The alarm went off at four forty-five and I had to walk across the room to shut it up, which was the whole point of putting it there, and I stood by the dresser in the dark hating the guy who'd set it.
Then I went out back.
Ninety-one degrees, at a quarter to five in the morning. This city doesn't cool off in July so much as briefly stop yelling at you. But it was dark, and there's one hour before the sun clears the Superstition Mountains when Phoenix is almost decent. Flat grey light. Doves going. The whole valley quiet.
My legs were wrecked from the night before. Every step down off the porch was a negotiation. The concrete was still warm from yesterday under my bare feet, so I went back in for shoes, and sitting down on the edge of the couch to tie them was its own negotiation.
Agility. Six. My worst number, four full points off ten. If the trait couldn't touch Agility, then the ceiling on my whole life was slow guy who can lift things, and I was about to find out.
I got the jump rope out of the garage.
Jump rope is the most honest exercise there is. You can't fake it, because the rope tells on you immediately and out loud. Three sets of a hundred, in a pattern I'd picked up off a video. Right foot twice, left foot twice, alternate, start over.
First set I caught the rope on my ankle at thirty-one and again at seventy. Second set was cleaner. Third set I went through all hundred without a break, the rope slapping the concrete in a quick steady rhythm off the block wall, and two yards over a dog started barking at me about it.
Somewhere around eighty my calves started to go. With rope it feels like the backs of your legs are filling up with wet sand, slowly, from the ankle, and the rope doesn't care. It comes round at the same speed whether you're ready or not. At ninety-four I felt the plastic tick the toe of my shoe and was sure that was it, and it went under anyway. I counted the last six out loud through my teeth, like that would help.
I bent over with my hands on my knees.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained agility training registered.
Agility +0.1
─────────────────────────────
I said something out loud that I'm not going to write down, at five fifteen in the morning, with my whole chest.
Then I stood there in the yard with the rope hanging off one hand and grinned at the block wall like an idiot. The dog was still going.
It works on Agility. It works on the one I was born bad at. Whatever I am at the bottom of all this, it isn't decided yet.
I went and got the ladder, the rope-and-webbing kind you flatten on the ground, ten squares, and run patterns through. It looks ridiculous. Football players and boxers have been doing it for a hundred years because it works. In, in, out, out. Your feet are supposed to touch every square and your eyes are supposed to stay up, and mine kept dropping to my shoes, and every time they dropped I caught a rung with my heel and the whole ladder skated a foot sideways on the concrete and I had to stop and drag it straight. I did fifty lengths. Somewhere in the thirties the sun came over the wall and the temperature started climbing in real time, five degrees in twenty minutes, the way it does here.
I sat down on the patio step and waited for the screen.
─────────────────────────────
Exercise session complete.
Sustained agility training registered.
Agility +0.1
Notice: F-Class trait limitation. Each stat may be increased by a maximum of 0.2 points per day.
─────────────────────────────
I read it three times.
Then I got up and did the ladder again, all fifty, in the sun, with my legs gone, out of pure spite, because I wanted the system to tell me no to my face.
Nothing. No screen. Not even a no.
So I did the rope. Two hundred straight through, ugly the whole way.
Nothing.
I stood there with the handles in my fists, breathing, and waited anyway. Ten seconds. Thirty. A dove came down onto the top of the wall, thought better of it, and left.
I sat down on the step and put my head in my hands.
* * *
Over the wall, Mrs. Ferreira's screen door banged.
"Mijo." Not loud. "It's six in the morning."
"Sorry. I'll stop."
"I didn't say stop. I said it's six." Then her head came up over the block wall. She was up on the step stool she keeps for the lemon tree. She had her coffee in one hand, and she looked at me sitting on the step. "What happened? Last night it worked."
"It still works." I held up two fingers. "Two tenths. That's all it'll give me in a day. Per stat. After that I can do whatever I want and it doesn't count."
"So how many days?"
I hadn't done it yet. I'd been too busy being angry at the ladder. I did it out loud, to her, because she was there.
"Strength's at eight. I need ten. That's two points, at two tenths a day, so ten days. Stamina's seven. Fifteen days. Agility's six." I stopped. "Twenty. They all run at the same time, so it's whichever one's worst. Twenty days."
"Twenty days is nothing," said Mrs. Ferreira. "Twenty days is July."
I looked up at her.
"And then what happens at ten?"
"Then I can go into a portal. The easiest kind. Without being a corpse that hasn't happened yet."
She didn't answer that. Her eyes went past me to the back of my house, at the kitchen window, and I knew what she was thinking about, because it's what everybody on this street thinks about when they look at my house.
"With who?" she said.
"Nobody, yet. Nobody takes an F." I wiped my face with my shirt. "If you're low and you're useless, people call you an oil bottle. Dead weight you haul along so somebody's cousin can level. That's what I am to a party right now."
"Oil bottle," she said, like she was trying it out. "Who says that?"
"Everybody. Every diver forum there is."
"Ugly." She says that about the yards on this street that let the gravel go to weeds. She held the mug against her cheek a second, though it couldn't have been doing anything for her. "So you need money while you wait."
"I need a job in a gym." I'd thought of it on the run last night, somewhere around the Kims'. "Front desk, mopping, whatever. Somewhere I'm already standing next to the equipment all day. It's the only kind of job where the money and the training are the same place."
"And in the portal? What are you, with a six in the jumping?"
"Shield," I said. "Front. I'm not fast. I'm never going to be the guy who isn't there when the claw comes down. So I'll be the one still standing when it does."
She drank her coffee.
"Your father carried one of those," she said. "A big one. He used to lean it by the garage door."
"I know."
"That's not why."
"That's not why," I said.
"I know it's not why, mijo." She started down off the step stool, and her voice came from lower down, behind the wall. "Eat breakfast. Twenty days, you said. Don't waste one of them sitting on a step."
* * *
In the shower I worked out the part I hadn't said to her. I'd thought the one thing I had was that I'd out-work anybody. Ten sessions a day. But after two tenths, the four hundredth push-up is worth the same as no push-up. And I can't do four tenths tomorrow to cover for today. A missed day goes in the ground and doesn't come back out.
I got out of the shower and found a legal pad in my backpack, which was still by the door from Friday with the graduation program crumpled in the front pocket, and sat at the kitchen table and wrote it all down, because I think better in ink.
At the top, the sentence. Two tenths a day. Days are the currency. A missed day is a theft, and it's permanent.
Then four problems, and what I had for each.
1. The rate. I crossed that one out and wrote 0.2 / stat / day next to it.
2. Diving.Not yet. Nobody carries an F. Get to 10 alone.
3. Money.JOB IN A GYM.
4. What kind of diver. And under it, one word, and I underlined it twice, and it looked insane sitting there on a legal pad in my mother's kitchen, an F-Class writing down that he's going to stand in front.
SHIELD.
I sat there with the pen for a minute. The fridge hummed. Two houses down somebody's sprinklers came on, ticking, and I could smell the wet gravel through the screen.
I tore the page off and stuck it on the fridge with the magnet shaped like a chile pepper that my mom bought in Santa Fe.
Then I made eggs and toast and turned on the TV for the portal ticker at the bottom of the news, the way I do every morning.
They weren't running the ticker. They'd led with it instead. A factory out past Buckeye, with the lights going in the parking lot, and one word along the bottom of the screen, in red capitals, that you don't see in Arizona very often anymore.
BREAK.