Day 26. Strength 12.3. Stamina 11.3. Agility 10.2. Intelligence 10.3.
The Open Listings tab is the saddest thing in that app and they've buried it three screens down, which I think tells you they know.
Class, monster, location, date, how many bodies they still need, and then a hundred and forty characters of free text where a person gets to make their case.
E / KOBOLD / NEW RIVER / SUN 06:00 / NEED 2
have cleared this one 4x. no drama. bring your own water.
F / RAT / 27TH AVE / SAT / NEED 3
first timers welcome!!! lets get those levels 🙏
E / SLIME / QUEEN CREEK / FRI 19:00 / NEED 1
need a body. any class. will split even. please.
I sat on my couch and scrolled that board for two hours on Tuesday night.
It's where you go when no guild will take you, which is most people. Every listing on it is a person doing arithmetic I recognize. A hundred and thirty dollars for six hours, times four Saturdays, is five hundred a month, and five hundred a month is a car payment or a daycare or the difference between the two jobs and the three jobs.
Nobody on that board is chasing a dream. They're all doing a shift.
The one I answered was near the top of the F-rank filter and it had been up for eleven days.
F / SLIME / BELL RD SELF-STORAGE / SAT 08:00 / NEED 1
3 of us, done this one twice. need a 4th, any class, dont care. we start on time. NOT A JOKE
I read "any class, dont care" about six times.
Then I typed: Miles North, unranked, F-Class. Never been in. I hold a shield. And before I could think about it any harder I hit send, and then I put the phone under a couch cushion like a coward and went and did my second Intelligence set.
He answered in forty minutes.
ok. bell rd lot tomorrow 7pm, come look at it with us. bring the shield.
* * *
Tomás Guzmán is thirty-four and works nights at a distribution center out in Tolleson, and he came straight from a shift he'd swapped to make this, which he mentioned once and never again.
E-Class. His trait is Sure Footing. He does not slip. Not on wet floors, not on gravel, not on whatever's on the ground in a slime hole. He's had it since he was eighteen and he said it the way you'd tell somebody your blood type.
Level 5. Two kids. A clipboard on the hood of his truck with a printed map of the Bell Road interior on it, three levels, with pencil on it in three different colors.
"Okay," he said, before I'd finished walking across the gravel. "North. That's you."
"Yeah."
"You really never been in."
"No sir."
"Don't call me sir." He looked at the shield, which I was carrying at my side because I'd been told to bring it and had not thought about how I'd look walking across a parking lot with it. "How long can you hold that?"
And I told him the truth, which was: "Nineteen minutes and forty seconds."
Tom looked up from the clipboard.
I found out later what that was. Everybody who comes off that board says "a long time," or "a while," or "pretty long I think." Nobody says nineteen minutes and forty seconds, because to say that you have to have sat on a crate somewhere with somebody timing you and then gone home and written it down.
"Huh," Tom said. And then, to the other two: "He's fine."
He turned the clipboard around on the hood so I could see it. The map was a printout gone soft at the corners, and the pencil was everywhere, arrows and circled spots and little tally marks in the margins, red and blue and a grey that might have just been a pencil going dull. He didn't explain any of it. He put his finger on the entrance and ran it down to the bottom of the page and back up, slow, the way you'd trace a route you'd driven so many times you didn't need the map, and then he took his finger away.
"You'll see it Saturday," he said.
* * *
Renata Choi is twenty-two and in a respiratory therapy program at Glendale Community College, and she was leaning against the chain-link with her arms crossed when I got there and she did not uncross them for the whole conversation.
E-Class. Her trait is Ember. She can light a flame about the size of a match head, up to about ten feet away, about eight times before she gets a headache.
"It's a lighter," she said. "That's what it is. I got a lighter."
"It's the only ranged thing we've got," Tom said, without looking up.
"It's a lighter that works on a slime, which nobody expects, which is the only reason it does anything." She shrugged one shoulder. "Ren. Don't call me Renata, my mom calls me Renata."
And Colby Estrada is nineteen, and he was so happy I was there that it took me a minute to work out what was going on.
"You're F?" he said. "Wait, actually F? Bro."
"Yeah."
"Bro." He put his hand out and I shook it and he kept shaking it. "Colby. F-Class, I got Pocket, it's like — " and he held up his hands to make a shape " — like a shoebox? I can put stuff in it and it's not anywhere, and then I take it out. That's the whole trait. Everybody thinks it's for stealing."
"Is it for stealing?"
"I mean you could." He looked troubled by the idea. "I carry the water."
He carries the water. Six liters of it, in a space the size of a shoebox that isn't anywhere, for a party of four, for six hours, which is a thing no amount of muscle does for you and which is worth more in an F-rank than a sword.
He also had a sword. It was on his back and it was too big for him and he had clearly saved up for it and I did not say one word about it, because a week ago I watched a woman on Grand hand me a shield and say "nobody buys the shield first," and I've been carrying that around ever since like it makes me better than somebody.
* * *
We stood at the fence and looked at it.
It was seven at night and still a hundred and five, and the gravel was giving the day back up through the soles of my shoes. Somebody two rows over was loading a couch into a storage unit by himself and swearing at it in a low steady voice. Colby passed around water bottles nobody had asked for, out of nowhere, out of a shoebox that isn't anywhere.
The Bell Road portal is in the back corner of a storage lot under a steel shade canopy the county put up, and it is the size of a door, and it is blue, and it has been blue for nine years. Up close the blue isn't a color exactly. It's more like a direction.
"Twenty-five, thirty of them," Tom said. "Three levels. Second one's a ring, you go around it, don't cut across the middle even though the map says you can. Four, five hours if nobody's stupid."
"What's the split?"
"County pays three hundred for the reset. Cores go nine bucks at the place on Grand, sometimes eight." He did it without a pause, which meant he'd done it a thousand times. "Twenty-six cores last time. Came out about a hundred thirty apiece."
A hundred and thirty dollars.
I stood there and ran it, because I can't not. A hundred and thirty dollars is three days and change of what I lose standing still. Six hours underground, four people, somebody's forearm going purple, for three days.
And Tom Guzmán does it most Saturdays and has for two years, and he'd swapped a shift to stand in a gravel lot and explain it to me.
* * *
"I've got to say a thing," I said.
Tom capped his pen. "Okay."
"I got told last week not to go into a portal with people I met that week."
Ren laughed once, out of her nose.
"Who told you that?" Tom said.
"A D-rank. Copper Vale. I was at a clear."
"Yeah." He nodded slowly, and he wasn't offended, he was thinking about it. "She's right. That's how you do it if you've got a choice."
He put the clipboard under his arm and looked around the lot. Ren against the fence. Colby with a sword on his back he can't use. Me. A blue door behind a storage unit on Bell Road.
"Nobody standing in this lot's got a choice," he said. "That's what the board is."
Ren pushed off the fence. "So is he in or not. I have to study."
"He's in," Tom said.
"Cool." She was already walking to her car. Over her shoulder, not turning around: "Bring two pairs of socks."
I said I already knew that, and she lifted a hand over her shoulder, and I couldn't tell if that meant good or meant nobody cares.
* * *
Saturday. Day 29. Eight in the morning, in the lot, boots on, two pairs of socks.
I drove home the long way and I didn't turn the radio on.
Then on Thursday morning at seven I stood in front of the counter at Grindstone while Coach was doing the schedule, and I said, "I need the Saturday."
She didn't look up.
"Ask me for it, then."
"I'm asking you for the Saturday."
Coach Reyes put a line through something on the sheet and wrote something else in its place, and said, "It's yours," and then, still writing, "Friday you're not training. You'll want to and you won't."