Day 31. Strength 14.1. Stamina 13.0. Agility 11.9. Intelligence 11.9.
Sunday I had a cap of four tenths a day for the first time in my life and I got two.
That is the entire report on Sunday. I was awake at six because the dressing pulled when I rolled over, and I sat in my own backyard at seven in the morning with a jump rope in my hand and found out that a body which has spent five and a half hours in a portal and then been on its back on a ramp does not go to failure four times in a day. It found the edge twice in each stat, the old two, and then it couldn't find it again. Everything after that was a man doing exercise.
Two tenths across four stats, on a day when I was allowed four.
I'd like to say I took that well. I sat on the patio step for about twenty minutes first.
Tom sold the cores on Grand on Sunday afternoon and sent the four of us fifty-four dollars each over the app. The Association's anomaly report pays two hundred and fifty to the reporting party, which is sixty-two apiece, and it is filed, and it takes six to eight weeks.
So: nine thousand two hundred and forty dollars against eleven hundred a month, after a second-degree burn and the best day's work anybody in that party has ever done. Ren was right about everything except whether it was worth doing.
* * *
Monday I went in at four fifteen and mopped the floor of a gym one-handed, and did the corners, because the corners are the job.
Hector came in at five on the dot, looked at the dressing on my neck, and said, "Huh." At about five forty Priya asked me what happened and I said a chemical thing at work and she said "at a gym?" in a tone I deserved, and then let it go, which was generous of her.
Coach came in at seven and put her bag down behind the counter and didn't take her eyes off me once while she did it.
"Sit down," she said. "Not there. On the bench, where I can see your neck."
She took the dressing off herself, without asking, and looked at it, and put it back on better than the urgent care had.
"F-rank slime hole," she said.
"Yeah."
"No."
"...No."
"Tell me," Coach Reyes said, "or don't, and we'll do split squats. But pick one and pick it now, because I'm not doing another month of this."
* * *
So I told her.
All of it, standing in an empty gym at twenty past seven in the morning, in the worst possible order, starting somewhere in the middle with the cap and going backwards to the crystal and then forwards again and then sideways into the money.
The trait gives me stat points for exercise. A completed session that goes to actual failure is a tenth. There was a hard cap at two tenths a day and it moved to four tenths on Saturday when I hit level two. Technique doesn't raise what I get, it lowers what it costs, which is why the forty-five minutes you spent on my squat on Day 3 are still paying out. Recovery is where the work lands, and you told me that on Day 14 and I did not believe you until I had wasted two and a half points proving you right.
I did not tell her about Intelligence.
I'd like to have a good reason. The honest one is that it came up in the order it came up and by the time I got near it something in me went quiet and stepped around it, and I let it.
* * *
Coach listened to the entire thing without saying one word.
When I stopped she went and got her coffee, and stood at the counter with her back to me, not drinking it, and then came and sat down on the bench opposite, slowly, with the knee.
"I've been telling myself you were a fast novice," she said.
"I know."
"Four weeks. Your push-ups went nineteen to twenty-four and then twenty-four to thirty-one. Your bottom position stopped shaking. You held a shield for nineteen minutes and forty seconds eight days after you first picked one up." She turned the cup around in her hands. "I've had that in front of me for a month and I have been very carefully calling it talent, because the other options were that I'd gotten better at my job at fifty-six or that something was wrong."
"It's not wrong."
"No. It's the other thing." She looked up. "Nobody is that fast a novice, Miles. Nobody has ever been that fast a novice. I've seen four hundred people start."
Then she asked me the question I had been dreading since about the second sentence, and she asked it in the same voice she uses for heels down.
"Does it work on me?"
* * *
You see, Coach Reyes has been training in her own gym every day for eleven years.
I had never thought about that and I should have. She opens at five. She hates opening at five. She is in that building six days a week, she was a 31 in Strength the day her knee went and she is a 31 in Strength today, and she has spent eleven years inside a room full of the one activity that the entire world agrees cannot help her.
Nobody does that for eleven years out of habit.
"I don't think so," I said.
"No," said Coach. "It doesn't."
And she said it flatly and instantly and without one bit of self-pity, the way a person says a thing they have already checked, every day, for years, and stopped expecting anything from, and kept checking anyway.
That was the whole moment. It lasted about two seconds. She drank some coffee.
"Right," she said. "Then here's what we change."
* * *
We got about forty minutes on it before the eight-thirty regular came in, and it all came down to one idea.
I told her the arithmetic that had kept me up: that the cap is not the constraint, that the constraint is how much of a day it costs me to reach the edge of myself in four separate things, and that as the numbers go up the edge gets further away and the day does not get longer.
Coach Reyes put her cup down.
"That's it," she said. "That's the actual problem and you got there in two days and it takes most people a career." And then, because she is who she is, "It's also the only problem in strength training. Everybody who ever lifted anything has had it. You've just got a screen that tells you the score."
"So there's an answer."
"There's a hundred years of answers. Loading. Frequency. Specificity. Ordering your day so the expensive thing goes first. Knowing the difference between failure and grinding, which you do not currently know, because you think they're the same and they're not, and the second one costs you three days for one tenth." She pulled the clipboard off its nail. "You've been running a four-stat program designed by an eighteen-year-old on a legal pad."
"It worked."
"It got you to a 14 and a burn on your neck." She clicked the pen. "Tomorrow at seven I'll have a real one."
* * *
The last thing.
At about a quarter to nine she said, "You asked me about a punch card," and sat down on the crate, which is how I know it was going to cost her something.
"On Friday you told me they died in a D," she said. "And I said not today. So."
"So."
"About six weeks before it happened, your father came in here on his own. Not to train. He hadn't been in months by then, I'd told them what I told them and they'd stopped coming and that was that." She had her hands on the head of the cane. "He came in at about four in the afternoon and he stood roughly where you're standing and he asked me one question and then he left."
"What was the question."
"He asked me whether a portal's rating could be wrong."
The AC cycled on. Somewhere in the back the water heater did what it does.
"What did you tell him?"
"I told him no," Coach said. "I told him the survey teams rate them conservative because of the liability, that in all my years I never once saw a portal come in worse than its letter, and that if he was worried about a rating he should trust the paperwork over his gut." She looked at the floor. "Which is the standard answer, and it is what everybody in this industry would have told him, and I have had two years to decide whether I believe it and I have not gotten anywhere."
I stood in the middle of a gym in the back of a shopping center with a dressing on my neck.
"Coach."
"Mm."
"On Saturday I was in a portal that has been rated blue for nine years." My voice was doing something and I let it. "The first two levels are blue. The bottom of it is green. The color is the light off the walls and it comes up from underneath, and the fence and the sign and the man who drives past four times a year are all bolted to the only part of it that can't change."
Coach Reyes did not move.
"The Association has had a second fence around it since three o'clock on Saturday afternoon," I said. "So the answer to my dad's question is yes. A rating can be wrong. It can be wrong under a sticker, and nobody would know."
* * *
She sat on that crate for a long time.
"Ray was not a clever man," she said eventually, and it was the kindest thing I have ever heard anybody say about my father. "He was a careful one. He did not have ideas. If he drove out here on a Tuesday afternoon to ask a woman he'd stopped talking to whether a rating could be wrong, then he'd already had a reason to think so, and he'd had it for a while, and he'd have checked it twice before he said it out loud to anybody."
"And you told him no."
"And I told him no," Coach said.
She got up off the crate, with the cane, the way she does.
"Six weeks later they filed a plan for a D-rank portal inside their grade," she said, "the boring kind, and did every single thing right, and did not come out. And everybody who has ever said their names to you has used the word careful."
"Yeah."
"Miles." She picked her coffee up off the floor. "They weren't being careful. They were being sure."