Day 75. Strength 27.3. Stamina 26.2. Agility 15.7. Intelligence 19.1.
Coach put a broomstick across my shoulders at five past eleven on Wednesday morning and said, "What does it weigh?"
"Nothing. A pound."
"Hold it out."
I took it off my shoulders and held it out in front of me with both hands, arms straight, at chest height, like I was offering it to somebody. She sat down on the end of the bench to watch.
"Now what does it weigh?"
"Still a pound."
"Does it?"
It didn't. Not after about a minute. My shoulders started to talk to me at a minute and a half, and by two minutes the front of them, the bit under the collarbone, was hot, and the stick had started to drift down an inch at a time and I had to keep bringing it back.
"Put it down," she said, and I did, and she took it from me and leaned it against the rack. Across the room Hector had the mop going under the leg press, slow, and he'd stopped to watch the stick come down.
"That's the slower number," she said. "I said it wrong last week. I've been saying it wrong to people for years. It isn't slower. It's farther."
* * *
None of what I'd tried since Monday was her idea.
I'd tried walking the carry faster, which made my lungs go first and left my arm sitting there fine. I'd tried a different grip on the enarme, a worse one, on purpose, which Coach saw from across the room on Tuesday and stopped in about four seconds with the cane and a look. She hadn't got up. She'd pointed the cane at me from her chair by the desk, the way you'd point at a dog on the couch, and held it there until I'd changed my hand back.
"You don't get a cheaper edge by doing it badly," she'd said. "You get a hurt shoulder and a tenth you'll pay back in a month."
So on Wednesday she sat me down on the bench next to her.
"Thirteen pounds at your ribs," she said. "Where's the weight?"
"At my ribs."
"How far from your shoulder?"
I thought about it. "Eight inches. Maybe."
"Hold it out. Arm straight. Shield face-up, flat, like a tray. Where is it now?"
"Two feet."
"So what does your shoulder think it weighs?"
I had it before she finished saying it. Thirteen pounds at eight inches against thirteen pounds at twenty-four. Three times. The steel didn't change. The shoulder's job did.
"About forty," I said. "It thinks it's carrying forty."
She looked at me sideways over her glasses.
"That was fast," she said.
"It's just multiplication."
"Hm." She looked at me for a second longer than the multiplication needed, and then she looked away, at the floor where the shield was lying. "Most people I explain that to need a drawing."
I didn't say anything. I'd answered in about a second and a half, and I'd done it without trying to, and I'd watched her notice. She picked her coffee up off the bench and drank some and put it back down in the same wet ring it had come out of.
* * *
There were rules. She gave them to me sitting down with the cane across her knees and her finger up like she was counting, and she counted to five, not three, and the fifth one she said twice.
Elbow soft, never locked. Shoulder blade down and back, set before the shield comes up, not after. Breathe. The second the shield tilts, it's over, because a tilted shield is a shoulder doing something it shouldn't. And the fifth one.
"The first shake," she said. "The first time it shakes, you put it down. You do not hold through a shake. You don't hold through it for the tenth. You don't hold through it because you're two seconds from the edge and you can feel it. You put it down."
"How do I know if it's the edge or a shake?"
"You don't, yet. So you put it down." She tapped the cane on the concrete, once. "Shoulders are what end shield men. Not claws. Shoulders. You'll get one good one in this life and I watched one go on a man I liked very much at thirty-four, and he holds his coffee with the other hand now."
She said it with no change in her voice at all, which is how I knew it was somebody.
I didn't ask who. She didn't tell me.
"The fifth rule," she said again. "Say it."
"First shake, I put it down."
"Good. Up."
I stood. My shoulders already knew what was coming and had gone tight on their own, up around my ears, and I had to put them back where she wanted them.
* * *
Shield face-up on my forearms first, then out onto my hands. Arms straight. Elbows soft. I set my shoulder blades the way she'd shown me, down and back, like putting them in your back pockets. The shield came up flat in front of me at the height of my chest, and for the first thirty seconds it was nothing. It was a tray.
At a minute it was something. My elbows wanted to lock. I let them bend a hair, like she'd said, and the shield dipped, and I brought it back.
At three minutes the front of both shoulders was hot, and the heat was spreading, up into my neck and down into the tops of my arms. I watched the clock over the door. I breathed. At five minutes the burn had a sound to it, a high thin hum somewhere behind my ears that I don't think was real. At six minutes I wanted to put it down so badly that it was the only thing in my head.
That had not happened in eleven days. Eleven days of the long flat stretch in the middle, where nothing hurts enough to want anything. I'd forgotten wanting to put it down was a thing.
Sweat ran off my eyebrow into my left eye and there was nothing I could do about it. I blinked. The shield was close enough that I could read the scratches on its face, and there was one long one across the top, old, worn smooth at the edges by somebody else's hands, and I looked at that instead of the clock.
At eight minutes Coach said "Breathe," and I realized I hadn't been.
At nine minutes and fourteen seconds the shield shook.
Just once. A tremor, left side, a little jump like a car going over a seam in the road.
I put it down.
I brought it in to my chest, slowly, and started it down toward my knees, and my arms kept trying to float up, like they'd forgotten how to hang.
The notification came while it was still on its way to the floor.
Strength +0.1
Coach clicked the watch. She looked at it, and then she wrote on the card in her lap, and turned it round so I could see.
9:14.
"Next to forty-eight," she said, and touched the number from the morning carry with her pen.
"Yeah."
"That buys you a while," she said. "More than a week. This one goes further before it stops." She put the card down. "And then we go farther again, and then that runs out too, and then we're having a different conversation."
"About what?"
"About money," she said, "or about a level. Ten more seconds. Then lungs, on the carry."
* * *
The morning carry had given lungs at fifty-four minutes, longer than ever, and I didn't care, because Strength had a cheap edge again and the carry could have the whole hour for Stamina.
Colby was in the lot at 12:05. He'd left the AC on high with the windows up, and the hula girl with no head was rattling on the dash in the blast. He saw my face when I got in.
"You look happy," he said. "That's weird. Are you okay?"
"I found a thing."
"Cool. What thing?"
"Holding stuff out in front of you is heavier than holding it close."
Colby thought about this through a whole green light.
"Yeah," he said. "Everybody knows that, though."
"I know," I said. "I didn't."
* * *
Coach had stood up to go to her office when I left, and stopped at the door.
"Monday," she said. "Four fifty-two. You said later."
"I know."
"It's been later for two days." She didn't turn round. She still had the card in her hand, 9:14 at the top, and she tapped it against her leg twice while she talked. "I'm on that bench every morning at four fifty-two this week, for as long as it takes. I don't need to know what it is. I said that, and I meant it. But you came and stood in front of me on Monday like a man with a thing to say, and I'd like to hear it said."
She went into her office and shut the door, and through the window in it I watched her sit down and put her glasses on and pick up a crossword, and not do any of it.