“Rescue one, they’re here. Send down the litter, and some help.”
Ham knelt next to Jenny, eyeing her gash. “We put down and were looking for you but we would have never found you if you hadn’t screamed, Jenny. That was quite a . . . well, are you okay?”
She had screamed, maybe. But she looked at Orion, whose mouth tightened. So not her scream but his had brought Ham to their tomb.
“She has a dislocated shoulder, I think,” Orion said, his eyes on her a long moment before he turned back to Ham. “How are you? We thought we lost you in the slide.”
Another person was coming down the rope.
“It just missed me. I hunkered down behind a serac and watched as Jenny disappeared . . . and then, there was nothing. You must have fallen too far down for your beacons to reach the top. I hadn’t a clue where you were.” He had unzipped Jenny’s jacket, was reaching inside to probe her shoulder.
He had warm hands, and she closed her eyes as he touched the loose socket. “We need to get that secured before we transport you.”
“Orion’s knee is busted, too.”
“It’s fine,” Orion snapped.
Ham frowned as he got back on the radio. “Jake, send down a splint kit.”
“Jake?” Orion said as the second person landed on the ledge. “He’s with you?”
“We already got Sasha and Aria off the mountain.”
“Sasha—is she—?” Jenny asked.
“She’s on her way to the hospital in Anchorage,” said a female voice.
Kit.
The woman’s dark braids wound out of her wool hat, her face lined, probably with worry. She knelt next to Jenny. “As soon as we got her to Base Camp, her husband was there. She’s in good hands.”
Poor Lucas. He’d been through so much watching his wife suffer.
“Let’s get you splinted up and into the chopper,” Ham said.
“We have another telescoping pole in the pack,” Orion said and gestured to their gear, still tied into the rope.
Ham made to get up, but Kit stopped him, her hand on his arm as she rose slowly. “Oh my . . . oh . . .” Her face had paled and she looked at Jenny, then back to the pack. “Where did you get that?”
“It was frozen to some dead climber, in the ice,” Orion said, but Jenny wanted to grab him, stop his words. Because she didn’t have to be a doctor of psychology to see the shock, the grief rippling across Kit’s face. She knelt next to the pack, rubbing her thumb over a patch sewn on to the top flap.
“He fell into the crevasse,” she said quietly.
Orion looked at Kit, then drew in a breath. “Oh, Kit.”
Kit’s eyes closed.
Orion got up and limped over to her.
“Who is it?” Ham said.
“I think it’s her missing husband,” Jenny said quietly, watching as Orion, the rescuer, drew Kit close and wrapped his arms around her.
Her eyes filled and she looked away.
The litter came down, and with it the splint kit. Ham worked quietly, stabilizing her arm, then packaging her up into a sleeping bag, and finally lifting her into the litter.
Orion had brought Kit over to the ledge, pointing up to where her husband lay.
He never looked at Jenny.
Probably a good thing. Because she couldn’t bear to look back and see all she’d lost. The could-have-beens.
The debris of her mistakes.
Ham clipped himself into the basket line and radioed up. In a moment, they were lifted off the ledge and into the cool blue of the crevasse, out into the open blue skies that blanketed the Denali massif.
Jake pulled them into the chopper. He and Ham lifted her out of the litter and secured her onto the platform.
She closed her eyes as a PJ took her vitals. He set up an IV line and gave her a shot of morphine.
Somewhere in there, Ham was lowered again with the litter, but he unhooked it and sent the line back up, empty.
“Ham says they’re going to retrieve a body, and to come back for them. So, let’s get you down to camp,” Jake said, leaning over her, concern in his eyes.
She nodded. It didn’t matter if she waited for Jake or not. Because she was already away, already running.
Already saying goodbye.
Rescue had come too late.
An hour earlier and he would have never known Jenny’s secret. In truth, Orion wasn’t sure he didn’t want to rewind time and go back to that moment when he didn’t know the broken woman in his arms had betrayed him.
Answers. He’d come onto the mountain seeking answers, and now his entire body was filled with poison.
He watched as Ham belayed Kit up the wall to retrieve her frozen husband. She’d been weeping as Ham had delivered Jenny to the chopper, but by the time he returned with the litter, Kit had pulled herself together.
Orion wished he could do the same.
“He must have fallen off the pass, just like Jenny and her team,” Ham said. He fished out the belay rope as Kit mounted the bridge and anchored herself into the ice screws. She’d created a lowering system while Ham was splinting Orion’s leg.
“Maybe he tried to hike down, like we did,” Orion said, trying to pay attention, but really his thoughts kept cycling back to Jenny.
“I wanted to start over.”
So, she’d run from the truth. Run from the people she’d hurt.
Run from him.
Orion wrapped his arms around himself. Ham had given him a shot of morphine, so he might not be all himself, but the fact was, no one got away, not really.
He’d always be trapped, somehow, in the dark, cold crevasse of his anger.
God had brought him back to the mountain, all right. To connect him with hope. With a future. To restart his frozen heart.
Only to betray Orion again.
Kit had chipped her husband free and now pulled his frozen body into her arms. Bent her head down.
Ham looked away, giving her a moment.
Orion, too, looked away.
Pain followed you through life, and it was a miracle if you just got back up again after life knocked you down.
“I’m ready to lower him.” She’d clipped the rope to a biner on his harness and then his rope into an anchor on the wall. Ham and Kit switched ropes, working with the pulley system she’d rigged.
She pushed the body over the edge of the wall and Ham lowered it to the ledge.
Then she rappelled down, leaving her tech in the wall.
Ham and she carried the body to a bag Ham had brought down. They zipped him up and loaded him into the stretcher.
Kit sat on the ledge, her hand on her husband’s form.
“The chopper will be back soon,” Ham said, unrigging the ropes to coil them back up.
Orion had nothing. Because what then? He got to spend more time in rehab, then maybe return to his homestead to finish his current novel?
Add another addition on the house?
The thought settled like a fist in his gut. Shoot, but Jenny had awakened something inside him, given him a taste for more.
He didn’t want to return to the woods.
Ham hunkered down beside him. “Okay. I guess I would have thought you might be happy to get out of this crevasse. Sorta makes me wonder if you had planned to set up a vacation home down here, or if I found the bat cave. What gives?”
Orion looked at him.
“You were the one who shouted, weren’t you?”