Chapter 12: The Water Table
Twenty minutes after the whistle, the far circles were still grinding. The atrium had settled into its long middle stretch. Two pairs still had rope in hand over by the north dais, and the squeak of nylon ran under everything, that dry, complaining sound, threaded through with somebody's heel scuffing the tape. The dome lights cycled orange, then blue, then orange again. Every polished surface in the compound threw the color back.
David sat on the bench beside the water table with a paper cup going soft in his hand.
Simone's palm had left a warm spot on his back and taken it away. Tasha's cup was crushed flat in his fist now, the second one. Renee was somewhere behind him, still talking to Derek about the bracket, still laughing, and her laugh had a hinge in it that he couldn't quite read. He ran the bracket in his head because it was the only thing in there that stayed quiet.
The bench dipped. Mia sat down.
She didn't look at him. She reached across his lap, took a fresh cup, and filled it from the spigot. The water came out in a thin, chlorinated ribbon. She drank half of it without stopping, then set the cup on her knee and looked at the rope circles instead of him.
"You're still sweating," she said.
"It's a dome."
"It's a dome," she agreed. "That's what it is."
Somewhere across the atrium Kyle's voice rose and broke, still sore about the tape, and a couple of people laughed at him. The sound carried a long way in here. Everything carried.
Mia turned her cup a quarter turn on her knee. "What was that in round one, David?"
"Which part."
"The part where you stepped over the line."
He'd known it was coming for twenty minutes and it still landed like a hand on his chest. He took his glasses off, wiped the bridge of his nose with his thumb, put them back on. "The math was simple."
"Simple."
"Kyle and I were going to trade rounds. It was going to be a grind, and whoever got the last grip was going to be somebody's grudge. If I go down early, he takes the win, he stops looking at you, and I've got two rounds left to take it off him." He heard himself and heard how clean it sounded. "That's the whole thing. That's the math."
Mia drank. Then she said, "You think I came here to be somebody's charity."
"I didn't say that."
"You didn't have to." She finally looked at him. Her lips pursed, and the gold at her throat caught the blue phase of the light.
"I do math, David. I've been doing math since I got here. Rent times four, uniforms times two, the braces Devon’s going to need next year. I do math in my sleep. Don't you dare stand there and tell me you did this with a calculator."
"I did it because he was going to plant you."
"I know what he was going to do."
"Then why'd you look at me like that after?”
The words were out before he'd checked them. Mia went still. Across the atrium a rope hit the floor, and Zola's voice floated over, calm and enormous, telling the pair to reset their grip.
Mia set the cup down on the bench between them.
"Because you did it without asking me," she said. "Because you decided, in about four seconds, that the way to take care of me was to lie down in front of Kyle Barlow on international television. Like I'm a damn china cabinet and you're the man holding the door."
"That's not it."
"Then say what it is."
He looked at his hands. His knuckles were red from the rope, and there was a grey smear of tape adhesive along the side of his right palm. He thought about lying. Renee had told him the truth was a muscle you had to use or it went slack.
"I was scared," he said.
"Of Kyle."
"Of you. Of watching you get sent home on a night I could have stopped." He made himself keep going. "In high school you sat two rows in front of me in homeroom and I never said one word to you. Not one. I had a whole school year’s worth of chances and I used none of them. So when I saw your name come up with his, I just, I moved. I didn't think about what it would say to you. I only thought about not doing the homeroom thing again."
The far circles kept grinding. Somebody hooted. Mia's jaw worked once, side to side, the way it did when she was deciding something.
“That was when you were fifteen," she said at last. “That was so long ago.”
"Yeah."
"You're thirty-one now. A grown man.”
"I'm aware."
She laughed, short, mostly through her nose, and knocked her knee against his. Then she stopped laughing and left her knee there, and that was somehow the loudest thing that had happened to him all day.
"Okay," she said. "New math. You have to hold the final. You drop that one, you're on the block with Kyle and my name's not in it. So the question stops being what you'd do for me." She picked her cup back up. "What do you want now? Not the virginity. You've told me that one a hundred times. What do you want now that you've stopped being the easiest target in this house?"
He opened his mouth to say the prize. He opened his mouth to say immunity. What came out instead was…
“I don't know. I've never gotten this far at anything."
Mia drank the rest of her water and crushed the cup.
"Then go find out," she said. "Tonight. Before the bracket moves." She stood, and the bench came up under him with a jolt. She looked down at him for a second, and some of the heat went out of her face and something else came in behind it, something tired and kind and much older than thirty-two. "And David. I'm not mad about the rope. I'm mad that you keep spending yourself on me when I've got my own hands."
She walked off toward the south wall, where Renee had her arms folded and was watching them both.
David turned his cup over. A last thread of water dropped onto the tile. He turned it over again and nothing came out, and when he glanced up past the water table, across the pulsing orange length of the atrium, Remy Richards was standing at the edge of the far circle with his arms loose at his sides.
He wasn't watching the rope. He was watching the bench, holding that same flat, check-and-tally look he'd worn all morning, the one he'd given David from the dais before he said Beatriz's name out loud. Beatriz stood half a step behind him with a towel on her shoulder, and she was watching Remy watch David.
Remy didn't look away this time. He raised two fingers off his thigh, small, barely a wave, and then turned back to the circle like he'd finished a count.
David watched the two fingers come off Remy's thigh and drop back down, and then Remy squared his shoulders to the rope again like the count was over and the tally had been filed. Beatriz was still half a step behind him with the towel on her shoulder, and she was still looking at the back of his head. The dome lights went from orange to a flat, hospital white, and the far circles went on grinding.
By the time that side finished, the light had gone blue and stayed blue. Lance and Diana took the last round against Owen and Daphne, and Daphne threw her rope down hard enough that it slapped the polish and skidded. Zola read the bracket off a card. Nobody clapped. Kyle was sitting on a stool with his elbows on his knees, and Mia was nowhere David could see, and the atrium drained toward the couches and the showers in twos and threes, everyone talking low.
David stayed on the bench with the dead cup in his hand. His palm had started to throb in time with his pulse. He was three minutes into deciding whether to go get ice when a towel landed on the bench beside him.
"Move over."
Beatriz sat down before he did, so it was less an instruction than a notice. She smelled like salt and the orange peel of her own sports drink. She took his right hand off his knee without asking and turned it over under the light.
"That's a rope burn."
"It's a blister."
"It's both." She pressed the pad of her thumb somewhere near the raw spot and he hissed and pulled back. "Sensitive. Good. Means it's still a hand and not a callus. You don't want hands like mine anyway.” She let go and sat back. Her hoop earring threw a tiny gold dot onto the bench between them. "You won that with geometry."
"I won it with Renee."
"You won it with both. I'm not going to pretend I didn't watch. I watch everything." She unzipped her jacket to her collarbone and fanned herself with the collar. The white light made the neon orange of her set go flat and chemical. "Kyle is stronger than you and he's been pulling rope since he could walk, and you took two rounds off him standing still. That means something. I want to know what it means, because I'm standing next to the man who's going to be asked to throw you."
"Remy."
"Remy." She said it the way you say the name of a storm that already has a date. "He picked me for the rope because I don't flinch. He thought he was someone that was a tool. Someone that was best for his game here. He was picking a witness." She turned her head and looked at him flat. "You know what they're going to do to you next, don't you?"
"Zola's going to pair me with him."
"He's going to stand next to you on camera and take his shirt off and the network is going to get exactly what it paid for. And when they've got it, the show needs one of you to be the villain of it, and it's not going to be him. He's four seasons deep. He's spent his whole time in this franchise being the one who gets left standing." She held up one finger. "So. That's YOUR problem. Now here's mine."
"Does he know what he's doing with you?"
"He thinks he does." Beatriz drank from David's cup, made a face, and drank again anyway. "The pair lock runs out at the end of this week. Every season he attaches to somebody in week one, and every season that person goes home before the final three. I've watched the tapes. It's not a pattern, it's a mechanic. Like clockwork." She set the cup down. "I'm not going to be the story he tells about himself."
The bench was warm where she sat. David could feel the heat coming off her through the towel, the way you can feel an engine idling in a parked car. She wasn't flirting. That was the thing. She was doing exactly what she said she did, which was watch, and then move.
"So here's my offer," she said. "I coach people. That's not a hobby, that's the business. I've taken people with two left feet and no breath and put them through competitions they had no business finishing. You're not that. You've got smarts and you've got hinges and you've got about nine percent body fat, which is a problem, but it's a fixable problem." She tapped two fingers on his forearm. "The next one isn't a rope. I've heard the crew talk. I'm not going to tell you the name of it because I don't know the name of it. But I know it's going to ask you to do things with your body you have never done, in front of cameras, with somebody watching the whole time."
"I know."
"You don't know. You think you know." She smiled for the first time, and it was quick and real and gone. "I've seen the way you hold a cup. You hold it like it might get taken off you."
David looked down at his hands. The left one was clean. The right one was going red in a band across the palm.
"What do you want, Beatriz?" he said.
"Good question. Nobody asks that." She pulled the towel off her shoulder and folded it in half on her knee. "I want a lane out. I want to still be standing at the final and I want it to be because I out-worked them and not because I was somebody's hot beautiful accessory on the way to the end. To do that I need a second. Not a partner exactly. A second, in the corner, that Remy Richards can't predict." She looked at him. "That's you. You don't even have to be good. You just have to be unreadable. Which is the one thing you've got going."
"That's the whole deal."
"That's the whole deal. Starting tonight, midnight, the gym. Bring shorts that don't look like they were ironed. I'm going to teach you how to move on a floor with a person on it, and it's going to be humiliating, and then it's going to be useful." She stood and knotted the towel around her waist. "You've got a bracket to survive and I've got a reputation to keep off the burn pile. Neither of us has a week to waste."
David stood too, because sitting under her felt like a decision he hadn't made yet.
"Midnight," he said.
"Midnight." She took two steps and stopped at the tape line, one hand on her hip, and looked back over her shoulder. The gold hoop swung once. "And David."
"What."
"When Remy asks you what we talked about, you tell him."
He opened his mouth. She was already walking, one arm up, waving the whole thing off before he could get the question out.
"Not tonight," she said. "He's not going to ask tonight. He's going to ask when he's decided what he wants it to mean." She kept walking toward the south corridor, and her voice carried the last ten feet without her raising it at all. "That's when you tell me what his face does. That's the part I'm paying for."
She was gone into the corridor, and the doors hushed shut behind her, and David stood alone at the water table with the dead cup and the raw band across his palm and the bracket running in his head like a countdown that had already started without him.