She’s looking around. I didn’t have time to bury myself properly. Any second now, she’s going to spot me.

There’s a piercing whistle from somewhere down the slope. Odette lets out a shout and pulls the rifle off her back. Why did Curtis have to do that? I watch with horror as she aims the rifle.

She lowers it with what sounds like a curse. The whiteout. She can’t see him. I imagine him racing down the long, steep slope back to the plateau. He’s made it.

Odette pulls something from her backpack—a dark object about the size of a brick. What is that? She fiddles about with it and hurls it down the slope.

She covers her ears and a few seconds later, there’s a boom. Silence. Then a loud whooomp. And a rumbling that gets louder and louder until it sounds like the whole mountain is crashing down around us. Through my shock I realize what it is. She couldn’t see him, so she triggered an avalanche.

And judging from the sound of it, that whole slope just slid.

CHAPTER 64

PRESENT DAY

An avalanche is like a slow-moving wave of concrete. The force of it drives all the air from the snow, causing it to set solid as soon as it stops moving.

My gut twists as I imagine Curtis’s body tossed over and over down the slope.

Don’t panic. He knows what to do. He’ll swim with it if he can, to stay near the surface. As it slows, he’ll clear a breathing pocket around his head.

If he didn’t lose consciousness in the slide.

He knows to keep calm and conserve his air supply. All he can do now is wait for rescue. He’s wearing his transceiver; I’m wearing mine. Avalanche victims have a 90 percent chance of survival if they’re found in the first fifteen minutes.

After half an hour, the chances drop to just 35 percent.

I have to get to him. But first I have to get past Odette.

She clearly thinks both of us are down there because she’s still facing the other way, goggles raised, peering into the whiteout. Gripping the ice axe, I inch myself out of the snowdrift. Every minute counts.

My goggles have misted up. I jerk them to my forehead. Odette straps her rifle onto her back and clicks her left foot into her ski. She’s going to race down and check we didn’t escape the slide. I limp toward her, praying she doesn’t hear me.

The irony of this. I spent years beating myself up because I thought I’d injured her terribly, only I hadn’t, not exactly. But now I must. Where should I aim for? Her upper body is swathed in layers, so her leg seems a better option, her right one—the one she doesn’t drag.