Page 46 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Okay. How?"

"The near arch failed at the second section joint."

"Right. In the wind?"

"No."

The safety officer waits.

Bear has the camera on his shoulder. The red light is on. He is eleven feet away and he is framed on the tent, and then, slowly, he is framed on the tent and me.

"There was no wind at four in the morning," I say. "The cell had gone through by one."

"So what broke it?"

"I did."

"Doing what?"

"Getting out."

"Out of the tent."

"Out of the tent," I say, "at four in the morning."

Neve comes over the lip with the stool. She stops. She looks at the tent. She looks at me. She sits down on the stool much faster than she usually sits down on the stool.

"Well," the safety officer says, filling in a box on a laminated sheet, "we've got spares. I'll radio for a pole set." She clicks her pen. "Was there anything else during the hold?"

And I open my mouth.

"We stayed in the tent. Then the pole broke."

Nine words. Nine entirely true words, in an order that a person with any facility at all would have arranged differently, and I have arranged them in the order in which they occurred, because that is the order in which they occurred.

The sound tech takes one side of his headphones off his ear.

"Right," the safety officer says.

"It broke at the sleeve," I say. "It was structural."

"Sure."

"The failure was in the aluminum. It was not conduct."

"Ghorlan," Junie says, coming out of the shelter with the trough under one arm and the filter in her other hand, in a jacket, in her boots, with her hair scraped back and her hands cut and eleven pounds gone off her, "is talking about the shock cord, which slackened, which he has been furious about since four in the morning. He does this. He gets a structural grievance and he prosecutes it at whoever's nearest. Yesterday it was a folding chair."

"The chair was rated two hundred and twenty," I say.

"He priced Delia Prine's chair to her face."

"I did."

The safety officer laughs. Neve puts her hand over her mouth. Junie sets the trough down on the fire ring stones and starts filling it, easy, unbothered, a woman running a camp at seven in the morning, and there is not one single thing on her that gives anything away, and she is doing it in front of a lens with the red light on.

She is extraordinary at this.

I stand on my own deck and take that in, and it goes down badly, and I have to work at it while a man rebuilds a tent pole eleven feet away.