Read Chapter 3: Static

The storm had stopped, but its silence was worse than its fury. Luc pressed the cracked earpiece of the chalet’s radio handset to his ear and listened to nothing. Not static. Not the hollow hiss of a dead frequency. Nothing at all. He thumbed the transmit button. His voice came back to him flat and empty from a speaker that should have crackled with the usual VHF chatter of the valley below.

“Luc.” Camille’s voice came from the doorway of the small communications room—a converted pantry lined with battery boxes and coiled cable. She hugged a wool cardigan around herself, her dark hair still damp from the meltwater drip in the hall. “Anything?”

He set the handset down gently, as if it were a wounded bird, then traced the cable from the radio base unit toward the wall plate. The plastic casing there was snapped loose, one screw missing, the other sheared off. He didn’t need to open it to know. But he did anyway.

Inside, the wires weren’t frayed. They weren’t burned out or shorted. They were cut. Clean, deliberate slices through the copper core, each strand severed with the same decisive pressure of a pair of side-cutters. The red one hung lowest, swaying slightly as the draft from the hall caught it.

“Luc?” Camille stepped closer. He heard her boots on the linoleum, then stop.

He closed the plate, careful not to touch the sheared edges, and turned. “The aerial coax is fine. It’s the power feed. Someone cut it, inside the wall.”

Her face went pale beneath the tan she’d brought up from the sunnier south. “You mean—someone did this deliberately? Like the weather station?”

“Yes.” He saw no reason to soften it again. He’d held the news about the weather station back from the group for the past seven hours, feeding them fragments—a malfunction, a false readout, a possible software glitch—while he sorted through the knot in his stomach. But the radio was different. The radio was their only voice to the outside world, and someone had known exactly where to cut.

“The storeroom,” he said, moving past her into the main hall. “There’s a backup. A satellite handset. Henri keeps it with the emergency kit, first-aid box, flares. Should have been charged and ready before the season.” He crossed the open space where the guests had gathered around the fireplace, ignoring the low murmur of conversation, the clink of spoons in cold soup tins. Jules, the cook, sat to one side with her arm in a makeshift sling made from a tea towel, her face tight with pain but her mouth set in a stubborn line.

Luc reached the storeroom door. It was open. Not ajar the way Jules had left it when she’d rummaged for canned stock earlier—fully open, swinging gently, as if someone had passed through recently and not bothered to close it behind them. The small room inside was a controlled chaos of tinned goods, bottled water, firewood stacked in neat cords, and a metal locker bolted to the back wall.

He checked the locker. Locked. But he had a key.

He slid it into the mechanism, turned, and swung the door open. The emergency beacon was there. The flare gun. The first-aid kit, its plastic case dusty but untouched. But the shelf where the satellite phone should have been—where it had been when he’d done his walkthrough three days ago, before the clients had arrived—was bare. A faint rectangle in the dust, mocking him.

“No.” Camille spoke from behind him, her voice thin. She’d followed him, of course. That seemed to be her habit.

“That’s where it was. I saw it there myself,” Luc said. He ran a hand through his hair, fingers catching in the frost that had formed at the tips. The chalet was losing heat slower than he’d feared but faster than he liked. The generator would hold for another week if they rationed. Maybe less.

“Someone took it.” Camille’s tone wasn’t a question. She leaned against the doorframe, and he heard the click of her teeth as she worried her lower lip. “Someone took it before the avalanche hit. Before all of this. They knew they’d need to take it out of play early.”

Luc didn’t answer. He was counting off in his head the timeframes. The storm had rolled in at forty-three minutes past noon. The weather station had been overridden at 16:47. The avalanche had struck at just past two in the morning. Whoever had cut the radio wire and lifted the sat phone had done it either in the chaos of the storm’s arrival or in the dead hours between the override and the slide.

He turned to face her. Camille had pulled back into the hall, standing at the edge of the firelight’s reach. Her cardigan was buttoned wrong, one side dipping lower than the other. She looked like she hadn’t slept, and he knew she hadn’t—no one had.

“When we got back from the ski run,” Luc said, careful to keep his voice low, “just before the storm broke fully. Did you see anyone near this room? Or the radio?”

Camille’s eyes darted sideways. She was a journalist, he remembered. A features writer who’d come to profile Henri’s resort for a luxury travel magazine. She was trained to watch people, to notice the small inconsistencies that told larger stories. Her hesitation now wasn’t the hesitation of someone piecing together vague memory. It was the hesitation of someone deciding whether to speak.

“The Finnish woman,” she said at last. “The photographer. Ingrid. I saw her in the corridor outside the communications room about twenty minutes before the worst of the wind hit. She was checking lens cases, or so it looked. But she had her back to the door, and she was still when she thought no one was watching. Standing very still, with her hand on the handle.”

Luc felt his neck tighten. “You’re sure it was her?”

“I’m sure it was her,” Camille said. “I’m not sure she did anything. She might have been deciding whether to go in and call for help. A lot of people would. The storm was just coming in—if she’d realized the tower was already down, the radio would have been her first thought.”

“But she didn’t mention it to anyone. She didn’t say, ‘I tried the radio and it wasn’t working.’ Not in the mess hall after the avalanche, not when Henri gave his little speech about resilience and Alpine spirit.” Luc had been there for that speech, and he’d been struck then by how neatly Henri had glossed over the broken tower, the dead lines, the fact that they were stranded not by fate alone but by something smaller and more vicious. He hadn’t known then what he knew now.

Camille shook her head. “She hasn’t said anything. She mostly sits by the window with her cameras, photographing the snow. I don’t think she’s spoken more than four sentences since the slide stopped the generator the first time.”

Luc made a decision. He stepped out of the storeroom, pulled the door mostly closed to keep the cold from spreading, and walked back into the main hall. The fire had been banked too low; Henri’s wife, Margaux, was adding a log with the careful motion of a woman who had done it a thousand times before. Viktor, the skier who had nearly died on the slope three hours before the avalanche, sat nearest to the flames, his broad face flushed, a blanket over his shoulders. The others were scattered around the room: Ingrid by the far window, her camera in her lap, eyes fixed on the white nothing outside; a Swiss couple, the Kaufmanns, sharing a bench in tense silence; Henri himself, standing by the liquor cabinet with a half-empty glass of mulled wine, watching the room with the alertness of a man who didn’t like being the last to know things.

Luc crossed to him. He kept his voice level. “Henri. We need to talk.”

Henri’s eyebrows rose. He was a stocky man in his early sixties, weathered by decades of mountain life, but his eyes were sharp above the rim of his glass. “Radio?”

“Cut,” Luc said. “Not broken. Cut. And your satellite phone is missing from the storeroom.”

Henri’s face shifted. For a moment, the affable host collapsed into something harder, older, more careful. Then it was back, smoothed over with practiced ease. “Impossible. I checked the emergency kit myself after the slide. The phone was there.”

“It isn’t now.”

“Then someone moved it. One of the guests, perhaps. A nervous city dweller who wants to keep their own little lifeline close to the vest.” Henri shrugged, a gesture that was meant to look casual and didn’t. “I’ll ask around. No need to make a scene.”

Luc held his gaze. “Someone cut the wire inside the wall. That’s not a nervous city dweller. That’s someone who knows where things are and what they do.”

Henri’s smile tightened. “And you think you know everyone who knows? You were a guide, Luc. You know the mountain. You don’t know my chalet.” He tilted his glass toward the window where Ingrid sat. “But I know every guest I brought in. Every contract, every NDA, every background check. And I know the one who didn’t come through my vetting.”

The words hung in the air for a moment before Luc understood what Henri was implying. He turned his head slowly toward Camille, who had followed him across the hall and now stood at the edge of the firelight, her arms wrapped around herself, her face pale.

Henri’s voice was soft, almost amused. “She saw what she wanted us to see,” he said. “But she saw the storeroom because she was already looking at the storeroom.”