Read Chapter 26: The Last Stand

The shelter was a dent in the mountain, a low concrete bunker half-swallowed by drift. Its door had been warped by a decade of freeze and thaw, and Luc had to throw his shoulder against it twice before it ground open, spitting a plume of stale air and grit.

Élise ducked inside first. Her headlamp cut through the dark, catching the slumped shape against the far wall. The missing friend—Marc, Paul had called him—was curled in a corner, wrapped in a silver emergency blanket that crinkled with every shallow breath. His lips were blue. His fingers were the color of old wax.

“He’s alive,” she said, and the words felt like a hand placed over her heart.

Luc was already beside her, dropping his pack, pulling off his gloves. “Help me get him flat. Gently.”

They moved him onto his back. Élise pressed two fingers to his throat, found a pulse—weak, thready, but there. She peeled back the blanket. His clothes were damp, not frozen solid, which meant he’d been moving recently, fighting his way to the shelter before his body gave out.

“We need to get his layers off. Dry ones from my pack.” Luc was already unzipping Marc’s jacket. “His core temp’s dropping. We can’t afford rescue shivering.”

It took them ten minutes, working like a practiced team despite everything. Élise stripped Marc down to his base layer while Luc built a nest of sleeping bags and foam pads. They wrapped him in layers, fed him warm sugar water from a thermos Luc had guarded through the storm. Marc stirred once, mumbling something that might have been a name, then slipped back into unconsciousness.

Élise sat back on her heels. Her hands were shaking from the cold and the effort and the fear she’d been swallowing since the slope had released beneath her feet.

“He’s stable,” Luc said. “For now. Hypothermia’s not our biggest problem.”

He dug a satellite phone from his pack. Flip open, cracked screen, older than god. He hit the power button.

Nothing.

He tried again. Nothing.

“Battery’s dead,” he said, and the words landed like a stone in the silence. “Charged it at the refuge. Must have drained in the cold.”

Élise pulled out her own device—a personal locator beacon, the kind that sent a signal but received nothing back. She pressed the test button. The LED blinked once, then died.

“Mine too,” she said. “We’re dark.”

Luc stared at the phone for a long moment, then set it down carefully, like it was made of glass. Outside, the wind screamed past the shelter’s concrete walls. The sound was not the whistle of snow, but the howl of a storm that wanted to bury something.

“The check-in window,” Élise said. “If I don’t signal by dawn, Orti will know something’s wrong.”

“Orti will know something’s wrong,” Luc repeated, his voice flat. “That doesn’t mean he can reach us. The pass will be closed. The refuge is out of radio range. The storm isn’t breaking tonight.”

“So we wait.”

He looked at Marc, then at the door, then at the cracked satellite phone in his palm. “The shelter’s stocked. Food, fuel, enough for forty-eight hours. But if the storm holds longer than that, we’re not walking out. We’re being carried out.”

“Or not at all,” Élise said. The words hung between them.

Luc pulled out a folded piece of paper—the old map de Vries had penciled, its lines faded to ghosts. He spread it on the floor, weighted the corners with his gloves. His finger traced a trail from the shelter down the mountain’s western face, a route scratched in capital letters: *VALLON MAUDIT*. The Accursed Valley.

“This drops to the valley floor,” he said. “Four hours in good weather. Six in this. No maintained paths, no bridges, no markers. De Vries marked it as a last resort.”

“We’d be doing it blind, in a whiteout, with him—” she nodded toward Marc, who was shivering again, “—on our backs.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve never used this route.”

“Never. And I don’t want to. But I know something about de Vries’s mapping.” Luc looked up at her, and his eyes had something old in them. “When you found his body, on that ridge three years ago—the one that started all this—do you remember what was in his pocket?”

Élise blinked. She hadn’t thought about that day in months, not with mountains falling all around them. “A camera. A notebook.”

“The notebook’s last entry.” He tapped the map. “It wasn’t a journal. It was a route log. Overlay this against the aerial photos from the original avalanche, and there’s a path he’d marked that never made it onto any official chart. He knew this valley better than anyone. And he’d survived being buried once.”

“You think this is why Paul’s uncle found him? Why Margaux knows more than she’s saying?”

Luc folded the map and tucked it into his jacket. “I think de Vries was trying to get someone out of the Accursed Valley when he died. And his body was found not far from where you and Chloé were climbing that day. Almost as if—” He stopped, shook his head. “We can’t solve that now. We have to choose.”

The floor of the shelter was cold beneath her, the wind relentless, and Marc’s breathing was a shallow metronome marking how little time they had. Élise looked at Luc, at the map folded against his heart, at the storm white behind the cracked doorframe.

“We wait till dawn,” she said. “If the beacon’s still dead and the storm hasn’t broken, we take the Accursed Valley.”

Luc nodded once. It wasn’t agreement, exactly. It was recognition—that she was asking not to be left behind, and he was saying he wouldn’t ask her to stay.

From outside, a sound split the wind. A crack, then a low groan.

The slope above them had shifted.