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Neve turns the card over. The back is blank. She holds it there anyway, blank side out, for three full seconds, and something in the set of her mouth is trying very hard to be a sentence.

Then she puts it down and walks.

CHAPTER 23

JUNIE

DAY 13

The cache is a hole.

That is not a figure of speech and I want to be precise about it, because the show will never bother to be. There is a hole in the ground under a slab of shale on the east shoulder of our site, and in that hole for thirteen days there has been a dry bag, and in that dry bag there has been the resupply we earned on Day 6 and have been rationing at a hundred and forty grams a day like two accountants dividing an estate.

Now there is a hole, and the shale set back neatly over it, and beside the shale a laminated card on a wire stake.

BURDEN: EPISODE FOUR. TEAM SIX FORFEITS ALL CACHED PROVISIONS. RESUPPLY RESUMES DAY 16.

Three days.

Ghorlan crouches and picks up the card and turns it over the way he turns everything over, checking the back for information, because he is a man who has been let down by the fronts of things.

"Three days," he says.

"Three days."

"We have hemlock tea and the boiled water and whatever the traps give us."

"The traps have given us four voles and a grouse in thirteen days."

"Yes." He sets the card down and rests it against the shale, square to it, because the alternative would be leaving a thing crooked. "The grouse was good."

"The grouse was six ounces of bird between two people, one of whom is the size of a garage."

"It was still good."

I sit down in the mud next to the hole where our food used to live and I put my head back against the shale and I laugh, and the laugh comes out wrong and shakes at the end, so I stop it.

Somewhere down the drainage a generator turns over at base camp and someone gets a hot shower.

Here is the part that will never be on television.

The burden did not come because of Deet. The burden came from an audience of four million people who took something in on Day 12 and voted, and the vote landed this morning, and we do not have the first idea what was put in front of them.

Two nights ago Ghorlan spent forty minutes rebuilding the fish trap gate with a fever running and half a sleeve of skin off his forearm and did it without a single word. That footage exists. That is a real thing that really happened.

And somewhere in an edit bay four hundred miles from here, a person with better coffee than mine took that footage and made a choice about it, and four million people voted on the choice, and now we do not eat until the sixteenth.

I have played against people who were better than me. That is fine. That is a Tuesday. What I have never done is play against a table that gets to rule, after the hand, on what my cards were.

Marisol comes at dusk.

She comes up the draw without calling out, which is an Arbogast thing, and she stops at the edge of the firelight with a small dark shape in her good hand and stands there until Ghorlan says her name.

The shape is fish. Four of them, gutted, threaded on a green stick.

"No," I say.

"Didn't ask you," she says.