Page 59 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Because it is a joint."

"That's not an argument, that's carpentry."

"It is the same thing." I set the last piece and stand and dust my hands. "You want to hold it over him for nine days. Nine days of him wondering. Nine days of you and me speaking carefully around a rival team. Nine days of a thing between us that we are managing." The smoke goes straight up between us. "I have spent twenty-three years managing what people carry about me. I am not doing it for nine more days for food."

"Then we starve."

"Possibly."

"There is no possibly." Her hands come up and drop. "You are six foot eleven and you are burning twice what I burn and you have lost, what, twenty pounds? You go to the eighteenth on boiled water and hemlock tea and I get to stand there and be the one who had a better plan."

"You had a faster plan."

"Oh, that's good. Say that one on camera."

"I will say it anywhere."

That lands. She goes quiet and looks off at the ridge, and the muscle at the corner of her jaw moves, and above us a raven says something obscene about both of us and goes on north.

"You are asking me to be a different person," she says, to the ridge.

"No."

"That's what it is."

"I am asking you to be the person who did the work yesterday." I wait until she turns. "You had him in an hour with no camera on you and nothing but two stories and a pile of shavings. That was not a bluff. That was the truest thing anybody has done on this mountain in thirteen days and you did it alone in the rain and nobody will ever cut it into anything. That is who you are when nobody is buying. I am asking you to stand behind it out loud once."

She gives me a long, level look.

"You're a nightmare," she says.

"Yes."

"Fine." She picks up her hat and jams it on. "Fine. We do it your way. And when it costs us, I get to say so."

"You get to say so every night. That is the practice."

"I hate the practice," she says, and starts up the trail.

Bear falls in behind us at the fork.

He is there without arriving, the way he always is, a wall of a man with a rig on one shoulder and a rain cover taped at the seams, and he gives me the flat lift of the chin that is the entire history of our relationship and takes the left side of the trail where the light is.

Neve comes forty feet back with the card against her thigh. She does not run to keep up. She never runs.

The Arbogast camp smells of woodsmoke and fish and pine tar. Marisol is at the drying rack with her back to us and her right hand tucked into her jacket, and Deet is sitting on the log with the yew stake, and he looks up and takes us in, the four of us, the lens, and something goes across his face and then away.

"Morning," he says.

"You cut our filter," I say.

The clearing gets very quiet. A wet branch lets go of its water somewhere above us.

"On the eleventh, after the Flat, on your way up the ridge trail," I say. "One pass through the element with a fine blade and then the housing at the threads, so it would fail at the seal in four days and read as a defect. You did it because we placed first on the eleventh and your sister cannot close her right hand, and a burden right now ends your season."

Marisol turns around.

"Deet," she says.