“We can’t—”
“I will leave you behind, Kate,” he says.
“You’re a bastard.”
“No,” I say. “He’s what’ll keep you alive.”
Kate gasps, looks in my direction, and her breath catches formless in the air. I wonder if she can read something in my expression that I’m usually better at hiding. I’ve been free-soloing since Acke, but it would be pretty petty to say so. Though I want badly to bask in Nick’s uncommon approval.
Nick’s head drops further between his knees, and I hear only his chattering teeth. Still none of us move. Up here, we’re statues: half-frozen, half-thawed; half-numb, half-crazy. Half-alive, half-dead. It’s a miracle we feel anything at all.
Nick gets back on his feet with grunted effort. He swears again; coughs. The latter rattles down inside his chest. “Let’s go.”
The serac is a block of glacial ice as big as a three-story townhouse. Near to the start of our summit ascent, the route alongside was lit by flare lamps and set with fixed ropes. Now, its threat is magnified by darkness and formless new terrain. And all the death and weight that we’ve brought back down the mountain with us.
Nick wedges a metal nut into one of the rocks close to the serac’s beginning. He clips a quickdraw to the wire, threading the rope through it and his own carabiner before feeding it backwards in generous loops. “We’re not decking out, okay? Not fucking today.”
Some color has returned to Kate’s cheeks. She picks up the rope, locks into the belay. I do the same—muscle memory triggering too many other less welcome memories: me and Nick, Kate and James climbing rock faces, ice pillars, mountains. Trekking and hiking and camping all over the world. Getting shit-faced in dodgy bars and on deserted beaches. At James’ funeral, Kate clung to Nick as if he was the only anchor on a Grade V vertical climb. She and I had been friends since high school, but she never again dragged me to karaoke bars or treated me to spa weekends in wanky Essex hotels, as if she’d lost me over the same sheer cliff as her husband. When I asked Nick how I could help her, he told me I’d be best leaving her alone until she came to me. And she never did.
The serac radiates a different kind of cold than the mountain. It’s breathless, sharp, and thin. Fragile. Silent blue dark looking up into an icy white space and sky. Endless shadow.
Nick edges along the base of the serac too slowly. The ledge is narrow—less than a foot across in some places—and the drop on the other side is big; even in the dark it has the power to squeeze my stomach, water my eyes. And it’s always been Nick’s cautiousness that frightens me, never his selfish recklessness. He feeds back more rope in slow turning loops, but he doesn’t look around. “Don’t stop,” he says.
Close to the halfway point, Kate falters, one gloved hand getting caught in the gear as she tries to navigate Nick’s hastily improvised line. I dilute my impatience with the memory of the couloirs, the dread and relief of now I’m fucked, there’s no way I’m not when the avalanche stole the fixed lines. It’s too easy to stop thinking past doctored routes, too easy to start shitting yourself whenever you have to unhook from their security for even a few seconds.
Kate goes on fumbling, hesitating, trying and failing to free herself, to move. Powdered snow falls through the gap between us. The serac was never stable, but now fuck knows how many tons of avalanche threaten to overload it to the point of collapse. And if that happens, it doesn’t matter how careful and slow we’re being; how many ropes and anchors we do or don’t have.
“I’m scared,” Kate whimpers, and her hands still, shoulders hunch.
Nick is far enough ahead to be nearly out of sight, so she can only be talking to me. I remember the puja twelve hours before we left base camp: a Lama and two skinny monks bent over a stone altar, the smell of juniper reminding me of the gins from the night before; equipment spread around us and waiting to be blessed: harnesses, crampons, ice-axes, and helmets, even our expedition flag. Pasang chanting alongside the monks, placating the spirits, making his offerings of yak milk and chocolate and rice as the Lama talked to the mountain, asked it to let us climb to its summit. Kate, hungover and dull-eyed, her smile scornful as she stifled a yawn: Mountain says no.
She doesn’t know I hate her. She doesn’t know that less than six months after James’ funeral, Nick got down on his knees and told me how many times they’d fucked; that he held onto me so tightly I was nearly glad that they had. She doesn’t know that he would never leave me. She doesn’t know him.
“It’ll be all right,” I say, and her shoulders drop, she finally tugs her glove free, clips back into the line.
And at the halfway point, I start to think it might be. That maybe—just maybe—the sheer number of Bad Things that have already happened are enough. But then I feel it: the air changing just like it did before Jakub came sliding out of the gloom on the other side of that mirror—a hush, a breath too close to my ear—and I know that I’m wrong. Again.
I unclip myself from the line, and I’m no longer slow, no longer afraid. My crampons find little purchase; my left foot slips off the ledge into dark space more than once, but I keep on going, faster, faster. Until I reach Kate.
“Go!” I push her so hard she shrieks—but either she can sense the danger in my voice or in the slow deadly shifts of the wall of ice against us, because she immediately obeys, abandoning the fixed line even as Nick is screwing in another anchor up ahead.
“Go!” I scream again. “Nick! Go!”
He turns just as my headlight finds him, his face slack and pale, and then he looks up at the serac in the very moment that it starts to scream.
We run. And run. And the world collapses around us.
Kate is who I hear first. She’s sobbing again, but she can’t catch enough breath—the result is an oddly comforting squeak. She only stops to shout Nick’s name, and a sob comes out of me too when, finally, he answers in a hoarse shout.
I sit up, struggle to get to my knees. When I look back, the line is gone, the ledge is gone, the serac is gone. I’m finding it hard to breathe myself—I hear the thin air wheeze through my lungs—but my O is gone too.
I stand up and sway, but there’s nothing to hold onto. When Nick struggles to his feet a few meters further down, his headlight glancing off Kate’s helmet, her suit, I see a long streak of blood running from his temple to his jaw.
“Oh my God, Nick,” she says. She sounds exhilarated and broken at the same time. “Oh my God.”
He doesn’t answer, just keeps staring up at all the destruction behind us, eyes still wide and wild and black.
And I stare back, but even though we’re the closest we’ve been since the summit, I know I can’t reach any closer. My dread is exhausted, heartbroken. He’s safe. He’s alive. But it isn’t enough.
“You felt her too, right?” Kate grabs hold of his upper arms. “I know you fucking did. She was there! She was—”
“Don’t touch me,” he says, but he’s already shrugged her off, already backed away. He keeps on looking, looking, looking, and something in him finally breaks as he drops to his knees, as he howls into the black, the vast ocean of white.
I look away from Nick and back at the summit. The low moon throws light and shadow against the rock, the snow, the ridges and fissures, the pillars and gullies. I think of Jakub and Acke and all the others who’ll be left on this mountain, frozen in time and in place; disappeared, or dragged away from the path to become a landmark, a trig point, a cautionary tale. I think of Pasang and Chongba and the Slovaks trapped inside the Death Zone with no fixed lines, and an avalanche and collapsed serac between them and Camp IV. They may as well be on that moon.