Read Chapter 32: The Re-route

The dawn came gray and bitter, the wind stripping the last of the snow from the ridgeline in long, mournful screams. Élise stood at the shelter’s narrow window, watching the light bleed over the Aiguille des Glaciers. The col was there, a pale notch between two black shoulders of rock, but it looked wrong. Too steep. Too exposed.

She unfolded Pfeiffer’s map—the map he’d altered, the map that had killed Margaux—and set it aside. Then she pulled out her own, the one she’d sketched over a decade of wandering these valleys. Her finger traced a line that didn’t exist on any official chart: a goat path she’d once followed during a summer shoot, a series of chutes and ledges that switchbacked up the eastern flank of the col before cutting through a narrow chimney to the glacier beyond.

Luc came up beside her, his breath fogging the glass. “You’re not using his route.”

“It’s not his route. It’s never been his route.” She tapped the map. “This is. It's harder. There’s a traverse, maybe four hundred meters of exposed slope, and the chimney’s tight. But it avoids the lee side of the col where the wind-loading will be worst. If we go now, before the sun hits the south face, the snow might hold.”

Luc studied the sketch, his jaw working. “You’ve done this?”

“In summer. Never with this much snow.”

“And never with a man bleeding internally in a sled.”

Élise didn’t flinch. “That’s why we go now. Every hour we wait, Marc’s condition worsens and the snow stabilizes into something worse. You know this.”

He did. She could see it in the way his fingers tightened on the map’s edge, the way his eyes traced the chutes again and again, searching for the flaw she’d missed. Luc had never been a man who trusted luck. He trusted preparation, skill, and the willingness to make hard calls.

This was a hard call.

“We go,” he said. “But I’m leading the traverse. You’re on snow assessment.”

She almost smiled. “You’re not going to argue about the chimney?”

“No point. You’re the only one who’s seen it.”

---

Thirty minutes later, the group stood at the base of the first chute, a narrow funnel of rock and wind-scoured snow that climbed at a brutal angle. Marc lay strapped in the makeshift sled, his face pale beneath the grime, his eyes open but glassy. Sophie knelt beside him, pressing a water bottle to his cracked lips.

Pfeiffer hung at the back of the group, his hands bound loosely in front of him with a length of climbing rope. Liam—the broad-shouldered banker from Leeds—had volunteered to keep watch, and he stood beside Pfeiffer now, his expression grim and unyielding.

Luc checked the anchor points on the sled’s harness, then turned to the group. “Listen. This isn’t the route we planned. It’s steeper, tighter, and there’s no margin for error. We move in a single line, one person at a time, no gaps. If someone slips, you brace and you hold. If the sled goes, it goes—but not because of you.”

Élise stepped forward, her ice axe in hand. “I’m going first up the chute. I’ll assess the snow as I go and call down whether it’s safe to follow. Keep your voices low—shouting can trigger a slide if the layer’s unstable.”

She didn’t wait for questions. She turned and began to climb, her knee plunging into the soft snow with each step. The chute was steep enough that she had to kick her crampons in with deliberate force, testing each placement before committing her weight. Halfway up, she stopped and drove her axe into the slope, listening.

The snow was quiet. No drumming, no hollow crack. She pulled the axe free and examined the blade. A thin crust of ice, then powder. The layer underneath was cohesive. For now.

She called down. “Stable. Send the line.”

Luc sent the tourists up one at a time, spacing them ten meters apart. They moved in silence, the only sound the crunch of boots and the hiss of breath. Sophie stayed with Marc, and Élise watched from above as four of them—Ingrid, the two brothers from Munich, and a retired teacher named Claude—hauled the sled up the chute in careful relays, their ropes tensioned and their movements synchronized.

A strange warmth spread through Élise’s chest. They weren’t clients anymore. They weren’t strangers. They were a team, moving with a quiet competence born of shared fear and shared purpose.

At the top of the chute, the slope opened onto a narrow bench—a frozen ledge barely wide enough for the group to stand in single file. Élise pulled off her glove and pressed her palm to the snow, feeling for the subtle give that indicated surface hoar. The bench was wind-scoured, the snow hard and icy. Good for footing, bad for stability if they lingered.

She looked up. The traverse stretched across the eastern flank—four hundred meters of tilted snow field, studded with rocks, dropping away into a shadowed couloir that vanished toward the valley floor. The angle was steep, maybe forty degrees at its worst, but the rock outcroppings would provide natural anchors if they moved quickly.

“Luc,” she called as he crested the chute behind the sled. “I need to see the full face. Give me a minute.”

He understood. He always had.

Élise pulled her camera from her pack—a battered DSLR with a scratched lens, her constant companion for a decade—and began to shoot. Wide shots of the entire slope, bracketed exposures to catch the subtle shadows that revealed wind deposition. Then telephoto, compressing the terrain, isolating individual slope segments. She zoomed in on a convex roll near the far end of the traverse, where the snow surface had a faint, satiny sheen.

She checked the LCD, then zoomed tighter. The sheen was a wind slab—a layer of dense snow deposited over a weaker layer of facets. It was loaded, tense, waiting for a trigger.

“There’s a slab section about halfway across,” she called down. “Just past that rock spine. It’s not big, but we need to cross it one at a time, fast, with no stopping. And we need to do it before the sun hits it.”

Luc shaded his eyes, studying the slope. “How long?”

“Twenty minutes. Maybe less.”

He looked back at the group, at Marc’s pale face, at the tired, frightened eyes of the remaining tourists. Then he looked at Élise, and something passed between them—an old understanding, a shared language that had nothing to do with words.

“We move now,” he said. “Everyone, one rope team. Élise, you’re on point. If you see anything change, you call it and we stop. No heroics.”

She nodded and turned back to the slope. The next hour would be the hardest. But for the first time in days, they were moving on their own terms, following their own map, trusting their own instincts.

---

They were three-quarters of the way across the traverse when she felt it. A subtle change in the snow beneath her boots—a shift, a settling, a whisper from the layers below. The wind slab had been disturbed, and it was talking.

She froze, turning her head slowly to the side. Kai and Marta had emerged at the far end of the traverse, their figure silhouetted against the gray sky, a rope harness strangely out of place for tourists, and a line of fresh footprints descending toward the valley floor. But that wasn’t what made Élise stop.

It was the ski tracks. Fresh, parallel, cutting across the slope from the ridgeline above—tracks that hadn’t been there before. And they didn’t come down from the peak.

They led down from a notch in the ridge, directly above the slab she was crossing. Someone had been watching them from above. Someone who knew exactly where they would be.

“Luc,” she said quietly, her voice barely carrying over the wind. “We have company.”

She pointed to the tracks, and Luc followed her gaze. His face hardened.

“How fresh?” he asked.

“An hour. Maybe less.”

The tourists kept moving, unaware. But Élise could feel the slope beneath her change—the slab shifting, the tension coiling. She had seconds to decide, and the wrong decision would bury them all.