Day 46. Strength 19.1. Stamina 18.0. Agility 13.3. Intelligence 14.5.
She came into Grindstone on a Tuesday at ten past six in the morning, which is a time of day when the only people in that building are six regulars and me.
I was behind the desk. She got the door on the second try, which nobody does, and then stood on the mat looking at the racks the way somebody looks at a room they already know the shape of.
D-rank. Copper Vale jacket. Her forearm wasn't purple anymore.
"Sandoval," I said.
"You remembered."
"You gave me four minutes in a flood channel."
"Yeah, well." She came to the counter. "I've been reading about what you did with them."
"You want coffee? There's a pot."
"Is it any good?"
"It's six scoops."
"Is that a lot?" She watched me pour it. "Never mind. God, yes. Thank you. I've been up since God knows, I had to drive a grown man to the airport who could have called a cab." She took the cup in both hands and didn't drink it yet, just held it under her face. "Sorry. That's not your problem."
* * *
She'd read the Bell Road report. All of it, including the annex, which she said guild leads get and I did not know existed.
"Your socks are in it," she said.
"They're your socks."
"They're in it as party member reports adopting a halfway sock change on the advice of a D-rank observer at the 51 wash prior to first descent." She set the cup down and put her hands flat on the counter on either side of it. "Do you know how many times anything I have ever said to anybody has ended up in a county annex?"
"No."
"Once. That one." She looked at me. "Nine years of this and once. I said it to a kid behind a rope because he asked me a real question and I was tired. Then a week later there's a reclassified portal with an eight-hundred-foot hole under it and my name's in the paperwork and I've got a guildmaster forwarding me a PDF at eleven at night."
* * *
Hector looked up from his western at her, and at her jacket, and said "Huh," and went back to it.
Wendell, on the rower, did not even pretend not to stare. Priya stopped talking in the middle of a sentence, which I had never once seen happen, and then started again, quieter, about something else.
"You work here," Sandoval said.
"I open."
"You open." She said it flat. "You're a level two who held a corridor against an unindexed specimen and you mop a floor at four forty in the morning for a woman with a cane."
"Thirteen an hour."
"I know what it is, my first gym paid twelve." She looked past me at the mop bucket, which was still in the corner by the fountain where I'd left it, the water gone grey. I'd meant to empty it an hour ago. Coach would see it before she saw anything else. "Christ. Okay." She rubbed her eye. "Okay. I'm going to do this badly, because I've been told to do it and I don't like it, and the version where I pretend I'm here on my own is worse."
* * *
Copper Vale has the county contract for an F-rank out past Laveen, eighteen days out. Two thousand dollars, one day, four to six hours.
They don't want it. F-rank contracts are a loss for a guild. You pay four licensed divers a day rate and insurance and a medic on standby to clear an F-rank hole, and the county pays two grand, and you do it because the contract bundle you actually want has three F-ranks attached to it and the county won't split them.
So guilds subcontract them. They put a registered party on it, take a cut, and file the clear under both names.
"Which you need," Sandoval said. "Because your party registration is pending on one completed clear, and Bell Road isn't going to give you one, and every F on the open board this month is somebody else's booking, so none of them file as yours."
"You've looked at our registration."
"The guild looked at your registration. I got shown it." She held up a hand. "Two Pairs. Guzmán, Choi, Estrada, North. Fourteen-day window, day twelve."
* * *
This is the part where I should have been happy.
It's the exact thing we sat at a picnic table on 51st trying to solve. Tom took a day off he can't afford to sit in a windowless room and be told there was no clear, and here is a clear, handed over a counter at six in the morning by a woman who owes me nothing.
Two thousand dollars, minus a guild cut. Four to six hours. On a schedule you can book a day off for.
"What's the cut," I said.
"Thirty percent. Fourteen hundred to you, three fifty a head."
"That's fair."
"It's better than fair, it's what they pay a D-party, and I want you to notice that, because the reason it's better than fair is the thing I came here to say."
* * *
She let a second go past.
"They're not buying a party," Sandoval said. "They're buying a look at you."
I didn't say anything.
"Copper Vale read that annex the same as I did. A level two with twenty-seven days on his registration stood in a six-foot corridor and killed a thing that put a survey lead in the office writing memos at two in the morning. Nobody at that guild thinks Two Pairs is a good party. No offense to Guzmán, he's solid, he's a five and he's thirty-four and he'll be a five at forty."
"That's not—"
"I know it's not. I'm telling you what's in the room." She tapped the counter twice. "They're paying D-money for an F-job because a prospect assessment costs them four times that and this way they get a whole day of watching you work and it goes on the books as a subcontract."
* * *
"So it's an audition."
"It's an audition where they don't tell you it's an audition and you can't fail it in any way you'd notice," Sandoval said. "There'll be a guild observer. There always is on a subcontract, it's legitimate, it's in the paperwork. His name's Vance and he is very good at seeming bored."
"And what does he write down."
"Everything. What you carry, how long you carry it, whether you're winded at hour four, what you do when somebody's slow, what your hands look like coming out."
I looked down at my hands on the counter before I could stop myself. Chalk in the creases, a split on one knuckle, a callus coming up across the base of the fingers where the enarme sits. She saw me do it and let it go. She shrugged one shoulder. "Same stuff I looked at when I came out at the wash and you stood behind a rope with your phone out. Except you were doing it for free and he's getting paid."
* * *
Then she finished the coffee standing up, all of it at once, and went around the end of the desk and rinsed the cup out in the little sink back there before I could stop her, and said "Sorry, habit," and put it upside down on the paper towel like it was her own kitchen.
She stepped back like she was finished, and then didn't leave.
"Off the record, and I will deny it," she said. "Whatever you are, decide what you're going to say about it before somebody asks you in a room with a lawyer in it. Because they will ask. And saying nothing is an answer, and it's the answer that gets you watched instead of hired."
"I don't—"
"Kid. I've been a D for nine years." She said it without any bitterness I could hear. "I know what I am and how far it goes and I made my peace with that in about 2022. You are somewhere on a curve that I have never seen on a person and neither has anyone else, and you have got maybe two months before that stops being a thing people find interesting and starts being a thing they find useful."
* * *
She left at ten to seven, ten minutes before Coach came in, which I don't think was an accident.
The contract is two and a half weeks out, on a Saturday. Laveen. F-rank, kobold, three levels, county-mapped last year.
I took it. Standing at that counter, on my own, in about eleven seconds, and then I texted the group chat.
Tom said thats real money. in.
Ren said what's the catch.
Colby sent four exclamation marks and then, ninety seconds later, wait what's the catch
And I sat there behind a desk at Grindstone at five to seven in the morning with a phone in my hand and did not type the answer, which is that there isn't a catch for them.
There's a catch for me, and I've just spent theirs on it.