"Status," I said out loud, and felt like an idiot, and then thought it instead.
It was four in the afternoon. I was on the couch with the blinds shut and my car keys still in my hand, and I didn't remember the drive home. The screen came up about a foot in front of my face, pale blue, hanging in the air on nothing. When I moved my head it stayed put. When I put my hand behind it I could still see my hand.
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Name: Miles North
Level: 1
Strength: 8
Agility: 6
Stamina: 7
Intelligence: 8
Trait: Exercise (F-Class)
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
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I'd been sitting there for hours before I thought to call it up. Sat in the dark with my keys, and never once looked.
An average adult sits around 5 in everything. Five is the guy at the grocery store. Five is your uncle.
I was 8, 6, 7, 8. Because for two years I'd been getting up at five and running until I wanted to throw up, in a house with nobody in it to tell me to knock it off. I'd have told you it was running. Mostly it was a reason to be out of the house before the sun came up. The body doesn't know the difference, apparently. It had been writing all of it down the whole time.
Which was lucky, because that body is the only one I'm ever getting.
Once you awaken, push-ups do nothing. A year in a gym does nothing. That's why every kid who's serious about diving trains like a maniac the year before they turn eighteen, and why the ones who didn't spend the rest of their lives bringing it up.
You get one body free. Then the door shuts.
I looked at the sentence under the letter.
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
I sat forward so fast I dropped my keys.
I'd read it on the stage and heard it as an insult. A trait for the thing everybody can do. But that's not what it says. It says the more you exercise, the more points. After the crystal. For me.
It doesn't sit on top of the rule. It goes straight through it.
"The door doesn't shut for me," I said, to the empty living room, to see if it still held up outside my head.
It held up. It also didn't mean anything yet. I didn't know if a workout was worth a tenth of a point or a hundredth, or if it only worked once, or if there was a ceiling. For all I knew I'd do a thousand push-ups and get a notification that said nice try.
There was one way to find out, and it was free, and it was in the backyard.
* * *
It was six forty in the evening and a hundred and four degrees. There's a rule here in the summer: you go out before six in the morning or after eight at night. I didn't think I could sit in that house for another hour and a half.
Basketball shorts. Running shoes with the tread going bald on the outside of both heels. The big steel bottle, thirty-two ounces, filled to the neck and topped off with ice until it sweated in my hand. The bottle isn't optional. Every summer this city loses somebody who thought it was.
Our neighborhood is a loop, a mile if you take the outside streets. Gravel yards, oleander gone leggy, a basketball hoop at the Kims' that's had no net on it since I was twelve. I ran half a mile, walked a quarter, ran again. The heat at dusk doesn't come out of the sky. It comes up, out of the asphalt and the driveways and the block walls, everything that spent eleven hours soaking it up and now wants to give it back. Cool patch under a palo verde. Then a wall of it off somebody's driveway like you opened an oven.
By the third leg I'd stopped thinking about the crystal, or the laugh from the back rows, or the number nine thousand. That's the real reason I'd been running for two years. It makes you too stupid to feel anything. Your whole brain gets down to the next mailbox.
I came up my own driveway breathing like a dog, with the bottle empty and everything going a little grey at the edges.
Mrs. Ferreira was out front of her place with the hose, watering a bougainvillea that's been dying since the Obama administration.
"You're gonna kill yourself out here, mijo," she said, not looking up.
"Probably."
"Your mother used to say that too." She moved the hose to the next pot. "So? Today was the rock."
I walked slow circles in the driveway with my hands on my head. I hadn't said it to anybody yet. The woman with the microphone had said it for me.
"F," I said. "Exercise."
She turned the hose off at the nozzle and looked at me properly. She's lived next door my whole life. For two years she's watched me come and go from a house with nobody else in it, and never once said anything about it.
"Exercise," she said. "What, like this?" She pointed the hose at me, at the sweat, the state of me.
"I think so. It says I get points the more I do it."
"Everybody does it."
"Everybody else stops getting anything for it. From today." I didn't know how to say the next part without sounding crazy, so I just said it. "I don't think I stop."
Mrs. Ferreira thought about that for a while. She has a way of thinking where her whole face does it.
"Then go find out," she said. "And drink water, you look like a tomato." She turned the hose back on. "And eat something. A real something. Not cereal."
"Okay."
"I hear you through the wall, Miles. I know it's cereal."
* * *
I got the exercise mat out of the garage. Mom's, purple, with a chunk torn out of one corner. Put it down on the patio where the block wall had finally thrown some shade.
High reps, not much weight, almost no rest. I didn't want to be somebody who could move something heavy one time. Something with claws kills that guy in the second minute. I wanted a body that could do a hard thing and do it again and keep doing it after it had stopped wanting to.
Three rounds. Thirty push-ups, thirty sit-ups, twenty lunges a leg.
Round one was almost fun, which should have been a warning. Round two the push-ups went sloppy around twenty-two and I had to stop and reset my hands.
Round three, last lunge, right leg.
By then my legs had gone past burning into something more like a hum, one high constant note from hip to ankle, and the sweat had my eyes stinging so bad I was working with them shut. Right foot out. Down, knee a hair off the concrete, which was still warm coming up through the mat. And then there's the part where you have to come back up.
For a second and a half, I didn't.
I hung there at the bottom with both arms out for balance like a guy on a wire, leg screaming, the bougainvillea smell coming over the wall. And some part of my brain said, very reasonably, you could just kneel down. Nobody's watching. There is no one who will ever know.
Which was true. That was the thing about it. It was completely true.
I came up anyway.
Then I fell over sideways and lay face down with my cheek on the concrete.
And the screen came up.
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Exercise session complete.
Sustained strength and stamina training registered.
Strength +0.1
Stamina +0.1
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I laughed. Face down on the patio, dead-legged, with the light going purple over the block wall. It came out cracked and wrong and I didn't care.
A tenth of a point. Apparently that's the smallest amount of progress the universe sells.
Eight billion people, and for every one of them the day they touch the crystal is the last day their body changes on its own. Mine had just changed. I'd leaned on the door and felt it give.
From over the wall, Mrs. Ferreira's voice, not loud: "Mijo? You alive?"
"Yeah," I said, into the mat. "Yeah. It worked."
"Good," she said, like she'd known it would, and I heard her go in.
* * *
I lay there and did the math, because I'm my mother's kid and I can't leave a number alone.
Ten in everything. Ten across the board is where I stop being a liability and start being somebody who might live through the easiest portal in the county. Strength two points away. Stamina three. Agility four, and a tenth a session is forty sessions for Agility on its own, and I didn't even know yet if the trait could touch Agility at all.
I didn't know how many sessions I could do in a day. I didn't know anything. Nobody I could find had ever done this. If anybody else ever drew Exercise, they never wrote down what it did.
I made chicken and rice and broccoli, a real something, and ate it at the kitchen table. Then I set an alarm for four forty-five and put the phone on the dresser across the room so I'd have to stand up to turn it off.
Strength had moved. Stamina had moved. Agility was the one I'd been trying to move for two years without getting a single point out of it, and I lay in the dark knowing I'd find out at five in the morning whether the trait could do what I couldn't.