Day 71. Strength 26.8. Stamina 25.7. Agility 15.4. Intelligence 18.5.
The alarm went at 3:30 and I was sitting up before it finished the first ring, because I'd been awake since 3:12 waiting for it.
Kitchen. Light over the stove only. Legal pad. Four-digit by four-digit, no paper for the partials, until the numbers started sliding off each other and the back of my head went hot and tight. That's the edge, for Intelligence. It doesn't feel like much from outside. You'd see a guy staring at a fridge.
It went at 4:02. Earlier than usual. I wrote the time down and didn't think about what that meant, because I had thirteen minutes.
* * *
I'd done the bike in the dark the night before, in the driveway, twice. The shield goes flat on the rack with two bungee cords crossed over it, and the cords have to go under the rim and not over, or the shield walks backward on every bump. I found that out on the second try, at the bottom of the driveway, when it slid off and hit the concrete with a noise that woke Mrs. Ferreira's dog and probably Mrs. Ferreira.
This time it held. I pushed off at 4:15 with the front light on and the back one blinking red, and turned onto the street, and the street was dark.
Eighty-six degrees. No wind. The sprinklers on the medians on Cave Creek were going, and when I rode past them I rode through the edge of the spray and it was the best thing that had happened to me all week. The bike was heavier than I expected at the back, from the steel, and on the first hill, the long shallow one past the Circle K, the front wheel went light and wandered and I had to stand up on the pedals. My thighs started to burn about halfway, and that was fine, that was just a hill. I'd thought it might count for something. It didn't. Nothing went to the edge. It was just a guy on a bike.
A coyote crossed in front of me at Greenway. It came out from between two parked cars and trotted across the lane in my headlight like it had somewhere to be, and it didn't hurry, and it didn't look at me. I braked so hard the shield shifted. I sat there with both feet down and watched it go up the far curb and into somebody's front yard, past a kid's plastic slide, and gone, and the sprinklers kept going.
At Bell a police car came up slow behind me with its lights off and sat there for about a block, and then pulled alongside. The cop looked at me, and at the shield on the rack, and at the luggage strap round my chest that held my water.
"Where you headed?"
"Work. Grindstone, on Bell. I open."
He looked at the shield again.
"That's a diver's shield."
"Yes sir."
"You a diver?"
"Level two."
He thought about that.
"Long way to work for a level two."
"It's four miles."
"That's what I said." Then he said "Lights are good," and sped up, and turned off at the next street.
I got to the lot at 4:36. Twenty-one minutes. I'd guessed twenty-five. The building was dark and the streetlight was on, and Hector was sitting on the curb under it with his gallon jug and his western, and he watched me roll in and get off and kick the stand down and undo the bungees.
"Huh," he said.
"Car died," I said.
"I figured." He turned a page of the western without looking at it. He had the jug between his boots. "You want to know a thing about bikes?"
"Okay."
"Nobody in a truck at four in the morning is looking for you." He licked his thumb. "That's the whole thing about bikes."
I got the key in and pulled while I turned, and the door went first time.
* * *
That was the ride in. It was fine. I'd known the ride in would be fine.
The ride home was at noon.
The bank sign on Bell said a hundred and seven. There was no shade. The sun comes straight down at noon in September, so the poles and the palm trees throw nothing, just a dark circle at their feet you can't stand in. The asphalt was giving off heat you could see, a wobble a foot above the road.
The shield had been sitting on the rack in the lot since 4:36 and it had been in the sun since about seven. I put my hand on it to tighten the cords and took my hand off again. You could have cooked on it.
I'd drunk a liter before I left. I drank half of what was left at Greenway and the other half at the Circle K, standing in the ice machine's shade by the door, which is about a foot wide. I'd thought about that liter for three days. I'd done the numbers on sweat rates. Colby carries six liters for four people for six hours inside a portal at sixty-one degrees. This was one person, twenty-one minutes, outside, at a hundred and seven, and it went faster than any of my numbers said it would.
On the last hill before my street my hands started to tingle. Not hurt. Tingle, like they'd been asleep. I knew what that was. I didn't stop, because I was a quarter mile from the house and stopping wouldn't have made the sun go anywhere, but I pedaled slower, and I sat up, and I made myself breathe through my nose.
Inside, I stood in the kitchen with the front of the fridge open and drank from the faucet with my head sideways until I couldn't, and then I sat on the floor with my back against the cupboard and waited for my hands.
I watched them while I waited. They were mine and they were doing something on their own, a fine buzz in the fingertips and up into the palms, like the streetlights on Cave Creek. I opened and closed them. I put them flat on the cold tile. The fridge hummed over my head and breathed cold down the side of my face and I left it open.
It took about twenty minutes.
* * *
Colby texted at two.
You walking home from work in this?? Tom said your car died
I've got a bike now
In THIS??
It's 4 miles
I switched to opens. Off at 11:30 Mon-Fri, Bell and 19th. I can swing by Grindstone. Its on the way to nothing but whatever
I read that four times.
It wasn't on the way. Bell and Nineteenth is three miles the wrong direction from Grindstone, and Colby lives near Thunderbird, which is the other wrong direction. I knew that the way I know everything about where people live and how long things take, without trying to. He'd be adding twenty minutes to every weekday, in a car he'd told me at the tables he was still paying off.
The old answer was already in my thumbs. No thanks, I'm good. It's quick to type. I've typed it a lot.
Can I tell you Monday? I'm figuring out the schedule
Sure. Drink water you lunatic
* * *
I didn't do the evening carry.
There wasn't an evening. Bed at nine thirty means you're winding down by nine, and the yard wasn't under a hundred till about half past eight, and I'd learned on Tuesday what thirty minutes of carry is worth when the arm doesn't go till forty-seven. It's worth nothing. It's a walk.
So the floor at Grindstone was all of it. Two tenths in Strength and two in Stamina. That was the day.
At nine I sat at the kitchen table with the Copper Vale folder, because I'd told myself I'd read it before Sunday, and Sunday was in three hours.
The folder was heavy paper, the kind with a grain to it, and the Copper Vale logo was pressed into the cover so you could feel it with your thumb without looking. Eleven pages. Dana Whitfield writes clearly, I'll give her that. Most of it was what Haskell had said. The retainer, the twelve months, the exclusivity. The gear. A page on insurance that I didn't understand and read twice anyway.
Page seven was the assessment. Fourteen days from signing. Medical, physical, trait. And a sentence near the bottom that I read three times, the third time out loud, quietly, to the kitchen.
Contractor agrees to disclose in full any trait-derived capacities, including those not reflected in Association records.
Including those not reflected in Association records.
I turned the folder over. On the back of the last page, in the bottom corner, small, in grey, there was a line of print that wasn't meant for me. A file name. North_dev_v3. And a date.
The date was Monday. The day Sandoval stood in the shade with me and read me Vance's line. They'd been on the third draft of this before I'd said I'd come in.