Day 47. Strength 19.5. Stamina 18.4. Agility 13.4. Intelligence 14.7.
Ren was already at the picnic table when I pulled in, which has never happened. She had a horchata she wasn't drinking, sweating a ring onto the tabletop, and she watched me all the way across the lot from the car. It was nearly nine at night and the bench was still warm through my shorts when I sat on it.
"Hi," I said.
"What's the catch."
"Can I sit down first."
"You had a day and a half to sit down."
That was fair. I was already sitting, so I put my keys on the table instead, which was the closest I could get.
* * *
Tom came at five past nine with the clipboard and forty minutes before he had to leave for Tolleson. Colby came at ten past with a bag of rolled tacos he put in the middle of the table for everybody, which is a thing he does, and which nobody has ever asked him to do. He tore the bag open down the side so it lay flat, with the little cups of green sauce in a row along the edge.
Tom had the packet. Copper Vale had sent it to him as lead on Tuesday afternoon, eleven pages, and he'd printed all eleven at the library because he doesn't have a printer and doesn't trust a phone with anything he has to sign.
Page one was the subcontract. Page two was the county listing. Page three was the map.
Laveen is three levels, like Bell Road was, except it goes down in a spiral instead of switchbacks, and the county surveyed it in March of last year and wrote kobold, 30–50 est., no anomalies noted in a box at the bottom. Level one has five rooms. Level two has seven and a note in pencil that somebody scanned without erasing: standing water NE, 2–3 in. The stair to three is past the second room on the northeast side, through the water.
Tom turned it around so the rest of us could see it, and I got about as long with it as it took Colby to say "oh, it's a snail," and then Tom turned it back.
* * *
"So," Ren said. "North."
I'd decided in the car what I was going to say. I'd decided it Tuesday, actually, standing behind the desk at Grindstone with the group chat open, and then I'd driven around with it for a day and a half without changing a word, which should have told me something.
"It's an audition," I said. "Copper Vale's paying D money because they want a day of watching me work. There's a guild observer on the dive. His name's Vance. He writes down everything. What we carry, how long, whether we're winded at hour four, what our hands look like coming out."
"Watching you," Ren said.
"Watching me."
"Because of Bell Road."
"Because of the report on Bell Road. Sandoval says they read the annex."
"There's an annex?" said Colby.
"Your socks are in it."
"My socks?"
"Everybody's socks."
Colby looked extremely pleased about this, and then looked at Ren, and stopped.
* * *
Tom didn't say anything. He had his pen out and he was clicking it, which he does when he's reading, except he wasn't reading.
"Okay," Ren said. "So we're the other three bodies in the room."
"You're the party. It's our clear. It files under Two Pairs. That part's real."
"I know that part's real. That's the part you put in the group chat." She finally picked up the horchata and then put it back down without drinking it. "Tuesday at five to seven in the morning. Laveen. Two grand. Three fifty a head. Copper Vale sub. And a thumbs-up from Tom, and Colby losing his mind, and then you're gone for a day and a half."
"I didn't want to do it over text."
"You did the yes over text."
I didn't have anything to put against that. Nobody at the table did.
* * *
You may be wondering why she was angry, since what I'd handed her was three hundred and fifty dollars for one Saturday and the registration she'd been sitting at this table trying to get for two weeks.
Ren has eighteen months of a program left and a job at a sleep clinic on the weekends that she'd have to trade a shift out of. She did the arithmetic on Tuesday morning the same as I did. She'd have said yes. That was the whole problem. I'd known she would say yes, so I hadn't asked, and she worked that out somewhere between the text and the table.
"I'm in," Ren said. "Obviously I'm in. I need the three fifty. That's what I'm mad about."
* * *
Tom stopped clicking the pen.
"When she told you," he said. "Sandoval. When she said it was an audition. Were you still at the counter?"
"Yes."
"And you said yes to her before you walked away from it."
"Yes."
He nodded, like I'd confirmed a count, and wrote something at the top of page one with his other hand over it. Then he turned the page over.
"Okay," he said. "Kobolds."
* * *
Tom has been in one kobold hole, New River in 2022, the one where nobody was carrying tape. Ren and Colby have been in none. I have been in exactly one portal in my life and it was full of things that couldn't aim.
"They're small," Tom said. "Up to about here." He put his hand flat at the height of the table. "They don't come at you in a line. They come around the side. They throw things, rocks mostly, sometimes a bit of something they sharpened, and they're bad at it, and there are a lot of them, so it doesn't matter that they're bad at it."
"How bad," Colby said.
"One in five hits you. Forty of them throwing once is eight."
"So bring the shield," Colby said, and pointed at me with a taco.
"The shield covers one person," said Tom. "Sometimes two if they're standing right. The other thing about kobolds is they run. You push, they back off down a tunnel, and you think you won, and then they're behind you."
"How do you know which tunnel they went down?"
"You count them," Tom said, and he didn't look at me when he said it, and everybody else did.
* * *
Then they started talking about three different things at once, which is what happens at that table after about half an hour.
Colby wanted to know whether a kobold core was worth more than a slime core, and whether we got to keep them on a contract. Ren was on her phone trying to find somebody to take her Saturday at the clinic and reading the replies out loud. Tom was going down the gear list on page six, and got to minimum eye protection, rated and said "Huh."
I found I was answering all three.
Cores on a contract go to the party, page one, fourth paragraph, the guild takes thirty percent of the payment and nothing else. Denise can't do that Saturday but said she'd do the one after, which doesn't help. Safety glasses from Home Depot are rated, the ones with the side shields, eleven dollars.
"Where's the stair to three," Tom said, going back through the packet.
"Past the second room, northeast side. Through the water."
He found page three and put one finger on the northeast corner of it and said "Yeah," and went back to the gear list.
Colby asked about cores again, and Ren found somebody for her shift. She read the text out, ok but you owe me one, and said "Fine," to her phone, and drank about a third of the horchata in one go.
* * *
At twenty to ten Tom stood up and put the packet back on the clipboard, all eleven pages, squared.
"Walkthrough's the Saturday before," he said. "Here. Nine a.m., it's my day. Bring your gear. All of it, packed the way you'd carry it."
"It's going to be a hundred and five at nine a.m.," said Colby.
"Then it'll be good practice for the part where it's inconvenient." Tom looked at me. "And North. On the day, you do the plan. Whatever that man's writing down, you don't do anything for him. You do what I call, same as Bell Road."
"Same as Bell Road," I said.
"Not the bottom of Bell Road," said Ren. "The top."
* * *
He walked me to my car, which he doesn't do.
It was still a hundred and three. The drive-thru sign made his face orange and then didn't when a car pulled through and blocked it.
"She say anything else?" Tom said. "Sandoval."
There was a whole paragraph. The lawyer. Two months. The difference between interesting and useful, and that saying nothing is an answer.
"No," I said.
He nodded, and got his keys out, and said "Okay. Saturday before, nine," and walked back across the lot to the truck.
I sat in my car with the engine running. The AC has been blowing warm since the week I started at Grindstone and it picked that night to blow warm and smell faintly of something burning, and I turned it off and drove home with the windows down.