Day 29. Strength 12.7. Stamina 11.7. Agility 10.6. Intelligence 10.7.
Tom was in the lot at twenty of eight with the tailgate down and the clipboard on it, and he'd been there a while, because that's a man with a night job using the only quiet twenty minutes he gets.
Ren showed up at ten of and sat on the concrete parking block to put her boots on.
Colby came at four minutes to eight at a jog with his sword banging around on his back and said "I'm not late" before anybody said anything to him.
We stood in a gravel lot behind a self-storage place at eight in the morning at the end of July and it was already ninety-six degrees, and Tom put his finger on the clipboard.
"One more time, and then I'm not saying it again inside."
Formation. Tom front, because Tom does not slip and the floor in there is wet the whole way. Me on his right shoulder, half a step back, shield up when we come into a room. Ren behind the both of us in the middle where she can see past either side. Colby last, water and light, and Colby does not engage anything, ever, for any reason.
"Order in is order out," Tom said. "You come out in the same order you went in, every room, every time. That's how we know we're all here without counting heads in the dark."
Then the numbers.
"I call the room, I call the count, you answer the count. I say four, everybody says four. If you can't say four you say the number you've got and we stop moving." He looked at each of us. "Slime hole. Nobody dies in a slime hole from a slime. People die in here because somebody got separated three rooms back and nobody said a number out loud."
"Four," said Ren, flatly, to nobody, like she'd heard it two hundred times.
"Four," said Colby.
"Four," I said.
* * *
Two pairs of socks. I put the second pair in a ziplock in the side pocket where I could get at it one-handed.
Tom saw me do it and didn't say anything about it, and then about five seconds later, he said, "Who told you the socks."
"D-rank at the wash."
"Yeah," he said. "Good."
* * *
The Association's portal reader is a grey box bolted to a post inside the fence, and you tap your registration on it and it logs the party and the time. Under a flip cover on the side there's a red button marked ASSIST.
Four beeps.
PARTY 4 — DESCENT LOGGED 08:02.
And then there was nothing left to do, which I had not expected. You see, I'd been building toward this for twenty-nine days and I think somewhere in me I expected a gate, an inspector, somebody to check my class letter and make a face. There isn't one. There's a grey box, and a fence you walk around, and then a blue door under a county shade canopy that anybody in the world can step through.
Tom went first.
He didn't look back. He put his hand on the strap of his bag and walked into it the way you'd walk into a shed.
Then me.
* * *
It isn't a flash and it isn't a fall.
There's about half a second where you are not in either place. Pressure on the eardrums, like the moment the wheels leave the runway, and a feeling in the middle of your chest of being very slightly moved without going anywhere.
Then the cold hit me and I nearly said something out loud.
Sixty degrees. Maybe sixty-one. After a July in Phoenix, after four forty in a gym and a hundred and nine at a fence on Bell Road and a house at ninety-eight with a dead compressor, I stepped through a door in a parking lot into sixty-one degrees, and for two full seconds the only thing in my head was that it felt fantastic.
So my first experience of the inside of a portal was relief.
Then I looked at it.
The light is the part I can't get across properly. It comes off the walls themselves, low and even and a sort of grey-blue, the color of a swimming pool at night, and there is no source to it anywhere. Which means nothing casts a shadow. You don't notice how much of seeing is shadows until they're all gone. Everything sits in front of you flat, like a photograph of itself, and your eyes keep trying to find the edge of things and sliding off.
Distances lie. Tom told me they would and they did. A wall I'd have sworn was six feet off was eleven.
The tunnel was maybe nine feet high and wide enough for three of us across, and it was too regular. Not carved. Not a cave. The walls curved into the floor with no seam, like something poured, or like something grew that way on purpose, and every fifteen or twenty feet the whole passage stepped down a little, gently, so that you were always walking downhill and never noticed you had been.
The floor was wet. Not puddled. Filmed, everywhere, with about a millimeter of something that was mostly water.
And the sound was wrong. There wasn't any. No echo. The walls eat it. Four people walking and it sounded like four people walking in a closet.
It smelled like wet stone, and under that, faintly and unmistakably, like the back of a bakery.
* * *
"Second room's the first one with anything in it," Tom said, at a normal volume, which startled me. "Four."
"Four." "Four." "Four."
We went down.
Colby talked. I found out that this is a thing he does and that Tom and Ren have long since decided to let him, and by the end of the day I'd decided the same. He told me about a YouTube channel, and about his cousin, and about how the walls aren't actually wet, they're sweating, which he'd read somewhere and which I still don't know if it's true.
Ren said "Colby" once. He got quieter for about ninety seconds.
Then we came around the bend into the second room and Tom said "shield," and I put it up, and my whole body went somewhere it had never been.
* * *
It came out of the left side.
Knee high. About the size of one of those beanbag chairs, translucent, grey-blue like the light, and it moved like a dropped water balloon would if the balloon never burst and just kept going. There's a rolling to it. The whole mass turns over itself.
And inside it, drifting a little off-center, a dark thing the size of a walnut.
It made no noise whatsoever.
I had the shield at my ribs and my elbow in and my feet live and my heart going so hard I could feel it in the straps, and I had eleven days of a woman with a cane hitting me with pipe insulation, and I was ready. I was so ready. Every single thing I had done since I put my hand on that crystal was so that I could stand in that spot and be ready.
Tom stepped past my left shoulder and hit it with a maul.
Once, to flatten it against the floor, and once straight down through the middle, and the core went with a sound exactly like cracking a knuckle.
The whole thing came apart into about two gallons of water and a smell, and the water ran off across the floor and down the slope and away, and there was a walnut-sized dark lump sitting on the stone, and Tom bent over and picked it up and put it in his bag.
"That's one," he said. "Four."
"Four." "Four."
"...Four," I said.
Six seconds. Maybe seven.
* * *
It was easy. That's the whole thing. It was so easy that I never got to the part I'd been training for. A man with a night job at a distribution center walked past me and killed it with two swings the way you'd break down a cardboard box, and then he said a number, and we kept walking.
Twenty-nine days. A hundred and sixty-odd sessions. A six-hundred-dollar shield, a woman hitting me eighty times in four minutes, a headache at a kitchen table over two four-digit numbers.
All of it together has made me adequate at the easiest thing in the world.
And Coach Reyes told me something on Day 8 that I understood with my head and did not understand at all, which is that Bryce Halloran will be a 14 in Strength by Christmas because a guild will walk him through enough rooms just like this one. I got it in my head then. I got it in my stomach standing on a wet floor at 8:11 in the morning watching two gallons of water run downhill.
That's what this is. That's what everybody gets. That's what I have spent a month becoming barely qualified to be allowed near.
Tom was already twelve feet down the tunnel.
"Twenty-five, thirty of them," he said over his shoulder. "You'll get sick of it by ten."