Day 57. Strength 23.1. Stamina 22.0. Agility 14.3. Intelligence 16.4.
The first tennis ball hit me in the ear.
"Left!" Colby yelled, a full second after it mattered.
"That's not a call," said Tom, from the shade. "That's a report. Again."
It was nine in the morning in the parking lot of a Filiberto's on 51st and the bank sign across the road said 105. I was standing in the middle of four empty parking spaces with thirteen pounds of steel on my arm and everything I'd carry into Laveen strapped onto me the way I'd carry it, and there was a nine-year-old girl behind the dumpster enclosure with a bucket of tennis balls and an arm like a catapult.
Her name is Luz. She's Tom's. Her brother Mateo is six and was in the cab of the truck with the AC on high, watching a tablet, and every so often he'd look up at us through the windshield like we were a show that was on too early.
* * *
Coach had let me go at half past eight on the condition I was back for floors by eleven. I'd opened at 4:31 on Friday and 4:29 this morning. Priya checked her watch at me anyway, both days, and went to the rower, which was worse.
* * *
The drill was Tom's. He'd thought about it all week, you could tell, because it had rules.
Kobolds throw from the side. So Colby and Luz threw from the side, from behind things, whenever they wanted, as many as they wanted. Ren walked behind me at the pace of the dive, being everybody I'd have to cover. My job was the shield. Everybody's job was to call.
"A call is where and how many," Tom said. "'Left two.' 'Behind one.' If you don't know how many, you say 'left some' and that's still better than 'left' after it's already hit him."
"What if it's Luz," Colby said.
"It's always Luz. Luz is better than you."
Luz, from behind the dumpster, did not argue.
* * *
For the first twenty minutes we were bad.
We were bad the way four people are bad at something they have never done together. Ren called "behind" once for a ball that was in front of her. Colby called everything, including a pigeon. I got the shield round in time about half the time, and the other half I got it round in time for the ball that had already gone past, and Luz got me in the back of the knee twice and in the neck once, and each time she said "sorry" in a voice that was not sorry at all. The asphalt came up through the soles of my boots. Sweat ran down inside the shield strap and the strap started to slide on my forearm, and every time I hitched it back up Colby took that as his turn.
Tom didn't throw anything. He stood in the shade of the awning with the packet on the clipboard and said "Again" and wrote things down.
Around twenty past nine it got better, and I noticed something about the throwing.
Luz threw after Colby. Every time. He'd throw from the left, from behind the truck, and while everybody was turned toward that she'd come round the right side of the dumpster and put one in low. She didn't know she was doing it. She was nine. She was just waiting until everybody was looking the other way, the only strategy there is if you're small and throwing things at people bigger than you.
After that I stopped looking for her. I listened for Colby. When his ball came off the left I got the shield round to the right and low, and the next one hit steel. A tennis ball on a shield makes a flat dull pock, nothing like you'd think, like somebody knocking on a car door.
"Hey," said Luz.
The one after that hit steel too.
"He's cheating," she said to her father. "He's not even looking."
"He's looking," said Tom, and wrote something down.
* * *
At half past nine Tom called water, and we sat in a row on the curb in the eight inches of shade the building gave us while Colby got bottles out of the Pocket, cold, one each, and didn't drink first himself. Mine had frost on it. I held it against the side of my neck where Luz had got me and the whole left side of my body went quiet for a second. Behind us the kitchen fan blew out the smell of carne asada and fryer oil, which at nine-thirty in the morning in that heat is not as nice as it sounds.
Luz went and sat in the truck with her brother. You could see her through the windshield telling him something with both hands.
Tom went down the gear. What each of us carried, what it weighed, whether it was strapped or held. He had me take the pack off and put it on again with the shield already on my arm, which I couldn't do, and then showed me how, which took him about four seconds. He asked Ren where her glasses were and she took them out of her shirt pocket and he said "On your face. They don't work in your pocket," and she put them on and pushed them up her nose with one knuckle. So she agreed with him.
Then he turned the packet to page three again, the map, and passed it down the curb, so everybody would have held it.
Ren held it the longest.
* * *
"Laveen," she said.
"Laveen," said Tom.
"No, I mean." She had her finger on the box at the bottom, the county's box, kobold, 30–50 est., no anomalies noted. "Surveyed March of last year."
"That's what it says."
"Dev reported it in April. This April. The guy in my program. I told you guys, in Bell Road, when we were—" She stopped. "I said 'the one out by Laveen.' This is the one out by Laveen."
Nobody said anything for a second.
I remembered her saying it. Under the storage place on Bell Road, cold, with her sleeve pulled down over her hand, as the example of why nobody listens to four nobodies off the open board. It happened to a guy in my program in April at the one out by Laveen. And when Tom said and?, she'd said And nothing. Nothing happened. It's still there. He was probably wrong.
I remembered it word for word. I'd remembered it for four weeks without once putting it next to the packet, which I'd also read, and I don't know what that says, except that remembering two things and knowing they're the same thing are not the same job.
"What did he say was wrong," Tom said.
"I don't know."
"You didn't ask."
"It was a guy in my program saying a portal felt weird. No, I didn't ask." She had her phone out already. "I'm asking."
* * *
Tom took the packet back and read the box again himself, as if it might say something different when he held it.
"County survey's March last year," he said. "His report is April this year. So it's thirteen months after they looked, and it says no anomalies because nobody's looked since."
"And nothing happened," said Colby.
"Nothing happens," said Tom. "That's not the same as nothing's wrong. We had nine years of nothing happening at Bell Road."
He didn't look at me when he said it. Everybody else did, a bit.
I thought about the card in my kitchen drawer. Desk line, no title. When you want to tell somebody, tell me and not a guild.
"I know somebody at the Association," I said.
"The woman from the debrief," said Tom.
"Okafor. She gave me a card."
Tom took his time with that.
"Then we call her," he said. "Monday. All four of us, on speaker, from here. Not you at the bottom of something on your own."
"Monday," I said.
* * *
Ren's phone buzzed at nine forty-one.
She read it, and then held it out flat so we could all see without anybody having to lean, because they teach you that in clinicals, apparently, so everybody at a bed reads the same number at the same time.
It was a text from somebody saved as Dev (RT 210).
lol yeah laveen. didnt go past the first stair. the water on 2 was warm. like bathwater. told the county, never heard back. why
Colby said "Huh. That's weird," and drank some of his water.
Tom put the cap back on his bottle and screwed it down tight.
I was looking at the map. Level two, northeast, the pencil note somebody had scanned without erasing. Standing water NE, 2–3 in. The stair to three went through it.
At Bell Road the walls got warm near the fourth tunnel. I'd put my palm on one. I know exactly what warm stone means at the bottom of a portal whose door has read the same color for years, because I stood in it, and Tom stood in it next to me, and he was forty feet up the ramp when the light went out.
Out in the lot, Luz climbed down out of the truck with the bucket and shouted "Are we doing more?"
"No, baby," Tom said. "We're done for today."