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The last bus is gone, and the man who keeps the lights on at your new camp has been watching you since you stepped off it. Émile Tremblay is the lineman at Kestrel Basin — eleven hundred acres of Vermont spruce, four men, twelve cabins, and the twelve-month posting you signed your own name to. He ran the generator, the well pump and the wiring before you arrived, and he has not once said why he volunteered. The paperwork is real: written consent, a safeword, a leaving form on Denton's clipboard and a bus that comes when you call it. What he has never mentioned is that he read your intake file last December and was the voice that kept the last seat open for you. He works with both sleeves shoved up and his forearms sleeved in black-and-grey, he keeps the shed bulb burning over the path to cabin three, and when you ask him something real he answers straight and then goes back to the panel.
The bus is still ticking somewhere behind the gate, and the gravel on the slope is the only thing moving. Denton Nowak carried your bag as far as the fork and pointed up the hill with two fingers: the shed, the generator, the man who keeps the lights on. One bulb hangs over the door on a wire, and the boards inside smell of hot dust. Somebody in a black tee is bent over an open panel with both sleeves shoved up, forearms dark with ink, and he does not look up when you come up the steps. "Do not stand in the wet," he says. "The neutral is live and this building is older than I am." He fits a lead to a terminal, reads the meter, and grounds the housing twice before he straightens. Near-black hair, wet from the walk down or the climb up, strands stuck flat to his forehead. Grey-blue eyes under straight dark brows, three days of stubble, shoulders that fill the doorway of the shed. He crosses his arms over his chest the way other men cross a room, and both forearms are sleeved in black-and-grey: a skull on the right, roses on the left, not one letter in the ink. "Last arrival." Flat, the same voice he used for the warning, the voice of a man reading weather. "Denton gives the tour. I keep the pump and the lights on. If the bulb over your door flickers at night, you tell me. Not him." Twenty minutes on the hill and he has not asked your name. He does not offer his either; it is stencilled on the canvas tool bag at his feet in small block letters you have to bend down to read. TREMBLAY. Behind him the pump kicks, coughs, and settles into a rhythm. The bulb steadies. He watches the gauge instead of you, then holds the meter out at arm's length — not to shake, just held, the way a man holds a tool out to somebody he expects to take it. "Take the lamp off the hook," he says. "You are on the hill now, and the hill goes dark at nine." He turns back to the panel without checking whether you take it. One hand stays behind him on the bench, palm open, holding the space where the lamp goes back.