Read Chapter 34: The Cache of Secrets

The cable was frozen deeper than it looked. Luc braced his boots against the ice and pulled until the tendons stood out on his neck. The metal wire sang once, a high thin note, then snapped loose with a crack that sent a shower of granular snow skittering down the slope above them.

“Careful,” Élise said, stepping back. She watched the slide die against a boulder ten meters away, then her eye caught something the snow had uncovered. A glint. Regular, metallic, not stone.

“Luc. There.”

He followed her gaze and dropped to his knees, brushing at the exposed edge with a gloved hand. The box was the size of a shoebox, painted the dull orange of emergency equipment, its surface pitted and scarred. A climbing cache, she thought. Left by some alpinist who never made it back.

“Is it locked?” she asked.

Luc worked the clasp. It gave with a squeal of corroded metal. Inside, layered over with frost like a dusting of powdered sugar, were two ice screws, a coil of static rope, a headlamp with a cracked lens, and a notebook wrapped in a plastic bag that had long since lost its seal. The paper inside was dry, curled at the edges, the handwriting cramped and neat.

“That’s him,” Luc said quietly. “The dead climber. Must be his.”

Élise crouched beside him. Behind them, the group had stopped in a loose huddle. Pfeiffer was watching with an expression she couldn’t read—half curious, half wary. The tourists looked hollowed out, cheeks chafed raw, lips cracked. Marc lay in the sled, his breathing shallow but steady.

“Can you read it?” she asked.

Luc flipped through the first pages. Dates, coordinates, observations. Technical notes. He stopped at an entry marked with a folded corner and read silently. His jaw tightened.

“What?” she said.

He didn’t answer at first. He turned the notebook toward her. The page was dense with columns and a hand-drawn sketch of a ridge line, a crosshatched zone marked with arrows.

“This is the Accursed Valley,” he said. “He was doing snow stability surveys out here. There’s a whole series of entries about the eastern slope beneath the Aiguille des Glaciers.”

Élise studied the page. The climber had marked a broad band of the mountain with repeated notes: unstable substrate. Vertical shear planes. Water infiltration at depth. Then a single underlined phrase: *Route below should be considered high risk under load. Recommend closure.*

“He wasn’t just climbing,” she said. “He was mapping the avalanche risk.”

“He found something. Something about the route the tour companies use.” Luc’s voice dropped. “Look at the dates. This was written two seasons before the accident that supposedly killed him. He was building a case to close that passage entirely.”

“And someone didn’t want that to happen,” Élise murmured.

Pfeiffer took a step toward them. “What did you find?”

Luc slid the notebook into his jacket before the man could get close. “Cache gear. Old climbing supplies.”

“That’s not all,” Pfeiffer said flatly.

“That’s all you need to know.”

The tension between them drew the tourists out of their exhaustion. Nils rose to his feet, knuckles white. The other two remained seated, watching.

“He has a right to ask,” Nils said. “If it concerns the route.”

“It concerns who we can trust,” Luc shot back. “And right now, the person who confessed to tampering with the map doesn’t get to ask questions about what we find.”

Pfeiffer’s face reddened. “I told you, I never meant for any of this. The insurance—it was just numbers. Margaux was supposed to spot the change and raise an alarm. She was supposed to find it and shut the route down before anyone got hurt. She didn’t. She went out with her group the day before the claim window closed, and I panicked. I never planned the avalanche. I never planned for anyone to die.”

“But you planned the fraud,” Élise said. “You planned to use a potential disaster to cash out, and you didn’t care who was standing on the slope when it happened.”

“That’s not—”

“We don’t have time for this,” Luc cut him off. He stood, brushing frost from his knees, the notebook hidden inside his coat. “The weather window holds maybe six more hours. We need to gain the upper ridge before the wind shifts.”

He didn’t look at Pfeiffer when he said it. He didn’t have to.

The group moved out in silence. Élise took point with Luc, the sled bumping between them, its runners hissing over the compacted snow. Marc’s face was pale, a fine sheen of sweat along his brow despite the cold. When she glanced back, she saw one of the tourists—a woman, the one who had barely spoken since the refuge—staring at the ground as she walked, her steps dragging.

They reached the base of the col after an hour of switchbacking through loose rock and ice. Élise stopped to catch her breath and looked back along their track. The mountain lay in perfect stillness, white and vast and indifferent.

“How much of that notebook did you actually read?” she asked Luc, keeping her voice low.

“Enough to know the route we’re taking is one he called risky,” Luc admitted. “But every route out of this valley is risky. The difference is, he had data. Data meant to close the original path down. If Pfeiffer’s map was altered, and the original was already unsafe, then someone knew about it before the avalanche ever hit. Someone wanted that survey to never see the light of day.”

“You think Margaux knew.”

“I think Margaux knew more than she told you,” he said. “And I think whoever sent that avalanche down on us is still out here. Not the mountain. Not Pfeiffer’s greed. Someone who didn’t want the Accursed Valley closed.”

He tapped his chest where the notebook rested. “And now we’re carrying the exact evidence they tried to bury.”

Élise looked up at the col above them—the steep couloir, the cornice at its lip waiting to fall. Somewhere beyond, Kel and Marta were still missing, a ridge away. Whatever had started this, whoever had orchestrated it, the cache had just told them that the disaster was never an accident.

It was a silencing.

And they were still carrying the target on their backs.

She pulled Henri’s photograph from her inside pocket without thinking. The image was creased, softening at the edges from handling. She looked at it for a second too long, then tucked it away and turned to face the slope.

“We move,” she said. “Now. Before the wind finds us.”

Luc nodded, and they began to climb.