It had become clear over three days that Ashley had the least survival experience of all of them. She had poor instincts with fire, putting damp wood on dark coals, blocking the flow of air by accident. She said most of her outdoors experience was car camping. Mara liked that she didn’t pretend otherwise. She respected Ashley as much for that as she would for expertise. It struck her as brave both to come here without training and to admit it.

“What about you guys?” said Mara.

Bullfrog, still stretching his toes, gave a nod.

Kyle didn’t answer. They all looked at him. Eventually he noticed them looking.

“James was weak,” said Kyle. “Objectively. That’s not rude to say. It’s the truth. It was too much for him.”

The light caught his hair, gave it a golden glow, and he seemed in the moment like a child. An idiot child. But Mara felt a strange protectiveness, which surprised her, and she didn’t quite like the feeling. Kyle was annoying, but he was part of the team. Which meant that she was, too, she guessed. Four people on the inside of something no one else would ever truly see.

8

If there was ever a routine at camp, it was those first days after James left. Though the days made up, proportionately, a tiny portion of the survivors’ stay, it was the time that would serve as quintessential, and in retrospect idyllic. Mara did not enjoy the days nearly as much as she would later miss them.

Lenny offered no more missions, and anyway, the survivors probably would not have followed them. Instead he hovered around, directing the cameras and making pointed statements—“I bet you’re getting hungry out here”—until somebody, usually Kyle, humored him by repeating them: “You know, I’m really starting to get hungry.” The survivors settled on tasks themselves. Bullfrog’s shelter grew stronger and more intricate by the hour, bark shingles over layers of moss insulation, with mounds of dry grass and leaves to soften the floor. He built out the shelter’s sides until it was less of a lean-to and more of a building in its own right. A slit for the door, which the survivors slipped through sideways, and a fire pit that vented through a hole in the roof. Lenny propped a camera inside, in the far corner. Kyle carved lines in the eave to count the days.

Inside, with the fire, the shelter was much warmer than the outside air, and the survivors no longer shivered in their sleep. They slept curled in chosen quadrants; there was no room to stretch out. But apart from the itchiness of the grass, and the bugs that crawled from the fire and over their bodies, the nights weren’t bad. When the morning warmed and the crew arrived, the survivors built a second fire outside, too, so as not to make the shelter too hot. Bullfrog took breaks from building to chop and stack logs faster than they could burn them.