The Climb

The cable car had opened early, and by the time Tomek Wrona stepped out into the thin air above Courmayeur, the Giant's Tooth was already watching them.

It rose out of the glacier like something the mountain had grown by accident: a black fang of granite, 4,013 meters high, split into two summits that leaned toward each other like old friends. Kasia stood beside him in her red jacket, tightening her harness, her breath ghosting in front of her face.

"It looks smaller from the photographs," she said.

"It looks smaller when you're lying to yourself," Tomek answered, and she laughed, the quick bright laugh he had fallen for two summers ago on a rainy crag outside Kraków.

They were not reckless people. Kasia kept the spreadsheets of their climbing life: the weather windows, the gear lists, the turnaround times. Tomek was the one who looked up and simply wanted. Together they made one reasonably careful climber. That was the joke they told at parties.

The forecast for the last days of September had been unsettled but promising, a clean day, then a front arriving at night. They had done the arithmetic twice. Up by afternoon, down by dusk, a hut bed at the Torino refuge and a plate of something hot.

The first pitches were joy. The granite was cold and honest under their fingers, the rope ran smooth through the carabiners, and below them the Italian side of the range unrolled in folds of gold and shadow. At every belay Kasia grinned at him over her shoulder. At the third, she leaned in and kissed him quickly, her lips chapped and tasting of salt.

"For luck," she said.

"We don't need luck. We have a spreadsheet."

"Everybody needs luck, Tomek."

He would remember that later, in the dark, with the rope biting into his hips. He would remember the way she said it, lightly, as if luck were a small thing, a coin you could drop in a pocket and forget.

Above them, unnoticed, a thin gray veil began to slide across the sun.