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"There is a clause."

"There's always a clause." She opens the catalogue again. "You've read it. Have you read the roof?"

"Gran..."

"I have buckets, Ghorlan. I've had buckets for six years and I'll have them six more and it never cost me a thing I couldn't spare." She turns a page and does not look up and her hand is not entirely steady on the paper. "Go and be a person in a room. It's about time."

I pick up the keys.

CHAPTER 31

JUNIE

DAY 21

Itake the garland down at first light, and it takes me longer than it should, because my hands have stopped working the way hands work.

Nine feet of alder curls on a length of paracord. Twenty-two stripped-bark stars, and four of them have gone brittle and crack apart in my fingers before I get them off the line. I coil the cord around my palm and elbow the way he taught me on Day 4, and I put the whole nest of it in the top of my pack, and then I stand under an overhang of country rock that has been out of the weather for ten thousand years and say goodbye to it out loud like a lunatic.

Twenty-one days. Six of them alone.

My pants are held up with a length of bank line. That is a real sentence about my actual body. I went into Tarn Reach at a hundred and twenty-eight pounds and there is a cinch of cord through my belt loops now with three wraps in it, and every morning for six days I have taken up another wrap, and this morning there was no more room, so I cut a new hole in the strap with the tip of my knife and moved on with my life.

The trail down to the Flat is nine miles and change. I do it in four hours and forty minutes, which two weeks ago would have taken me seven, and there is nobody on this mountain to tell that number to.

They have built a television show at the Bog overnight.

That is the only honest way to put it. Three days ago the Flat was forty acres of shin-deep muck and skunk cabbage with a scoring table under a canopy. Now there is a truck. There is a generator on a pallet with a sound blanket over it. There is a hundred and twenty feet of staging on scaffold and a lighting grid and eleven miles of cable in yellow runs pinned down with cones, and a screen the size of a barn door facing a set of bleachers that somebody trucked up a logging spur in pieces.

There is catering. The smell of it hits me at three hundred yards and my mouth floods so hard my jaw cramps.

A woman with a clipboard takes my elbow at the perimeter, which is the first time another person has touched me in five days, and my whole body startles like a horse.

"Sorry. Sorry. Halloran, north site?"

"That's me."

"Medical first, then wardrobe, then you're at your mark by four." She checks something. "You're solo."

"I'm aware."

"Right. Sorry."

Medical takes my blood pressure twice and my weight once and a man in his fifties looks at the scale, and then at me, and then writes down a number without saying it.

Wardrobe is a folding table with my own clean spare shirt on it. That is all wardrobe is. They give me back the shirt I packed twenty-three days ago in a hotel room, laundered, folded, smelling like a laundry that has never been up this mountain, and I hold it against my face for a second like a weirdo and then put it on in a portable toilet with a mirror the size of a paperback.

The person in the mirror has a jaw now. Cheekbones like a coat hook. Six freckles that have joined into a continent across the bridge of my nose, and a white line on the left temple from the pot handle on Day 19, and eyes with a great deal of room around them.

Two weeks ago I would have said the woman in that mirror looks like she has been through something.

She looks like she has been through it and is still going.

The final is three legs and it is designed for two people, which everybody involved understands and nobody says.

Leg one: two twenty-liter cans of creek water, yoked, four hundred yards across the Bog to a barrel. Leg two: fire from a flint and a fixed kit, up through a suspended cord at thirty inches. Leg three: a ninety-pound sandbag, up the north slope of the Flat, ninety vertical feet, on a rope.

Marisol and Deet Arbogast take it outright and it is barely a contest.