Chapter 3: Compression

Dawn came thin and gray over her street, the maglev two blocks off already working, and Felix was on her step with the folded page creased soft from a night of handling. He had not slept past three. He had run the drill on the hour as instructed until midnight and twice past that out of stubbornness, and the nosebleed from yesterday had dried to nothing on the cuff of his jacket and been scrubbed with cold water so it was only a faint ring.

She opened the door before he rang. She was already dressed, braid pinned, a mug in her hand.

"In," she said. "Shoes."

He left them on the mat and followed her down the hall. The dining-room-workspace had the same tired warmth as yesterday, bergamot and old paper, the pendulum on its stand still hanging that measurable degree off true. She pointed at the stool. He sat.

"Run it," she said.

He closed his eyes. Four in. Hold two. Six out. Sternum, diaphragm, hip, floor. The draw came in along the centerline and he was already congratulating himself for not needing to be told when her hand flattened against his upper back.

"Shoulders," she said. "Not pulled. You are bracing."

"I'm not."

"You are. Soft the sternum."

He softened the sternum. The draw re-seated. On the third cycle she touched his jaw lightly with two fingers and he realized he was clipping the exhale. He had been shaving half a second off the six-count without noticing, the way a runner rounded a corner tight to save himself work.

"Six is six," she said. "Not five and a half. You are rushing because you think rushing is discipline. It is not."

He did not answer. He breathed out the full six.

On the fifth cycle his right hand, resting on his thigh, drifted. Not much — a quarter-turn of the palm, the ghost of yesterday's habit when the whole point had been to push the thread out along the arm and make the shimmer sit. He felt her notice before he did. She reached down and moved his hand three inches farther from his chest and set it flat on his knee, palm down.

"Here," she said, two fingers tapping the line from his sternum down through his diaphragm. "Not there." A tap at his palm. "You are leaking it toward the hand because that is what you taught yourself. Untaught."

"I know."

"You know and you do it anyway. That is worse than not knowing."

He ran it again with his hand dead-flat on his knee, and the thread came in along the centerline and stayed there, and for the first time the pressure did not try to sidle off down his arm. The hips took the weight the way a loaded bag took weight. He held the cycle. He let it go on the out.

The pendulum, at the edge of his closed eyes, was not hanging straight.

He felt her step back. The old printer wheezed in the corner and spat a single sheet with two more rings on it than yesterday's diagram had had. She did not hand it to him yet.

"You have the cadence," she said. "You do not have the placement. You will drill placement today. Every hour. No shimmer. Do not push to visible."

"Understood."

"If it goes visible, it is because you pushed again. Stop pushing."

"Understood."

She folded the new page along the spiral and held it out. He stood and took it and slid it into the inside pocket to live next to yesterday's. She looked at him, briefly, the way she had looked at him through the screen the first time. Then, at the coat hook in the hall, half to herself and half to him, she said, "You are statistically inconvenient, Mr. Ward."

She did not explain. He did not ask. He put his shoes on.

"Tomorrow," she said.

"Tomorrow," he said.

The door closed behind him and the air outside was cool and dry and smelled of cut grass somebody had done yesterday two houses down. He sat in the sedan for a breath with his hands at ten and two and filed the phrase in the same place he had filed the ink and the capsule specs, and did not let himself turn it over twice. He pulled away from the curb.

• • •

Ninety minutes east, the road thinned to two lanes and the air dried out. The radio lost its stations one by one and he did not replace them. He ran the drill in his head as he drove, not the mana part, only the cadence — four in, hold two, six out — and after the second hour the cadence sat under his pulse the way a metronome sat under a song.

The parcel was where he remembered it, which was to say it was where the listing said it was and nothing about it argued the point. Twelve acres of scrub and low sage, a fence line collapsed on the north side, a wooden stake with a red-faded top, a for-sale sign gone white on the side that had faced the sun. He parked on the shoulder and walked the near edge of it to the stake and back. The ground under his boots was hard and pale. A hawk drew a slow circle half a mile out.

The agent met him at a strip-mall title office twenty minutes further in. She was efficient and uninterested and took the signature without looking at his face twice. The wire went from his phone to her screen and cleared on the third refresh. He initialed where she pointed. He signed where she pointed. She slid him a folder he did not open, and he thanked her and took it and went back to the sedan and set it on the passenger seat on top of the morning tissue he had forgotten to throw away.

At the sedan door he pulled up a number he had written in the notebook the first morning and pressed call. He gave a name that was his, an address that was now his, and a delivery window. The voice on the other end confirmed, read back a total, and rang off. He put the phone down. The list on the page had been four items long. The call had been a minute. The parcel was a fact.

He did not re-read the notebook.

• • •

The diner was the only one on the main street of the nearest town, which had three stoplights and a hardware store and a feed shop that advertised in hand-lettering. A neon sign in the window said OPEN in cursive red. He went in because he had not eaten.

Cracked red vinyl on the booth bench, the foam underneath going soft at the corners. The fryer in the back held a specific steady pitch, a note the room had built itself around. An HVAC unit above the door clicked twice every forty seconds. A greasy stripe of noon light came through the front window and lit the laminate at an angle that would have annoyed anyone trying to read a menu, which he was not.

"Coffee," he said when she came. "And whatever's fastest."

"Fastest is the grilled cheese."

"Grilled cheese."

She clocked him in about four seconds. He watched her do it without making it obvious he was watching. Late twenties, coppery hair losing a strand from a practical bun, freckles over a sun-scarred nose, hazel eyes that tracked the door behind him once before they settled on him. A thin burn scar on the back of her right hand where she was holding the pad.

"Tomato soup's also fast," she said. "If you're the kind of tired that needs soup."

"I'm the kind of tired that needs grilled cheese."

"Sure you are." She wrote it without looking at the pad. "Anything else weird I should know about you up front?"

"Road east of town. Any of it closed?"

"Not this week. You planning to drive it?"

"Eventually."

"Watch the dip about four miles past the second cattle guard. It'll eat a low car." She glanced at the window, where his sedan sat in the sun. "Yours'll probably survive."

"Probably."

"You want the coffee first or the food first."

"Coffee."

She came back with it in thirty seconds and went away again. The coffee was bad in the comforting way diner coffee was supposed to be bad. The grilled cheese came faster than it should have, which meant she had put the order in before he had ordered. He ate it in seven bites. The HVAC clicked. The fryer held its pitch. Two booths over, an old man was reading a paper folded in quarters and turning the pages without looking up.

She brought the check face down on the table.

"Hardware store's two blocks up on the left," she said, as if he had asked a second question. "Owner's a prick but the kid works weekends and he's alright."

"Good to know."

She left. He flipped the check. Her handwriting was fast and square, the total underlined once. Under the total, a name, written for the tip line the way servers wrote names on checks because it was the only place on the slip that felt like theirs. *Rhea.*

He looked at it a breath longer than was useful, then did not look at it again.

He put cash on the table, more than the check asked for and less than she would notice right away. On the way to the door he said, "Thanks," in her general direction without turning around. She said, from somewhere behind the pass, "Don't die in the dip."

"I'll do my best."

He was back in the sedan before he realized he had almost asked. He had not asked. He filed the not-asking where the pendulum and the ink and the capsule specs lived, and did not turn it over, and started the engine.

• • •

The drive back ran long and flat. The maglev line came in on his left past the county marker and paced him for twenty miles, the cars smooth and silent and going somewhere he was not. The afternoon bled toward amber. He kept the cadence under his pulse without running the draw; placement was a parcel thing now, not a freeway thing.

The Zenith billboard came up on the north side before the freeway split. The open hand. The shimmer above the palm that was not quite CGI. He had driven past its twin yesterday and set it down without reading it properly, because yesterday he had not had the room for it. Today the copy had changed.

*STEWARDSHIP OF THE FIRST GENERATION OF PLAYERS.*

Not *stewards of a new medium.* Not *welcome.* Stewardship. Of them. Of the players. His jaw tightened once. He did not gloss it. He did not look at it twice. He kept driving.

Between one mile marker and the next a hand surfaced in his head — someone's hand on a doorframe, the knuckles bony and the second finger slightly crooked from an old break — and he knew whose hand it was and he did not name it. He took the next breath and cut it off on the inhale and called himself, internally, a sentimental idiot, and the word sentimental did some of the work of putting it down. The billboard receded in the mirror. He did not look at that either.

• • •

He took the off-ramp he had come in on and did not take it home. He drove past it and kept east until the road thinned again and the color of the sky had gone from amber to something closer to violet at the edges. The parcel came up on the right with its red-faded stake. He pulled onto the shoulder and walked out into his own land.

The air smelled of scrub sage and of something drier under it that he did not have a word for. The light was low enough that the ground threw long thin shadows off the creosote bushes and short ones off the hummocks of grass. A single crow, unimpressed, called twice from a fence post a hundred yards off and did not call again. The horizon was wide in a way that his apartment window had not been able to make room for in any timeline. The air carried weight.

He found a flat place twenty steps in. He set his feet.

The first run went badly. The shoulders wanted to brace the way she had caught him bracing at dawn, and the hand wanted to drift, and the exhale wanted to clip at five and a half. He did not force it. He let it go and stood with his eyes open and looked at the scrub for a full minute and ran it again.

The second run went badly in a different way. The draw came in clean and then got greedy on the hold, and he felt it try to stack behind his sternum the way it had on the porch before he had bled. He let it go before it found purchase.

He stood for another minute. He did not call himself anything. The light dropped another shade.

The third run.

Four in. Hold two. Six out. Hand dead on his thigh. Sternum, diaphragm, hip, floor.

The thread came in along the centerline and did not slide. He did not push. He placed. On the second cycle the pressure behind the sternum was a shape he could feel the edges of, and on the third cycle the shape did not move when he breathed — it only brightened, somehow, against the inside of his chest, the way a coal brightened when you did nothing but look at it. He did not push. He placed.

On the fourth breath the pressure widened without collapsing.

It did not spread down the arm. It did not stack behind his eyes. It sat against the sternum like something held, and for the first time it had a shape you could have traced with a finger if your finger could reach inside. He counted through body rather than clock. The fourth breath. The fifth. The sixth. On the sixth the widening held steady; on the seventh it deepened a quarter-inch; on the eighth the quality of the air in his mouth changed, sage and something colder under it, and he understood that he was not the only thing in the field right now. He did not name it. He held the core.

Ninth breath.

The hold slipped on the exhale, the way a pot slipped off the edge of a stove when someone nudged the handle. He staggered half a step, caught his weight on his back foot, and stayed up. The pressure went out of him the way heat went out of a room at night, evenly, to nowhere he could name.

No blood on his lip. He checked with the back of his wrist. Nothing.

He stood in his twelve acres with his hands at his sides and let his breathing come back to four-two-six without being told to, because the body wanted the pattern now and was doing it unsupervised. The violet had gone deeper at the horizon. The crow did not call. He felt, behind the plain relief of having done a thing he had set out to do, the sharp appetite to set up and do it again immediately, longer, tighter, to see if the tenth breath was available and the eleventh after that. He had always been worst at his own pacing. He knew this about himself. He named it — *tired appetite* — and did not let it win.

He also felt, at the back of it, small and quiet and not going away, the sense that something had held him in its attention while he had held the core, and he could not prove it, and he was not going to try.

He walked back to the sedan.

• • •

Full dark on the freeway. The maglev was gone. His headlights were the only ones for long stretches.

He thought about the diner for the space of two exits. Rhea's handwriting on the check. The way she had clocked him in four seconds without deciding anything about it out loud. She had been on a list he had made in his first life of people he would have liked to get to in time. She was on it because she had been — *would be* — the one in the cellar who checked whether everyone had eaten, and because she had, in the end, been one of the people he had not managed to keep alive.

He did not dwell on the reasoning. He made the decision between one exit sign and the next.

Not before launch. She got to choose the game the same way everyone else got to choose it. If she came in, he would find her. If she did not, he would not drag her in by name. He had come back to be ahead of people, not to conscript them.

He filed it. He drove.

• • •

The apartment was the way he had left it. The notebook was on the nightstand next to the coin he had flipped and not read. The wallscreen in the upper right said *T-22:14:07*. He watched it roll over to thirteen and did not watch it roll over to twelve.

He drank two glasses of water at the sink. He ate the other banana. He did not open the notebook. He did not reread Eliane's folded pages in his jacket. He hung the jacket on the hook by the door and put the phone on the nightstand with the alarm set for 03:00 and lay down in his clothes, because the last time he had undressed before sleeping he had been a different age.

The back of his throat still tasted of sage.

He slept four hours.

He woke a minute before the alarm and killed it with his thumb before it made a sound. The wallscreen, across the dim of the room, read *T-18:00:00* in the same clean sans-serif it had used the first morning.

He sat up. He planted his feet on the floor. He took the first inhale.