Day 64. Strength 25.1. Stamina 24.0. Agility 14.8. Intelligence 17.4.
The Laveen portal is in a dirt lot off Dobbins Road, between a dairy and a canal, and at a quarter to seven in the morning the whole lot smelled like cows.
Coach had made me take Friday off, the same rule as the day before Bell Road. No blocks, no carry, nothing. I'd obeyed, which is to say I'd lain on the couch from noon until eight with the shield leaning against the wall where I could see it, and when I got up to get water I'd checked the straps again. So I came into the lot rested, which I wasn't used to. My arms felt like somebody else's.
Tom's truck was already there. So was a white SUV with a small copper-colored mountain on the door.
* * *
Vance was leaning on the SUV eating sunflower seeds out of a bag.
He was maybe forty-five. Grey polo, cargo pants, a tablet in a rubber case under one arm, and a short sword in a scabbard on his hip that looked like it had been used for something and cleaned after. He spat a shell into the dirt when we walked up and didn't straighten off the car.
"Guzmán," he said.
"That's me."
"Sign here. And here. That's the observer waiver, that says I'm on your dive but I'm not in your party. I don't call anything, I don't carry anything, I don't fight." He held the tablet out to Tom without looking at it. "Unless somebody's about to die. I decide what about means."
Tom signed. Vance took the tablet back and looked at the four of us the way you'd look at a menu you'd already read.
Then he got to me, and the shield.
"How much does that weigh?"
"Thirteen pounds."
He typed something. It took longer than "13."
That was all he said to me, the whole morning, before we went in.
* * *
You go down at Laveen in a spiral. It's the same wet stone and the same light coming off the walls with no shadows, and the same smell somewhere under everything of the back of a bakery. But the tunnel doesn't switch back. It turns, always to the left, always gently down, so after five minutes you've lost which way the lot is and after ten you've stopped trying.
Sixty-one degrees. I checked it on my fingers.
Tom walked point with the map and called every turn. Ren came behind him with her glasses on her face. Colby was third, talking, which is his job, and I came last with the shield, because kobolds come round behind you and the last man is the one they come round to.
Vance walked about fifteen feet behind me. I could hear the seeds. He'd brought them in.
* * *
The first one threw at Colby.
We'd come into the second room on level one, low and round, with two tunnels going off the far side, and Colby was in the middle of telling Ren about a guy at his work who'd been bitten by a spider in his boot, and a rock the size of an egg came out of the left tunnel and went past his ear and broke on the wall.
"Left one!" Colby said. Then, "Left some!"
There were five. I saw them a second after the rock, and they were exactly what Tom had said, table-high, grey-brown, with long forearms and a way of running low that made them look like they were falling forward and catching themselves. They came out of the left tunnel and went wide along the wall instead of at us, and two of them were already winding up.
I got the shield across in front of Colby. Two rocks hit the steel, one after the other, and it made a sound I hadn't heard before, a flat bang like hitting a stop sign with a stick.
"Ren," said Tom.
Ren put a flame on the nearest one at about eight feet and it shrieked and went back into the tunnel, and the other four went with it, all at once, like they'd agreed.
"Five," I said. "All five back in the left."
"Five in the left," said Tom. "Nobody chase. Wait."
We waited.
They came out of the right tunnel about a minute later, behind where Tom had been looking, and by then I was already standing there.
* * *
It took me most of level one to see the pattern, and when I saw it, it was so simple I was annoyed at myself.
They threw at whoever was talking.
Not at the biggest of us. Not at Tom, who had the map and was obviously in charge, or at me, who had a sheet of steel and was obviously the threat. The first rock went at Colby mid-sentence. In the third room Ren called "behind two" and the next rock came at her, and Tom said "Ren, down" and the one after that came at him. Every time. Somebody spoke and something came at the place the sound came from, half a second later, like they were throwing at a bell.
It made sense when I thought about it. Nothing in here casts a shadow. You can't judge distance by eye, I'd learned that the hard way at Bell Road. But you can hear a voice. Down here, if you were small and you wanted to hit something, you'd aim at the noise.
We were clearing the fourth room when I said it.
"Colby. Get behind me and keep talking."
"About what?"
"Anything. Your spider guy."
He got behind the shield, and he talked, and they threw at him. Six rocks came at the sound of a man explaining how big the spider was, and all six hit steel, and Tom and Ren walked round the side of the room while the kobolds were busy throwing at a voice behind a wall and took two of them before they knew anyone else was there.
"Huh," said Tom, when it was over. That was all. He gave me a look that had a whole sentence in it and then went back to the map.
Behind me I heard Vance stop chewing, for about the length of a word, and then I heard him typing.
* * *
Level one took us an hour and fifty minutes. Eleven kobolds, all counted, all accounted for. I broke three cores with the hammer and Tom broke four and Ren broke two and Colby broke two, the last one with the sword, which he swung like a bat and which worked, and he was so pleased about it that he forgot to talk for almost a full minute. A kobold core is darker than a slime's and about the size of a plum stone, and they rattle in the bag.
I'd taken one rock on the side glasses, early, before I'd worked it out, and it had cracked the left lens and nothing else. Ren had taken the glasses off my face, turned them over once, and put them back on me, which was her saying it.
Nobody was winded. My arm was fine. Six weeks ago I held a lighter shield than this one until my arm quit and wrote the time down like a record, and this morning I'd held thirteen pounds of steel up for most of two hours and it was just there, on my arm, the way a jacket is.
Vance came down the stair behind us onto level two, and checked his watch, and typed something.
* * *
You can smell water before you get to it, down there. Level two smelled of it from the bottom of the stair.
Tom took us round the spiral to the northeast slowly, calling every turn, and nobody talked who didn't have to, and nothing threw anything. Two rooms. Three. The floor got wetter, which it does everywhere, and then wetter than that, and then the tunnel opened out and it was there.
It filled the room almost wall to wall. Still. Maybe two inches, like the pencil note said, a flat sheet of it reflecting the light off the walls so the room looked like it was lit from underneath. The stair to level three was on the far side. You could see the top step going down into the dark.
Nobody said anything. Colby had a hand on my pack strap and I don't think he knew it.
I held my palm a few inches above the water. I didn't touch it. I couldn't tell anything, which might have meant there was nothing to tell, or might have meant my hands had been cold for two hours.
Tom got down on one knee at the edge, carefully, and took the thermometer out of his chest pocket. It was a Walgreens one, a real one, the kind with a metal probe and a little grey screen. He pressed the button and it beeped. He put the probe in the water up to the end of the metal, and held it there, and we stood behind him and watched the side of his face.
It takes a digital thermometer about twenty seconds to settle. The number climbs and then it slows down and then it stops.
Behind me I heard Vance put the seeds away.
Tom looked at the little grey screen for a lot longer than it takes to read two numbers.