Page 21

She holds it at chest height. And then she taps it. Twice, with her index finger, on the lamination, right at the bottom edge.

Tap. Tap.

The tapping is nothing. The tapping is a woman with cold hands adjusting her grip on a piece of plastic in the rain, and I have spent nine years learning that people do meaningless things with their hands constantly and that reading meaning into all of it is how amateurs go broke.

Nothing her hands do is meaningless. Three days, and not once.

She has held that stack like a dealer holds a deck.

Two taps at the bottom edge of a card that says take your time, while a red light is on, from a woman who is contractually forbidden to say a single word to me and has therefore had eighteen days of her professional life reduced to what she can do with a rectangle.

Keep going. Or: stop talking. Or: nothing at all.

I look at her over the top of the card, and her face is empty, and it is empty the way mine is empty, which is to say expensively.

"I'm done," I say.

Neve lowers the card, and Bear kills the light, and she packs the stool.

And on the way down the hill, at the switchback, she stops and adjusts the stack against her hip and fans it slightly with her thumb, and one card at the back of the stack turns over, face out, for about a second, and it is not one she has ever shown me.

Then she rights it and goes.

I stand on the bench in the rain with my hands going numb.

I have been playing this thing all wrong.

Three days I have been reading contestants. Marisol Arbogast and her birch bark. The Farrows and the perimeter walk. Coby and Stitch and their collapsing debris hut. All of it useless. Contestants settle nothing on this mountain. Contestants are the raw material.

The people who settle it are the ones who never appear in a shot.

There are ninety of them two ridges over and thirty on this hill, and every one of them has a face, and every face has been in a room where a decision got made, and none of them have been trained to hold still, because nobody films the crew.

That is a table. That is an entire table nobody has been sitting at.

Ghorlan comes down the slope with a load of dry rock in a bark sling and stops when he gets a look at me.

"You are smiling," he says. "It is raining and you are smiling."

"I've been playing the wrong game."

"Which game were you playing?"

"Theirs."

CHAPTER 10

GHORLAN

DAY 4

Day four is when the hunger stops being an idea.

It arrives in the morning, on the deck I built, in a specific way I have never had happen to me before, which is that I go to stand and my legs do it late.

Half a second late. That is all. The signal goes down and the legs come up behind it like a man answering a door from another room.

I sit back down and give it a moment and go again, and the second time it works.