Page 5 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

The folder woman stops writing.

Behind her, the sound man's arm comes up. A lens swings off the gear table and finds me. The young man with the legal pad turns it back over. In the doorway, the charcoal blazer has not moved, but her thumb has, twice, on the side of the tablet.

Six cameras in this room. Five of them are pointed at my face and the sixth one is coming.

I have said one sentence and I have said it flatly and I have said it about lumber, essentially, about load and where load goes, and something in it has fed something in them, and I have no way to reach inside and take it back out.

The blazer crosses the room. Up close she has gray at one temple and very good boots.

"Delia Prine," she says. "I'm your executive producer. That was excellent."

"It was true."

"Even better." She holds out a hand and I take it carefully, the way I take every hand, twenty-three years of taking hands carefully. "Get some sleep, Mr. Ostvek. Bus is at five thirty."

She goes. The cameras stay.

My hand goes to my shirt pocket, flat over the fold, the way it has been going all week, and the paper crackles once under my palm.

CHAPTER 3

JUNIE

DAY MINUS 1

The staging site is a gravel lot at the end of a logging road, and somebody has built a small wooden stage on it, and behind the stage the mountain goes up into cloud like it has somewhere better to be.

Rain. It does not fall here so much as hang. It arrives on you sideways in units too small to have a sound.

Twelve of us stand in two rows on marks made of gaffer tape while a man adjusts a light that will make no difference whatsoever.

Bristow Cade comes out of a heated trailer at seven fifteen with a coffee in a mug that says HOLDFAST on it and a jacket that has never been wet.

You would place him anywhere. That jaw, that gray at the sides, the whole retired athlete thing. He won season two. Then he got paid to stand on gravel in the rain and smile at people about to go through what he went through, and he has been doing it long enough that the smile arrives before he does.

"Good morning," he says. "You look cold."

"We are cold," says the bucket hat. Coby.

"Good." Cade grins. "Save it. Here's how this works, and then we get to the part you're all standing very still about."

He walks the line as he talks. He is good at this. Feet apart, mug in the left hand, eye contact rotating on a count I could set a metronome to.

"Twenty-one days on Tarn Reach. Six teams, six sites, nine miles of ridge. You have ten items between you and a tarp that is smaller than you want it to be. Challenges converge at the Flat."

"The Bog," somebody says.

"The Flat," Cade says pleasantly. "Now. The part that makes this show what it is." He stops walking. "We cut fast. An episode drops every third day. Days three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, eighteen, and then the final. Four hundred miles from here, people are going to be shown your week while you're still having it."

Beside me, Danna Trell shifts her weight. Her husband does not.

"After every drop," Cade says, "the audience votes. One team gets a boon. One team gets a burden. Boons are good. Burdens are not."

"What kind of burden?" That is Rooney Pike, the tall one with the fraternity haircut, standing next to a man who introduced himself yesterday as a hospitalist named Ovid and has looked faintly nauseated ever since.

"Varies," Cade says.

"Varies how?"