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She is awake longer. Eight feet away, in a blanket that smells like a horse, absolutely still, and breathing like somebody doing arithmetic.

CHAPTER 7

JUNIE

DAY 2

The Flat is a bog.

I want that established immediately, because everybody calls it the Flat, and it appears on the production maps as the Flat, and Bristow Cade says the Flat in a voice that suggests a meadow with wildflowers in it, and what it actually is is nine acres of standing water in sphagnum moss with a crust on top that holds until it does not.

You put a foot down. The crust holds. You put the second foot down. Your first leg is gone to the knee.

Six teams stand on the one dry hump of ground at the north end, which production has floored with plywood and rubber matting for the equipment, and there are eleven crew on that plywood and twelve contestants standing in the wet beside it.

"Morning, HOLDFAST." Cade, on the plywood, dry. "Challenge one. Three legs. Fire, water, distance."

Coby has his hands cupped around his mouth. "LET'S GO, BOG."

"The Flat."

"THE FLAT."

Cade lays it out and I hold every word of it in my hands like cards.

Leg one, fire. Each team gets a bundle of wet standing wood, a flint striker, and no accelerant, and burns through a cord strung eighteen inches above the fire lay. Leg two, water. Two gallons carried from the seep at the far side of the bog back to the hump, in whatever you brought. Leg three, distance. Both partners cross the bog on a route of their choosing and cross the line together.

"Both of you," Cade says. "Together. A team is not across until a team is across."

Ghorlan is beside me with his arms folded, and he has been running the same math I have, and he gets there about the same time I do.

Fire is his. Water is his, because he can carry the pot and I can carry the pot lid and a rain shell tied off at the sleeves, which is genuinely the plan and I hate it. Distance is where we lose, and distance is where we lose because of me, and the reason we lose is not speed.

The reason is weight.

I go over that crust like a leaf. Ghorlan is six foot eleven and built like the thing he builds, and he goes through it at every step, and by the third step he is in to mid thigh in cold black water with a bottom made of nothing.

"Route," he says.

"There's a line of hummocks," I say, pointing. "There, there, there, and then that stand of dead spruce. Those are rooted. Rooted holds."

"How far apart."

"Six feet. Seven."

He looks at the gap between his own boots and the first hummock, and he does not say anything, and he does not have to, because a six foot gap is a hop for me and a controlled fall for him.

Whistle.

The fire leg is the most beautiful thing I have ever been adjacent to.

He does not chase a flame. Everybody else chases a flame. Across the line, Rooney Pike is striking a flint at a fluffed handful of wet grass with the desperate optimism of a man who has done all his learning on a screen, and Danna Trell is working a bird nest bundle properly and getting nowhere because her tinder came off the ground.

Ghorlan splits a wrist-thick spruce round with the back of his knife and a baton, splits the halves, splits those, and goes into the middle of the driest quarter with the blade and starts feathering. Curls come off in long ribbons and stay attached at the base, and he stands them in a bundle like a small dead flower, and he does that four times before he strikes anything.

Then one strike. One.

The feather sticks take, he builds a lattice over them in ascending thickness with his hands and does not touch it again after, and by the time the flame has a shape it has already eaten forward into wood that is drying eleven inches ahead of it.