Page 19 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"A thing that makes a person walk faster up a hill at the end of a day is doing structural work. It is just not doing it in the poles." I go get the good split for morning and set it butt out under the eave. "Move the vase eleven inches left. It is under the drip line."

She moves it eleven inches left.

Before dark I go up the slope, because there is a thing above this site I have been leaving until the build was done.

Forty yards up and slightly east, the hill throws out a shelf of rock, a long overhang of basalt with a dry floor under it, twenty feet deep and eight feet high at the mouth and dropping to a crawl at the back. Old fire scars on the ceiling. Somebody has used it, and used it a long time before anybody used it for television.

Dry. Bone dry, in three hundred inches of rain a year.

I go in and turn around, and that is when I get the other thing.

The camera rig at the north site is on the bench below, on a tripod, aimed uphill at the shelter. From inside this overhang, the whole left third of the floor sits behind the shoulder of rock at the mouth. Standing there, the rig is gone.

There is a rule about that in my trade. Sight lines run both directions. If the rig is gone from here, then I am gone from there.

I stand in it for a moment, in the dry, with the rain coming off the lip of the rock in a curtain in front of me, and then I go back down the hill and I do not mention it.

Neve is packing the stool at dusk when the radio on her hip does something, and she takes it off and turns away and listens with two fingers on the earpiece.

Then she comes back to the middle of the bench with the whole stack in her hand and pulls a card that is not laminated. A printed sheet. Fresh, and going soft in the rain already.

She holds it up.

AUDIENCE VOTE, EPISODE ONE. BOON: RENN AND STITCHFIELD. BURDEN: OSTVEK AND HALLORAN.

Junie comes off the deck.

"What's the burden," she says.

Neve turns the sheet over. There is a second line on the back, printed in the same font by the same machine that printed the first one.

Surrender the pot.

CHAPTER 9

JUNIE

DAY 3

Apot is not a pot.

That is the thing about the burden, and it is the thing the show will never say out loud, because saying it out loud takes ninety seconds and there is no way to score it.

Here is what a pot is.

A pot is boiled water, which is the only water on this mountain that will not put you on your back for three days. A pot is heat you can hold, which is the only thing that gets a core temperature back up at the worst hour of the night when the rain has been at you for eleven hours. A pot is the difference between eating something and gnawing something, and at four hundred calories a day the difference between eating and gnawing is measured in what you can absorb.

A pot is a container, and everything you can do out here, you can do because you can put a thing in another thing.

Take the pot and you do not lose a pot. You lose water, heat, food, and time, in that order, forever, for eighteen days.

A production assistant carries it down the hill at nine in the morning inside a plastic tote, with a paper tag on the handle, and he apologizes to us twice.

We work out a system by noon, because Ghorlan does not sit and grieve about things, which is a quality I am beginning to have opinions about.

The system is rock boiling. You heat stones at the fire edge, you fill a hollowed section of cedar bark folded and pinned with slivers, you drop the stones in with two green sticks, and the water goes to a rolling boil in about ninety seconds and the bark does not burn because there is water in it.

It works. It works beautifully.