Day 61. Strength 24.3. Stamina 23.2. Agility 14.6. Intelligence 17.0.
I wrote eleven replies to that text and sent none of them.
The first one was at 9:53 on Monday night, a minute after it came in, and it said I was going to tell you, which was true, and which I deleted because it was also what everybody says. The one at 4:10 on Tuesday morning, before the Intelligence set, was a full paragraph about the phone call I'd been saving him on four hours' sleep. I read it back and it sounded like a lawyer. The one on Wednesday at lunch just said Sorry. I had my thumb over the button for that one long enough for the screen to go dark.
Then I put the phone face down on the kitchen table and decided I'd say it at the tables, to his face, the way you're supposed to. That was a decision too, and I made it on my own, and I noticed that and did it anyway.
* * *
I got there at ten to nine. Colby was already there with a bag of rolled tacos, eating them out of the bag, not putting them in the middle of the table this time, which I noticed. He pushed the bag an inch toward me without looking up. I didn't take one.
Ren came at five to with her hair still wet from somewhere, twisted up in a clip, dripping a dark spot onto the back of her shirt. She sat at the end of the bench instead of across from me. It was ninety-something and there were moths going round and round the Filiberto's sign, and the drive-thru speaker kept asking somebody if that was everything.
Tom came at 9:04. He sat down on the bench across from me and put the packet on the table and put his hand flat on it, and waited until I was done not eating a taco.
"Okay," he said. "Go."
So I told him. Not the paragraph, just what happened. That I'd sat in my car in the lot after the call with the AC blowing hot air, and I'd had Sandoval's number, and I'd thought it would save him a call on no sleep, and I'd texted her before I'd decided to. That she'd called back in four minutes and told me to tell him, and I'd said I would, and then I hadn't.
"Why not," said Tom.
"I don't know."
"Yeah you do."
The tacos had gone quiet. Colby was holding one about halfway to his mouth.
"Because if I told you, you'd be mad," I said, "and if I didn't tell you, maybe she wouldn't mention it."
"She mentioned it in the first ten seconds." Tom took his hand off the packet. "I called her at quarter to ten from the 10, I had my whole thing ready, I'm the lead, here's what we found, here's what the Association said. And she goes, 'Yeah, Miles told me. It stands.' And then there's nothing for me to say. I'm just a guy on the phone."
"I'm sorry."
"I know you are. That's not the part I care about." He turned the packet a quarter of the way round on the table with one finger, and back. "Saturday I said not you at the bottom of something on your own. You said okay. And then Monday you did it in a parking lot."
"It was one text."
"It was the same thing. It was just smaller."
* * *
Ren hadn't said anything yet. That was unusual enough that I'd been watching her the whole time without looking at her, the way you keep track of where somebody is.
"You did the yes over text," she said. "Again."
"It wasn't a yes. I asked a question."
"You asked a question that was Tom's to ask, on a contract you took at the counter without us, and now the guild's guy reads that we called the Association before he reads anything else, and he reads it as your call, not ours." She said it all in one breath, without any heat in it, like a list of medications. "I'm not mad. I'm just saying it so it's been said."
She was a little mad.
Colby put the taco down.
"I would've texted her too," he said. "Just so you know. I'd have done the exact same thing."
"That doesn't help, Colby," said Ren.
"I know. I'm just saying he's not, like, a criminal."
Tom almost laughed. It didn't get all the way out but it was there, and something in the middle of my chest let go about half an inch.
* * *
"Okay," Tom said. "Saturday."
He turned the packet to the map and put it in the middle of the table, under the light from the Filiberto's sign, which made everything on it a little red.
"I talked to their mom," he said. "I'm going. I want to say that first so nobody thinks they're voting for me. That doesn't mean you have to." He waited on each of us in turn, Ren and then Colby.
"I'm going," said Ren. "I told you what it's for."
"I'm going," said Colby. "My mom thinks it's a warehouse again. I'm going to tell her after. Probably."
Tom looked at me last.
"Yes," I said, and he nodded like that was the one he'd already counted.
"Then I need one thing from all of you," he said, "and it's not a vote." He tapped level two. "The water. We get to it, we put a thermometer in it, and we read it. If it's normal we go on and do the job. If it's not normal we turn around, all of us, and walk out, and we don't get paid, and we don't get registered, and I drive Ren to her fit test anyway."
"What's normal," said Colby.
Tom looked at me.
You see, I'd been doing that number since Saturday, mostly at four in the morning. Inside Bell Road it was sixty-one degrees at the door, and I'd felt it in my fingers by hour three. Down by the fourth tunnel I'd stopped shivering and been too glad about it to ask why. Water that's been sitting in a stone basin for a year is going to be whatever the stone is. Dev said bathwater. Bathwater is something like a hundred.
"Sixty-one is the air," I said. "If nothing's wrong the water's sixty-one, maybe sixty because it's wet. A couple of degrees either way could be the thermometer. It's nine dollars."
"So what's the line?"
There was an answer. I'd had it for two days. Somewhere in the low seventies, where it stopped being the thermometer and started being something heating the stone from underneath, and I could have said that number and said why, and the three of them would have taken it, because I'm the one who counts.
I didn't say it.
"You pick it," I said. "You're the one reading it."
Tom took a while.
"Seventy," he said. "Seventy or higher, we walk."
"Okay."
"And I read it. Nobody else. I put it in, I read it, I say the number out loud, and whatever the number is, that's what we do." He wrote 70 on page one, big, and drew a box round it. "Ren, you write it down after I say it, so it's not just me."
"Okay," said Ren.
"And when I say up," Tom said, and now he was talking only to me, "you go up first. Not last. Not 'one second, Tom.' First."
I thought about Bell Road. About the shield set in the middle of the floor and everything going round me, and saying I'll be right behind you, and not being.
"First," I said.
* * *
It went back to normal after that, more or less. Colby wanted to know if a kobold could swim and nobody knew. Ren read us the email from the clinic that said her mask fit test was Tuesday at seven a.m., which was the first time anyone had written down a day after Saturday like it was going to happen. Tom went down the gear list again and made Colby say out loud everything that was in the Pocket, and it took four minutes, and two of the things were snacks.
At twenty to ten Tom stood up and put his keys in his hand.
"Thermometer," he said. "I'll get one from Walgreens on the way in tomorrow. A real one, not a meat one."
"I can get it," I said. "I go past one."
"No," said Tom.
He said it nicely. He picked up the packet and put it under his arm and went to the truck. Ren went after him and said something across the hood I couldn't hear, and he nodded at it, and she came back for her keys.
I sat there after the others left. Colby had left me the bag with two tacos in it and I ate them both, cold, because he'd meant me to. The grackle wasn't there. It was too late for grackles. The bank sign across 51st said 97 and 9:46, and then 97 and 9:47, and I got up and went home so I'd be in bed by ten, and I was, just.