Day 43. Strength 18.3. Stamina 17.2. Agility 13.1. Intelligence 14.1.
Tom brought it back on the Saturday morning, two weeks to the day, in the bed of the truck under a moving blanket like something he was returning to a family.
He'd cleaned it. That's the part I wasn't ready for. He'd taken the tape off and got the green residue out of the seam where the canvas meets the rim, which is not a thing that comes out easily, and he'd oiled the leather on the enarme by the rivet he'd re-set at hour four.
It is still folded thirty degrees along the crack and it will never be anything again.
He lifted it out with both hands, which you don't need for nine and a half pounds, and held it a second before he passed it to me. I took it the same way. The leather was soft and smelled of whatever he'd used on it, something with lanolin in it, and the canvas over the crack had been brushed flat so you could see exactly where the face had given.
I ran my thumb along it. The driveway was already hot through my shoes.
"Don't get another ply one," he said.
"No."
"They're fine. Ply's fine." He put his hands in his pockets. "You're not doing what I'm doing anymore, that's all."
* * *
Then he stood in my driveway for a second, and I watched Tomás Guzmán get ready to say a thing he had spent two weeks constructing, and it came out about as well as those things do.
"I got up the ramp," he said.
"Yeah."
"I was forty feet up when the light went out. I've been standing on that spot for two weeks." He said it to the truck, not to me. "My kids are nine and six."
"Tom—"
"No, I'm doing this badly, I know I'm doing it badly." He rubbed the back of his neck. "What I came to say is that I have been trying to work out what I'd tell them if it had gone the other way. And I don't have it. Two weeks and I don't have the sentence."
"There isn't one."
"There isn't one," he agreed. "So I'm going to keep coming out on Saturdays and I'm going to be the guy who walks one speed, and you're going to stop doing whatever it is you're doing where you decide something by yourself at the bottom of a ramp and then tell me about it after."
I said okay.
"Say it like you mean it."
"I can't," I said, "because I don't know if it's true."
Tom nodded once, slowly, and got in the truck.
"Yeah," he said, through the window. "That's the honest one. Fine."
* * *
Marguerite had two for me and she'd had them out on the counter before I got through the door, which means Coach had called her again and neither of them is ever going to admit it.
"Reyes says the kite's too light for you," she said, without looking up from the crossword. "Reyes says a lot of things. Reyes told me the buckler with the bad enarme was a crime against children and I sold it last week to a very nice boy who is still using it. So. Pick one up and we'll see."
She pushed the lighter one at me first. Of course she did.
I left it where it was. It was a nice one, and I could tell from across the counter it was too light, the way you can tell a bag is empty when somebody hands it to you.
Marguerite wrote something into the crossword. She didn't look up for that either.
"Hm," she said.
"Right," Marguerite said, and put the pencil back through her bun. "Then you can have the heavy one."
* * *
Thirty inches. Steel face, steel rim, steel through and through, no ply anywhere in it. Thirteen pounds.
It was cold. That's the first thing. Everything in that shop is room temperature and the steel was cold under my palm, the way metal stays cold in a building where somebody runs the AC all day and nobody opens the door.
I picked it up off the counter with one hand and put it at my ribs and stood there, and it was fine. Nine and a half pounds put my forearm into the hum at nine minutes on Day 19. Thirteen pounds at an 18.3 was a weight I was holding.
Which was the problem, and the reason Coach had called ahead. The loaded carry on her eleven-pound kite failed my arm at twenty-two minutes on Day 32. On Thursday it took fifty-one, and the second block at home had started running past ten o'clock. The stronger the arm, the longer the walk to the edge of it, and the day doesn't get any longer. A heavier shield gets me to the edge sooner. It's nineteen clean push-ups instead of forty sloppy ones again, except this time I'm paying for it in money instead of form.
Three weeks ago I could not carry a mop bucket with one hand.
"Eleven hundred and fifty," Marguerite said.
"Okay."
"Don't say okay like that, say it after you've done it."
So I did it, standing there, and it took about four seconds, which is the part that would have frightened me a month ago.
Eight thousand eight hundred dollars. Eleven fifty is thirty-one days of hallway. I have a burn on my neck that cost three forty and a party that can't get a clear and a portal I can't go back to, and there is no version of the next six months where I walk into anything holding a piece of plywood.
On Day 19 I stood in this shop and argued with myself for ten minutes about six hundred dollars.
"Okay," I said again.
"There it is." She put her hand on the rim. "I'll take the broken one off you. Rim's good, the fittings are good, the ply's firewood. Hundred and eighty."
"It's not worth a hundred and eighty."
"No," Marguerite agreed. "Do you want it or not."
* * *
On Day 19 I worked out how to tell which of her stock came off an estate, and then I spent twenty-four days not applying it to anything.
This one had been cleaned and cared for and the straps had been replaced, which is the tell for a trade-in.
It also had four inches of grip tape on the enarme in a place your hand doesn't go, put there by somebody whose forearm was narrower than mine, worn shiny.
"Marguerite."
"Mm."
"Who had this."
She kept writing the receipt for a second.
"Her brother brought it in in April," she said. "Marisol Vega. Twenty-six. E-rank. She went into a kobold hole out by New River in March with four people she'd been running with for a year and a half and she's the one who didn't come out."
"You've had it since April."
"I've had it since April because it's a thirteen-pound shield and everybody who's strong enough to carry it can afford a better one, and everybody who can't afford a better one can't carry it." She tore the receipt off. "You're the first person who's been both, and it's taken four months, and I want you to know I have thought about her every single time somebody picked it up and put it back down."
I wrote the name down in my phone in the car before I drove anywhere. I don't have a good reason for that either.
* * *
While she was doing the paperwork Marguerite said, not looking up:
"Somebody cleaned me out of lining this week."
"Lining?"
"Acid-resistant. Neoprene sheet, the gauntlet liners, the seam tape. Everything I had, and I had a lot, because nobody buys it. It sits." She squared the receipt on the counter. "Man came in on the Thursday, didn't haggle, didn't look at anything else, paid cash, took eleven hundred dollars of stock that I have been trying to move since 2023."
"Guild?"
"No patch. Didn't say. Knew exactly what he was looking for and knew the names for it, which most people don't." She looked up. "There is one thing in this county that eats gear like that and it is closed, and the county closed it two weeks ago. So somebody is kitting out for the same problem somewhere else."
I stood there with thirteen pounds of a dead woman's shield hanging off my arm.
"Did you tell anybody?"
"I'm telling you," said Marguerite, "because you're the one who came in here with a burn on his neck, and because Reyes would want me to, and because I sell equipment and I am not in any way obliged to tell a soul."
* * *
I put it in the passenger seat because it wouldn't have made sense in the trunk, which I have now done twice.
Seven thousand eight hundred and thirty dollars. Eleven hundred a month. Seven months and change, and a shield that does not fold, and a name in my phone that nobody at that shop had said out loud since April.