Read Chapter 20: Charge

The silent chalet felt like a tomb as Luc gathered them in the kitchen before first light. Camille stood with her arms crossed, Ali leaned against the counter with a coil of jumper cables over his shoulder, and Marcel hovered near the door, his hand brushing his pocket in that same guarded way. Viktor had refused to come, muttering about Luc’s “theatrics” and choosing instead to watch from the hallway, a shadow in the dim.

“The phone’s battery is shorted,” Luc said, keeping his voice low. “Professional job. Someone didn’t want us calling out.”

“So we’re stuck with a dead phone and a dead plan,” Ali said.

“Not quite.” Luc held up the device. “The short is in the battery, not the phone itself. If we can jury-rig power from the generator shed’s batteries, we might get enough juice to fire it up and grab a signal. Even a second of transmission could be enough for a rescue service to triangulate.”

Camille frowned. “The generator shed is fifty meters out. In this snow, that’s a crawl.”

“Then we crawl.”

Marcel finally spoke, his voice a low rasp. “You want us to go out there? Now? The storm’s not done.”

Luc met his eyes. “It’s never going to be done. We wait, we freeze, or we get picked off one by one by whoever’s doing this. I’m not waiting.”

The four of them suited up in the mudroom, layering every scrap of wool and down they could find. Marcel produced a headlamp from his pocket—the same pocket—and clicked it on without a word. Luc noted the gesture but said nothing.

They left through the service door, into a world of screaming white. The wind hit them like a physical wall, and Luc had to shout to be heard even a foot away. He led the line, breaking trail with his poles, feeling the familiar ache in his calves that came from post-holing through waist-deep drifts. Behind him, Camille carried the phone wrapped in a scarf, and Ali dragged the jumper cables like they were pulling a sled.

The generator shed materialized out of the murk after what felt like an eternity but was probably only ten minutes. Luc unlatched the door and shoved it inward, the hinges groaning against the accumulated ice. Inside, the air was still and sharp with the smell of diesel and cold metal. A small workbench lined one wall, and in the corner sat the two deep-cycle batteries that fed the chalet’s electrical system.

“Car batteries,” Ali said, dropping the cables. “This’ll work.”

Luc moved to the batteries and stopped. His breath fogged in the cold as he stared.

The terminal connectors were loose, dangling. The leads had been cut clean through with a blade, the copper ends gleaming bright and fresh. The battery acid had been siphoned out of both units and left to pool on the concrete floor in a dark stain.

“What the hell,” Marcel breathed.

Luc crouched, running a gloved finger along the clean cut. “This was done recently. Last night, maybe. Whoever did this knew we’d come here next.”

“Or they wanted to make sure we couldn’t,” Camille said quietly.

Luc stood and swept the shed with his eyes. A fuel canister, half full. A box of spare fuses. A tool rack with a missing wrench. And there, tucked behind the workbench leg, a crumpled oil-stained rag that smelled faintly of cigarette smoke.

“Viktor didn’t come with us because he knew we’d find this,” Marcel said.

“Or because he didn’t want to be seen near this shed in the dark,” Luc countered. “Don’t jump to the easy accusation. That’s what whoever’s doing this wants.”

Ali had already dropped to his knees, peering at the battery housing. “Hold on. These are flooded lead-acid, not sealed. The acid’s gone, but we could refill them from the generator’s coolant—no, that won’t work. Different chemistry.”

“What about the generator itself?” Luc asked. “Does it have a starter battery?”

Ali’s eyes widened. He scrambled to the far corner, where the small diesel generator sat under a tarp. He pulled the tarp back, and Luc saw it: a standard 12-volt starting battery, intact, fully charged. The saboteur had hit the main power but missed the generator’s own kick-start.

“We’ve got one shot,” Ali said. “Maybe two. This battery’s small—it’ll give us a few minutes of phone time at most before it drains.”

“Then we make those minutes count,” Luc said.

They rigged the phone to the generator battery with the jumper cables, using a strip of duct tape from Luc’s pocket to secure the connection. The phone’s screen flickered, then glowed to life with a dull hum. A tiny battery icon appeared in the corner, red and nearly empty.

“Signal?” Camille asked.

Luc held the phone up, moving it in slow arcs around the shed, stepping closer to the metal door to angle the screen toward the window. The signal bars stayed stubbornly empty.

“Nothing inside. I need to go out.”

“The wind will kill the connection,” Marcel said. “And the cold will kill the battery faster.”

“Then I’ll be fast.”

Luc cracked the door and slipped outside, pulling the phone with him. The wind ripped at his jacket, and he cupped the device in both hands, shielding it from the spray of snow. He raised it to the sky, turning in a slow circle, praying to see a single bar.

Nothing.

He moved around the shed, pressing his back to the wall for shelter, holding the phone higher. The screen flickered—a single bar, faint as a dying ember—then vanished. He shifted. Adjusted. Swore under his breath.

Then it came back. One bar. Steady enough to stay.

He dialed the emergency number from memory—the mountain rescue coordination in Chamonix—and hit send. The phone rang once. Twice. A third time. Static, then fragments of a voice, tinny and broken like it was coming from the bottom of a well.

“—cez-vous? Répétez, je n’entends—can you repeat, I can’t hear you—”

“Luc Moreau,” he shouted into the wind, his voice cracking. “Avalanche at the Les Arcs valley—north face—we’re trapped at the old refuge chalet—seven survivors—injuries—sabotage—repeat, sabotage, someone is killing us out here—”

The line crackled, sputtered, and died.

Luc stared at the screen. The call timer read 0:04. Four seconds. The bar flickered once more, then the screen went black as the generator battery gave out.

He stood there in the whiteout, the phone a dead weight in his hand, the wind screaming past him like it was laughing. He didn’t know if the words had made it through. He didn’t even know if the voice on the other end had been a real operator or just a ghost in the static.

He walked back into the shed. Ali saw his face and said nothing. Camille took the phone from his hand, pressed her thumb to the cold screen, and turned it over.

“Did it send?” Marcel asked.

“I don’t know,” Luc said. “Maybe. Maybe not. Four seconds isn’t enough for a full transmission, but it might have registered. Depends on signal bounce, weather, alignment of the damn stars.”

The silence that followed was heavy, laden with the weight of it. Four seconds wasn’t nothing. It could mean the difference between a rescue and a burial.

But it also wasn’t enough.

“We go back inside,” Luc said. “We warm up. We regroup. And we figure out who cut those wires before they cut something else.”

They trudged back through the storm in a line, each lost in their own thoughts. The chalet loomed ahead, warm and bright and suddenly less like a refuge and more like a stage. A stage where the killer was already among them, watching, waiting for them to make their next move.

Back inside, Luc peeled off his wet layers and hung them by the fire. The others filtered to their corners. Viktor appeared in the doorway of the kitchen, studying him with narrowed eyes.

“Well?” Viktor asked. “Did you perform your miracle?”

“The phone’s dead,” Luc said flatly. “Generator batteries were drained. We got four seconds of signal out.”

Viktor’s expression didn’t change. “Four seconds.”

“Four seconds can save us.”

“Or it can mean nothing at all.”

They stared at each other across the room. Luc thought of the burn mark on Viktor’s jacket, of the scarred man in his father’s photograph, of the way Viktor always seemed to be watching from the edge of every conversation.

“It means something,” Luc said. “Everything means something in this valley.”

Viktor’s mouth quirked, not quite a smile, and he turned and walked away, disappearing into the upper hallway.

Luc stood alone by the fire, listening to the wind howl against the windows, the weight of those four seconds pressing down on him. Somewhere out there, a fragment of his voice was riding the storm, if it had been heard at all. And somewhere in this chalet, someone was listening for it too.