How It All Goes Down
No Salvation
- The next day is athletic training day at Sword & Cross.
- The students have to meet up at the church-turned-gymnasium, where Randy assigns them to different sports for their fitness regimen.
- Luce and Penn get assigned to the pool, along with Gabbe, Luce's new nemesis.
- As they're walking through the gym toward the locker rooms, Penn explains that this building used to be a church before getting converted into the school's gym, and the Olympic-sized swimming pool was placed right where the pews used to be.
- Luce, who learned to swim at a very young age, throws herself into the pool with a butterfly stroke, but she stops as abruptly as she began when she hears Gabbe say Daniel's name.
- Luce pops out of the water like a jack-in-the-box on overdrive and loses the race by a hair.
- When Luce gets out of the pool to dry off, Roland comments on her technique, and she blurts out the question that's been burning a hole through her since the night before: "Are Daniel and Gabbe together or what?" (6.68).
- Roland tells Luce that she should ask Daniel.
- Thanks for the help, Roland. A simple "yes" or "no" would have been fine, you know.
- Still dripping wet, Luce heads straight to find Daniel. She spots in the weight room jumping rope.
- Luce watches Daniel for a few seconds, feeling déjà vu over seeing him jump rope, and then a shadow kicks her key to the locker room out of her hand and throws it across the room under the weight room door, making her stop and stare at Daniel some more. She now has to confront him if she wants to retrieve her key and change out of her wet bathing suit.
- Either the shadows are trying to tell Luce something, or they're the best wingmen (…wing-things?) ever.
- After a moment of roundabout talking, Luce asks Daniel to confirm once and for all that they've never met before.
- Surprisingly—or, perhaps, not surprisingly—Daniel does just that, looking her straight in the eye and telling her, "You have never in your life seen me before this week" (6.103). That's a total bummer, because it seemed like they were just about to have a moment.