Page 74 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

Here is Day 16 after that, in order, because the order is the only thing holding me together.

I get the tarp up. It takes two hours and forty minutes and I do it by giving up on doing it his way. I cannot hold tension and take slack at the same time, so I stop trying to be two people. I run the working end around the anchor stump, back through the loop, and then down to a stick, and I twist the stick. A Spanish windlass. He made one on Day 9 to bend a green pole and I logged it the way I log everything, without meaning to, and I stand in the mud with a stick in my hands turning it a half revolution at a time while the ridgeline comes up out of its smile and goes straight.

It is ugly. It is nothing he would have done. It is drum tight and there is no pool in it.

I sit down on the log and look at it for a while.

Then I get the fire going, and it takes me forty minutes and eleven strikes and a handful of the dry duff from the rock shelter that I hauled down in my hat like a squirrel, and when it goes I sit back on my heels and say, out loud, to nobody, "Yeah."

Then I do the woodpile. He kept three days of split ahead. I have one day. I take the hatchet to rounds for two hours, badly, and by the end of it my hands will not close all the way and there is a day and a half on the pile, and I understand something about the two hours a day he spent on this that I did not understand yesterday, which is that he was not doing it because he was strong. He was doing it because somebody had to be a day and a half ahead of the weather or we die.

The resupply comes at four.

It is in the hole under the shale where the burden took it three days ago, and it is a full team resupply, because the contract says team, and the contract has not been updated to say what I am now.

Two of everything. Two ration blocks. Two packets of the oat thing. Two vacuum bricks of that unspeakable meat product he used to cut in half with a knife on the log, precisely, every time, and hand me the larger half, every time, and say nothing about it.

I sit in the mud with a full six days of food for two people in my lap and I eat one ration block very slowly and it takes me twenty minutes and I do not taste any of it.

Dark at half past four.

I bank the fire the way he banks it, which is not the way I would do it, and set the pot for morning, and go around the shelter and put my hand on each of the four bearing points the way he does at the end of every day, and none of them have moved, because he cut them.

Then I sit down on the log across from the empty side of it, and the fixed rig puts out its small red eye, and I open my mouth to say the thing.

Nothing comes.

I sit there for a long time with my mouth open like an idiot in the dark. Sixteen nights I have done this. Fifteen of them were counterfeit and one of them was true and cost me everything I had, and now there is no one to hand it to, and it turns out the practice does not work with one person, which is the entire point of it, which is the thing they cut out of it on Friday and sold to four million people.

"Tomorrow," I say to the fire.

Then I take out my knife.

Both boots have been on my feet for sixteen days. They came out of a box eighteen days ago with a card in the toe and a silica packet and a hangtag on a plastic barb through the heel loop of the left one, and every single person on this mountain clocked that tag in the first eleven seconds on Day minus one, and I left it there on purpose, because leaving it there was a bit, and a bit is a way of getting to a joke before somebody else does.

Sixteen days of rain and mud and it is still legible. HOLDFAST-RATED. GORE-TEX PERFORMANCE COMFORT.

I put the blade under the barb and cut it off.

It comes away in my hand, an inch of plastic and a rectangle of cardstock, and I turn it over twice, and then I put it in the fire and it goes up green for about a second.

Nobody is there for it. There is one fixed camera bolted to an alder pointed at the shelter mouth and the fire ring, and a woman sitting on a log in the dark at the north site of Tarn Reach with six days on the clock and no partner and no prize at the end of it.

I put another piece of wood on. Badly. It is my woodpile now.

"Six days," I say.

I stay.

CHAPTER 28

GHORLAN

DAY 17

Base camp before first light has ninety people asleep in it and one man awake in a trailer with a laminated binder, and he processes me out in eleven minutes.

There is a form. There is a second form about the first form. There is a bag with my phone in it, which has been in a bag since Day minus two and which has four hundred and six notifications on it, and I put it back in the bag.