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"Say all of it."

"I owe a man named Renny Doust ninety-one thousand dollars." The number goes out of me and does not come back and the world does not end. "He backed my last year. Backers take a cut of your wins and eat your losses up to a cap, and I blew through the cap in March and kept sitting down anyway, because I had a read on the room and the read was right and the cards were not, and there is no difference between those two things at the cashier's window. He has been patient in a way that costs interest. This show is the last stake I have. I did not come up this mountain for two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, I came up it for ninety-one and a clean ledger and the ability to walk into a room in that city again."

The fish smell is still on my hands.

"And you have been carrying me for thirteen days," I say, "and the whole mountain has that down as a story about a big kind man and a small useless woman, and it is actually a story about a woman who bought her seat with a lie and let you pay the difference, and every single night I have sat here and handed you a fake one, and you took it, and you never once made me say it, and I would honestly rather you'd hit me."

I get it all out. Every piece. And then I sit there in the ruin of it with my hands under my arms, waiting for the part where his face does something.

His face does nothing.

He leans forward with his forearms on his knees, and the firelight goes up the side of his jaw, and he takes about four seconds, and then he nods once, slowly, the way he nods at a joint that has come out square.

"All right," he says.

"All right?"

"That is a true one." He picks up the hatchet and sets it against the log, head down, the way it goes. "The first one. Thirteen nights."

"Ghorlan, I lied on a federal document."

"You lied on a television application."

"I lied to you."

"You did." He says it plainly, and it lands, and he lets it land. "And now you have not."

That is it. That is the whole reckoning. Somewhere out beyond the firelight a bird makes a noise like a rusty gate and the red eye of the rig sits there recording every second of this for people I will never meet, and the largest man on this mountain looks at the worst thing I have ever done and does not flinch, does not soften, does not forgive me, does nothing at all except set it on the pile with the rest of the day's work.

I have spent my entire adult life keeping people from getting a look.

Nobody ever warned me what it would do to me to be looked at.

"Go to bed," he says. "Tomorrow is cold."

CHAPTER 24

GHORLAN

DAY 14

The cold comes up the drainage before dawn and by six the puddles carry ice thick enough to take a thumbnail.

I put my hand on the north wall of the shelter and the moss under my palm has gone stiff. Our tarp is doing what a tarp does at twenty-six degrees with a body under it, which is to say it is collecting our breath on the underside and giving it back as frost, and by the second night that frost will be water, and by the third night we will be wet at twenty-six degrees, and wet at twenty-six degrees is how people die politely in their sleep.

Junie is awake. She has been awake since the cold woke her, sitting up in the bag with the hood cinched to a two-inch hole, and out of that hole comes a small white cloud every four seconds.

"We move," I say.

"Where."

"Up."

The rock shelter sits ninety feet above our site where the ground shoulders out into a shelf of gray stone, and I logged it on Day 3 while I was sourcing cedar and I have kept it in the back of my head since, the way you keep a spare bearing.

It is an overhang, forty feet of it, cut back eight feet deep, with a floor of dry duff that has been out of the weather since before either of us was born. The roof is one piece of country rock and it does not move. I put my shoulder into the face where the shelf meets the slope and lean my full weight into it and nothing anywhere responds.

"Two hundred tons," I say. "Give or take."