Day 78. Strength 27.9. Stamina 26.5. Agility 15.9. Intelligence 19.5.
The channel was a hundred and four degrees when we came up out of it, and we took our boots off at Tom's tailgate, all four of us, without anybody saying to. The concrete was hot enough that we all ended up standing on our own boots, like kids on a towel at the pool.
Colby got the water out of his Pocket one bottle at a time, reaching into the air beside his hip and coming back with a liter like he'd taken it off a shelf. He gave one to each of us and kept the last for himself and didn't drink it until we'd all started.
Tom tipped the core bag out onto the tailgate and counted them out loud into rows of five. Twenty-nine. Walnut-sized and grey-green, and the almost-white one from the last room sitting at the end of the last row by itself. Colby touched it with one finger like it might still be cold.
"Two-sixty at the processor," he said. "If it's nine. Two thirty-two if he says eight."
"He'll say eight," said Ren.
"He always says eight on a Saturday."
"Can we argue with him?" said Colby.
"You can argue with him," said Tom. "He'll still say eight."
He took pictures of the rows, and of the door, and of the four of us with our bare feet on the hot concrete, which is apparently what the county wants for an open-board clear now. Then he filed it from his phone, sitting on the tailgate with his tongue in the corner of his mouth like Luz doing homework, and the app went Clear submitted: Two Pairs. Review: Mon.
"Two," said Colby. "Two clears."
"Two clears," said Tom.
* * *
I'd told myself I'd do it at the tailgate, after, if it went well. It had gone well. So I did it.
"There's a thing I need to tell you two," I said. "Tom knows. And Coach. I'm going to do it in order."
Ren put her water down.
So I told them, shorter than for Coach, shorter than for Tom. Day 11, eight to twenty and a half with the level, and what it does, which is let me hold more at once.
Colby listened with his mouth a little open.
"So you're, like, smart," he said.
"Smarter."
"Can you do my taxes?"
"I don't know how to do taxes."
"But you could learn really fast."
"Probably."
"Okay," said Colby, like that settled something important. "Okay. That's sick. That's honestly sick. Can I tell my mom?"
"No," said Ren and Tom at the same time.
"Okay, but later I can."
"Later," said Tom, "we'll see."
Colby took that as a yes. You could watch him take it.
Ren hadn't said anything yet. She was sitting on the edge of the tailgate with her feet hanging and her glasses pushed up on her head, and she was looking at me the way she'd looked at the napkin in the last room.
"How long have you known it worked?" she said.
"Since Day 11."
"Before you met us."
"Yes."
"From eight." She was doing something in her head. I could see her lips move a little. "That's every morning."
"Nearly every."
"Okay."
She thought about that. "And you were training it at the kitchen table the whole time. At Bell Road. At Laveen. Every time you counted something."
"Not every time I counted something. The counting's just what it does now. The training's the multiplication."
"Who else knows?"
"Coach. Tom. You two. That's all."
"Keep it that way," said Ren. "Until Thursday, at least. Until you've told that woman no or yes." She picked her water back up. "And if it's yes, I want to read the contract first. All eleven pages. With a pen."
Tom snorted. "She'll find something on page three."
"Page two," said Ren. "It's always page two."
"Okay."
"I'm not mad," she said. "Just so you know. I'm a little mad. Mostly I'm annoyed I didn't work it out myself. I had the kobolds. I had the packet. I should've had it."
"You had the napkin," said Tom.
"The napkin was arithmetic," said Ren. "Anybody can do arithmetic." Then she glanced over at me, and said "Sorry," and Colby laughed so hard he had to put his water down.
* * *
That's when I saw him.
He'd been there a while. I don't know how long. There's a dirt pull-off on the far side of the channel where people park to walk dogs in the winter, and there was a pickup in it, grey, a few years old, nothing on it. A man was standing beside it in the sun with his arms folded, looking across the channel at us.
The strange part was that he was standing in the open at a hundred and four degrees in long sleeves, and when he saw me see him he didn't move or look away. He just kept looking.
"Tom," I said.
Tom looked. Ren looked. Colby kept laughing for a second and then stopped.
The man came across.
He came down the concrete side of the channel at an angle, carefully, the way you'd come down a ramp with a bad ankle, and across the dry bed and up our side. Halfway across the bed he stopped and looked down at something in the dirt, and turned it over with the toe of his boot, and kept coming. He was maybe fifty. Clean-shaven, his face burned dark across the nose and forehead and pale under the chin, like he'd worn a hat for years and stopped. Grey work shirt with the sleeves buttoned at the wrist, khakis, boots that had once been brown and were now a kind of mottled pale yellow from the toe to the ankle, like they'd been stood in something that ate leather. He had a pair of rated side-shield glasses pushed up on top of his head. Home Depot. Eleven dollars.
No patch. No guild name. No jacket. Nothing.
He stopped about fifteen feet from the tailgate, close enough that I could see he hadn't sweated through the shirt, which at a hundred and four didn't seem possible.
"Good clear," he said.
"Thanks," said Tom. He'd stood up off the tailgate. He'd stood up in a way that put him a step in front of the rest of us, and I don't think he knew he'd done it. I'd stood up too, and moved half a step toward the back wheel, toward the shield, and I hadn't decided to either.
The man looked at each of us. He looked at the rows of cores on the tailgate. He looked at our bare feet, and our boots in a line, and the thermometer sticking out of Tom's chest pocket, and he looked at that for a second longer than the rest.
Then he looked at the shield, leaning against the back wheel where I'd put it.
"Which one of you is North?" he said.
Nobody answered. Nobody needed to. Tom didn't move, Ren didn't move, Colby didn't move. Everybody just didn't look at me so hard that it was the same as pointing.
The man nodded, slowly, like that was fine, like that was an answer too.
"That's Vega's," he said, and tipped his head at the shield.
It went very quiet. A car went by on the road above the pull-off and none of us turned to look at it.
"Who's asking," said Tom.
"Nobody," said the man. He looked at the shield a little longer. "She'd have liked that somebody could carry it."
I had a question ready, how he knew, and it didn't get as far as my mouth.
Then he turned round and went back down the side of the channel at the same careful angle, and across the bed, and up the other side, and got in his truck.
None of us moved until the door shut. The sound came across the channel late, after we'd already seen it close.
* * *
Ren had her phone up. I hadn't seen her get it out. She took three pictures of the truck as it backed out of the pull-off onto the road, and then it was gone, north, toward the 101.
"Acid," I said. "His boots."
"I saw," said Tom.
"Marguerite said a man with no patch bought every piece of acid lining she had. Eleven hundred dollars. Two weeks after Bell Road closed. And then he came back and bought every pair of rated glasses." I looked at the road where the truck had been. "And he asked her if she'd sold any steel."
"He knew her," said Tom. "Marisol. He knew her shield by looking at it."
"Is that bad?" said Colby.
"I don't know yet," said Tom.
Ren was zooming in on her phone with two fingers. She turned it round so we could see.
It was the back of the truck. The plate. No maroon, no sunset. The plate was plain white, with red letters, and no county name on it, and across the bottom in small capitals where the slogan would be it said:
OFFICIAL USE