.
The place on Grand doesn't have a name. It has a sign that says USED EQUIPMENT — ALL RANKS — WE BUY, and under that, smaller, CONSIGNMENT WELCOME, and that second line is the whole business and everybody knows it.
I got there at eight in the morning, because Coach had sent me and said the floors could wait till ten, and because I wanted to be out before the heat.
It's a long room with a concrete floor and better lighting than you'd expect, and it is organized within an inch of its life. That surprised me. I'd pictured a junk shop. It's closer to a shoe store. Racks by rank, F through C down the left wall, and then a locked cage at the back for anything above that, and everything tagged, and everything clean.
Marguerite is maybe sixty, with a pencil pushed through a grey bun, and she was doing a crossword when I came in and did not stop doing it.
"Reyes sent me," I said.
"Course she did." She filled in a word. "You the F-Class?"
I have to assume my face did something, because she looked up for the first time.
"She called me last night," Marguerite said. "Relax."
* * *
You see, everything in that shop is secondhand.
Which is fine. Most gear is. Divers upgrade, divers change builds, divers quit.
But some of it comes in because a person didn't come back.
There's no sign about it. Nobody mentions it. It's just a fact of the business that a portion of the inventory in every used-gear shop in the country arrives from an estate, and the estate is generally a person in their twenties or thirties, and somebody's mother or husband or brother drove it down here in a car and took whatever was offered because they wanted it out of the house.
You can tell which ones, if you look. Gear that gets traded in has been cleaned and cared for and the straps have been replaced. Gear that comes from an estate has been used right up until Tuesday. There's still tape on the grip where somebody's hand liked it.
I stood in front of the F and E racks for a while thinking about a truck in a garage with a vanilla clip still on the vent.
Then Marguerite said, "You want a shield, or you want to stand there," and I got on with it.
* * *
She pulled down four.
The first was a round steel buckler, sixteen inches, light, about as basic as it gets. Two hundred and forty dollars.
"No," she said, before I'd got my hand on it. "That one's for a person who's going to dodge. Reyes says you're a wall. Walls don't buy bucklers."
She put it back and I noticed, a half second late, that the enarme on it had a repair on it. The enarme, I know now, is the strap your forearm goes through.
Three people she's done it to.
"You just—"
"I test," Marguerite said, without embarrassment. "It's a good shield for the right person and you'd have put it back yourself in a month and I'd have bought it off you for a hundred. Next."
The second was a heater shield, steel-rimmed ply, thirty inches, nine and a half pounds. Six hundred dollars.
The third was the same thing but aluminum-faced, lighter, newer, with a guild's stencil sanded off the front. Eight hundred and fifty.
The fourth was a slab of a thing at fourteen pounds that she admitted immediately was for someone with a 20 Strength and was only out here because she liked watching young men try to pick it up.
I picked up the second one and didn't put it down.
Nine and a half pounds. Thirty inches. Steel rim, plywood core, canvas over the face, leather enarme and a leather grip both of which had been replaced at some point by somebody who knew what they were doing.
Coach's drill is twenty minutes. A dive is six hours. I stood in the middle of that shop and held a nine-and-a-half pound shield at my ribs and tried to imagine hour four, and could not, and understood that not being able to imagine it was the answer to whether I was ready.
"How much with the straps redone?"
"They're done. That's why it's six." Marguerite folded her arms. "The ply's got a season in it, maybe two, then you'll crack the core and you'll want steel through and through. The rim's honest. Nobody died on it, if that's what your face is doing."
"It wasn't."
"It was."
* * *
I had just over ten thousand dollars, a burn rate of eleven hundred a month, and nothing left in the house worth selling, and I could do the whole calculation in about a second, which is the curse of being able to do the calculation.
Six hundred dollars is sixteen days of hallway.
And I stood there and thought about it honestly, which meant thinking about the version where I don't buy it.
Because I don't need a shield for six more days. Agility hits 10 the night of Day 24, and Day 25 is the earliest I go anywhere near a portal. I could keep using Coach's D-rank kite in the back room for another month and save the six hundred and buy this in August.
That's the responsible answer. That's what a sensible person does.
I didn't wait, because what I'm shortest of is reps. Every day I train on a shield that isn't the shield, I'm learning a set of distances that are wrong. Coach's kite is thirty-eight inches and lives at a different height and swings on a different arc, and every single one of the eighty taps she gives me is teaching my body an answer I'll have to unlearn.
Six hundred dollars to stop practicing wrong. Which is the same bill I paid with nineteen push-ups on Day 7 and again with three rest days on Day 14, showing up a third time in a shop on Grand wearing a different hat.
"I'll take it," I said.
* * *
Marguerite ran the card and then went in the back and came out with a strip of leather and a punch and sat down on a stool and adjusted the enarme to my forearm right there on the counter, which she did not have to do and did not charge me for.
"How long you been diving," she said, working the punch.
"I haven't."
Her hands stopped for about a half second.
"You bought a shield before your first dive."
"Is that bad?"
"It's backwards." She got the strip through and tested it. "Most of them buy a sword before their first dive. Every single time. Eighteen years old, saves up, comes in here, buys the biggest thing he can lift, and then you see him back in October selling it because he got out of an F-rank slime hole with his hands shaking and decided to go be an electrician."
She handed it across the counter.
"Nobody buys the shield first," Marguerite said. "Tell Reyes I said so."
* * *
I put it in the passenger seat of the car because it wouldn't have made sense in the trunk. Drove it home with the AC blowing warm and my hand on it at every stop light, like a kid.
Then I spent the afternoon in the backyard finding out what nine and a half pounds actually is.
Twenty minutes was optimistic. At about nine minutes my left forearm went from burning to that other thing, the hum, the one I know from the lunge on Day 1. At eleven minutes the shield came down about four inches without my permission and I understood in a physical way what it means that I'm a 10 in Strength and not a 15.
I did it in four-minute blocks for an hour and a half with rests, holding it at my ribs, moving my feet, watching an imaginary shoulder.
Strength +0.1
Strength +0.1
Both in one afternoon. Cap met, and I hadn't even started on the rest.
And it registered on Stamina too, on the second block, which I hadn't expected. The system doesn't care what an exercise is called. It cares what ran out. Hold a shield until your arm fails and it's a strength session. Hold the same shield in the same hour until your lungs fail and it's a stamina session.
* * *
That night I stood the shield against the wall in the living room where you can see it from the kitchen.
It doesn't look like much. It's a scuffed plywood-and-steel thing with a canvas face and somebody else's repairs on the straps, and it cost me sixteen days.
I sat at the table and did the numbers, and then sat there looking at it longer than the numbers took.
Six days to Day 25. Ten across the board, and a shield, and a portal behind a self-storage place on Bell Road that has been blue for nine years. And no party. No plan for getting one, and no earthly reason for three strangers to let a level 1 F-Class walk in behind them.
Six days is not enough time to make anybody trust you. I should have started on that two weeks ago and I had been too busy enjoying the part I was good at.
I turned the light off. The shape of it stayed there against the wall, and I went to bed at ten, the way I'm supposed to now.