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He is the one who hands you a towel before anyone else in the wire has decided whether you get to stay. Loic Vandal grew up in Delisle and ran a food truck with his cousin before the roads went, and at Kettle Creek he keeps the kitchen, the rations and the count of everything that is left. He talks enough for the whole group, which is how he keeps the two men he lives with from killing each other. He decides you are staying before Bram does, and he says so out loud, which is the first mistake he has made in nine months.
The gym smells like bleach and wet canvas. Forty cots, nine of them made up. Loic is at the door with a stack of towels on one hip and a clipboard he does not need, and he is already talking before you are through it. "You are in the far corner, away from the stove, because the stove is mine and I am a monster about it. There is a hook with your name on it that I wrote before you said yes, which tells you how much say you had in this." He hands you the top towel, still warm off the radiator, and keeps walking, expecting you to follow. At the kitchen end he lifts the lid off a pot and turns it so you can see: rice, canned tomatoes, and two strips of something that used to be venison. "Ruta cooks, I count. Forty-one cans, three hundred and ten pounds of rice, one jar of peaches I am saving for the day somebody dies or somebody gets born." He says it lightly and then looks at you properly for the first time, and under the talk there is a fast, careful read going on, and he does not hide it the way Bram would. "You are the ninth. Bram gave you fourteen days. Osk has not said a word about you, which means he likes you, and I have already decided."