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"Ghorlan."

"I let the mountain call it carrying because being the one who carries is a comfortable thing to be." The fire ticks. "That is my error. And it is a bigger one than yours."

She sits with that for a while.

"You're doing tonight's early," she says.

"Yes."

"Why."

"Because I would like the rest of tonight for something else."

She gets up and comes around the fire.

She stops in front of me, and I am sitting, so for once in this entire arrangement we are nearer the same height, and she puts one hand along my jaw. Her fingers are cold. Everything up here is cold. Her thumb goes across the ridge of bone under my eye, once, carefully, the way a person checks a piece for square.

"Say the thing," she says.

"Which thing."

"The corner thing. Say it out loud, in your terrible flat carpenter delivery, because I have wanted a man to say it exactly like that my whole life and I have never gotten it."

So I say it.

"There is a fold in the rock at the back left of this overhang, nine feet deep and four feet wide," I say. "The fixed unit is on the ledge at eighty feet with a fifty millimeter lens on it. There is no line from that unit into that fold. There is no field producer on this site after eighteen hundred. The floor there is duff over sand, dry, about six inches, and it will take both of us, and the roof over it has been holding for ten thousand years, so I have no concerns about the load."

Junie Halloran shuts her eyes.

"You beautiful, literal disaster," she says.

Then she takes my collar in both fists and pulls, which does nothing, because she weighs a hundred and eighteen pounds, and I let her do it anyway, and I stand, and I take her up off the ground with one arm under her and carry her nine feet into the dark.

The bags go down first. I do that part because she will not, and because the duff is cold even if it is dry, and I put my coat over the bags on top of that.

Then there is no more preparation to be done and we are standing in a fold of rock four feet wide with the fire throwing orange up the wall behind us, and neither of us has spoken in a minute.

"You're going to have to talk," she says.

"I talk."

"You issue structural assessments." Her hands are working the buttons of my shirt and her fingers keep slipping because they are half numb. "I want the other thing."

"Say what you want and I will say it."

"That's not how..." She laughs, once, low. "God. Fine. Fine, all right."

I take her wrists and stop them and put both her hands flat on the stone above her head, and hold them there with one of mine, and get the rest of the buttons myself, and she goes quiet in a way she has not gone quiet in fourteen days.

"On the fifth night," I say, "you came out of the tent at two in the morning to check a knot you had already checked twice, and you were wearing my shirt because yours was soaked, and it came to your knees, and I lay there and did arithmetic about what I would have to be to not be looking."

"Ghorlan."

"On the ninth night in the tent you put your mouth on the underside of my jaw and the tent was rated for a hundred and eighty pounds and I gave it very little attention at the time." I get the last of the shirt off her and the cold takes her skin and she makes a sound. "It has been on me every night since. That is the honest answer to the question you have been asking me sideways for five days."

"I wasn't asking sideways."

"You were asking sideways."