Chapter 6: First Climb

The foreman looked at me over his clipboard at five-forty Monday morning.

"Ordway."

"Yes, sir."

"Don't sir me. I work for a living." He squinted. "You're the Varden girl."

The co-op yard went quiet.

Five linemen stopped loading the bucket truck to listen.

Word traveled down a mountain fast.

"I'm an Ordway," I said. "The Vardens threw me out on Saturday."

The foreman chewed on that.

"They say you stabbed somebody up there."

"They say a lot of things up there."

"Did you?"

"No," I said. "Somebody cut the generator feed and tried to hang it on me. I'm going to find out who."

He looked at me for a long second.

Then he spat on the gravel.

"Can you climb?"

"Yes."

"Then you're on my truck. The rest of it's none of my business until it makes us late."

That was it.

That was the whole interview.

The oldest lineman on the crew had a white mustache and a thermos the size of a fire extinguisher.

He handed me a hard hat with a strip of tape across the front.

Somebody had already written NEW on it in marker.

"Don't take it personal," he said. "We all had one."

"How long did you wear yours?"

"Nineteen eighty-eight to nineteen ninety-one."

The youngest guy on the crew snorted into his coffee.

He was maybe twenty-two, with a sunburned neck and a toothpick.

"Is it true you can't smell anything up there?" he asked. "Like, you're a werewolf with no wolf?"

"Other way around," I said. "They can't smell me."

"That's so cool."

"It's really not."

"It's a little cool," the old lineman said.

Nobody asked anything else about it all day.

I couldn't remember the last time I'd gone a whole hour without someone mentioning it.

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