Read Chapter 24: The Friend's Last Signal

The beacon’s pulse came through the radio like a heartbeat in the wrong place. Luc pressed the earpiece closer, his face going pale behind the frost riming his lashes. Élise watched him count the seconds between blips, her own heart dropping before he even spoke.

“Chloé’s signal,” he said. “Less than four hundred meters from the base station.”

Élise’s breath caught. The base. The resort the avalanche had swallowed hours ago. She’d assumed—they’d all assumed—that Chloé had made it out with the first evacuation group. But the beacon blinked steady and unmistakable, buried beneath the white chaos they’d barely escaped.

“She wasn’t on the manifest,” Élise said, though even as she said it she knew manifests meant nothing when the world came apart.

“She stayed behind to pack the darkroom equipment,” Johannes said from the door of the refuge. His arm was bound tight against his chest, his face gray with pain. “I tried to get her to come with us. She said she’d catch up.”

The cold settled deeper into Élise’s bones. Chloé had been the first friend she’d made in the Alps, the only person who’d never once hinted at the shadow that followed Élise’s reputation. She’d laughed at Élise’s careful avoidance of the mountain rescue crews. She’d made her coffee and talked about light and shadow while Élise learned to love the mountains again through a lens instead of ropes.

And now she was beneath them, trapped, signaling for help that had to cross avalanche terrain to reach her.

“Three of us could make it to the base in under two hours,” Luc said, checking the wind speed on his wrist unit. “The path along the eastern fork is sheltered. It’s not safe, but it’s possible.”

“You can’t,” Élise said. “You’re coming back to the refuge with the tourists.”

He looked at her with that expression she knew too well—the one that said *don’t tell me what I can’t do*. But she saw the exhaustion beneath it. The tremor in his hands that had nothing to do with cold. Luc had been out in the storm for hours. He’d fought a crevasse. He’d pulled Paul from the edge of death. He was running on reserves that wouldn’t last much longer.

“The group needs someone who knows the high route,” she said. “Margaux can’t lead them through the saddle if the visibility closes in. Bea has a head injury. Johannes has a broken arm. Paul can barely walk.”

“And you?” Luc asked. “You’re not exactly—"

“I’m the one who pulled you out of that hole,” she said, her voice flat. “I know what I can do.”

The refuge fell quiet. Behind them, Bea had coaxed a fire from the last dry wood and was wrapping Paul’s hands in a blanket. The tourists clustered together, their faces pinched with fear and cold. Orti stood apart, watching Élise with that assessing look she hated.

“She’s right,” Orti said slowly. “Luc, you’ve been pushing for hours. You’re no good to anyone if you collapse on the slope.” The older guide nodded toward Élise. “And she knows the base. She knows what Chloé would have done, where she would have taken shelter.”

Luc’s jaw tightened. He crossed the room and stood close enough that Élise could smell the snow and sweat on his jacket. “If I go back to the refuge, you go to the base. Alone with Paul and Bea. That’s not a rescue team. That’s a liability.”

“I’m not taking Paul and Bea,” she said. “I’m taking them as far as the refuge, you take the group the rest of the way, and then I go for Chloé. Just me and the beacon.”

“No.”

“Luc.”

“I said no.” His voice cracked. “I watched you nearly kill yourself climbing to that crevasse. Your heart—"

“Is fine.” She said it too quickly, too sharp, and she saw him flinch. The word hung between them like an accusation. She’d hidden the POTS from him for years. Now it was all he could see when he looked at her.

She stepped closer, lowering her voice so only he could hear. “I know what I can give. I’ve spent a decade learning my limits, learning how to work within them. I can get to that base. I can dig her out if she’s close to the surface. And I can get back before dark if the weather holds.” She met his eyes. “What I can’t do is carry a group of injured strangers through a storm to safety. That’s you. That’s your gift.”

Something shifted in his face. Not surrender—never that. But a recognition she hadn’t seen from him since they’d climbed the Aiguille du Midi together, young and stupid and certain of everything. “You’ll check in every twenty minutes.”

“Every fifteen.”

“If you don’t answer, I’m coming back for you.”

She felt the warmth spread through her chest despite the cold. “I know.”

Dividing the group took twenty minutes. Luc layered the walking tourists into the single rope team, pairing the strongest climbers at the front and back. Élise helped Bea lace a brace around Paul’s knee, checking the splint Johannes had devised from a broken ski pole. Paul winced when she tightened the straps but nodded, determination fighting the pain in his eyes.

“He was looking for de Vries,” Paul said quietly as she adjusted his pack harness. “My father’s brother. He was on the expedition when the glacier collapsed. They never found his body. Jasper came to the mountain every year to look for him, and he always said this was the year. When I heard Margaux talking about him, I realized he must have known something.” He looked up at her. “Did he find him? Is that what this is about?”

Élise didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure what the answer was anymore. Klaus and Marta were still across the ridge, their position an open wound in the storm. Jasper de Vries might have been buried in that crevasse field for years. Or he might have been killed within the last twenty-four hours for what he knew.

“We’ll talk about it when we’re not freezing to death,” she said.

Orti appeared at her elbow, his hand extended. He wasn’t holding a rope or an ice axe. He was holding her yellow scarf. “You’ll want this,” he said. “It gets colder on the lee side of the ridge.”

She took it, the wool soft against her cracked fingers. The scarf Luc had given her on their first climb together, found in her pack the night they’d brought Paul in. She wound it around her neck and breathed in the faded scent of alpine air and something warmer.

“The eastern fork has a cornice that overhangs about two hundred meters out,” Orti said. “You remember it.”

It wasn’t a question. Of course she remembered it. She’d been this route a hundred times, back when she’d been one of the strongest climbers in the valley, before everyone learned her heart could betray her at any moment.

“I remember,” she said.

Orti nodded. “Then you know the alternative—the crevassed terrace below the cornice, the traverse you did with de Vries. It’s faster. You can reach the base in ninety minutes if you move smart. But you’ll be alone, and the snow bridges are new. Untested.”

Élise looked at the scarf in her hands. At the trail marker posts she could see through the window, bent under the weight of the storm. At Chloé’s beacon signal still pulsing in the radio in her pocket.

“I’ve walked untested ground before,” she said.

Orti opened his mouth to say something else, then closed it. He gave her a look that was almost protective, and for a moment he looked less like the gruff stranger who’d stood back and watched her struggle, and more like someone who understood exactly what she was about to do.

“Don’t make it untested for long,” he said. “The storm’s not done with us yet.”

He moved away before she could ask what he meant. But she felt it anyway, the weight of the weather pressing down on the roof, the shudder of the walls as another gust hit. The mountain was holding its breath, waiting for the next piece to fall.

Luc came to her then, strapping his pack tighter. “Five kilometers. Straight east, then down toward the lower glacier where the resort was built.”

“I know the way.”

“Jasper’s traverse,” he said. It wasn’t a question. “The crevassed terrace.”

She didn’t answer.

“Élise.” He took her hands, his gloves rough against her skin. “That route hasn’t been checked since the quake. If those bridges give way—"

“They won’t.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I don’t know anything,” she said. “I don’t know if Luc’s alive under that snow. I don’t know what Klaus is doing across that ridge. I don’t know if the man who was following Jasper is still out here with us. But I know Chloé’s beacon is running out of battery, and I know what it feels like to be buried under snow and hear only silence. I can’t let her spend another night down there.” She pressed his hand. “I’ve been waiting my whole life to be useful again. Let me be useful now.”

Luc’s breath fogged the air between them. For a long moment, he just looked at her, and Élise saw something crack open in his expression—the raw, unvarnished fear she’d seen when she’d pulled him from the crevasse.

“Two hours,” he said finally. “If you’re not back at the base by then, I’m coming after you. Refuge group be damned.”

“Two hours,” she agreed.

He pulled her into an embrace that was over too quickly, a press of cold nylon and warmth that left her cheeks burning. Then he was gone, barking orders at the tourists, herding the walking wounded through the door into the white roar of the storm.

Élise stood in the empty refuge for just a moment, listening to Margaux’s footsteps recede with the group, to Johannes’s labored breathing fading into wind. Then she checked Chloé’s beacon frequency one more time, felt the pulse against her palm, and stepped out into the snow.

The terrace shadowed by the cornice was where the mountain had tried to kill her before. She’d climbed it once with Jasper de Vries, before his obsession had made him dangerous. He’d shown her the cracks, taught her which snow bridges held and which ones moaned under your weight like warnings.

The storm had erased every mark. She’d have to feel her way across.

Behind her, somewhere in the white, she thought she heard Orti’s voice. “Be careful, Élise Moreau.” As if he knew something she didn’t.

She moved into the storm and let the mountain swallow her whole.