The cold from the snowpack under Annie’s feet is reaching her toes. The sky is a cloudless blue, but the wind steals all the sun’s warmth. Annie is willing to deal with cold, but not if it’s because she’s standing still instead of moving in the direction of the summit. Matt and his client are passing behind her on the rope, making wide slow swings with their crampons so they don’t slash her in the calf as they go. They’re turning back. It’s taking forever.

As he passes, Matt says, ‘We don’t like this wind. It might be building into something.’ He has to lean in and raise his voice. She nods.

‘Are you good?’ he asks.

‘I’m fine,’ she shouts, louder than she needs to.

He nods and puts a hand on her shoulder. ‘OK. But you need to hurry.’ Annie shrugs the weight of his hand off, not appreciating the gesture. Or the warning.

When they’re finally past, Annie is in lead position, with no one ahead of her to fall into rhythm with. She is exposed and vulnerable.

Annie’s guide Hans leans in and says, ‘Let me pass you and take lead.’

‘I got this,’ she yells back, giving the ‘got’ an extra punch. She’s not worried about what Matt said—wind always might or might not be building into something—but the summit window is short, and they’ve wasted a lot of time standing around. The summit is everything. The only thing.

The pain in her knee is worse than she expected at this point, but she knew it would be bad. After all those marathons, she’s used to just pushing through the pain. After this, she’ll face the consequences—a complex surgery that will have her in a brace, maybe never a hundred percent again—so she’s pushing through the pain one last time to climb a high mountain. A goal she didn’t have until threatened with not being able to do it at all.

They’re climbing up out of a bowl, a giant thumbprint on the side of the mountain. The summit is only an hour or so along the ridge, but the slog out of the gulch is slow and difficult. There’s a direct route, straight up the gulch wall, but it’s steep and full of ice shelves, and requires a lot of climbing and scrambling. It would have been faster than the switchbacks they’re on, Annie thinks, but Matt probably picked the slower route because of her knee. Now, it will take just about all the time they have, so she sets a pace that tells Hans that her limp isn’t the reason they need to hurry.

She leads them up three and a half switchbacks and now there are only two left. Snowboarders are lined up along the ridge to descend the other side. She twists back to see Matt and his client way across the gulch below, tiny bold-colored figures against the washed-out landscape, on their way down to High Camp at ten thousand feet, where the four of them made their alpine start in the middle of the night. It takes Matt less than an hour to undo almost eight hours worth of uphill trudging.

A flash of black makes Annie swivel to her left. It tumbles past, down the steep flank of the gulch, a snowboard sliding alongside. She looks up to where it came from, where the snowboarders are all watching. They’re usually local high schoolers, according to Matt, not here to summit, but to climb up and go down the steeper side of the ridge. Because of the climbing routes, they don’t descend on this side. Not on purpose, anyway. She looks down at the black lump lying motionless.

She takes a deep breath, hoping the boarder is OK, and keeps moving. The line pulls taut.

‘We’re going back,’ Hans yells.

‘What? Hans, we have time, we’re almost at the ridge,’ Annie turns away from him and responds with her own yank of the rope.

‘Hey,’ he yanks again. ‘That kid just fell over six hundred feet, and now he’s not moving.’

Before she responds, Annie feels a wind gust build, and in perfect sync with Hans, she thrusts the handle end of her ice axe into the snowbank uphill from her. She huddles, anchored, and a hail of ice crystals carried down from the ridge pelt her helmet. The gusts have been a constant annoyance all day, but they’re getting more frequent, and sustained longer. The wind dies, she straightens, and a layer of ice pellets slides off her back.

Annie faces Hans and thrusts an arm up to the ridge. ‘Fifteen people watched him fall, Hans. They’ve probably already radioed for help.’

‘We’re closer. Let’s go.’

‘No,’ Annie yells at his back. ‘You’re here to get me to the summit, not play fucking ambulance.’ Anger shortens her breath. She isn’t letting this slip away. She feels bad for the kid, but he has people to help. Really, he’s looking for a reason to turn back, Annie thinks. He was outright hostile about guiding her at all because of her knee. She’s only here because Matt owns the guide company, and Hans works for Matt. ‘Stop acting like I can’t do this,’ she yells louder.

He ignores her, turning on his radio, and shouting into it.

‘Great,’ she yells when he pauses to listen. ‘Call it in and let’s keep going.’

Hans leans close and grabs the front of her jacket. His goggles are nearly touching hers. ‘This is my call to make. Let’s go.’

Annie stumbles behind him, watching his long, perfect strides, enraged by his apathy. He doesn’t care—he can climb this mountain any time he wants.

Hans’ fast pace on the descent is murder on Annie’s knee. Icepicks of pain shoot down to her heel, and she’s sweating. When they finally stop, standing in the wind in wet layers is going be agonizingly cold. If she could catch her breath, she’d yell that he didn’t have this much urgency about going up.

At the base of the wall, they pause to untie the rope that kept Annie tethered to Hans. It’s a short trek to the injured snowboarder. Checking her watch, Annie can’t help calculating that, from here, they still wouldn’t be too far outside their mandatory summit window if they turned back now. If.

She looks at the kid. He’s conscious, screaming in fact, while Hans handles him roughly, splinting his leg. She wants to rest her own leg but might not get up again if she sits down.

‘Come on, Hans, search and rescue will take it from here,’ Annie says.

Hans stands, looking at the kid, looking up at the sky. Hands on his hips, he shakes his head. ‘This isn’t good,’ he says.

Annie shivers all over when the wind blows, cold beyond belief, and angry that she wouldn’t be if they were still climbing.

‘It’s a good splint, dude. Come on, let’s go,’ she says again.

Hans turns to her and leans down at her again. She steps back, tired of dealing with his in-her-face conversation style.

‘Listen,’ he says. ‘Your climb is over, OK? There’s no summit today. Period. The sooner you get that message the better.’

Annie stares at Hans, uncomprehending.

‘The beacon can’t get a good signal in the gulch,’ he says. ‘I can’t even radio them from here. Search and rescue won’t find him, and this wind is getting worse. It’s impossible to see anything from a distance.’

‘Well, what are we supposed to do about that? I don’t get why that means we can’t—'

‘God, just shut up for a minute, will you?’ His chest heaves and he’s only looking at the kid. ‘He can’t walk. You’re barely managing. Search and rescue are somewhere between here and the trail head, which is a descent of maybe four miles.’ His voice is taut, the way people talk when they’re trying to cover up their doubts. He’s laying out his logic like he doesn’t know if he’s right. She is unsettled to realize Hans is scared.

‘You won’t make it,’ Hans says. ‘I need you both to wait here, keep as warm as you can.’

‘What? No way, I’m not—’

‘The mouth of the gulch is straight south. I’m going to go radio them from there and guide them in.’ He shoulders his pack while he talks. ‘I don’t know how long it will take, but it isn’t far. Hopefully they’re already close, and I’ll be right back. Maybe fifteen minutes.’

‘Maybe?’

He leans in to grab Annie’s shoulder strap. ‘Keep this on so we can find you.’ He clips the small orange and black beacon just below her shoulder.

He starts to turn, then shoves a finger in her face. ‘You stay put!’ Like he can tell she’s already planning not to.

Annie watches, open-mouthed, as Hans is quickly swallowed whole by the swirl of snow and ice crystals being kicked up by the wind.

‘Are you kidding me?’ she screams at his back. This is not how this ends. There was plenty of time. They would have made it.

She’s been staring at the kid while thinking all of this. He’s looking up at her, his eyes big and round. Fear, probably, and pain.

‘Hey there. What’s your name?’ she says, and crouches down.

His chattering jaw makes him unintelligible.

‘It’s OK, man, you heard Hans. He’ll be right back.’ Annie gives him a fake grin. ‘The cavalry’s coming.’

‘D-d-don’t. L-l-l-l-letme. D-die,’ the kid stutters. His breathing is loud and fast, struggling for air. He’s panicking, she thinks, knowing what it feels like and at the same time wishing he’d figure out how to calm down. He gulps air and exhales sobs.

‘It’s just pain, dude. Nobody dies just because it hurts.’ She pats his shoulder. ‘You got this.’ Then, pulls her hand away, recalling the same gesture from Matt. Patronizing.

He hangs his head, and begins to swing it from side to side, crying. Annie doesn’t want to watch this. Her face pinches. She doesn’t want to feel disgust, but it’s so hard to pity this kid. He’s young, his leg will heal in no time. He’ll be back up here before the end of the season. She’s losing so much more. Her eyes fall on her ice axe. Her pack is right next to it. She has so much more gear sitting in a tent at High Camp. All gear she’ll never use again. She even knew it when she was buying it all but spent the money anyway. All in, no half measures on this one last thing.

Straightening, Annie favors her good leg because crouching made her knee tighten up. Pain mixes with rage and roars out of her, primal and wordless into the wind.

She doesn’t need to be rescued, and there’s no reason to sit here like a babysitter. Chills from her sweaty layers still ripple through her body every time the gusts hit her head-on. She needs to be moving.

She checks her watch again, wonders how much of a difference thirty minutes or an hour past the summit window really makes, if anyone would even know. The direct route could buy her a lot of time. She has her axe for the ice patches. Her body warms up at the thought of climbing again.

She grabs her pack, yanks roughly at the cinches, and pulls out the pre-assembled first aid kit sitting at the bottom. ‘Aww, what a cute owie kit,’ Hans had laughed during the pre-hike gear check. It did turn out to be mostly useless, but it has an emergency blanket. It’s all she has to give the kid. That and a fistful of band-aids. She wraps the foil blanket around him, covers his head, tucking and jamming edges and corners to keep it from being ripped off by the wind. He grabs her arm before she can move away.

‘P-please d-don’t l-leave me alone,’ he says, jaw clenched. Tears and snot have frozen in globs on his face. ‘Please.’

Annie removes his hand and pulls his neck gaiter up to cover his red-raw skin. She takes the beacon from her shoulder strap, clipping it to the collar of his jacket. ‘This is what you need, dude. Not me. Don’t worry, they’re coming.’

Before shoving the first aid kit back into her pack, she sifts through the pill packets, pulling out the ibuprofen. She pops them in her mouth without counting. She swallows the last couple of ounces of water in her bottle and shoulders her pack. Picking up her axe, Annie looks toward the gulch wall.

She can’t see it. There’s no ridge, no line of snowboarders. There’s no sky either, just a grey backdrop to the swirl of ice and snow. The wind might be worse, she concedes, but by the time she’s halfway up, she’ll probably be looking at blue sky again. Just get out of this effing gulch.

Annie goes straight away from the kid’s back, hoping she’s reversing the course they took to get to him. In seconds she knows she’s right and stands at the foot of the first switchback. To her left is the steep direct route—the one she’d watched the kid tumble down. She flinches at the memory, how much that must have hurt. He’s lucky that his leg is the only thing he broke. She scans up. Small moraines and lumps of ice and talus patches dot the snow pack all the way up. It would suck to hit any one of them on the way down, and he had hit a lot of them. It’s not an easy route, up or down.

Clapping her gloves together loudly, she yells, ‘I got this,’ to the wall in front of her. She climbs. Excitement burns off the chill as she heaves, jams her toe spikes into the packed snow and engages her quads. Every step is a gift she gives herself. They don’t understand, people like Hans with his perfect, uncrippled body, or the kids who grow up here snowboarding every weekend all winter long.

Annie looks toward the ridge but can’t judge the distance left to go. She stops. There’s a solid ledge of ice jutting straight out above her head. It’s impassable without being scrambled over. She wonders if the kid hit this when he fell. The gulch behind her is in near total whiteout. She still can’t see the sky.

She pulls out her axe and hammers hard at the frozen ledge. A shard of ice chips off and falls, and the axe comes free. She tries again. And again. After four hacks, the pointed tip stays in the ice. She hangs some of her weight on it. It holds. Annie throws her good leg up onto the icy ledge. The motion twists her other foot, which is fixed by her toe spikes in the ice, wrenching her knee. She gasps in pain. She can’t dislodge her toe spikes to swing her second leg up. The axe is holding all her weight, and if she lets go, she’ll fall. She swings her good leg back down and jabs the toe spikes back into the ice. She frees the twisted foot and yanks her axe free. The pain in her knee is blinding. Blood pounds in her neck and her breaths are fast and shallow.

The wind screams relentlessly, and the temperature has dropped. Holding the axe with both hands, she brings it back over her left shoulder, and swings with rage at the face of ice and rock in front of her. The impact jars her, from her palms to her shoulders. She swings again and keeps swinging, emptying her rage against the mountain, the weather, Hans for taking the summit away from her. Against the kid for falling, against her ruined knee. The knee she ruined. The defeat that, really, she has handed herself. When she can’t swing anymore, Annie closes her eyes, and gives in to the cold, dark shame of defeat. It’s a glue filling her lungs. It slows her pumping heart and the blood in her veins moves like a river freezing over. Her swelling leg hangs limp and pulsates.

Behind her, the world has gone white, formless and dimensionless, and her mind fogs in. A gust builds and too late she remembers to duck her head, feeling a thousand pin pricks of ice against a few inches of uncovered skin on her face. Her hands still feel the echoes of axe hitting rock. Eventually, numbness in the toes of her good foot reminds her that she has to move soon, or not at all.

The journey down, hopping backwards, is harder than going up and now there’s a nauseating grind like crushed gravel under her kneecap. Back on the gulch floor, she crumples to her hands and vomits into the snow. Her vomit is yellow acid, and she remembers the ibuprofen. There isn’t anything else for her stomach to get rid of. The Clif bar she ate before entering the gulch with Hans and Matt was so long ago it feels like an old, aching memory. Way back then, way back there, when nothing was going to stop her. When risking it all didn’t seem to mean so much.

Annie sobs, barking her breaths out, heaving them back in. Defeat feels like this, she thinks. It tastes like yellow acid and fear. Fear of dying alone in the freezing cold. She remembers the kid’s eyes, caked with frozen tears. He felt this too, she knows. It wasn’t about his broken leg. He can’t save himself, and he knows it. This thought electrocutes Annie with panic.

She lifts her axe and jams the handle into the snow, hauling herself up. Fifty yards, not much more. She can put some weight on her knee, just has to ignore the gravel and not wonder what it means.

She staggers and stumbles at first, but hits a decent, limping, stride. The kid is close—she can see him like a black blob sitting on the snow. He should be an orange blob now, though, from the color of the outside of the foil blanket. It’s nowhere to be seen, and the kid is hunched over, moving his blue lips soundlessly.

Annie kneels, winces, and covers his face again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘Hey. I’m here. I’m back.’ The kid doesn’t open his eyes.

Annie checks her watch again. She was gone for thirty-four minutes. Hans should be back by now. The kid is halfway to freezing to death.

She shakes him by the shoulder. His eyelids flutter, but don’t open, and Annie is scared for him. ‘Kid—I need you to wake up. Hey.’ She moves his head back and forth. He opens his eyes, but she’s not sure he’s focusing on her.

‘Hey, kid. Hey. Listen to me. I have an idea, but I need you to help me.’ She’s relieved when he nods, and she grins. A real one. ‘Awesome. We’re gonna get out of here, OK? First, we have to get you up, but don’t worry, we’ll do this together.’

Annie stands and breathes as deeply as the thin mountain air will allow. She faces away from the kid, does a one-leg squat, and shouts over her shoulder, ‘Give me your hands!’

She sees his gloves in her peripheral on either side and pulls them over and down until his elbows are hooked over her shoulders. Engaging the quad on her good leg, she heaves.

She’s surprised to realize how much taller he is than her. ‘God, so heavy,’ she says, and doesn’t know if she can actually do this.

She doesn’t feel it in her bad knee until she takes a step. The icepicks stab, and the gravel grinds under her kneecap. Just pain, she tells herself. It works, it just hurts. At least it isn’t broken.

Annie leans into the wind. South, Hans had said. They have to head for the mouth of the gulch if they want to have any chance of being found by the rescue team. Assuming there is one. The wind whips snow and ice crystals into a full white-out, and she has to let go of one of the kid’s hands to check her compass.

‘OK, this way,’ she shouts, like she’s leading an expedition, and steps again. The kid screams into her ear. ‘Sorry dude,’ Annie yells, panting. ‘Try to use your good leg.’

The thrill of a way forward begins to warm her again, but this time she’s fighting doubts. He’s heavy, and she can’t deny how tired her own pain is making her. But she’s the only way this kid isn’t dying alone in the middle of a storm. If she hadn’t lost her shot at the summit, nobody would be saving him right now. She needs to make this work.

The wind shoves against Annie like a solid mass. She leans forward, hoping the kid’s weight will propel her. For a few paces, she feels him stumble on one leg, out of sync with her. She decides the kid is unconscious when he stops grunting next to her ear.

She checks her compass again to stay on track but gives up trying to guess how much distance she’s covering. She doesn’t even know exactly how far she has to go, anyway. Not far, Hans had said, way too long ago. Nothing to do but keep going. The punishing cold finds every crack in her barriers of Gore-Tex, fleece and silk, like jabbing needles on her skin. She’s never known cold like this.

The deafening howl rushes and recedes like freight trains crisscrossing just beyond her sight. She stumbles and goes down on her good knee, biting her lip, and tastes blood in her mouth. She engages every muscle in her body just to stand again and screams into the gale. Now she can smell the blood she spits into her neck gaiter when she exhales, and it makes her nauseous. No more vomiting, she insists, and willing it seems to be enough.

Annie opens her eyes, alarmed that they have been closed. She is standing still, frozen in place. Minutes or hours. She thinks she has been walking, but maybe that was a dream. She needs to be walking. You won’t make it, she hears Hans tell her again. You stay put.

‘Fuck that,’ she whispers.

She steps. All the kid’s weight bears down on her knee, and pain explodes from ankle to hip. A hoarse cry comes out with her exhaling breath.

A voice reaches her from beyond the grey-white curtain that surrounds her. Maybe it’s her own voice, an echo of her cry, bouncing around in the wind. Maybe it’s her mother’s voice calling her from the back porch. It’s getting dark, and she’s calling Annie home.

‘OK,’ she breathes. ‘I’m coming.’

Dark shapes materialize through the curtain.

‘I told you to stay put!’ she hears in her right ear.

‘You’re late,’ she wants to say, but her mouth won’t move.

She is jostled, and when the weight that holds her down is finally lifted, her feet leave the ground.

Someone says, ‘he’s breathing—we have a pulse.’

Annie closes her eyes again and the pain is gone.