Day 64. Strength 25.1. Stamina 24.0. Agility 14.8. Intelligence 17.4.
"Sixty-eight," said Tom.
He said it to the water. Then he turned round on his knee and said it again, to us, louder. "Sixty-eight point four."
Ren had the pen out already. She wrote it on the back of her hand, because the packet was in Tom's chest pocket and she wasn't going to reach into it, and she held her hand up so he could see she'd written the right thing.
"That's under," said Colby.
"That's under," said Tom.
Nobody moved.
It was under. It was under the line Tom had drawn in a box on page one, which was the line I'd given him the job of picking. It was also seven degrees warmer than the air, in a room where everything should have been the same temperature as everything else, and every one of us knew that, and none of us said it, because we'd agreed on Wednesday that the number would decide and not us.
I could have said it. I stood at the edge of that water with the shield on my arm and I had the whole argument ready, the stone and the basin and the seven degrees, and I could have made it in about thirty seconds, and the other three would have listened.
I didn't. I'd said first, not last, and I'd said the number was his.
"Read it again," said Vance, from behind me.
Everybody turned round. It was the first thing he'd said since the lot.
Tom stayed down on his knee. Then he took the probe out and shook it off and put it back in, in a different place, nearer the middle, and we waited the twenty seconds again.
"Sixty-eight point one," he said.
Vance nodded and typed it.
"Ren," said Tom. "Take a picture of the screen with your phone. With the time on it."
She did. The flash went off and lit the whole room up white for an instant, and for a second the water looked like a floor.
"Okay," said Tom. He stood up. "That's the rule. We go on." He went round all of us, and stopped on me a little longer. "Same as before. When I say up."
"First," I said.
* * *
We walked through it.
It was two inches deep, like the note said, and it came over the toes of my boots and soaked through to my socks in about four steps. I'd thought it would feel warm. It didn't, really. It felt like water that had been left in a glass on the counter. That's all sixty-eight is. If you put your hand in it at home you wouldn't think anything.
Halfway across, I put the back of my hand against the wall.
Stone. Cold, wet, ordinary. Nothing like Bell Road, where the wall by the fourth tunnel had been warm like the side of a car that's been parked in the sun. I kept my hand there for a few seconds longer than I needed to, to be sure, and Ren saw me do it and didn't ask.
The stair to level three was where the map said. Tom went down it first, with his light up, calling the steps.
* * *
Level three was the bottom, and the bottom was a single long room with the floor sloping down toward the far end, and at the far end there were fourteen of them and one more.
I counted fifteen in the first second. That was the easy part. The one more was the size of a man sitting down, with the same long arms, and it was holding something in its right hand that it had sharpened out of what looked like a piece of rebar.
"County boss," Tom said quietly. "That's the one we're paid for."
"Fifteen," I said. "Fourteen and the big one. They'll split, like upstairs."
"Okay." He didn't take his eyes off them. "Colby. Same thing."
Colby got in behind the shield, and took a breath, and started telling the big one about his spider guy.
* * *
It sounded more like a job than a fight.
They threw at Colby's voice and hit the shield. They split, like Tom said they would, half down each side of the room, and I counted them out loud as they went, "seven left, seven right," and Ren put flame on the right side so they went back, and they came round behind us out of a gap in the wall that wasn't on the map, and I'd already turned, because I'd counted seven go and only six come back to the front.
The thing about knowing where everybody is, it doesn't feel like anything. Tom was on my left, four feet, moving. Ren was behind Colby. Colby was behind me, talking about the spider, which had now apparently been the size of a hand. I didn't look at any of them. I just knew it, the way you know where your own feet are on stairs.
The big one came last.
It came straight at the shield, the only one of them that did, and it hit it with the rebar overhand, and the steel rang and my arm took it all the way back to my shoulder, and I held. That's what thirteen pounds and twenty-five Strength is for. It hit it again. I held again. And while it was doing that, Tom walked round the side of me and put his hammer through the back of its head, and it went over, and the core was right where it should be, and he broke it on the second hit.
The light in the walls dimmed.
Not much. Half a shade, like a cloud going over the sun. It stayed like that.
"That's a reset," said Tom. He was breathing hard. "That's what it looks like from inside." Then he said, "Count."
"Fourteen down. One in the left gap, it ran. It'll come back."
It came back about a minute later and Ren got it, and that was all of them.
* * *
We came up the spiral in the same order we went down, Tom first, me last, and nobody talked who didn't have to. We crossed the water on level two. Ren made Tom stop and read it again on the way through so there'd be two times on it, and it was sixty-eight point three, and she took another picture.
The screens came on the climb out, in the fifth hour, on the long spiral up from level three, when my arm finally did what it hadn't done all morning and shook under the shield:
Strength +0.1
Stamina +0.1
and then once more for both near the top, when the climb took my lungs too. The other two of each came that night in the backyard at nine, on the carry, with Mrs. Ferreira's dog barking at the rim. Four tenths on both, which is the cap. Agility once. I didn't level. A kobold is worth more than a slime and I broke five of them and it still wasn't close, and I knew it wouldn't be, and I looked anyway.
I'd done the four-ten set at the kitchen table before I left, in the dark, out of habit. Nobody knew. That was the only one I'd get today.
* * *
The lot was a hundred and four degrees and smelled of cows.
We took our boots off at the tailgate of Tom's truck, all four of us, immediately, without anybody saying to. Colby got the water out. Ren held her hand out flat to show Tom the back of it, the three numbers in blue pen gone smeary with sweat, and he took a picture of that too.
Vance came up out of the gate behind us and stood by the SUV with the tablet.
He went through it with Tom first. Time in, time out, count by level, the boss confirmed. Twenty-six kobolds.
"County's estimate is thirty to fifty," Tom said.
"County's estimate is from March last year." Vance didn't look up. "Did you miss a room?"
"No."
Vance typed. Then Tom signed something and Vance said "Clear's confirmed. County gets it in the morning, you'll see it on the app Monday," and that was it. Two Pairs had a clear.
Colby made a noise and hit the side of the truck with his open hand, and Mateo's booster seat jumped.
Then Vance came over to me.
"Hands," he said.
I held them out. He turned them over, both sides, the way the medic had at the Copper Vale clear. Then my neck, at the scar there that's the shape of a hand, and he typed something. He didn't ask to see the shield arm specially. He'd been watching it for five hours.
"What level are you?"
"Two."
He typed that too. It was short.
"Okay," he said.
He went back to the SUV and opened the door and put the tablet on the passenger seat, and then he stopped with one foot up and looked across the roof of the car at Tom.
"Your shield man," he said. "Good. Very good, actually. They all are, the hard-working ones." He got the seeds out of his pocket. "Right up until they're not. Don't build a party round it."
He shut the door and started the car and drove out over the dirt toward Dobbins, and the dust came back across the lot behind him and settled on our boots.
Nobody said anything for a while.
"What's that mean," said Colby.
Tom was looking at the road.
"Nothing," he said. "Drink your water."