The horn went off about a foot from my window.
I jerked the wheel right and a pickup went past close enough that I felt it through the glass. Somebody yelled something out the window. I didn't catch what. Then they were gone down Thunderbird and I was stopped at the light at Cave Creek with both hands locked on the wheel, trying to remember the last half mile and not able to.
"Sorry," I said. There was nobody in the car.
I was on my way to get my trait. Every school in Arizona lets out the last Friday in June, and on Saturday the crystals go round the gyms, and every eighteen-year-old in the state sits in a folding chair and puts a hand on a rock that decides the rest of their life. I'd been awake since four thinking about it, and twenty minutes from school I'd drifted into a pickup's lane in light traffic. That was about how the week had been going.
The light went green. I didn't turn toward school. I went straight, the long way, past the dead strip mall on Cave Creek. I always take the long way past the dead strip mall on Cave Creek.
There's a portal back there, behind the video store that closed when I was a kid. The county put a fence around it before I was in kindergarten and bolted a sign to it. PORTAL — CLASS F — MONITORED. A phone number under that in smaller letters.
It's blue. It's been blue my whole life.
That's the part movies get wrong. Portals don't tear open and eat a city. They sit there for years and change color, slow. Blue first. Then green, then yellow, then orange. Twenty years ago they started showing up everywhere, in parking lots and canyons and one in the basement of an apartment building in Osaka, and for about a year and a half everybody stood as close to them as the police would allow and took pictures of them.
Then one in Kazakhstan went red. The things inside came out and forty thousand people died in a weekend.
So now there's a fence, and a sign, and a number to call. And every kid in Arizona learns the color order in the third grade, same as we learn what to do if there's a fire.
I slowed down going past and looked at it through the gap between the video store and the nail place. Sitting back there behind the chain-link, being blue.
Then I turned the car around and drove to school.
* * *
The school lot was a circus.
Minivans double-parked. A guy selling cold water out of a cooler by the flagpole and doing real business at nine in the morning, because it was already ninety-eight degrees. Somebody had tied balloons to a truck bed. Actual balloons.
Everybody came with somebody. That's the part I hadn't thought about. Kids I'd sat behind for four years were climbing out of cars with both parents and a grandmother and a little brother in a clip-on tie. One girl's family had made a banner.
I parked at the far end by the fence and sat there with the engine off. The heat started coming in through the roof right away, and the steering wheel got too hot to rest a hand on.
You see, my parents were divers. Elena and Ray North, D-rank, licensed, insured. Careful. That was the word everybody used about them, every time, like it was part of the name. They went into a portal two years ago, the day after my sixteenth birthday, and they didn't come out.
The paperwork says missing, presumed deceased. When somebody asks me I say they passed away, because that ends the conversation faster. I've never once said it that way in my own head.
So, no minivan. No banner, no grandmother.
What I had was a house with the property tax paid through November, about nine thousand dollars in an account that still has both their names on it, and a number I'd been not-looking-at since April. Three thousand a month going out and nothing coming in, no matter what I do about it.
Three months. Give or take.
I got out of the car.
* * *
There was a table at the gym door with a woman from the Association behind it, a lanyard, a printed list.
"Name?"
"Miles North."
She found me and drew a line through me with a yellow highlighter. "Family can sit anywhere on the left, hon. Bleachers are open."
"It's just me."
She looked up then, for about a second, the way people do when they're working out which kind of story it is and deciding not to ask. "Back rows are open," she said, and peeled a sticker off a sheet and wrote MILES on it, and held it out.
They did it in the gym. Folding chairs in rows on the same floor where I failed the mile run freshman year, and that rubber-and-bleach smell every school gym in the country has.
Up on the stage, on a folding table with a black cloth over it, was the crystal.
It's smaller than you'd think. About the size of a fist. Clear, like tap water. No glow, no hum, nothing. If you found it in a kitchen drawer you'd figure it was a paperweight and put it back.
A survey team dug the first one out of the ground the year I was born. If you'd had your eighteenth birthday and you put a hand on it, you walked away with a screen nobody else could see, and you got stronger by killing the things that came out of portals. By that, and by nothing else, ever again. Whatever body you carried up onto the stage was the one you had to work with.
Once people could level, they could go in and clear the portals before they ripened, and the portals mostly stopped going red.
They give you a pamphlet about it in fifth grade. There's a cartoon of the rock on the front, smiling.
I found my row and sat in the back.
Nobody saved me a seat. I'm not complaining about it, I hadn't asked anybody to. Somewhere around sixteen I looked at homecoming and senior sunrise and the group chat and decided none of it was holding anything up, and I never went back and checked if I'd been right.
The principal talked for eleven minutes about how your trait doesn't define you.
Everybody in that gym knew he was lying, him included. Your trait decides which schools take you. It decides which jobs exist. There are companies that put the class letter on the application right under your name. I think he said it because somebody in that room was about to have a very bad morning and he wanted to already have been nice to them before it happened.
Then he started reading names.
Alphabetical, which meant I had a long time to sit and watch it happen to other people. Most got E or F. A couple of Ds. You could tell what somebody got without hearing it, just from the room. Polite clapping, polite clapping, polite clapping. Then an actual noise out of a whole section when Bryce Halloran got a C. I'd had ninth grade biology with him. His mom stood up in the bleachers with both hands over her mouth, and he turned round in his chair to find her, and he was laughing.
One C in a graduating class. That's what the odds look like in real life.
I didn't need a C. I'd done that math in April and let it go. I needed a D. Your trait's letter goes on your diver's license, and a D gets you a guild interview and a first party that isn't doing you a favor, and a D is what they'd had.
"Miles North."
I stood up.
It's maybe forty feet to the stage. My hands had gone slick and I wiped them on my jeans twice on the way up, and my heart was going hard enough that I could feel it in my jaw. I kept my face still the whole walk. That was the one thing I still had, that nobody in that room got to watch anything happen to me.
Up close it's just a rock.
I thought about the fence on Cave Creek. I thought about the word careful. Then I put my hand on it.
It wasn't dramatic. There was a click, sort of, somewhere behind my eyes, like a lock turning. Then a voice that wasn't a voice said:
Congratulations. You have awakened your trait.
Exercise — F-Class.
Allows you to gain stat points the more you exercise.
The Association woman beside the table leaned into the microphone. The crystal sends your trait and your letter to her tablet, never your numbers, and she read it off the way she'd read everybody's.
"Miles North. Exercise. F."
Somebody in the back rows said, "Exercise?" Not even mean. Just surprised, the way you'd say it if somebody's trait was Sandwich.
And somebody next to him said, "Bro, I do that," and that one got a laugh, a real one, about six rows of it.
Somewhere far off the principal said "congratulations, son," and shook my hand. I know I shook his back because I remember that his hand was dry and mine wasn't.
F-Class. Bottom letter. What most people get.
And not even one of the F-Class traits that's worth something. Not minor regeneration, not enhanced hearing, nothing you could put on an application and have it mean anything.
Exercise. The thing every person on the planet can already do.
I went down the stage steps and up the aisle and out the double doors into a hundred and four degrees. Nobody stopped me. There were forty names left and nobody was looking at the back of the room.
I made it all the way to the car, which I was proud of, and still am, a little. I got the door open and I got in and I got it shut.
Then I put my head on the steering wheel and cried like a little kid, in a parking lot, in the heat, until there wasn't any more of it.
There had been a sentence on that screen, under the letter. I'd read it standing on the stage. It was hours before I heard what it said.