Adam selected pills for himself, studying Hakan’s face. “This cousin you didn’t tell us about? He’ll have given his group the same medicines, I assume?”
Hakan closed the pill bottle, slid it back into his jacket, and stomped on the last embers of the fire. Meryam approached Adam and cupped his scruffy, bearded cheek in her hand. When he turned to her, she dry-swallowed the pills and grinned.
“Let’s go, my love,” she said. “We’re in a bit of a hurry now.”
“Olivieri’s got horses and mules,” Adam replied quietly, clutching his own pills.
“And you’ve got me. Get ready and then start filming.”
“You have a plan?”
Meryam laughed. “The only possible plan. They’ll want to use their animals as long as possible. They’re going to Camp Two and then straight across to the southeast face, above the cave, just as we’d planned to do.”
Adam thought about the broken rock and earth that the avalanche would have spread down the mountainside beneath the entrance to the cave. He thought of the inch or more of snow that had fallen on top of it during the night.
“So we stay just west of the rockfall. Straight up, but not in the avalanche zone,” he said. “Not completely suicidal, but still dangerous as hell.”
As the burning rim of the sun crested the eastern horizon, her eyes sparkled. “Exciting, isn’t it?”
The next time Meryam saw Olivieri more than nine hours had passed. She had her pick buried in the icy rock in front of her and the claws of her crampons digging for toeholds. Her stomach twisted and bile burned up the back of her throat but she forced herself not to vomit with the pain inside her skull. Acute altitude sickness could be fought. She’d already taken more medication and she had both prayed to and cursed her own god and everyone else’s. She told herself that she would be all right, and maybe that was true. As long as her lungs didn’t fill with fluid and her brain didn’t swell—the results of pulmonary or cerebral edema—the other symptoms would subside eventually.
If she did develop edema and didn’t descend immediately, it would be quite a different ending to her story. She would die.
Breathing deeply in the thin air, Meryam dug the toe of her boot into the ice and hauled herself upward, ripped her pick out and smashed it back into the mountain overhead. Skipping acclimatization had been a stupid, stupid plan. Setting off on their own, even with guides who knew the secrets of the mountain better than the curves of their wives’ flesh, had been idiotic.
The horizon had turned a deep indigo on one end of the sky, the sun gliding into hiding on the other. A hand touched her back and she glanced to her right, surprised to see that Adam had overtaken her. The wind whipped at his face, making him squint.
“Didn’t you hear me calling you?”
“The wind,” Meryam said, resting against the mountain. “What’s the problem?”
“Feyiz is right. We should have stopped at that shelf we passed half an hour ago. I think we should go back to it.”
Grip tightening on the handle of her pick, she stared at him. Queasy, head pounding, she had to play the words over in her head to make sure she’d heard them correctly.
“Hakan said we could make it! He said we were almost there!”
Adam’s expression hardened with frustration. “That was an hour ago and where are we now? Do you see the damn cave? Even if we get there, you know as well as I do that there’s no ark inside. It makes for great footage, but it’s impossible for a flood to have reached this height—”
“Who’s this talking now?” Meryam said. “Not my Adam. I’m the atheist in this relationship, remember? What’s impossible when God’s in the mix?”
Her parents and brother refused to speak to her or even acknowledge that she still shared the same planet with them. The alienation had both broken her heart and emboldened her to fulfill her dreams, but still it was so lonely. The last time she had been with them, on a hot July day in London six years before, she had seen sadness and longing in her mother’s eyes but only hatred and disgust from her father and her brother. If her mother had the courage to flout her husband’s wishes, Meryam thought they might speak again one day. But she doubted that time would ever come. Declaring herself an atheist had been as bad as spitting in her father’s face and she had known that before she had ever spoken the words. She had done it anyway, determined not to hide her true self. Not ever.
Now here she was, desperate to claim whatever lay in that cave. Part of her wanted to find it empty, to throw that emptiness in the faces of the self-righteous bastards in every faith she had ever encountered. But another part of her wanted very badly to find something… anything to believe in. Anything that might ignite a spark of faith in her and lead her, if not home, then at least to a place where she and her family could speak again.
“Can we have this conversation later?” Adam said. “We need to do something. We can’t make it to the cave before sunset and it’s too dangerous to—”
She set her knees against the thin layer of snow and let go of the pick, just the crampons on her boots holding her in place. “Come on! It’s not like it’s a vertical face. I’ll get banged to hell if I fall, but I’m not going to plummet to my doom.”
He fixed her with a cold glare. “Stop it.”
Meryam sighed and grabbed hold of the pick. Yes, they ought to have brought pitons and rope, and if they’d brought them they would have been using them here. And, yes, if she did fall at the wrong point and couldn’t slow her tumbling descent, there was always the chance that she’d smash into a rock or fall into a crevasse, but the terrain to the east was so much steeper. A sheer, jagged face, even under the snow. As long as they kept climbing straight up—
“No,” Adam said, reading her face. “We’re already close to the rockfall. You don’t know how close. Not even Hakan knows. We’re going back down to that shelf and camping there for the night.”
Meryam grabbed hold of the pick again, feeling herself deflate. “If we stop, I’m not sure how long it’ll be before I can carry on.”
Adam rested against the mountain beside her. “You should’ve spoken up.”
Hakan shouted at them from below. Meryam felt her hackles rise, ready to snap at him for his impatience. Then she caught the tone in his words, and put the syllables together to form a name. Olivieri.
She glanced below her and saw Hakan pointing up and to the west, then she lifted her gaze and squinted into the burning golden light of the setting sun. Higher on the mountain, still at least eight hundred meters below the peak, a line of black silhouettes made their way across a snow-clad ridge.
“Shit.”
“Meryam—” Adam began.
She whipped her head around to stare at him, heat rushing to her face, unable to explain her urgency, the necessity, her obsession with making this discovery herself. Rough and handsome in his scruffy way, it was the warmth and intelligence in his eyes that always got to her—that had supported her through so many journeys—but there were things she could not say to him. Not now.
At the moment she had only one word for this man she loved.
“Climb!”
“What—”
“Adam, just climb!” she snapped. Hauling back her pick, she planted it in the rock and ice above her head and hauled herself up. She kicked her left boot at the mountain, caught the teeth of her crampon into a toehold, and scrambled upward.
As she moved out of his sightline, she heard Adam swear, as he finally registered what she and Hakan had reacted to. Meryam glanced over again and saw the line of half a dozen silhouettes moving along the ridge to the west, nothing but dark cutouts against the golden gleam of the dying sun, shapes moving through the hour of long shadows.