Day 74. Strength 27.2. Stamina 26.1. Agility 15.6. Intelligence 18.9.
Okafor's voicemail was forty-one seconds long and I listened to it three times in the Grindstone hallway with my finger in my other ear. Somebody was on the rower out front, pulling hard, and every stroke the chain went through the wall like a zipper.
"Mr. North, this is Officer Okafor, Dungeon Diver Association, valley office. The anomaly bounty for the Bell Road incident has been processed. Disbursement for a non-registered party at the time of the incident requires each member to sign individually. Mr. Guzmán, Ms. Choi and Mr. Estrada have been contacted separately. My office hours are posted. I'll be here until four." A pause, about one breath long. "There's also something I'd like to ask you. It isn't on a form."
* * *
Colby drove me. He had a dentist at three, which he told me about the whole way down the 17 without once saying why he'd gone, and I didn't ask, and I wondered if Haskell would have known.
The building was the same. The dentist, the bail bondsman, the solar company. Eleven chairs. The poster from third grade with the five colors on it and a cartoon diver giving a thumbs up in front of the blue one.
We sat in two of the eleven chairs. Colby's knee went the whole time. He read the five colors off the poster under his breath, bottom to top, like he was checking they were all still there.
Colby signed first. He came out after four minutes holding the check in both hands like it might blow away.
"Sixty-two dollars and fifty cents," he said. "From the government. For being alive."
"You should frame it," I said.
"I'm going to cash it so fast."
Then Okafor put her head out of the door and said "Mr. North," and Colby sat down with his check and his phone, and I went in.
* * *
Same room. No windows. Same table. She had a single sheet of paper on it face down, and next to it a check, face up, and a pen. Nothing on the desk was crooked. The pen lay square to the check, and the check lay square to the edge of the table.
"Sign on the line," she said. "Both copies. Print your name under it."
I signed. She separated the copies and gave me the check. Sixty-two dollars and fifty cents. It was the first portal money I'd ever had that skipped the processors on Grand, and it came to about two days of burn.
"Bell Road," she said. "The lab in Tempe completed its analysis of the core fragments on Friday. The fragments do not match any entry in any index available to this office." She said it like she was reading the next line of a form, but she wasn't reading anything. "The lab has asked whether further fragments are available. I have told them no, because you broke it in two places with a three-pound hammer."
"Sorry."
"It was the correct thing to do at the time." She moved the face-down sheet an inch to the left. "Laveen. Your party's report has been attached to a re-inspection request. The request is in the queue. The queue is not moving. That's not a finding. It's an observation about the queue."
"Okay."
She folded her hands.
"Copper Vale has approached you," she said.
It wasn't a question, so I didn't answer it like one. I just said, "Yes."
"Have you signed anything?"
"No."
"Good." She looked at me for a second. "That was not advice. That was a word."
* * *
I'd brought one question. I'd thought about it on the bike, and on Coach's floor, and in Colby's car while he told me about his dentist's fish tank.
"If I signed," I said, "there's an assessment. Inside fourteen days. They file a development profile with the Association. Who reads it?"
Okafor looked at the face-down sheet, and then at me.
"Development profiles are held by the Talent Registry," she said. "The Registry is an office of the Association. It is read by guild liaison staff, for the purpose of transfers and disputes, and by the survey division."
"Why the survey division?"
"Because the survey division administers the Registry."
"Why?"
"That is a decision that was made before I was hired," she said, "and nobody has explained it to me, and I haven't asked." She said that one very evenly. "I have not asked yet."
I didn't know what I'd been expecting. Not that. The survey division rated Bell Road blue for nine years. The survey division wrote no anomalies noted on Laveen in March last year. Okafor's own intake log, two weeks ago, had no entry for a man called Devin Marsh who'd phoned them about warm water.
And they'd be the ones who read whatever Copper Vale found out about me.
"There's another way to do it," Okafor said. "If you want to. You can file a voluntary trait characteristics report. With me. It's held in this office, under this division, until you're contracted, at which point it's transferred with your profile. But it's yours first. It's dated before theirs. It says what you said, not what they measured."
"Why would that matter?"
"Because if what they measure is different from what you said," she said, "somebody has to explain the difference. And it won't be you."
I sat with that. The chair was the plastic kind that gives a little when you lean back, and I didn't lean back. I didn't say yes. She didn't seem to expect me to.
"You said there was something you wanted to ask," I said. "That isn't on a form."
* * *
She turned the sheet over.
It was a printout of the county contract board. NR-14. New River. Two Pairs' bid under Copper Vale's, entered at 8:51 on Monday night.
"Your party bid on this," she said.
"Yes."
"Why?"
I thought about how to say it. I thought about Tom's two fingers on the rim of the shield.
"The shield I carry belonged to a woman called Marisol Vega," I said. "She died in a kobold hole near New River in March. Tom knew her a bit. And the listing says somebody had it awarded in February and didn't clear it, and the award got pulled in April, and that's all it says." I stopped. "Tom wanted our name on the list."
Okafor didn't move for a moment.
"I'm going to tell you two things," she said. "Both of them are on the public record if you know where to look, so I'm not telling you anything. The first is that NR-14 was awarded in February to a private party of four. The second is that the clear was not completed and that the award was withdrawn in April."
"That's what the listing says."
"Yes." She looked at the printout. "I came in early this morning to pull the incident report for that withdrawal, because a withdrawn award generates one. It's automatic. A form opens when the box is ticked." She put one finger on the grey text. "I don't have an entry."
The room was very quiet. The AC was going somewhere in the ceiling. Through the wall, faintly, a drill went on in the dentist's office and then stopped.
"Like Laveen," I said.
"I'm not saying it's like anything." She turned the sheet back over. "I'm saying I don't have an entry. That's twice in one month I've said that sentence to you. I've said it four times in my whole career to anybody else."
She stood up, which meant we were done, and pushed her chair in under the table until it was square with the edge.
"Your bid is a matter of record," she said, at the door. "So is Copper Vale's. Somebody will look at both of them. I'd like you to think about who."
* * *
Colby was asleep in the chair with the check on his chest, his mouth open and his phone face down on his leg, still playing something tinny about shipping containers.
I woke him up, and he drove me back up the 17 with the windows up and the AC on high, and talked about the fish tank again. At the Bell Road exit he asked what she'd wanted.
"To tell me she didn't have something," I said.
"That's it?"
"That's it."
"Weird," said Colby, and turned up the radio. He'd put the check on the dash under the hula girl with no head, where he could see it, and at every red light he glanced at it.
We stopped at Filiberto's on the way. I paid, with the check still in my pocket uncashed, because I'd decided on the way out of the building that Colby was getting a burrito out of the government. Two carne asada, two horchatas, fourteen dollars and eighty cents. Colby ate his in the car with the engine running, and talked, and I sat with mine on my knee and thought about a form that opens on its own when you tick a box, and somebody, somewhere, who'd learned how to keep it shut.