Page 78 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Under a rock crying."

"I was going to say struggling."

"That was Monday." I stir the vole. "Sit down, I've got hot water and nothing to put in it."

They sit down. Stitch takes the log and sits with his forearms on his knees, and about a minute in he says, without any preamble at all, "We stopped shooting the shelter."

"Sorry?"

"Our shelter." He looks at his hands. "It's bad. It's been bad since Day 6 and we've been shooting it from the one angle where the corner looks like it's holding. Two point one million people are under the impression we live in a structure." He gets one shoulder up and down. "That episode messed me up, is what I'm saying. I've been doing the same thing to myself for four years and it took them doing it to you for me to spot it."

"Stitch."

"Anyway. That's it. That's everything I came to say."

Coby digs in his jacket and puts something on the log beside me. A caramel, individually wrapped, from a bowl in a tent three days ago.

"I took nine," he says. "I'm not proud."

They go. I hold the caramel for a while and then put it in my pocket, and I do not eat it, and I could not tell you why.

Neve brings the vote at three.

EPISODE FIVE. AUDIENCE VOTE. YOUR TEAM HAS RECEIVED THE BOON.

The boon comes up the hill in a dry bag twenty minutes later. A second sleeping bag, rated to zero. A tin of coffee. Four ration blocks over the standard. A headlamp with lithium cells. And, at the bottom, wrapped in tissue paper like it is a thing, a small brown stuffed bear about six inches tall with a network logo stitched on the sole of one foot.

I sit down in the mud with the tissue paper in my lap.

Four million people took in a woman being left on a mountain and they voted her a companionship item.

The rage that arrives is so clean and so total that it goes through me and comes out the other side and leaves almost nothing behind, and what it leaves is this: they are not wrong to pity me. That is the awful part. I am a hundred and eight pounds now, alone, nine miles up a ridge, ineligible to place, six days into eating four hundred calories a day and now three, and pity is a completely reasonable response to that situation.

They are just pitying a woman who does not exist, built out of my face.

I put the bear on the ridgepole of the shelter, facing out, next to the garland.

"You can stay," I tell it. "But you're doing water tomorrow."

Dark at four twenty.

The red light comes up on the alder. I sit down on the log across from the empty side of it, which is the third night I have done this, and this is the part where I tell you it has gotten easier, and it has not.

Night one I could not get a word out.

Night two I got out, "I let the pool build up in the tarp because I did not check the lines when the frost came out of them, and that is the second time this week I have skipped a check because I was cold," and then I sat there another ten minutes with my hands shaking like I had done something enormous.

Tonight is night three.

"Trestle-word," I say, to a fixed camera bolted to a tree.

The light does not blink. The light never blinks.

"I put the deadfall sets on the north side of the draw because it is closer to camp, and I have had one animal in four days, and the sign is all on the south side and I have had my eyes on it since Monday. I did the easy thing and then told myself I did the smart thing." I wedge my hands between my knees. "That is one.

"Two. On Day 8 an executive producer sat on that stump with a thermos and offered me a shape to be, and I told her no, and then that night I sat right here and gave her the shape anyway, in nine words, because it was four degrees and I was hungry and it was the easier sentence. And I have spent three days being furious at a network for using nine words that I said. They were mine. Nobody put them in my mouth. That is two.

"Three." My throat locks. It does it every night now, at the same place, right when the thing gets close to the actual thing. "Three. He asked me on Day 1 to name one thing I got wrong, every night, and I lied to him for thirteen nights straight, and he let me, and the letting was the kindest and worst thing anybody has ever done to me. And when I finally told him the truth he did not flinch, and I have had four days to work out what to do with a man who does not flinch, and I have done nothing with it. I said nothing on the fourteenth when he told me there were drawings in a drawer. I let eleven minutes go by. He said a man should say what he is building before he starts so the other person can object while objecting is still cheap, and he handed me a whole house, and I lay there and ran the odds like it was a hand."