Page 32 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Junie."

"Pot and the filter."

The crew guy writes it down before Ghorlan can restate his case, which is a thing crew guys do, and then the table is gone and so is the axe.

He does not say anything on the trail. He does not say anything up the switchbacks. He says it eight hundred yards from the north site with a barrel of nothing on his shoulder.

"The axe was two days of work."

"I have five days of numbers," I say. "You've been boiling water with rocks since Day Three because they took the pot, and that's forty minutes of your morning, every morning, and you're down eleven pounds. And the creek's dropping. Have you looked at the creek? It's dropping, and when it drops the silt comes up, and rock boiling in silt water gives you grit soup, and the filter takes the grit and the pot takes the boil, and in six days from now when everybody up here is drinking out of a shrinking creek, we are the only team that is not."

He carries the barrel another hundred yards.

"That is a build," he says.

"It's a bet."

"No." He shifts the barrel. "That is a build. You looked at six days out and you built for it. The axe is a build for tomorrow."

"You're not going to tell me I was right."

"I told you it was a build."

"That is not the same thing and you have to say the words."

"You were right," he says, in the voice of a man reading a gauge, and I am so unprepared for it that I trip over a root and he catches my whole pack strap in one hand and sets me back on the trail like a lamp.

The camp changes shape that night.

That is the only way to put it. On Day Five nobody came up our hill. On Day Six, Rooney Pike comes up our hill with half a plan and a question about lashings. Kit Farrow comes up with nothing at all and stands at the tree line with his hands jammed up under his arms and looks at the shelter a good while before he goes back down. Coby and Stitch come up with a camera and ask if they can do a collab, and Ghorlan says, "What is a collab," in the flattest available register, and Stitch laughs until he has to sit down on the step stone.

And Marisol Arbogast comes up the hill last, at dusk, alone, and does not come onto the bench.

"Nine minutes," I call out.

"Log was there," she says.

"Log was there for everybody."

Marisol Arbogast looks at me for about a second and a half, which is how long she looked at my boots in a hotel conference room before any of this started.

"Was," she says, and goes back down.

The fire is banked at nine. Neve has gone. Bear is on the far side of the bench with the rig on the tripod, and the red light is a small hard star in all that black.

Ghorlan finishes the last course of bark on the weather side, comes down, and sits on the deck edge with his forearms on his knees.

"I set the last piece," he says. "So I go first."

The trestle-word. Six nights running now. The one thing he got wrong, out loud, before anyone sleeps under it.

"Say it."

"I under built the crossing." He says it to the fire. "I put two stringers under a span that needed one and a handrail, because I wanted the thing to be right and I wanted it to be mine. Nine hundred pounds of capacity for a sixty pound barrel and two people. I spent eleven minutes on capacity nobody asked for and it cost us the placement."

"Marisol won that with a log."

"Marisol won that because she asked what the challenge was. I asked what a bridge is." He turns his hands over. "That is my error. Vanity, in the joinery."