Page 69 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

They have gone through the trestle-word. All of it. Every night since Day 1, both fixed rigs, and they have taken his half out.

That is all they did. They did not fabricate one frame. They took a two-person practice with a two-person structure and they removed one of the people.

"I put the tarp corner in the wrong place."

Cut.

"I let the fire go out and blamed the wood."

Cut.

"I tied the ridgeline wrong."

Cut.

"That was my error."

Cut. Cut. Cut. Fifteen of them, fourteen of them, I stop counting, my own face in fifteen different weathers in fifteen different lights, every one of them exhausted, every one of them saying a version of the same sentence, and each cut lands harder than the last because the rhythm is doing the work, and the rhythm is very good, and whoever cut this is extremely good at their job.

"I got that wrong."

"I got that wrong."

"I got that wrong."

And on the fifteenth one they let it run three seconds longer, and my face on the screen ten feet wide comes apart slightly at the corner of the mouth before the picture cuts, and under it, quiet, they put the nine words back in.

He carries me. That's just the shape of this team.

Black.

HOLDFAST returns Friday.

The lights come up.

There is applause. I want to be exact about this, because I have gone over it many times since and it is the detail that keeps me honest about people: the applause is not for the cruelty. The applause is because a screen went dark at the end of a piece of television and there are twelve exhausted people in a warm tent with sugar in them, and applause is what a body does.

Coby is on his feet. "Okay, that was..." He turns around, looking for me, and finds me, and whatever he was going to say gets left somewhere behind his teeth. "Junie. Hey. Junie, that's just, they do that, that's a mid-season thing, they..."

"It's fine, Coby."

"It's not..."

"It's fine."

Bristow Cade is at the front of the tent with his hands out, saying something about Friday.

Delia Prine has not moved from the flap. There is no gloating in it. She is not doing anything at all except standing in a good coat with her attention on a room she designed, with the mild, unhurried attention of a woman confirming a number she already had. She looks at me and her face is kind. That is the part. Her face is genuinely kind and there is nothing behind it that is sorry, and I would have taken a smirk over that, I would have taken almost anything over that.

I have played against people who wanted to beat me. That is a relationship. That is two people at a table agreeing on the terms.

She does not want to beat me. She wants a fourth-quarter number, and I am a material, and materials do not get to have feelings about the shape they are cut into.

I turn around.

Ghorlan is still on the ground against the tent pole. He has not moved through any of it. Fifteen days of hunger have taken the flesh off the sides of his face and left the architecture, and his hands are open on his knees, palms up, which is a thing I have not observed him do.

He is not looking at the screen. The screen has been white for a while.