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Indira’s hand came up to cover her mouth, and then she took it away, reached out her arms, and they held each other. Rosemary closed her eyes and waited for the snow to come. Would it all come at once? Would she know it was happening, or would it just be a blink, alive and then dead, here and then gone?
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.
