Maren slept four hours and woke at half past four with the feeling that someone had moved the furniture inside her head.
Her mother had been reasonable the night before, which was the most alarming thing about her. Karin Sundal had opened the door of the guesthouse, taken one look at her daughter's face, and announced that the Closing Supper would be held on Saturday instead, because a bread truck in a gully was reason enough to postpone a tradition. She had fed Maren soup standing up at the kitchen counter and asked nothing at all. The questions had been in the way she folded the dish towel, once, and then twice, and then a third time. Maren had carried them home through the new snow like a second set of footprints.
Now it was dark and silent and snowing again, soft heavy flakes that drifted past the kitchen window without a sound. She dressed, braided her hair, drank her coffee black, and walked to the station through a town that did not yet know it was awake. The pass had been closed for less than a day. Already the valley felt different, smaller, as though the mountains had taken one step inward during the night.
The duty room was empty and cold. She switched on the lamp over the long table, pulled the winter roster from its folder, and uncapped a pen.
The roster was a grid. Seven days across, two shifts down, a column for each volunteer, and in the center of it, in her own square handwriting, the pairing she had drafted in September when she still believed she would be working beside a man named Jonas who repaired tractors and complained about everything. Jonas had broken his collarbone in October. Jonas was gone from the grid, and in his place Ingrid had written, in her looping hand, a single name.
Maren looked at it for a while. Then she took a clean sheet and began again.
It was good work, she thought. It was careful and fair and entirely defensible. She gave Elias Rask the day shift, six in the morning until six at night, because the days were short and the calls fewer, and a man who stayed out of the way could stay out of the way in daylight. She kept the night shift for herself, six until six, and drew the line between them so cleanly that the two names did not touch anywhere on the page. A handover at dawn, a handover at dusk, a nod across a doorway. Twelve hours of distance, every day, all the way to April.
She was blotting the last line when the door opened behind her and Per came in stamping snow off his boots with a paper bag under his arm.
"Bread," he said. "From Halvor's. He's been up since three, he says, out of respect for the dead flour." He set the bag down on the table, looked at the roster, and then looked at her with an expression of enormous, deliberate innocence. "That's a very tidy piece of paper."
"Thank you."
"Nobody's on it at the same time as anybody else."
"That's called coverage."
"That's called a fence." He tore the heel off a loaf and handed her half. "Eat. You look like something the mountain coughed up."
She ate. The bread was warm, and it tasted of salt and caraway and ordinary mornings, and for a few seconds she let herself be a person eating bread in a quiet room. Then the corridor filled with voices and boots, and the day began.
The briefing room occupied the whole east end of the station, a long low space with a woodstove at one end and a wall of photographs at the other. The photographs were the team, year by year, back to the days when the volunteers wore wool knickerbockers and held ice axes like scepters. Beneath them, bolted to the plaster over the door, hung a small brass plate that had been polished by so many passing hands that the letters were nearly smooth.
NO ONE GOES UP ALONE.
Maren sat at the far end of the table with her roster in front of her and her back to the plate. She did not need to see it. She could have recited the engraving in her sleep, and sometimes did.
The team came in by ones and twos. Halvor Nygard, the baker, big and floury and soft-spoken, who took the chair nearest the stove as though it had been built around him. Dagny Moe, who taught the village school and had a laugh like a dropped tray of cutlery, carrying a travel mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER. Per, with his beard and his bread. Liv Eide from dispatch, in her headset and her cardigan, perching on the edge of a radiator with her tablet open on her knee. Tobi, who arrived last at a jog, and stopped dead in the doorway, and then turned bright red for reasons that became clear when the man behind him stepped through.
Elias had cut his hair. It was only a little shorter than yesterday, but it was tidier at the neck, as though he had spent part of the night at a mirror with scissors and a very stern attitude. He wore the gray sweater again. He took the chair at the opposite end of the table from hers, put his hands flat on the wood, and looked at no one.
Ingrid entered last, closing the door behind her. She carried no papers. She stood at the head of the table with her braid over one shoulder and her left hand resting, as it always did lately, against her sternum.
"Good morning," she said. "The pass is closed. The weather window for helicopters between now and March is perhaps eleven days, and none of them are promised. Everything that happens in this valley between now and April is ours to handle. You know that. I'm saying it anyway because I like to hear it aloud."
A murmur ran around the table, half amusement and half ritual.
"Before we begin," Ingrid said, "we have a new colleague. Or an old one, depending on how long your memory is. Tobi, you have been bouncing in your seat for ten minutes. Introduce him."
Tobi shot upright so quickly that his chair legs shrieked. "Right. Yes. Okay." He turned to the room with the glow of a man about to present a rare animal. "Everyone, this is Elias Rask. Elias, this is everyone. So. Elias is the one who brought the Vestli brothers off the Hornet's Needle in a whiteout, with a broken rope, and one glove, and—"
"Two gloves," Elias said mildly. "And the rope wasn't broken. It was frayed."
Dagny let out her tray-of-cutlery laugh. Halvor smiled into his coffee. Even Liv glanced up from her tablet with something like approval.
"He also," Tobi pressed on, "did the Ravn couloir in under four hours, which people say is impossible, and he guided the Danish expedition when the cook got appendicitis, and—"
"Tobi," said Elias.
"Sorry. Yes. Sitting."
Maren's jaw had begun to ache. She unclenched it deliberately and watched Elias from across the length of the table. He had lowered his eyes and his ears had gone faintly red, and the sight of it struck her as a kind of insult, because it was exactly how he used to look when people praised him. He had always hated it. He had always borne it with a rueful grace that had made her want to push him into a snowdrift, and the old, absurd fondness of that thought arrived so fast she could not stop it. She crushed it flat and put her pen down.
"Thank you, Tobi," Ingrid said. "Now. The rule."
Every head turned toward the brass plate above the door, and then, with a courtesy so reflexive it was almost cruel, toward Maren.
It was a ritual. Every autumn, on the first morning of the closed season, the chief of the Hallvik team read the rule aloud to everyone in the room, and every autumn the volunteers listened with the polite, slightly bored patience of people hearing a thing they already knew by heart. This year, nobody looked bored. The room had gone still in a different way.
Ingrid did not turn to the plate. She spoke it from memory, in the level voice she used for protocols and funerals.
"No one goes up alone. Not for a lost child. Not for a friend. Not for a sheep. Two people, minimum, roped or radioed, within shout or within sight, on every call, in every weather, without exception. If there are not two, there is no rescue, there is only a second accident." She paused. "This rule was written into our charter twenty-two years ago this winter. We call it Sundal's Rule because of the man whose absence taught it to us. Henrik Sundal went up the Ulvbre ice alone, against orders, to bring down a boy who had wandered off. He found the boy. He did not come down."
Nobody coughed. Nobody moved. Maren looked at the grain of the table. It was pine, scarred with decades of coffee rings and the pale tracks of thermos lids, and she could have traced every mark with her eyes closed. She had been nine years old. She remembered a kitchen in the middle of the night, the smell of cold coffee, her mother sitting in a chair by the door with her coat still on, perfectly upright, facing the dark glass. That was all she remembered. It was enough.
She felt someone looking at her, and she did not lift her head. She knew who it was. Out of the corner of her vision she saw Elias turn his face toward her, a slight motion, no more than a man might make toward a sound he could not quite place. He looked for exactly one breath. Then he looked back at the table, and his hands, which had been flat, closed slowly into loose fists.
"That is the rule," Ingrid said. "It is not a suggestion, and it is not decoration. This winter I will enforce it more strictly than I ever have, because this winter I am asking two of you to carry a weight that used to be carried by three." Her eyes moved down the table and settled, finally, on Maren. "Maren, would you read the pairings."
Maren stood. She had practiced this. "For routine patrols and low-grade calls, the roster is posted," she said, and handed the sheets to Per to pass down. "Day shift, Rask, Nygard, Moe, with Tobi shadowing. Night shift, myself, Strand, and Tobi when he is not on days. Heavy rescue calls will be assigned by me, based on grade and—"
"Maren," said Ingrid.
"—and based on the availability of personnel who—"
"Maren."
She stopped. Everyone was studying the roster very hard, with the fixed, tender attention of people trying not to be in the room.
"A word about heavy calls," Ingrid said, quietly. "The regional authority defines a heavy technical rescue as anything above grade three. Crevasse. Avalanche burial. Vertical extrication. Any such call requires two certified rescuers on scene. Not one and a volunteer, not one and a promise. Two with the certificate. In this room there are exactly two such people."
"I'm aware of the regulation."
"Then you're aware that you cannot split them."
"Then I'll split the grades," Maren said. "I decide what's heavy and what isn't."
"You will decide honestly."
The words were not unkind. They landed like a hand on the back of her neck. Maren felt her face heat, felt the weight of eight pairs of eyes, and understood with sudden, awful clarity that Ingrid had arranged this moment on purpose, in front of the whole team, so that she could not pretend afterward that she had not been asked.
"Fine," she said. "On heavy calls, and only on heavy calls, the two of us go together. On everything else, we work the roster." She turned and looked down the table, directly at him, for the first time that morning. "Is that acceptable to you, Rask?"
He lifted his gaze to hers, and for a second the whole room seemed to tilt toward the strip of air between them.
He nodded. Once. He did not say yes, did not say fine, did not say a single syllable. He simply accepted it, the way a man accepts a sentence he has been expecting.
It was the most irritating thing he could possibly have done. Her palms were suddenly damp. She sat down hard, and Ingrid, to her credit, moved on to the matter of the generator.
The meeting dissolved into noise. Chairs scraped, mugs clanked, Per began a complaint about the station's gutters. Maren stayed bent over her roster until the room emptied, and when she finally raised her head, Tobi was standing in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets and an expression she had never seen on him before.
"Can I ask you something?" he said. "You can say no."
"No."
"Okay." He didn't move. "Why do you hate him?"
"I don't hate him."
"You say 'Rask' like you're spitting out a seed."
"I say it like it's his name."
"I know about Anders," Tobi said, very low. He flushed to the roots of his hair. "Everyone does. I'm sorry. I'm not being, I just. He's really good, Maren. He's really good, and he's kind, and he spent the whole of last night showing me how to coil a rope so it doesn't kink, and I keep thinking, that doesn't sound like somebody who—" He stopped. "I'm sorry. I'm shutting up."
She looked at him. He was twenty-three, and he still believed that a person's character could be read off the way they coiled a rope, and she felt, to her surprise, an aching tenderness toward him that she did not know what to do with.
"Go and inventory the ropes," she said, gently. "All of them. Twice."
"Twice."
"And, Tobi?"
"Yes?"
"It isn't a thing you can read off a rope."
He nodded, and went. At the door he glanced back at her with a troubled, thoughtful look, the look of a boy who has just discovered that the problem he thought was about a roster has no bottom.
The equipment store lay at the back of the station, a narrow windowless room lined floor to ceiling with steel racking. It smelled of nylon and grease and cold metal. Maren went in at half past ten for a spare harness for Dagny and found the aisle already occupied.
Elias was crouched at the far end with a coil of dynamic rope across his knees, running it through his hands inch by inch, checking the sheath for cuts. He did it the way he did everything, with a calm, absorbed gentleness, and he did not look up until she was almost beside him. Then he stood, quickly, and stepped back to give her room.
There was not much room to give. The aisle was a little over a meter wide. She squeezed past with her shoulder turned, and he flattened himself against the racking, and for one long second they stood so close that she could have counted the threads in his sweater. He smelled of cold air and soap and rope. Under it there was something older and warmer that she refused to name.
He was not looking at her face. His eyes had gone to her jacket, to the right-hand pocket where the shape of the compass pressed a small round bulge against the cloth, and they rested there for a moment, steady and unreadable.
"What," Maren said.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at my pocket."
"I'm not." He lifted his eyes, and they were as empty and courteous as ever, though something at the corner of his mouth had tightened. "I'm sorry, Paramedic."
Her hand had gone to the pocket without her permission. She closed her fingers around the brass through the fabric, hard, and glared at him, and he gave her a small, quiet, almost apologetic nod and walked out of the store, leaving the rope still coiled on the shelf behind him.
She stood alone in the aisle with her heart going far too fast and thought, with perfect clarity: he knows what's in there. He has always known.
She did not know what she meant by that. She did not want to.
She was reaching for the harness when the alarm went off.
It was the old brass bell in the station hall, the one that had been rung for emergencies since before the radio, and it clanged now in long, urgent strokes that shivered the racks. Liv's voice cut over the speakers in the ceiling, calm and quick.
"Call-out. Call-out. Ulvbre glacier, lower tongue, near the Aas summer hut. Elderly male, shepherd, fallen into a crevasse. Conscious, reports a leg injury. Estimated depth six meters. Technical rope rescue required."
Maren was already running. At the end of the corridor Ingrid stood in her office doorway with one hand pressed flat to her chest and her face bleached and calm, and as Maren came level with her she said only, without any inflection at all:
"That's both of you."
Maren stopped. Down the corridor, at the head of the stairs, a tall man in a gray sweater had already reached for his jacket. He did not look back at her. He did not need to.
"Of course it is," said Maren, and went to get her rope.
You've reached the end of this chapter
Maren slept four hours and woke at half past four with the feeling that someone had moved the furniture inside her head.
Her mother had been reasonable the night before, which was the most alarming thing about her. Karin Sundal had opened the door of the guesthouse, taken one look at her daughter's face, and announced that the Closing Supper would be held on Saturday instead, because a bread truck in a gully was reason enough to postpone a tradition. She had fed Maren soup standing up at the kitchen counter and asked nothing at all. The questions had been in the way she folded the dish towel, once, and then twice, and then a third time. Maren had carried them home through the new snow like a second set of footprints.
Now it was dark and silent and snowing again, soft heavy flakes that drifted past the kitchen window without a sound. She dressed, braided her hair, drank her coffee black, and walked to the station through a town that did not yet know it was awake. The pass had been closed for less than a day. Already the valley felt different, smaller, as though the mountains had taken one step inward during the night.
The duty room was empty and cold. She switched on the lamp over the long table, pulled the winter roster from its folder, and uncapped a pen.
The roster was a grid. Seven days across, two shifts down, a column for each volunteer, and in the center of it, in her own square handwriting, the pairing she had drafted in September when she still believed she would be working beside a man named Jonas who repaired tractors and complained about everything. Jonas had broken his collarbone in October. Jonas was gone from the grid, and in his place Ingrid had written, in her looping hand, a single name.
Maren looked at it for a while. Then she took a clean sheet and began again.
It was good work, she thought. It was careful and fair and entirely defensible. She gave Elias Rask the day shift, six in the morning until six at night, because the days were short and the calls fewer, and a man who stayed out of the way could stay out of the way in daylight. She kept the night shift for herself, six until six, and drew the line between them so cleanly that the two names did not touch anywhere on the page. A handover at dawn, a handover at dusk, a nod across a doorway. Twelve hours of distance, every day, all the way to April.
She was blotting the last line when the door opened behind her and Per came in stamping snow off his boots with a paper bag under his arm.
"Bread," he said. "From Halvor's. He's been up since three, he says, out of respect for the dead flour." He set the bag down on the table, looked at the roster, and then looked at her with an expression of enormous, deliberate innocence. "That's a very tidy piece of paper."
"Thank you."
"Nobody's on it at the same time as anybody else."
"That's called coverage."
"That's called a fence." He tore the heel off a loaf and handed her half. "Eat. You look like something the mountain coughed up."
She ate. The bread was warm, and it tasted of salt and caraway and ordinary mornings, and for a few seconds she let herself be a person eating bread in a quiet room. Then the corridor filled with voices and boots, and the day began.
The briefing room occupied the whole east end of the station, a long low space with a woodstove at one end and a wall of photographs at the other. The photographs were the team, year by year, back to the days when the volunteers wore wool knickerbockers and held ice axes like scepters. Beneath them, bolted to the plaster over the door, hung a small brass plate that had been polished by so many passing hands that the letters were nearly smooth.
NO ONE GOES UP ALONE.
Maren sat at the far end of the table with her roster in front of her and her back to the plate. She did not need to see it. She could have recited the engraving in her sleep, and sometimes did.
The team came in by ones and twos. Halvor Nygard, the baker, big and floury and soft-spoken, who took the chair nearest the stove as though it had been built around him. Dagny Moe, who taught the village school and had a laugh like a dropped tray of cutlery, carrying a travel mug that said WORLD'S OKAYEST TEACHER. Per, with his beard and his bread. Liv Eide from dispatch, in her headset and her cardigan, perching on the edge of a radiator with her tablet open on her knee. Tobi, who arrived last at a jog, and stopped dead in the doorway, and then turned bright red for reasons that became clear when the man behind him stepped through.
Elias had cut his hair. It was only a little shorter than yesterday, but it was tidier at the neck, as though he had spent part of the night at a mirror with scissors and a very stern attitude. He wore the gray sweater again. He took the chair at the opposite end of the table from hers, put his hands flat on the wood, and looked at no one.
Ingrid entered last, closing the door behind her. She carried no papers. She stood at the head of the table with her braid over one shoulder and her left hand resting, as it always did lately, against her sternum.
"Good morning," she said. "The pass is closed. The weather window for helicopters between now and March is perhaps eleven days, and none of them are promised. Everything that happens in this valley between now and April is ours to handle. You know that. I'm saying it anyway because I like to hear it aloud."
A murmur ran around the table, half amusement and half ritual.
"Before we begin," Ingrid said, "we have a new colleague. Or an old one, depending on how long your memory is. Tobi, you have been bouncing in your seat for ten minutes. Introduce him."
Tobi shot upright so quickly that his chair legs shrieked. "Right. Yes. Okay." He turned to the room with the glow of a man about to present a rare animal. "Everyone, this is Elias Rask. Elias, this is everyone. So. Elias is the one who brought the Vestli brothers off the Hornet's Needle in a whiteout, with a broken rope, and one glove, and—"
"Two gloves," Elias said mildly. "And the rope wasn't broken. It was frayed."
Dagny let out her tray-of-cutlery laugh. Halvor smiled into his coffee. Even Liv glanced up from her tablet with something like approval.
"He also," Tobi pressed on, "did the Ravn couloir in under four hours, which people say is impossible, and he guided the Danish expedition when the cook got appendicitis, and—"
"Tobi," said Elias.
"Sorry. Yes. Sitting."
Maren's jaw had begun to ache. She unclenched it deliberately and watched Elias from across the length of the table. He had lowered his eyes and his ears had gone faintly red, and the sight of it struck her as a kind of insult, because it was exactly how he used to look when people praised him. He had always hated it. He had always borne it with a rueful grace that had made her want to push him into a snowdrift, and the old, absurd fondness of that thought arrived so fast she could not stop it. She crushed it flat and put her pen down.
"Thank you, Tobi," Ingrid said. "Now. The rule."
Every head turned toward the brass plate above the door, and then, with a courtesy so reflexive it was almost cruel, toward Maren.
It was a ritual. Every autumn, on the first morning of the closed season, the chief of the Hallvik team read the rule aloud to everyone in the room, and every autumn the volunteers listened with the polite, slightly bored patience of people hearing a thing they already knew by heart. This year, nobody looked bored. The room had gone still in a different way.
Ingrid did not turn to the plate. She spoke it from memory, in the level voice she used for protocols and funerals.
"No one goes up alone. Not for a lost child. Not for a friend. Not for a sheep. Two people, minimum, roped or radioed, within shout or within sight, on every call, in every weather, without exception. If there are not two, there is no rescue, there is only a second accident." She paused. "This rule was written into our charter twenty-two years ago this winter. We call it Sundal's Rule because of the man whose absence taught it to us. Henrik Sundal went up the Ulvbre ice alone, against orders, to bring down a boy who had wandered off. He found the boy. He did not come down."
Nobody coughed. Nobody moved. Maren looked at the grain of the table. It was pine, scarred with decades of coffee rings and the pale tracks of thermos lids, and she could have traced every mark with her eyes closed. She had been nine years old. She remembered a kitchen in the middle of the night, the smell of cold coffee, her mother sitting in a chair by the door with her coat still on, perfectly upright, facing the dark glass. That was all she remembered. It was enough.
She felt someone looking at her, and she did not lift her head. She knew who it was. Out of the corner of her vision she saw Elias turn his face toward her, a slight motion, no more than a man might make toward a sound he could not quite place. He looked for exactly one breath. Then he looked back at the table, and his hands, which had been flat, closed slowly into loose fists.
"That is the rule," Ingrid said. "It is not a suggestion, and it is not decoration. This winter I will enforce it more strictly than I ever have, because this winter I am asking two of you to carry a weight that used to be carried by three." Her eyes moved down the table and settled, finally, on Maren. "Maren, would you read the pairings."
Maren stood. She had practiced this. "For routine patrols and low-grade calls, the roster is posted," she said, and handed the sheets to Per to pass down. "Day shift, Rask, Nygard, Moe, with Tobi shadowing. Night shift, myself, Strand, and Tobi when he is not on days. Heavy rescue calls will be assigned by me, based on grade and—"
"Maren," said Ingrid.
"—and based on the availability of personnel who—"
"Maren."
She stopped. Everyone was studying the roster very hard, with the fixed, tender attention of people trying not to be in the room.
"A word about heavy calls," Ingrid said, quietly. "The regional authority defines a heavy technical rescue as anything above grade three. Crevasse. Avalanche burial. Vertical extrication. Any such call requires two certified rescuers on scene. Not one and a volunteer, not one and a promise. Two with the certificate. In this room there are exactly two such people."
"I'm aware of the regulation."
"Then you're aware that you cannot split them."
"Then I'll split the grades," Maren said. "I decide what's heavy and what isn't."
"You will decide honestly."
The words were not unkind. They landed like a hand on the back of her neck. Maren felt her face heat, felt the weight of eight pairs of eyes, and understood with sudden, awful clarity that Ingrid had arranged this moment on purpose, in front of the whole team, so that she could not pretend afterward that she had not been asked.
"Fine," she said. "On heavy calls, and only on heavy calls, the two of us go together. On everything else, we work the roster." She turned and looked down the table, directly at him, for the first time that morning. "Is that acceptable to you, Rask?"
He lifted his gaze to hers, and for a second the whole room seemed to tilt toward the strip of air between them.
He nodded. Once. He did not say yes, did not say fine, did not say a single syllable. He simply accepted it, the way a man accepts a sentence he has been expecting.
It was the most irritating thing he could possibly have done. Her palms were suddenly damp. She sat down hard, and Ingrid, to her credit, moved on to the matter of the generator.
The meeting dissolved into noise. Chairs scraped, mugs clanked, Per began a complaint about the station's gutters. Maren stayed bent over her roster until the room emptied, and when she finally raised her head, Tobi was standing in front of her with his hands shoved in his pockets and an expression she had never seen on him before.
"Can I ask you something?" he said. "You can say no."
"No."
"Okay." He didn't move. "Why do you hate him?"
"I don't hate him."
"You say 'Rask' like you're spitting out a seed."
"I say it like it's his name."
"I know about Anders," Tobi said, very low. He flushed to the roots of his hair. "Everyone does. I'm sorry. I'm not being, I just. He's really good, Maren. He's really good, and he's kind, and he spent the whole of last night showing me how to coil a rope so it doesn't kink, and I keep thinking, that doesn't sound like somebody who—" He stopped. "I'm sorry. I'm shutting up."
She looked at him. He was twenty-three, and he still believed that a person's character could be read off the way they coiled a rope, and she felt, to her surprise, an aching tenderness toward him that she did not know what to do with.
"Go and inventory the ropes," she said, gently. "All of them. Twice."
"Twice."
"And, Tobi?"
"Yes?"
"It isn't a thing you can read off a rope."
He nodded, and went. At the door he glanced back at her with a troubled, thoughtful look, the look of a boy who has just discovered that the problem he thought was about a roster has no bottom.
The equipment store lay at the back of the station, a narrow windowless room lined floor to ceiling with steel racking. It smelled of nylon and grease and cold metal. Maren went in at half past ten for a spare harness for Dagny and found the aisle already occupied.
Elias was crouched at the far end with a coil of dynamic rope across his knees, running it through his hands inch by inch, checking the sheath for cuts. He did it the way he did everything, with a calm, absorbed gentleness, and he did not look up until she was almost beside him. Then he stood, quickly, and stepped back to give her room.
There was not much room to give. The aisle was a little over a meter wide. She squeezed past with her shoulder turned, and he flattened himself against the racking, and for one long second they stood so close that she could have counted the threads in his sweater. He smelled of cold air and soap and rope. Under it there was something older and warmer that she refused to name.
He was not looking at her face. His eyes had gone to her jacket, to the right-hand pocket where the shape of the compass pressed a small round bulge against the cloth, and they rested there for a moment, steady and unreadable.
"What," Maren said.
"Nothing."
"You're staring at my pocket."
"I'm not." He lifted his eyes, and they were as empty and courteous as ever, though something at the corner of his mouth had tightened. "I'm sorry, Paramedic."
Her hand had gone to the pocket without her permission. She closed her fingers around the brass through the fabric, hard, and glared at him, and he gave her a small, quiet, almost apologetic nod and walked out of the store, leaving the rope still coiled on the shelf behind him.
She stood alone in the aisle with her heart going far too fast and thought, with perfect clarity: he knows what's in there. He has always known.
She did not know what she meant by that. She did not want to.
She was reaching for the harness when the alarm went off.
It was the old brass bell in the station hall, the one that had been rung for emergencies since before the radio, and it clanged now in long, urgent strokes that shivered the racks. Liv's voice cut over the speakers in the ceiling, calm and quick.
"Call-out. Call-out. Ulvbre glacier, lower tongue, near the Aas summer hut. Elderly male, shepherd, fallen into a crevasse. Conscious, reports a leg injury. Estimated depth six meters. Technical rope rescue required."
Maren was already running. At the end of the corridor Ingrid stood in her office doorway with one hand pressed flat to her chest and her face bleached and calm, and as Maren came level with her she said only, without any inflection at all:
"That's both of you."
Maren stopped. Down the corridor, at the head of the stairs, a tall man in a gray sweater had already reached for his jacket. He did not look back at her. He did not need to.
"Of course it is," said Maren, and went to get her rope.
You've reached the end of this chapter