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"We came second."

"I am not talking about the challenge." She turns the cup in her hands. "Junie. I have been making this show for eleven years. You want a number? Episode two dropped on Day Six and you two are outperforming every other pairing on this mountain by a factor I am embarrassed to say out loud in front of the Arbogasts, who are, objectively, the best survivalists we have ever cast, and who are being skipped."

"Skipped."

"People pause on you. They rewind you." She smiles, and it is a real smile, and that is the entire trouble with Delia Prine. "Do you understand how rare that is? I can buy competence. Six teams up here can start a fire in the rain. I cannot buy a five foot four woman and a six eleven orc standing under one tarp."

"That's the show."

"That is the show."

The heater goes on doing its work on my ankles.

"So here it is," she says, "and I am going to be very straight with you, because you'd catch me otherwise. Lean into it."

"Into what."

"Into the thing you already are. Let him carry you." She holds a hand up before I can move. "I do not mean fake it. I have no interest in you faking anything, you'd be terrible at it and the audience would smell it in a week. I mean stop fighting the frame. When he does the heavy thing, be small in front of it. When he builds, be delighted. You're already delighted, I have footage of you stamping on a deck like a child, it is the best forty seconds we shot all week."

"And in exchange."

"There's a bonus structure for finalists that is not in the contract you signed, because it attaches at the top eight and there were only twelve of you." She says the number. It is a real number and it is a serious number and it is a lot closer to what I owe than anything else on this mountain. "That is per person. That is on top of the appearance fee. And it is not a bribe, Junie, it is a schedule, and every finalist gets it, and all I am telling you is which of you is likely to be one."

The coffee is very good. It is astonishingly good. It is coffee somebody made in a pot with electricity.

"You could just not tell me any of that," I say.

"I could."

"You're telling me because a person with money on the table plays the table differently, and you'd rather have me playing it than not."

Delia looks at me with something like affection.

"There she is," she says. "God, you're a pleasure. Casting sent me a poker player and I got a poker player." She reaches over and takes the pastry box lid off and pushes it toward me. "Take one for him too. I loved that elk story, by the way. The diaphragm. The steam off the arms. I have gone back to that detail more than once."

The heat comes up off the floor vents.

"Thank you," I say.

"You're welcome."

I put my cup on the table and get out of the cab, into the rain, out of the heat, which takes actual physical labor.

"No," I say.

"No?"

"He's not a frame. He's a guy who does joinery with a four inch knife and gives me his half of an energy bar and has not once, in eight days, asked me for anything." My hands are in my armpits. "You want me to stand next to a man doing the best work on this mountain and act like furniture so an editor has an easier night. No."

Delia Prine takes that without a flicker.

"Okay," she says.

"Okay?"

"Junie, I'm not going to argue with you in a turnaround." She screws the lid onto the thermos. "You'll do what you do. That's the fun of it."

She lets me walk back up eleven hundred vertical feet in the rain on an empty stomach, and she does not offer me a ride, and I would not take one, and she has arranged the entire morning so that I have to climb out of the warmth on my own legs.