Page 37 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"No." I lunge for the phone. "No, no, no."

Rain arrives all at once, a full ocean dumped onto sheet metal thirty feet overhead. The roar of it swallows the whole valley. I run to the big bay window I paid too much for and cup my hands against the cold glass.

The driveway is already a river.

Water sheets down the gravel slope in ribbons, pooling at the low culvert where the county road bends. My little pastel SUV sits at the bottom, hubcaps disappearing under brown water. Beyond it, the road itself shimmers and ripples where a road should never ripple.

My throat tightens. I pull up the weather app on instinct and get a spinning wheel that never stops spinning.

A shadow blots out the gray light from the far doorway.

Oggan.

He fills the frame of the unfinished archway the way he fills every space, shoulders nearly grazing both sides, drywall dust ghosting the dark green of his forearms. Rain drips from his tusks. He must have come in from the truck. His flannel clings to him, soaked through, outlining a body that has crashed my analytics more than once.

"Road's gone," he says.

Two words. Flat as a level.

"It's not gone." My laugh comes out thin. "It's just, you know, temporarily aquatic."

"Culvert backed up an hour ago." He crosses the plywood subfloor in four strides and stares past me at the drowning driveway. Water beads roll off the ridge of his brow. "Fire department shut the low bridge. I passed the barricade coming in."

"Then we go the back way. The gravel service road, the one by the..."

"Underwater."

"The north cut, we can..."

"Underwater." He turns, and the gray light catches the scar that splits his eyebrow. "Both bridges. This whole hollow drains into one creek, and that creek is standing in your yard."

I open my mouth. Close it. My grandmother's milk jugs float up out of memory, mocking me.

Somewhere in the guts of the building, water starts to drip. A rhythmic tick against bare subfloor.

"Okay." I mash my palms together like a prayer, like a pitch meeting, like anything that gives my hands a job. "Okay. So we wait it out. Patsy will send someone. She's got that assistant, the one with the Jeep, he can..."

"Nobody's driving into this."

The certainty in him lands somewhere under my ribs and stays there. I round on the window again and stab at my phone. The gray triangle mocks me. No bars. No signal. No cell tower on earth is going to reach through this wall of water.

"There's no service." The words come out smaller than I want. "There's no service, Oggan."

"Good."

My head snaps up. "Good?"

He crouches by the far wall, opening the metal breaker panel he installed last week, running one blunt finger down the row of switches. "No cameras. No manager. No sponsor calling you off a beam at midnight." He flips the main to off with a solid clunk, then flips it back, testing something I don't understand. "Whole grid's down for the county. Won't be back tonight."

"That's a disaster." A high, hysterical thing climbs into my mouth. "Do you understand? I have a livestream scheduled at eight. I have a brand integration. I have..."

"You have nothing until that water goes down." He stands. He doesn't loom on purpose; he simply exists at a scale the rest of the world does not. "So you might as well quit pretending you do."

The tick of the leak speeds up. Two drips now, out of sync.

I turn from him and pace the plywood, arms wrapped around myself, cataloguing the ruin. The insulation we hung last week, exposed. The subfloor, unsealed. If water gets under it, if it warps, if the whole thing swells and buckles, I lose everything. And I mean the literal, life-savings, no-house-no-channel-no-plan everything.

"We have to save the floor." I spin back. "The moisture, if it gets under the..."