Day 77. Strength 27.9. Stamina 26.5. Agility 15.9. Intelligence 19.5.
The alarm went at 3:30 on Friday and I got up and went to the kitchen and sat down at the table in front of the legal pad and didn't do anything.
That's what a zero day is. Coach had said not even that one, not even the small one, I don't care how small it is. So I sat there in the light from the stove with my hands flat on the table, the stove light buzzing over the burners, and four-digit numbers going past in my head on their own, the way a song does, and I didn't hold onto any of them.
It's harder than you'd think, not doing something you've done every morning for sixty-six days. I lasted eleven minutes. Then I got up and put the shield in Tom's cradle and rode to work early, and sat on the curb in the lot under the streetlight until it was 4:40, because the door doesn't open any faster for being early.
* * *
I'd texted Tom at nine on Thursday night, before bed, which is the latest I text anyone now.
Can you come by Grindstone tomorrow after shift. There's a thing I need to tell you. In order.
He'd answered at 2:40 in the morning from Tolleson. ok. 6:15.
He was in the lot at 6:12. I saw his truck pull in through the front window and I looked at Coach, who was at the desk with her coffee doing nothing, and she said "Go," before I'd asked.
He'd let the tailgate down. He was sitting on it in his work clothes, the hi-vis vest still on, with a bag of something from the gas station on his knee. It was eighty-nine degrees and the sun wasn't over the buildings yet. The sky behind him had gone the pale orange it goes for about ten minutes before it turns white, and his vest was almost the same color.
"In order," he said, and held the bag out.
They were those little powdered donuts. I took one.
* * *
I told him.
I did it faster than I'd done it for Coach, because I'd done it once now and I knew where it went. The legal pad, Day 11, eight to nineteen and a half.
Halfway through, a garbage truck came along Bell and turned into the lot and stopped at the dumpster at the far end. It lifted the dumpster over its head and banged it twice and set it down, and Tom waited for it to finish without turning round, and I waited too. Then I kept going.
I told him about the fridge, and Luz reading it out loud. I told him he'd been right on Sunday, that I'd been holding something behind my back since I met him.
He listened the whole way through without saying anything. He ate four donuts. The fifth one he just held. There was powdered sugar on the knee of his work pants and he didn't brush it off.
When I stopped he sat there looking at the gym.
"So you're smart now," he said.
"I was always..." I stopped. "I'm smarter."
"That's how you knew where I was. At Laveen. Without looking."
"I think so. I think it's that." I'd thought about this a lot, on the bike, in the dark. "It's not that I'm looking harder. I can just hold more. You, Ren, Colby, the count, the map, all at once. It used to be I could hold about two things. Now it's more like six."
"And the packet. At the tables. Upside down."
"Yes."
"And the thermometer." He looked at me. "You had the whole argument ready, at the water. Seven degrees. I watched you not say it."
"I didn't think anybody saw that."
"I saw it. I didn't know what it was." He turned the bag in his hands. "I thought you were being polite."
"I was. Partly."
"Huh." He put the fifth donut back in the bag. "Okay."
He wiped his fingers on the vest, which left two white stripes on the orange.
"Luz is going to ask me what that note on your fridge means for the rest of her life," he said. "Every stat all four what. I'm not telling her."
"Okay."
"You can tell her." He thought about it. "When she's ten. Not before. She'll put it on a poster at school."
* * *
I'd thought about what he'd say for two days. I'd had a whole list. That he'd be hurt it took so long. That he'd want to know why Coach got it first, and the answer was that Coach told me to tell him, which made it sound like I wouldn't have.
He didn't say any of those things.
"Copper Vale," he said. "That clause. 'Not reflected in records.' That's this."
"I think so. I don't think they know what it is. I think they know there's something."
"Vance wrote 'F-Class'," said Tom. "Sandoval said. And then Haskell asked for your number. And then she wrote a clause for something she doesn't know the name of." He shook his head slowly. "She's good."
"Yeah."
"If you sign that, you have to tell them."
"Yes."
"And then they know, and the survey division knows, and whoever Okafor's not allowed to tell you about knows." He folded the top of the donut bag over twice. "Okay. That's not a today problem. That's Thursday. Today's problem is tomorrow."
* * *
Tomorrow was Thunderbird wash.
Tom had posted it on the open board on Tuesday, our first listing. A slime hole in the flood channel off the 51, the same channel as the Copper Vale clear I'd watched from behind a rope on Day 22, a different door. F. Four bodies. Six hours. It would file under Two Pairs, because we were the ones who'd listed it.
"About the cores," I said.
"Yeah."
"Ren needs the level more than I do. She's at three. And Colby's at two, like me. If we rotate, like Bell Road..."
"We're not rotating."
"Tom."
"We're not rotating," he said again, pleasantly. "You're breaking them. All of them. Every core in that hole is yours."
"That's not fair to..."
"It's completely fair. We voted."
I looked at him. "When?"
"Wednesday night. In the thread."
"I'm in the thread."
"You're in the thread," Tom agreed. "There's another thread."
It took me a second.
"There's a thread without me?"
"Since Laveen." He had a face on I hadn't seen before. It was close to enjoying himself. "Me, Ren, Colby. For deciding things about you without asking you. It's mostly Colby sending pictures of cows."
"What did you decide?"
"That we level our wall." He counted on his fingers. "You hold the shield. You're the reason we got through Laveen and you're the reason we got through Bell Road. Every level you get makes the next hole safer for the other three of us, and Ren did the math on it, not me, she did it on a napkin. A level for you is worth more to the party than a level for her, right now. She was pretty annoyed about that. She checked it twice."
He was grinning a little now, with powdered sugar caught in the stubble on his chin and it was hard to stay annoyed at.
"I didn't agree to that."
"No," said Tom. "You didn't. We decided it. You found out after." He slid off the tailgate and stood up and shut it. "How's it feel?"
I opened my mouth, and nothing came out of it.
"Yeah," said Tom. "That's how it feels."
* * *
He went home to sleep. I went back in.
Coach was at the desk where I'd left her, with her coffee gone cold at her elbow and a skin on it, and she looked at my face and didn't ask anything. I told her anyway.
"They've got a thread without me," I said. "They voted that I break all the cores tomorrow."
"Good."
"I didn't get a say."
"No," she said. She turned a page in her crossword, which she was not doing. "You didn't."
She held out a pen without looking at me. I took it. It was a minute before I understood she wanted me to fill in the clue she was stuck on, and another few seconds before I saw she'd been stuck on it since she sat down, on purpose, waiting.
Seven letters. Of one mind. The second letter was an N.
I wrote it in. She took the pen back, and read the word over once, and filled in the clue that crossed the end of it herself in about two seconds, like it had been easy the whole time.
The rest of the zero day I did nothing. I went home in Colby's car with the windows up and lay on the couch under the vent and watched two movies I don't remember and didn't train, didn't count, didn't hold anything in my head on purpose. At six I checked the straps on the shield. At seven I packed the bag. At nine I lay down.
At 9:20 my phone lit up. Colby. A picture of a cow, and under it:
other thread says hi