by Ruthie Knox
The wind was the worst kind of horror-show monster, roaring too loud to bear, the tent wanting to lift up and blow away, bucking against the inevitable arrival of cold death in a horrible rush.
“Do you pray?” Indira asked.
She thought of childhood church services. Wood pews and Sunday dresses. “I used to.”
“Let’s pray for them.”
Rosemary tried to access the right words around her dry throat, the terrible ache in her chest, the confusion in her head, but she couldn’t remember how to pray, and when she opened her mouth, she asked, “Who?”
Indira pulled away. She looked closely at Rosemary. “Base Camp, the icefall, Camp One, I don’t know. Wherever it might hit them, let’s pray it doesn’t.”
It took a long moment, several deep breaths, before Rosemary caught on. The avalanche—it wasn’t here.
She hadn’t been thinking clearly. Indira was right: the sound they’d heard had traveled to them from far below. They were safe in their tent, as safe as one could ever be high on the mountain, where death could arrive at any time. But beneath them, thousands of feet deep in the chasm of dark, others might not be so lucky.
There would be no South Col for her team. No summit.
About that, Rosemary could only feel relief.
If the avalanche had taken out a portion of the route back to Base Camp, or the radios and satellite phones that made communication possible, or the rope-and-ladder path through the icefall…
“Our Father,” she said quietly. “Who art in heaven. Hallowed be thy name.”
She counted each repetition of the prayer.
One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six.
The tight spot in her heart eased and opened, making way for the love and hope to pour out into the darkness, into the night, to do what little good it might.
—
Thirty-two hours and countless prayers later, the helicopter lifted off from Camp One, blades fighting for purchase in the thin Himalayan air.
Through the open side, Rosemary saw the route she’d taken up and down the mountain, one ant among dozens, back and forth to try to accustom her body to exertion at altitude. They passed over the icefall, the field now wiped clean by the avalanche, the ladders and ropes buried.
No one had been there in the night, of course. No lives lost. But Base Camp.
Two-thirds of Base Camp was gone, the tents that remained pointing to the broad swath of white where there was nothing—no colors, no prayer flags, no people.
There were bodies underneath. No one knew how many. Dozens. Uncounted bodies. Uncountable.
One medic had survived to help the injured. One radio operator to figure out the generators, fire everything up, and speak into the darkness, coordinating the rescue efforts that first lifted out the wounded to hospitals in Kathmandu, then came for the stranded climbers, evacuating the teams as they made it down to Camp One. It was the highest point on the mountain that could be reached by helicopter, and then only by the most experienced pilots in the most favorable weather conditions.
Conditions hadn’t been favorable. The rest of her team left a full day before the helicopter had been able to return to pluck her off the side of the mountain.
For Rosemary, there had been nothing to do but wait, no satisfying action to take aside from packing up her things and descending on legs that felt like disconnected stalks, her heart sore, her thoughts chasing themselves in a loop, naming the people she’d met in the past several weeks of acclimatizing who were down there in the camp, Lisa, Anders, Scout, Katix, Will, Lapsang, Chiti, Sarah, Rachel, Samir, Brett, Sajit. She’d lived at Base Camp for nearly two months, her life entangled with hundreds of others, and all she learned from the reports that reached her was about the one medic who had survived to care for the wounded, and the one radio operator who arranged for her rescue.
Broken limbs, contusions, bodies under the ice, no one knew how many, no numbers to assign, no way to count the damage.
Uncountable, impossible destruction.
Lisa.
Anders.
Scout.
Katix.
Will.
“Hey.”
The voice drifted into her body with the awareness that it had been speaking for a while. “Rosemary. Hey.” A hand on her shoulder. “Take a breath.”
She closed her eyes and tried. Her lungs burned. Her face was wet, the air coming through the door of the helicopter too cold. She shuddered.
“In through your nose. Out through your mouth.”
She tried.
Impossible.
“Come on.” An arm came around her shoulders, a weight of heavy tech fabric, red in her peripheral vision. “In through your nose.”
She tried again, concentrated. When she exhaled, her breath hitched, hitched, hitched. Three times.
“That’s perfect. Give me another one.”
“I can’t.”
“Yeah, you can.”
So she had to, and she could, she did, but only because he made her with the pressure of his heavy arm and his attention.
“Good girl.”
She looked at him, blinking. The Sherpa. Doctor Doom. Without anything covering his face, his hood pushed back, a black knit hat, he was unbearably attractive, unbearably alive.
He’d coordinated the rescue. Indira, bless her, had tried, but she hadn’t had the steady nerves, the knowledge to make sense of the radio transmissions. This man, though. He’d worked the radio, made the decisions, put her on the helicopter.
She didn’t want to be on a helicopter. Her escape was perverse. Her privilege, to be one of those spirited away, was indefensible. She wanted to be down there, doing something.
“I hate this.” She was surprised to hear her own voice. How flat she sounded. How removed.
“It’s what’s happening.” He squeezed her shoulder when he said it, and she wanted to be annoyed, but more than that she wanted to curl into his body and weep for Lisa, and Anders, and Scout, and Katix, and the bodies that couldn’t be counted, the ones she couldn’t name.
“It shouldn’t be what’s happening.”
It should not be.
It should not be.
They felt like the right words. The only words. She said them again. “It shouldn’t be.”
He nodded in agreement. Which made her angry. The roar of the helicopter was hateful. She wanted a button that would turn everything off. She stared through the hole punched through the side of the helicopter into space, watching Base Camp drop away into an undulating sea of rock and ice. A woman lifted through the air in a hydrocarbon-powered tin box, flesh no more worthy of survival and rescue than any other flesh.
“You’re from England, right?”
“Yes.”
“You have people to go home to there?”
She had people. Friends. She had a cottage in Harpenden, twenty-five miles north of London, easy to get to the city by train but far enough away that it felt like a retreat. She had a conservatory where she would grow oranges one day, a kitchen she planned to renovate with Spanish tile and new cupboards that she would paint the color of Drabware—just as soon as she’d climbed the Seven Summits and finished her book.
She had too much.
Sajit had showed her a picture on his phone of his newborn baby. A tiny person he’d never met. Maybe he’d survived, and he would go home to his girlfriend and meet that baby.
Maybe.
“Everything’s going to move fast once we hit the ground,” Doctor Doom said. “It helps to know where you’re headed.”
“Sure.”
Sajit. Katix. Katix had a daughter, too, younger than Rosemary’s. Katix was from Alaska. Katix made the best coffee, and Rosemary didn’t know if she’d died in a hurricane of cold, her breath stolen right from her lungs. If she’d suffered or for how long. She didn’t know.
“Do you have a plan?”
First Everest in May. Denali in July. Elbrus in August. Rosemary had a plan, and she wanted him
to stop annoying her with questions so she looked up, the angle too abrupt with his arm around her, his face and neck close, his warmth, the square shapes of his chin and jawline.
A skull under there. Muscles, organs, blood, bone.
She didn’t want to die on a mountain.
“I don’t think so.”
His arm tightened, drew her close, pushed the wool of his knit cap into her forehead, hard. She felt his breath against her face. “You’re okay.”
She wasn’t.
“Everything’s okay.”
It wasn’t.
“It will be.”
It wouldn’t.
She closed her eyes, pressed her head against his head, her skin into his skin, her coat into his coat, because it never would, again.
It never would be the same, and it never would be okay.
“We’ll figure it out. I promise.”
Rosemary didn’t believe him. But all the way to Lukla, she clung to his promise, clung to his coat like his body was the rock she’d wrecked her ship against.
She didn’t let go until the helicopter landed and the world fell silent.
Chapter 3
With a tray balanced on his left palm and a bottle of wine dangling from his right hand, Kal Beckett rapped his knuckles against the door.
It was a thick door. So thick, he wondered if she could even hear him in there.
She had to be able to hear him, though. If she couldn’t, how would the lodge staff ever manage to rouse its trekker clientele to accept room service, or kick them out the morning after a bender?
He rapped on the door again.
She opened it, and his whole field of vision went suddenly white and pink, wet hair sending runnels of water down her—
Naked.
Holy shit, she was stark naked. She was—
Kal ripped his gaze off her body and brought it to her eyes. She blinked. He shifted the wine bottle to his left hand and snapped his fingers. She blinked again. Looked down at herself. “Oh.”
Jesus. The princess had left the building.
This was exactly why he’d ordered a meal sent up and dragged his ass over here—the alarm bell that had started going off in his head when he thought about that blankness in her face on the helicopter. Afterward, she’d been questioned by the local Nepalese authorities and cleared by a busy medic with too much on his plate to give much thought to an Englishwoman whose ever-present composure easily disguised the signs of stress.
“I brought you something to eat.”
Her eyes darted to his, and a flush began to creep up her neck. She covered her breasts with one arm, then brought the door forward to hide the rest of herself. “Thank you.”
That was more like it. Always polite, this one, with her round English vowels, her crisp consonants. The princess.
He’d carried her a cup of tea once, and when he handed it to her she looked right into his eyes and thanked him with the sincerity of a woman who’d learned young that it wasn’t enough just to say the words—you had to pay attention, to think about the person you were saying them to.
She glanced at the covered tray, the wine bottle. His face. Helpless to figure out what came next.
“Why don’t you close the door?” he suggested. “Find something to wear. Get a towel and dry your hair.”
“I don’t…” Her hand fluttered beside her hip, a gesture that didn’t mean anything, a purple bruise the size of a fist on her thigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I…”
Kal gave it a beat, but she didn’t finish the sentence. “Nothing to be sorry about. Just close the door.” He spoke slowly, holding her gaze. “Find something to wear. Get a towel and dry your hair. When you’re ready, open the door again. We’ll eat, if you want to.”
She bit her lip, then nodded and shut the door in his face.
Kal let out a long breath. He set the tray down on the carpet and sank to the ground with his back to the wall, wrapping his fingers around the glass neck of the wine bottle.
There was nothing else to do.
He’d been to the makeshift medical clinic where they were triaging the wounded and found it fully staffed. All the critical cases had already been transported to better facilities in Kathmandu, the less critical cared for and kept comfortable.
He’d called home and talked to his mom. He’d checked the news and stopped at a bar that was serving as an information center for the rescue operation. He’d told the people who needed to know everything he had to say.
Kal had been here before, when it was a thousand times worse. Two years ago, the avalanche at Everest came courtesy of an earthquake that had destroyed so many lives and so much property, Nepal still hadn’t begun to recover.
Kal was off the mountain in Pheriche that day, where the earthquake knocked down buildings, knocked people around, scared the shit out of everyone, caused bruises and lacerations, but somehow, miraculously, resulted in only one death. He’d stuck around the village afterward, helping where he could, connecting people who had resources to people who needed them.
He knew what to do. There just wasn’t all that much he could do.
Story of his life.
He ran his fingers up and down the neck of the wine bottle. The green color of the carpet looked wrong beneath his legs. Like maybe it was the wrong green, or maybe he’d forgotten what green looked like.
Just before he left his room, he’d checked the news: the Nepalese government had already canceled the open permits for the season. Everyone who could help was at Base Camp or on their way there. They would find the dead, give them names and burials, carry their effects down the trail to pass along to their families.
The guides and cooks, the people who carried loads and supplied dung to burn and delivered packages and fresh vegetables and milk for coffee—they would service the cleanup until there was no one left to service, and afterward they’d take whatever wages they’d managed to salvage from the canceled season and go home.
No one would ask whether all this death could have been prevented. No one would ask whether it was a good idea to start the machine back up again next year.
Kal had given a lot of time to asking those questions, pushing them on people who didn’t want to hear them. But that kind of work took faith, and he didn’t have any left.
He’d failed.
One mountain in the world had to be tallest. It would never run out of people ready to pay for the right to die on it. Kal couldn’t save any of them. They didn’t want to be saved.
“Only two kinds of people climb Everest,” he told the empty hallway. His voice bounced off the walls and came back to him from the corners. Ghost voice. Haunted.
Maybe he was feeling a little weird, himself.
Only two kinds of people—he’d come to the realization a long time ago. Every spring, his parents traveled to Everest Base Camp from their place in Queens. When he was younger, he and Tashi stayed with relatives in the villages of the Khumbu, but when he turned ten they let him come along.
He fetched a lot of cups of tea. Pitched a lot of tents. Carried newspapers, started fires, watched climbers, and figured out that exactly two kinds of people showed up to scale the tallest mountain in the world: the megalomaniacs, who were obsessed with their own power, and the walking wounded, who wanted the mountain to heal them.
Kal was neither. He’d never climbed to the summit of Everest. He’d never wanted to.
The only reason he’d come to Nepal this season was guilt. One of his cousin’s friends, a guy from Namche named Pasang, had called him up.
I need an ice doctor. Kal had the skill and experience to round out his team. Pasang put the screws to him. You owe me. I could really use you.
Pasang had lost his shirt on Kal’s trekking guide initiative, lost his house in the earthquake, and lost his daughter to traffickers.
Now Pasang was missing, presumed dead.
Kal was finished with Everest.
He’d help the people who really needed hi
m—his mom, his family—instead of wasting his time in the Khumbu, where nothing he’d ever done had made one bit of a difference.
He ran his fingers up and down the neck of the wine bottle. He needed to turn off his brain for a while. Probably he should have bought a couple bottles of wine. He could knock himself out.
After he was done checking on the princess, he’d do that, maybe. Give his head a rest. Get some sleep.
The door opened a foot.
She stood in the crack, hair toweled but not combed, a man’s white Oxford shirt buttoned askew over a pink T-shirt, jeans too big for her hips, bunched at the ankles. Barefoot. Shivering. Either those weren’t her clothes, or she’d lost twenty pounds since she bought them.
If the headlines he’d seen in his news feed were to be believed, the princess here belonged to the megalomaniac category of Everest climbers—completely full of herself, looking for attention that would make her feel more powerful, more important, more alive.
Kal had been raised by a megalomaniac. Abused by him more times than he could count. He didn’t like them much.
This woman, though—she needed someone. The rest of her team was long gone, out on the first morning flight to Kathmandu before she’d even made it off the mountain. He’d kept her at Camp One the longest of any of them because she held her shit together better than most. But keeping your shit together had a price, and the princess was paying it now.
Kal felt responsible.
“Come in, please.”
He rose, dimly aware he should be exhausted and stiff. In fact, his body felt immaculate.
That was the adrenaline. It would wear off, and the crash would be a son of a bitch.
Kal picked up the things he’d brought and stepped to the door. Eyes averted, the princess moved out of the way.
In her world, her real world, people like Kal were nothing more than specks. Given a place, expected to stay in it, rewarded with reasonable salaries and thank-yous delivered with three seconds’ sincere attention. He doubted she knew his name, doubted she’d paid him enough mind at Base Camp to even be able to distinguish him from all the other Sherpa guys.
Kal didn’t hold it against her.
Megalomaniacs gotta megalomaniac. Princesses gotta princess. He chuckled to himself, and she looked at him, forehead furrowed.
