Read Chapter 2: Falling for the Past

The roar was still in her chest when she looked up. A slab of white had peeled off the east face, moving with the slow, terrible grace of something that knew it would win. It rode the ridgeline's curve, rolling into the steep couloir below—a river of snow and shattered rock and air so compressed that it sounded less like thunder and more like a building falling down.

Élise flattened herself against the granite, scrabbling for the anchor point she'd driven in an hour earlier. The rope came up taut. Good. The wind hit her first, a brutal sideways slap that tore at the hood of her shell. Then the spray—fine, crystalline powder driven at a hundred kilometers an hour, finding every gap in her zippers, icing her goggles into white blindness.

She counted. One. Two. Three. The avalanche core was below her, not on her. It had split against the spur she'd been standing on, taking the path of least resistance down the valley. A river of debris where, thirty minutes ago, she'd watched a line of tourists in bright orange parkas making their way across the lower snowfields.

*Shit.*

The roar faded into a grinding, settling hiss. Élise wiped the ice from her goggles and scanned the valley below. Where the snowfield had been, clean and white, there was now a crushed, fractured chaos—blocks the size of cars, dust still rising in lazy plumes off the surface.

And there, above it, small as a toy against the sky: the rescue helicopter, banking hard away from the debris field. Luc's helicopter. He had seen it all. He was turning to circle back when something caught his attention—no, not the avalanche. Something lower, to the west.

Élise followed his line of sight. Her binoculars were in her pack, but she didn't need them. She knew that fold in the terrain, the way the snow built up against the moraine wall in a shallow, sheltered basin. Tourists weren't trained to think about terrain traps. They saw open snow, a pretty place to stop for a photo.

They were still there. All of them, clustered in a tight, frightened knot. Alive for now, but the debris field was sliding past them—not on them, not yet—but it had cut off the route they'd come up. The basin would hold them, unless another slide broke loose from the unstable slopes above.

The helicopter was already moving. Not toward them—around them. Luc was looking for a landing zone, a spot of flat ground close enough to reach them on foot. He was going to drop someone, or he was going to try to get to them himself.

And the only feasible approach route, the only track that ran along the moraine's crest without crossing the fresh debris field, was the route Élise had scouted an hour ago on her way up.

Her route down.

She stood there on the ridge, wind tearing at her jacket. Her anchors were still good. Her camera was still in her chest pack, the files safe. She could descend the north face, away from the valley, and be at her car in ninety minutes. She could be warm. She could be safe.

Her satellite phone buzzed. She fumbled it out of her chest pack, squinting at the screen. The message was a group alert—the regional rescue coordination, automatically forwarded to anyone registered in the area with a beacon or a phone.

AVALANCHE REPORT: MASSIF DU VAL BLANC. 11:42 LOCAL. MULTIPLE CASUALTIES UNCONFIRMED. TOUR GROUP LAST REPORTED WEST-NORTHWEST OF THE OLD GLACIER PATH. HELICOPTER RESPONDING. GROUND TEAMS ROUTING VIA CHAMBRON.

She looked at the lettering. Ground teams routing via Chambron. That was the long way—two hours, maybe three, with the roads as they were. By then, the temperature would have dropped further. The anxiety in that cluster of tourists would have curdled into cold, into panic, into bad decisions.

She moved before she finished thinking it through. A direct rappel off the ridge's south shoulder, then a traverse along the moraine's spine. It was the route she knew. The avalanche's reach had been impressive, but the moraine stood high enough. If she was smart, if she stayed high, she could reach the basin's edge in under an hour.

If another slide let go above her, there was nowhere to run on that exposed spine. She'd be in the open, at the mercy of terrain she couldn't control. The kind of choice her mother had made on a mountain thirty years ago, on a day she hadn't come home from.

Élise shoved the thought down and set her first anchor.

---

Her boots crunched through the wind-packed surface as she moved along the moraine. The traverse wasn't technical—a few careful steps, a handhold here and there on the exposed rock—but the concentration it demanded was total. She couldn't afford to think about Luc, about the last time she'd stood this close to him, about the way his jaw had tightened when she'd told him she was leaving for the season and hadn't said when she'd be back.

Five years. Five years of photos, of mountains, of hundreds of rescues logged on the radio frequencies she kept in the background of her work life, a habit she'd never been able to break. Sometimes she caught herself listening for his voice, and when she found it, she turned the volume down.

Not now. The radio strapped to her chest crackled with traffic. Dispatch voices, other pilots, coordinates. And then, cutting through the static, the voice she would have recognized in a burning building.

"Val Blanc Control, Alpha-November, I'm descending to recon the western edge. The basin looks clear. I'll get eyes on the group from the south ridge."

Luc. Calm. That was the thing about him. The more dangerous the situation, the calmer his voice got. Élise had always found it infuriating. She'd always found it beautiful.

"Alpha-November, Copy. Chambron ground team estimates forty minutes to your position. Do you have a landing zone?"

A pause. Then: "Not yet. Basin's too soft. I'm going to do what I can from the air, then we'll see."

We'll see. That was Luccese for *I'm probably about to land where I shouldn't.*

Élise picked up her pace.

---

The group came into view when she cleared the moraine's final rise. Twenty of them, maybe twenty-five, huddled against the basin's back wall. A few thin figures had broken away from the group and were stomping out patterns in the snow—trying to carve something, a signal, an X, though the freshening wind was already filling in their footprints.

They saw her. A woman in the middle of the group raised an arm, a flash of orange against the gray sky. Élise returned the wave and picked her way down the slope's last tricky section, dropping into the basin with a final jump that jarred her knees.

"Are you okay? Is anyone hurt?" She was pulling off her pack as she approached, mentally taking stock of the supplies she'd brought. First-aid kit, a lightweight thermal blanket, a fire starter, half a pack of chocolate from her breakfast.

The woman who'd waved—mid-fifties, wind-burned, her guide clearly not among the group—shook her head. "No one hurt. Shaken up. That thing... we saw it coming, the guide yelled, told us to get up on the wall, but he went back for someone who'd fallen."

Élise scanned the group. "Your guide. Where is he now?"

"Out there." The woman pointed west, toward the edge of the debris field. "He went to find a couple who'd broken off before the slide. He hasn't come back. It's been—" She checked her watch with shaking hands. "Twenty-five minutes."

Twenty-five minutes. On the far side of a debris field that could contain voids deep enough to swallow a person, or unstable enough to shift without warning. Élise had seen rescue teams work worse. She'd also seen them find bodies under worse.

From above, the helicopter's rotors changed pitch. Luc was banking for another pass, low enough that the downdraft flattened the fresh powder around the basin. He was probably close enough to see the group's cluster, to see Élise standing in the middle of them.

She didn't look up. She was already pulling her headlamp out of her pack, checking that the battery was full. Twenty-five minutes. In that time, a person on the far side of a debris field could have reached hypothermic shutdown if they were wet. If they were injured, if they were trapped, the clock was even shorter.

"Stay here," she said to the woman. "Keep everyone together. I'm going to find your guide."

"You're going out there?" The woman's voice was cracking. "Isn't that dangerous?"

"This whole mountain is dangerous." Élise adjusted her crampons and started west. "I'm just choosing the useful kind."

The rotors boomed overhead. Luc was still circling. She finally looked up. Through the haze of snow and rotor spray, she could see the shape of the helicopter, the pilot's silhouette behind the glass.

She raised her arm. A quick, deliberate signal: *Staying out here. Going west. Mark me.*

The helicopter dipped its nose. Once, twice. He'd seen her. He understood.

Élise turned and started across the debris field, calling out the guide's name into the wind. Beneath her boots, the surface was deceptive—solid in some places, hollow in others, groaning softly as she shifted her weight. She kept her pace deliberate. One careful foot at a time.

The wind carried her name back to her. Not a voice—she didn't know it was the guide, a survivor, or just the mountain playing tricks. But somewhere out there was a man in a yellow scarf flag, and somewhere above, a helicopter with a man who knew exactly who she was and still wouldn't leave.

She moved toward the sound.