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He sets the stake down on the log. He does it carefully. Then he puts both hands on his knees and looks at them.

"Yeah," he says.

That is all he says for a while. Marisol crosses the clearing and stands over him, and her wrapped hand comes out of her jacket without her attending to it at all, and it is bad, the two middle fingers swollen tight against the wrap, the skin above the strapping shiny in a way I have opinions about.

"Six days," she says. "You did it six days after I told you I could carry."

"You can't carry."

"You could have asked me what I wanted."

"I had what you wanted." He is still looking at his hands. "You wanted the twelfth season and Dad's boat and to not be pulled off a hill by a kid with a thermometer. So I bought us four more days."

"Off them."

"Off anybody." He looks up at me then. He is not a large man and he is fifty-one years old and there is nothing in his face except a person waiting to be told what it costs. "Say what you want."

"Nothing," I say.

"Say it again."

"Nothing. We are not taking it to production." Junie makes a small sound beside me. "You will have to carry it yourself. That is all of it."

Deet Arbogast has a weathered, wind-scoured, entirely unreadable face, and it comes apart in front of the lens in about two seconds, and Bear, without any change in his posture at all, lets the rig drift six inches down and to the left.

"Get your sister's hand looked at," I say. "Or she goes septic by the eighteenth and you will have bought four days with the rest of her life."

Then we go.

Junie says nothing for the first half mile. She walks fast, which is how she walks when she is doing arithmetic she does not want to share.

"He'll pull her," she says finally. "Tonight or tomorrow. He'll go to medical himself, because you gave him the room to."

"Yes."

"You understand what that means."

"It means the Arbogasts stay in and they owe us." She is walking faster. "It means we handed back the only leverage on this mountain and we did it in front of a camera so nobody can even claim credit for it quietly. It means we get to be gracious and hungry."

"Yes."

"I said I got to say so when it cost us."

"You did."

"I'm saving it," she says. "It hasn't cost us yet."

Neve is standing at the fork.

She has the prompt card up. Held high, no longer against her thigh, no longer face down, held at chest height in both hands like something she is delivering rather than something she is asking, and her jaw is set in a way it has been set exactly once before.

The card says, in the network's clean sans serif:

AUDIENCE VOTE, EPISODE FOUR. YOUR TEAM HAS RECEIVED THE BURDEN. PROCEED TO YOUR RESUPPLY CACHE.

Junie stops walking.

"Episode four," she says. "It dropped last night. Four hundred miles away, four million people, and we have not been shown one frame of it."