Day 8. Strength 9.3. Stamina 8.3. Agility 7.2. Intelligence 8.0.
The list got long and none of it worked.
Read a book. I read eighty pages of a paperback western off Hector's stack, which is the only book that was in the building, and got nothing at all.
Chess. Downloaded an app. Lost eleven games in a row to a computer set to a difficulty the app described as "beginner," which was humbling in a way I hadn't budgeted for. Nothing.
Sudoku. Did four of them. Got faster at them. Nothing.
Memorize something. I did the first forty elements of the periodic table on Day 9 and I can still do them, which has never once been useful. Nothing.
Crossword. Nothing.
Learn a language. I did two hundred words of Spanish in an app with a bird on it, which my mother would have found hilarious, since she spoke it and I never picked it up and she used to say I'd regret that. Nothing.
Math worksheets. I printed off a set meant for eighth graders and did thirty problems. Nothing.
Three days of that. Six tenths of a point in the ground, on top of the one and two tenths I'd already lost, and by Day 10 I was starting to think the honest answer was that Intelligence simply isn't trainable and the trait only reaches the physical stats and I should stop wasting evenings on it.
That nearly ended it. A reasonable, sensible, grown-up conclusion, arrived at after ten data points.
* * *
The other thing that happened that week was Bryce Halloran.
I was on the desk at eight in the morning when the door did its stick-and-give and two people came in. One was a man in his thirties in a quarter-zip with a guild patch on the chest, holding a tablet. The other one I'd sat forty feet from at the awakening a week earlier.
Tall kid. Good haircut. The kind of face that photographs well and knows it in a way that isn't obnoxious about it, which is worse.
C-Class. The one whose mother stood up in the bleachers with both hands over her mouth.
He saw me and his whole face opened up.
"Miles!"
My first reaction was to check whether he was making fun of me. My second was to be ashamed of the first one, because he wasn't. He was just glad. He crossed the gym with his hand out like we were old friends, and as far as he was concerned we were, because we'd had ninth grade biology together and that's enough when you're eighteen and happy.
"You work here? That's awesome. Dude, Ms. Reyes is supposed to be the best technical coach in the whole valley."
"She is?"
That came out before I could stop it.
The guild guy looked up from his tablet. "Where do you think we send our prospects," he said, like I'd asked whether water was wet.
Which is when I understood the thing I'd been walking past every morning for a week.
Grindstone has eleven reviews and a photo of a parking lot and no sign in the window because it has never once needed one. Coach Reyes doesn't advertise because the people who need to know already know. A guild in this city with money to spend on a C-Class prospect sends him to a woman with a bad knee in the back of a shopping center, and pays her, and waits.
And she gave me the seven-to-noon for free because I did nine gyms in July.
I'd walked into the one gym in the valley the guilds pay to get into, and the only reason I walked in was that it was number ten and I hadn't gone home after nine.
* * *
Bryce's trait is Reinforce, C-Class. He puts a hand on something and for about ten seconds it's much harder to break. A door. A rope. A shield.
That last one is what makes it worth money. Every guild in the country wants a Reinforce on a front line, because it turns a two-second block into a five-second block and five seconds is the difference between a party getting out and a party not.
He told me this apologetically. That was the part I couldn't get past. He'd clearly had a week of people being excited at him and he'd developed a whole apparatus for taking up less room about it.
"It's pretty situational, honestly," he said. "Ten seconds. And it doesn't work on anything alive."
"It works on a shield."
"Yeah." He brightened. "Yeah, it's good on a shield."
Then he said, "What'd you end up with?"
And the thing is, he knew. Everybody at that ceremony heard everybody's. He was asking to be polite, or he'd forgotten in the noise of his own morning, and either way there was nothing in it.
"F," I said. "Exercise."
And Bryce Halloran said, "Oh, right! Yeah." Nodded. Thought about it for a second. And then, meaning every word of it, said:
"You know what you should look at, is the logistics side. Like gear haulage, supply, permits, that stuff. There's really good money in it and you don't need a rating, and the guilds are always short. My cousin does scheduling for Copper Vale and he clears like eighty a year."
He was trying to help. He'd taken the problem seriously for about four seconds and produced the correct, sensible answer, which is the answer everybody would give, which is that a person like me should go work near the thing instead of doing it.
Eighty thousand a year. That's a real number. That's nearly three times what Grindstone pays me. That solves the money problem in one phone call and I could sleep past four fifteen for the rest of my life.
"That's not a bad idea," I said.
"Right? I'll get you his number."
He did, too. He texted it to me that afternoon. I still have it.
The guild guy called him over for the assessment and Bryce said "good seeing you, man" and went off to get looked at by the best technical coach in the valley, and I went back to the desk and signed in a man named Wendell who wanted to tell me about a guy he used to work with.
I couldn't be angry at him. I tried, a little, in the car. There was nothing to hold onto. He was nice, and he was right, and he'd never once in his life had to think about what it costs to be told the reasonable thing.
* * *
I watched the assessment from the desk, because I had nothing else to do and because I couldn't not.
I expected Coach would teach him what she teaches me, and he'd be better at it, and that would be that.
He was worse than me.
Not a little. He couldn't hold a hollow position for twelve seconds. His squat was every bit as bad as mine had been on Day 3 and he had no idea, and when she took his heels apart he got frustrated in about four minutes and started making jokes about it, and the guild guy watched with his face very carefully doing nothing at all.
And Coach didn't push him. She corrected, and moved on, and corrected, and moved on, and let a dozen things go that she would have stopped me dead for.
After they left I said, "You went easy on him."
"Yes."
"Why?"
Coach put the clipboard back on its nail.
"Because he'll be a 14 in Strength by Christmas whether he listens to me or not," she said. "The guild will run him through enough F-ranks to get him to level six, and the levels will hand him the numbers, and by the time it matters he'll have a body that can do things his technique has no business being able to do. Nobody on that road ever has to get good at the boring part. They outgrow it."
"That doesn't sound fair."
"It isn't unfair. It's just true." She looked at me. "You want to know the actual difference between him and you, since you've been chewing on it all morning."
I didn't say anything.
"He's got a ceiling and he'll hit it in about six years, and it'll be a high one, and when he hits it he'll stop, because nobody ever taught him what to do with a body that isn't getting free upgrades." She picked up her coffee. "You don't have the upgrades. So you're going to learn the boring part properly, because you've got no choice. And there's a version of this where that turns out to be the better deal."
"You don't believe that."
"No," said Coach. "But it's not impossible, and I've seen stranger. Go clean the bathroom."
* * *
I thought about that all the way home and most of the night, and somewhere in there it collided with the other thing and made a spark.
He'll be a 14 in Strength by Christmas whether he listens to me or not.
The levels hand him the numbers. He doesn't have to earn the body. He outgrows the boring part.
Which means Bryce Halloran will never in his life have to ask what an exercise is. Nobody will. There's no reason for a single person on this planet to ever wonder what it means to train a stat, because the only mechanism anybody's ever had is killing things, and killing things pays out whether you deserved it or not.
That's why there's no answer to my Intelligence question anywhere. Nobody has ever needed to ask it.
I got out the legal pad and looked at the list of everything that didn't work. Books, chess, sudoku, elements, crossword, Spanish, worksheets.
And it hit me what every single one of them had in common, and I felt so stupid that I said it out loud in my kitchen.
Every one of those is something you do.
Not one of them is something that's hard.
I'd been treating my brain like a hobby. Which is word for word the mistake Coach caught me making with my body on Day 3.
You've been exercising two years. It's not the same word.