Page 39 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Because I wanted my arms full."

He takes that in, the way he takes everything in, like a man setting a stone and testing whether it rocks.

"That is an honest one," he says.

And it is. That is the thing. Every word of it is true and it is the exact shape of the truth with the truth taken out of it, and he sets it into the wall of the day and sleeps under it, and I lie in eighty-four inches of nylon with my back to the warmest thing on this mountain and hold very, very still.

I have disliked myself before. I busted out on borrowed money fourteen months ago and I disliked myself for eleven weeks straight.

This is a new one. This one has a shape I have never had in the house before.

I did not sell him.

I gave him away for nothing, because it was raining.

CHAPTER 16

GHORLAN

DAY 9

Day nine is family messages, and they run it at the Flat, six teams cycling through a pop up tent from eight in the morning.

Sixty seconds. One take. No second attempt, which they tell you at the door and which they tell you again inside, in case you were planning to come apart on the first one.

There is a bench outside the tent under a canopy and twelve of us on it, in order, in the rain.

The Trells go first and Danna Trell comes out with her hand over her mouth and Wes puts an arm around her, and the two of them go and stand at the edge of the Flat with their backs to everybody for about four minutes.

Nobody talks after that.

Kit Farrow is beside me on the bench, which is where the order put us, and Kit Farrow talks when he is uncomfortable the way other men bounce a knee.

"Margaux's crying already," he says. "She's not even in yet."

"Yes."

"It's a machine for it. That's what it's for. You go in there and there's your mum on a screen the size of a paperback and sixty seconds and a man holding up fingers." He wipes his face with his sleeve. "I told her, do the water run, I'll do the message. She does all the runs now anyway. I haven't been past the second switchback on your trail since the drop."

"Our trail."

"North trail, the switchbacks, past the fork. My knee's gone. It went on Day Two on that scree and it's been going ever since." He knocks a fist against his own leg, twice. "So Margaux does everything above the fork and I do everything below it, and that's our season. Eleven days of me sitting in a creek bed."

"That is a bad joint."

"It's a knee."

"It is a joint," I say. "A joint that is failing tells you it is failing for a long time before it goes. You are past the telling."

Kit Farrow laughs, wetly, and says, "You're a strange man, Ostvek," and then Margaux comes out of the tent with her face wrecked and he stands up fast and goes to her.

They call my name at eleven.

Inside there is a folding table, a monitor about the size of a paperback, a camera on sticks aimed at my face, a sound tech, and a producer with a stopwatch, and a chair.

I look at the chair.

"That is going to fold," I say.