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Her eyes move over my face. She has a way of doing that where she is taking inventory and where you can tell exactly how fast she is going, and right now she is going very slowly.

"That wasn't a bluff," she says.

"I have started to be able to tell them apart also."

Her hand comes up out of the blanket and lands on my jaw, and her palm is freezing, and she does not seem to have any plan for what happens next, which for her is the whole event.

The rain goes over the eave.

She comes up on her elbow. I come down about two inches, which is all the geometry will give me, and her nose grazes mine, and her mouth is right there, and every calculation I have run since my growth year about how much room to leave a human being goes straight out of my head and takes my whole vocabulary with it.

Something enters the tent from above.

It comes down between us with terrible slowness. Gray. Furred. About nine inches long, on the end of a carbon pole, poking in through the door of the tent that neither of us zipped, and it stops eleven inches from Junie's ear and hangs there like the hand of God.

Junie closes her eyes.

"Is that a microphone," she says.

"That is a microphone."

"On a stick."

"On a boom."

"In our tent."

"In our tent."

The boom operator, who is nineteen and who will be telling this story at parties until the day he dies, says, "Sorry, I'm getting a lot of rain on the deck fill, can you just, like, keep going?"

Junie lies back down.

I lie back down.

Outside, eleven feet away in the streaming dark, Bear stands in the rain with the camera on his shoulder and the red light on and the lens pointed at the open door of a two person tent.

And then he takes it off his shoulder.

He lowers it, all the way, until the barrel is aimed at the deck boards, and he stands there holding sixty pounds of it down at his knee, and he looks off across the drainage at nothing at all.

Four seconds.

I count them, because counting is what I have instead of speech.

Then the camera comes back up, and the red light is still on, and Bear has not made a sound in five days and does not make one now.

CHAPTER 13

JUNIE

DAY 6

Challenge two is a gully.

It runs across the low end of the Flat, twenty-two feet wide and nine deep, with a creek in the bottom of it doing an impression of something much larger, and on the near lip there is a pile of material: alder poles, a coil of manila, four planks, and a wooden barrel with sixty pounds of water in it and a lid strapped down with two turns of webbing.

Bristow Cade stands on his plywood with the rain in his hair, because Bristow Cade is never given a hat.