Page 2

"Second week of October," I say. "My uncle's place, up past the fork. We got him about an hour before last light, which is the worst possible time, because now you're doing everything you have to do in the dark and everything is warm and nothing waits."

Perrin's pen stops moving. Good.

"Field dressing is not complicated," I say. "It's just committed. You go in at the sternum, you keep two fingers ahead of the blade so you don't open the stomach, and you work down. The part nobody tells you about is the diaphragm. It's this sheet of muscle across the chamber, front to back, and you have to cut it loose all the way around the ribs before anything else will come out. You're in past your elbows. You're reaching by touch. It's warm in there and it's cold outside and there's steam coming off your arms."

The room behind the lights has gotten quiet in a way rooms do.

"And the whole time," I say, "you're aware that this animal was walking around ninety minutes ago and now you're inside it up to your shoulder, and you have to be very calm about that, because being calm about it is the entire job."

Silence. Then Perrin exhales through his teeth. "Okay," he says. "Okay. Yeah. That's the reel."

I smile the way you smile when the river card comes and you already had it.

Every word of that is true except for the part where any of it happened to me. The diaphragm detail came off a hunting forum at two in the morning, third page of a thread about gut hooks, posted by a man in Montana who spells "definitely" with an A. I read it four times. I read the replies. I read the two guys arguing about whether you go in at the sternum or the pelvis, and I picked the sternum because the man who said it had better grammar and forty thousand posts.

That is the skill. Everybody assumes the skill is lying. The skill is picking which true thing to put in front of the lie so the lie never has to carry weight.

"Can we get one more," Perrin says, "where you say the word elk earlier? Legal likes the noun up top."

I say the word elk earlier. Legal likes the noun up top.

By the time they turn the lights off, my shirt is stuck to my back, and I have that specific hollow under the ribs that shows up when a bluff runs long and clean and nobody calls it.

There is a coffee urn by the door, and I go stand near it because standing near an exit calms me down.

The application said verified field experience. Underneath it, in gray, it said we may request documentation. They never requested documentation. Casting wanted a poker player with a face and a story, and they got one, and the checking part turned out to be optional in the same way that the wedge in a hatchet turned out to be mandatory.

Kestler has been very patient. That is the thing about Kestler. He has yet to raise his volume, not in fourteen months, and every month the patience gets a little heavier to carry, and neither of us has ever said the number out loud.

Two hundred fifty thousand dollars fixes it. Two hundred fifty thousand dollars and a ledger with nothing on it.

"Everybody, if I could." Perrin, up on a chair now, headset dangling. "Quick logistics. Bus loads at five thirty tomorrow morning, five thirty, not five forty. You'll be at the staging site by seven. Pairings get announced there."

A hand goes up near gear inspection. "Announced how?"

"On camera."

"No, I mean," the guy says, "when do we get to pick?"

Perrin's smile does not move at all. That is the tell. A smile that does not move is a smile somebody has been issued.

"You don't," he says. "Production pairs the teams. Nobody gets a say."

The room makes a sound. Half laugh, half something else.

Across the room, Marisol Arbogast looks at her brother. Deet shrugs with one shoulder, still working on the apple.

I set my paper cup down on the table by the urn, and my hand is steady, because I have spent nine years making sure my hand is steady, and the only thing my hand has ever told anybody is what I want it to.

Somewhere in this building, a person I have never met is looking at a chart with my name on it.

CHAPTER 2

GHORLAN

DAY MINUS 2

The estimate lives in my shirt pocket, folded in half, and I keep it there because folded in half is how it sat on the kitchen table for two weeks with the number turned toward the wall.