Page 67 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"I want to say a thing," I say.

"Then say it."

"When this ends. There are eight days on the clock and then a transport down to the staging town and then everybody flies." My hand is still on the back of her head. "There is a house four hours north of that town with a bad roof and a sill under the kitchen wall that has been going soft since before I could read. I have the drawings for the sill work in a folder in my grandmother's second drawer. It takes a week with two people and a month alone, and I have been doing it alone for six years in the two weeks a year I can afford to be there."

She has gone very still.

"There is a barn on that property with a slate floor and thirty feet of clear span," I say, "and it has been a barn for a hundred and ten years and it wants to be a shop. And in about four months, when the sill is in and the roof is on and the barn is swept, there will be a house with two rooms nobody has any use for."

"Ghorlan."

"I am not asking you tonight."

"Good, because..."

"I am telling you the drawings exist," I say. "That is all. A man should say what he is building before he starts, so the other person can object to it while objecting is still cheap."

She does not answer.

She lies there against my side with her hand stopped on my hip and the coals going gray, and the silence gets long, and then longer, and I let it. I have been building things for twenty years next to people who needed a minute.

But this is Junie, and Junie fills silences the way water fills a low spot. She has filled every silence on this mountain for fourteen days. She has an answer for the rain.

She says nothing at all for eleven minutes.

Then she puts her face against my shoulder and says, "Tomorrow they're showing us the episode," and that is not an answer either.

CHAPTER 25

JUNIE

DAY 15

They bring the catering up the mountain.

That is the part I keep coming back to afterward, when I am taking the whole night apart looking for the moment it could have gone differently. Before anything else happens, before the screen, before the ninety seconds, there is a folding table under a pop-up canopy at the Flat with four chafing dishes on it and a man in a fleece standing behind them with tongs.

Pulled pork. Rice. Green beans with almonds. A tray of dinner rolls under plastic wrap, and beside it, in a hotel pan, sliced oranges.

Twelve contestants come out of nine miles of ridge and stand in a line in front of that table in the dark, and nobody says anything, and the man in the fleece says, "Take what you want, guys, there's more," in the specific bright tone of somebody who has been told to say it that way.

Ghorlan puts four rolls and a scoop of rice on his plate and stops there.

"That's it?" I say.

"Fifteen days at four hundred calories. If I eat what I want I will be sick on the ground in twenty minutes." He hands me an orange slice. "Slow."

I eat the orange slice. It goes through me like a spike of light. Fifteen days is enough to make a piece of fruit into an event, and I stand there in the mud with juice on my wrist and my eyes stinging and Coby fifteen feet away saying, "Are you getting this, are you getting me getting this," with a plate of pulled pork in both hands.

Marisol is not here. Deet is, alone, at the end of the table, and he takes rice and nothing else, and does not look up.

Then Bristow Cade comes around the canopy with his coat collar turned up and his hands out and says, "You've earned this, all of you. Come and take a look at what the world has."

The tent is forty feet long and they have laid it out like a rec room at the end of the world.

Camp chairs in two rows. A screen at the far end, ten feet across, on a frame. Two space heaters going, and the smell of hot dust off them, and after fifteen days of wet cold that smell alone is nearly enough to put me on the floor. Somebody has put out a bowl of individually wrapped caramels.

They have a camera on the screen and three cameras on us.