Day 22. Strength 11.5. Stamina 10.5. Agility 9.4. Intelligence 9.5.
Bryce texted me on the Tuesday.
hey man! random — we're doing a clear sat morning, F rank, out by the 51. observers allowed, you want to come watch? no pressure
I read it about nine times standing at the front desk.
What I was weighing was this. On the one hand I'd spent three weeks discovering that I know nothing, that every single assumption I brought into this has been wrong, and that the most valuable thing anybody's given me is information. There is a portal a week out with my name on it and I have never in my life seen the inside of one.
On the other hand, "observers allowed" means I stand behind a rope at eight in the morning watching four people who got picked do a thing I've been bleeding for three weeks to maybe survive, and Bryce's mother will probably be there.
I typed "thanks but I'm working" and deleted it.
yeah. what time
* * *
The wash portal is eleven miles out on the far side of the 51, at the bottom of a concrete flood channel behind a self-storage and a place that sells above-ground pools.
You walk down a maintenance ramp and there's a fence, and a gate, and a county sign, and then the thing itself sitting about four feet off the channel floor.
I had never been closer than eighty feet to one in my life.
It's about the size of a door and it isn't a door. It doesn't have edges so much as it has a place where it stops being. This one's been green since 2022, and there's a very slow movement in it, like looking down into water that something has just gone under.
And there's no sound. I'd expected a hum. There's nothing. It's the quietest thing in the channel.
Copper Vale had set up a folding table and a pop-up canopy, and a woman with a tablet took my name and my registration number and made me sign a waiver with the word "decedent" in it twice.
There were nine observers. Bryce's mother was there. She did not remember me, which was a relief so large I felt it in my knees.
* * *
The party was four.
Bryce, and three adults he'd been assigned to, and I got their names off the roster board: Sandoval (D-rank, party lead), Achebe (E-rank), and a man listed only as Kirilenko who had a guild jacket and did not speak the entire morning.
They went in at 8:02.
They came out at 8:41.
Thirty-nine minutes. I'd blocked out my whole Saturday. I'd asked Coach for the morning on Friday, and she'd looked at me for a second and said "Watch their hands," and given it to me.
* * *
Nothing happens. That's it. Four people step through a doorway into somewhere else and the doorway sits there being quiet, and nine people stand in a concrete channel in the sun and there is no feed, no audio, no telemetry, nothing. A guild medic sat on the tailgate of a truck reading her phone.
At about the twenty minute mark Bryce's mother said, to nobody, "They said it's usually around forty," in the specific voice of a person who has said that sentence to herself eleven times already.
And I stood there and did the thing I'd been carefully not doing for two years, which is imagine it from the outside.
My parents went in at seven in the morning, which I know because it's on the incident report, and I have read the incident report, and it is four pages long and the fourth page is mostly signatures.
I'd always pictured a canopy like this one. A table. Somebody with a tablet.
And at some point on that morning, the number of minutes people expected went past, and then kept going past, and there would have been a moment where everybody standing in that channel stopped saying it's usually around forty and started not saying anything at all.
Nobody has ever been able to tell me how long that took.
I got back up the ramp and stood at the top of it for a few minutes and then came back down, and the medic gave me a bottle of water without being asked, which I think means it was obvious.
* * *
They came out at 8:41 and the relief in that channel was physical.
And then I got about six minutes of a party that wasn't performing. They're tired, they're talking to each other, and nobody has remembered yet that there are observers.
I typed all of this into my phone standing right there:
They came out in order and it was the same order they went in. Sandoval first, Kirilenko last. Which means the formation held for thirty-nine minutes.
Bryce was in the middle and he was fine. Not a scratch, not winded. The two adults on either side of him were both sweating through. He'd been carried and everybody in that channel knew it including him, and there's no shame attached, it's the entire point of a prospect run.
Sandoval's shield was on her back and her forearm was purple. Not a wound. Pressure. Three weeks ago I'd have read that as she got hit a lot. I know now it means she held it at her ribs for most of forty minutes and that is what that costs. I looked at my own forearm and thought about eleven minutes in a backyard.
Achebe's first words coming out were about numbers. "That's nineteen," he said, to Sandoval. Not "that was close" or "good work." Nineteen. They were counting. The whole time, in there, somebody was keeping a count, and it mattered enough to be the first thing out of his mouth in the open air.
They took their boots off. All four, immediately, right there at the table. There was a reason and I didn't know it and I wrote down why boots and circled it.
Nobody drank anything for the first four minutes. Then all of them at once, on some signal I didn't catch.
And the medic checked hands first. She skipped heads and chests. She took each one's hands and turned them over and looked, and then moved on.
* * *
Bryce came over afterward with his helmet under his arm, absolutely lit up.
"Dude. Dude. Okay so," and he told me about it for ten minutes, and to be fair to him he told it well and he was generous about the other three, and he said "Sandoval's unbelievable" about four times.
Then he said, "Honestly though it's mostly just kind of boring? It's like a lot of walking."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah, it's like — you go in, and there's tunnels, and you clear rooms, and the things come at you and you hit them. It's not like a movie."
Which, from him, is a completely accurate and completely useless description. He'd been inside the thing I need to understand for thirty-nine minutes and came out with "there's tunnels."
Because he doesn't have to understand it. Two more of those and he's level 4 and the numbers come to him regardless. Coach told me that two weeks ago and I didn't really hear it until I was standing in a flood channel watching him describe the inside of a portal like a hallway at school.
Then Sandoval walked past and I did the only smart thing I did that whole morning.
"Ma'am. Why'd you take your boots off?"
She stopped. Her eyes went to me, and then to the observers' rope, and then back.
"You registered?"
"Yeah. Unranked."
"Slime?"
"Three days."
Sandoval sat down on the edge of the tailgate and rolled her shoulder, and gave me four minutes I had not earned.
"Floor's wet in a slime hole. Always. Water and whatever else, and it works into the seam and by hour three your feet are soft and you don't notice, and then you get a hot spot, and then you're limping, and then you're slow, and slow is the whole thing." She pointed at my shoes. "Two pairs of socks, and you change them at the halfway mark, and you take the boots off the second you're out. Every single time. Nobody tells you that and it ends more first dives than teeth do."
"Thank you."
"What'd you get?"
"F. Exercise."
And Sandoval, who is a D-rank with a purple forearm and had been awake since five, said: "Huh." And then: "First one, don't go with people you met that week. Go with people who'll count out loud."
"Count what?"
"Everything," she said, and got up, and that was the end of it.
* * *
I sat in the car in that parking lot for twenty minutes with the door open, typing.
This is what I came home with:
The count is real. They were counting kills, or rooms, or minutes, and it was the first thing said out loud. Somebody in every party is keeping a number. If nobody's keeping it, that's my job, because I'm the one who can now hold four partial products in his head while his legs are gone.
Forty minutes of shield is a purple forearm on a woman with a D-rank body. I'm at eleven minutes. That's the gap, in a single honest measurement, and it is enormous, and now I know its size.
Don't go with people you met that week.
That last one I wrote down and then sat with, because it is the most sensible thing anybody has told me and I have no way in the world to do it.
Day 25 is three days out. I have a shield, a 10 in Strength and Stamina and not yet in the other two, an Intelligence I have moved a point and a half further than any living person has ever moved theirs, and a portal four point six miles from my house.
And I know four people. One of them is my boss, one of them is a landscaper in Mesa, one of them is a nurse who brings me coffee because mine tastes like a penny, and one of them is the woman next door, who'd kill me herself.
* * *
I drove out to Bell Road on the way home. I hadn't meant to. I just didn't turn.
The storage place has a gravel lot around the back and a chain-link run along the wash, and the portal is in the corner of it under a steel shade canopy the county put up, with the fence and the sign and the number to call.
PORTAL — CLASS F — MONITORED. Last inspection sticker, and a date in May.
It's blue. It's been blue for nine years.
I stood at that fence at one in the afternoon in a hundred and nine degrees for longer than was sensible, and it was quiet, the way the green one had been quiet, and I got out my phone and started a new note and typed:
I need three people who will count out loud.
Three days.
Then I stood there a while longer and did not type the other one.
It's been in the drawer under the takeout menus for eight days. Twelve holes. I keep taking it out and putting it back, and I am going to have to ask her, and I keep finding that today is not the day.