Day 34. Strength 15.1. Stamina 14.0. Agility 12.3. Intelligence 12.5.
We met Thursday at nine at night at the picnic tables outside a Filiberto's on 51st, because that is the only hour that exists for all four of us at the same time.
Tom gets off nights at six in the morning and sleeps until three. Ren has labs. Colby works at a shoe store in a mall and closes three days a week. I go to bed at ten.
Nine o'clock at a taco place with the heat finally down to a hundred and one and the light from the drive-thru sign turning everybody orange. That's the crew. That's the whole glamorous thing.
* * *
"So we've got a problem," Tom said, and put the clipboard on the table.
It's the same clipboard. Bell Road is closed, the map on it is now a map of a place nobody is allowed into, and Tomás Guzmán still brought the clipboard.
"The board's dry," Ren said.
"The board's not dry, the board's garbage." He turned it around. He'd printed the open listings and gone through them with a pen. "Four in the county this month. One's the rat hole on 27th, which pays sixty a head and takes five hours. One's out past Wittmann, which is forty minutes each way for the same sixty. Two are E and we'd get killed. And every one of them is somebody else's booking looking for one or two bodies, so whatever we clear files under their lead."
"We did fine at Bell Road," said Colby.
"We did not do fine in an F, Colby."
Colby turned his cup around on the table, once, by the straw.
"Fair," said Colby.
* * *
Then Tom told us about the tier above, which I had not known existed, because it is on a screen of the app that never opens for anybody like us.
"County clearing contracts," he said. "The ones the guilds bid on. Two thousand for an F, five for an E, and they run on a schedule so you know six weeks out and you can book the day off work."
"Two thousand," I said.
"Split four ways, and it's a real number, and you get it four to six times a year instead of a hundred and thirty on a Saturday when somebody's cousin bails." He tapped the clipboard. "You can't get on that list off the open board. You have to be a registered party."
Four registered divers on a filed roster. A party name. A designated lead who signs for the whole roster, which meant Tom, which he did not offer and which nobody discussed.
And one thing more, which is the thing. One completed clear on record in the last twelve months.
"We don't have one," Ren said.
"We have three," said Tom. "Three I led. Bell Road twice and New River once. Every other Saturday I was filling somebody else's listing and it's their name on the clear. And the three I led are under my registration as an individual. None of them are a party. The Association doesn't care what I did with people whose names weren't on a form."
"So we need one clear."
"We need one clear, clean, filed as a party, with four names on it."
* * *
You may be wondering why four people who had just come out of the worst day of their working lives were sitting at a picnic table planning to go back in.
Tom has two kids and a job that pays him to walk eleven miles a night inside a building with no windows. Ren has eighteen months of a respiratory therapy program left and no way to not work through it. Colby is nineteen and lives with his mother on Thunderbird and makes eleven dollars an hour selling shoes.
And two thousand dollars, four to six times a year, on a schedule you can plan around, is not a fortune. It's a car repair that doesn't wreck you. It's rent paid in the first week of the month instead of the fourth. It's a tooth fixed the week it starts hurting instead of the month after. Nobody at that table said any of that out loud. Everybody at that table knew it.
* * *
"Okay," Ren said. "Name."
"Oh," said Colby, and sat up.
"No."
"You don't know what I was going to say."
"I know what you were going to say because you have said four of them to me already this week over text and I did not respond to any of them on purpose."
Colby said them anyway. I'm going to put them down because he was completely sincere every single time.
Ashfall. Crimson Vanguard. The Iron Verdict. And one that was just the word APEX, in capitals, which he had already drawn twice on the back of a receipt.
"We sell slime cores to a man on Grand for nine dollars," Ren said.
"You don't name it for what you are—"
"That is exactly what you name it for."
Tom had his pen out and was not participating.
* * *
I wasn't going to say anything. I'd been on the crew for eight days and the naming of a thing is not for the person who has been there eight days.
Then Ren said, "North. You've got the tiebreaker, congratulations," and everybody looked at me.
And what came out of my mouth was: "Two pairs."
"...Of what," said Colby.
"Socks."
Ren put her cup down.
"A D-rank told me that before I ever went in," I said. "Two pairs of socks, change them at the halfway mark, take your boots off the second you're out. She said it ends more first dives than teeth do. And she was right, and I did it, and my feet were still soft at two hours, and if I hadn't done it I'd have been limping by hour four and I'd have been slow in a hallway where being slow was the whole thing."
Nobody said anything.
"That's what we've got," I said. "We're not the strongest party anybody's ever registered. We came out of Bell Road because Tom walks one speed, and because Colby had tape in a hole in the air, and because Ren came down a ramp she'd been told to stay off and put a match head right where it needed to be. That's all preparation. It's all boring. It's the socks."
Tom clicked his pen.
"Two Pairs," he said, and wrote it on the form, and nobody argued, because he is the one who signs for the roster.
Colby looked at it upside down on the table.
"It does sound like a poker hand," he said.
"It's a bad poker hand," said Ren.
"It beats one pair."
"It beats one pair," Tom agreed, filling in the addresses.
* * *
The roster went in that night from Tom's phone, four names, one lead, and a fourteen-day processing window.
TWO PAIRS — party registration pending — 1 clear required.
I drove home the long way and I noticed I was doing it on purpose, which I hadn't in a while.
Somewhere around Cactus I realized I could still see Tom's printout.
Not the gist of it. The page. Four listings, top to bottom, the rat hole on 27th and the Wittmann one and the two E's, the dates and the start times and the free text under each, and the place where his pen had gone through the paper on the second E. I'd read it upside down across a picnic table, once, while Colby was pitching APEX. I hadn't tried to keep any of it.
A month ago I needed a legal pad to hold four problems.
Intelligence twelve and a half. It was an 8 the day I got it. I don't know what four and a half points of that are supposed to feel like, and so far they feel like nothing, the way the mop bucket felt like nothing until I noticed I was carrying it with one hand.
When I got home I checked the Wittmann listing against the app. Sunday, six a.m. I had it right.
There was a thing I didn't say at that table. If I hadn't stood at the top of that ramp on Day 29 and told Tom the count was wrong, we'd have gone up, filed a report nobody would have read, and been paid three hundred dollars for a clean clear at Bell Road. It would be on the record. Tom would have had his three hundred and his Saturday, the county would have had one more clean F on file, and this conversation would never have happened.
I was right about the count. Everything after it was right too, all the way down, and Colby's mother lives four miles from that lot.
It still cost these three people the thing they needed, and Tom Guzmán sat at a picnic table for an hour tonight solving the problem I made. He never brought it up. I don't think it occurred to him to.
I got home at twenty past ten, which is twenty minutes late, and lay there in the dark doing four-digit multiplication at the ceiling until it stopped working.