Read Chapter 13: The Wind's Decision

The first gust hit like a wall. It came off the glacier with a howl that seemed to have no beginning and no end, just a constant, escalating scream. Élise instinctively turned her back to it, bracing against the rope Luc had rigged to the anchor points along the crevasse field. Around her, the mountain changed in seconds. The pale afternoon light turned to a bruised gray, and the air filled with a stinging spray of ice crystals that found every gap in her jacket.

Luc was shouting beside her. She caught only fragments. "…tie off! All of you, now! Make a chain to the snow bollard!"

Philippe lay on a makeshift sled of climbing rope and tarpaulin, his face pale beneath the grime and dried blood. His moans were lost in the wind. Élise saw Marta scrambling down from the upper ridge, her goggles frosted, her movements jagged with panic. Ingrid's group was still moving toward them, dark shapes leaning hard into the storm. One of the tourists—a man, she thought, the one with the expensive camera—was stumbling, unable to keep his footing.

"Luc!" she yelled, grabbing his arm. "We need to get them somewhere safe. They're not climbers, they don't know how to move in this."

He shook her off, but not unkindly. His face under the helmet was grim. "We can't reach the main shelter in this. It's an hour's traverse with wind gusts over a hundred kilometers. Philippe won't survive it."

"What about the old refuge? The one near the Rochers des Écoutes?" She knew it. A stone hut, battered but standing, roughly ten minutes from their position if they cut across the lower moraine. She used to photograph it at sunrise, before it had been decommissioned.

Luc blinked, wiped ice from his lashes. "It's abandoned. No supplies. No radio."

"Better than dying in the open," she shouted back. "We hunker down, we wait out the front, and then we get Philippe."

He held her gaze for a long moment. Then something shifted in his expression—a flicker of the old willingness to trust her judgment, before the years and the silences had gotten between them. He nodded once. "Marta! Start pulling the sled. Ingrid, get your people moving. We're heading to the old refuge, now!"

The wind screamed its disagreement. Getting there was a crawl. Each step was a negotiation with the gusts, which surged and relented in no visible rhythm. Élise found herself at Philippe's side, holding the sled level with Marta as they crossed a patch of slick ice. Bright shards of spindrift carved white rivers over the ground, erasing their footprints as soon as they made them. The world had narrowed to a bubble of chaos: the sound of Luc barking orders ahead, the rasp of Philippe's breathing, the crunch of crampons on frozen rock.

Inside the refuge, it was dark and close with the smell of old dust and mouse droppings. The windows were intact, but small. Élise counted fourteen bodies pushing through the door, then slammed it against the wind. The room was a single chamber with a rusted woodstove, a few iron bunks, and a stack of ancient, brittle logs. It was not much. But it was not the open face of the mountain.

"Fire," Luc ordered. "Élise, with me."

They worked swiftly. Luc broke the logs with a hammer from his kit while Élise fed kindling into the stove. When the first flames caught, a sigh rippled through the group. People pressed closer to the warmth. Ingrid was doling out water from her pack. Marta was re-wrapping Philippe's leg with clean bandages from the rescue kit. He was conscious, barely, his eyes tracking Élise as she moved.

"Thank you," he whispered, voice thin. "For coming back for me."

She squeezed his hand. "Don't thank me yet. We're not out of this."

Luc heard. He turned from the stove, his face hard to read in the firelight. "We're not. This storm could last the night. And we're short on everything." He paused, looked at the ceiling as if he could see through it to the sky. "I know a place. Higher up the valley, past the Rochers des Écoutes, there's a refuge that has a working radio and a snowcat. If I can get there, I can call in a lift. Air rescue won't fly in this, but ground extraction is possible if we can get the cat down to the lower road."

"How far?" Élise asked.

"Forty minutes in good weather. In this?" He shook his head. "Maybe two hours. On my own."

"You won't go on your own."

The words left her before she had fully decided to speak them. Luc raised an eyebrow. "Élise, your…" He stopped, glancing at the others.

The half-truth she had told the tourist earlier—that she and Luc had split because his job consumed him—suddenly felt wafer-thin. The real reason was the altitude sickness that had put her in a hospital bed three years ago, a blood pressure monitor beeping beside her as she signed her name to a doctor's note that ended her photographing above three thousand meters. She could feel the doctor's warning in her chest. And she could feel the weight of why she had come up here anyway, against advice, against reason. Because the mountain had called her back. Because Luc was up here.

"I'm not asking as your ex or as a patient," she said, her voice steady. "I'm asking as the person who knows the Rochers des Écoutes better than you ever did. The path is on the leeward side of the ridge most of the way. I know where the wind will be negotiating cover. And you'll need a second pair of eyes at the ice crossing. Alone, you're gambling."

"Luc." Marta's voice cut through. "She's right. Don't go alone. But don't be stupid either."

Luc studied Élise for a long moment. The firelight flickered across his face, illuminating the scar by his eye—a memento from a rescue gone sideways. He looked like the man she had loved, and also like a stranger. Then he let out a breath that fogged in the cold air.

"You have my radio. I'll take the flare gun. We move fast. We don't stop for anything." He pulled his pack onto his shoulders. "If this goes bad, you turn back and hold the shelter. Everyone here depends on you coming back with that snowcat."

Élise took the radio, its weight familiar in her palm. Outside, the wind shook the hut like something alive. She would be walking into it anyway. Because that was the kind of stubbornness the mountain had always rewarded and punished in equal measure.

"Let's go," she said, before she could tell herself no.