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The cord goes at four minutes eleven.

Second. Second by nineteen seconds, because Marisol Arbogast did the same thing without the feathering and used birch bark she has apparently been carrying in a jacket pocket since the shuttle, which is either brilliant or cheating, and which Cade rules is brilliant.

Coby and Stitch place fifth on fire. Stitch films Coby striking the flint eleven times from three angles. They get it eventually.

Water is a slog and we go third, and then it is the bog.

He goes in on the first step past the hummocks, right to the hip, and the bog takes hold of him the way it does, with suction, and every pull out costs double what the step cost going in.

I am forty feet ahead before I make myself stop.

Turning around is expensive. Turning around means eating the difference twice. Every instinct I have from nine years of table play is screaming that you do not turn around, you never turn around, you play your position.

I turn around.

"Give me the pot."

"No."

"Give me the pot, you're carrying forty pounds of water and thirty pounds of bog and you weigh what a truck weighs."

"You cannot carry the pot."

"I can carry the pot for eleven steps at a time and eleven steps at a time is how we do this."

He looks at me. Water to the hip. Rain coming in flat off the west. His face does not move much at the best of times, and it does something now that I have no read on, which is a first, and which annoys me even at the time.

He hands me the pot.

Eleven steps. Hand it back. He goes ahead and I go behind, and when he goes in past the hip I stand on the hummock behind him and put both hands on his forearm and lean back at forty-five degrees with my heels dug in, and I weigh a hundred and eighteen pounds and I am providing approximately nothing.

But there is a thing about a bog. A leg comes out with a twist and a slow pull, and it will not come out with a heave, and what I actually give him is a fixed point to pull against.

Four hundred yards takes us thirty-one minutes.

We cross the line together, because a team is not across until a team is across, and I have both hands on the pot and he has one hand on the back of my pack strap, and my legs are black to the thigh, and the whole hump of plywood is applauding in that particular way crews applaud when they are not allowed to have favorites.

"Fifth," Cade says, "of six."

The Farrows beat us. The Farrows beat us by four minutes because Margaux Farrow, who is enormous and cheerful, simply walked the perimeter for a mile and a half instead of crossing, which nobody said you could not do.

Coby and Stitch win.

They win the entire challenge. They lost the fire leg and they lost the water leg and they took the distance leg in eleven minutes, because Stitch went out on the crust on his belly with the camera and Coby laid down beside him and the two of them belly-crawled four hundred yards through a bog, hooting, filming each other the entire way, and came up over the line covered head to foot in black mud with their arms in the air.

Cade times it. Cade says the number out loud. The plywood loses its mind.

And I stand there dripping and add it up, and the total is very clean.

The challenge was scored on three legs and the three legs were weighted, and the weights were not published, and distance was worth more than fire and water combined. Whoever set those weights set them after casting. Somebody looked at a list of six teams, and worked out which team was going to produce the footage, and built a scoring rubric that got them there.

The Arbogasts place third and take it the way they take everything, which is by nodding once and going to get their gear.

Delia Prine is on the plywood with a coffee, in dry boots, and she is not looking at Coby and Stitch at all.

She is looking at Ghorlan, forty feet out in the bog, coming in slow with mud to the waist and my pot lid in one enormous hand, and she has the expression of a woman at an auction who has just had a very good afternoon.

Cade wraps it. Crew break down the timing gear. Somebody hands out an energy bar per contestant, which is the challenge participation reward, and which is four hundred calories and a small piece of theater.