The call came in at ten past one on a Tuesday afternoon, which was the sort of hour at which nothing was supposed to happen.

"Hiker overdue," said Liv, over the speakers in the ceiling, in the voice she used for things that were probably nothing. "Male, thirty-one, a visitor staying at the Fjellstue. He left at eight this morning to walk the Brekke ridge. Return time was noon. He's not back, he's not answering his phone, and the owner says his boots were new."

Per, who had risen from his sickbed on Sunday and had been insufferable since, groaned from the kitchen. "New boots. Always the new boots."

"Last position?" Maren was already on her feet.

"Phone pinged the Tannvik mast at nine-forty. After that, nothing. Weather is closing from the northwest. Wind gusting to sixty by four o'clock."

"Grade?"

"Ingrid says two. A search. No technical." There was a pause. "She says take three."

Maren's mouth tightened. She knew what that meant. It was a low-grade call, a lost walker on a ridge, and any two of them could have handled it, and Ingrid had said *three* because she had a Tobi on her hands who had been waiting seven weeks for a real one.

"Rask," said Maren, into the corridor. "Tobi. Kit up."

They took the snow machines to the foot of Brekke, where the ridge rose in a long white shoulder above the Tannvik road. It was a gentle mountain, as mountains went. In summer it was a Sunday stroll, a ridge walk with a cairn at the top and a view of three valleys. In winter, with a fresh load of snow on the lee slope and a wind building from the northwest, it was a different thing, a loaded gun with a pretty face.

Maren led the way up. Elias walked beside her. Tobi came behind, in the new red helmet that Halvor had given him for his birthday and that he had not taken off in five days, and she could hear him humming something under his breath, a tuneless, delighted drone, the sound of a boy on the first real day of his life.

She let him hum.

They made good time. The first hour was easy, a long steady climb through stunted birch and then out onto the open slope. The snow was knee-deep and soft, and the wind had not yet begun. The sky overhead had turned the color of pewter. From time to time Maren paused and shouted the hiker's name, Lukas, Lukas, and heard it fall away across the empty white and be swallowed.

At two o'clock they reached the cairn.

It stood on a small rise where the slope steepened, a waist-high pile of stones that someone had topped with a red-painted tin. Elias stopped beside it. He did not say anything. He stood with his head tilted, and his hand on the strap of his pack, looking up the long white face above.

It rose perhaps three hundred meters, smooth and unbroken, tilted at an angle that Maren knew without measuring. It was a beautiful slope. It had the soft, rounded, innocent look of a slope that had been built overnight by the wind, a pillow of new snow laid over old, and when she looked at it she felt the small cold prickle at the back of her neck that she had learned to trust.

"Thirty-five degrees," Elias said quietly. "Maybe thirty-eight at the top. That's all wind slab. It's been loading since Sunday."

"I agree."

"I don't like it."

"No."

They looked at each other. She saw the question in his eyes and knew the answer. It was a low-grade call, and the slope was above grade, and there was no way to search it safely without a probe line and a spotter and a great deal more time than they had.

"We turn back at the cairn," said Maren. "We search the lower slopes and the tree line. If he's higher up, we go for the helicopter and we pray for a window."

"Agreed," said Elias. He turned, and looked past her. "Tobi. This is the line. We don't cross it. If I say turn around, you turn around. No arguments. Understood?"

"Understood!" said Tobi. His cheeks were red and his eyes were shining. "Sorry. Yes. Understood."

They went down along the edge of the rise, moving left toward the birch, calling as they went. Maren walked point. Elias followed, scanning the slope. Behind him, Tobi lagged a few paces, his head turning from side to side with the happy, distracted air of a spaniel in a field of rabbits.

It was Tobi who saw the tracks.

"Wait," he said. "Wait. Look."

They stopped. He had dropped to one knee in the snow a little above the line of the cairn and was pointing, with a gloved hand shaking slightly with excitement, at a line of marks in the drift. A trail of footprints, crisp and fresh, came out of the birch, crossed the rise, and ran away up the slope toward the head of the ridge.

"That's him," Tobi said. "That's his boots. They're new, they've got that deep tread, look, you can see the pattern. He went up. He went up that way, toward the top."

Maren came over. She crouched beside him and looked at the prints. They were big and well defined, with a deep sharp zigzag of tread, and they ran in an unbroken line to the base of the steep. They looked as if they had been made an hour ago. They looked, in short, exactly like the trail of a man who had gone up the slope and not come back.

Elias knelt on the other side.

"Those are going down," he said.

"What?"

"The toe's shallow and the heel digs in. See?" He ran a gloved finger along the edge of one print. "He's coming off the ridge, not going up it. He came down this way, and he turned into the trees. Those prints are heading for the hut at Brekke Lower. It's three hundred meters away. If he's sheltering anywhere, he's sheltering there."

"They look like they're going up," said Tobi.

"I know they do. It's the wind. It fills the heel."

"But—"

"Tobi," said Elias, very gently. "Trust me on this. It's down."

Tobi looked at the tracks. Maren saw it happen. She saw the stubbornness pass over his round, open face like the shadow of a cloud, the dogged conviction of the very young that what they have seen with their own eyes is true. She had worn that look herself. She had worn it on a good many mountains, and she opened her mouth to say his name.

He was already moving.

"He might be hurt," Tobi said. "He might be just up there. I'll only go a little way and look. Ten meters. I'll be right back."

"Tobi, no—"

"Turn around," said Elias, in a different voice, a voice she had not heard from him before, flat and absolute and very fast. "Tobi. Turn around. That's an order."

But the boy was already on the slope. He had climbed past the cairn and the line of the rise, ten meters, twenty, thirty, wading through the new snow with the eager, floundering gait of a puppy on a beach, and the wind was rising, and somewhere very high up the long white pillow of the mountain gave a faint, dry, whispering sigh.

Maren felt it in her stomach.

"*Tobi!*"

Elias moved.

She had never seen anyone move like that. He went from a standstill to a dead run in half a stride, his poles flying away from his hands, and he went straight up the slope after the boy, on the rope line, across the line, over it, into the place where nobody was supposed to go. He covered thirty meters in what felt like three seconds. He threw himself forward and caught the strap of Tobi's pack in his gloved fist, and wrenched.

The slope broke.

It did not make a sound at first. It was merely a long crack that ran across the face above them, a bright black line in the white, like a seam splitting in a sheet. Then the whole upper slab shifted, with a slow, enormous, almost courteous deliberation, and began to slide.

It was not a big one. That was the only mercy. It was a small slab, perhaps twenty meters across and half a meter deep, and it came down the slope in a smooth, hissing sheet and swept past within a meter of the place where Elias stood, with Tobi hauled backward against his chest and both of them braced flat against the wind. The snow went by like a river. It roared. It broke on the rise below and rolled on in a spray of white powder, and then it was gone, and the silence afterward was so total that Maren could hear her own heart.

She did not remember crossing the distance. She found herself standing in front of the two of them with her hands out, and Tobi was alive, white-faced and gasping, with his helmet askew, and Elias was alive, crouched in the snow with one arm locked around the boy's chest and his bandaged forearm bleeding faintly through the sleeve.

"All right," said Elias, in a rough, level voice. "All right. It's over. We're all right."

"I'm sorry," Tobi whispered. "I'm sorry. I thought, I really thought, the prints, I thought they were." He began to shake. "I didn't, I wasn't—"

"Breathe."

Maren's hands were moving without her. She checked Tobi, the neck, the pulse, the pupils. She checked Elias, and found nothing new, and was furious about it. She turned back to the slope, to the wide smooth scar on its face where the slab had been, and she stood there for a long moment looking at it with something that was not quite anger and not quite terror.

Then she walked down, very calmly, past the cairn and into the birch, and followed the line of prints.

The hiker was in the hut.

It was a small timber shelter at the foot of the slope, black with age, with a rusty stove pipe and a door that stuck. He sat inside on a bench with a sleeping bag around his shoulders and his left boot off, an ankle swollen to the size of a grapefruit, a pale, shivering, perfectly cheerful man named Lukas Brandt who said he had slipped on the ridge at ten, crawled to the hut at eleven, and been very much hoping someone would come, because he had finished his sandwich and was down to a single bar of chocolate.

"I did try to phone," he said. "But I'm afraid there's no signal. I did think I'd done something stupid with the boots."

"You did," said Maren, kneeling to look at the ankle. "It's the stupidest thing I have seen all week. Hold still."

He held still. She splinted the ankle with a foam wrap and gave him hot sweet tea from her thermos, and by the time she had finished the others had come in. Elias stood in the doorway with Tobi at his shoulder. They both looked at the hiker, and at the stove, and at the empty chocolate wrapper on the bench, and then, with a dawning, dreadful comprehension, at each other.

The prints had been going down. The man had been safe the entire time.

The boy sat down on the floor.

The wind came up as they brought Lukas down, and by four it was howling across the ridge like a thing let off a chain. They loaded him onto the sled at the foot of the hill, wrapped like a parcel, and Per met them at the Tannvik road with the truck and a flask of something strong. In the cab, Maren took the front seat and said nothing at all. Behind her she could hear Tobi trying to speak, and Elias's low voice answering him, and a long, quiet silence that she did not turn around to look at.

Ingrid was waiting in the briefing room.

She had not sat down. She stood at the head of the long table with her arms folded across her chest and her braid over her shoulder, and she looked, in the lamplight, like a magistrate. Maren had given the report standing. Lukas Brandt, thirty-one, sprained ankle, mild hypothermia, transferred to Dr. Ellefsen's cottage. Search concluded. All team members safe.

"All team members," said Ingrid, "safe."

"Yes."

"Per tells me there was a slide."

The room was very still. Elias stood beside the stove, with his hands loose at his sides. Tobi stood three paces from him, white as paper, with his helmet in his hands, and Maren could see his knuckles shaking.

"A small one," she said. "Twenty meters wide, about half a meter deep. Nobody was caught. It came down on the line of the rise."

"Who crossed the turn-back point?"

Nobody spoke.

"The turn-back point," Ingrid said, with great and terrible gentleness, "was agreed at the cairn. You agreed it. You told me, Maren, when you radioed in, that the three of you had agreed it. Somebody went above that line. I would like to know who."

Tobi took a breath. She saw him do it, saw his shoulders straighten, saw the whole young, honest, terrified face compose itself into resolution. His mouth opened.

"It was—" he said.

"My call."

The words came from the stove.

She did not see Elias turn his head. She only heard it, as one hears a voice in a dream, a low, level, quiet voice speaking in the lamplit room with no particular emphasis, without apology or defiance, as plainly as a man reading out a time.

"My call," Elias said again. "I should have been clearer about the slope. I called the turn-back, and I didn't enforce it. I should have put myself between him and the line. It was my responsibility."

Maren stopped breathing.

It was not the words. She had heard those words before, not these, not exactly, but the pattern of them, the shape. It was the voice. It was a voice she had last heard crackling from a radio in a warm room, in the middle of a bright afternoon three years ago, a voice with something dreadful held down under a perfect calm, saying a thing that she had believed for every day and night since. *It was my call. It was mine.*

The room had turned. She felt it. The walls seemed to slide backward, and the stove, and the faces, and she stood very still in the center of it with her hand closed hard around the compass in her pocket and looked at the tall man by the fire.

He was not looking at her. He was looking at Ingrid, steadily, with the faint gray patience of a man waiting out a verdict he has already accepted.

She looked at Tobi. His mouth was still open. He was staring at Elias with a look of such blank, stricken, dawning horror that she could have wept.

"Rask," said Ingrid, after a long, long pause. Her voice was quiet. "You and I will speak in my office."

"Yes, Chief."

"Tobi, go and wash."

"But I—"

"Go."

He went. Maren, standing frozen by the table, heard the slow tread of Elias's boots go past her toward the corridor, and felt the air stir against her sleeve, and did not turn her head. When he had gone, and Ingrid had followed him, and the door of the office had closed behind them with a click, she was left alone in the briefing room with the stove and the plate on the wall and the long pale smear of the lamp.

She stood there for a very long time.

She found Tobi in the garage.

It was half past six and quite dark. He was sitting on an overturned crate in the circle of the work light, with a coil of rope across his knees, trying to flake it, and his hands were shaking so badly that the loops kept falling out of them. She sat down beside him on a drum of diesel. For a minute she said nothing. She took the rope from him, gently, and began to coil it herself.

"It was me," said Tobi.

"I know."

"He told me to turn round. He told me twice. I heard him. I just, I thought I knew, I saw the prints, I thought I was right." His voice cracked. "I wasn't even right. He was in the hut the whole time."

"Yes."

"Why did he do that?" He looked at her with wet, bewildered eyes. "Why did he say it was his? He didn't have to. He could have just, I was going to say it. I had my mouth open. I was going to say."

"I saw."

"He just looked at me afterward," said Tobi, "and he said, go and get warm, Tobi. That was all. Like he'd said it a hundred times before. Like it was nothing. Like it was what he did." He rubbed his face with both hands. "I don't understand. Why would anyone do that?"

She did not answer. She looped the rope around her elbow and hand, around and around, in the ordered pattern of fifty winters, and she heard the question, and she did not look at it. It was a door, and she had been standing in front of it for weeks, and she knew perfectly well that if she opened it she would have to look at what was behind.

"I don't know," said Maren.

"Are you going to tell Ingrid it was me?"

"You are."

He flinched. Then he straightened, and his chin came up, and she saw, with a wrench of tenderness, the first faint shape of the man he was going to be. "Yes," Tobi said. "Yes. I will. Tomorrow. First thing."

"Good."

"Maren?"

"Yes?"

"He pulled me out of the way of a slab," said Tobi, very quietly. "Twice in one week. Once off a roof and once off a mountain. And I think I've been, I think I'm the reason that somebody—" He stopped. "I don't know what I think."

"Go home," said Maren. "Sleep."

She finished coiling the rope and hung it on its peg. She turned off the work light. And then, instead of going home, she walked along the dark corridor to the records room at the back of the station, a narrow windowless closet lined with steel shelves and binders, where the station kept its logs.

She had not been in it for three years.

The binders stood in rows, each with a year on the spine in white paint. She walked slowly down the aisle with her fingers trailing along them, one by one, two thousand and eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one. She stopped at the one for the year of the fall. It was thicker than the others. Its spine was cracked. Below the year, on a strip of masking tape, in a handwriting she knew better than her own, someone had written NORTH FACE. SUNDAL, A.

She put out her hand.

Her fingertips touched the cold cardboard, and rested there, and she heard her own breathing very loud in the narrow room. A hundred pages of reports and statements and diagrams lay behind that spine, and the rope lay in them, and the weather, and the sequence of events in a flat typed hand, and the signature at the bottom of the last page.

*My call. I should have been clearer. It was my responsibility.*

She stood there, with her fingers on the spine of her brother's file, for perhaps a full minute.

Then she drew her hand away, and put it in her pocket, around the brass, and walked out of the room, and turned off the light.