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The rain does its sideways thing across the bench. Bear does not move at all, which is worse than moving.

I sit on that stump with my hands in my cuffs and my heart going like something with wings caught in a lampshade, and I run it again, and the run comes back the same.

Wrong. Nowhere close. Wrong shape entirely.

Because I have spent five days working out how they intend to make me small, and they have been doing something else the entire time, and the small was only the wall they were building it against.

"No," I say.

Neve holds the card up.

"No," I say again. "Never."

She turns the card over. There is a second line on the back. She holds it up for a two count, and then does something she has never done, which is turn it back around and look at it herself for a moment before she puts it away.

Has there been a moment?

Behind her, past the stump, past the rig, Ghorlan comes back down the hill with two more rocks for the trough, and he passes Bear the way he always passes Bear, which is wide, hands out from his sides, angling his shoulders in a doorway that does not exist.

He has been doing that since Day One. He does it in the open air. He does it going by a woman with a clipboard, a kid with a boom, a sixty pound stump.

Thirty years of practice at making himself smaller so nobody in a room has to work out what to do with him.

And every single frame of it is on a hard drive four hundred miles away.

"No," I say, to the card, to Neve, to whoever reads the transcript on a laptop at midnight. "There has not been a moment."

Ghorlan sets the rocks by the fire ring and asks me if I got it right, meaning the card, meaning the game, and I open my mouth and my throat has closed most of the way.

"Two dollars," I say. "You owe me two dollars."

He nods once and goes to bank the coals.

CHAPTER 12

GHORLAN

DAY 5

The system arrives at nine and it arrives sideways.

I have four hours of light before it lands and I spend all four in the same forty feet of ground. Storm braces first, two of them, alder poles running from the ridge beam down to a deadman buried on the windward side, because a lean to fails at the ridge or it fails at the feet and mine is going to fail at neither. Then the bark courses on the weather side get a batten pole lashed over them, top to bottom, one lashing every eighteen inches, so the wind has nothing to lift.

Then the tent.

The tent goes on the deck, under the roof, which is the only sane place for it, and I take the fly off because the fly is redundant under three feet of overhang and the fly is what wind grabs first.

Junie sits on the step stone with the poles and reads the instruction sheet out loud like scripture.

"'Sleeps two comfortably.'"

"Give me the sheet."

"You cannot have the sheet."

"Read the specification."

"There is no specification. There's a cartoon of two people smiling."