The snow machine coughed twice and caught.
Elias stood beside it in the station garage with one hand on the cold fairing, listening to the engine settle into a rough, even idle, and made himself look at the engine instead of at the woman on the other side of it. This was a discipline. He had arrived at it in the lowlands, over three years of empty rooms, and it had a list of rules as strict as any rescue protocol. Do not look at her hands. Do not look at the loose strand of hair that has already escaped the braid. Do not notice that she has put on the green wool hat with the hole worn in the left earflap because she will not throw it away. Do not, under any circumstances, remember what the inside of that hat smelled like.
He checked the fuel line. It was fine. He checked it again.
"Sled's loaded," Maren said from the far side. She was crouched at the rear of the trailer, tightening a strap with a short, savage yank. Her breath rose white in the garage light. "Two ropes, ice screws, pulleys, the vacuum splint, the long board. Thermal bag for the patient. I'll drive. You ride behind with the kit."
"All right."
"If you have a problem with that, say so now."
"I don't."
She looked up at him then, quick and suspicious, the way a cat looks at a dish that has been set down too gently. He kept his face blank. It was a thing he had practiced as well. He thought that she must find his calm unbearable, and he thought, with a small, sorry flicker of something that was not quite humor, that she was right to.
She swung onto the machine and gunned the throttle. He climbed on behind her, careful to keep his hands on the rear grab rail and his knees away from her hips, and the garage door rolled up on a wall of falling snow.
The Ulvbre glacier lay four kilometers above the valley floor, a long gray tongue of ice that crawled down out of the high cirque and ended, abruptly and without ceremony, in a field of boulders and birch scrub. In summer it was a gentle place, a destination for school trips. In late autumn, under the first heavy snow, it became a hidden thing. The crevasses closed over with thin bridges that looked, to the careless eye, exactly like solid ground.
The machine roared up the trail through the whitened birches. Elias held on and watched the back of her head. The braid swung between her shoulder blades. A little ice had gathered on the green wool at her temple, and he thought he could see, in the set of her neck, the stiffness of someone sitting very still on purpose. They did not speak. The engine made speech impossible, and silence made it unnecessary, and the silence pressed on him anyway, round and heavy, like water.
Three years, he thought. And I am sitting on a snow machine behind her as though nothing has happened.
He had made a promise on a mountain. He had kept it, and the keeping had a price, and the price was being paid, steadily and without complaint, by the person in front of him, in coin he could not refund. He had known that when he made it. He had decided that it was a fair trade. Some mornings he even believed that.
The trail steepened. Maren slowed the machine, and the engine's snarl dropped to a growl, and across the white slope ahead a small figure became visible, standing beside the black square of a hut.
The old man was not standing. He was shouting at them from the ground, from somewhere beyond the hut, in a thin, cheerful, outraged voice that carried across the snow like a bird's.
"Down here! Down here! Don't step on the bridge, it's not what it looks like!"
His name was Gunnar Aas. He was seventy-eight and had run sheep on the Ulvbre side of the valley for sixty years, and he had come up this morning to check that the last of the ewes were safe in their winter shed, which they were, because he was a man who had never in his life been wrong about a ewe. He had simply put one boot on a patch of snow that did not belong to the world he believed in. The patch had opened. He had fallen six meters, bounced off an ice shelf, and landed wedged between two walls of blue, with one boot twisted under him at an angle that Elias could see from the rim.
"Hello, Gunnar," Maren called, kneeling at the edge. "It's Maren Sundal. How badly are you hurt?"
"Oh, it's only the ankle," the old man shouted up. "And my pride. And my hat, which is down here with me. Are you the girl who set my wrist in the spring?"
"I'm the girl."
"Good. Don't bring that fellow Per, he sings."
Elias was already setting the anchor. He did it in the quiet, absorbed way that had once been the only thing that kept him sane, walking the rim in a wide arc to test the snow, finding the ice beneath it with the tip of his axe, driving the first screw and then the second and tying them off in a wide, equalized triangle. His hands knew the work and left his mind free. His mind, unfortunately, was not grateful.
"Anchors are in," he said. "I'll belay. You go down."
She looked up sharply. He had expected that. In the old days he would have gone down himself, because he was the lighter and the quicker and the one with the longer reach, and because he had been the one to say *I'll go*. But this was her patient and her rescue, and the crevasse was a place where the two of them had never been, and if she wanted to go down first, he would not take it from her.
"Fine," said Maren, after a moment. She buckled her harness. She clipped in. She checked his knot, and then checked it again, and for a heartbeat her gaze met his and neither of them looked away.
"Backed up?" she said.
"Backed up."
"Then I'm going."
He fed the rope through the device and watched her disappear into the blue.
He lowered her slowly, listening for her voice, and from the depths came the sound of the two of them talking, the old man's high, delighted chatter and Maren's low, patient answers. He heard the zip of a medical bag. He heard her say, "This will sting," in the calm, warm voice she used on the frightened. He had been listening to that voice, in his head, for three years, and it had never once sounded as good as it did now.
That was the trouble. He had trained himself so hard to keep his distance, and the distance was only ever as far as the next time she opened her mouth.
"Elias." Her voice floated up, echoing against the ice. "I've got him splinted. He's cold but alert. I'm going to rig the sling. Give me slack."
"Slack."
He gave it. He leaned over the rim to watch, because he had to, because it was his job to watch, and he told himself that was the only reason. Six meters below him she knelt in the blue gloom with her headlamp turning the ice to glass, and she was talking to Gunnar as she worked, her gloved hands moving swiftly around the old man's boot and leg. She straightened his blanket. She pulled a small paper packet from her breast pocket, and he knew what it was before she tucked it into the pocket of Gunnar's coat and patted it flat.
"For later," she said. "Chamomile. You'll need it when you're warm and cross."
"I'm always cross," said Gunnar.
"That's why it's chamomile."
Elias closed his eyes.
She had done it at every accident he had ever seen her work. A bag of tea, a boiled sweet, a square of chocolate, tucked into a stranger's pocket with the brisk, offhand tenderness of a woman who would deny, if asked, that she had done anything at all. She had done it to Anders, once, on a Thursday evening in the practice yard, pressing a packet into his jacket as he set off on a training climb and telling him it was for emergencies. And it had been in Anders's pocket on the day of the fall, because Elias had found it there afterward, and kept it, and had it still, in the bottom of a duffel bag, a small square of limp paper that had traveled three years and eleven hundred kilometers with him and that he had never once been able to throw away.
He opened his eyes. The old feeling was rising in him, the dangerous one, the one he had spent three years learning to hold under with both hands, and he put his full weight on it and pushed it down until it lay still.
*Not now. Not ever. You do not get to want this.*
"Ready to haul," Maren called.
The hauling was a pulley system, a z-drag, three-to-one with a ratchet. He rigged it with fast clean hands and set his boots against a ridge of ice, and together, he above and she below guiding the sling, they began to raise the old man toward the light.
Gunnar came up swinging gently, enthusiastic and spinning. At two meters from the rim, he said loudly, "I haven't been this high since 1983," and Elias, in spite of everything, laughed.
That was when the screw gave.
It happened in a single instant, with a flat dry crack. The left anchor, the one he had placed in what he thought was good blue ice, sheared out of the wall with a puff of white, and the whole system lurched sideways. The haul line leapt. Gunnar yelped. And Maren, who was standing on a narrow ledge below with her weight on the lowered rope, lost her footing on the ice and fell backward with a startled cry.
Elias did not decide anything. His body moved. He threw himself flat, caught the edge of her harness with one hand as she swung, and clamped his other fist on the rope above the knot, and hauled. For a long, strained moment the whole mountain hung from his arms. Then the second anchor held, and the line steadied, and Maren's boots scraped against the ice and found the ledge again, and she was upright, gasping, with her hand wrapped tight around his wrist.
They stared at each other across a meter of air.
His heart was going so hard that he could feel it in his teeth. He could feel the heat of her hand through his glove. Her face was white, and her eyes were wide and dark and furious, and in them, just for the length of one breath, he saw something else, the frightened child at the kitchen table, the one nobody was allowed to see.
"Don't," Maren said.
She wrenched her hand free so hard that she nearly overbalanced again. The word hung in the cold between them like a plume of smoke.
"All right," Elias said, and let go.
They finished the haul in silence. He re-anchored with two new screws and tested each one with his full weight, three times, until his arms shook. She came up the rope without a word and walked straight past him to the old man, who lay on the long board under his silver blanket, beaming.
"That was a lovely bit of rescuing," Gunnar said. "I've never been dragged out of a hole by a more attractive pair of people."
"Thank you, Gunnar," Maren said grimly, tucking in the blanket.
"You two," the old man went on, with the shameless serenity of the very old, "bicker like a married couple. I said so to my late wife, God rest her. I said, Ragna, those two are going to marry or murder each other, and I don't mind which as long as I'm invited."
"Gunnar," said Maren.
"Yes, dear?"
"Be quiet and breathe."
She turned her head, and gave Elias a single, level, deadly look over the old man's chest. It was a look that could have stripped paint. He bent his face to the strap he was buckling and kept it there until he was certain nothing was showing on it.
They ran the old man down on the sled, Maren driving this time at a careful, steady pace, Gunnar propped in the back like a king being carried to a coronation. The doctor's cottage at the edge of town took him in. Maren handed over the ankle, the chamomile, the pulse, the chart, and every detail of the whole procedure in a flat, crisp voice, and the doctor's wife, who had known her since she was in diapers, put an arm around her shoulders and got shrugged off.
It was dusk when they turned the sled back toward the station. The snow had stopped, and a small, thin light lay along the western ridge like the edge of a blade. Elias sat behind her, with his hands on the rail, and watched the valley slide past in blue.
She throttled down at the foot of the station road and let the engine idle. For a moment she did not move. Then, without turning her head, she said, in a voice almost too low to be heard over the motor:
"You were good down there."
He went quite still. It was the first thing she had said to him in three years that was not an order, an accusation, or a refusal. It was the first thing, in fact, that was not armored.
"Thank you," he said.
"That doesn't change anything."
"I know."
"I want you to know it."
"I do, Paramedic."
She let out a short breath, like someone who has lifted something heavy and set it down in the wrong place, and gunned the engine. They rolled through the station gates under the lamplight, and she parked in the garage without another word and walked away down the corridor with her back straight and her shoulders very stiff. He watched her go. He was good at watching her go. He had had a great deal of practice.
The station was quiet that night. Maren had gone home, and the volunteers had drifted off to their houses in ones and twos, and the corridors had filled with the soft, creaking, settling silence of an old wooden building under snow. Per had left him a plate of bread and cheese on the table in the duty room, with a note that said *EAT IT OR I TELL SUNDAL*. Elias ate it, standing at the window.
Then he climbed the stairs to the narrow volunteers' room at the top of the building, where a single iron bed had been made up for him with a gray blanket, and sat on the edge of it with his elbows on his knees.
The room was small. A shelf, a hook, a window that looked out on the lights of the town. He could see Bakke Lane from here. He could see the end of it, and the small square house the color of weak tea, and the light in its kitchen window, burning steadily, the way it burned every night, the way he had once, a long time ago, learned to notice in the dark.
His phone buzzed against his knee.
He did not need to look. He looked anyway. The screen glowed in the dimness with a single line of text from a contact that was saved under one letter, and the letter was A.
*Is she okay?*
Elias sat very still. Snow ticked against the glass. Somewhere below him a pipe knocked once and was quiet.
He typed with his thumbs, slowly, and deleted it, and typed again. He thought of the white face in the crevasse and the hand clamped on his wrist and the word *Don't*. He thought of a green hat with a hole in the left earflap. He thought of the weight in his chest that had come with him over the pass, and the other weight that was waiting at the bottom of the valley, and the fact that he was the only person alive who held both.
*She's alive,* he wrote. *She's furious. She's exactly the same.*
He read it over. Then he added, because it was true and he could not help it, *She asked about you in her sleep, I think. Or I wanted her to.*
He deleted the last line and pressed send.
You've reached the end of this chapter
The snow machine coughed twice and caught.
Elias stood beside it in the station garage with one hand on the cold fairing, listening to the engine settle into a rough, even idle, and made himself look at the engine instead of at the woman on the other side of it. This was a discipline. He had arrived at it in the lowlands, over three years of empty rooms, and it had a list of rules as strict as any rescue protocol. Do not look at her hands. Do not look at the loose strand of hair that has already escaped the braid. Do not notice that she has put on the green wool hat with the hole worn in the left earflap because she will not throw it away. Do not, under any circumstances, remember what the inside of that hat smelled like.
He checked the fuel line. It was fine. He checked it again.
"Sled's loaded," Maren said from the far side. She was crouched at the rear of the trailer, tightening a strap with a short, savage yank. Her breath rose white in the garage light. "Two ropes, ice screws, pulleys, the vacuum splint, the long board. Thermal bag for the patient. I'll drive. You ride behind with the kit."
"All right."
"If you have a problem with that, say so now."
"I don't."
She looked up at him then, quick and suspicious, the way a cat looks at a dish that has been set down too gently. He kept his face blank. It was a thing he had practiced as well. He thought that she must find his calm unbearable, and he thought, with a small, sorry flicker of something that was not quite humor, that she was right to.
She swung onto the machine and gunned the throttle. He climbed on behind her, careful to keep his hands on the rear grab rail and his knees away from her hips, and the garage door rolled up on a wall of falling snow.
The Ulvbre glacier lay four kilometers above the valley floor, a long gray tongue of ice that crawled down out of the high cirque and ended, abruptly and without ceremony, in a field of boulders and birch scrub. In summer it was a gentle place, a destination for school trips. In late autumn, under the first heavy snow, it became a hidden thing. The crevasses closed over with thin bridges that looked, to the careless eye, exactly like solid ground.
The machine roared up the trail through the whitened birches. Elias held on and watched the back of her head. The braid swung between her shoulder blades. A little ice had gathered on the green wool at her temple, and he thought he could see, in the set of her neck, the stiffness of someone sitting very still on purpose. They did not speak. The engine made speech impossible, and silence made it unnecessary, and the silence pressed on him anyway, round and heavy, like water.
Three years, he thought. And I am sitting on a snow machine behind her as though nothing has happened.
He had made a promise on a mountain. He had kept it, and the keeping had a price, and the price was being paid, steadily and without complaint, by the person in front of him, in coin he could not refund. He had known that when he made it. He had decided that it was a fair trade. Some mornings he even believed that.
The trail steepened. Maren slowed the machine, and the engine's snarl dropped to a growl, and across the white slope ahead a small figure became visible, standing beside the black square of a hut.
The old man was not standing. He was shouting at them from the ground, from somewhere beyond the hut, in a thin, cheerful, outraged voice that carried across the snow like a bird's.
"Down here! Down here! Don't step on the bridge, it's not what it looks like!"
His name was Gunnar Aas. He was seventy-eight and had run sheep on the Ulvbre side of the valley for sixty years, and he had come up this morning to check that the last of the ewes were safe in their winter shed, which they were, because he was a man who had never in his life been wrong about a ewe. He had simply put one boot on a patch of snow that did not belong to the world he believed in. The patch had opened. He had fallen six meters, bounced off an ice shelf, and landed wedged between two walls of blue, with one boot twisted under him at an angle that Elias could see from the rim.
"Hello, Gunnar," Maren called, kneeling at the edge. "It's Maren Sundal. How badly are you hurt?"
"Oh, it's only the ankle," the old man shouted up. "And my pride. And my hat, which is down here with me. Are you the girl who set my wrist in the spring?"
"I'm the girl."
"Good. Don't bring that fellow Per, he sings."
Elias was already setting the anchor. He did it in the quiet, absorbed way that had once been the only thing that kept him sane, walking the rim in a wide arc to test the snow, finding the ice beneath it with the tip of his axe, driving the first screw and then the second and tying them off in a wide, equalized triangle. His hands knew the work and left his mind free. His mind, unfortunately, was not grateful.
"Anchors are in," he said. "I'll belay. You go down."
She looked up sharply. He had expected that. In the old days he would have gone down himself, because he was the lighter and the quicker and the one with the longer reach, and because he had been the one to say *I'll go*. But this was her patient and her rescue, and the crevasse was a place where the two of them had never been, and if she wanted to go down first, he would not take it from her.
"Fine," said Maren, after a moment. She buckled her harness. She clipped in. She checked his knot, and then checked it again, and for a heartbeat her gaze met his and neither of them looked away.
"Backed up?" she said.
"Backed up."
"Then I'm going."
He fed the rope through the device and watched her disappear into the blue.
He lowered her slowly, listening for her voice, and from the depths came the sound of the two of them talking, the old man's high, delighted chatter and Maren's low, patient answers. He heard the zip of a medical bag. He heard her say, "This will sting," in the calm, warm voice she used on the frightened. He had been listening to that voice, in his head, for three years, and it had never once sounded as good as it did now.
That was the trouble. He had trained himself so hard to keep his distance, and the distance was only ever as far as the next time she opened her mouth.
"Elias." Her voice floated up, echoing against the ice. "I've got him splinted. He's cold but alert. I'm going to rig the sling. Give me slack."
"Slack."
He gave it. He leaned over the rim to watch, because he had to, because it was his job to watch, and he told himself that was the only reason. Six meters below him she knelt in the blue gloom with her headlamp turning the ice to glass, and she was talking to Gunnar as she worked, her gloved hands moving swiftly around the old man's boot and leg. She straightened his blanket. She pulled a small paper packet from her breast pocket, and he knew what it was before she tucked it into the pocket of Gunnar's coat and patted it flat.
"For later," she said. "Chamomile. You'll need it when you're warm and cross."
"I'm always cross," said Gunnar.
"That's why it's chamomile."
Elias closed his eyes.
She had done it at every accident he had ever seen her work. A bag of tea, a boiled sweet, a square of chocolate, tucked into a stranger's pocket with the brisk, offhand tenderness of a woman who would deny, if asked, that she had done anything at all. She had done it to Anders, once, on a Thursday evening in the practice yard, pressing a packet into his jacket as he set off on a training climb and telling him it was for emergencies. And it had been in Anders's pocket on the day of the fall, because Elias had found it there afterward, and kept it, and had it still, in the bottom of a duffel bag, a small square of limp paper that had traveled three years and eleven hundred kilometers with him and that he had never once been able to throw away.
He opened his eyes. The old feeling was rising in him, the dangerous one, the one he had spent three years learning to hold under with both hands, and he put his full weight on it and pushed it down until it lay still.
*Not now. Not ever. You do not get to want this.*
"Ready to haul," Maren called.
The hauling was a pulley system, a z-drag, three-to-one with a ratchet. He rigged it with fast clean hands and set his boots against a ridge of ice, and together, he above and she below guiding the sling, they began to raise the old man toward the light.
Gunnar came up swinging gently, enthusiastic and spinning. At two meters from the rim, he said loudly, "I haven't been this high since 1983," and Elias, in spite of everything, laughed.
That was when the screw gave.
It happened in a single instant, with a flat dry crack. The left anchor, the one he had placed in what he thought was good blue ice, sheared out of the wall with a puff of white, and the whole system lurched sideways. The haul line leapt. Gunnar yelped. And Maren, who was standing on a narrow ledge below with her weight on the lowered rope, lost her footing on the ice and fell backward with a startled cry.
Elias did not decide anything. His body moved. He threw himself flat, caught the edge of her harness with one hand as she swung, and clamped his other fist on the rope above the knot, and hauled. For a long, strained moment the whole mountain hung from his arms. Then the second anchor held, and the line steadied, and Maren's boots scraped against the ice and found the ledge again, and she was upright, gasping, with her hand wrapped tight around his wrist.
They stared at each other across a meter of air.
His heart was going so hard that he could feel it in his teeth. He could feel the heat of her hand through his glove. Her face was white, and her eyes were wide and dark and furious, and in them, just for the length of one breath, he saw something else, the frightened child at the kitchen table, the one nobody was allowed to see.
"Don't," Maren said.
She wrenched her hand free so hard that she nearly overbalanced again. The word hung in the cold between them like a plume of smoke.
"All right," Elias said, and let go.
They finished the haul in silence. He re-anchored with two new screws and tested each one with his full weight, three times, until his arms shook. She came up the rope without a word and walked straight past him to the old man, who lay on the long board under his silver blanket, beaming.
"That was a lovely bit of rescuing," Gunnar said. "I've never been dragged out of a hole by a more attractive pair of people."
"Thank you, Gunnar," Maren said grimly, tucking in the blanket.
"You two," the old man went on, with the shameless serenity of the very old, "bicker like a married couple. I said so to my late wife, God rest her. I said, Ragna, those two are going to marry or murder each other, and I don't mind which as long as I'm invited."
"Gunnar," said Maren.
"Yes, dear?"
"Be quiet and breathe."
She turned her head, and gave Elias a single, level, deadly look over the old man's chest. It was a look that could have stripped paint. He bent his face to the strap he was buckling and kept it there until he was certain nothing was showing on it.
They ran the old man down on the sled, Maren driving this time at a careful, steady pace, Gunnar propped in the back like a king being carried to a coronation. The doctor's cottage at the edge of town took him in. Maren handed over the ankle, the chamomile, the pulse, the chart, and every detail of the whole procedure in a flat, crisp voice, and the doctor's wife, who had known her since she was in diapers, put an arm around her shoulders and got shrugged off.
It was dusk when they turned the sled back toward the station. The snow had stopped, and a small, thin light lay along the western ridge like the edge of a blade. Elias sat behind her, with his hands on the rail, and watched the valley slide past in blue.
She throttled down at the foot of the station road and let the engine idle. For a moment she did not move. Then, without turning her head, she said, in a voice almost too low to be heard over the motor:
"You were good down there."
He went quite still. It was the first thing she had said to him in three years that was not an order, an accusation, or a refusal. It was the first thing, in fact, that was not armored.
"Thank you," he said.
"That doesn't change anything."
"I know."
"I want you to know it."
"I do, Paramedic."
She let out a short breath, like someone who has lifted something heavy and set it down in the wrong place, and gunned the engine. They rolled through the station gates under the lamplight, and she parked in the garage without another word and walked away down the corridor with her back straight and her shoulders very stiff. He watched her go. He was good at watching her go. He had had a great deal of practice.
The station was quiet that night. Maren had gone home, and the volunteers had drifted off to their houses in ones and twos, and the corridors had filled with the soft, creaking, settling silence of an old wooden building under snow. Per had left him a plate of bread and cheese on the table in the duty room, with a note that said *EAT IT OR I TELL SUNDAL*. Elias ate it, standing at the window.
Then he climbed the stairs to the narrow volunteers' room at the top of the building, where a single iron bed had been made up for him with a gray blanket, and sat on the edge of it with his elbows on his knees.
The room was small. A shelf, a hook, a window that looked out on the lights of the town. He could see Bakke Lane from here. He could see the end of it, and the small square house the color of weak tea, and the light in its kitchen window, burning steadily, the way it burned every night, the way he had once, a long time ago, learned to notice in the dark.
His phone buzzed against his knee.
He did not need to look. He looked anyway. The screen glowed in the dimness with a single line of text from a contact that was saved under one letter, and the letter was A.
*Is she okay?*
Elias sat very still. Snow ticked against the glass. Somewhere below him a pipe knocked once and was quiet.
He typed with his thumbs, slowly, and deleted it, and typed again. He thought of the white face in the crevasse and the hand clamped on his wrist and the word *Don't*. He thought of a green hat with a hole in the left earflap. He thought of the weight in his chest that had come with him over the pass, and the other weight that was waiting at the bottom of the valley, and the fact that he was the only person alive who held both.
*She's alive,* he wrote. *She's furious. She's exactly the same.*
He read it over. Then he added, because it was true and he could not help it, *She asked about you in her sleep, I think. Or I wanted her to.*
He deleted the last line and pressed send.
You've reached the end of this chapter