Read Chapter 38: The Last Obstacle

The wind had teeth now, biting through every layer, screaming across the col in relentless gusts. Élise squinted through ice-crusted lashes at the terrain ahead, and her stomach dropped.

The crevasse field stretched the entire width of the descent route. What had been a simple traverse on their map was now a shattered lattice of gaping blue wounds, some wide enough to swallow a truck. The storm had done its work, cracking the glacier open like an eggshell.

"No way around," Luc said, his voice flat over the wind. He stood beside her, ice axes in hand, scanning the field with the practiced eyes of a man who'd flown over this terrain a hundred times. "We go through or we don't go down."

Marc groaned from where Bastien was half-leaning on him. "I can't climb over that. I can barely walk."

Bastien said nothing. His face was gray, one arm wrapped tight against his ribs where the slide had caught him. He wouldn't meet Élise's eye.

Luc moved forward, testing the snow with each step, his boot sinking only slightly before finding firm purchase. Élise watched him work the field's edge, his body angled into the wind, reading the ice like a language only he spoke. After nearly two minutes, he stopped.

"There." He pointed to a narrow ribbon of white arcing between two gaping mouths of blue darkness. A snow bridge, no wider than their shoulders, spanning perhaps twenty meters. "It's the only solid crossing. Fresh drift overlays a firn seam. It'll hold."

"How do you know?" Kira called over the wind, her voice thin and reedy.

Luc turned, meeting Élise's eyes. "I don't. But it's the only option."

They rigged a rope line. Élise watched Luc hammer in a snow anchor with quick, efficient motions, testing it with his full weight before nodding. The plan was simple: cross one at a time, clipped to the fixed line. If the bridge gave, the anchor would hold.

"You first," Luc said, looking at Kira. "Lightest. Then Marc with Bastien, then me and Élise last."

"How gallant," Élise said, forcing a thin smile. He caught it and something passed between them—the weight of all the unsaid things they'd buried under ice and silence.

Kira went first. She moved slowly, deliberately, each foot placed with terrifying precision. The bridge creaked. Élise held her breath. At the halfway point, a chunk of snow calved off the edge and disappeared into the darkness below. Kira froze, then kept moving. When she reached the far side, she collapsed to her knees, shaking.

Marc supported Bastien next. The two of them moved like a wounded animal, slow and unsteady. The bridge sagged under their combined weight but held. When they made it across, Marc immediately dropped Bastien and bent over, hands on his knees, gasping.

Élise clipped herself to Luc's rope and stepped onto the bridge.

It crunched beneath her. The wind screamed. She kept her eyes fixed on the far edge, refusing to look down into the cold, bottomless blue that yawned beneath her feet. Fifty meters behind her, Luc followed, keeping tension on the line.

Three quarters of the way across, the bridge sighed.

It was a sound she'd never heard, a low, groaning exhale like the ice itself was breathing out. Élise didn't stop. She couldn't. She took another step, then another, and the world fell away beneath her.

She dropped.

The rope caught her for a single heart-stopping second—then the anchor ripped free of the snow and she was falling, arms flailing, into the blue-dark silence.

She hit something hard and broken. Pain exploded through her ribs. She skidded down a slope of ice and slammed to a stop on a narrow ledge, the breath knocked out of her, the darkness spinning around her.

Above her, a jagged slash of gray-white light showed the sky. And in that slash, a shape appeared.

Luc.

He'd thrown himself flat at the edge of the break, the rope still in his hands, his body braced against whatever anchor he'd managed to find in the last second. His face was a mask of strain, veins standing out on his neck.

"Élise!"

She couldn't speak. The air was still fighting its way back into her lungs. She looked down. Below her, the crevasse fell away into a darkness so complete it seemed to have weight.

"I've got you," he called down. "I'm coming down."

"No!" The word came out broken, strangled. "You'll fall too. The bridge is gone. Just—"

He wasn't listening. With brutal efficiency, he hammered a new anchor into the ice at the edge, clipped himself to it, and rappelled over the lip.

He moved fast, too fast, his boots finding holds on the walls of ice, the rope singing. He reached her ledge in under a minute, landing beside her so heavily that a chunk of ice broke free beneath his right foot and tumbled into the abyss.

They stood together on the narrow shelf, pressed against each other for warmth and stability, the crevasse walls rising sheer above them.

Then they heard it.

A low, deep rumble from somewhere high above. Distant at first, but building with terrifying speed.

Élise's blood ran cold. She looked up past Luc's shoulder, toward the cornice high above the col. A hairline fracture was spreading across its face, a dark crack growing like a lightning bolt through ice.

"Luc." Her voice was barely a whisper. "It's coming down."

The rumble grew to a roar. The ice beneath their feet began to tremble.

Luc looked at her. For a wild, impossible moment, there was no fear in his eyes. Only her.

"Hold on to me," he said.

The world came apart around them.