Page 84 of This Orc’s Got Rizz

I take it.

It is printed in the same forty-point type as every card on this mountain for twenty-one days, and it says:

DESCRIBE WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE CARRIED.

The same card. The exact same card they gave me on Day 1, on my first night, on the worst night of my life, when I sat down in front of a lens with mud in my hair and understood precisely what show I was on.

Four million people on the feed.

Somewhere north of here a man is nine hours down a road in a truck, and I have no way to reach him and no reason to expect him, and there is a house with four buckets in the upstairs hall.

I hold the card up so the lens on the A camera can rack focus onto it, because I have spent fourteen months at tables learning exactly how long to hold a card up.

"I'm going to pass on this one," I say.

Bristow Cade goes very still.

"Junie."

"You've got thirty seconds of me and then a break, so I'll be quick." I put the card face down on the mark by my boot. "Twenty-three days ago I sat in a hotel conference room and told a casting producer that I field-dressed an elk in The Bitterroots. I have never field-dressed anything. I read the whole story on a forum at two in the morning, including the part about the diaphragm, which is the part that sold it. Nobody checked. Nobody wanted to check. It went in the sizzle reel and it's still in the sizzle reel."

Down the line, out of frame, somebody says a word into a headset.

"On Day 8, an executive producer of this program sat down on a stump with me and asked me to lean into being carried, because it was outperforming everything on this network. That's a real conversation and it's on a fixed rig and it has a timecode on it. I said no. Then four hours later I was cold and starving and I gave them the line anyway, because it was easier, and that's mine, and I'll be carrying it for a while."

"We're going to a break," Bristow says, to the floor, to nobody.

"They cut the no. They kept the line."

The floor manager's arm is up. The light on the A camera stays red.

"Ghorlan Ostvek is a timber framer. He built a shelter at the north site out of standing cedar with a knife, and it is standing tonight, twenty-one days later, through two storms and a freeze, and I have been under it. Every night, for twenty-one nights, he named one thing he got wrong out loud, on camera, because that's what his people do, and you took twenty-one nights of a man's honesty and you cut it into a monster, and you did it without a single lie. Every frame you used was real. That's the part I want on the record. You didn't fake anything. A true thing cut badly is worse than a lie, because there's nothing in it for anybody to deny."

"Junie."

"I lied to get on this mountain," I say. "He never lied once. And you made him the liar."

There is a sound out there past the lights that is ninety people not moving.

Bristow Cade looks straight into the A camera. His mouth opens.

The network goes to commercial one and a half seconds too late.

CHAPTER 32

GHORLAN

DAY 21

Nine hours is a long time in a truck with a bad idea.

I leave the house at dusk with the sill still on the horses under a tarp and a scarf joint cut and pegged and no wall over it, and Vessik stands in the kitchen doorway with her arms folded and does not wave, because she has never waved at anybody in her life.

The truck is a three-quarter ton with two hundred and ninety thousand miles on it and a heater that works if the heater is in the mood. South through the pass. Down along the sound. The rain starts at midnight above Coldbrook and stays with me for six hours, and the wipers do the thing they do where the left one lifts off the glass at fifty-five, and I go fifty-four.

At two in the morning I stop for fuel at a place with one working pump and buy coffee that has been on a burner since the Ford administration, and there is a television bolted to the wall behind the register with the sound off.

She is on it.