Read Chapter 4: The Voice in the Static

She found the dead man’s radio first.

It was wedged under a slab of broken shale, its casing cracked, its antenna bent at a right angle. The storm had been picking up for the last hour, and Élise had stopped twice to catch her breath, the thin air burning in her lungs. She’d almost missed it—a glint of plastic half-buried in the rubble. She crouched, pried it loose, and turned it over in her gloved hands. The channel dial was set to the rescue frequency. The battery light flickered once, twice, then held a weak, steady green.

She pressed the transmit button. Static. She pressed it again, longer this time, and heard her own breath echo back at her, tinny and hollow.

“This is Élise Moreau. I’m on the east ridge, below the second couloir. I have the guide’s map. Over.”

She released the button and listened. The wind screamed over the rocks. Snow particles stung her cheeks. She was about to try again when the radio crackled—not with static, but with a voice.

“Copy that, Moreau. Hold position. We’re routing a unit to your coordinates.”

Not Luc. A woman’s voice, clipped and professional. Élise recognized the cadence of rescue coordinators from years of watching Luc’s work from a distance. She pressed the button.

“I’m not holding. I’m moving toward the lower slope. The group is somewhere below the Tour du Vallon traverse. I have the marked route.”

A pause. The radio hissed. Then the voice again, harder this time.

“Moreau, do not move. We have a ground unit inbound. Advise you wait for extraction.”

Élise looked down at Benoît’s map, the ink bleeding where her sweat had touched it, the red line of the route curling down the valley like a vein. The group was out there. Eight tourists. One guide who was barely conscious when she left him. And Luc, somewhere in the sky, fighting the same storm she was walking through.

“No,” she said, and she pressed transmit. “I’m not waiting.”

She stood, shoved the radio into her jacket pocket, and started moving again. The snow was up to her knees in places, and she had to lift each foot like it was weighted. She counted her steps in her head. Ten steps. Rest. Ten steps. Rest. The couloir narrowed ahead of her, a natural funnel between two rock walls that would spill her out onto the lower slope where the avalanche had finally come to rest.

She was halfway through the funnel when the radio crackled again.

“Moreau.”

His voice. Luc’s voice. Low, precise, the voice he used when he was in the air and everything else had to wait. She stopped dead. The wind dropped for a moment, as if the mountain itself was listening.

“Luc,” she said. She didn’t press the transmit button. She just said his name into the storm.

The radio crackled again. “Moreau, do you copy?”

She pulled the radio out, pressed transmit. “I copy.”

A pause. The static filled the space between them. Then his voice came back, clipped, almost mechanical.

“Your coordinates put you above the avalanche debris field. You need to move west, not east. West will take you to the traverse. East is a dead end.”

She looked at the map, then at the terrain ahead of her. He was right. The route Benoît had marked curved west, following the natural shelf of the mountain. She’d been walking east out of habit, taking the faster line down.

“Copy,” she said. “West.”

Another pause. She could hear his breathing through the static, a rhythm she remembered from nights when they’d lain in the dark, his chest rising and falling beneath her ear. Then his voice again, softer now, almost hesitant.

“How’s the guide?”

She blinked. The question caught her off guard. “Benoît’s alive. He’s in a shelter above the tree line. But he’s in bad shape. He gave me the map. He said the group is below the traverse, past the second switchback.”

A long silence. The wind picked up again, and she had to brace herself against the rock wall beside her.

“Second switchback,” Luc repeated, and she heard him speaking to someone else in the cockpit, muffled words she couldn’t catch. Then his voice came back, sharper now. “Élise, that’s the lower slope. The avalanche swept past that point. They’re in the direct line of the next slide if the snow shifts again.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m going.”

She heard him exhale, a sound she knew well. The sound he made when he was losing an argument and knew it.

“Copy that,” he said. And then, quieter, as if he didn’t want anyone else in the cockpit to hear: “Be careful.”

She wanted to say something. Something sharp, something that would cut through the distance between them, the years, the silence. She wanted to ask him about the scarf, about why he’d given it to Benoît, about what he’d told him. But the wind screamed through the funnel, and the radio hissed, and she heard his voice again, formal now, back in the cockpit with his crew.

“For the record,” Luc said, his tone shifting to something official, “the subject is a civilian contractor, not a rescue operative. She has no formal training. I need a volunteer to walk her through the terrain.”

Another voice, the woman’s from earlier, came through the static. “Chief, you want me to route her?”

There was a pause. Then Luc’s voice, firm. “No. I’ll walk her through myself. She knows the mountain.”

The words hit her harder than the wind. She knows the mountain. The mountain they’d climbed together, the peaks they’d photographed, the ridges they’d crossed in the years before everything fell apart. He was telling his crew that she was competent. That she could be trusted. That the woman who’d walked away from him, who’d chosen the mountains over the man who flew through them, was still worth saving.

She pressed transmit. “I’m moving west now. Talk to me.”

“Copy,” Luc said. “Heading west along the shelf. You’ll see a rock overhang in about two hundred meters. Shelter under it if the wind picks up. Then continue southwest toward the traverse.”

She walked. She didn’t look back. The radio stayed in her hand, pressed against her ear, his voice a thread pulling her forward through the white.

“You’re doing good,” he said after a few minutes. “Keep your pace steady. Don’t stop.”

“I’m not stopping.”

“I know you’re not. That’s why you’re doing good.”

She felt the bitter smile cross her face. Even now, after everything, he found ways to say exactly what she needed to hear. She hated him for it. She hated him because it made her remember why she’d loved him.

“Luc,” she said, her voice tight.

“Don’t.”

A pause. “Don’t what?”

“Don’t walk me like I’m a tourist on a day hike. I know this terrain better than the back of my hand.”

The radio crackled. When his voice came back, there was something almost amused in it.

“Fair enough.”

She descended the shelf, her boots finding cracks and ledges that she remembered from a dozen other storms, a hundred other descents. The map in her pocket was weightless, but the knowledge of what she was carrying pressed down on her like the sky itself. Eight strangers. One guide fighting for consciousness in a rock shelter. And a man above her in the clouds, flying a rescue helicopter he’d inherited from his father, the same helicopter she’d watched him fly a hundred times from the ridgelines, always hoping he’d look her way.

“I’m at the traverse,” she said, her voice breathless. “The second switchback is below me. I can see the outcrop—the one Benoît marked.”

“Copy. That’s where the group should be. I’m routing the ground team now, but they’re forty minutes out. You need to get them to the shelter at the col before the front hits.”

She looked up. The sky had gone from white to a bruised, dark gray. The front was coming faster than either of them had expected.

“Forty minutes isn’t enough,” she said. “I’ll have to guide them myself.”

A pause. Then his voice, hard as the rock around her.

“Élise, you don’t have the gear to move eight people through that. Not alone.”

“I have the map. I have the terrain. And I have you.”

The words hung in the static between them. She’d meant them simply, pragmatically. But they came out weighted with something else, something she hadn’t allowed herself to feel in years.

Luc’s voice, when it came back, was quieter than she’d ever heard it.

“I’m not going to let you do this alone.”

She looked up at the sky, at the gray slash of storm where his helicopter was invisible but present.

“You’re not letting me,” she said. “You’re with me. That’s different.”

She pressed the radio into her pocket and started down the slope toward the outcrop.

Behind her, the radio crackled one last time, Luc’s voice breaking through the noise, urgent now.

“Élise. Wait. There’s something you need to know.”

She stopped. She pulled the radio out.

“What?”

A long silence. The wind howled. She could hear him breathing again, and she knew him well enough to know what that hesitation meant.

“The scarf,” he said finally. “Benoît didn’t just have it because I gave it to him. I gave it to him the day after you left. I couldn’t look at it without thinking about you. I thought if he wore it, it might bring him luck the way you brought me luck. But it wasn’t luck. It was you. It was always you.”

She stood in the snow, the radio pressed to her ear, and for a long, terrible moment, she couldn’t speak.

Then she pressed transmit.

“Save it for the ground, Luc. I have eight people to find.”

She didn’t wait for his answer. She turned, faced the outcrop below her, and moved forward into the storm.

But she didn’t turn the radio off.