Day 38. Strength 16.3. Stamina 15.2. Agility 12.6. Intelligence 13.1.
The Association's valley office is on the second floor of a building off the 17 that also contains a dentist, a bail bondsman, and a company that does something with solar panels.
I had pictured, I don't know. Something.
There's a waiting room with eleven chairs in it and a water cooler and a poster about the color scale that is the exact poster from the third grade, and four of us sat in it on a Monday morning for twenty minutes while a man in the corner filled out a form with a chained pen.
Tom had taken the day. Ren had skipped a lab. Colby had called in sick from a shoe store.
Colby took the chair nearest the water cooler and drank three of the little paper cones, one after the other, and crushed each one flat and lined them up on his knee. Ren sat with her backpack on her lap and both arms through the straps, like somebody might try to take it. Tom read the color poster all the way through, every word, including the small print at the bottom about who'd paid for it.
I watched the man with the chained pen instead. He was on his second page, pressing hard enough to go through to the next one. He kept stopping to count something on his fingers.
"You think they'll pay us?" Colby said, low.
"No," said Ren.
"You don't know that."
"I know this building," she said, and that was the end of it.
* * *
Okafor came out at ten past nine and took us into a room with a table in it and no windows and said, "This is going to be shorter than you want it to be."
Then she told us what they found.
They put a D-team down Bell Road on the Tuesday. Four divers and a survey tech, paid, insured, with lights and a line.
They got through the first two levels in ninety minutes. It took us four hours. Nobody at that table mentioned it and all four of us did the division.
They found the junction. They found the fourth tunnel.
They went down it eight hundred feet and did not reach the end of it.
"The mapped depth of that portal is a hundred and ten feet," Okafor said. "That's all of it, three levels, surveyed twice. The fourth tunnel goes down at about a nine percent grade for eight hundred feet and it was still going when the team lead called it and brought them back up."
Nobody said anything.
"Bell Road is closed," she said. "Indefinite. It's reclassified pending survey and there is no survey scheduled, because the people who do that work are looking at four other things this quarter."
* * *
Tom asked the question. Of course he did. He'd driven forty minutes and taken a day he can't afford.
"Does it clear?"
"No."
"Ever?"
"Mr. Guzmán," Okafor said, and she did not enjoy it, "I have a portal with unmapped depth and a specimen that isn't in the index. It will not be cleared by a party. It will be handled, eventually, by people who do not get paid by the clear."
So that's three hundred dollars that does not exist, and a completed clear that does not exist, and a Saturday that ends at a table in a windowless room off the 17.
Ren had her arms crossed and was looking at the wall.
"The anomaly report's still good," Okafor said, to her, having clocked where in that room the temperature was. "Two hundred and fifty. It's filed. It'll come."
"Six to eight weeks."
"Six to eight weeks."
* * *
Then she came to the specimen, and the room changed.
"She stopped and moved the folder a quarter inch on the desk so its edge lined up with the edge of the blotter, which I don't think she knew she was doing. The core went to the lab in Tempe on the Monday. I'm told it doesn't match anything in the F index. I'm also told that's not unusual for a damaged sample and that I shouldn't put weight on it." She had a folder and she did not open it. "That's everything I'm able to say about it, and I'd ask you not to put it on the internet, and I'm aware I can't make you."
"Who's asking," Ren said.
"Pardon?"
"You said you're told. Who's telling you."
Okafor looked at her for a second.
"The survey division," she said. "And somebody above the survey division, who read my report on Sunday morning, which is not a thing that happens to my reports."
* * *
She let us go at twenty to ten. Tom and Ren and Colby went down to the parking lot and Okafor said, "Mr. North, a minute," in the tone that means it is not a request, and I stood in a hallway outside a room with no windows in it.
"I pulled your registration," she said.
"Okay."
"Level two. Unranked. F-Class, trait Exercise." She had her hands in her jacket pockets. "You registered thirty-six days ago."
"Yeah."
"Five weeks ago you were a high school graduate who had never been inside a portal."
I waited, because there wasn't a question yet.
Somewhere down the hall a phone was ringing and nobody was getting it. The carpet out there was the grey kind with little flecks in it that's meant to hide coffee, and it did not hide the coffee.
"Nine days ago you held a position against a migration of forty-plus for ninety seconds, then held a six-foot corridor against a specimen that put a D-team's survey lead in the office at two in the morning writing memos." Okafor took one hand out of her pocket. "Your party lead is a level five with two years. He told me the reason all four of them came out is that the eighteen-year-old did arithmetic and then stood in a doorway."
"Tom's generous."
"Tom Guzmán is not generous. I've read four of his reports and he's the most boring accurate man I deal with." She looked at me. "So this is the thing I'm not supposed to ask, and you're not obliged to answer, and I'd like you to anyway."
She said it like the next line on a form.
"What are your stats."
* * *
You see, there's no rule that says you have to tell anybody.
Your numbers are yours. They aren't on your registration or on the app or anywhere else. The DDA has your class letter and your level and your name and nothing else, and the entire social contract of this business is that people tell you what they are and you decide whether you believe them.
I've been on the other side of that for thirty-seven days. F-Class, Exercise, and everybody I ever said it to did the pause and the recovery, and not one of them ever asked me for a number, because nobody asks a joke for a number.
Okafor asked.
And I stood in a hallway on the second floor of a building with a dentist in it, and felt the whole shape of the last five weeks turn over, and understood that this is what the other side of it feels like and it is not better.
"Above average for my level," I said.
"That's not an answer."
"No," I agreed.
Okafor nodded slowly, and did the smallest possible smile, and it had nothing warm in it at all.
"That's what I'd have said," she said.
* * *
She gave me a card. It has the DDA seal on it and a name and a desk line and nothing else, and I have it in the drawer under the takeout menus with the punch card.
"When you want to tell somebody," she said, "tell me and not a guild. Guilds contract. I file."
"I don't know what you think—"
"Mr. North." She was already turning. "I have been doing this for twelve years and I write four hundred reports a year and I have never once had to go back and change a form because somebody was better than their letter. I changed yours on Sunday and I did not know what to change it to."
And she went back into the room with no windows.
* * *
Tom drove me home because I'd ridden over with him.
"What'd she want," he said.
There were about four true answers and I picked the smallest one.
"She wanted to know how a level two did that."
"Huh." He put the truck in reverse and looked over his shoulder. "What'd you tell her."
"Nothing."
"Good," said Tom, and pulled out.
He had the radio on low, a Spanish station out of somewhere, a man selling furniture very fast. At the first red light he reached over and turned it down a little more and then didn't turn it back up.
"She's all right," he said. "Okafor. As they go."
"Yeah."
"She'll write down what you tell her. Every word." He checked the mirror. "That's good and it's bad."
"I know."
"Okay," he said, and he did not ask me anything else for the whole forty minutes.