“No time,” Christian says. He’s already edging out onto the top of the steep slope, kicking down rocks that go tumbling and tumbling for what seems like years, toward that pretty blue lake below. “We burned too many hours getting up here,” he says. “If we want to summit this thing, we gotta go this way.”

“So maybe we don’t do it,” Amber replies. “Climb back down, take a rest day, head for home in the morning.”

Christian is unresponsive.

“Chris,” Amber says. “We don’t want to get anyone killed.”

“No one’s going to get killed.” By this time, Christian has disappeared around the side of the wall, and his voice is barely audible over the, oh yeah, the chilly, high-altitude wind that is starting to pick up.

“Look,” he says, “the chimney’s right here. It’s easy. We get over this and it’s smooth sailing, I promise.”

(Spoiler alert: it is not smooth sailing.)

First of all, just getting to the chimney is a nightmare. Dawn keeps slipping on the scree and sending it falling hundreds of feet down that, uh, approximately sixty-five-degree slope. And then the chimney is another form of hell.

It’s steep and narrow and it’s all loose rock that comes off in your hands as soon as you put your weight on it, or another person kicks it down at you as they make the climb, so you’re always either ducking or holding on to something that feels like it’s about half a second from crumbling and sending you falling to your inevitable death. And then there’s the wind, which is still rising, and the fact that if you look down between your legs you can see the rest of the Pack clustered beneath you, waiting for you to get a move on, and beyond them that god-awful slope and the little blue lake far below, and it’s enough to be freaking vertigo-inducing, panic-attack-causing, enough to make Dawn start to hyperventilate and freak out and freeze up on the mountain, which is exactly the kind of place you don’t want to do those things, but all Dawn can think about is how she’ll never see her nana again, and—

“Put your hand here.”

(Huh?)

Dawn snaps back into focus. She’s breathing hard and her whole body is shaking from being so scared. But when she looks up, there’s Warden leaning down from the top of the chimney above her, pointing at a rock just above her head.

It looks solid. Dawn tries it. The rock holds her weight.

“Good,” Warden says. “Now lift your right leg a little higher and there’s a ledge you can sort of stand on.”

Dawn does what he says, slowly, expecting at any second to pull the mountain down on top of her. Her foot finds the ledge. It holds.