Pasang doesn’t react. Chongba isn’t with him, so he must have left him behind with the Slovaks, while he’s come down the mountain to see how bad it is; if they can still make it down without having to bivy or call for an evac that’ll probably never come. How long did I stay kneeling in the snow waiting for Acke to die? It must have been hours. Pasang’s eyes scan the terrain ahead and then he looks back at the mountain behind. He never wears goggles and he never carries O. I sometimes wonder if he even needs to eat, shit, or fuck either.
He asks, “Who was higher than them?”
“Holmberg means Island Mountain. Did you know that?” I feel numb, but I no longer know which kind of numb. Something tugs at my mind, puckers my skin. Makes me remember to be afraid. I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing here.
He blinks. “Sarah. Who was higher than them?”
I know why he’s asking. It’s because I’m the first person he’s seen. And everyone else between us is gone.
“Bosse. Benoit and Savane. The Australians, I think. I don’t know.”
Pasang curses. This will be the end of the 8000er Experience, I think, and I feel a guilty spark of hope that must show in my eyes because Pasang straightaway narrows his.
“Why you here?”
“What the fuck does that mean?” I look down at the snow under my boots, my crampons. Already my escape route has filled in as if it never was.
“You hate the mountains. Always.” His voice is not cold, though his words are. They sound angry. “Why you come back, every time?”
I swallow because even if I understand the question, I don’t understand why he’d ask it now.
“You don’t belong here.” His gaze grows softer. “You never belong here.”
But I don’t want to argue with him, because he’ll never understand. He’s never understood why any of us keep coming back, not really. Most of the time he manages to hide his contempt. Just about.
“You know why. I’m here for Nick.”
The way is treacherous, of course. I’m clunky, a functional climber, Nick has always said, though I’ve never taken offense. It’s true. But now, clambering down barely settled snow, with no protection beyond my own gear, my own judgment, I wish that I loved it, I wish that I felt it. I wish that I could reach Nick by sheer force of want, of will.
Instead my descent is anything but functionaclass="underline" I stumble and I fall and I fuck up my handholds, my footholds. My rope snags and burns; my overhangs and hitches and anchors are poor—I move too slowly because I have as much confidence in my abilities as I do in the new ground beneath me. I only have the distant lights of Camp IV and Pasang’s directions to guide me, and I keep thinking of that cold, blue space and blunted pins, but I’m still doing it. I am doing it. And whether that’s down to his help or his scorn, I suppose hardly matters.
I knew Pasang would never come with me, but when he turned back to the dark shadow of the mountain, my belly clenched all the same, and I wanted to beg him to stop. Though I didn’t. His job is to look after the Slovaks. The fucking Slovaks who didn’t manage to get out of their fucking sleeping bags until 2 a.m. He has to trust that I can look after myself, and that Nick can look after his group. Alone. Just as I have to trust that Pasang will be okay, even if that suffocating dread behind thick, heavy curtains suspects better.
Nick. He’s all I can think about now. Not me or Pasang, Jakub, Bosse, the French Canadians, the Australians—not even Acke. Except to wonder if Nick has suffered the same terrible fate. I don’t think about the others in his group either. I don’t care about any of them—these idiots with too much money and too little of everything else. In that, I understand Pasang’s contempt. If my reasons for being here are stupid, then theirs are moronic. Nick despairs of their inexperience: their lack of knowledge, training, equipment; their sheer bloody self-entitlement. They’ve paid Nick and Pasang to get them to the summit and back, and nothing less will do. They haven’t paid for any kind of Experience at all. They’ve paid for a photo-op, a flag; Nick even prints them out a certificate. When Tomie Nà refused to stop after the docs at Camp II told him he could die if he climbed any higher, Nick rubbed his hands through his hair, spat into the snow, and then carried on preparing for the next section.
For all his faults—and I’m aware of them all, despite what everyone, including Pasang, believes—Nick loves these few places high above the rest of the world with a passion that could never be faked. And that’s why he’s here too. That’s why he puts up with everything else, all the other shit that he hates. Because he has as much choice as I do.
But it isn’t Nick I find first. It’s Kate. Her sobs creep up through the darkness like the wind around ice pillars; I only realize it’s her when I see headlights less than fifty yards below. I don’t know how long I’ve been descending now, or how much longer before I leave the Death Zone behind me. The lights of Camp IV look hardly closer, though the moon has moved far enough to disorientate me completely. I’m struggling to breathe, and my O is getting too low. That slow, creeping paralysis is back; a numbness inside and out that’s nearly seductive. It makes me want to stop asking myself if I’m about to dive-bomb the deep end of a swimming pool. It makes me not want to care if the answer is yes.
Kate’s sobs are nearly hysterical. I shout, but she doesn’t hear, doesn’t stop, barely draws breath. I try not to move too quickly as I edge down over still-shifting snow. The drifts are higher here, creating precarious peaks of their own, but overall the terrain is flatter, more glacial. Here is where most of the avalanche came to rest, I think. Here is where deep, dark crevasses will be hiding, waiting, beneath all that treacherous new snow. I try not to hesitate, to stop, to look for Nick, to waste precious breath of my own in more shouting. Instead, I carry on descending, descending, fucking descending, and praying a little too, for good measure. He has to be all right.
“We can’t go! How can we fucking go?” After an avalanche, mountain air gets thicker and sounds flatter; Kate’s voice is a hysterical monotone. “What about Tomie and—”
“Tomie, Jìng, and Lì are already gone, and you know it.”
I allow myself the luxury of stopping, of staring at the second headlight. His voice still echoes. Nick.
“Jesus, how can you be so cold?”
“We’re both pretty cold, Kate. And getting pretty fucking colder. It’s not them you care about. It’s the fucking serac between us and fucking freedom, and I can’t help you with that.”
By the time I reach them, I’m close to collapse. I can’t feel my legs, but I know it all the same. I feel hot when I should feel cold—or nothing at all. And all I can see is Nick. He’s hunkered down under a high overhang of rock, head low, gloved hands dangling between his legs. Kate sits close alongside him, and I try—and fail—not to care about that. They’ve been there too long, I care more about that; about the stiff, tired threat in their bodies, their voices.
“We can’t free-solo around a fucking serac with fuck knows how many tons of snow weighing down on it!” Kate’s digging in. Her voice is calmer, stronger. Once she makes her mind up about something, that’s usually it. “We need to stay here, wait for an evac. You’ve phoned our position in. We can’t—”
“We’re still in the Death Zone. No one will be coming for us.” Nick’s voice is just as calm, as confident, but I know he’s horrified. I know he’s blaming himself. Even though it’s the fault of the bloody Slovaks.