The last morning of autumn in Hallvik smelled of cold iron and coffee that had been left on the burner too long. Maren Sundal stood in the supply room of the rescue station with a clipboard in one hand and a box of sterile gauze in the other, counting the same shelf for the third time.

Gauze, forty packets. Tourniquets, twelve. Chest seals, eight. Oxygen cylinders, six full and two at half, plus one wrapped in red tape because its valve stuck in the cold and she had meant to replace it since September. Traction splints, three. Thermal blankets, sixty. She wrote each number in her small, square handwriting and drew a line under the column, and then she went back to the top and checked it against the winter inventory list pinned beside the door. The numbers agreed. They always agreed, because she did not let them do otherwise.

By nightfall the Skarvet Pass would close. It happened every year within a week of the same date. The plows made their final run up the switchbacks, the road authority sent a man to swing the barrier gate shut at the crest, and the gate stayed shut until April. On the far side of it lay the rest of the world, with its surgeons and its helicopters and its hospitals that did not need to be reached by a single road. On this side lay eighteen hundred people, one wooden rescue station painted the red of old barns, seven volunteers, and her.

She liked this day. It was an odd thing to admit, and she had never admitted it to anyone. Liking was not quite the word. She trusted it. On the last day before the snow, the winter was still a list. Nothing had gone wrong yet. Every shelf was full, every radio charged, every rope inspected and logged, and as long as she kept counting, a whole season of mountain and weather and accident felt like something she could hold in two hands.

In the pocket of her jacket, her thumb moved along the worn brass lid of her father's compass. She had not decided to do it. Her thumb always found it, the way a tongue finds a chipped tooth. Back and forth along the dented rim, eleven strokes, twelve. She had carried it every day for twenty-two years and had never once opened it on a mountain.

"Maren." Tobi Lund leaned into the doorway with one hand braced on the frame, his cowlick standing straight up as though he had slept on it at an angle. He was twenty-three and had been a volunteer for exactly eleven months, and he still looked at every piece of equipment as if it might be a present. "Per wants to know if you want the good thermos or the bad thermos for the supply run."

"The good one."

"He said you'd say that. He also said the good one is for emergencies."

"It's the last day before the pass closes, Tobi. That is an emergency."

"That's what I told him." He grinned, then looked at the clipboard and the neat columns and the box of gauze balanced on her forearm, and the grin softened into something more careful. "You've counted that shelf three times."

"Four," she said. "Go away."

He went. She set the gauze down, and the radio on the desk behind her coughed into life.

"Station, Liv. Station, come in."

Liv Eide worked the dispatch desk at the district office three streets over, and in six years Maren had never heard her voice go flat. It was flat now, scrubbed of everything but information. Maren crossed the room in three strides and thumbed the key. "Station. Go ahead, Liv."

"The last supply truck from the lowlands has gone off at the Skarvet bend. Driver's still in the cab. The cab's hanging over the drop. Nobody has reported a second vehicle."

"Condition of the driver?"

"Conscious, last report. That's all I have. The channel's bad up there."

"Copy. We're rolling." Maren was already pulling her jacket straight, already running the list in her head: the traction splints, the long board, two warm oxygen cylinders, the sled truck with chains. She turned and found Ingrid Voss standing in the doorway where Tobi had been.

Ingrid was sixty-two, with a silver braid down her back and the posture of a woman who had once carried a man on her shoulders down eight hundred meters of ice and had never let anyone forget it kindly. She had been chief of the Hallvik rescue team for twenty-six years. She had taught Maren to read a snowpack and to apologize to a patient before hurting them. She stood very straight now, one hand flat against her breastbone as though checking that something was still there, and she was looking at the shelf of splints instead of at Maren.

"I've signed you out," Ingrid said. "Take Per and the sled truck. Do it by the book."

"I always do it by the book."

"I know." Ingrid's gaze slid from the splints to the window, to the oxygen cylinders, to the floor. "Liv will have more for you on the channel."

It was a strange thing to say. Maren noticed it the way she noticed a pulse that was a beat too quick, filed it, and had no time to open the file. "Ingrid. Are you all right?"

"Go, Maren."

She went.

Per Strand drove the old rescue truck the way he did everything, with a broad, unhurried competence that made other people's panic feel embarrassing. He was fifty, with a gray-shot beard and forearms like fence posts, and he had driven the Skarvet road in every weather the mountain could invent. The chains bit into the packed snow with a steady, rhythmic chewing. The heater smelled of dust and old coffee. Behind them, in the side mirror, Hallvik shrank into a scatter of roofs at the bottom of a white trough, the red station at its edge like a single drop of paint.

"Last run," Per said. "Always feels like they're locking the door with us inside."

"They are locking the door with us inside."

"Don't be cheerful, Sundal. It's unnatural." He glanced at her, then back at the road. "You're doing the thing."

"What thing?"

"Going quiet and counting. Your lips move."

She made them stop moving. She had been running the protocol since the radio call: scene safety first, then mechanism of injury, then access, then extrication, then everything she would need if the answer to any of those turned out to be bad. Cab suspended over a drop meant unstable load. Unstable load meant she did not go near it until Per had it chocked and the anchors were set. Driver conscious meant airway likely clear, which meant she could afford to be methodical. Every step went into its slot, and every slot held. It steadied her the way the shelf steadied her. A winter was a list. An accident was a list. You did the next item and then the next, and the mountain did not get to surprise you.

The road climbed. The birches along the valley floor thinned and then gave out altogether, leaving bare scree and wind-scoured rock and a sky the color of wet slate. Fine snow began to blow across the road in long, hissing ribbons. Per slowed for the first switchback, then the second. On the third, the world on the left side of the truck simply stopped, and there was nothing out of the window but air and a long gray gulf of falling.

"Four more bends," Per said. "The Skarvet is the one after the culvert."

"I know where it is."

"I know you know. I'm talking to keep myself company." He cleared his throat. "Your mother was asking about you yesterday. Whether you'd eat with her tonight, the closing supper, the whole business."

"I'll be there."

"She said you'd say that too."

They rounded the culvert, and the Skarvet bend opened in front of them like a held breath.

The truck was a box lorry, white once, with a cartoon loaf of bread on its side that someone in the lowlands had thought would be cheerful. The trailer had jackknifed against the inside wall of the bend and stood there at a crooked angle, doors sprung, sacks of flour slumped out across the snow in a gray, spilled drift. The cab was the problem. It had punched through the guardrail and gone nose-first over the edge, and now it hung there at a sickening tilt, front wheels in empty air, held by the weight of the trailer and the stubbornness of one bent rail post that had no business still being upright. Below it the slope dropped away into a gully forty meters down, full of black rock and wind-packed snow.

Through the cracked windshield, a man's arm was raised and waving, slowly, the way a person waves from the window of a train.

Per let the truck roll to a stop well back from the edge, set the brake, and killed the engine. For a second neither of them spoke. The wind pushed at the doors. Then Per said, quietly, "Somebody's been busy."

Maren had already seen it. An orange rope ran from a boulder at the side of the road, across a stretch of snow, and over the broken lip of the guardrail, down along the tilted flank of the cab to the driver's door. It was tight, and it was tied off cleanly at both ends, and it had not been there when Liv made her first call. Somebody had come up this road before the rescue team, and somebody had known precisely what to do.

Maren climbed out of the truck into the cutting wind and walked to the boulder. She crouched. She put her bare hand on the anchor and followed the line from the rock back along the knot.

It was a figure eight on a bight, dressed so cleanly that the strands lay in parallel like the ribs of a ribbon, and backed up with a stopper on the tail that most climbers never bothered to tie. A double wrap, tucked under itself, finished with a small deliberate flat turn. She had seen that finish hundreds of times. She had watched it appear on the practice wall behind the station every Thursday night for four years, always the same, always a fraction more careful than the situation required, tied by a pair of large, scarred hands that did not know how to do a thing halfway.

She looked at it for too long. The wind picked at her hair. Her pulse had started doing something unprofessional at the base of her throat.

"Good knot?" Per asked from behind her.

"It's fine." Her voice came out normal, which was a small mercy. "It's a knot."

A coincidence, she told herself. Half the men in this valley had learned from the same old guides. There were a dozen people alive who might tie a stopper like that. She did not let herself finish counting them. She let go of the line and wiped her palm on her thigh as if it had touched something hot.

"Liv said somebody stopped," Per said. He had come up beside her with the long board over one shoulder, and he was studying the rope with an expression she did not like, a kind of patient, deliberate blankness. "A fella coming in from the lowland side. Hire car, she thought. Saw the truck go, pulled over, and got on the channel to say he was going down to see to the driver. He gave his name, but the static ate it."

"A tourist."

"Not a tourist who ties that."

"You don't know that." She kept her eyes on the cab. "What did Liv say his name was?"

"I told you. I lost it."

Maren unclipped the handset from her shoulder and keyed it. "Liv, Station Two. Say again the name of the passerby on scene." She released the key. Wind roared across the open channel, a long, rough tearing sound like cloth, and under it she thought she heard the edge of a word, a single hard syllable, and then nothing. She tried again. The static simply closed over her voice and gave nothing back.

"Mountain's in a mood," Per said mildly.

"The mountain is always in a mood." She clipped the handset back on and turned to the truck. "Let's get anchors on that cab. I want it chocked before I put weight near it. We do this properly."

"Yes, ma'am."

She set her own anchor to the boulder, a separate line, a separate knot, tied by her own hands in the plain, efficient way she had been taught. She did not trust a stranger's rope with a patient's life, and she did not trust this particular stranger's rope with hers. She told herself that was only prudence. She stepped into her harness, cinched the leg loops, and checked each buckle twice. Per fed her line through the friction device and gave her a look over the top of his beard that she pretended not to see.

"Backed up?" she said.

"Backed up."

"Chocks?"

"Chocks are set."

"Then I'm going over."

She leaned back until the rope took her weight and stood balanced on the broken lip of the road with the gully breathing up at her heels. For a moment the wind dropped. In that sudden stillness the snow hung almost motionless in the air, and she heard her own heartbeat, and she heard, from nowhere, from three years ago, a radio crackling in a warm room.

She had been at the station that day. She had been standing at the dispatch desk with a mug of tea going cold in her hand, listening to a rescue unfolding thirty kilometers away on the north face. Her brother was on that face. Her brother, twenty-four years old and laughing at her on the doorstep that morning, had gone up with a guide to climb the line he had been talking about for a year. Something had gone wrong. The channel filled with shouting, and then with stillness, and then, out of the stillness, a single voice, level and unhurried and terrible in its calm, saying six words she had been hearing in her sleep ever since.

"It was my call. It was mine."

She had not answered. She had put the radio down very carefully on the desk, the way you set down something that might break, and she had gone out into the corridor and stood with her forehead against the cold wall. Three weeks later the man who had said it was gone from Hallvik. No farewell, no forwarding address, a single duffel on the morning bus. She had not heard his voice since. She had trained herself not to listen for it.

She breathed out. Her thumb found the compass through the pocket of her jacket and pressed once, hard, against the brass.

"Maren?" Per said.

"Going."

She stepped backward off the edge.

The world tilted. The rope sang quietly through the device. The road disappeared above her, the sky shrank to a gray strip between two walls of rock, and the cab came up beneath her feet, huge and cold and creaking faintly in the wind. She lowered herself in short, controlled drops. Twenty meters. Fifteen. The flour-white snow under the cab was scattered with boot prints, deep, evenly spaced, the stride of someone tall and not in a hurry.

She was ten meters from the driver's door when the handset on her shoulder crackled.

She stopped on the rope. The line swung her gently against the cliff, and she did not feel it.

"Hallvik, this is Rask."

The voice was low, steady and a little hoarse with cold, and it came out of the tiny speaker as if it had been waiting at the other end of the wire for three years. It did not shout. It did not hurry. It simply reported, in the same unhurried tone that had once taken the blame for her whole life.

"Patient conscious, pinned at the leg. I've got him warm and talking. Tell Sundal I'll hold him until she gets here."

The wind came back. The snow began to move again. Maren hung on the end of the rope above forty meters of nothing with her hand frozen over the brass in her pocket, and for the first time in her life she could not remember what came next on the list.