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The wind takes the tarp and lets it go.

"That is three. That is the one. Everything else on this list is housekeeping."

I sit there.

"Nobody is doing this with me," I say, "which means nobody checks the joint, which is the entire reason for the practice, and I am doing it anyway, because it is the only thing on this mountain still holding anything up."

I stop.

Then, because it is dark and because there is nothing left to protect, I say, "I hope somebody keeps this one."

Neve is standing at the edge of the firelight.

She has been there for some part of that. I have no idea which part. She has no card in her hands at all, which in eighteen days is a first, and she comes three steps closer than the eight feet she has kept since Day 1, and she stops.

She is twenty-six years old and she has been standing in the rain at the edge of my life for eighteen days holding pieces of cardstock, and I have read every person on this mountain and I have never gotten a single clean line on her.

She opens her mouth. Nothing happens. She shuts it.

Then:

"There's ninety seconds after that."

Four days of nobody speaking to me and the sound of a human sentence goes through me like the orange slice did.

"After what?"

"Day 8." She swallows. "You gave them the nine words and then you kept going. Ninety-one seconds. It's on the card as unusable and it's still on the raw drive and nobody has pulled the raw drives yet because they pull them at wrap." She has her hands jammed in her jacket. "He should have it. I'm going to send it to him."

"Neve..."

"I'll lose the job." She says it fast, like a person reading the last line of something before somebody can take it away. "I'll lose the format. That's fine, the format's..." Her jaw goes. "Three days left. Stay on this mountain, Junie."

Then she turns around and goes down the trail with a light she does not switch on, and I sit on a wet log in the dark next to a small brown bear and nine feet of alder garland, and for the first time in eighteen days somebody on this production has said my name out loud like it belongs to a person.

CHAPTER 30

GHORLAN

DAY 19

Iam cutting a sill I have no money to install.

The stock came off the rack in the barn at seven this morning, a sixteen foot length of Douglas fir I bought four years ago and have been stepping around ever since, and by ten I have it up on horses under the window with the string line off it and the chalk snapped.

There is no job here. There is no draw and no schedule and no client and no forty-one thousand dollars. There is a soft sill under a kitchen wall, and a man with two hands and a week, and the arithmetic of that is not complicated, it is simply expensive in the only currency I have left.

I lay out the scarf at the east end. Six to one, bladed, with two pegs. It takes an hour to mark and most of a second hour to cut and I take the whole second hour, because a scarf you rush is a scarf that opens in eleven years, and I intend to be alive in eleven years and to have to look at it.

Vessik comes out at noon with a sandwich and stands with her arms folded.

"That's the good fir," she says.

"Yes."

"You've been walking past that stick for four years."

"Yes."