Page 64 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

"Are you appraising a cliff."

"I am confirming that a cliff is a cliff."

"There it is."

We haul up in four loads: the bags, the tarp, the pot, the pack frame, the fire kit, and the little string of alder curls and stripped-bark stars she hung across the front of our shelter on Day 8 and has maintained since with a seriousness that continues to elude me. She carries those up herself, in her hands, separately, and hangs them from a knuckle of rock at the mouth of the overhang, and steps back, and adjusts one.

"There," she says. "Now it's a house."

"It is a rock."

"It's a rock with garland, Ghorlan. That's a house."

I build the fire back under the lip where the reflected heat comes down off the stone and comes back off the wall behind us, and inside forty minutes the space under that overhang is twenty degrees warmer than the world.

Neve comes up at midday with the fixed rig on a shoulder mount and sets it on the ledge across the gully at eighty feet, which is where it has to go, because there is nowhere on this shelf to bolt anything. She frames it. She checks it. She takes a long time about it.

Then she comes back to the mouth of the overhang and holds up a card.

MEDICAL ADVISES CONTESTANTS REMAIN UNDER SHELTER OVERNIGHT. FIXED COVERAGE ONLY. NO FIELD PRODUCER ON SITE AFTER 1800.

She lowers it.

She stands there for a second longer than the card requires, and her eyes go, very deliberately, to the back left corner of the overhang, where the stone comes down and the wall kicks out in a shallow fold about nine feet deep and four feet wide.

Then she looks at the rig on the ledge across the gully. Then back at the corner.

Then she leaves.

Junie sits down in the middle of the shelf with her arms around her knees.

"She just told us where the blind spot is," she says.

"Yes."

"On purpose."

"Yes."

"That's the sixth thing that woman has done for us that she could lose her job over." She rubs her hands. "I've been reading everybody on this mountain for two weeks and I still can't read her."

I go and stand in the corner she indicated. From here the ledge across the gully is a pale smear behind the fold of rock, and the lens on it has no path to me at all. I put my hand out at arm's length and the geometry does not change. Eight feet by four. A dead angle, cut by a glacier, maintained by nobody.

Junie has not moved from the middle of the shelf.

"Say it out loud," she says. "Whatever it is. You've got a face on."

"I have one face."

"You have one face and it has eleven settings."

I come back and sit down across the fire from her. The light is going already. At this latitude in this season the day gives up at half past four and does it fast, and the cold arrives about ten minutes behind it.

"Last night you told me the truth," I say. "All of it. On camera, with a burden on us and no food."

"It is fresh, thanks."

"Today I have been going over my own work." I turn my hands over. There is a split across the pad of the right thumb that will not close because nothing closes up here. "For thirteen days I have been telling myself that I am carrying you. It is not true. It has not been true since about the sixth day. You talked Rooney and Ovid out of a trade that would have wrecked them, in ninety seconds, and no one filmed it. You caught a man out with two stories and a pile of shavings. You have kept this camp from turning into two people not speaking, every day, by working the whole time, and none of it is work anybody scores."