Touching The Void

His voice came back at once, small and warped.

The harness cut into his thighs. He swung against the crevasse wall and drove his crampons into it. One point caught. The other skittered free, shrieking across the ice.

“Stay still!” Mara yelled. “We’ve got you!”

Hugo pressed his cheek to the wall. The cold entered through the fabric of his hood and seemed to settle behind his eyes. His right leg hung uselessly below him, boot scraping for purchase. Somewhere above, the team moved. He felt it in the rope: a tremor, then another, as if the people on the surface were crawling away from the hole.

“Anchor me!” he shouted. “Don’t move!”

The rope tightened.

For three breaths, he believed them.

Then the glacier shifted.

A deep crack rolled through the crevasse. It began beneath his hip and traveled down into the blue. The shelf where his chest had struck sheared away in a slab the size of a table. It dropped past him, turning slowly, and vanished into the darkness.

The rope jerked.

Hugo’s harness bit deeper. His body snapped upward, then slammed against the wall. Snow poured down his neck. He heard Mara scream, though the wind tore the sound apart.

“Stop hauling!” he shouted. “Stop!”

The line went slack.

He dropped another meter before the rope caught again. His crampons struck the wall. One point punched through a thin crust, and his knee folded beneath him. He hung there, twisting, with nothing under his boots but cold blue depth.

Above, a dark shape appeared at the edge of the opening. Mara’s face, hidden behind goggles and a frost-caked mask.

“Hugo, can you climb?”

He laughed once. It came out as a cough. “That’s the plan.”

“Your prusik is on the line.”

He looked down. His gloved hands found the short loop clipped to his harness, then the main rope running above his shoulder. The cord had gone taut against the lip. He could haul himself toward it, but the wall offered no ledge and his right leg had begun to tremble.

“Pull when I say,” Mara called.

“No. The bridge is moving.”

“We can’t leave you hanging.”

“You’ll bring it down.”

A gust drove snow over her face. For a second she disappeared. When she emerged, she was looking past him, toward the opposite wall.

“Mara,” he said. “Listen to me.”

“I am listening.”

“Get the others back. Find a second anchor.”

“We have one.”

“You had one.”

The rope shuddered between them.

Mara’s head snapped upward. Someone behind her shouted. The sound was muffled, frantic. Hugo felt the line draw tight across his chest.

“No!” he yelled. “Don’t - ”

The rope pulled.

His body rose half a meter. His shoulders screamed. He jammed both crampons into the wall and drove his ice axe into a seam. The pick struck, bounced, struck again. His left forearm shook as he hung from the tool.

Above, the lip collapsed.

Snow and broken ice poured around him. The rope whipped sideways. Hugo’s axe tore free, and he dropped.

He fell through the beam of his headlamp, through a curtain of crystals, until his left boot struck something hard. The impact folded him against the wall. His harness caught a heartbeat later.

The line snapped taut with a violent crack.

Hugo’s hand opened. The axe disappeared below.

He swung in silence.

The rope had stopped him, but the force had shifted his body beneath an overhang. His pack scraped the wall. A strap had twisted around his arm, pinning his elbow against his ribs. He could not reach the ascender. He could not see the surface. The beam from his headlamp trembled across blue ice and found only a narrow shelf below his boots.

It was not a shelf so much as a broken tongue of snow, angled downward into the dark.

He lowered one foot.

The snow compressed.

He froze.

The shelf held.

“Hugo!” Mara’s voice came faintly from above. “Talk to me!”

“I’m here.”

“We’re securing the line.”

“Do it faster.”

A pause. Wind hissed through the opening. “Can you get onto anything?”

“Maybe.”

“What do you see?”

“An edge.”

“Can you reach it?”

Hugo looked down. The shelf lay below and to his left, perhaps a meter away. The rope held him against the wall, but his body hung at the wrong angle. If he swung, he might catch the shelf. If he missed, the rope would take him again - or the anchor would fail.

He flexed his fingers. The right glove was torn across the palm. Blood had darkened the fabric, though he felt only numbness.

“Mara,” he said, “the line is cutting into my harness.”

“We’re coming.”

“No. You’re not.”

“We are.”

“You can’t see the lip.”

“We can see the rope.”

“The rope is not me.”

The words left him before he could soften them. He heard the silence that followed and knew she had understood.

Hugo unclipped the loose strap from his arm with his teeth. The pack shifted, dragging his shoulders back. He reached for the rope, wrapped both hands around it, and pulled his knees toward his chest.

The shelf waited below.

He swung.

The crevasse wall struck his hip. Pain flashed white. His boots missed the shelf by inches. He swung back, pendulum slowing, and the rope creaked above him.

“Don’t do that!” Mara shouted.

Hugo pulled again.

The second swing carried him farther. His left crampon scraped the shelf, caught, and tore a trench through the snow. He kicked hard with the other leg. His knee landed on the edge.

The shelf dipped.

For a moment he lay half across it, chest suspended over the void. Snow crumbled beneath his ribs. His right boot dangled. He clawed at the surface with both hands, fingers punching through a thin crust into powder beneath.

Above, the rope jerked.

The shelf groaned.

“No!” Hugo shouted. “Stop pulling!”

The line snapped tight again, and the shelf broke at its outer edge. His body slid backward. He drove his elbows into the snow. The torn glove filled with ice. His left shoulder struck the wall, and his face pressed against the shelf’s rim.

He could see into the blue now.

The crevasse narrowed below, then widened again. Far beneath him, something pale rested on a ledge. A torn length of fabric, perhaps. Or snow caught on a spur. His headlamp could not hold the distance. The darkness swallowed its edges.

“Hugo!” Mara called. “We’re lowering a loop!”

He heard metal strike ice above. A carabiner clinked against the rope.

“Lower it!”

“It’s coming!”

The loop descended past his face, spinning. He caught it against his chest. The cord was stiff with frost. He threaded one leg through, then the other, and clipped it to his harness. His hands worked without feeling.

“Got it,” he said.

“Weight it slowly.”

Hugo shifted into the loop.

The rope above tightened.

The shelf sank beneath him.

A crack opened from his left hand to the wall. It was narrow at first, a black line under the snow. Then it widened with a wet, grinding sound. The entire ledge tilted.

Hugo drove his remaining axe into the wall. The pick struck a seam and held. He locked his arm.

“Mara!”

“We’ve got you!”

The shelf dropped another few centimeters.

“No, you don’t!”

He cut the loop free from the lowering line.

“What are you doing?” Mara screamed.

Hugo threw the loose cord into the darkness. It vanished before he heard it land.

The main rope remained clipped to his harness, but now it hung slack between him and the surface. He had only his axe, his crampons, and the unstable shelf beneath his knees.

“Tell them to stop,” he said.

Mara’s voice broke through the wind. “Stop what?”

“Everything.”

For a moment, the mountain seemed to obey.

The rope settled. Snow whispered down the walls. Hugo could hear his own breathing inside the mask, rough and shallow. His left arm burned from wrist to shoulder. The shelf pressed against his abdomen, and beneath it the glacier shifted with slow, enormous movements.

He looked up.

The opening was a pale wound far above, already narrowing behind blowing snow. Mara’s face was gone. The rope disappeared into the white. No one could see him now.

He had wanted the ledge. He had wanted anything that was not the open drop.

Now the ledge was moving.

Hugo pulled his knees under him. The shelf tilted farther, spilling powder past his boots. He drove the axe deeper and began to crawl toward the wall, inch by inch, keeping his weight low. His crampons scraped for purchase. The snow gave way beneath his palms, exposing hard blue ice.

The rope dragged behind him.

He reached the back of the shelf and found a crack running horizontally through the wall. He jammed his fingers into it. The ice sliced through the torn glove. He ignored the warmth spreading across his palm.

Another tremor passed through the glacier.

The shelf lifted, then dropped.

Hugo flattened himself against the wall.

The rope above snapped tight without warning.

His body lurched backward. The axe tore halfway out. He caught the shaft with his right hand and wrapped his legs around the narrow shelf. The line pulled once, hard, as if someone above had fallen.

Then it went slack.

A length of rope slid down beside him.

Hugo stared at it.

The upper system had not failed completely. But whatever held it had shifted, and the line now hung uselessly against the wall. No voice followed. No face appeared. The white opening above was gone behind the storm.

He gathered the rope against his chest and began hauling himself along the shelf.

The ledge narrowed to the width of his boots. His left knee slipped over the edge. He caught himself with both hands, dragging his body forward until his pack wedged against a protruding rib of ice. The shelf groaned beneath the weight.

He stopped.

The sound continued.

Not from the shelf alone. From the wall behind him, from the blue floor below, from the entire hidden architecture of the glacier.

Hugo pressed his cheek to the ice. It vibrated against his skin.

He had reached the ledge.

It was barely three meters long, sloping toward a black bend in the crevasse. The wall rose above him, smooth and unreachable. The rope lay coiled beside his hip, its end disappearing into the dark below. Above, the team’s line vanished into the whiteout. No one could see him. No one could know which way he had gone.

The shelf shifted under his hands.

Hugo tightened his grip on the axe and pulled himself flat.

A crack opened beneath his pack.

He dragged his body forward as the ice gave way behind him, and the narrow shelf dropped into darkness with him still on it.

End of chapter one. 14 more chapters and about 32,862 words in the full book.