Page 1

CHAPTER 1

JUNIE

DAY MINUS 2

Room 12B of the Cascara Inn holds six folding tables, forty-one bodies, and enough unearned confidence to float a barge.

I count the tables. Then the exits. Then the tells.

Table one is medical. A woman in scrubs wraps a blood pressure cuff around a bicep the size of my thigh and asks about prior knee surgery. Table two is gear inspection, where a man with a clipboard explains to a large sunburned contestant that a hatchet does not count as one item, because a hatchet is a head, a handle, and a wedge, and this show counts wedges. Tables three through six are contracts. Forty pages each, stacked in plastic trays, pink arrows stuck down the signature lines like somebody is doing me a kindness.

The kindness lives on page nineteen.

If your partner walks, both of you forfeit the appearance fee. The one who stays gets nothing either. Somebody wrote that clause on purpose, somebody else approved it, and then a third person drove home and had dinner.

I sign it anyway. My pen does a little skip on the R in Halloran because the table wobbles, and I fix the loop, and the production assistant takes the stack away before the ink dries.

"You're in the last group for gear," she says. "Then wardrobe wants a look at you."

"Wardrobe," I say. "For a survival show."

"For continuity." She has a lanyard, a headset, and the particular flatness of somebody on hour eleven of a nine hour day. "It's mostly checking that nothing has a logo."

Nothing of mine has a logo. Nothing of mine has anything. All of it came out of a single order placed at two in the morning eleven days ago, every item selected by cross-referencing three forums and one gear reviewer with a mustache and a Ph.D. in condescension. The pack is orange. The rain shell is orange. The boots are the exact color of boots in a catalog photograph, which is to say they have never been anywhere.

Across the room, Marisol Arbogast glances at my feet for about a second and a half, then goes back to her coffee.

Eleven seconds. That is how long it takes the first competent person in the room to price me. I have played tables where it took longer, and those tables cost me more money.

Her brother is with her. Deet. The two of them have the same face and the same jacket, both jackets faded to the color of wet cardboard, and neither of them has said a full sentence to anyone since I got here. He eats an apple down to a stem you could floss with. She reads the contract like she intends to litigate it.

That is the team. Everything else in this room is noise and lighting.

The noise is currently at table two, where a man in a bucket hat holds a collapsible shovel over his head and says, "Fourteen ounces, brother. Fourteen. That's a sandwich."

"Coby," says the other one, filming him. "Say the ounces again. Say it toward me."

"Fourteen ounces."

"One more, from the top of the handle."

They will be fine. Whatever else they are, they are professionals, and I could pick either of them out of a lineup by their teeth alone.

A woman crosses the far end of the room with a tablet in one hand, moving at the speed of somebody who has never once been late. Charcoal blazer. Boots that have been places. She does not stop at any table and every table adjusts as she passes, small corrections, the way a room full of card players adjusts when the floor manager walks the aisle.

That one runs the building.

"Junie? Hi. Perrin." A young man with a headset and a clipboard, smiling too much. "We're grabbing a couple of interview bites for the sizzle reel. Nothing scary. Two minutes."

It is never two minutes.

They put me on a stool in front of a paper backdrop the color of an old bruise. Two lights, one camera, a boom over my head like a fuzzy gray planet. Perrin crouches beside the lens with a card.

"Just tell it the way you told casting," he says. "The elk."

Here we go.

I set my hands on my knees, which is where I put my hands when I want them somewhere I have chosen. I let a beat go by. A beat is worth more than a paragraph.