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JUNIE

DAY 12

The filter sits on a flat rock between us like evidence at a trial nobody has bothered to convene.

Ghorlan turns it over. His hands make it look like a pill bottle. The housing carries a hairline crack running down from the threads, so fine that it takes the light at exactly one angle and vanishes at every other, and inside, when he thumbs the cartridge loose, the pleated element has a slit in it. One slit. Clean. About the length of my thumb.

"Boiling," he says.

"Boiling."

"Two hours of wood a day. Three, in this wet." He sets the cartridge down with the care of a man returning a borrowed tool. "We have nine days."

Nine days at four hundred calories, hauling deadfall out of ground we stripped a mile in every direction, so that we can stand over a pot making water that tastes like a struck match. The arithmetic runs itself. The arithmetic has no opinion about me.

"Don't fix it," I say.

"It cannot be fixed."

"Then don't move it."

He goes still. That is the thing about him. Other people freeze and it reads as fear. He stops the way a building stops.

"Explain."

"Somebody put a blade through that." I crouch, hands off, elbows on my knees. "I want it exactly where they left it."

Rain comes through the canopy in the loose, unserious way it does at midmorning, more of a suggestion than a weather event, and drums on the tarp he tensioned four days ago and has adjusted eleven times since. Above us the ridge steams. Down at the Bog they are building something out of scaffold and rope for tomorrow, and the sound of it carries up the drainage in flat metal notes.

Neve stands eight feet off with a prompt card face down against her thigh. She has been holding it for a while. Bear went down at first light with the challenge unit, so the only lens on this site is the fixed rig bolted to the alder, and the fixed rig points at the shelter mouth and the fire ring and nothing else, which is the first genuinely lucky thing that has happened to me on this mountain.

Ghorlan crouches across from me. The rock is between us. He has a way of lowering himself that involves no sound at all.

"You have a method," he says.

"I have a job I used to be good at."

"Then work."

He stands and goes back to the woodpile, and that is the entire conversation, and I sit with my hands on my knees and something warm and unfamiliar moving around under my sternum, which I ignore, because there is a man on this mountain who cut my water open and I intend to have his name by dark.

Here is what I have.

Six teams. Four are still standing. The slit is clean and single, which rules out an animal and rules out a tantrum. Whoever did it took one pass with something sharp and thin and then cracked the housing separately, on purpose, at the threads, where the crack would not show until the seal failed under pressure. That is two acts. Two acts is a plan.

They did it between the Day 11 challenge and dawn on Day 12, because I filled from it at dusk on the eleventh and it ran clear. Everyone on this mountain was at the Flat that afternoon. Everyone came back up the same three trails.

And they did it with a working understanding of filters. Anybody can smash a filter. Slicing an element and leaving the housing looking fine takes a person who has held one apart before.

That is the hand. Now I go make people talk.

Coby and Stitch's camp has gotten worse.

I say that as somebody with three weeks of ownership over the phrase. On Day 3 they had a lean-to with a swept floor and a hand-lettered sign reading BASE ALPHA. Today the ridgepole sags into a shallow V, one wall is a survival blanket lashed with paracord in a pattern that suggests panic, and the sign has migrated to a stump where it announces BASE ALPHA to nobody, at an angle, in the rain.

Their tripod, however, stands level. Their tripod has a bubble level on it. Their tripod is the only true thing in the clearing.

"Junie!" Coby says, arms wide, already framing. "Junie Halloran, everybody. Twelve days in. Junie, real talk, how are you holding up."