Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The thing about Denali's satellite peaks was that they were liars.

They looked manageable. That was the problem. Tourists came up from Anchorage with their rental gear and their YouTube tutorials and their absolute conviction that the smaller ridgelines would be forgiving. Shane had pulled eleven people off the eastern face of Mount Eklutna this year. Three of them in July alone, which was supposed to be the easy month. Carol from Portland was making it four.

"Okay," he said, keeping his voice level. "You're doing great."

The woman — Carol from Portland, here with her husband who was currently being escorted down by another Ranger — had stopped crying about ten minutes ago, which was either a good sign or a sign that shock was setting in. Shane crouched beside her on the ledge, checking the splint he'd set on her lower leg with the practiced efficiency of someone who had done this enough times that his hands worked independently of his brain.

"It doesn't feel great," Carol said.

"No. It wouldn't." He tightened the last strap, not hard enough to cut circulation, and sat back on his heels to look at the sky. Clear for another two hours, maybe three if the cloud cover coming in from the northwest moved slower than predicted. It probably wouldn't. "The fibula. Clean break, from what I can tell. You'll need imaging when we get down but you probably won't lose the leg."

"Probably —?" She asked, a little dazed.

"It's lucky, given where you fell." Shane looked at the section of trail above them — what remained of it, anyway. A four-inch ledge of frost-cracked granite, southeast-facing, which meant it got just enough afternoon sun to thaw and refreeze in a cycle that made it approximately as reliable as wet ice. "You went down at the worst possible point, actually. There's a seventeen-foot section up there that we flag every spring. The melt pattern on this face creates a false shelf — looks solid, tests solid, and then the substrate gives. Happens more often than you’d think."

Carol stared at him. "Is that supposed to make me feel better?"

Shane considered it. "Yes?"

"Right." She looked out at the valley below, which was beautiful and indifferent and enormous. "I thought I'd done my research."

"You did some research." He started packing his kit, organizing by return order out of long habit. Splint supplies, emergency blanket, the half-eaten protein bar he'd tucked in the outer pocket at six this morning. "You read about the weather windows and the trail ratings. Most people stop there. The trail rating system doesn't account for seasonal variance in the freeze-thaw cycle at this elevation, which is — honestly, it's a problem with the rating system. I've submitted two reports to the parks authority about reclassifying this trail for shoulder season access. They're pending."

"Pending," Carol repeated.

"Since 2014." He zipped the kit and stood, doing a quick calculation of the descent route. The direct path was faster but required her to put some weight on the leg for about sixty feet. The traverse added twenty minutes but was essentially flat. He'd take the traverse.

"Most people think of the mountain as a big rock. Permanent, unchanging. It's actually — rock at this elevation is constantly in motion. Freeze-thaw cycling, thermal expansion, microseismic activity from the range. It's a different mountain in April than it is in July. So." A small pause. "You shouldn't feel bad."

She looked up at him. She had the expression people got sometimes, out here, after the adrenaline had burned off — a raw, stripped-open look, like something had been reorganized inside them.

"Do you do this a lot?" she asked. "Talk to people while you —"

"No," Shane said honestly. "I'm usually better at the rescue part."

He got the harness rigged in four minutes and radioed back to base with their position and the updated descent route. The wind had picked up from the northwest — earlier than predicted, because the mountains in this range were predictably unpredictable.

"Ready?" he asked.

Carol looked at the drop below them, the valley impossibly far down.

"No," she said.

"Okay," Shane said, and started moving anyway.

Winter was the version of the job Shane had never thought to want until he had it.

Summer brought the tourists — well-meaning and underprepared, Carol from Portland and her eleven predecessors, people who had done some research and not quite enough of it. Shane didn't resent them. He understood the pull of the mountains in summer, the way they looked from a distance like something conquerable. He became a ranger because of it.

But winter cleared them out. The trails emptied, the parking lots at the trailheads went back to locals and the occasional serious expedition team, and Shane got to do his favorite part of the job— snowpack assessment, wildlife monitoring, the long quiet traverses across untouched virgin terrain. He'd been on snowshoes since mid-October, checking the eastern ridge lines for early instability, cataloguing the places where the season's first heavy snowfall had loaded the slopes unevenly.

He was three miles into a solo survey on a Tuesday morning, the temperature sitting at a comfortable minus twelve, when his satellite phone rang.

He looked at the screen. Hayden.

He considered not answering. He answered.

"Before you say anything," Hayden said, "hear me out."

"That's never a good opening."

"It's a great opening, you just have a bad attitude about opportunity." There was wind noise on Hayden's end, which meant he was outside, which meant he was probably already on a mountain somewhere and calling Shane from it, which was classic Hayden. "I've got a job. Private client, high-profile, technically demanding. I need the best SAR guy I know."

"I don't do private clients."

"You've done them before."

"Under duress."

"Shane." Hayden's voice shifted — dropped the sales pitch quality, went genuine, which was somehow more alarming. "I wouldn't call you for this if I didn't actually need you. The mountain is serious. The client is —" A pause that lasted just long enough to be telling. "a big deal."

Shane stopped walking. Around him the slope was silent in the way that deep winter made everything silent, the snowpack absorbing sound, the treeline dark and still. "What kind of ‘big deal’?"

"The rich European kind. Extreme skier. Olympian. He's planning a descent on Karanov."

Shane resumed walking. "No."

"Shane —"

"The north couloir hasn't had a successful descent. Ever. The avalanche risk above the —"

"I know. That's why I need you. Nobody reads snowpack like you do." Another pause. "He's paying thirty thousand a head for the search and rescue team. Ten thousand bonus each if the descent completes without incident."

Shane's snowshoes kept moving. His brain did something he didn't particularly want it to do, which was math.

Thirty thousand dollars. Plus ten. His parents' house in Ottawa had a second mortgage they'd taken out when his father's back had gone bad and the physiotherapy bills had stacked up alongside the lost income. Shane sent what he could every month, which was not much, because park rangers in Alaska were not paid in a manner that reflected the actual requirements of the job, and he'd been saying that in annual reviews for four years without measurable effect. He'd calculated, in a low moment last February, that at his current rate he'd have them clear of the debt in somewhere between four and seven years, depending on interest.

Forty thousand dollars would do it in one.

He could send them somewhere warm afterward. Hawaii maybe, they’d always wanted to go.

"Who's the skier," he said.

Hayden's relief was audible even through satellite interference. "Ilya Rozanov."

Shane knew the name. Most people who followed winter sports knew the name, and Shane didn't follow winter sports, but Rozanov was the kind of famous that crossed over. Two winters ago he'd taken gold in downhill at the games, the first Russian medal in the discipline in thirty years, and the footage had been everywhere for weeks whether you'd gone looking for it or not. Shane had seen it on a bar TV in Anchorage, seen it again channel-surfing late at night when sleep wasn't cooperating. A man coming down a mountain so fast it looked less like skiing and more like falling with intention, crossing the finish line and dropping to his knees in the snow. The kind of moment that ended up on the covers of things.

He was also, from what Shane had observed across two documentaries he'd watched without entirely meaning to, the kind of person who treated danger the way most people treated mild inconvenience.

"When," Shane said.

"Three months. March. Karanov north face. I've got four other guys confirmed, but I want you at the summit position. You know that mountain better than anyone."

Shane looked up at the sky, which was doing the thing it did up here in December — ink-black and so crowded with stars it looked less like a sky than like something had punched a thousand holes through to whatever was burning on the other side. He thought about his parents. He thought about the promise of Hawaii. He thought about the north couloir on Karanov, which he trusted approximately not at all.

"I want full authority over the go/no-go call," he said. "If I say the conditions aren't safe, the descent doesn't happen. Non-negotiable."

"Absolutely," Hayden said, with the speed of a man who would have agreed to anything in that moment, true or otherwise.

Shane should have clocked that. He didn't.

"Fine," he said. "I'm in."

The base camp setup was functional, which was the best Shane had ever hoped for from a privately funded operation and the most he intended to say about it.

Hayden's team had done the groundwork well enough — tents, equipment staging, the medical station Shane had specified having in his contract he'd submitted three weeks ago and then followed up on twice because he'd learned that "we'll have it" and "we will actually have it" were vastly different to Hayden. He'd checked the medical station first. It was correctly stocked. He'd made a note to tell Hayden that, because Hayden occasionally needed to hear that he'd done something right or he got maudlin about it.

Now Shane was working through the supply pallet, which was sitting on a patch of flat ground near the landing zone with the optimistic energy of something that had been packed by people who'd never spent a week alone at 3,800 meters. He went through it, item by item, moving things he wanted to the left and things that needed to be reconsidered to the right. The right pile was growing.

This was the pallet that would go up with him — slung underneath the helicopter, deposited at the summit station, which would be tomorrow if the weather held. He would spend the week up there alone, running snowpack assessments on the north face, monitoring the load on the couloir, building the picture that would let him make the go/no-go call on the day of the descent. He'd been wanting proper time on Karanov's upper slopes for two years. The fact that a Russian daredevil with a camera crew was financing that time was something Shane had made his peace with, more or less.

In exactly one week, the same helicopter that carried Shane up would carry Ilya Rozanov — who had apparently never met a mountain he considered worthy of him — to the top of a couloir that had turned back every serious skier who'd attempted it in the last decade. Shane had read the incident reports. Three serious injuries, one near-miss, and one fatality in 2014 that the mountaineering community had discussed at length.

Rozanov intended to ski it for a documentary. Shane intended to make sure that if it went wrong, someone competent was close enough to save his life.

He pulled a box of emergency rations to the right. The expiry date was fine. The calorie count per day was not — whoever had done the math had assumed a level of physical activity closer to light hiking than extended technical work in subzero temperatures. He'd supplement from his own supply.

"You are the one going up first."

Shane startled, hand going instinctively to the radio at his hip before his brain caught up with his body. He hadn't heard anyone approach. He turned around.

Ilya Rozanov was taller in person than the documentaries suggested, which was the first thing Shane noted. The second was his gear, which was immaculate and expensive looking. The third was the camera crew picking their way through camp about thirty feet behind him, and Shane filed that one under ongoing problems.

"That's right," Shane said. "Shane Hollander. I'm your Search and Rescue lead."

Rozanov looked at the pallet. Then at Shane. He had the manner of someone accustomed to arriving places and having them reorganize around him. "You go up a week early. To do what?"

"Building an accurate picture of conditions on the north face before you attempt the descent." Shane kept his voice even. "The couloir has a history of unstable loading. I want —"

"I know about the couloir," Rozanov said. Not rudely. Simply.

"Then you know three people have been seriously injured on it in the last decade and one person didn't come home." Shane held his gaze. "I'm going up there so I can tell you whether this week is the week, or whether we wait."

Rozanov was quiet for a moment. He looked at the pallet again, then back at Shane, and something moved through his expression that wasn't quite dismissal and wasn't quite respect and sat somewhere in the middle in a way Shane found difficult to categorize.

"The mountain," Rozanov said, "is always dangerous. You cannot wait for it to be something else."

"I've pulled people off mountains like this my entire career. If it's not ready, this isn't happening."

Ilya looked at him for a moment. Then he reached into his jacket and produced a cigarette, lighting it with the unhurried ease of a man who had never once considered that the setting might be inappropriate for it.

Shane watched him do it and tried not to notice anything about him, which was difficult. Golden brown curls, a jaw sharp enough to cut something, cheekbones sitting high and defined under tan skin. He was a full head taller than Shane, broad through the shoulders, and stood straight and loose with confidence.

Shane was aware, in the detached way, that he himself looked approximately like someone's younger brother by comparison. Shorter, leaner, the freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks that he'd had since childhood, his hair cropped short and practical under his toque.

Ilya exhaled a slow stream of smoke and looked at Shane with an expression of mild interest.

Rozanov was, objectively, gorgeous. Shane had enough self-awareness to admit that, if only to himself and only because denying it would have been its own kind of dishonest. Under different circumstances — different job, different mountain, different everything — Rozanov would have been exactly Shane's type. Physically, anyway. The lifestyle that came attached to Ilya Rozanov was a complete and total turn-off.

The problem with extreme sports types, in Shane's experience, was the personal philosophy of all of them — the idea that the mountain was a backdrop, a venue, something to be conquered and filmed and posted and moved on from.

Shane loved the mountain. The animals that nested there, the way the snow reflected the sun. He could stare at a single boulder for hours just admiring the way time has worn it down to the shape it came to be long before humans had evolved eyes to look at it.

Shane valued the life of the trees. How the old growth died and dissolved into the dirt to create enough nutrients for their babies to grow as big and strong as their parents. The mountain, nature, outside, was enough – was the whole point to Shane.

Rozanov's kind blew through. They took what they needed — the footage, the record, the rush — and they left, and they left behind helicopter fuel emissions and resource costs and occasionally a body that someone like Shane had to bring down. The environmental math alone was enough to make Shane's jaw tighten. The money Rozanov’s sponsors were spending on this single descent could fund a hundred more worthy causes.

It was why he said no when Hayden called with these jobs. Usually.

Shane looked at the cigarette. Then back at his pallet.

"The mountain," Ilya said, exhaling slowly, "it has been here for ten thousand years. It will be here for ten thousand more. It does not need to be ready. It is not trying on a dress."

Shane scoffed. "You'll care when an avalanche triggers on that couloir and buries you under fifteen feet of snow.” Shane pulled another box forward, checked the date, and moved it left. “Then you too can be on this mountain for the next ten thousand years."

Rozanov looked at him for one more beat, and then the corner of his mouth moved — not quite a smile, but enough of one to be irritating — and he said something in Russian under his breath that Shane didn't catch and wasn't sure he wanted to.

"Maybe." Rozanov took another drag, watching Shane work through the supplies with what felt like genuine curiosity. "Or maybe this is the only way to live. You have considered this?"

"I've considered it and rejected it, yeah."

Rozanov smiled true at that one. It was, Shane noted without wanting to, a very good smile. "You do this — " he gestured at the pallet, the meticulous sorting, the log open on top of the equipment case " — for every job?"

"Yes."

"Every item?"

"Every item."

Rozanov took a thoughtful drag of his cigarette. "This seems," he said, "like a very boring way to spend an afternoon."

Shane gave him a look. He didn't plan it — it was just the look his face made when someone said something that didn't warrant a full response but couldn't go entirely unacknowledged.

Rozanov's smile widened.

Which was somehow worse.

"You do not like me," Rozanov said, with the tone of a man making a pleasant observation about the weather.

"I don't know you."

"Yes, but already —" he gestured loosely in Shane's direction "— this. The face."

"I don't have a face."

"You have very much a face." He finished the cigarette, ground it out against the heel of his boot and pocketed the stub with the automatic tidiness of someone who'd smoked outdoors long enough to have developed the habit. Then he looked back at Shane with something that was almost, almost respectful. "You are good at this job, yes? The rescues."

Shane moved a box to the left. "Yes."

"Then we will get along fine," Rozanov said cheerfully. "I will ski, you will worry, and if something goes wrong you will be very good at fixing it."

"That's not —" Shane started.

"Hollander." The radio crackled. Shane had it off his hip and answered before Rozanov finished his sentence. It was Hayden.

"Go for Hollander." Clear, prompt, last name only — the way they'd drilled it into him in SAR school and the way he'd done it every day since without thinking about it. A radio was the most important piece of equipment on any rescue operation. Not the rope, not the medical kit. The radio. Communication was the difference between a bad situation and a fatal one and Shane had never once let a call go more than two seconds unanswered.

"Tell me you're not reorganizing the entire pallet again. Mitty bet me twenty bucks you were reorganizing the pallet."

Shane looked at the two distinct piles in front of him.

"Mitty is about to be twenty dollars richer. What do you need?" he responded to the radio.

"Weather window's looking good for your lift tomorrow, six AM. You good to go?"

"I'll be ready." He clipped the radio back to his hip and looked at Rozanov. "I need to finish this."

Rozanov held up both hands in a surrender pose, unbothered. "Of course." He turned to go, then paused. "Hollander."

Shane looked up.

"I will see you later." Rozanov turned heel and walked away.

Shane turned back to the pallet. "fan-fucking-tastic," he muttered, mostly to himself.

The stew was good. Shane would give them that.

It was caribou, somebody had said, sourced locally before the expedition flew in, and whoever was cooking for the film crew knew what they were doing with a camp stove and a dutch oven. Shane sat at the end of the folding table between Hayden and JJ and ate without contributing much to the conversation, which was his preferred configuration for group meals.

The camp was set up on the lakeshore, the tents ranged back from the water, the mountains visible in every direction. The temperature had dropped with the sun and everyone was in their down layers, breath visible, the camp lanterns throwing yellow light across the table.

Ilya Rozanov was at the other end of the table.

He had been talking for most of the meal. Not obnoxiously. Shane had been prepared for obnoxious and what he'd gotten instead was something more difficult to dismiss. A man who was genuinely good at a table, easy with people, funny in a dry clipped way that caught you off guard. The film crew laughed. Hayden’s team laughed too, which Shane found mildly irritating.

"Karanov is not the hardest mountain I have attempted," Ilya was saying. He was leaning back in his camp chair, his bowl mostly empty. "In terms of pure technical difficulty. But the couloir is something else. Nobody has read it correctly. I think I can."

"What's a couloir?" said one of the camera operators. Young guy, had introduced himself as Connor, seemed genuinely curious rather than just filling silence.

"A couloir is a steep narrow channel down the face of a mountain," Shane said. "Snow and ice funnel into it. It accelerates the skier and concentrates the avalanche risk."

"So it's like a chute," Connor said.

"Essentially."

"And nobody's ever skied this one?"

"Five attempts," Ilya said. "None completed."

"What happened to them?"

"Four pulled out partway down when conditions changed," Shane said. "One didn't." He left it there.

Connor looked at Ilya. Ilya looked back at him calmly.

"Oh," Connor said.

"What makes you think you can read it when the others couldn't?" Gilbert Comeau, the base camp medic, said.

"Because I have watched the footage of every attempt. I know where they lost it each time." Ilya tapped his temple. "Up here. Not the skiing. The decision making."

"What does that mean exactly?" said Marleau, the sound guy, who had been quietly eating and listening.

"It means they made the wrong call at the wrong moment," Hayden said, reaching across the table for the bread. "When conditions shifted mid-descent they either panicked or pushed when they should have pulled back. Reading a mountain is knowing what it's going to do before it does it."

"And you can do that?" Marleau said to Ilya.

Ilya smiled. "This is the goal."

"What about you, Hollander?" Ilya said, leaning back in his chair and looking down the table. "How did you end up in search and rescue?"

Shane looked up from his bowl. "SAR certification out of Ottawa, then a posting here. Six years."

"He's being modest," Hayden said. "Shane's pulled more technical rescues in this range than anyone. He's the reason I wanted him for this job."

Connor, one of the camera operators, looked up from his stew. "What's a technical rescue?"

"High angle work," JJ said, tearing off a piece of bread. "Rope systems, vertical terrain, situations where you can't just walk someone out. You need specialized gear and training to extract them safely."

"So cliff rescues," Connor said.

"Cliff rescues, crevasse rescues, avalanche extractions. Any situation where the terrain itself is part of the problem," JJ said.

"Ottawa," Ilya said, still looking at Shane. "You are a long way from home."

"Alaska is home," Shane said.

"And in the summer?"

"Park ranger. NPS, Denali region."

A beat.

"Park ranger," Ilya repeated.

"That's what I said."

"You wear the uniform?" Ilya gestured at his own collar. "The brown shirt. The little hat."

"It's a normal sized hat," Shane said.

JJ snorted into his stew. The rest of the SAR crew developed a sudden keen interest in their bowls, shoulders shaking.

"What kind of hat?" Connor said.

"Stetson. Campaign hat. Standard NPS issue."

"Like Smokey Bear!" Ilya said from the other end of the table, clearly delighted with himself.

Shane leveled a look at him.

The film crew laughed. Even Gilbert Comeau, who had the resting expression of a man perpetually doing risk assessment, smiled into his stew.

"Very authoritative," Ilya said, still grinning.

"It's a classic design," Shane said.

"Yes, yes. Very serious." Ilya straightened in his chair and arranged his face into an expression of great solemnity, which lasted approximately two seconds before the corners of his mouth gave him away entirely.

Shane turned back to his stew.

"I think the hat is cool," Connor offered.

"Thank you Connor," Shane said.

A pause settled over the table. Spoons hit bowls. Marleau refilled his camp cup.

"So if the SAR pays better, why bother with the ranger gig at all?" Connor said, scraping the bottom of his bowl.

"The SAR is the side gig," Shane said. "The ranger work is what I actually want to be doing. Wildlife monitoring, trail maintenance, backcountry safety, climate data collection. I know this terrain the way I do because I'm out here year round. The two things feed each other."

"Sounds like you don't get a lot of days off," Connor said.

"No."

"You must do a lot of these private jobs in winter then."

"I don't usually take jobs like this," Shane said. "The ranger work is what matters. Doesn't pay much but it matters."

A beat.

"Unlike this?" Ilya said.

Shane simply shrugged his assent.

A small silence fell over the table.

"He means no offense," Hayden said.

"No," Ilya said. He was watching Shane steadily. "He means exactly what he said." He picked up his camp cup. "You think this is a waste."

"I think the resources involved in this expedition could fund three years of the conservation program that got cut from the park service budget last spring," Shane said.

"And yet you are here," Ilya said.

"Forty thousand dollars is forty thousand dollars," Shane said.

Ilya nodded slowly. No judgment in it. The look on his face said he understood exactly what a person did for forty thousand dollars and respected that Shane wasn't pretending otherwise.

Then he turned to JJ and said something that made JJ laugh and the moment closed.

Shane picked up his spoon.

Across the table Hayden caught his eye and gave him a look that said you could try being slightly less you. Shane gave him one back that said no I couldn't. Hayden sighed into his stew.

Later, washing his bowl at the camp basin in the dark, Shane thought about all the descents Rozanov listed at the table. Many of them had even worse fatality rates than Karanov. He thought that someone should really have a dedicated SAR manager travelling with this man on retainer, because Ilya Rozanov moved through the world's most dangerous terrain on a seasonal basis and seemed to treat the logistics of his own survival as a secondary concern.

That was someone else's problem.

Shane dried his bowl and went to bed, he had an early helicopter flight in the morning.

The ranger station had been built the way most things got built up here. Slowly, by different people, over years. Hiking groups, mostly. Someone had carried a board up. Someone else had carried a hammer. The roof went on in sections over two separate summers. Nobody was paid. Nobody was credited. The result was eleven feet by nine feet, slightly uneven on the south wall, and it had kept people alive in it for thirty years.

Seven days in, Shane knew every inch of it.

The stove sat bolted to the floor in the corner, it was small but mighty. Shane had the fire management down to a routine. One small log every one to two hours during the day and the largest log right before bed would keep the fire going throughout the night. Every morning he made coffee on it using the dented camp mug that had been sitting on the shelf above it when he arrived. No way to know how long it had been there. It worked fine.

The rest of the station had the character of a place used by many people over many years, none of them staying long enough to make it theirs. A deck of cards on the small table, well-worn, missing the three of clubs. Shane had found it on day two and had been playing solitaire with a workaround since. A length of paracord looped over a nail on the north wall. A pair of wool socks on the shelf, clean, balled up, left behind by someone who had either packed a spare pair or made a poor call. A paperback with the cover torn off that Shane had not touched.

His wood pile was in the far corner, stacked neat, sorted by size.

His sleeping bag was on the camp bed. He had it nine years. There were two small patches on the lower left where a ground squirrel had gotten into his gear room two summers ago, while he was out on a rescue that ran a night longer than planned. He'd come back to find the insulation partially excavated. The squirrel had made a reasonable decision given the materials available. Shane had sewn the patches himself. The bag had been fine since.

He could have gotten a new one. The expedition budget was the most substantial he'd ever worked with and it extended to equipment. There were bags on the market now with insulation technology that impressed him on paper. He'd brought his own anyway. He knew exactly how it performed at exactly what temperature. That was worth more than new.

In the opposite corner, still in its stuff sack, was the bag that had come up with the supply pallet. Slim, matte black, a brand logo Shane didn't recognize but was certain belonged to one of Rozanov's sponsors. It had been filmed at base camp before Shane had left. He'd walked past the setup without slowing down. The camera crew had arranged Rozanov against a backdrop that would look, on screen, like he'd earned his way to altitude on foot. Shane had nothing to say about that. The list of things he could have said was long enough that he'd learned to be selective about it.

The bag would not be used. Rozanov wasn't camping here. He and his skis were being dropped at the summit by helicopter tomorrow morning, where Shane would take his vitals, administer supplemental oxygen for a few hours, and monitor his acclimatization before clearing him for the descent. Back at base camp by afternoon if everything held.

Shane had requested the extra supplies anyway. Double rations, the bedding, a full kit. Everything Rozanov would need if the helicopter couldn't get back, if the timeline stretched, if something went wrong in any of the ways things went wrong up here. He'd been doing this long enough to have a long list of those ways.

He pulled his assessment log and went through the week's data the way he did every evening. Wind, temperature, snowpack depth, settlement rates. The numbers had been good. Consistently good, against his expectations and his general distrust of things going smoothly. The slab he'd flagged before leaving base camp had settled and bonded. The weak layer underneath had strengthened with the cold clear weather. The couloir was loading evenly.

Shane looked at the data for a long moment.

The mountain had apparently decided to cooperate with Ilya Rozanov.

He found this irritating, but the data was the data. If conditions held through tomorrow morning, and the forecast said they would, Rozanov was going to get his window. He might actually do it. First clean descent of Karanov's north couloir, summit to base, which three serious skiers had attempted and none had completed.

Shane looked at the slim black sleeping bag in the corner.

He picked up the deck of cards and dealt another hand of solitaire.

The next morning had Shane outside at five forty-five. The sun was just beginning to crest over the distant mountainous horizon. At this height, the sunrise came much earlier than it would have at base camp. The helicopter wasn't due until six but he'd been awake since four. He ran through his checklist by headtorch, checked the landing zone markers he'd set the evening before, and packed all the equipment that he would be taking back with him down the mountain in the helicopter after it was done filming Rozanov’s run. Now he had nothing left to do but wait for him to show up.

Every inch of Shane’s skin was covered. It was not optional up here. The temperature was sitting at minus thirty-one without the wind, and the wind was ferocious. Shane had learned early in his career that frostbite made its decisions fast and without warning, and that any piece of exposed skin was a piece of skin he was negotiating over. He wanted to keep all his skin this week.

He keyed the radio.

"Hollander at summit. Weather check."

Hayden's voice came back prompt. "Mitty has eyes on the radar. Wind looks manageable, visibility good up to about nine thousand. Cloud cover moving in from the northwest but it's tracking slow."

"How slow."

A pause. Shorter than it should have been.

"Should be clear for the window. You'll have the morning easy."

Shane looked northwest. The sky in that direction was ink black and crowded with stars, same as every morning this week. He couldn't see what the radar was seeing. He trusted his eyes up here more than he trusted most things, but he couldn't see weather that hadn't arrived yet.

"Hayden."

"You're good, Shane. Everything's looking clear."

Shane held the radio for a moment. Hayden's voice had done something in that pause, but he didn't have time to it chase down. The helicopter was audible now, a low thrum coming up from the south, and he clipped the radio back and turned to watch it come in.

Eventually Shane could see the flying machine banking around the eastern ridge and dropping toward the summit. It wouldn't land. There was no platform built for it and the heavy aircraft on a surface this loaded with fresh snow was the kind of decision that ended careers and lives. The pilots would hover about fifteen feet up and lower Rozanov to the peak like they did Shane a week ago.

The wind, which had been bad, became something else entirely as the helicopter now hovered above Shane’s head.

Shane turned his face away and braced. Snow came off the surface in every direction, driven horizontal by the downdraft, and for about thirty seconds the world reduced to noise and white and the physical effort of staying on his feet. He'd been through worse. He kept his eyes on the bright blue clad body being lowered from the cabin door.

Rozanov descended painfully slowly, in sections where he wasn’t swaying violently on his rope, as he was pushed about by the same wind that was threatening to push Shane over. He touched down, found his footing, and Shane moved in to unhook the carabiner at his chest before the cable went taut and dragged him sideways. Clean release. Shane stepped back.

The skis and matching boots came down separately, lowered on a line and swinging wider than Shane would have preferred in the rotor wash. He caught them, planted them in the snow upright.

Shane watched the Helicopter hold position overhead and couldn’t help but think about all the repairs that the station needs. This helicopter could’ve carried a pallet that would have included new shingles for the south face of the station and four boards to shore up the floor joists on the eastern wall. That pallet would’ve weighed less than the camera equipment he could see through the open cabin door. The fuel it would have taken to bring it up here was a fraction of what this helicopter had burned this morning to lower one man and two skis.

He thought about every hiker who had ever carried a board up here. One at a time, thousands of feet, because it needed doing and there was no other way to do it.

He turned and walked back toward the station door. Rozanov needed vitals. The acclimatization protocol was two to three hours minimum at this altitude, oxygen if the readings called for it, and Shane wanted the first set of numbers in the next ten minutes to get a baseline read. There was a process. The process was what kept people alive.

He pushed the station door open and turned behind him to where he expected Rozanov to be right on his heels.

Rozanov was not there.

Shane backtracked a few feet and peered around the station and set his eyes on the landing zone again.

Rozanov was standing at the edge of the flat, facing out. Karanov was the highest point in this section of the range, and from up here the view was enormous. The other peaks dropped away in every direction, the valleys dark between them, the sky beginning to go from deep blue to reds and oranges as the sun rose more steadily.

He watched Rozanov stand there and tried to work out what he was looking at. Hard to tell with every inch of skin covered, goggles up, balaclava pulled to the bridge of his nose.

Shane had stood in that same spot four times this week during his morning checks. It stopped him every time. Not for long. Just long enough for the scale of it to interrupt whatever task he'd been carrying in his head, the snowpack readings and the supply lists and the radio checks, all of it going quiet for a moment while something larger moved through him. Gratitude, maybe, though that felt like too small a word for it. The simple fact of being alive and present on the surface of the earth while it looked like this.

Perhaps Rozanov was feeling that same majestic wonder and awe.

Then Shane dejectedly noticed the helicopter.

It had swung around to the south side and was holding position with its nose pointing back at the summit platform. Facing Rozanov. The camera in the open cabin door was visible even from here.

Shane could see Rozanov standing very still against the view, and understood that this was a shot. Someone in that cockpit had probably told Rozanov to stand there and look out at the range after he came off the line, and Rozanov was performing, and the camera crew was getting their footage, and none of this had anything to do with the view.

Shane went inside.

Rozanov would come in when he was done with his close-up.

The first two hours were quiet.

Rozanov had shed his outer layer and unclipped his helmet shortly after entering the station and set them on the floor beside him. The tip of his nose was still pink from the cold outside, his cheeks flushed from the temperature change inside the station. If Shane didn’t know how much of a dick he was, he’d probably think he was adorable right now.

Shane stoked the fire on a schedule, added wood when the temperature in the station dropped below what the thermometer on the wall said it should be, and took Rozanov's readings every fifteen minutes. Blood pressure, oxygen saturation, heart rate. He noted each one in his log without comment. The numbers were moving in the right direction.

Rozanov sat on the camp bed and just breathed. He was locked into something, some interior process that Shane recognized as deliberate even if he didn't share it. Deep, counted breaths, long exhales. His eyes were mostly closed. Every few minutes his hand would move to his chest and his fingers would find something at the end of a chain, pinching it between two fingers and holding it there. Shane couldn't see what it was in the dim light. In the glow from the woodstove he caught a glint of gold once, maybe twice, before Rozanov's fist closed around it.

Shane left him to it.

Between readings he went outside with his binoculars and checked the horizon. He didn't want to make the radio calls inside. The station was small and Rozanov's concentration was its own kind of presence in the room and Shane wasn't going to be the thing that broke it. Not with the man's oxygen saturation still climbing and two hours of acclimatization still to go.

Outside the sky had lightened to pale grey. The wind was steady from the northwest.

He put the binoculars up and looked at the horizon and didn't like what he saw.

The clouds were there. Deep on the horizon the first time he looked, which he noted and filed. An hour later they were closer. Not skirting. Not tracking slow. Moving with the kind of speed that Shane had learned over six years meant business.

He keyed the radio. "Hollander to base. Weather update."

Hayden came back fast. "We see it."

"Then you know what I'm going to say."

"Shane."

"Cancel the descent. The window is closing and it might not reopen today."

A pause. Longer than the one this morning. "We're going at ten. The helicopter is already gassing up."

Shane lowered the binoculars. "You told me I had final say on the go/no-go."

"There's a lot of money tied up in today, Shane. The crew, the equipment, the whole logistics of it. It needs to happen today."

"Hayden."

"Ten o'clock. Get him ready."

Shane stood on the summit of Karanov and looked at the clouds and said "Hayden you lying son of a bitch" very clearly into the open air where nobody could hear him. Then he clipped the radio to his hip and went back inside.

Ilya's eyes stayed closed when the door opened. He hadn't moved from the bed, still in the same position, still breathing slow and deliberate. But something in the set of him changed slightly, a small adjustment that told Shane he'd heard the door and was choosing to stay where he was. Still in it. Not ready to come back yet.

Shane stamped the snow off his boots and pulled off his toque, shaking the loose snow from it before the warmth of the room could melt it into the wool.

"We need to talk," Shane said.

"I am in the middle of something." He kept his eyes closed.

"I know. This is important." Shane pulled the stool out from under the table and sat down. "The storm on the northwest horizon this morning. Did you know about it before you summited?"

Ilya's face gave nothing. He was the picture of total concentration. "It was fifty-fifty," he said. "The forecast said it would skirt past. To the north."

"It's not skirting past."

Ilya opened his eyes then. They were wild in a way Shane hadn't seen on him before, desperate and searching.

"It's heading straight for us," Shane said. "It could hit in the middle of your run. If that happens the visibility drops to nothing and the likelihood of getting a rescue team to you in time drops with it. You understand what I'm telling you."

"I understand risk," Ilya said. His voice had an edge in it now.

"Then act like it," Shane said. "You knew there was a storm coming and you got on the helicopter anyway."

"It was going to skirt past—"

"It didn't." Shane cut him off. "And now you want to drop into a couloir that has killed someone in perfect conditions with a whiteout potentially rolling in behind you. If it hits mid-descent you're in zero visibility on the north face, then there is no realistic window to get to you in time." He held Ilya's gaze. "Tell me that's worth it."

Ilya's jaw tightened. "You cannot understand what this is."

"I understand what a dead body looks like."

"This is my moment," Rozanov said, and his voice was quiet but there was something underneath it that was not quiet at all. "This funding, this crew, this mountain, this window. I cannot just come back. This is not like going to a shop to pick up eggs, Hollander. Everything aligned for this. I need to take it."

"Even if it kills you."

"People have died doing things that mattered to them. This matters to me."

Shane stood up. He was done. He could feel the point past which continuing this conversation was going to make him say something that crossed a line he couldn't uncross. "It's not worth your life," he said. "Nothing is worth your life."

Ilya said nothing. He closed his eyes again but the serenity from before was gone, his jaw working, a muscle flickering at his temple.

Shane grabbed his gear off the hook by the door and went back outside.

He stood at the edge of the flat and put the binoculars up and watched the storm and knew before Hayden's voice came through on the radio what he was going to say.

"Hollander. Pilots won't fly in this. The descent is postponed. You and Rozanov are staying at the summit until it clears, at least overnight."

"Copy that."

"Shane, if it doesn't dump too much snow we should still be able to run tomorrow."

Shane took the radio off his hip and looked at it for a moment.

If they were just going to overrule every call he made, what exactly was he doing here? Prevention was the best rescue. That was the first thing they'd taught him and the truest thing he'd learned and apparently it meant nothing the moment money was involved.

He clipped the radio back without responding and went inside.

Rozanov was where Shane left him. Sitting on the bed with his eyes closed. The focused stillness from this morning was long gone.

"The helicopter isn't coming," Shane said. "The descent is postponed until tomorrow at the earliest. Longer if it snows."

The silence lasted about two seconds.

Then Rozanov picked up the camp mug off the table and threw it at the wall.

It bounced off the wood and clattered to the floor and sat there, dented but intact, which was the advantage of a mug that had been up here long enough to be made of nothing but metal and stubbornness.

Shane looked at the mug. Then at Rozanov.

He picked the mug up off the floor, set it back on the table, pulled the deck of cards out of his jacket pocket, and sat down.

"Do you know any card games?" Shane asked.

The storm hit the station by mid-afternoon.

It came in fast and loud, the wind picking up until it was a constant pressure against the walls, snow driving horizontal past the small window. Within an hour visibility had dropped to nothing. Shane checked the anemometer reading on his handheld monitor and noted it. There was no way to tell from inside whether what was hitting the window was fresh snow or just the top layer of the existing pack being whipped off the surface by the wind. It could be either. It could be both. They wouldn't know until the storm passed and one of them stepped outside and looked down at their boots.

He added one log to the fire and hoped for the former.

Rozanov sat on the camp bed and stared at the wall.

He'd been doing that since Shane had delivered the news about the helicopter. He wasn't doing anything. Not reading, not stretching, not running through whatever mental preparation process Shane had watched him do that morning. Just sitting, jaw tight, staring at the wall like he was having a very quiet argument with it.

Shane dealt himself another hand of solitaire.

"This is a terrible dinner," Rozanov said.

Shane looked up. He'd heated two of the emergency ration packs on the stove, the same ones he'd been eating all week. Beef stew, technically. Adequate calorie count, reasonable sodium, stable at altitude. He'd set one in front of Rozanov twenty minutes ago and the skier had eaten half of it and then apparently decided to be unhappy about the half he'd eaten.

"It's what there is," Shane said.

"At base camp there was a real dinner."

"At base camp there was a kitchen setup and a cook and a helicopter that could bring in supplies. We have emergency rations and a wood stove."

"The stew at base camp was good," Ilya said, reminiscing.

"Yes," Shane agreed. "It was."

Ilya looked at the remaining half of his ration pack. He ate another spoonful. He put it down.

"It is very small in here," he said.

"I know."

"One person small."

"It was built for one person," Shane said. "I've mentioned this."

"You could have requested a larger station."

Shane looked at him over his cards. "From who?"

Ilya didn't answer that. He shifted on the camp bed, which squeaked, and looked at the ceiling, and then at the window where the storm was doing what the storm was doing, and then at Shane's card game.

"What are you playing," he said.

"Solitaire."

"I know it is solitaire. What kind."

"Klondike."

Ilya watched him play for approximately ninety seconds. "You are losing," he said.

"I know."

"The red eight goes on the black nine."

"I see that."

"Then why—"

"Because if I move the eight now I block the column and can't get to the seven underneath it," Shane said. "I'm setting up three moves ahead."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "Does it work?"

"Sometimes."

Ilya watched for another minute, then went to lay back down on the camp bed and look at the ceiling again. The bed squeaked. Shane turned over three cards and found nothing useful.

"Can we play something together?" Rozanov said.

"Do you want to?"

A pause. "No," He said. "I am too annoyed."

"Okay," Shane said.

The wind hit the north wall hard enough to make the stove rattle. Both of them looked at it. It settled.

"More wood," Rozanov said.

"No."

"It is cold."

"It's fine."

"I am cold."

"You’ll live"

Shane looked over at him. Rozanov was still on his back, staring at the ceiling, and the anger in his voice had an edge under it that wasn't really about the cold or the dinner or the size of the station. Shane recognized it because he'd seen it before, on ledges and in crevasses and in the back of helicopters. The specific frustration of someone who had prepared for something for a very long time and been stopped by something outside their control.

Shane got up and put one log on the fire. Not two. One.

Rozanov said nothing.

Shane went back to his cards.

Outside the storm made its feelings known. Inside the fire ticked and the station creaked and Rozanov stared at the ceiling and Shane played solitaire and lost, and dealt again, and lost again.

The fire had been burning low for an hour before Rozanov said anything.

"More wood."

Shane was in his sleeping bag with his back to the room, nearly asleep. "No."

"I am cold."

"I know."

"Then put more wood on the fire."

Shane did not put more wood on the fire. He looked at the ceiling and calculated the remaining pile against the number of days they might be here and arrived at the same answer he'd arrived at when Rozanov had asked the first time, and the second time, and the third. "The wood has to last. We don't know how long we're here."

"We are here one more night," Rozanov said. "Tomorrow I ski."

Shane said nothing. He looked at the small window set into the station door. Outside was dark. Had been for six hours.

"You could add one more log," Rozanov said.

"Your sleeping bag is rated to minus twenty. You're in a heated room. You're fine."

A pause. "This bag is not warm."

Shane thought about the nine-year-old sleeping bag he was currently warm inside and said nothing.

"It is a very thin bag," Rozanov said.

"It's the most technically advanced bag on the market according to the brand that gave it to you for free."

Silence.

Shane closed his eyes.

In the morning it was Rozanov who woke first. Shane heard him before he was fully conscious, the sound of someone sitting up fast and swinging legs off a cot in the dark, then a solid collision between a hip and the corner of the table, a sharp exhale in Russian that Shane did not need to translate.

He opened his eyes. Rozanov was pulling gear on by headtorch, moving with the contained urgency of someone trying to be quiet and not quite managing it.

Shane sat up.

"I need to see," Rozanov said, without looking at him. He already had his boots on. "How much snow."

Shane looked at the window in the door. From the bed he couldn't see the ground outside, only the dark, and the dark told him nothing useful. He got up.

They geared up without talking. Shane was pulling his second glove on as Rozanov pushed the door open and stopped.

The resistance was immediate. The door opened outward, which Shane had always considered a design flaw for exactly this reason, and Rozanov got it about eight inches before it met the snow packed against the outside and held there. He put his shoulder into it, forced it the rest of the way, and stepped out.

He went in up to mid-thigh.

Shane stopped in the doorway and looked at the snow and made the unfortunate calculation. Two feet, maybe a fraction more where it had drifted against the station wall. The eastern face was beginning to lighten, the pre-dawn grey coming up slow, enough to see the slope below them buried and smooth and undisturbed. No wind. Just depth, everywhere, in every direction.

Rozanov stood in it with his headtorch cutting a beam through the grey and didn't say anything for a long moment.

Shane pulled out the radio.

"Hollander to base."

Hayden came back in under ten seconds, which meant he'd been awake, which meant he'd already seen whatever the sensors were showing. "Go for Pike."

"Two feet at the summit. The couloir will need a full reset. Snowpack assessment from scratch." Shane kept his voice neutral. "We're looking at a week minimum before the descent is viable."

A long pause. "Okay. We can pull you both out now and regroup, but if we do that the budget takes a hit we probably can't recover from. The descent might not happen at all this season."

Shane looked at Rozanov a few feet away from him, who was still standing in the snow with his back to him, headtorch aimed down the slope, shoulders set in a way that radiated misery as he listened to the bad news through the radio.

Shane felt just as disappointed. Forty thousand dollars. His parents' second mortgage. Hawaii, which his mother had mentioned once and then never again because she'd stopped expecting things like that to happen. He looked at the buried slope and said nothing.

"Or," Hayden said, "you two stay up there, ride it out, and we run the descent next week when conditions reset. I know that's a big ask."

A week. Seven days in an eleven by nine foot room with a man who had thrown a camp mug this morning and was currently refusing to look at anything except the mountain that had just humiliated him.

Forty thousand dollars. Hawaii.

Shane looked at Rozanov, who had turned back toward him, his head moving between the radio and Shane's face. Waiting. A day with this man had been enough to know that Rozanov would do almost anything to make this descent happen. But he also knew, standing here in two feet of fresh snow at 3,800 meters, that there was nothing he could do about it alone. Shane could walk away. Hayden would send the helicopter and they would be back at base camp by afternoon and that would be the end of it.

Ilya knew that too. It was written in the stillness of him, the way he wasn't pushing, wasn't demanding, wasn't doing any of the things Shane had watched him do all yesterday. Just waiting. The ball entirely in Shane's court and both of them aware of it.

Shane looked at him for a moment longer.

"We'll stay," Shane said. "I've got supplies for it," Shane said. "I planned for it."

"Shane, you're a saint and I owe you a serious drink."

"You owe me more than that." Shane kept his eyes on Rozanov. "We'll stay. Call you with a morning check at oh-six-hundred."

He clipped the radio and walked up to where Rozanov was standing.

Up close, Rozanov’s eyes behind his goggles looked…devastated. He was back to staring down the slope, jaw set, not moving.

Shane stood next to him and looked at the same slope and tried to think of something useful to say.

"The snow is bad," he said.

Rozanov didn't respond.

"Very bad," Shane added. "Genuinely one of the worst overnight accumulations I've seen up here. Which is actually somewhat interesting from a meteorological standpoint because the forecast had this system tracking north and the fact that it came directly over the summit instead suggests the pressure gradient was more complex than the model predicted, which means there's probably a topographic effect from the eastern ridgeline that isn't being accounted for in the regional—"

Rozanov turned and looked at him.

Shane stopped.

"Are you," Rozanov said slowly, "trying to make me feel better?"

"Is it working?" Shane said.

Rozanov stared at him for another moment. Then something cracked in his eyes, and he laughed, short and real, a breath of it into the cold air.

"You are terrible at this," he said.

"I know," Shane said.

Rozanov shook his head, still almost smiling, and looked back out at the buried slope. The laugh had done something to the set of his shoulders. Not fixed anything. Just loosened it slightly.

"One week," Rozanov said.

"At least."

"And we stay here."

"Yes."

Rozanov was quiet for a moment. "You have more of those cards?"

"Three of clubs is missing," Shane said.

"I don't need the three of clubs for the games I know."

Shane looked at him. "What games do you know?"

"Many games," Rozanov said, and started back toward the station door. "Come. You will make the coffee and I will teach you."

The station door took both of them to get fully open against the snow packed behind it. They got inside, and Shane pulled it shut, and the warmth from the banked fire hit immediately in a way that always felt like a hug.

Rozanov started pulling off his outer layer.

Shane was unwinding his balaclava and not looking at anything in particular when Rozanov reached back and grabbed his jacket and fleece together and hauled them over his head in one pull. His shirt came with it, riding up to his chest before dropping back down. A few seconds, maybe less. Long enough for Shane to clock the cut of his stomach, the definition of his obliques, the dark trail of hair disappearing below his waistband. The body of someone who did what he did for a living, functional and lean.

Shane's eyes came back to his own gear immediately.

Rozanov said nothing. If he noticed Shane’s gawking, he gave no indication.

They played cards for most of the morning. Rozanov knew games Shane had never heard of, which was not surprising given the breadth of Shane's card game experience was solitaire and a brief period in his early twenties when he'd played a lot of cribbage. Rozanov taught him two games in succession, both with Russian names Shane couldn't pronounce, both involving rules that seemed straightforward until they weren't.

Around noon Rozanov reached into his ski boot.

Shane watched him pull out a bottle of vodka. Full, labeled with Cyrillic text, a deep clear glass that caught the light from the stove window.

"Where did that come from," Shane said.

"My boot."

"But you thought you were skiing yesterday?"

"Yes."

"So why—" Shane looked at the bottle. "You packed a full bottle of vodka for a descent you were planning to complete in one morning?"

Rozanov looked at him. His toque had been off long enough now that his hair had fully escaped whatever it had been doing all day, golden brown curls going in every direction, and combined with two days of stubble and the particular unbothered expression he was currently wearing, he looked less like an Olympic gold medalist and more like someone who had never once made a decision he regretted.

Shane stared at him. "On a fifty-fifty you packed a shit sleeping bag that nearly got you hypothermia and a full bottle of vodka?"

"Very good vodka," Rozanov said. "Russian." He set two camp cups on the table. "We drink together."

Shane considered the position he was in. One week, no helicopter, no company but this man, and apparently a bottle of vodka between them.

"Fine," he said.

The drinking game Rozanov taught him had rules that started simple and then became whatever Rozanov decided they were, which Shane only realized gradually as the vodka did its work. Something about cards and forfeits and drinking. By the second round it had essentially become Ilya asking questions and Shane either answering or drinking, and somehow both kept happening anyway.

"You are very private person," Ilya said, looking at Shane's growing pile of cards.

"That's not a question."

"Not yet." Rozanov dealt. "You live alone, yes? In your ranger station."

"Not this one, but yeah usually I’m stationed alone."

"You like it."

"Yes."

"No one waiting for you at home."

Shane looked at his cards. "No."

“No girlfriend, or wife in Ottawa?”

Shane scoffed, “no!”

Rozanov nodded slowly, like this was important information. "You choose that or it happened to you?"

"I choose it." Shane picked up his hand. "That's two questions."

"Forfeit." Rozanov poured himself another measure, looked entirely unbothered. "Do you ever want someone waiting?"

Shane looked at his cards for a moment. The vodka had been doing its work for a couple of hours in the loose warm way that meant he'd passed comfortable and was heading somewhere else. "Sometimes," he said. "Not often. I'd have to find someone who could tolerate me."

"Why would someone not tolerate you."

"I'm better with mountains than people."

Rozanov considered this and refilled Shane's cup without being asked. "What kind of person would you want. If you were looking."

Shane looked at the cup. "That's definitely not part of the game."

"Everything is part of the game. I make the rules."

"You keep changing the rules."

"Yes." Rozanov put his elbows on the table. "Answer."

Shane drank instead of answering, which was technically a forfeit, which meant he was supposed to pick up cards, and by this point neither of them was keeping track of the cards. He looked at the stove. The fire was good. The bottle was considerably less full than it had started.

"Someone who—" Shane stopped. Restarted. "Someone who gets it. Why I'd rather be up here than anywhere else. Who doesn't think that's—" he turned his cup in his hands. "I explain things. A lot. I know I do it too much. Someone who thinks that's—" he laughed once, short, at himself. "Not the worst thing about me."

Rozanov was watching him with an expression Shane couldn't read from this angle and with this much vodka in him.

"Someone who—" Shane set down his cup. "I should clarify I mean a man. If that wasn't—I don't usually say that to people I'm working with. That's not professional." He looked at the table. "Blame the vodka."

"I don't blame the vodka," Rozanov said.

"Well." Shane picked up his cards and looked at them and put them back down because they didn't mean anything anymore. "Now you know."

Rozanov said nothing for a moment. Then he reached over and refilled Shane's cup again. "Your deal," he said.

Shane dealt.

He wasn't sure exactly when he stopped being able to reliably track the game. At some point the cards were entirely forgotten and the conversation moved in and out of topics he'd normally never touch with someone he'd known less than two weeks, and Rozanov laughed at something Shane said and Shane thought, with the clarity that sometimes came through vodka rather than despite it, that he was genuinely enjoying himself. That this was good company.

And he thought Ilya Rozanov was extremely handsome.

And then he was horizontal, which had happened without much transition, and his sleeping bag was up around his shoulders, and the fire was warm, and the wind outside was howling, and Shane was asleep before he knew it was happening.

He woke to cold.

Not dangerous cold. Not yet. But the fire had burned down and Shane didn't know what time it was or how long he'd been asleep and his first thought, coming up fast through the fog of too much vodka, was that he'd forgotten the large log. He was at the stove before he was fully awake, crouching down, pulling the door open. If the coals had gone out completely, getting a fire restarted at this altitude was not a simple thing. Wet wood, thin air, the kindling situation was not—

The large log was in there. Glowing orange at the edges, coals underneath it still good, still alive.

Shane sat back on his heels and let out a breath.

He looked at the wood pile. Otherwise untouched.

"I did it."

Shane turned. Ilya was on his back on the camp bed, arm thrown over his eyes, voice rough with sleep.

"The one big log?" Shane said.

"Yes. Like you did it—" he moved his arm and looked at Shane with one eye. "I remembered yesterday."

Shane looked at the stove. The coals were good. The room was cold but recovering already.

"Go back to sleep, Hollander," Ilya said, and put his arm back over his eyes.

Shane crouched there for a moment longer. Then he put a second log on. Not because they needed it. The coals were fine, the room would warm up on its own. He put it on because Rozanov had managed the fire all night without touching the rest of the pile, and that deserved something, even if the something was just an extra log and a warmer room for the morning.

"Thank you," he said, to both the stove and Rozanov.

From across the room, already half asleep again, Rozanov made a sound that meant you're welcome in any language.

The snowshoes Shane had were his own. The ones he'd dug out of the supply pallet for Rozanov were a size too large and Rozanov spent the first ten minutes of the assessment walk taking slightly too-wide steps to compensate, which Shane noted and did not comment on.

"You do this every day?" Rozanov asked, from behind him.

"Yes."

A pause. The snow squeaked under their snowshoes.

"Every day?" Rozanov said again.

"I already answered that question."

"In the dark. In the cold. Alone?"

"Usually alone, yes."

"By choice."

"By choice."

Another pause. Shane could hear Rozanov’s snowshoes catching slightly on each stride, the too-large frames dragging.

"You are a very strange person, Hollander," He said.

"You volunteered to come," Shane said.

"I was bored."

"And now?"

"Still bored," Rozanov said. "But outside."

Rozanov was quiet for a moment, keeping pace behind him. The snow from two nights ago sat heavy and undisturbed on everything, the slope below them smooth and clean in the early light. "Why," he said. "Why this. Why not — I don't know. A desk. A warm office somewhere."

Shane stopped at the first assessment point and dug out his probe. "I tried an office after my certification. Data entry for a geotechnical firm in Anchorage." He pushed the probe into the snow at the marked coordinates and read the depth. Noted it. "I lasted four months."

"What happened at four months?"

"Nothing happened. That was the problem." He moved to the next point. "What about you. Why skiing."

"Ah." Rozanov stepped up beside him, watching him work. "Now you are curious about me."

"I'm making conversation."

"You are bad at conversation. I have noticed this." But he said it without any edge. "I ski because — " He paused, and Shane glanced up and found him looking out at the slope, the range dropping away below them in the flat morning light. "When I am on the mountain, moving, everything else is very quiet. In here." He touched his chest briefly. "My whole life there is a lot of noise. On the skis there is nothing. Only the mountain and where I put my weight and what is coming next."

Shane straightened and looked at the slope. He understood that. He understood it exactly, which was not something he'd expected to be able to say about anything Ilya Rozanov told him.

"That's why you push it," Shane said. "The difficulty. The danger."

"The harder it is, the quieter it gets." Rozanov looked at him. "You understand this."

"I understand it a different way," Shane said.

"Tell me."

Shane moved to the third point and crouched down with his probe. "I went looking for it too," he said. "Just not like you." He pushed the probe in, checked the reading, noted it. "Up here everything gets simple. There's the weather, there's the snow, there's the job. I don't go into town much. Don't really need to." He stood. "I don't need the speed. Just the distance."

Ilya was quiet for a moment. "From what?"

Shane looked out at the range. "Everything else."

Rozanov was quiet for long enough that Shane looked up.

He was looking at the range again. All of it, the peaks and the valleys and the enormous indifferent sky above them.

"Yes," Rozanov said. Just that.

Shane looked at the same view for a moment.

Then he stood up, checked his map, and turned south toward the geothermal survey point he'd flagged in his first week. "Stay on my tracks," he said. "There's open water through here. I've got it marked but the snow bridges can be unpredictable."

"Open water?" Rozanov said. "At this temperature?"

"Geothermal. There's activity under this section of the range. Keeps a couple of the creek channels running year round." Shane pointed at the flagging tape tied to a stake ahead. "Stay between the markers, Rozanov."

Rozanov looked at the flags. "Ilya," he said.

Shane glanced back. "What."

"You keep calling me Rozanov. Call me Ilya." He fell into step behind Shane. "Anyone who has shared my vodka calls me Ilya."

Shane looked at him for a second. Then turned back and kept walking. "Stay between the markers," he said. "Ilya."

Behind him, Ilya smiled. “Of course," he said.

Ilya lasted seven minutes before he wandered.

Not far. Shane had his back to him, probe in the snow at the southern measurement point, writing in his log, when he heard Rozanov say something in Russian that was probably an observation about something he'd seen and was definitely said from a position that was not between the markers.

Shane looked up.

Rozanov had moved about four feet to the east, toward a section of creek bank that was hidden by a snow bridge, and he was looking down at something in the snow, and then the surface shifted and Rozanov went in.

His right leg broke through first and he went down hard onto his left knee, his right side dropping into the creek channel up to the hip, and the sound he made was short and sharp and not repeated.

Shane was moving before the sound finished.

"Give me your arms!" Shane shouted. He crossed the distance fast, keeping his own weight spread wide across his snowshoes, and got both hands under Rozanov's left arm and pulled. "Push with your left leg. Don't use the right."

Rozanov pushed. Shane pulled. It took two attempts and on the second one they got him up and out and onto solid snow and Shane kept pulling until they were both well clear of the bank.

Ilya's entire right side was soaked from the hip down. The water was geothermal but it was not warm. At minus fifteen, wet fabric against skin started making decisions fast.

Shane looked at the station. Forty-five minutes back.

"Can you walk."

"Yes," Rozanov said. His voice was already different, clipped shorter by the cold moving through the wet gear.

"We go now. Don't stop." Shane got his arm around Rozanov's left side, took his weight. "Tell me if you can't feel your foot."

"I can feel it."

"Tell me when you can't."

It took an hour.

Ilya didn't complain. That was the thing Shane kept noticing in between noticing everything else — the pace, the terrain, whether Ilya's gait was changing, how he was holding his weight. He didn't complain once. He moved when Shane moved him, leaned when Shane told him to lean, and when his right leg started seizing up twenty minutes out and his stride shortened into something closer to a drag, he just adjusted and kept going.

By the time the station came into view Shane's own shoulders were burning from taking Ilya's weight across the snow.

He got the door open and got them both inside and Shane's hands were already moving before Ilya was fully seated on the camp bed. Right boot first, laces stiff with ice, then the left. Then the bright blue snow pants, soaked through on the right side and already starting to ice at the surface — he got the zip undone and hauled them down and off. The base layer underneath was wet too, clinging, he peeled that away from the right leg and got it off. Then the jacket, unzipping it and pulling it back off his shoulders. The fleece underneath. The right side of his base layer top, which had wicked up enough water to be a problem.

He stopped there. Everything wet was off. What remained was Ilya sitting there in nothing but his briefs.

The skin on Ilya's right calf was white in patches.

Shane had seen worse. He'd seen much worse. He pulled frostbite cases off mountains like these every spring and half of them came in looking worse than this and walked out of the hospital three days later with all their extremities intact. This was manageable. This was well within the parameters of things Shane had handled before without his hands needing to move faster than the situation strictly required.

He told himself this panic was the forty thousand dollars. He told himself it was the liability, the professional obligation, the fact that this man was a gold medalist with a documentary crew at base camp waiting on him. All of that was true. And underneath all of it was something else, something that had no business being there, a protectiveness that had nothing to do with forty thousand dollars and everything to do with the specific person currently shaking on his camp bed.

"Your fingers," he said. "Show me."

Ilya held up his right hand. The tips were blue.

Shane put two logs on the fire, the largest two in the pile, and didn't let himself think about the inventory. Ilya let him work, which said more than anything. The man who had a quip about every single thing for three days sat on the edge of the camp bed without a word, hunched in on himself, arms pulled tight to his chest, shaking so hard his teeth were going in waves.

He looked small. Well, not small exactly, he was still over six feet. But folded up and shivering and wearing nothing but underwear, he looked nothing like the person Shane had watched step off a helicopter three days ago like he owned the mountain.

Shane kept moving.

Shane crossed to the camp bed where Ilya’s branded sleeping bag was in its stuff sack.

He picked it up, looked at it.

Put it back down. It would not be warm enough.

He crossed to his own bed and picked up his own sleeping bag, the patched one, the one Shane knew would be warm enough.

"Get in," he said.

Ilya got in. It took longer than it should have. His body had curled in on itself the way bodies did when they were trying to conserve everything they had left, and getting him horizontal and into the bag was less a smooth operation and more Shane feeding him into it in sections, an arm here, a leg there, Ilya's muscles locked up and uncooperative, his right side stiff and resisting every movement. He got there eventually, zipped in, and the shaking didn't stop but the bag was doing something at least, the down compressing around him.

It wasn't going to be enough on its own.

Shane stood there for three seconds and looked at the stove and looked at the bag and did the math.

He took his jacket off.

Then his fleece.

Then his base layer.

He was aware of Rozanov watching him from inside the sleeping bag, and Shane did not look back at him. Shane went down to his briefs as well, and he unzipped the sleeping bag and got in behind Rozanov and zipped it back up.

Ilya's skin was like ice. Shane pressed himself against his right side and felt the cold move through him and gritted his teeth and stayed there.

Ilya's shaking rattled the entire bed, maybe the entire room.

Shane put his arm over him and held on.

"You're okay," he said, quietly, into the back of Ilya's neck. "You're okay. The cold's coming out. Give it a minute."

Ilya said nothing. His teeth were going too hard for words.

"Your fingers are going to be fine," Shane said. "I checked them. Capillary refill is good. You're not losing anything." A pause. "The calf is going to hurt when the feeling comes back. That's normal. That means it's working."

The shaking didn't slow. Shane held on tighter.

"You're going to ski this mountain," Shane said. It came out quieter than he intended. "I'm going to make sure of it."

He didn't say anything after that. He just stayed there, his arm over Ilya, his chest against his back, and the fire built behind them, and at some point the shaking slowed, and at some point after that it stopped, and Shane didn't notice when he fell asleep because it happened the same way the shaking stopped, gradually and then all at once.