Hehadbeen here.
“Intense.” Angel came up beside him, breathing hard from the climb.
“I’ve been here.”
“In your wildest dreams?”
She’d had him laughing for days, but this was different. There wasn’t just humor in her words, but a thread of hope, thin as a spiderweb.
“We didn’t come from this direction, though.” He spun in a full circle. “From that way. Volkov.”
“Wait.” She straightened. “Are we closer than we realized?”
“No. No, but we stayed in a place out here. A hut.”
He turned to find her watching him closely. Maybe she wasn’t quite ready to pull on that fiber-thin thread yet, but he was.
“One of the Russians called this place Baba Yaga’s Lock.” He leaned back and admired the sharp peaks. What appeared high and aggressive from this direction smoothed out on the other side. “I see it now. See how they look like the edge of a key?”
“Yeah,” she breathed. “So, how far is this hut?”
“Just over that rise.” It was hard not to let excitement buoy his flagging muscles. “Don’t get excited, though. If they’ve cleaned it out for the winter, we’ll…”Die anyway. He couldn’t finish the sentence. And it apparently didn’t matter to Angel, who’d already set off for the summit.
They didn’t crest until late in the afternoon. And even then, it took a while to find the hut.
At first, he thought it was a sastrugi or some other impermanent geographical structure.
“I see it! There. I see it!”
Please, God. Let there be food.A fucking cracker could hold them for another day.
The closer they got, the boxier the structure appeared, with a second smaller building close beside it.
Hope pushed his legs a little harder, lightened the load behind him.
This was it—the field research hut, built by Norwegians maybe a couple decades before.
The hope he’d kept tamped down strengthened into a lifeline, pulling him toward the place.
Ice and snow had piled up around the bigger building, so high that only one roof corner remained visible. Was the door accessible? Shit, where was it? Maybe on the other side? He dropped the sled line, kicked off his skis, and sped around the corner, Angel right beside him.
He stopped and stared at the mound of snow, with the barest peek of metal showing. How the hell were they supposed to find the door, much less get in?
Angel grabbed his hand, as naturally as if they did this every day. Which he guessed they did.
“What’s it for?”
“Field research camp, originally, but I heard trekking companies sometimes use it as a way station. Russians come out pretty much every year to run some tests.”
Silently, they stared.
“There, where it’s sticking out,” she said.
As good a place to start as any. He squeezed her hand before heading back around for the shovel and ice axe.
For ages, they chipped away at what revealed itself to be the door. Ford hacked and Angel hauled, their rhythm steady but slow. The last thing they needed was to break into a sweat.
He took a swig of water and looked around. Had it gotten darker?
