The Fall

The front came early. It always does, the old guides say, and always on the day you have decided to trust the forecast.

By the time they reached the upper pitches the sun had gone out like a lamp, and the wind had found a voice. Snow-grains hissed against the rock. Kasia, ahead on the lead, climbed with her jaw set; Tomek, below on belay, felt the first icy needles of rain on the back of his neck.

"We go down," Kasia called. "Now. Forget the summit."

"Agreed. Fix an anchor. We'll rappel."

It was a sound decision, made at the right moment. What nobody could have planned for was the verglas, the thin invisible glaze that rain leaves on frozen stone. Tomek moved to unclip, shifted his weight onto a foothold that looked like granite and was glass, and the world turned over.

There was no time to be afraid. There was only a sound, his own voice, wordless, and the lurch of the rope snapping tight, and then a violent swing that slammed his shoulder into the wall and knocked the breath out of him. Then, absurdly, stillness.

He was hanging in the air, forty meters below the summit, with nothing under his boots but fog and a long way down.

"Tomek!" Kasia's voice came from above, cracked with terror. "Tomek, talk to me!"

"I'm here." His own voice sounded strange to him, small and distant. "I'm okay. I think my shoulder... I can't get back on the wall. The rock is too far. It's overhanging."

He heard her breathe in, the way she did before a hard move. He loved that breath. He realized, dizzily, that he might be hearing it for the last time, and the thought was so large that he put it away at once, in the place where he kept things he could not afford to feel.

"Stay calm," Kasia said. "I'm anchored. I've got you. I am not letting go of this rope, do you understand me? Not ever."

"I understand."

She tried to haul him up. She tried again. But a hanging man's weight against a wet rope and a single frozen belay is a cruel sum, and she was a hundred and ten pounds of stubbornness, not a winch. Her hands were already going numb.

At midnight, with the storm shrieking and the dark closing around them like a fist, she took out her phone and, with fingers that no longer felt like her own, called for help.