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Has she ever made you angry?

There is a version of me from Day One who answers that with the truth, which is no, and hands it over, and goes back to work.

That man is gone. He went at some point between a parcel with a hot water bottle in it and an axe I did not ask for, and what is left is a man who sits on a stump and prices a question before he answers it, and I dislike him.

"No," I say.

And I do not say anything else, and my silence goes down the hill on a hard drive, and I have started to understand exactly what they do with those.

Junie goes to fill the bottles at seven.

I am setting Marisol's brass wire when the sound of the filter changes.

It is a squeeze filter. You fill the dirty bag, you screw the cartridge on, and you squeeze, and it makes a particular noise, and it has made that noise about four hundred times in five days.

Tonight it makes a different one. Wetter. Faster. Almost nothing in the way of it at all.

"Ghorlan."

She is crouched at the fire ring with the cartridge in both hands and the bottle full to the neck in about nine seconds, and clear, and cold, and wrong.

I take it from her and hold it up to the light of the fire.

The cartridge is a bundle of hollow fibers in a plastic housing, and there are hundreds of them, and they are the whole apparatus. You cannot get at them without opening the housing, and the housing is sonically welded, and it does not open.

Somebody has opened it.

It has been split at the seam with something thin and closed again, and the join is a hair proud on one side, and when I turn it in the firelight the fiber bundle inside has been driven through, three times, at the middle, by something with a point.

Nothing fouled. Nothing clogged. No silt.

Cut, clean, in three places, by a person with a pin and eleven minutes.

The water goes straight through the middle of it and comes out the other end looking like water.

We have been drinking off this since Day Six.

Junie has not moved. She is still crouched by the fire ring with her hands where the cartridge was, and she is looking at the trees at the edge of the bench, at the place where a man stood four hours ago with his hands in his armpits and did not come onto the deck.

"Coby," I say. "They were up here for two hours with a lighting panel and nobody looking at them."

"No."

"Rooney, then. Rooney had his hand on the upright and I was talking about the ridge beam for the better part of an hour and he"

"No."

She stands up.

Her hands are steady. Her hands are always steady.

"Ghorlan," she says, "when Kit Farrow was up here today, what was the last thing he told us before he asked about his knee?"

"He did not ask about his knee. I asked about his knee."

"Right," Junie says. "Yes. You did."

CHAPTER 21