Page 6 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Varies." The smile again.

Here is what I clock, standing in the rain in boots that squeak.

The audience does not simply pick a favorite. The audience hands one team a pot and takes one away from somebody else. Which means the edit is not commentary. The edit is the game. Whatever story those people are shown on night three walks up this mountain on night four and takes food out of somebody's hands.

I have played against a lot of things. I have never played against a narrative.

So I stop reading the contestants and start reading the crew, which is the only table in this lot with money on it.

There are about thirty of them out here and ninety more two ridges over. They sort into three species. There are the ones in bright rain gear who came for the adventure and will be gone by day nine. There are the ones in gray, who have done four of these and have a system for socks. And there is a young woman in a black shell standing at the tree line with a stack of laminated cards under her arm and a rubber band around them.

She has not spoken once. Twenty minutes, no headset chatter, no small talk with the sound department, nothing. When Cade said the word burden she looked down at the cards.

Behind her stands the largest human being I have ever been in a parking lot with, a camera on his shoulder like a lunch pail, and he is not filming. He is pointed at us. The record light is off. He is simply looking, the way you look at a stack of firewood you are going to have to move later.

Neither of them has a name tag.

"Pairings," Cade says.

The lot goes quiet enough that the generator two ridges over comes up through the trees.

He reads them off a card, because of course there is a card.

"Coby Renn and Nathaniel Stitchfield. West site."

"STITCH," yells the second bucket hat, both arms up, already filming himself.

"Marisol and Deet Arbogast. South saddle."

Neither of them moves. Marisol nods approximately one degree.

"Wes and Danna Trell. Creek site." The matched couple, matched jackets, both ex-military, both with the specific posture of people who have folded a lot of things into squares.

"Ovid Cassabon and Rooney Pike. East bench." Ovid closes his eyes briefly.

"Margaux and Kit Farrow. Lower spur." Sisters-in-law, one of them enormous and cheerful, the other one already unhappy about the gravel.

And then Cade pauses, because there are three of us left in the arithmetic and only one slot, and because pausing is his job.

"Junie Halloran," he says. "North site."

I keep my hands at my sides.

"With Ghorlan Ostvek."

The row shifts. Barely. A ripple, six inches of collective lean.

He steps out of the second row and the sky goes away.

That is the actual sensation. There is weather up there, and then a shoulder occupies the place the weather was. Gray green, close cropped, forearms out of the rolled sleeves with old work marked into them in white lines. He gets to a spot two feet to my left and stops, and he stops the way a truck stops, all at once and completely, with nothing left over.

He looks down. I look a considerable distance up.

"Halloran," he says.

"Junie."

"Ghorlan." A pause with actual work in it. "Your pack is orange."