Day 29, continued. 8:40 a.m.
Four hours in an F-rank portal is mostly walking.
Rooms that are empty. Most rooms are empty. You come around a bend with your shield up and your heart going and there's nothing in there, and you stand in the doorway breathing for a second, and then Tom says a number and you go to the next one.
Cold. I had not thought about cold since May. Sixty-one degrees is a beautiful temperature for about twenty minutes and then you notice that you're wet from the knees down, and that the air has a damp in it, and that every time you stop moving for ninety seconds your hands start going. By hour three I was shivering in a room in July, in Phoenix, and I'd have paid money for a hoodie.
And underneath all of it, constantly, the walls with no shadows, so that your eyes never stop working and never get anywhere. That's the thing that actually wears you out. Not the shield. The light.
* * *
I killed my first one at about 8:40.
It came at me from the front in a small room off the main slope and I did what I'd been shown, which is put the shield down at an angle to take the roll out of it, and then hit the core with a three-pound engineer's hammer.
It took three swings because I missed once.
That's all. That's the entire event. I'd like to be able to tell you something about it and there isn't anything. The core cracked, the thing came apart into water, the water ran off down the slope, and I bent over and picked up a wet walnut and put it in the bag on my hip, and a small screen came up in the corner, Kill registered, and went away. Kills go to whoever breaks the core, and Tom had been rotating them so everybody got a share. Tom said "Six," and I said "Four," which was what was left in the room, and we kept going.
I'd spent twenty-nine days getting ready to be a person who could do that.
It felt like taking out the trash.
* * *
The others fell into their shapes fast.
Tom walks all of it at the same pace, a little slower than you'd want to go, and he does not speed up when you can see the next room and he does not slow down when you're tired. He has one speed and it is the speed you can still be doing at hour six. He called every room and every count and by hour two he had stopped counting the slimes himself and handed it to me.
"You're the one who says numbers," he said. "Keep the kill count. Tell me if I ask and tell me if I don't."
Ren barely talks in there. The count, and that's about it. She puts her hand out flat when she wants everybody to stop, and twice she lit an ember about three feet in front of a slime that was sitting in a corner not doing anything, and both times the slime came at the flame instead of at us, which is a whole tactic she's built out of a trait she calls a lighter.
Colby talks the entire time and it turns out this is load-bearing. You can hear where he is without looking. Around hour two I worked out that Tom has never once told him to be quiet.
Also Colby carries six liters of water in a space the size of a shoebox that isn't anywhere, and hands it over one bottle at a time, and never drinks first.
* * *
At about 10:05 we hit the halfway mark on Tom's map and he called a stop and everybody sat down on the dry side of a slope, and we changed our socks.
Four people in a grey-blue room with no shadows in it, sitting on cold stone, taking their boots off.
My feet were already soft. Two hours. I had followed the instructions exactly, dry socks on at eight in the morning, and two hours in, the skin on both heels had gone the color and texture of something that's been in a bath too long. Sandoval was right, and she was right about the shape of it too. It doesn't hurt. You don't notice it, and then you're limping, and then you're slow.
I got the ziplock out one-handed and did it in about forty seconds and Tom looked over.
"Huh," he said, for the second time in three days.
* * *
The strap went at 11:40.
Not the enarme. The rivet above it, the one through the ply on the upper left, and it didn't break so much as it pulled. The head of it came through the plywood core like a nail through drywall, slow, over about four rooms, and I felt the shield start sitting an inch lower on my forearm and told myself it was my arm.
Then it let go completely while I was pinning a slime and the whole shield rotated off my arm and hung from the grip and the slime came over the top of it onto my boot.
Tom killed it. I sat down on the floor with my heart going and a shield hanging off one hand.
"Okay," Tom said. "Colby."
"Yeah."
"The tape."
Colby reached into nothing up to the wrist and came out with a roll of gaffer tape.
And then Tom Guzmán, who does order picking on a night shift in Tolleson, took my six-hundred-dollar shield away from me, turned it over, looked at the hole, said, "Ply. Yeah. She tell you it'd go in a season?" Then he drilled a new hole two inches over with the tip of my box knife, worked the rivet through, backed it with three inches of folded tape on the inside face, and gave it back.
The whole thing took under four minutes.
"That'll hold today," he said. "It won't hold twice. Take it back to whoever sold it to you and make her put a steel plate behind the enarme, it's forty bucks."
"How do you know that?"
"Because mine did it," Tom said, "in New River, in a kobold, in 2022, and nobody was carrying tape."
* * *
The screens started at hour two and I nearly gave myself away.
I was holding the shield through a room. Just holding it, elbow in, feet live, the way I'd done for nineteen minutes and forty seconds on a Tuesday while Coach said nothing at all. And my forearm went from burning into the hum, and then:
Exercise session complete.
Sustained strength training registered.
Strength +0.1
In a portal. Grey-blue light, a wet floor, three strangers, and a pale blue box hanging in the air a foot in front of my face that nobody else in the room could see.
I got the second one forty minutes later, which capped Strength. Stamina went at about eleven. Agility came in somewhere on the second level from four hours of not-slipping on a wet slope, which is apparently a thing.
I had written this Saturday off. I'd sat at the kitchen table on Wednesday night and done the arithmetic and accepted it. One dive is one day, one day is eight tenths of a point across four stats, and I was spending it to get levels instead. That was the trade and I'd made peace with it.
There was no trade.
Six hours of holding a wall up and walking downhill in the cold does everything a backyard does, because the system has never once cared what an exercise is called. It cares what ran out. And I'd found that out ten days ago on my own patio with a shield I'd just bought, and I still hadn't thought it all the way through, because I'd been thinking of diving and training as two different activities.
They are the same activity. One of them also pays.
I stood in a tunnel under Bell Road with my forearm humming and kept it to myself, and it was the loneliest I have felt in a long time.
* * *
Hour four, and we were tired in the specific way where people get short.
Ren snapped at Colby over the water, which was nothing, and Colby went quiet for a while, which was worse than the snapping. Tom let it sit for about ten minutes and then, out of nowhere, in the same flat voice he says the counts in:
"Hey. First time I did this I threw up in the parking lot after. Not in here. After."
Colby said, "...Really?"
"Everybody does something." Tom shifted his bag. "You don't get less scared doing this. You get scared on a schedule. Right now's the part where it's boring and cold and you've got nothing to do but be scared, so it comes up and finds you. It passes at about hour five."
"What happens at hour five," I said.
"You want to go home so bad you stop being scared."
Ren laughed, once, through her nose, and reached over and knocked her knuckles against Colby's boot, and that was the apology, and it was accepted.
* * *
We came off the end of the second level at 11:58 and Tom stopped at the mouth of the ramp down to the third and looked back at me.
"Count."
"Twenty-four."
He nodded and started to turn.
And I stood there with the number in my mouth, because I'd been holding it for four hours the way I hold four partial products, and it had been sitting wrong for about twenty minutes and I had been telling myself I was tired.
"Tom."
"Yeah."
"The listing says twenty to thirty."
"Yeah."
"We haven't been down the third level."