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"Yes."

"Nobody has beaten us on a chart. Never this season, never the last thing we did, never at all." She turns the coil of wire over in her hands. "She made him spend the lie. That's not luck, that's a play, and it took her eleven minutes of standing in the dark not opening her bag."

"It did."

"We opened ours in four seconds." She sets the wire down on the step stone. "That's snare wire. You've been setting snares with cord and cord's wrong, it's got no memory, it lies down. That's brass. It stands up."

"That is your kit item."

"That's half my kit item," Marisol says. "Tell her the log was there for everybody."

And she goes back down the hill, and that is more words than Marisol Arbogast has said to any human being on this mountain in eleven days, and she said all of them to me because Junie was out.

Kit Farrow comes up at three.

He comes up alone and slowly, with a limp that has got worse since the Flat, and he stands at the edge of the bench with his hands in his armpits, which is what he does, and he does not come onto the deck.

"Margaux says congratulations," he says.

"Thank you."

"She means it. I don't, particularly, but she does."

Junie laughs from the trough. Kit Farrow's face does something that is almost a smile and then gives up.

"You'll get the vote tomorrow," he says. "Episode three drops tonight. You'll get the boon and we'll get the burden, because we've had the burden twice and there's a rhythm to it now, and I've stopped pretending there isn't."

"That is not certain."

"It's certain." He shifts his weight off the bad leg. "Do you have any idea what it's like being the team the audience forgets to have an opinion about? We came second on the build. Nobody rewound us."

I have no answer for that.

"Anyway," Kit says. "Water. We're all going to have a problem. Creek's down a foot on the pool under the second bend, and if the pool goes there's nothing between the fork and the head of the drainage."

Behind me, at the trough, something stops.

It is a small thing. It is the sound of a woman filling a trough, and then the sound of a woman not filling a trough, and then, after about two seconds, the sound of a woman filling a trough again at exactly the same rate as before.

"How is the knee," I say.

"Same. Bad." Kit knocks a fist against it, twice. "Right. I'm going down before the light goes."

He goes down.

At six in the evening Neve raises the last card of the day, and I sit on the stump for it, and Bear comes in low and left.

Do you ever worry that you are holding her back?

I look at the card for a long time.

"No," I say.

Neve waits.

"She won last night," I say. "She won it standing still in the dark for eleven minutes while five teams ran past her. I carried a bag."

Neve's pen does not move. The card goes back in the case, and the next card comes up, and the next card says: