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Neve holds it exactly where it is, and her face does not move, and she does not lower it early, and she does not lower it late.

"Can you read it to me?" I say.

She shakes her head. One degree. Barely a movement at all.

"Right," I say. "Contractually."

Nothing.

I look past her at the lens. Bear's eye is not at the eyepiece. He is looking over the top of the camera at the ground beside my boot, at the left one, where there is a small white tag still stapled to the heel and going soft in the wet.

I look back at Neve.

"Great," I say, and I smile, and I fold my hands on my knee, and I give them exactly nothing at all. "So. Being carried."

Here is what forty minutes of me looks like when I have gone flat.

"It's a partnership. Six teams up here and all six of them are partnerships."

Card change. What is it like sharing a shelter with someone that size?

"Warm."

Card change. Does Ghorlan intimidate you?

"The weather intimidates me."

Card change. Tell us about a moment today when you needed his help.

"He needed mine on the wood haul. I'm faster on that slope than he is, because he has to go around things and I go under them."

That last one is even true. It is also useless, and I can tell it is useless by the fact that Neve pulls three cards in a row looking for something else and then, at the bottom of the stack, finds a blank one.

She turns the blank one over and holds it up anyway, face out, at chest height. There is nothing on it.

She holds it there for a full four seconds.

Then she puts it away, and stands, and Bear kills the light, and neither of them looks at me on the way down the hill.

CHAPTER 6

GHORLAN

DAY 1

The fire holds through supper on cedar bark and resin knots, and supper is a pot of hot water with four crushed rose hips in it and a strip of jerky each from the drop kit, and afterward there is nothing to do but the last thing.

She has gone quiet. She has been quiet since the confessional, which took forty minutes and produced, by my count, nine sentences.

Neve and Bear went down the hill at dusk. The rig on the tripod at the tree line stays up all night and runs on infrared, which they explained on day minus one in a paragraph designed to be forgotten.

So there is a lens. There is always a lens. I have already made my peace with the lens by treating it as a window in a house I do not own.

"Halloran."

"Junie."

"Junie." I set the last piece of the night's wood on the stack under the eave, butt end out, the way you leave a stack for the next person. "There is a thing we do. Ostvek clan. When two build together."