Day 68. Strength 26.1. Stamina 25.0. Agility 15.1. Intelligence 17.9.
I'd written it out on the back of a Grindstone receipt so I wouldn't leave anything off, and when Tom sat down I put the receipt on the table between the salsa and his packet and turned it round so he could read it.
Three lines.
VANCE'S REPORT. NET 30. HER BOSS WANTS MY NUMBER.
Tom read it. He didn't pick it up. He read it the way he'd read the thermometer, for longer than three lines take, and then he looked at me.
"In order," he said.
* * *
So I did it in order.
Vance first, because it was the easiest, because I'd been practicing the sentence since Monday in the shower and on the floor and at the kitchen table at four in the morning between multiplications. I said Sandoval read it to me in the lot and wasn't supposed to. I said what it said about each of them, word for word, because I had it word for word.
"'Useful in a way he does not appear to understand,'" said Colby. "Say it again."
"That's what it says."
"That's the best thing anyone's ever written about me." He had a rolled taco in each hand and he pointed one at Ren. "You got 'would take.' I got a whole sentence."
"You got a sentence that means he thinks you're an idiot who's lucky," said Ren.
"Yeah, but he wrote it down."
Then mine. I said it like Sandoval had said it, flat, with the four pieces.
Nobody said anything. Colby put the taco in his left hand down on its paper. A car pulled into the drive-through and the speaker on the menu board said something nobody could understand, and the car said something back.
"Plateau risk," said Ren.
"It means he thinks I'll stop. That I'm an F who trained a lot before I awakened, and it runs out."
"Is he right?"
She asked it as a question. Ren doesn't do the thing people do where they ask you something to tell you something. I thought about the clock over Coach's door and the long flat stretch in the middle of the carry, forty-seven minutes on Monday and forty-seven again on Tuesday.
"About why, no," I said. "About the numbers, I don't know yet."
She held on to it a second longer and then nodded, like that was an answer she could use, and wrote nothing down.
* * *
Net thirty was worse to say than Vance.
Tom's face did what Sandoval said it would. It didn't move much. It just sort of set, like concrete going off, and he put his hand flat on the packet.
"Thirty days from Saturday," he said.
"That's what she said. She said to tell you sorry, because nobody told you either."
"Nobody told me." He nodded slowly. "Okay. Okay. That's fine. That's normal, actually, that's how a guild pays, I should've asked." He was talking to the packet. "I had it for the dentist. Luz has a tooth. It's fine, they'll do a payment thing."
Ren had gone still. I'd been waiting for that. Her fit test had been at seven on Tuesday morning, and the background check and the drug screen before that, two hundred and ten dollars up front, and her rotation started in about two weeks, and the money was now going to come in about two weeks after that.
I'd thought about this one for most of Tuesday night. I'd thought about it how I think about everything, which is alone, in the dark, with the answer already decided by about eleven.
So I said it out loud instead, at the table, where they could all hear it.
"Ren. I can cover the two-ten till it comes in. If you want. I'm asking."
She looked at me like I'd put something on the table that she had to decide whether to touch.
"No," she said.
"It's not a big..."
"I put it on a card. The card is twenty-four percent. Two hundred and ten dollars at twenty-four percent for a month is about four dollars." She picked up her drink. "That's my four dollars. Thank you for asking. I mean that. I'd have been really mad if you'd just done it."
"I was going to just do it."
"I know," she said. "That's why I said thank you."
Colby looked between us. "I'll take two-ten," he said. "If it's going."
"It's not going," said Ren.
* * *
Then the last line.
I told it in the order it happened. That the guildmaster at Copper Vale had read Vance's report Sunday, both pages, which Sandoval said she doesn't do for an F-job. That she'd asked for my number. That Sandoval had said she'd ask me first. That she hadn't asked for Tom's.
I didn't stop on that last part, but I didn't skip it either.
"And I haven't answered," I said. "I said I'd ask you."
It went quiet in a different way from before.
Over on the road a bus went by, lit up inside and empty, and the bank sign across the street changed from the time to the temperature. Ninety-six. Nine twenty at night.
"Ask us what," said Colby. "It's your number."
"Ask you if I should give it to her."
"Why wouldn't you?"
"Because she asked for mine," I said, "and Vance said recommend about Tom."
Tom laughed. It wasn't much of a laugh, more like air going out of something.
"Yeah," he said. "Vance said recommend." He turned the packet over so the back was up, and there was nothing written on the back. "I've been doing Saturdays for two years. You know how many guilds have called me? I'm a good lead. Vance says so. He says so in writing." He looked up. "They don't call good leads. There's a lot of good leads. They call the thing they haven't seen before."
"I'm not..."
"You are, though." He said it without any meanness at all. "You're the thing. I watched it on Saturday. You knew where I was the whole time and you never turned your head."
I didn't know he'd seen that. I didn't know anyone had.
Colby's phone buzzed face down on the table. It was his mother. I knew it was his mother because it had buzzed at 9:00 and 9:10 too, ten minutes apart, and he'd turned it over both times without picking it up and gone a little pink round the ears. He did it again.
"Take the meeting," Tom said.
"You think?"
"I think somebody in that building wants to know what you are, and she's going to find out either way. Better you're in the room when she does." He tapped the receipt. "And then you come here and you tell us. All of it. Like this. In order."
"Don't sign anything in the room," said Ren.
"I won't."
"I mean it. Not a waiver, not a visitor thing, not a form for parking. They'll have a pen out. Leave it there."
"Ask if they have dental," said Colby. Then he caught Tom's face. "Sorry."
"No, ask," said Tom. "Ask for real."
* * *
I wrote the text to Sandoval at the table. I held the phone so they could see it, which felt stupid, and which I did anyway.
I'll meet her. I'm going to tell my party what she says.
It took about a minute.
Thursday 2pm. Copper Vale, Priest & Broadway, Tempe. Bring nothing you'd mind signing. Her name is Teresa Haskell.
Ren read it upside down.
"'Bring nothing you'd mind signing,'" she said. "That's the first good advice anybody's given you out of that building."
"Sandoval's okay," said Tom. He was already standing up, getting his keys, because it was nine forty and Tolleson doesn't wait. He stopped with one leg over the bench.
"Hey," he said. "That was good. Tonight. Doing it like that."
"It was a receipt."
"It was a receipt," he agreed, and went.
* * *
The car started on the second try.
I pulled out onto the road with the AC on and it blew hot for about a block, which it had been doing for a week, and then the smell came, the burning one, the hair dryer in another room. Except it wasn't in another room anymore.
I turned the AC off. I put the windows down. Ninety-six degrees came in off the road and it was almost better.
At the light on Cave Creek I checked the dash. There's a temperature gauge with a little thermometer symbol and a needle, and in two years of driving that car I'd never once paid it any attention, because it had never once given me a reason to. The needle sat about three-quarters of the way up. I watched it while the light was red. It didn't move.
Teresa Haskell was in Tempe. Tempe was twenty-two miles.
I drove the last four miles home with the needle where it was, and with the windows down, doing arithmetic I didn't have the numbers for yet.