Day 28. Strength 12.7. Stamina 11.7. Agility 10.6. Intelligence 10.7.
Coach was right about Friday. I wanted to train and I didn't.
That was the deal I'd made with her and I kept it, and keeping it was harder than the ladder in the sun on Day 2 and harder than nineteen push-ups. Eight tenths of a point, lying there on the floor of the day, and me walking around it.
So I did the other thing instead.
I put everything I owned that was going into that hole on the living room floor and went over it twice.
The shield. Straps, both of them, and the rivets, and the four inches of rim on the bottom left where the steel's gone thin and Marguerite said it's fine and I don't fully believe her. Ply core, no cracks. The leather on the grip is shiny in one spot now, which is a thing I did in a little over a week.
Boots I bought when I was seventeen for a landscaping job that lasted nine days.
Two pairs of socks, per Sandoval, and a second two pairs in a ziplock for the halfway mark.
Tape. A headlamp and two spare batteries. Gloves that are too big. A knife I've never used for anything but a box.
A three-pound engineer's hammer from the Home Depot on Thunderbird, nineteen dollars. Ren asked me on Wednesday what I was bringing to kill things with and I said I'd let her know. Everybody at that shop wanted three hundred dollars for a mace and a slime core is a walnut in a bag of water, and a walnut does not care what the thing that hit it cost.
A digital watch from the Walgreens on Bell, fourteen dollars, because the app says no signal inside a portal and no signal means no phone and no phone means no clock. Tom told me to bring one and said it like a man who has watched somebody not bring one.
Then I filed the dive plan.
It's four screens. Party, portal, entry time, expected duration, next of kin.
I sat on that last field for a while. I thought about Mrs. Ferreira next door, who'd made me promise to do the papers so somebody always knew where I was. I knew what she'd do with a phone call from the county. She'd pick up the phone the way she still picks it up when there's a break on the news, and I couldn't do that to her twice. So I put down Salomé Reyes, and then I took it out, because you can't do that to somebody without telling them, and then I put it back in, because the form wouldn't submit empty.
Underneath it, in the same grey text as everything else:
By submitting, you acknowledge that descent is undertaken at your own risk and that the Association assumes no liability for injury or death.
That word again. It was on the observer waiver at the wash, twice. They really do just leave it lying around in the text like it's nothing.
* * *
I went in to Grindstone Friday morning because work isn't training, and I mopped, and did the corners, and had the coffee on by ten of five. Hector grunted at me and went to his bench. Priya beat her rowing time and made me confirm it. Annette came off a night shift and put a coffee on the counter in front of me and said "big weekend?" because apparently I am not as mysterious as I think I am.
At half past nine, when the last of them had gone and Coach was doing the books, I took the punch card out of my pocket and put it on the counter between us.
Small, orange, twenty circles, twelve of them punched. RAY + ELENA — 2 PPL across the top in my father's handwriting.
I didn't say anything. I'd had fourteen days to work out what to say and I had nothing, so I just put it down and stood there like an idiot.
Coach Reyes didn't touch it at first. She just sat there with the pen still in her hand.
Then she took her reading glasses off, which I had never seen her do, and set them on the ledger, and sat back.
"Glovebox," she said.
"Yeah."
"Ray kept everything in that glovebox. Elena used to get on him about it." She didn't smile, exactly. "Four months. Maybe five. That's the last card. There were others." She put it down. "It was a while ago now."
"Why didn't you say anything."
"Because you came in off a list on the worst day of your life and asked me for a job," Coach said. "And if I'd told you the first week, everything after it would have been about that. You'd have been here for them. I wanted to see if you'd stay for it."
I stood there and had about six feelings and couldn't get hold of any of them.
"Twelve punches," I said. "Out of twenty. They stopped."
"They stopped."
"Why."
She said it the way she says everything, straight at it with no run-up.
"Because I told them they weren't going to be ready and they should not go."
The gym was empty and the AC was running and somewhere in the back the water heater was doing what it does.
"Ready for what," I said.
"They were D-rank. They were training for a C."
* * *
You see, my parents were careful.
That is not something I think. That is the word. Every person who ever said their names out loud in front of me for two years put that word next to it like it was attached. The Association investigator said it. The insurance woman said it. The man from the county said it twice in one sentence and then apologized for saying it twice.
Ray and Elena were careful. It was the whole shape of them. They filed the plan, they dove inside their grade, they came home. Two years of my life have been built on top of a sentence that goes they did everything right and it happened anyway, and I have needed that sentence, because the alternative is a world where there was something they could have done.
"They were careful," I said.
Coach Reyes looked at me and I watched her decide how much of this to do today.
"They were patient," she said. "That's a different thing. They were patient for eleven years and then they stopped being patient, and I don't know what changed and I asked twice."
"You asked them—"
"I asked Elena, in the back, by the rack you've been training on. She said it was theirs to worry about." Coach picked her glasses back up and turned them over in her hand. "Nobody trains above their grade for fun, Miles. It's expensive and it hurts and it doesn't make you any money. People do it because there's something up there they need."
"They died in a D," I said.
I hadn't meant to say it. It came out flat and fast and it was the only thing in my head. It's on the incident report, page one, right under the date. A registered D-rank portal, inspected, inside their grade, the boring kind.
Coach stopped turning the glasses over.
"I know," she said.
"So then why would they—"
"Not today."
"Coach—"
"Not today." She put the glasses back on, and the conversation was over as completely as if she'd walked out of the room. "You're going into a portal in twenty-two hours. I'm not putting that in your head tonight and you'd have to be a fool to want me to."
She slid the punch card back across the counter.
"Come in Monday," she said. "We'll talk Monday."
* * *
I didn't sleep, obviously.
At about ten I lay down, and at about eleven I got up, and at midnight I went through the gear again and found nothing wrong with it. At one I ate a bowl of cereal standing at the counter.
At two in the morning I got in the car and drove the long way, and pulled into the lot behind the dead strip mall on Cave Creek, and got out.
Ninety-four degrees. Two in the morning.
The portal's back there behind where the video store was. Chain-link, and the sign bolted to it, PORTAL — CLASS F — MONITORED, and the phone number in smaller letters underneath, and an inspection sticker from May with somebody's initials on it.
It's blue. It's been blue my entire life. I learned to ride a bike about four hundred feet from it.
I stood at that fence with my fingers through the links.
They trained for four months at a gym in the back of a shopping center. Twelve visits. My mother stood at a rack in that back room and told a woman it was theirs to worry about, and then a year and a half later, or two years, or however long it was, they went into a portal rated a full grade under what they'd been getting ready for, and did not come out.
And at some point in the middle of all that, they came home, and made dinner, and did not mention any of it to me.
The security light on the back of the video store runs on a motion sensor and it clicked off while I was standing there. It takes somebody moving to bring it back on. I stayed still long enough to find that out.
Then I went home and set the alarm for five, and lay down on top of the covers with my boots by the door, and got about three hours.