Page 42 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

She does not ask what my grandmother said, or how it was, or whether I am all right, and she does not put a hand on my arm, and she skips every one of the eleven things a person does when they want a story out of somebody so they can be the one it got told to.

She takes the chocolate bar out of her jacket, the one that came up the hill in a parcel with her name on it two days ago, unopened, and puts it in my hand.

"There's a stump over there," she says. "Out of the wind. I'll be at it."

And she goes and sits on the stump with her back to me, and leaves me the whole distance between us to cross or not cross, on my own legs, in my own time.

I cross it.

CHAPTER 17

JUNIE

DAY 9

The safety call comes at four twenty in the afternoon and it comes fast.

A woman in a high visibility vest comes up the trail at a jog, which nobody does on that trail, and she is talking before she clears the last of the trail.

"Lightning hold. Cell coming up the strait, we have strikes on the water at nine miles and closing. All crew off the ridge, now, everybody down to base, nobody on high ground, nobody near the rigs."

Neve is already folding the stool.

"Contestants stay in place," the safety officer says. "You are lower than the trees, you are fine, you stay off the exposed ground above the bench and you stay out of that rock overhang, that is a wet cave with a rock ceiling and I do not want a single one of you in it. Minimum twelve hours. Nobody comes back up until we have a two hour gap with no strikes inside fifteen miles."

"Twelve hours," I say.

"Minimum." She is already turning. "There's a beacon in the orange case on the rig leg. Pull the tab if somebody is dying. It is not for anything else. Do not pull it because you are bored."

Bear takes the camera off the tripod, bags it, sets a rain cover over the whole rig, and cinches it. Then he stands up and takes a long look at the shelter, and at the deck, and at the woodpile with the ends out under the eave, and then at Ghorlan.

He does not nod. He does not make a sound. He picks up sixty pounds of camera and goes down the hill.

Neve is last. She stops at the lip with the card case under her arm, and she pulls a card, and she holds it up.

NO PRODUCTION PERSONNEL ON THE RIDGE UNTIL FIRST LIGHT.

She holds it. Rain on the lamination.

Then she turns it over, and the back of it is blank, and she holds the blank side toward us for a full three seconds, which is longer than she has held a blank card at any point in nine days, and then she puts it away and goes down the hill after Bear.

And then there is nobody on this mountain but us.

I stand on the bench in the rain with my hands in my armpits.

"Okay," I say.

"Yes."

"So that's a lot of hours."

"Twelve."

"Minimum."

"Minimum."

The rig sits there under its cover like a dead thing. There is no red light on it. There has been a red light in my peripheral vision for two hundred and sixteen consecutive hours and its absence is doing something to the back of my skull that a person could get high on.