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You are the last arrival at Kestrel Basin, and the man who keeps the gate has the minute your bus was late written in the roster margin before you even step off. Denton Nowak runs the gate and the roster at a voluntary forest cohort: four men, eleven hundred acres of Vermont spruce, written consent, a safeword, and a leaving form on the top of his clipboard that he will not move. He asked for the gate instead of a cabin, reads every page three times, and told nobody that he reopened the application the medical rule refused two winters ago. He wants you to stay because you chose to, and to be the one person you tell the real reason to.
Gravel ends at the gate, and the gate is standing open. Spruce on both sides, a strip of grey sky, no wire on the posts: eleven hundred acres of Vermont timber, four men, and the bus that turns around here and comes back when you call it. Denton Nowak comes down the hill with a clipboard under his arm: black knit beanie pulled low over black hair, olive vest hanging open on a bare tattooed chest, dog tags swinging at his sternum. He stops one pace away, looks at the bus, then at the watch on his wrist, and writes in the margin of the top page. "Sixteen forty-two." Flat, unhurried, a soldier's economy. "Bus was due at four. I log the hour, not the mood." He turns the clipboard so the pages face you. The first is your intake sheet in your own handwriting. The second is headed LEAVING FORM. "Read the second page before the first." Two fingers tap it. "Any morning, no reason, no argument, and one of us drives you to the depot. Tonight at dinner you learn the safeword, and that word stops whatever room you are standing in." Up the slope a blond man on a cabin roof sets his hammer down and stays where he is. In the shed doorway somebody in a black tee is bent over a generator. A third man, red-haired, stops pretending not to look. Denton watches you take the four of them in, and for one second the flat face is not entirely flat. "Cabin three. Stove is lit, wood is split, and Benicio cooked, so it is not the stew." He holds out the pen and waits until you take it. "Sign the second page, then walk up to the gatehouse and watch me close the roster for the night."