Read Chapter 6: The Missing Footprints

The wind had already erased half of them. Élise crouched low, her crampons biting into the ice as she studied the faint depressions in the snow—shallow, shuffling prints, the kind a man makes when his legs have given up but his fear keeps him moving. Philippe. He’d wandered toward the crevasse field, toward the worst possible terrain, and the snow was already filling in his tracks like the mountain was trying to hide its mistake.

She clicked the radio. “Luc, I’m on his trail. Heading east-northeast toward the seracs.”

Static crackled back, then his voice, tight and low. “Élise, you’re pushing into the slide path. I don’t like where that terrain is angling.”

“His prints are fresh. Maybe fifteen minutes.” She stood, squinting through the blowing snow. The crevasse field loomed ahead, a chaos of blue shadows and jagged ice towers, and somewhere beyond it, a dark speck moved. She couldn’t be sure—the light was thinning, the storm chewing at the edges of the world—but she thought she saw a figure stumble and fall.

“I see him,” she said. “Beyond the second serac. He’s still moving.”

“Élise.” Luc’s voice cut through the static, sharp as a blade. “You’re two hundred meters from the group’s route. If you go further, you’re alone. No backup. The team is still forty minutes out, and that storm front is moving faster than my last read. You need to turn around.”

She hesitated. The speck moved again—just a flicker, but it was a flicker of life. A man she’d never met, whose name she’d only learned from a frantic guide in a rock shelter. She thought of Benoît’s yellow scarf, the one wrapped around his neck like a promise Luc had refused to keep. She thought of the seven tourists shivering their way toward a shelter that might not be reachable before dark.

“I’m not leaving him,” she said.

The wind ripped the words from her mouth as she pressed forward. The prints led her along the lip of a shallow depression, then angled sharply toward a ridge of wind-loaded snow—a convex slope that made her stomach drop. She knew that shape. She’d photographed a hundred like it, admired the way the snow curved like a wave about to break. She had never stood on one.

The ground shifted beneath her feet. A soft, sickening settlement, like a held breath released.

“No,” she breathed.

The slab cracked open like an egg. A sheet of snow the size of a house broke loose above her and began to slide, silent at first, then roaring as it swallowed the sound of everything else. Élise tried to run, but there was nowhere to run to—the slope dropped away on every side, and the snow was already curling around her ankles, then her knees, then her waist. She threw her arms up to protect her face just as the wave hit her.

Darkness. Pressure. The world compressed into a crushing silence.

She tumbled, rag-dolled, her body twisting in white chaos. Snow packed into her mouth, her nose, the spaces between her clenched fingers. She hit something hard—a rock, the base of a serac—and felt a crack of pain shoot through her ribs. Then everything stopped.

Élise lay still in the cold, tasting snow and blood. She spat, forced herself to breathe slow. She could breathe. That was something.

She clawed at the snow around her, digging with numb fingers. The avalanche had thrown her clear—she wasn’t buried, just partially covered, her legs pinned beneath a drift. She worked free inch by inch, gasping at the pain in her ribs. Her flashlight was gone. Her pack was gone. She patted her chest and found the map still zipped inside her jacket, but the radio—the radio was gone.

Panic fluttered at the edge of her thoughts. She forced it down.

The wind had eased, just slightly, and through the swirling snow she saw the crevasse field again—but it was different now. The avalanche had reshaped everything, carving new channels, filling old ones. The seracs looked like teeth in a giant’s jaw. And there, beyond the largest one, a figure was standing. Watching.

Philippe. It had to be. He was upright, a dark shape against the blue-white ice, thirty meters beyond a gaping crevasse that split the ground like a wound.

“Hey!” She shouted, her voice thin and shredded by the wind. “Hey! Stay where you are!”

If he heard her, he gave no sign. He turned and stumbled deeper into the field, disappearing behind a wall of ice.

Élise looked down. Her radio lay at her feet, half-buried in the snow, its antenna snapped. She picked it up, pressed the button. Nothing but static—a low, broken hum. She slapped it against her palm. The static flickered, almost found a signal, then died.

She was alone. No radio. No pack. No light beyond the gray dimness of the storm. The map—the map she carried was the only thread connecting her to Luc, to the rescue effort, to the group that was stumbling toward a shelter she could not now reach.

She turned to take in the terrain. The crevasse field stretched east for what looked like half a kilometer. Philippe was out there somewhere, fading fast. Behind her, in the direction she’d come, lay a steep rise, then a long descending slope that would—if she remembered the map correctly—eventually lead back to the main track toward Tour du Vallon.

But darkness was falling.

She stood there in the fading light, chest heaving, ribs screaming, turning in a slow circle. The radio hummed in her hand like a dying bee.

In the distance, a new sound: a whistle. Three short blasts, then two. It came from far away, from the direction of the ridge she’d descended. The tour group. Ingrid, leading them on, whistling for stragglers.

The sound was getting louder. Closer.

Élise pressed the dead radio to her chest. Luc didn’t know where she was. The group was moving without her. The missing man was vanishing into a maze of ice.

And then the wind shifted, and she saw something that made her breath catch.

The yellow scarf. Her scarf—the one she’d left for Luc at the outcrop, the signal to tell him where she’d gone—was gone. In its place, pinned to a rock by a discarded hiking pole, was a folded piece of paper.

A note. Weathered, laced with frost, but readable in the fading light. Not from Luc. From Philippe.

*If you’re reading this, you followed me. Don’t. I’ve been here before. The crevasse field has a path—I know it. I’ll come back when the wind drops. There’s a tunnel under the third serac, an old summer route. It connects to the Tour du Vallon glacier. I’ll meet you at the shelter. Trust me.*

She turned the paper over. On the back, in pencil, was a crude map of the crevasse field. Marked with a cross. Marked with an arrow that pointed through the ice.

Élise looked up. The third serac stood fifty meters away, its base gnawed into shadow—a dark opening she hadn’t seen before. A tunnel. A way through the mountain.

And she remembered, suddenly, with painful clarity, a conversation from years ago. Luc, leaning over his own map in a cramped station kitchen, pointing to a route he’d been sketching for a film crew. *Tunnel under the third serac. Old war route. If we ever need to move people through a slide zone, that’s the way.*

The map she carried was his route. The tunnel he’d found.

Philippe had found it too.

She clutched the note, stuffed it into her pocket beside the map, and started toward the tunnel mouth. The whistle sounded again, closer now, almost on her. Ingrid was leading the group toward her direction, not away—directly toward the crevasse field.

She broke into a run.

Before her, the radio crackled once, as if trying to speak. She stopped, pressed the button. Static—but underneath it, faint and far away, a voice she couldn’t quite make out.

Then the battery died, the radio went silent, and she was left alone with the tunnel mouth yawning before her and the yells of seven tourists rising from behind.