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Dark.
Dark, underground, dirt walls around her, dirt above her head. Scrabbling in the dirt with her fingernails, no air, no light, no hope of surviving, she raked at the dirt, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t breathe, and she kicked hard against something that broke with a crack.
Rosemary woke up gasping.
Dark.
She reached out a hand, felt the tent wall, reached out the other, found the cold fabric of a sleeping bag, and remembered.
Everest. High on the mountain, Camp Three. Tomorrow, the South Col. The summit. Indira next to her.
She was safe. For now.
Someone needed to inform her respiratory system.
Breathe through a straw, she reminded herself. Slow and steady. It was difficult to sleep at such a high altitude, difficult to stay warm, impossible to catch a breath that felt full and satisfying, and her brain compensated with nightmares.
She was alive. Not buried. Frightened but basically okay, scared in the normal way that anyone would be scared doing something so big, but lots of people had done it before her, would do it after, and—
“What’s that noise?” Indira asked.
The wind howled outside the tent. “I don’t hear anything.”
They listened. Gusting wind. Then, something else, a deeper rumbling and a crack. “That.”
A crack. The crack in her dream. The noise had awakened her.
Rosemary sat up, reaching for her boots, shoving her feet into them as she turned on her light. “I’ll go find out.”
As soon as she stepped out of the tent, she collided with a rushing red blur. “Sorry,” she said on instinct, and the voice
that came back at her was strong against the wind.
“Get back in your tent.”
Snow blew into in her face. She hadn’t put on her goggles or covered her head, and that was a stupid mistake at altitude, the kind of mistake that could get her killed.
“Do you know what the noise was?” The cold rubbed her throat raw, the effort it took just to make herself heard astonishing.
She could see his face now, headlamp-illuminated beneath the red hood. It was the Sherpa man from earlier, Doctor Doom, his face hard and blankly impassive. “Get back in your tent.”
He took her by the shoulders, his grip strong even through her cold-weather suit. “Avalanche,” she heard, and then she was being pushed and turned at the same time, on her knees fumbling with the zipper, crawling into the relative warmth of her sleeping bag before she’d had a moment to make the decision for herself.
Avalanche.
Oh, God.
“What’s happening?”
For a moment, Rosemary could only think of her daughter, Beatrice, the last time she’d spoken to her, months earlier, and the promise she’d made to come home alive.
She’d lied.
She’d lied to Bea, lied to herself, lied her way into this expedition telling them she belonged here when she didn’t, she didn’t, she didn’t. Her chest hurt, she couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak.
“Rosemary, what?” The fear in Indira’s voice snapped a cord in Rosemary, woke her up a bit.
“Avalanche,” she croaked.
