“Someone?”
“I think he’s watching us,” he said, his voice lower.
It was too dark to see anything.
At my feet, Hollinger’s dead eyes, frozen in their sockets, were white, pupil-less stones.
Petras blew briskly into his palms, flexed his fingers, and tugged his gloves back on. When he turned to me, there were frozen bullets of ice clinging to his beard and eyelashes. His eyes looked as if two steel-colored pitons had been driven deep into the sockets.
“Forget it. Trick of the light,” he said, though he sounded like he was trying to convince himself, not me.
Beneath the cover of night, we hiked along the ridge, the snow a glittering carpet of diamonds, until exhaustion and the freezing temperature caused my muscles to seize.
“Petras—” I keeled over against a pillar of stone, clutching my body with stiffening arms.
Petras looked equally exhausted. He slumped beside me, his immense weight pressing me flat against the rock, though I was grateful for his warmth.
“No more,” I uttered. “Not tonight.”
“Your nose is bleeding again.”
I pulled off my glove and attempted to wipe the blood away, but it had frozen in a streak down my lips.
We bivouacked beside the stone pillar, which kept most of the freezing wind from attacking us, and took turns keeping watch. Most of our gear was soaking wet, so it took forever to get a small fire going, which died out halfway through the night. But it was probably for the best: we didn’t want to bring any further attention on us.
While Petras slept, I sat wrapped in my sleeping bag with thepickax in my lap. With the fire out, there was nothing but our sleeping bags and our own body heat to keep us warm. The tent was only about ten degrees warmer than outside. The wind screamed down the canyons, rattling like a runaway locomotive. I listened, forcing my eyes wide just to keep them open. They didn’t want to stay open. If I drifted too far into my own thoughts, I’d fall asleep, lulled by the numbing calm of dreams and the painlessness of frozen nerve endings. I set the timer on my watch for every three minutes—loud enough to jar me from an unplanned doze yet quiet enough not to disturb Petras.
I was just nodding off when the alarm on my watch made my head jerk up, my eyes blinking repeatedly. Lightning flashed, causing the tent to glow and the plastic windows to fill with brilliant blue light.
My breath caught in my throat.
Backlit by the lightning, stark against the canvas of the tent, a figure briefly appeared.
An electric dread coursed through my body. Gripping the handle of the pickax, I leaned toward the tent flaps. I thrust my head and shoulders out into the freezing night, blindly stabbing the pickax into the darkness in front of me. It had started to sleet, and it was impossible to see beyond the far corner of the tent. A second finger of lightning threw the valley into a wash of pale blue snow and bleak, shapeless shadows.
There was no one out there.
—Tim …
I shook my head, closed my eyes. “No. Not now, Hannah. Please.”
—Come with me, Tim …
“I can’t. You need to go away and let me keep my head straight.” Just hearing my own voice out loud caused a tremulous, self-indulgent laugh to rumble in my throat. “Jesus, I’m cracking up.”
Retracting the pickax into the tent, I took one final glimpse of the surrounding gully before withdrawing my head and shoulders through the canvas flaps.
In the morning, we continued along the outer ridge on empty stomachs. Beyond the peaks of the Himalayas, the sky looked scratchy and sepia toned, like an old filmstrip. Low-hanging cumulus clouds drew together like brooding eyebrows against the horizon. The sun was thumb smeared and pink. I began to convince myself that Petras and I were the only two men alive on the planet.
At lunchtime, Petras discovered oyster crackers at the bottom of his pack, which we shared while sucking down mouthfuls of snow.
“Andrew’s just as dead as we are,” Petras said after half a day of silence. His beard was fuller and white with freezing snow. Bits of ice dropped off as he spoke. “There’s no hope for him, either.”
But he has our food, I thought. He has the stove to make heat and the means to make a fire that can last through the night. He has the advantage of knowing where the hell we are, while we don’t know where he is. I thought all these things but didn’t say them. It hurt my throat to talk, and my nose had started bleeding again: the mound of melting snow in my hand was streaked red.
“It’ll take over a week to get back down the way we came.” Petras chewed the oyster crackers like a cow chewing cud—working his jaw in a slow rotation. “And that’s if we can even manage getting back just the two of us. Of course, that’s if we had food, a better source of heat, fire …”
“This is all stuff I know,” I informed him bitterly. “What are you suggesting? We just lie down in the snow, let it cover us up? Stick a few plastic flags around and hope maybe years from now someone will find us?”
“Is that what you want?” Petras wiped away the larger chunks of ice forming in his beard. His knife-blade eyes jabbed at me. “Remember when you told me about your solo trip into a cave? You broke your leg after falling down a ravine, right?”
I shrugged. It pained my muscles. “So?”
“So are you still that same man? The guy who can’t deal with shit and needs to go off by himself in a cave, hoping he won’t comeout?” He looked down at his fingers, powdered with cracker crumbs. “You still that guy?”
I thought about it. I honestly did. I thought about it for so long that it might have appeared I would never answer his question. But Petras didn’t rush me and didn’t meet my eyes in order to intimidate me into an answer.
Eventually I said, “No, I’m not that man. I’m a different man now.”
“Good.”
“So what do we do? You said it yourself we won’t make it back the way we came. And we sure as hell don’t know any other trails.”
“You’re right; we don’t. But if we go straight down—we take the easiest wall and abseil down the face—we can get to the valley in a day, maybe two. And in the valley—”
“There’s food,” I finished, suddenly comprehending. “There’re trees and streams and animals we could catch. It’s not as cold, and we could survive there if we had to. We just have to reach it.”
“Remember Hollinger’s story about living off the land in the outback for months with Andrew? It’s no different. If we can kill enough food, pack it in snow, take it with us … we might have a chance out of here.”
2
WE FOUND WHAT APPEARED TO BE AN EASY RAP-
pel to a series of jagged peaks, their black pointed hoods cresting through the snow. It was a straight run with what looked like sizable handholds all the way down.
“We’ll use one line,” Petras suggested. “Go one at a time.”
“You go ahead first.”
“No,” Petras said, “you go. I’m heavier. I’ll brace the line for you.”
He anchored the line to the ridge and ran it through my harness while I put on my helmet.
Petras breathed into my face: “You strong enough?”
“Guess I’ve got to be …”
“You can do it.”
“Yeah …” But the intervening days—the intervening hours—had weakened me considerably. My head felt filled with helium, and my eyes would not stop watering. The core of my body felt hollow, my face chafed raw from the unrelenting Himalayan wind.
“All right,” Petras said and thumped a hand atop my helmet.
I pitched over the side, Petras’s hands briefly on my shoulders, and abseiled the length of the wall to the craggy rocks below. At the bottom, I dropped my gear onto the ground and took off my helmet. Suddenly weightless, I felt as though a strong wind could sweep me right off the ridge.