Day 79. Strength 29.3. Stamina 27.9. Agility 17.0. Intelligence 20.5.
On Sunday evening, at a quarter to seven, when the sun had gone behind the White Tanks and the street had dropped to a hundred and one, I got on the bike without the shield and rode to Cave Creek.
I hadn't been since the night before Bell Road. That was fifty-one days ago, and I'd driven it then, at two in the morning, and stood at the fence for a long time, and gone home and got three hours of sleep. I didn't plan to stand there long this time. I don't think I planned anything. I'd been on the couch since noon not training, the second zero day in three, and my legs wanted to go somewhere.
It's eleven minutes by bike. I learned to ride one four hundred feet from it.
The asphalt was still giving the day back. You could feel it on your shins through the pedals, a dry heat coming up instead of down, and every time I passed a sprinkler on somebody's lawn the air went cool and wet for about one house and then it was gone again. A man was hosing his driveway two streets over in his socks. He lifted the hose at me like a wave.
* * *
The strip mall on Cave Creek has been dead since before I can remember. There was a video store, and a nail place, and a Chinese restaurant my dad liked that closed when I was eight. Now there's a church in the old nail place on Sundays and nothing else. The lot behind it is broken up, with weeds in the cracks, and at the back of the lot there's a chain-link fence about the size of a two-car garage, and inside the fence there's a door that isn't a door.
PORTAL — CLASS F — MONITORED. The phone number. The inspection sticker. I leaned the bike against the fence and looked at the sticker. May. Initials I couldn't read.
The chain-link was hot. Not hot enough to burn, but I took my hand off it anyway. Somebody had zip-tied the bottom of one panel to the post with three white ties, new ones, and left the cut tails on the ground in a little pile, and a plastic Fry's bag had blown into the corner and stayed there so long it had gone the color of the dirt.
Inspection is theatre. I'd said that to myself at Bell Road. A man drives out, looks at a fence from twenty feet, writes a date.
The portal was blue.
You can see a little of the light from outside, if you stand right at the fence at dusk and look past the edge of the frame. Just a faint color on the concrete under it, the same color as the walls inside a portal, coming out at the bottom like light under a door. Blue. The same blue it's been my whole life.
My dad used to stop here. A few times a year, on the way back from somewhere, he'd pull into this lot and leave the engine running and walk over to the fence with something flat in his shirt pocket, and stand there about a minute. Then he'd come back and write in a little notebook against the steering wheel before he pulled out. I was six, seven. I thought it was a diver thing, like checking the tires. I never asked him what he wrote.
I stood where I thought he'd stood. It's hard to tell, with a fence, there's no mark. The engine would have been running behind me, the radio down low on whatever station my mom left it on, and I'd have been in the back with my feet on the seat, which I wasn't allowed to do, watching his back. That's what I remember. The back of his shirt, and his hand going to the pocket and not taking anything out.
I looked at it anyway. I knew now that the color you can see from the parking lot is only the top. That Bell Road read blue for nine years while its bottom level went green. That a portal ripens from the bottom up, where nobody stands.
* * *
"Miles? Miles North?"
I turned round.
Bryce Halloran was standing at the edge of the lot in running shorts and a Copper Vale T-shirt soaked dark down the middle, breathing hard, with a ring on his finger blinking a little green light. He had his hands on his hips. He looked exactly like a guild prospect is supposed to look.
"Bryce."
"Dude." He came over, grinning, still breathing. "I run past here every Sunday. I never see anybody back here. I thought you were, like, casing it." He looked at the bike. "Where's your car?"
"Died."
"Oh, man. That sucks." He meant it. He always means it. "On the freeway?"
"The 51."
"In this? Oh, man." He wiped his face with the front of his shirt. "Hey, I heard about your party. Two Pairs, right? Sandoval said. And I heard about Laveen. Vance was on it?"
"Vance was on it."
Bryce made a face. "Vance is so..." He looked for the word and didn't find a nice one, so he didn't say it. "He's good, though. He's really good."
"I know."
"He wrote me up on my first dive. I read it later. It said 'Reinforce reliable, judgment developing.'" He laughed. "Developing. I was so mad. He was right."
He was jogging in place a little, the way runners do when they're afraid their legs will forget. The ring blinked. He looked down at it.
"If I stop too long it thinks I'm done," he said. "Then the run counts as two runs and somebody asks me about it on Monday."
"So don't stop."
"I'm stopping." He stopped. He put his hands on his knees and breathed at the ground for a second and then came up grinning. "Man. It's like a hundred out here."
"A hundred and one."
"You would know that."
* * *
I hadn't meant to ask him. Then he was standing there, and he was the only person I knew who'd said yes to them.
"You're on a development contract," I said. "With Copper Vale."
"Since graduation. Well, since the week after." He held up his hand with the ring on it. "Sleep tracker. They give you one. It sends them your sleep every morning, and your heart rate, and how much you move. I got a call once because I went to bed at one on a Tuesday. A nice call. But a call."
"What's it like?"
He thought about it. Bryce is the kind of person who actually thinks about a question before he answers it, which is one of the reasons it's impossible to hate him.
"It's good," he said. "Honestly. It's really good. They pay me thirty-four hundred a month, and I'm eighteen, and they've got a nutritionist, and Salomé three afternoons a week, and every Saturday I go into a hole with three D's who know what they're doing." He looked at the portal. "They own your Saturdays, though. All of them. And your sleep, like I said. And your numbers. Everything you do goes in a file."
"Do you see the file?"
"Some of it. Not all." He shrugged. "On my first day they showed me a chart. Me, at twenty-five. My level, my stats, roughly. A line going up. And I'm on the line. I've been on it every month." He smiled, but it was a slightly different smile. "It's weird, being on a line somebody drew before they met you. You start to feel like if you go off it, something's wrong with you. Not with the line."
"Would you sign it again?"
"Tomorrow," said Bryce. "Without even reading it. I'm a C. I'd be stupid not to."
I didn't say anything.
He looked at me. Then at the bike, and the fence, and me again. And I saw him get it, a little. He's not stupid. He's never been stupid.
"Did they offer you one?" he said.
"I can't really say."
"That means yes." His face lit up. "Dude, that's huge. They don't offer F's anything. Ever. I've never heard of it." Then it changed, slowly, as he thought about it. "Huh. They don't, though. Ever."
* * *
"Did your assessment go to the Registry?" I said.
"Sure. Everybody's does."
"Did anybody from the survey division ever come and talk to you?"
"Survey?" He frowned. "No. Why would survey..." He stopped. "Actually, one guy came to the facility once. In August. He said he was from the Association. He watched sparring for like an hour and didn't talk to anybody, and Haskell walked him round. Grey shirt. He had a weird way of doing stairs, like his ankle was bad." He shrugged. "I figured he was an inspector or something."
The security light on the back of the old video store clicked off. It runs on a motion sensor. We'd both been standing still.
Bryce waved his arm at it and it came back on.
"I gotta go," he said. "My mom does dinner Sundays, it's like a whole thing." He started to jog backward, then stopped. "Hey. What level are you now? Can I ask?"
"Three. Since yesterday."
"Three!" He stopped dead in the middle of the lot. "You were one in July! Dude!" He came back and hit me on the shoulder, hard, the way guys do, and he grinned like it was his. "Three. Okay. Okay. That's awesome. That's actually awesome."
"Thanks."
"Okay. Bye." He jogged off toward Cave Creek with his ring blinking, and turned round once at the street and waved with his whole arm.
* * *
I rode home in the dark with the light on.
At 9:12, lying in bed with the alarm set for 3:30, my phone buzzed.
Bryce: Proud of you man. Level 3!! Seriously.
And then, a minute later:
Bryce: whatever you decide. Read the part about the file twice
I put the phone face down on the nightstand. Then I picked it up again and checked the alarm was set for 3:30, which it already was.