The horn went off about a foot from my window.
I jerked the wheel right and a pickup went past close enough that I felt it through the glass. Somebody yelled something out the window. I didn't catch what. Then they were gone down Thunderbird and I was sitting there in my lane with both hands locked on the wheel.
"Sorry," I said. There was nobody in the car.
The light went green. I drove.
Twenty minutes out from the thing that decided the rest of my life and I'd almost died at a four-way stop. That was about how the week had been going.
I took the long way, past the dead strip mall on Cave Creek. I always take the long way past the dead strip mall on Cave Creek.
There's a portal back there, behind the video store that closed when I was a kid. The county put a fence around it before I was in kindergarten and bolted a sign to it. PORTAL — CLASS F — MONITORED. A phone number under that in smaller letters.
It's blue. It's been blue my whole life.
That's the part movies get wrong. Portals don't tear open and eat a city. They sit there for years and change color, slow. Blue first. Then green, then yellow, then orange. Twenty years ago they started showing up everywhere, in parking lots and canyons and one in the basement of an apartment building in Osaka, and for about a year and a half everybody stood as close to them as the police would allow and took pictures of them.
Then one in Kazakhstan went red. The things inside came out and forty thousand people died in a weekend.
So now there's a fence, and a sign, and a number to call. And every kid in Arizona learns the color order in the third grade, same as we learn what to do if there's a fire.
I slowed at the light and looked at it. Sitting back there behind the chain-link, being blue.
* * *
The school lot was a circus.
Minivans double-parked. A guy selling cold water out of a cooler by the flagpole and doing real business at nine in the morning, because it was already ninety-eight degrees. Somebody had tied balloons to a truck bed. Actual balloons.
Everybody came with somebody. That's the part I hadn't thought about. Kids I'd sat behind for four years were climbing out of cars with both parents and a grandmother and a little brother in a clip-on tie. One girl's family had made a banner.
I parked at the far end by the fence and sat there with the engine off. The heat started coming in through the roof the way it does.
You see, my parents were divers. Elena and Ray North, D-rank, licensed, insured. Careful. That was the word everybody used about them, every time, like it was part of the name. They went into a portal two years ago, the day after my sixteenth birthday, and they didn't come out.
The paperwork says missing, presumed deceased. When somebody asks me I say they passed away, because that ends the conversation faster. I've never once said it that way in my own head.
So, no minivan. No banner, no grandmother.
What I had was a house with the property tax paid through November, about nine thousand dollars in an account that still has both their names on it, and a number I'd been not-looking-at since April. Three thousand a month, in and out, no matter what I do about it.
Three months. Give or take.
I got out of the car.
* * *
They did it in the gym. Folding chairs in rows on the same floor where I failed the mile run freshman year, and that rubber-and-bleach smell every school gym in the country has.
Up on the stage, on a folding table with a black cloth over it, was the crystal.
It's smaller than you'd think. About the size of a fist. Clear, like tap water. No glow, no hum, nothing. If you found it in a kitchen drawer you'd figure it was a paperweight and put it back.
A survey team dug the first one out of the ground the year I was born. Turned out if a person who'd already had their eighteenth birthday put a hand on it, they'd walk away able to see a screen nobody else could see, and they'd get stronger by killing the things that came out of portals. The world called them awakeners. After that the world stopped losing.
That's basically the whole history of the last twenty years. A fence, a sign, a phone number, and a rock the size of a fist.
I found my row and sat in the back.
Nobody saved me a seat. I'm not complaining about it, I hadn't asked anybody to. Somewhere around sixteen I looked at homecoming and senior sunrise and the group chat and decided none of it was holding anything up, and I never went back and checked if I'd been right.
The principal talked for eleven minutes about how your trait doesn't define you.
Everybody in that gym knew he was lying, him included. Your trait decides which schools take you. It decides which jobs exist. There are companies that put the class letter on the application right under your name. He knew it, we knew it, and he said it anyway. I think he said it because somebody in that room was about to have a very bad morning and he wanted to already have been nice to them before it happened.
Then he started reading names.
Alphabetical, which meant I had a long time to sit and watch it happen to other people. Most got E or F. A couple of Ds. You could tell what somebody got without hearing it, just from the room. Polite clapping, polite clapping, polite clapping. Then an actual noise out of a whole section when a kid two rows up got a C and his mom stood up in the bleachers with both hands over her mouth.
One C in a graduating class. That's what the odds look like in real life.
"Miles North."
I stood up.
It's maybe forty feet to the stage. My hands had gone slick and I wiped them on my jeans twice on the way up, and my heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my jaw. I kept my face still the whole walk. That was the one thing I still had, that nobody in that room got to watch anything happen to me.
Up close it's just a rock.
I thought about the fence on Cave Creek. I thought about the word careful. Then I put my hand on it.
It wasn't dramatic. There was a click, sort of, somewhere behind my eyes, like a lock turning. Then a voice that wasn't a voice said:
Congratulations. You have awakened your trait.
Exercise — F-Class.
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
Somewhere far off the principal said "congratulations, son," and shook my hand. I know I shook his back because I remember that his hand was dry and mine wasn't.
F-Class. Bottom letter. What most people get.
And not even one of the F-Class traits that's worth something. Not minor regeneration, not enhanced hearing, nothing you could put on an application and have it mean anything.
Exercise. The thing every person on the planet can already do.
I went down the stage steps and up the aisle and out the double doors into a hundred and four degrees. Nobody stopped me. There were forty names left and nobody was looking at the back of the room.
I made it all the way to the car. I want to be clear about that part, because for a long time afterward it was the only thing about that day I was proud of. I got the door open and I got in and I got it shut.
Then I put my head on the steering wheel and cried like a little kid, in a parking lot, in the heat, for a while.