Sam turned to make sure Olivia finished strong. She kneeled on the edge of the ridge, ready to give Olivia a hand up as soon as her head appeared at the top of the slope.
“Almost there. Not much farther now.”
Olivia was ten feet from the top. Five. In a few more minutes, she would be on solid ground and Sam could breathe easy for a few days. They all could.
Olivia pulled herself hand-over-hand. The rope scraped against the rocks. How long had the faded line been in place? Five years? Ten? How many climbers had used it to aid their ascent? More than Sam could count.
She held out her hand. Olivia reached to take it. Too late, Sam heard the rope’s strands start to give way. Too late, she saw the rope begin to shear. Just like with Bailey, she was too late.
The rope broke.
Olivia cried out as she plummeted down the embankment. Sam made a desperate lunge for her hand. Just like with Bailey, Olivia’s fingers were just out of reach.
Olivia slid inexorably down the ridge, her crampons slowing but not arresting her descent. The metal spikes screamed as they gouged deep grooves in the ice.
“Olivia!” Sam called after her.
“Doc?” Marie-Eve said. Interview forgotten, she, Pasang, and Peter peered over the edge of the ridge. “Doc!”
Panic rose like a swollen river in Sam’s gut, threatening to wash her away.
Olivia’s gloved hands slid over the ice, desperately seeking purchase. Finally, fifty feet down, she managed to grab the remaining rope. The nylon line pulled taut as her body jerked to a stop. She held on to the rope with one hand as her momentum sent her crashing into the mountain. With a grunt of effort, she swung the right side of her body around and grasped the rope with her second hand. She wrapped her feet around a bulky knot and held on like a PE student stuck in the middle of a rope climb in the high school gym.
Sam lay on her belly. She wanted to rappel down to her, but in the time it would take to prepare the equipment, Olivia might run out of arm strength. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Clip onto the rope,” she called out. “Use your jumar.”
Olivia unlocked her ascender, freed it from the remnants of the severed line dangling from her waist, and attached it to the remaining fixed rope. Then she slowly made her way back up the incline.
Sam didn’t take any chances this time. As soon as Olivia neared the top of the ridge, she grabbed her by her shoulders and hauled her over the edge.
“Are you all right?”
Olivia lay on her back, her chest heaving. Her eyes wide. She didn’t respond to Sam’s question. Was she in shock or had she sustained some kind of head injury that prevented her from speaking?
Trying to rein in an all-too-familiar sense of panic, Sam reached for the radio. “I’ll hail BC and get Dr. Curtis on the horn.”
“No, don’t do that.” Olivia slowly sat up. “I’m okay.”
“Are you sure?” Sam carefully helped her to her feet as Marie-Eve and Peter rushed to her side.
“I’m fine, Sam. Really.”
Olivia flashed a brilliant smile. She seemed too cool, too composed, considering what had just happened. Either she had nerves of steel or she was trying to convince everyone she wasn’t as frightened as Sam knew she had to be.
Sam wanted to offer her words of comfort, but when she looked at her, she saw Bailey’s face staring back at her. She quickly turned away from the painful apparition.
“You gave us all quite a scare,” Peter said.
“Not intentionally, I assure you.” Olivia laughed shakily, giving Sam a hint of the inner turmoil lurking beneath her placid surface.
“What happened down there, Doc?” Marie-Eve asked.
“I wish I knew. I was almost done when the rope just…broke.”
Olivia waved her hands like a magician who had just made her sequin-clad assistant disappear. Sam’s self-confidence disappeared with it. Was the accident her fault? Had she, distracted by her conversation with Olivia, made what had very nearly amounted to a fatal error? She had lost focus during a climb once before and it had cost her dearly.
Over breakfast the morning they set out to climb Mont Blanc, Bailey had asked her how she felt about marriage and children. Before that moment, Sam had never considered the possibility. After Bailey posed the question, settling down and starting a family was all she could think about. She had spent the rest of the morning imagining herself walking with Bailey down a rose-covered aisle. Rubbing Bailey’s steadily swelling belly and bickering with her as they perused a book of baby names. She had pictured it all—first steps, first day of school, high school graduation, college commencement. Birthdays, anniversaries, family gatherings. And through it all, through good times and bad, there she and Bailey would be. Looking on proudly. Laughing through their tears. Then, in a matter of hours, the dream had become a nightmare.
“I inspected the rope myself,” Jimmy said defensively. “It was intact.”
“No one’s questioning you, Jimmy,” Sam said, even as she continued to question herself.
Eventually, everyone drifted back to camp. Pasang hung his head after his offer of food wasn’t met with a great deal of enthusiasm.
“This happened because of me,” he said.
“The rope was intact,” Sam said. “Jimmy inspected it today. So did I the last time we took this route.”
But that was a year ago. She should have inspected it today. She trusted Jimmy—she was confident in his work—but she should have checked behind him. If she had, she wouldn’t be spending the rest of the climb wracked with doubt. Neither would Jimmy.
“Why are you blaming yourself?” Sam asked.
Pasang jerked a thumb in Peter’s direction. “I tried to tell him jiggy-jiggy on the mountain bring very bad luck.”
Peter’s face reddened. “You didn’t have any complaints when you got what you wanted.”
He stalked off. Pasang followed suit, heading in the opposite direction.
“Lovers’ tiff,” Marie-Eve said with a shrug. “I’ll see if I can help them kiss and make up.”
Sam regarded Olivia as she stared off into the distance. Though Olivia claimed to be unaffected by her accident, Sam could see the truth behind the lie. A few hours ago, Olivia had seemed larger than life. Now she was noticeably smaller. Diminished. Sam wanted to hold her and take away her doubts, but first she had to resolve her own.
She wished she could turn back the clock to prevent today from happening. She would gladly lose the tender moment she and Olivia had shared during the climb in order to prevent the terrifying one that had soon followed.
“Are you sure you’re all right?” she asked.
“I’m sure,” Olivia said with a smile that was becoming less and less convincing. “I’m going to check on Peter and Pasang.”
She looked anxious to get away. Sam knew from experience the last thing Olivia needed right now was to be alone, but Sam let her go. She had to. She needed to put some much-needed distance between them before someone ended up with something much more serious than a broken heart.
As Jimmy and Lhakpa began the laborious task of replacing the broken lengths of rope, Sam mentally retraced her actions over the past twenty-four hours to see if she had deviated in any way from her usual routine during this leg of the climb. The only change was the addition of the impromptu round of Q&A Olivia had subjected her to during their dual climb up the ice ridge.
She had loved hearing Olivia’s questions and trying to imagine what Olivia would come up with next. She had been amused by Olivia’s quirky sense of humor and fascinated by the way her mind worked. Perhaps too fascinated. If she had been thinking clearly, she would have noticed the frayed rope. She would have been able to get to Olivia before she began her slide. She would have done her job.
She shouldn’t have allowed herself to get so close. She had stopped seeing Olivia as a client and started to think of her as something more. Now she had to pull back before it was too late. For everyone.
Chapter Ten
In Camp Six, Olivia and the rest of the team used their axes to break off shards of ice Pasang would melt to make fresh water. She placed the latest batch of ice she had collected in a plastic garbage bag, then sat with her elbows on her knees as she tried to slow her racing heart. Ignoring the pain in her ribs, she breathed deeply to allow the oxygen from her portable tank to fill her lungs.
They were nearly a month into the ascent. Twenty-four thousand feet up. A little more than twenty-five hundred feet from the summit. Tomorrow, instead of continuing to climb, they would begin to descend. They would spend three glorious days at base camp resting their weary bodies and minds for the final push to the top. She couldn’t wait to have a shower and collapse into a warm bed, even if the bed in question was a thirty-year-old cot that had seen better days.
Her last three meals had consisted of hot tea and crackers, the only solid food she was able to keep down as she battled the unrelenting nausea brought on by the plummeting oxygen levels. Her energy was at an all-time low. She didn’t have much of an appetite, but her thirst was insatiable. She took in nearly a gallon of fluids a day as she fought to remain hydrated in the thin, dry air.
She repositioned the oxygen mask over her nose and mouth. The gas wasn’t flowing as freely as it had a few minutes earlier. She checked the gauge. The canister was nearly empty. She would need a fresh one before she went to bed. She hated sleeping with the mask on, but she hated waking up gasping for breath even more. She was counting the minutes to tomorrow’s descent. When they returned to this spot after a week of breathing the oxygen richer air at base camp, the climb wouldn’t prove nearly as taxing as it had the first time around. The weeks of acclimatizing would finally pay off. She hoped.
She pushed herself to her feet and slowly made her way to the mess tent. She added her garbage bag to the growing pile and lifted her oxygen mask long enough to ask, “Do you need more?” She was amazed how easily Nepali came to her now. In a few more weeks, she might be as fluent as a native speaker.
Pasang looked inside the garbage bag and shook his head. “When I add this to what the others harvest, we should have about sixteen liters.” He poured freshly melted ice into a canteen. “That’s more than enough to get us back to BC.”
“Do you need help rationing it out?”
“No, Dr. Bradshaw. I—We have it under control.” He grinned as his eyes flicked over her shoulder.
She turned to follow his line of sight. Peter stood in the mouth of the tent.
Olivia smiled to herself. Looks like Marie-Eve is a more skilled negotiator than I gave her credit for. I might have to ask for her help the next time I’m in a bind. Which could be any second now.
Sam approached the tent, a bulging plastic bag in her arms. Parts of the bag were in tatters, sliced by long shards of ice.
Olivia held the tent flap open as Sam ducked inside. Sam didn’t look at her as she brushed past. That was nothing new. Sam had been studiously avoiding her. Olivia wasn’t surprised Sam was giving her the cold shoulder. The incident on the ice ridge had probably reminded Sam of Bailey’s accident on Mont Blanc. Olivia had tried to downplay her fall in order to prevent Sam from making the inevitable comparison, but those moments of sheer terror weighed heavily on her mind.
She had never felt so close to dying. So completely out of control. She had come face-to-face with her own mortality, the boogeyman she had been running from since she was eleven years old.
She had felt as helpless on the ridge as she had the day she had discovered her father’s lifeless body. Only this time it had been worse. Because this time, she’d thought she was prepared. She couldn’t have been more wrong.
She had planned for everything Mother Nature had to offer—rain, snow, ice, good weather, and bad—but she hadn’t accounted for what the universe had in store. Was karma, fate, or sheer bad luck to blame?
She had been in a fog since that day on the ridge. Thankfully, no one seemed to have noticed. Because of the effects of the high altitude, none of them were at their mental or physical best. But Olivia didn’t know how much longer she could keep up the charade. Her emotions were so close to the surface she knew it was only a matter of time before they broke free. When they did, she didn’t know if she would be able to regain control of them.
Sam relieved herself of her burden, then turned to face her. “I need your help.”
Olivia welcomed an opportunity to focus on something other than her own issues. “What’s going on?”
Sam unclipped her walkie-talkie from her waistband. “I received a call from the Ecuadoran team. John Kingsley, their lead guide, appears to have come down with HACE. Members of his team are bringing him down now. The climb doctor at their BC wants to know if you’ll confirm his diagnosis before he radios for an emergency medical evac.”
Unlike HAPE, which affected the lungs, High Altitude Cerebral Edema affected the brain. Oxygen-deprived blood vessels began to leak, causing the brain to swell. As the intracranial pressure increased, the victim’s mental and motor skills rapidly deteriorated.
“I’d be happy to help.”
Olivia strode toward her tent to fetch her medical bag. She had to move fast. If he did have HACE, John wouldn’t realize he was affected until it was too late. If he didn’t descend immediately, he could lapse into a coma and die. She needed time to examine him, confirm or discount the initial doctor’s diagnosis, and wait for the airlift to arrive if she felt an evacuation was warranted.
A few minutes later, four men carrying a fifth bundled inside a mummy-shaped sleeping bag appeared in camp. Sam introduced one of them as Graham West, John’s longtime assistant. “Give me the details,” Olivia said as she knelt next to John and began to examine him.
Graham ran a hand through his hair. “As long as I’ve known John—and Sam can back me up on this—he has never slept for more than four or five hours at a stretch. Yesterday, he slept for eighteen hours straight. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. He was exhausted after we crossed the rock band. We all were. When he finally woke, he didn’t seem himself. His speech was slurred and he stumbled around camp like he’d drunk two bottles of his favorite Scotch when I know for a fact he hasn’t had a drop since we left BC. Now he’s hallucinating and his vision’s starting to fade.”
“After blindness comes partial paralysis, seizures, unconsciousness, total paralysis, and coma.” Olivia ticked the symptoms off on her fingers. “I don’t need to tell you what comes after that.”
She increased the output on John’s canister of oxygen and gave him an injection of dexamethasone to temporarily alleviate his symptoms and prepare him for descent. His pulse was strong, but he was becoming increasingly lethargic.
“Radio your doctor at BC and tell him to get a chopper up here ASAP. We need to get this man off the mountain now.”
“We’re too high up,” Sam said. “A chopper with a turbine engine can fly this high, but the air is too thin for it to hover. You’ll need to descend much lower for a medical rescue.”
“The boys and I will take him down to twelve thousand,” Graham said. “Have the chopper meet us there.”
“Roger that.” Sam lifted the walkie-talkie to her mouth and made the call.
Olivia watched Graham and the other men begin their descent, a slow, treacherous race to meet the arriving helicopter. As the bird hovered above the ground, medical personnel would slowly lower a rescue basket. Graham or one of the other men would guide the litter to the ground, place John inside, and secure straps over his arms, legs, and chest. Then the rescue team would raise the basket and take John to Kathmandu so he could get the medical attention he needed.
Olivia couldn’t stop imagining herself in John’s place. In Chance’s. In Marie-Eve’s. In Bailey’s.
Exhaustion set in as soon as Graham and the other men were out of sight. Olivia felt her legs begin to give way. As she sank to her knees in the snow, she finally lost her fragile hold on her emotions. Tears welled in her eyes. She
tried to keep them from spilling over, but a dam had burst inside her and she was powerless to stem the tide.
How could she have been foolish enough to think she could conquer a mountain that had bested so many? Why had she even tried?
She was so tired. Tired of running. Tired of climbing. Tired of chasing impossible dreams.
She just wanted to stop.
Strong hands hauled her to her feet. An arm curled around her waist, holding her up.
Olivia blinked away her tears. When her eyes regained focus, Sam’s wind-burned face filled her vision. The concern she saw radiating back at her was too much for her to handle.
“I can’t do this,” she said, breaking down again. “It’s too much.”
“No, it isn’t. You’re one of the strongest climbers I’ve ever seen. If you stop now, you’ll regret it for the rest of your life. Keep going, Olivia. I know you can do it. And you won’t have to do it alone. I’ll be right by your side the whole time.”
Olivia wrapped her arms around Sam’s neck and, as she had been doing since the day they began the ascent, put her life in her hands.
Chapter Eleven
At base camp, Sam sat at the conference table and rubbed her hands over her face to try to pierce the fog shrouding her brain. Surprisingly, she was having more trouble concentrating at BC than on the mountain. Olivia’s breakdown, though expected, had been difficult to see. Watching Olivia’s emotions pour out of her had reaffirmed Sam’s decision to keep hers under wraps, a decision that was proving easier to make than to keep. When Olivia had cried in her arms, she had wanted to hold her until she stopped. Instead, she had given her a pep talk and convinced her she had what it took to reach the summit. Convinced her of what her heart already knew but her mind had forced her to forget. Convinced her to keep going.
Unfortunately, Olivia wasn’t the only one suffering from the physical and mental effects of their extended exertions. The entire group had taken quite a beating during the climb, herself included. They needed a break. Much longer than the three days of down time they would have before they began the summit push. But with more bad weather approaching, they didn’t have time to waste.
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