Day 78. Strength 27.9. Stamina 26.5. Agility 15.9. Intelligence 19.5.
The Thunderbird wash door is a different door from the one I watched Copper Vale go through on Day 22, but it's in the same concrete channel, a quarter mile north, and when I got out of Tom's truck at six in the morning I could see the old one from where I stood. Same chain-link. Same rope. Nobody behind it.
I'd stood behind that rope fifty-six days ago and watched Bryce Halloran come out not winded and thought I'd never be on the other side of it.
Then Ren handed me my glasses and said "On your face," and I put them on my face, and we went in.
* * *
Slimes are easy now.
I should be careful saying that, because they weren't easy at Bell Road, and I've got a hand-shaped scar on my neck from the thing that wasn't a slime, and Tom would hit me if I got careless. But they're knee-high and slow and they don't aim and they don't flank and they don't come back round behind you. They come at you in the straightest line the floor allows, and they press, and that's all they know how to do.
And I'm not the person who went into Bell Road.
At Bell Road it took me three swings with the hammer to break a core. On the first slime at Thunderbird wash I swung once, from the shoulder, not even hard, and the walnut in the middle of it split and the whole thing let go round my boots in two gallons of cold water. The water was cold through the leather in about two seconds. I stood in it and looked at the hammer, which looked like the same hammer.
Colby, behind me, said "Whoa."
"One," said Tom.
* * *
That was the day. Most of it was the same thing, again and again.
Tom walked point with the map and called every room. Ren pulled with the Ember, a little flame at ten feet, and the slimes turned toward the heat and came in a line. I took the line on the shield and broke them one at a time, one swing each, while Colby stood behind me and talked, out of habit, about a girl at his work who'd sold forty pairs of the same shoe in one day and gotten a plaque. Slimes don't throw at sound. Slimes don't do anything at sound. He talked anyway, and nobody asked him to stop, because it's how we know where he is.
Level one, nine. Level two, eleven.
Every core was mine. Every time one came up and Tom was right there with his hammer, he stepped back. Every time one got near Ren she pulled it toward me instead of breaking it herself. Once, on level two, a slime came round the side and got to Colby before I'd turned, and he had his sword half up and you could see him think about it, and then he jumped backward into Ren and shouted "MILES, LEFT ONE," and I turned and broke it.
"Sorry," he said. "I almost did it."
"You're allowed to do it."
"No, I'm not," said Colby. "We voted."
* * *
Level two at Thunderbird wash has a wide low room at the bottom of the stair with standing water across the floor, maybe an inch, like most of them.
Tom stopped at the edge of it. He got down on one knee and took the thermometer out of his chest pocket. The Walgreens one, with the metal probe. He put it in the water and we all stood behind him and waited the twenty seconds.
"Sixty-one point two," he said.
Ren laughed. It came out of her before she could stop it, a short surprised noise that went off down the tunnel with no echo.
"What?" said Tom.
"Nothing," said Ren. "You just brought it."
"I'm always bringing it now." He shook the probe off and put it back in his pocket and stood up. "Sixty-one. That's normal. That's what normal is."
He said it like a man reading a good test result off a sheet, and I found I'd been holding my breath.
I looked at the walls, because I always look at the walls now. Blue. The same faint even blue all the way down, top to bottom, the color the app said it was. I put the back of my hand on the stone going down the stair to level three and it was cold, and wet, and nothing.
I didn't know until then how much I'd been waiting for it to be something.
* * *
Level three was the last room and the biggest, and there were nine of them in it, waiting the way slimes wait, which is not at all. They were just there, piled loosely against the far wall like laundry.
"Nine," I said.
"Nine," said Tom. "Last nine. Ren."
Ren pulled. They came.
I'd stopped counting tenths a while ago. You can't, in a dive, there's too much else, and the screens come and you swipe them away and you add them up later. Tom had stopped us at the top of every stair so I could do the lever, the way Coach had shown me on Wednesday, until the first shake, while the other three drank water and pretended not to watch. That was Strength. Stamina went in the fights, when I was moving fast and breathing hard, which the carry never does to me. Agility once. The kills don't go on a screen, not one at a time. They go somewhere you can't see, and you just have to trust that they're adding up.
I broke the first one. The second. The fifth, which took two swings because it moved as I swung and I hit it off-center. The seventh.
The eighth was big, for a slime, the size of a beanbag chair, and slow, and I set my feet and took it on the rim of the shield and broke it with the hammer from above.
"Eight," said Tom.
The ninth was the last slime in Thunderbird wash. It came straight at me in a line, because that's all it knows, and it was small and it had a core that was almost white, and I hit it once, from the shoulder, and it let go round my boots.
"Nine," said Tom. "That's the room."
And the screen came up.
* * *
A tenth comes up small, in the corner of everything. This came up the way it had at Bell Road, all at once and in the middle, so you have to look at it whether you want to or not.
LEVEL UP
Level 2 → Level 3
Strength +1.0 · Stamina +1.0 · Agility +1.0 · Intelligence +1.0
Daily growth limit (Exercise): 0.4 → 0.6
I stood there in an inch of water with the hammer in one hand and read it twice.
"What," said Colby, behind me. "What? Is it? Are you?"
"Three," I said.
Colby yelled. It's the loudest noise I've ever heard anyone make inside a portal. It went off down the room and didn't come back, because nothing comes back down there, and he did it again anyway, and hit me on the back of the shield arm with his open hand.
Tom didn't yell. He came over and stood next to me and looked at my face for a while. He had water to his ankles and the map still folded in his hand.
"Okay," he said. "Good."
Ren had got something out of her pocket. It was a napkin from Filiberto's, folded in four, with numbers on it in blue pen. She unfolded it and held it up next to the light from the wall and looked at it, and then at me, and then at it again.
"What?" said Tom.
"Nothing," said Ren. "I said twenty-five to thirty cores." She folded it up again. "It was twenty-nine."
"Is that good?"
"It's right," said Ren, and put it back in her pocket, and I think that's the happiest I've ever seen her.
* * *
Daily growth limit, 0.6.
I read that line a third time on the stair going up. On the night I hit Level 2 and the cap went from two tenths to four, I'd sat at my kitchen table at half past eleven at night and done the arithmetic and got a number so big I knew I'd done something wrong. It wasn't wrong. It just didn't matter. The cap was never what stopped me. The clock stopped me, and the walk to the edge, and the hours there are in a day.
Six tenths. I couldn't spend four, most days.
When I added it up that night, Strength was 29.3. Stamina 27.9. Agility 17.0. Intelligence 20.5.
Twenty. I'd started at eight.
Tom stopped at the top of the stair, where the light from the door comes down in a square and lands on the wet floor, and turned round to make sure we were all there, and counted us out loud the way he always does. Four. Then he went up into it.