Read Chapter 11: The Brace of Fate

The snow groaned beneath Élise’s boots. A low, animal sound that vibrated up through the ice and into her spine.

Philippe’s voice came from below, thin and reedy through the crack. “Élise? What’s happening?”

She didn’t answer. She was staring up at the rim of the crevasse, where a shape had appeared against the bruised purple sky. Luc’s silhouette, broad against the fading light, a coil of rope slung over his shoulder.

“Luc!” She waved her free arm. “He’s down here. Philippe. His leg is broken.”

Luc dropped to his knees at the edge, peering down. The crevasse mouth was only four feet wide at the top, but it opened like a throat into the blue-dark below. “I see you. Hold on.”

He uncoiled the rope, and she watched its length fall. Meters of bright orange nylon, snaking down toward her. It stopped swinging a good twelve feet above her head.

Luc’s jaw tightened. “It’s not enough. I used the better line on the group split. The other coil is in the shelter.”

Élise looked at the dead end of the rope, swaying just out of reach above Philippe’s broken form. She looked at Marta, who was holding the anchor point, her face pale and tense.

“The headlamp,” Élise said quietly. “You have it?”

Philippe nodded, understanding. She flicked the lamp from her pack and showed him the camera strap loops. “My strap’s nylon. It’ll double.”

“No.” Luc’s voice cut down like a chisel. “No. You’re not improvising with camera gear.”

“It’ll hold.” She was already working at the buckle of her body harness, unbuckling the chest belt. “My kit is rated for climbing weight. And we’re under a time ceiling. Ingrid’s group is still moving toward the field.”

“Élise.” Luc’s voice cracked. He shifted at the rim. “I’ll rappel down and haul him up. You tie off on something and get out.”

“The field is unstable,” she called back. “Marta can’t hold that anchor alone if the ground shifts. And I know this crevasse system better than you do—I walked the glacier from the east side. You know your ropes. I know this ice.”

Silence. She could feel his frustration radiating off him even from up here.

“You’ll be left,” he said finally, his voice barely audible.

“You’ll come back.” She said it like it was simple arithmetic. Then she turned to Philippe and began binding the camera strap tight around his chest, under the armpits, creating a sling harness.

Philippe’s broken leg was bent at a bad angle, the ankle swollen through his boot. He’d gone pale, sweat beading along his temples despite the cold. “You two argue like people who’ve had this fight before.”

“We have.” She snapped the camera strap buckle into place and fed the rope’s tail through it, testing the knot twice. “Talk when you’re above.”

Luc leaned over the lip, his face a mask of controlled fury. “If it fails, I’m coming down after you.”

“If it fails, you run. You get the tourists safe.” She met his eyes. Time stretched between them, one heartbeat cracked with everything unsaid.

Then she pulled.

The rope went taut. Luc took the load, leaning back into his anchor, and Philippe rose off the ground with a sharp gasp of pain. Élise braced herself against the crevasse wall, steadying him, keeping him clear of the jagged ice as Luc hauled hand over hand.

Philippe’s boots scraped the wall. His weight shifted. The rope creaked.

Marta’s voice floated down, sharp and panicked: “The snow’s cracking! Under Élise!”

Before Élise could process the words, the floor beneath her feet gave way.

She felt it as a sudden drop of nothing, a falling sensation that came up through her knees before the ice sheared and the world tipped. The crevasse’s second chamber split open beneath her—the same crack she’d felt moments earlier, now fully yawning.

Luc’s shout was somewhere above, distant and distorted: “ÉLISE!”

She had a single breath of time, a single frame of vision, as she fell through the dark: Philippe’s figure being hauled out, his shadow against the night sky; Luc’s arm extended impossibly toward her; and then nothing but widening blue-black space, walls sliding past her, the headlamp dying as it hit the ice.

The frostfire of impact never came.

Instead, she landed sideways into a drift of soft, ancient powder. The fall was maybe fifteen feet, buffered by the settled snow that filled the cavern floor. Air left her lungs with a cough, and gravelly ice slid across her skin. She lay still, catching her breath, staring up at the faint pinprick of light that marked the opening far above.

“ÉLISE!” Luc’s voice again, bouncing off the walls, made small by distance. “ÉLISE, CAN YOU HEAR ME?”

She sat up, pushed a hand through the powder. Cold bit into her knees. Her wrist ached. Her camera was gone—she’d unclipped it to give Philippe. The radio was long destroyed. She had no headlamp, no rope.

But the light from the opening was enough to see by, dimly. And as her eyes adjusted, shapes began to emerge in the dark around the cavern’s floor.

She blinked.

Twenty feet away, propped against the ice wall, sat a figure. Fully dressed. Hood up. Backpack leaning beside it like a companion. It had been there a long time—frost filmed over the shell of the jacket, a thin skin of ice sealing the face beneath the hood.

An old climbing partner, someone she thought she’d lost years ago.

Someone whose name she hadn’t said aloud in four years.