Renata the dietitian turned out to be a tiny woman with a gray buzz cut, a fleece vest covered in pins, and the energy of a drill sergeant who had found God and the God was electrolytes.
Owen never met her. He met her handwriting.
His mother came home from her Tuesday night shift at 7:40 on Wednesday morning, just as Owen and his dad were getting back from the walk, and she put an index card on the kitchen table like she was laying down a winning hand.
"Renata says hi," she said. "Renata also says the honey thing was a crime."
The card said, in small, angry capitals:
FOR DANA'S KID (THE GAMER)500 ml water, cool not cold
¼ tsp salt (sodium, ~575 mg)
¼ tsp potassium chloride ("lite salt," NOT more than this)
1 tsp sugar OR 1 tbsp juice. NOT HONEY. NOT A MILKSHAKE.
1 scoop unflavored whey isolate (20 g), shaken, not blended
Juice of half a lemon so he'll actually drink it
Sip over the first hour. Not a chug. Eat real food too.
If he gets cramps, headaches or weird heartbeats, he stops and tells you.
Under that, in a different pen, like she'd come back to it: Also tell him to sleep. Nothing in a glass beats sleep. I mean it.
Owen read it twice. Then he read it a third time, because he was holding the thing that a deleted forum post in 2038 had only hinted at, written out on a hospital index card by a woman who'd probably known all of it since nursing school.
In his first life, the community had called it the "Clear Draft." People had sold it. Literally sold it. A pod guild's private coach had leaked a version in year twelve, and somebody had put it in a can with a lightning bolt on it and charged eleven dollars. Owen had bought a case. It had tasted like a battery and done nothing, because he'd been drinking it at three in the morning after four hours of sleep.
"This is it," he said.
"It's salt water with a protein shake in it," said his mother. "It's what we give marathon runners. It isn't magic."
"I know it isn't magic."
"Do you?" She looked at him the way she looked at patients who said they only had two drinks. "Because you're holding that card like it's a holy relic."
He put the card down. "It's a little bit a holy relic."
"Sleep," said his mother, tapping the bottom line. "Renata underlined it. Renata never underlines anything."
His father, who was standing at the counter in the CALLERY jacket eating dry toast with a face of profound grief, said, "Does Renata have one for me?"
"Renata has a whole folder for you, Rick," said his mother, and his father stopped chewing.
The thing nobody told you about time travel was how much of it was homework.
Owen had been eighteen for five days now, and he'd started to notice that the hardest part of it wasn't the guilt or the foreknowledge or watching his father climb the stairs. It was the volume. Being a teenager meant being given an endless amount of small tasks by people who were all, technically, right.
Do your chemistry. Eat your vegetables. Text Theo back. Fill out the form for the college fair you're not going to. Take the trash out. Stop leaving your water bottle in the bathroom. Why is your water bottle in the bathroom. Why are there four water bottles in the bathroom.
At thirty-two, his entire life had been one task: log in. Everything else, he'd let fall. His apartment had been a nest of takeout bags and the dishes he rinsed only when he ran out. He'd paid bills when the red notices came. He'd answered his mother's texts on Sundays, sometimes. He'd been, when he was honest about it, a very well-informed raccoon.
Now he had a clock on the fridge, a sister with a contract, a chemistry teacher who'd turned around to look at him, and an index card. And it turned out that doing a hundred small things right was the same as doing one form right. Stance, motion, breath. You just did it every day.
He did his chemistry in study hall. He did the problem set before it was due, which was a sentence he hadn't been able to say about himself since the sixth grade. At lunch, he ate the chicken and rice his mom had packed, and a banana, and drank water until Theo started making faces.
"You pee more than anyone I've ever met," Theo said.
"It's called being hydrated."
"It's called having a problem." Theo was eating a gas-station burrito with the dead-eyed serenity of a man who had made his peace with it. He'd come to school with a forty-two in his head. He'd told Owen, the way some people tell you their weight. "I went to bed at one. That's progress. That's three hours of progress."
"Midnight tonight."
"You're not my mom."
"Your mom asked me to say it."
"...Did she really?"
"No," said Owen. "But she would."
Theo pointed his burrito at him. "Rook. Real talk. Are you doing a thing? Like a cult thing? Because you got super into vegetables super fast, and you knew where a rare rat was going to spawn, and you keep saying stuff like 'trust me,' and that's literally what cult people say."
"I'm not in a cult."
"That's what cult people say."
"I watched a lot of videos."
"Nobody watched those videos," said Theo. "The game came out on Saturday."
It was a fair point. Owen was starting to understand that he could not keep answering some guy's video forever. Theo wasn't stupid. Theo had never been stupid. In his first life, he'd just been ditched before he could get suspicious.
"Okay," said Owen. "Tomorrow. I'll explain tomorrow. Some of it."
Theo stared at him. Then he took a huge bite of burrito. "If you're a lizard person," he said with his mouth full, "I want to be told first."
He went to bed at ten-thirty on Tuesday and woke up at 6:15 on Wednesday without the alarm, which had never happened to him in either life. He lay there for a minute in the gray light and took stock, the way he'd taken stock of a raid group before a pull.
No headache. No dry mouth. Legs a bit sore from the walks, in a good way, the way that meant something was building instead of breaking. Shoulders sore from the bench. His notebook on the nightstand said: Bench: 10. Sleep: 7h50. Water: 2.8L. Dad: slow on bridge again.
His body felt like a machine he'd finally put oil in.
He'd made the drink after school. He followed the card to the gram, with the kitchen scale his mother used for baking, while Maddie sat on the counter and watched him like he was performing surgery.
"Is it a potion?"
"It's science."
"It looks like a potion." She sniffed it. "It smells like a lemon that got lost at the beach."
"That's the salt."
"Can I have some?"
"No. You're twelve, and you had a juice box at lunch, and your blood sugar is fine." He shook the bottle. The whey went cloudy, then pale. "This is for people who sit still for three hours and forget they have a body."
"So it's for you."
"So it's for me," he agreed.
He sipped it over the next hour, like the card said, while he did the rest of his chemistry at the kitchen table. Mrs. Okonkwo's worksheet was about electrolytes, which felt like the universe making a joke. Why does a solution of sodium chloride conduct electricity? Because the ions move. Because your nerves are wet wires. Because a headset was, in the end, listening very closely to a lot of small, salty sparks. This story is hosted at novelping.com.
He finished the worksheet at 6:40. He ate dinner at the table, chicken thighs and roasted carrots and the brown rice his father regarded as a personal attack. He got up. He went upstairs. He lay down on the dinosaur blanket at exactly 7:00, settled his shoulders, took four long breaths, and put on the headset.
[LATTICE OS v1.0.4]
[Calibrating... please lie still and breathe normally.]
The blue ring warmed on his temple. He could feel it reading him, the way you could feel someone reading over your shoulder. Heart, skin, the small electrical static in his arms. Somewhere in a server farm in eastern Washington, a model compared him to the person he'd been on Monday and made a decision.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 51%]
Owen didn't move.
He'd known it was coming. He'd done the math. Forty-eight from Monday, plus the three percent Renata's drink was worth, if the forum post had been right. He'd expected fifty-one. He'd been ready for it.
He still lay there for a full ten seconds with his eyes closed and his throat tight.
Fourteen years. Fourteen years of forty-nine. One day of fifty-three that he'd talked about for the rest of his life like a guy talking about the night he almost went pro. And here he was on his fifth day, on a Wednesday, on a school night, at fifty-one, and he'd gotten here with chicken thighs and a walk.
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It's the drink, he told himself. Three of it is the drink. It wears off in four hours. Don't get excited.
He got excited anyway.
The river came up.
[Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 3h 41m remaining]
That was new. Or rather, it was old, but he'd never seen it. In his first life, the little buff icon hadn't shown up until patch 1.6, when Lattice had added wellness modifiers to the HUD and the whole community had briefly lost its mind. He'd assumed they'd added the feature. Now it looked like it had been there the whole time, hidden, waiting for someone to actually be hydrated.
Of course it was, he thought. Of course it was there. We just never triggered it.
He opened his status panel by the fountain, with the waterwheel creaking behind him and the bread smell coming down Bakery Lane.
ROOK - Level 8 VanguardHP 260/260 | Stamina 212/212
STR 11 | AGI 19 | END 21 | FOC 5 | SPI 4
SYNC 51% (Drift) - dodge window 102 ms - input lag ~147 ms
Modifiers: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3% [3h 41m]
Forms: Rising Cut (45) ✓ | Back Step (40) ✓ | Taunt Strike (40) ✓ | Breath Guard (50) ✓
Traits: Reedwalker
Trinket: Gnasher's Molar
XP: 67% to Level 9
Breath Guard had a check mark.
He looked at that check mark for longer than he'd looked at most things in his life.
Next to him, a man in starter cloth with a forty-one in his head tripped over the fountain step, fell in, and came up spluttering. Somebody in zone chat said lmao fountain got another one. The Harrowgate fountain had a name in his first life. People called it the Baptism. Eventually, a dev added a hidden achievement for falling in it a hundred times, and xXDarkReaperXx got it first.
Owen closed the panel and went to find something that would hit him.
The quarry was a no.
He knew it before he got there, because the road up from the South Gate was full of grey tabards. Iron Hollow had a wagon at the top of the quarry ramp now, a big hired thing with a white tower painted on the canvas, and four players sitting around it with a cooking fire, like they were on a camping trip. A sign was nailed to a post by the first terrace in what was clearly somebody's best attempt at a medieval font:
THIRD TERRACE RESERVED - IRON HOLLOWSHIFTS 24/7. ASK FOR TOR.
(DON'T ASK FOR TOR.)
It was a little bit funny, which annoyed him.
He could see the ledge from the ramp. Two pod players were standing on it, at ninety-eight percent, pulling mudlings up the slope with perfect, lazy efficiency. Someone with a staff behind them was baking each one Brittle the second it surfaced. Under the crane chain, then the cart. Brannagh had learned it in one afternoon and handed it to a guild of thirty people with money.
In his first life, Iron Hollow had found the ledge on their own, on Wednesday of week one, and camped it for three months. This life, they'd found it on Sunday because of him, and they were camping it on Wednesday anyway. The date had come back around like a dog that knew where it lived.
Huh, Owen thought. Wednesday.
He didn't go up. There was nothing on the ledge he couldn't get somewhere else, and the last thing he needed was Tor knowing his face any better. He turned around and walked east, toward the Cairn Hills, where the rams were, and the wind, and nothing with a guild tag.
The bellwether rams were exactly as stupid as they'd been on Monday, which was the great thing about rams.
Owen found a big one on the second hill, a Level 10 with horns like curled firewood and a bell the size of his fist. It saw him, lowered its head, stamped twice, and charged.
He did not sidestep.
He planted his feet shoulder-width apart. He brought the starter sword across his body, flat of the blade out, left hand on the back of it. He let his weight sink into his heels, the way Kettering had shown him on Sunday, the way he'd watched a thousand Vanguards do on a thousand streams. He breathed in while the ram came across the grass, its bell ringing faster and faster, and he felt the form catch, like a gear clicking into place in his chest.
The horns hit.
[Breath Guard: damage taken -30%]
It hurt. It hurt the way a hard tackle hurts through pads, a bright flat shock all the way through his arms, and his boots skidded back half a meter in the grass. But it didn't knock him over. It didn't stun him. The ram's head bounced off the blade, and the stupid animal staggered, and for one second Owen just stood there, rooted, holding the guard, feeling his whole avatar hum.
Clean.
Not Imprecise. Not a fifty-percent version of a skill, like a cheap knockoff of a real one. The real thing. The thing he'd paid one silver and fifty copper for on Sunday and couldn't use.
He'd used Breath Guard in his first life, of course. Every Vanguard did. At forty-nine, after the community found out about dehydration penalties and he started drinking water out of spite, he'd crossed fifty maybe one session in three, and he'd always used it the way the tooltip said. Hold the stance. Take less damage. That was the form.
It was only years later, watching the frame data from a Nilo Faust video, that he'd understood the tooltip was lying by omission.
The ram shook its head and backed up for another charge.
Owen breathed in again.
This time, when the ram hit, he tried to do what the frame data had shown. Breathe out on impact. Not before. Not after. On it. Like the hit was a weight you were lifting and the air in your chest was what lifted it.
He was too early. He felt it the moment it happened, the breath going out of him a quarter-second before the horns arrived, the stance going a little soft.
[Breath Guard: damage taken -30%]
Same number. Fine. He sidestepped the next charge, hit the ram twice with Rising Cut while it skidded, put a Bleed on it with the Molar, and finished it on the third pass. It fell over with a long, offended groan and a bell sound like a dinner gong.
[Bellwether Ram defeated. +118 XP.]
[Loot: Copper Bell x1, Mutton x2]
He put the bell in his bag. One hundred and forty-one. He went looking for another ram, and stopped counting bells, because there were going to be a lot of them. Follow the newest chapters on novelping(.)com.
It took him an hour to see the number move.
He spent the whole hour on the same patch of hillside, charging rams on purpose, like an idiot. It must have looked insane. A low-level Vanguard standing in a field letting sheep run into him. A party of three Rangers went past on the road at one point, and one of them stopped and watched, and Owen heard her say, "Is he okay?" and her friend say, "I think he's grinding defense," and the first one say, "That's not a thing," and they all walked off.
It was, though. In a way. He was grinding his lungs.
The problem was the beat. The breath had to land with the hit, and the hit came at a speed that depended on the ram, and the rams were all slightly different. Big ones were slow. Young ones were fast. And at fifty-one percent, there was still that little softness between what he meant and what his avatar did, a hundred and forty-seven milliseconds of wait for it, so he had to aim his breath at where the hit was going to be, not where it was.
It was exactly the kind of problem he was good at, it turned out. Not because he was talented. Because he'd spent fourteen years living a hundred and fifty milliseconds behind his own body, and he knew that gap like he knew the inside of his own mouth.
On the forty-first ram, he got it.
He didn't know he'd got it until the number came up. The horns hit, and his breath went out of him at the exact moment, all of it, a long hard hhhah like he was pushing a car, and the impact went through him and didn't seem to stay. It was like stepping on a stair that wasn't there, but in reverse. He'd braced for a weight and the weight had been lighter.
[Breath Guard: damage taken -51%]
He stared at it.
Then the ram hit him again, because he'd stopped paying attention, and he took the full charge in the ribs and went over sideways into a gorse bush.
[Bellwether Ram hits you for 64.]
He lay in the gorse bush and laughed until the ram came back.
Fifty-one percent. Not fifty. Fifty plus one for the sync over fifty, if Nilo's frame-by-frame breakdown had been right. In his first life, that video had come out in month five, and Nilo had never actually said what he'd figured out; he'd just shown the numbers and smirked and said some of you are breathing wrong, lol, and let the community fight about it for a year. Owen had worked it out from the frames in year nine. By then, his sync had been so bad that the trick only worked every fifth try.
Here, on day five, with his head in a gorse bush, it had worked once in forty-one tries.
Once, he reminded himself. Once is luck. You can't build on once.
He tried for another hour. He got it twice more, both times on big slow rams, both times by accident, and both times the number said -51% and then never again. With the young rams, he never got it at all. The breath was always early or late. He wrote it down after he logged out, in the notebook, in handwriting that looked a lot like Renata's:
Breath Guard: exhale ON hit = more than -30. Got -51 x3 at 51% sync. Timing is the whole thing. Can't do it on fast mobs. Need a rhythm. WHO KNOWS BREATHING?
He looked at the last line for a while. Swimmers. Singers. Rowers. People who'd spent their whole lives counting breaths.
He didn't know any of those people. Yet.
At 8:01, he logged out, stood up, did ten squats, drank water, and looked at himself in the mirror on the back of his door. Pale kid. Skinny arms. Dinosaur blanket in the background, because his mother had refused to buy him a new one until the old one wore out and the old one was apparently immortal. He looked like nobody. He looked like a kid who'd been told to go to bed.
In a pod somewhere, Brannagh was at ninety-eight percent and had never once had to think about a glass of salt water.
He wasn't jealous, exactly. He thought about it while he squatted. The pod did all of this for her. It cleaned her heart rate and fed her and moved her blood, and she got to be ninety-eight percent of herself without lifting a finger. It was a fantastic deal. It was the best deal anyone had ever been offered, and it was the reason, in his first life, that by year six half the pod players he knew couldn't jog to the mailbox.
She doesn't know that yet, he thought. None of them do.
He went back in at 8:04.
[Baseline synchronization estimate: 51%]
[Modifier active: Hydrated (Clear Draft) +3%, 2h 37m remaining]
The rest of the session went like a song. The XP bar crawled from sixty-seven percent to ninety-four, and he had to stop himself from hunting the last six, because the clock on the fridge didn't care about level bars. Theo logged on at 8:40 for half an hour and spent most of it complaining that rams were "sheep with anger issues" and getting knocked into the same gorse bush. Owen showed him the sidestep. Theo got it on the fourth try and yelled so loudly in voice that Owen had to turn him down.
"Forty-four!" Theo announced. "I went to bed at one!"
"I'm so proud of you."
"Don't be sarcastic."
"I'm genuinely proud of you, and I'm also being sarcastic. Humans can do two things."
At 9:01, a second break. At 9:24, he logged out for good, standing on the same cairn as Monday, looking east. The shrine light on the ridge was still there, a little blue dot in the night.
Not at fifty-one, he thought. But closer.
[Session ended. Final SYNC: 51%.]
No drift. Two breaks, two bottles, one drink, one gorse bush, and thirty-six more bells, for a total of one hundred and seventy-seven. The drift hadn't even tried.
LATTICE COMPANION - Session SummaryDuration: 2h 21m
Baseline in: 51% | Baseline out: 51%
Breaks: 2 ✓ | Hydration check-ins: 3 ✓
Physical adaptation: logged
Personal best, Rook! Wellness streak: 5 days.
He read the summary in bed. Personal best. The app was right, he supposed, technically. This profile had never been to fifty-one. The app didn't know about the man in Tacoma with the cold hands.
At 9:50, his phone buzzed again. A text from Theo.
Theo: ok so tomorrow you're explaining
Theo: the cult thing
Owen: It's not a cult. I have tutoring at 3
Theo: TUTORING?? from WHO
Owen: Okonkwo
Theo: bro she's going to eat you
Theo: ok after tutoring then. bakery. you're buying
Theo: also i'm going to bed. at 10. like a FREAK
Owen put the phone face down.
He thought about what he was going to tell Theo. Not the truth. Nobody would believe the truth, and even if Theo did, it would put something on his best friend's shoulders that Owen wasn't ready to put there. I'm from the future. Your family's going to have money trouble in a few weeks. You quit the game in a month in my first life and I didn't call you for six years.
No.
Something closer to the truth, then. Something true enough.
I've been paying a lot of attention, he practiced in his head. I figured out that the headset reads your body. I can show you. It works. That's all.
That was true. It was just not all.
At 10:30 he turned off the light. Downstairs, he could hear his mother, home for one night before she went back on shift Thursday, laughing at something on TV with his father. His father's laugh was big and stupid and wheezed a bit at the end. Owen lay in the dark and listened to it the way you'd listen to rain after a drought.
Fifty-one, he thought. Breath Guard, clean. Minus fifty-one, three times.
He fell asleep before he could finish the thought.