Chapter 2: The Weight of Cool Water

Harker was good at her job, which made things easier. She walked him through the margin agreement in the efficient voice of someone who had said these sentences a thousand times and still wanted to get them right, and Felix answered in the short clean register of a man who had read the document before hanging up last night and wasn't going to pretend otherwise. The account opened. His hands, he noticed, were steady on the phone. They had never not been steady when someone else was listening.

"And you wanted to place orders today as well."

"A few," he said. He named the aerospace one first, because he remembered the number best. Call options, six months out, strike a notch above the current quote. He named the biotech play next and gave her the position he wanted without dressing it up. Two more after that, one energy, one that he remembered as a logistics concern that would not be a logistics concern for very much longer. He kept the sizes reasonable to the account and the conviction high. He did not explain himself. Harker did not ask him to.

"Confirming four open orders," she said, and read them back, and the words sounded exactly as boring as they needed to sound.

"That's right."

"Anything else today?"

"Not today."

"Have a good morning, Mr. Vance."

He thanked her and ended the call, and then his hands shook. It was a small, specific tremor that traveled from the phone up the tendons of his wrist, the kind of shake that only arrives after the thing it belongs to is already over. He set the phone on the desk face-down next to the tablet and pressed both palms flat to the wood until the shake smoothed out.

"That's money you're not going to need in two years," he said aloud to no one, dry, because the alternative was standing there with his hands on a desk feeling the shape of what he'd just done. He shook his head at himself and moved on.

The tablet woke under his thumb. He went through the fulfillment apps one after another with the efficiency of someone who had practiced this in his head before getting out of bed. Protein and electrolyte powders in a crate delivery, one flavor, enough to last past launch and into the first shake-out weeks. A doorway pull-up bar, the cheap clamp kind that lived in rental apartments and college dorms, rated for more than he currently weighed. Then the one he had been thinking around the edges of: a NerveLink Mk. I capsule, routed to the unit next door under the name he'd put on a second account years ago for a reason he couldn't remember now and wouldn't have cared about if he could.

He did not want a second capsule delivery under his own name three days before launch. He told himself that and knew, while telling himself, that part of what he felt was the small private pleasure of getting away with something. He did not care. A delivery AI chirped cheerfully in his ear and told him his orders had been received and that he was appreciated as a customer. He closed the tab before it could appreciate him any further.

He stood in the middle of the living room and looked at the space like a man estimating a room he had to fight in.

The coffee table he dragged against the wall, scraping a line in the cheap carpet that he would fix later or not. The rug he rolled half back to give himself bare floor. He stood in the clear spot and took honest stock of what he was working with. Twenty-two. Undertrained, in the way specific to someone who had once been trained hard and then had a decade of not being twenty-two. No scar on the wrist. No chest ache. The weight of him distributed wrong for what his reflexes still thought he could do.

He went to the bedroom doorframe and set the pull-up bar, tested the clamp, tested it again with more of his weight. It held. He did a set. The set was bad. His grip went before his back did, and his back went well before it should have, and the last two were ugly little jumps he wouldn't have allowed in anyone he was training.

"Right," he said, to the doorframe. "That's where we are."

He dropped off the bar and walked back to the living room.

He sat on the cleared carpet cross-legged, settled his hands on his knees, and closed his eyes. The breathing part came back first: a slow inhale, a held pressure behind the sternum, a measured release. He had done this in a bunker once for weeks with an old woman who had never asked where he learned to do it badly, only corrected what she saw. Inhale. Compress. Shape. Release. The words didn't matter. The shape did.

The first step of the method was sensing: finding the thin current that ran through the air of a pre-launch room and letting it register against the inside of his attention without doing anything about it yet. It was there. He could feel the density of it, barely, a resistance against the held pressure in his chest the way water gave faint resistance to an open hand moving through it slowly. That much was the same as yesterday.

The second step was compression: narrowing the attention until the current noticed it back. That was where it went wrong.

He reached.

It slid out from under him. The thin current that had been there a moment ago was suddenly not there, and when he grabbed after it he grabbed at nothing and felt nothing and knew he had just done the beginner's thing. He tried again. He reached harder. Something strained that wasn't quite a muscle, somewhere behind his eyes and under his tongue at the same time, and the back of his throat filled slowly with the taste of old copper.

He spat into his palm by reflex. It was only spit.

The old woman had told him — he remembered this with the part of his mind he kept for her specifically, a cupboard he opened and closed — that you knew you had it right when it hurt somewhere you didn't have a name for. He had names for everything that hurt now. That meant he did not have it right.

He tried again. He tried with his jaw loose and then with his jaw set. He tried with his hands open on his knees and with them cupped loosely in his lap. The current would rise to the edge of his awareness and skitter off it like a ball bearing on glass, and each time he reached after it the copper thickened in his throat until his pulse was doing uncomfortable things in his ears.

Twenty minutes. An hour. He lost the thread of how long he had been at it because time ran oddly when his eyes were closed and his breath was counting itself. The light through the blinds warmed and moved and he noticed it without opening his eyes.

The problem was that he was reaching.

He knew this. He had known it from the third attempt. He kept doing it anyway, because his reflexes still thought of mana the way he had learned to think of it late, under pressure, when the world was full of it and grabbing was the right verb. Grabbing was not the right verb now. Now the air held about as much of it as breath on glass, and you did not grab breath on glass. You made a low place and let it settle.

So he stopped.

He sat very still. He let the next inhale fill him and held it past where his body wanted it back, held it through the first kick of want in his diaphragm and through the second, and on the third he did nothing. He did not reach. He did not turn his attention inward in the small purposeful way that had worked yesterday. He let the holding be the low place.

The current came up under his ribs like a pilot light seen through thick glass, cool and steady, and pooled in his lower belly without being asked. It was not much. It was a thimble's worth against what he remembered carrying in the late years. But it was held, and it was his, and it did not slip.

Something in him answered it with a fractional pulse that he logged as his own nervous system recognizing its own trick, and the pool stayed. He let the breath out slow. He let the next breath in slower. The pooled weight did not drift. He opened one hand on his knee and the pool noticed the hand without moving to it, which was what he had wanted: capacity first, not circulation, and certainly not display.

He let himself grin, once, with his eyes still closed. Then he put the grin away and did the drill again.

The second time was cleaner. He found the thin current faster, made the low place faster, and the pool settled in the same spot under his ribs with noticeably less strain through his jaw. The third was cleaner than that. He ran it a fourth time with attention split, watching what his body did on the approach and what it did once the pool had formed, and started making the distinctions he wanted.

Capacity was how much of the cool weight he could hold before his breath rate had to adjust. Method was the step anyone watching would clock first: the held breath, the stillness, the specific angle of the inhale. He also tried, tentatively, the third step of the old technique — circulating the pool up along the line of the spine, a slow thread rather than a push — and got it to move once, a finger's width, before it slid and re-pooled where it had started. Good enough for a first day. He logged that too.

Capacity was the private number. Method and circulation were the parts he'd have to think about hiding.

He made a quiet note about that and moved on.

Somewhere under the running count of his breath he was also listing. Not on the tablet. In his head, against the headers he had underlined earlier and tried not to read twice. Mentor-type NPCs whose branch trees had been gated by checks the first-life playerbase hadn't realized were checks. A certain scarred smith who had been notorious for giving half-greetings to new arrivals and then never being available again; Felix was increasingly sure that had been an evaluation he'd failed by not knowing it was one. A handful of quests that had gone into the community wiki under unfinishable that he suspected were miscast rather than broken, requirements phrased just badly enough that the first wave had all tried the wrong verb.

He filed the list back under its header without opening it further.

The next drill he ran with his hands flat on the carpet, palms down, and noticed the floor through them differently than he had before he'd started. The next one he ran with his eyes open and the light in the room at its full afternoon warmth. The pool held through both. He counted that as repeatable.

He stopped when his hands started to shake, and only after he had confirmed that the shake was low blood sugar and not strain. He had broken himself on overtraining once in this life and twice in the one before, and he was not going to do it on the first day of the three he had.

He got up, went to the kitchen, and ate cold leftover rice and something that had once been chicken standing at the counter with the container in his hand. The chipped mug was still where he'd left it that morning. He ran water into it and didn't drink from it. Through the window the light had gone long and the building across the street was catching the copper end of the afternoon on its upper floors.

He woke the tablet with his knuckle. A browser tab he'd left open that morning showed a real estate listing for a parcel out in the Caldera Ridge foothills: access road, well, a barn older than any of them. He didn't click through. He dragged the listing into a bookmarks folder without reading the description again and closed the tab.

In the sidebar, a second folder header sat a row below the first with a label he had written in a hurry at some point and then not changed. He hovered. He did not open it. He closed the browser entirely and set the tablet face-down.

Three blocks over, the maglev went through on its evening run, and the apartment ticked faintly under his feet.

His phone buzzed on the counter.

He picked it up. The notification was from the fulfillment service, short and anodyne, in the same cheerful typeface the AI had used to appreciate him as a customer a few hours earlier. Your NerveLink Mk. I delivery has been rerouted. Order flagged for launch-week verification by our fulfillment partner. A representative will contact you to complete identity confirmation. There was a reference number. There was a smiling cartoon capsule.

He read it once. He read it again.

He set the phone face-down on the counter with the flat of his palm and did not let it make a sound going down.

Interesting, he thought. Why.