Page 38 of Orcs Don’t Fake It

"Already on it."

I stop.

He's already moving. He grabs the roll of plastic sheeting from the corner, the six-mil stuff he insisted we overbuy, and shakes out a length with a snap that echoes off the metal ceiling. He drops to one knee at the leak and jams a bucket beneath it in the same motion, then anchors the plastic over the exposed subfloor, folding and tucking the edges under scrap lumber like a man who has never once in his life waited for permission.

I stand there, useless, hair frizzing in the rising humidity, my hands empty while he does the exact thing I was panicking about doing.

"What can I..." My throat sticks. "Give me a job. I need a job."

He glances up. Something moves behind that permanent scowl, quick as a shutter.

"Buckets." He jerks his chin toward the utility corner. "Every one you've got. Line the low wall. And find the flashlights, the real ones, not the phone."

I go. My sneakers slap the plastic. I haul six paint buckets across the floor and slam them down along the seam where the metal siding meets the concrete curb, where the first fingers of water are already curling in dark. I dump the paint out of two of them without hesitating. Ten grand of premium eggshell, gone, and I don't care, and the not-caring is the strangest sensation I've had in years.

By the time the buckets are set, I'm soaked to the elbows and breathing hard, and the panic has burned down to something cleaner. Something with edges I can hold.

Oggan rocks back on his heels and surveys the room. Rain hammers on. The bay window has gone fully dark, the driveway invisible now, just the roar and the black.

"That'll hold the worst of it," he says.

I sink down onto an overturned bucket. My legs shake. When was the last time I sat down? When was the last time nobody was going to see me sit down?

"I've never done that before," I say.

"Done what?"

"Nothing." I dig the heels of my hands into my eyes. "For four years there's always been a camera. Or a schedule. Or Patsy. Every single minute has been for something." I let my hands drop. He's a big dark shape against the darker room, so still I can barely find the edges of him. "I don't even know what I do when nobody's looking."

Silence, except for the storm and the steady drum of water into the bucket.

"You dumped ten grand of paint without blinking," he says. "To save a floor nobody's filming."

Heat prickles up my neck. "That's not..."

"That's who you are when nobody's looking." He hauls himself upright, and the whole room seems to reorganize around his standing. "The rest is a costume."

The word lands and stays. Costume. My perfect hair, plastered flat now. My trendy overalls, mud to the knee. My smile, which I have not worn in twenty minutes and have not missed.

Something splinters in the far dark. Wood giving. He turns toward it fast, and I get to my feet, and the two of us stand shoulder to shoulder in the wet black, listening to the house we built groan against the weather.

"It'll hold," he says again, quieter.

I don't know if he means the house.

Thunder rolls long and low across the whole valley, and the last gray light dies out of the window, and for the first time since I bought this place, I am completely, gloriously off the grid, alone with the one man who has never once believed my smile.

CHAPTER 22

OGGAN

The girl is shivering.

She hides it well. She's got that talent, the one where she rearranges her face into something bright and puts it between herself and the world. But my people were built for cold country, and my eyes work fine in the dark, and the fine tremor running through her shoulders tells me more than her smile ever has.

I move to the hearth.

We finished it three days ago. Local stone, a firebox deep enough to roast a boar, a chimney I flashed myself against exactly this kind of weather. She wanted it for the aesthetic. I built it to work.