Day 32. Strength 14.3. Stamina 13.2. Agility 12.1. Intelligence 12.1.
Coach had it written out when I came in Tuesday. Two pages, on the back of a fun-run flyer from 2014, in handwriting that is much worse than you'd expect from a woman that precise about everything else.
"Sit."
"Can I—"
"Sit, read it, and don't talk until you've read all of it, because the first half is going to make you angry and the second half is the reason."
So I read it. And she was right about the first half.
* * *
At the top of the page, underlined twice, which I noticed and did not mention:
STRENGTH + STAMINA — PRIORITYAGILITY — MAINTENANCE. 1 SESSION. DO NOT ARGUE.
"No," I said.
"You read the whole thing?"
"I read enough of it."
"Then you didn't read the whole thing." She took the coffee off the counter and sat down on the bench across from me, slow, with the knee. "Say the objection."
"Agility is my worst number. It's a 12. It was a 6. It has been the lowest thing on that screen since the day I got it and I have spent more of my life on it than on all three of the others put together, and you want me to stop."
"I want you to stop paying full price for it, yes."
"Why."
"Because you're a wall," Coach Reyes said, "and walls don't get bought out of a dodge."
* * *
She let me sit with that for a second and then she did the thing she does, which is take it apart in front of you so you can't argue with the pieces.
"On Saturday you were in a hallway with a thing that could go around a corner by changing shape. Say your Agility had been a 20 instead of a 12. Say I'd given you eight extra points in the one stat you want. What happens differently in that hallway?"
I thought about it, and the honest answer was nothing.
"Nothing," I said.
"Nothing. You still can't outrun it in a six-foot corridor, you still have to be between it and Tom, and you are still the only thing standing in a place where standing is the entire job." She drank some coffee. "Now say I'd given you eight points of Strength instead."
The shield doesn't fold. That's what happens. The ply cracks because nine and a half pounds of plywood was at the absolute edge of what a 12 could hold in position against something that pushed. At a 20 I'm holding a steel shield, and a steel shield does not fold, and I walk out of that corridor with a bruise.
"That's not fair," I said.
"It is completely fair. It's just not nice." She set the cup down. "You've got three things to buy and a day that fits about five hours of real work in it, and you have been spending it evenly, like a person dividing a check. That's politeness, Miles. Pick the two that decide whether you live and buy them, and let the other one tick over."
* * *
The second half of the page is where she was right twice.
I'd been running eight sessions a day. Four stats, two each, one after another, every one of them ridden all the way to failure and then stopped. That's how I built it on a legal pad in my mother's kitchen the first week, and I'd never once questioned it.
Coach's version has five blocks in it. Not eight.
And four of the five are built to fail twice.
"Loaded carry," she said, tapping the page. "Forty minutes. You're going to walk that shield around the floor at your ribs until the arm goes, and then I'm going to give you ninety seconds and you're going to keep walking it until the lungs go. Those are two different things happening to two different systems in the same forty minutes and most people can't tell them apart. You're going to learn to."
"My shield's at Tom's."
"Not yours. Mine." She pointed the pen at the back room. "The kite. Go get it. You can finish reading after."
* * *
Her kite is thirty-eight inches and eleven pounds and sits at the wrong height on me, and I walked it around the outside of the floor at my ribs, past the rack and the rowers and the chalk bucket and back, while she sat on the bench with her coffee and the page on her knee and said "In" every time my elbow drifted. She said it a lot. She never said it louder.
Somewhere around the fourth lap my forearm started to burn. Somewhere past the ninth it went to the hum. Then the rim came down an inch and I put it back, and it came down again and I couldn't.
The box came up in front of my face. Strength.
"Ninety seconds," Coach said, looking at her phone. "Drink something. Don't sit down."
I didn't sit down. I stood in the middle of the floor with the kite hanging off my arm, drinking, and watched the clock over the door.
"Go."
The second half was worse, because the arm was already gone and had to come along anyway. She made me walk faster. By the end I was breathing through my mouth like I'd done the loop twice, with the shield more or less resting on my hip, and my lungs went before my legs did, and the second box came up. Stamina.
She thinks she's teaching me to read my own fatigue, which is a normal thing a coach teaches a normal athlete. What she's doing is describing the rule I found in my own backyard on Day 19 with a shield I'd owned for four hours. The system doesn't care what an exercise is called. It cares what ran out. She built that block because it's good programming. It happens to also be worth double, and I am the only person on this planet who can see the second half of the invoice.
I put the kite down on the floor slowly, because my hand wasn't going to do it slowly for me.
"Which went first," Coach said.
"Arm."
"Then?"
"Lungs."
"You could tell?"
"Yeah."
She watched my face a second longer than she needed to, and wrote something small in the margin. "Good. Now sit."
* * *
"Third thing," Coach said, once I could talk. "The expensive work goes first."
"It does?"
"It always did. You've been putting the hardest thing you do at the end of the day for a month because that's when you had a gap." She turned the page over. "What time did you do your hardest set on Day 13."
Eleven at night. After a shift and her hour and a full circuit and dinner, on five hours of sleep, at a kitchen table, with my hands shaking.
"Late," I said.
"Late. And it didn't register."
"...No."
"So it goes first," said Coach Reyes. "Whatever it is. I don't need to know what it is. It goes first, before the floor, before me, before anything, because the thing you do first is the only thing in your day that gets all of you."
* * *
She wasn't being delicate. That's not in her. She'd listened to me talk for forty minutes on Monday about a trait that pays out on failure in four stats, and she'd counted, because she counts, and she'd noticed that I described three.
She built the whole program around a hole and then told me to put the most expensive thing in my day into it.
And I said thank you, and took the page, and did not fill the hole in.
I keep waiting to have a good reason. What I've got is that she asked me on Monday whether it worked on her and answered it herself in two seconds flat, and there's a version of Intelligence being trainable that makes that worse for her, and I haven't worked out whether that's a reason or an excuse.
* * *
So the new day, as of Tuesday, goes like this.
Four ten: up. Nothing in my stomach but water. Twenty-five minutes at the kitchen table with two four-digit numbers and no paper, which is the hardest thing I do and which now gets the sharpest version of me there is. It's worse first thing. I had not expected that. Rested, at four in the morning, I get further before it comes apart, which means the edge is further away, which means the walk to it costs more.
Four forty: the gym. Lights on in order, breaker four is still bad, six scoops.
Five to seven: the desk. Hector, Annette, the Vogels, Priya, Wendell.
Seven to eleven: Coach. Three priority blocks, all stacked, all built to fail twice.
Eleven to noon: floors and the bathroom and the chalk.
Afternoon: one agility block, short, unglamorous, exactly as much as keeping it from rotting requires.
Evening: the second stacked block, at home, on my own.
Nine thirty: the second Intelligence set, which is the one that doesn't work properly, because by nine thirty I am not sharp enough to reach the edge and I know it and I do it anyway.
Ten: down. Non-negotiable. Sunday off completely, which she wrote on the page and then said out loud and then made me repeat back to her.
* * *
Tuesday night I sat on the end of my bed at five past ten with the numbers up and looked at what a real program does.
Strength 14.7. Stamina 13.6. Agility 12.2. Intelligence 12.3.
Four tenths. Four tenths on both of the big ones, on the first day of running it properly, which is the cap, which is everything the world will currently give me.
A tenth on agility, which is what maintenance costs and what maintenance buys.
And two tenths on the fourth one. Half of what's available. Because the person who could double it is across town, and would take one look at the problem and know four things about it before lunch, and I have decided, for reasons I'd rather not look at this late, not to ask.
Three numbers she touches. One she doesn't.
They are going to keep diverging every single day, and I am going to sit here and watch it happen on a blue screen in the dark, and at some point that gap is going to get big enough to be an answer.