Kris walked the perimeter of the lodge at dawn, checking the foundations the way she'd learned to check her own designs — for the cracks no one else wanted to see. The stone showed hairline fractures near the northwest corner, small enough to ignore if you were trying to meet a deadline or impress a producer. But the transmission tower beyond the lodge stopped her cold. Steel lattice bent at angles that made her stomach drop, power cables frozen mid-droop like stopped clocks. Ice had locked the damage in place, made it look stable. The base had sunk three inches into compromised ground — she could see where the concrete pad had cracked and shifted. She pulled out her phone and photographed the angles, the measurements, the way the weight was redistributing through failing joints. No one had mentioned this. Not in any safety briefing, not on any walk-through. The tower fed power to half the cabins, and it would come down in the next heavy wind. She could write it up, submit it to the producers, let them decide if contestant safety mattered more than their shooting schedule. Or she could fix it herself — spend three days on someone else's neglect instead of designing anything that would get her noticed, get her paid, get her out of debt. She took another photo. The lodge behind her was full of people who'd already decided this wasn't their problem.

She went looking for the producers before breakfast, while the other contestants were still in their cabins. The tower wasn't going to fix itself, and pretending it wasn't her problem felt like the kind of choice that would catch up to her later. She found two of them in the lodge's monitoring room, screens flickering with empty cabin shots. They listened to her explain the tower — the measurements, the concrete failure, the timeline before the next storm — and then one of them leaned back in his chair and smiled. "Here's what we can do," he said. "Fix it yourself. Quietly. Three days, no cameras, and we'll make sure you get good airtime on the next build challenge." The other producer slid a key across the table. "There's a workbench by the north storage. Tools are in the cabinet. Or you file a formal complaint, we shut down production for an investigation, and you lose access to materials for the rest of the season." Kris picked up the key. She didn't trust their promise, but she trusted a failing tower even less. Outside, she hauled the workbench to the tower's base herself, the wooden legs scraping tracks through the snow. No one came to help. No one even looked.