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Ghorlan says my name once, like a man reading a load off a gauge and disbelieving the number.

Then I move.

There is no room for either of us to move properly. That is the night, start to finish. His head is jammed against the peak and my hands are braced on nylon and his boots are in the taper and every stroke is a negotiation with a structure rated for two average persons, and the tent shifts on the deck, and the arches take it, and neither of us goes near a pole.

He gets a hand under me and takes my whole weight in it, and after that he does the moving, and he lifts me and brings me down on him with an unhurried strength that turns my arms to string. I come apart with my mouth open against his throat and my teeth in the muscle there, and he holds me through all of it with one hand spread across my back, and does not stop, and I am still shuddering when he goes over, deep, his hips coming up off the deck and his other arm locking around me hard enough to bruise, and something Ostvek and low and wordless coming out of him against my hair.

The rain goes over the eave.

Somewhere south, the cloud lights up green.

We lie in a wrecked tent in a heap of wet wool with my head under his jaw and his hand still spread across my back, and my leg has gone numb from the hip down and I have no intention whatsoever of moving it.

"Structural report," I say, into his throat.

"Fabric intact. Poles intact. Two grommets have pulled about a quarter inch and the shock cord in the near arch has slackened, which I will correct in the morning." A pause. "The floor is fine."

"The floor is a hundred and fifty denier."

"The floor is a hundred and fifty denier and it has never concerned me."

I laugh into him until my ribs hurt.

Later, in the dark, with the storm gone down to normal weather, I lie against the warmest thing on this mountain and go through it the way I go through anything, hand by hand, and the trouble is that I have no name for what this was.

It was not the show. The show was off. That is the entire and only reason it happened tonight and both of us have that.

Nobody said a word about after.

At five forty in the morning the rain stops properly for the first time in nine days, and the sky over the drainage goes from black to a color like the inside of a shell, and I lie there with my ear against his ribs and count him breathing.

At six ten, down the ridge, an engine starts.

It hits the culvert at the second switchback and goes bang, and somebody swears.

CHAPTER 18

GHORLAN

DAY 10

They come over the lip of the bench at six forty in the morning, and the first one over is the safety officer, and the second one is Bear.

I am standing on the deck holding a broken tent pole.

There is no version of this morning in which I am not standing on the deck holding a broken tent pole, because at four in the morning I put my elbow through a section of the near arch getting out to bank the fire, and the aluminum went at the joint exactly as I said it would, and now there is a foot of cut tube in my hand and a two person tent with a limp on the deck behind me.

"Morning," the safety officer says. "Everybody breathing?"

"Yes."

"Anything to report?"

Here is the situation.

I have no capacity for concealment. None. It is not a principle with me, it is an absence, like a man with no sense of smell. My grandmother has told this story at every family gathering since I was nine years old, about the window and the cricket ball and the fact that I stood in the garden holding the ball and waiting.

"The tent is damaged," I say.