Day 69. Strength 26.4. Stamina 25.3. Agility 15.2. Intelligence 18.1.
There was a pen on a chain at the front desk of Copper Vale, and a clipboard under it, and the woman behind the desk turned the clipboard round to face me and smiled.
"Just your name and the time, hon."
"I'd rather not."
She kept smiling. I don't think she'd ever had anyone say that before, because it took her a second to find what to do with her face, and what she found was to pick the pen up herself and write it for me. Miles North, 1:52. Her handwriting was better than mine.
"Mrs. Haskell's ready for you," she said. "Up the stairs, all the way down."
* * *
Copper Vale is a two-storey office building on a corner in Tempe that used to be something else. You can tell because the windows on the ground floor are the wrong size for offices, too big and too low, like a car dealership. Now there's a copper mountain on the glass and a rack of practice shields in the lobby in a row, every one of them better than mine had been, and nobody touching them.
Upstairs was quieter and colder. The carpet was the kind that eats sound. I walked down it past a room with a long table and nobody in it and a room with a treadmill and nobody on it, and at the end there was an open door, and Teresa Haskell stood up from behind her desk when I got to it.
She was in her sixties, I'd guess. Short grey hair. A cardigan, in an office that was set to sixty-eight, on a day that was a hundred and nine. She came round the desk to shake my hand, and her hand was dry and stronger than it needed to be, and she didn't make anything of that.
There was a second woman in the room, younger, sitting in a chair by the window with a laptop open on her knees.
"This is Dana Whitfield," said Haskell. "She's our counsel. She's here so I don't promise you anything I can't keep. If she coughs, I've gone too far." She smiled. "She's never had to cough."
Dana Whitfield said hello and didn't get up.
I sat down. I thought about Sandoval in the counter light at Grindstone, saying in a room with a lawyer in it, and I thought, well, here's the room, and here's the lawyer, and I'm in it.
* * *
She didn't start with the offer. She started with me.
She asked how I liked working at Grindstone, and whether Salomé still kept the coffee at six scoops, and she laughed when I said yes. She asked how Tom Guzmán was doing on nights and whether he'd ever thought about a day job, and she asked it like she cared about the answer, and I think she did. She talked in long, easy sentences that went round corners and came back. She called me Miles every third or fourth one.
Then she put her hands together on the desk.
"Vance is the best observer I've got," she said. "He's been doing it fourteen years. He's wrong about one time in twenty, and I've made a lot of money paying attention to which one." She tilted her head. "I read his report twice. Do you know what plateau risk means?"
"Sandoval told me."
"Of course she did." She didn't seem to mind. "Here's what I read. I read that a level two held a sheet of steel up for five hours and didn't drop his arm. I read that he worked out kobolds throw at sound on the first level, which I've had D-rank leads take three dives to work out, and Vance didn't write that down as yours, but I know Tom Guzmán, and I know it wasn't his. And I read the word F-Class, which is the only thing in the whole report Vance underlined."
She waited, to see if I'd say something. I didn't.
"So I want to ask you one thing, and you can say no. What are your numbers?"
"Above average for my level."
She smiled at that, a real one. "That's a good answer," she said. "Somebody taught you that."
"Nobody taught me it."
"Then you're quicker than I thought, and I already thought you were quick." She opened a drawer and took out a folder, and put it on the desk between us, and didn't push it toward me. "Okay. Here it is."
* * *
She gave it in order, and Dana Whitfield didn't cough once.
A development contract. Twelve months. Copper Vale pays me a retainer of $2,600 a month, plus gear. I'd train at their facility with their staff. "And with Salomé, if you like," Haskell said. "We send her people anyway. That wouldn't change." I'd dive only on Copper Vale contracts, with Copper Vale parties. Not on the open board. Not on anybody else's listing.
"Two Pairs," I said.
"Is a good little party with a clear on its record that it needed us for," she said, kindly. "You could still eat tacos with them. You couldn't dive with them."
Inside fourteen days of signing, an assessment. Their medical staff, their trainers, a full workup. "Everything," she said. "Trait, numbers, how you recover. We file a development profile with the Association. That's standard for every contract we hold. It protects you as much as us."
"Who reads the profile?"
"The Association."
"Who at the Association?"
Dana Whitfield looked up from her laptop for the first time.
"Whoever's entitled to," said Haskell, pleasantly. "I don't run the Association, Miles."
* * *
I'd done the money before she finished the first sentence. I couldn't have stopped it if I'd tried.
Grindstone pays me about nineteen hundred a month after tax. This was twenty-six. I'd lose the job, because their hours and opening Grindstone at five in the morning couldn't both be true. So the twenty-six came out as seven hundred dollars more a month, and I spend three thousand. The burn went from eleven hundred to four hundred. Six months of runway turned into about seventeen, before tax took its share of the twenty-six.
And gear. She'd said it twice. Heavier shield or a slower number, Coach had said on Monday, and I knew the price of a heavier shield to within fifty dollars because I'd been looking at Marguerite's site at eleven at night. This woman had a lobby full of them that nobody touched.
That was the part that sat on my chest. She'd offered me the exact thing I needed, without knowing I needed it.
Or she knew. I looked at her cardigan and I couldn't tell.
"I'm not going to sign anything today," I said.
"I'd think less of you if you did." She slid the folder an inch toward me, then took her hand back. "Take that. Read it with whoever you read things with. Two weeks. If I don't hear by the thirteenth day, Dana sends me a reminder and I send you nothing, because I'll assume you've decided."
"Can I ask a question?"
"Of course."
"Do you have dental?"
Dana Whitfield made a small noise that was not a cough.
"Yes," said Haskell. "Good dental. Ask Guzmán why he's asking."
* * *
The car made it out of Tempe.
It made it up the 143 and across the 10 and onto the 51, north, with the windows down and the AC off and a hundred and nine degrees coming through the car like a hand. The needle had been at three-quarters in the Copper Vale lot. At the Thomas exit it was at the top. At Glendale it was past the top, against the little peg where the needle stops, and the smell coming out of the vents had changed from hair dryer to something sweet. Like syrup on a stove.
I got it onto the shoulder north of Northern before it decided for me.
Steam came out from under the hood in a long white sheet and blew back across the windshield. The engine made a sound like it was clearing its throat and then it didn't make any sound at all.
Cars went past at seventy. Every one of them rocked the car a little.
I sat there with the folder on the passenger seat and my phone in my hand, and I opened the contacts. Tom was asleep. He sleeps from about seven in the morning to two in the afternoon and then again before shift, and it was ten to four. Coach was at the gym till six. Ren had class. Colby was at work.
I looked up a tow company and called it myself. A hundred and fifteen dollars for the hook and three a mile after. Forty-five minutes.
It wasn't until I was sitting in the cab of the tow truck, with my car on the back of it and the driver's radio on a station playing something in Spanish with an accordion in it, that it occurred to me there had been anyone else I could have called.