Day 29, continued. 12:03 p.m.
Tom came back down the ramp and put the clipboard flat against the wall and got his headlamp on it, and the four of us stood in a grey-blue tunnel and looked at a printout of a map somebody made in 2019.
"Twenty-four," he said.
"Twenty-four."
"You sure."
"I'm sure." And then, because he deserved better than that: "Six on the first level. Eighteen on the second. I can tell you which rooms."
Tom held my eye a moment and went back to the map.
Colby leaned in over his elbow to look at it too, as if it might say something different up close. It didn't. The paper had gone soft from four hours of damp, and the pencil on the second-level ring had smeared grey where Tom's thumb kept going over it.
I had read that listing maybe three hundred times without understanding one word of it. Typical population: 20–30. That is every level of it. That's the number the county's been printing on that pin since 2019 and it's the number Tom cleared twice, mid-twenties both times, and then went home.
We were at twenty-four and we had not set foot on the third level.
"Could be a heavy year," Ren said.
"Could be."
"You said it yourself, they breed back between resets. Nine years is a long time for a blue."
"I did say that." Tom was running his thumb down the second-level ring on the map and counting rooms, and I watched him do it twice and I watched his thumb stop in the same place both times. "Ren, how many rooms on two."
"Eleven."
"Map's got eleven." He didn't look up. "We walked thirteen."
Nobody said anything.
"I could be wrong," Tom said. "I'm tired and it's a bad map and the ring makes you double back and it's easy to count a room twice."
"You're not wrong," I said. "Thirteen. I've got which ones."
Tom let a breath out through his nose and folded the map once, along a crease that was already there.
* * *
So that's where we were at ten past twelve. Twenty-four counted with a whole level still under us, two rooms that aren't on a map revised eighteen months ago, and a county inspection sticker from May with somebody's initials on it.
I'd spent my whole life assuming there was a system underneath all this. There is no system. There's a guy in a truck.
The sticker means a man drove out to Bell Road in May, walked around a fence he did not go through, looked at a blue door from twenty feet, wrote a date, and drove to the next one. Nobody has been inside that portal since Tom Guzmán and two other people came out of it in March and got paid three hundred dollars.
The inside of a portal is checked by whoever happens to be in it.
* * *
"We're going up," Tom said.
"Tom."
"That's the rule, Ren. The map's wrong, you go up and you file it. It's not my rule, it's everybody's rule, it's the first thing anybody says to you."
"And then what happens."
"Then the Association sends somebody."
"Then the Association sends somebody," Ren said, "and it's an E-team out of a guild, and they get the three hundred and the cores and the clear, and we get what we're carrying, which is fifty-four bucks a head, and we drive home."
"Yeah."
"Say the rest of it."
Tom didn't.
"Four people off the open board," Ren said. "One unranked, one F, one E who's been level three since April. We go in the Association office on Monday and tell a woman at a desk that a blue portal with nine clean years on it felt wrong." She pulled her sleeve down over her hand, because she was cold, we all were. "They'll file it. They'll put it in the queue. It'll get looked at in November."
"That's probably true," Tom said.
"It's definitely true. It happened to a guy in my program in April at the one out by Laveen."
"And?"
"And nothing. Nothing happened. It's still there. He was probably wrong." Ren pushed off the wall. "I'm not saying stay. I'm saying I want it on the record that going up is also doing nothing, and it costs us seventy-five dollars each to do it, and everyone's going to act like it's the responsible choice."
Seventy-five dollars each.
I stood there and did that arithmetic, because I cannot help it and I have stopped apologizing for it. Three hundred dollars is what the county of Maricopa pays to reset a portal. Four ways. Seventy-five dollars a person. Two days, at my rate.
We were four people standing in the cold under a storage facility arguing about seventy-five dollars, and both of them were right.
Tom had a hand on the back of his neck. Ren had her arms wrapped around herself with her sleeves pulled down. I was holding the shield by the rim with the taped rivet against my leg, and I could feel the tape through my pants, cold and a little tacky.
* * *
Colby had been quiet for about six minutes, which for Colby is a geological era.
"My mom's apartment's on Thunderbird," he said.
Everybody looked at him.
"Like — " He did a thing with his hand, pointing up and sideways, at a ceiling. "That way. It's four miles? Four and a half."
"Colby—"
"No, I know. I know." He had his thumbs hooked in the straps of his bag and he was looking at the floor. "I'm just saying if this one's got extra in it and it's been getting extra for nine years and the guy just drives past, then that's the, that's the thing, right? That's the whole thing that happened at the factory in Buckeye."
The argument ran another four minutes, but it was over.
You see, everybody in this state has the Buckeye number in their head by now. It was on the news the second morning I had my trait, while I was standing in my kitchen with a spatula. A portal ripened all the way to red inside a building nobody had been in for thirteen years, and then it broke, and then the anchor said the word fatalities and went to weather.
Nobody looks at the ones nobody's inside of. It was built that way.
* * *
Tom made the call, and the call was not brave, and I think that's why it was the right one.
"We go down to the junction," he said. "We look. We count what we can see from the junction and we do not go past it, and we do not go in anything, and then we come up and we file it with a number in our hands instead of a feeling. That's it. Anybody's not good with that, say it now and we all go up, no argument, no grudge."
Nobody said it.
"North. You keep the count."
"Yeah."
"Ren, you're on the ramp behind us, you don't come down past the last turn. Colby, you're with Ren."
"I can—"
"Colby," Tom said, "you're with Ren."
Colby opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he reached into nothing up to the wrist and came out with a water bottle and held it out to me, and I drank about half and gave it back, and he put it away wherever it goes.
* * *
The ramp down to the third level is longer than the other two put together.
It runs about three hundred feet on a slope you can feel in your shins, and it narrows as it goes, from three-across to two, and about halfway down the wet on the floor stops.
Tom went first, with the maul held across his body in both hands. I was on his right shoulder where I'd been all day. Behind us I could hear Ren and Colby coming down, and then at the last turn I couldn't, because they'd stopped where Tom told them to.
That was the first thing. Not a warning, just a thing. For four hours every surface in that place had a millimeter of water on it, and then for the last hundred and fifty feet, nothing. Dry stone. My boots started making a noise they hadn't made all day.
The second thing was the temperature.
I noticed it the way you notice the AC's dead in your house, which is twenty minutes late and all at once. I'd been shivering since hour three. Somewhere on that ramp I stopped shivering, and I had been so glad about it that I hadn't asked why.
Sixty-one degrees at the door. I put my hand flat on the wall at the bottom of the ramp and the wall was warm.
I took my hand off and put it back to be sure. Same. Like the hood of a car somebody just drove in from Tempe, and there is no sun anywhere down there to explain it.
The third thing was the junction.
It's a wide low chamber where four tunnels come in, and you can stand at the mouth of the ramp and see all of it at once, and Tom had the map up against his chest with his light on it and his mouth slightly open.
The map has three.