The Pass (Wattys 2019)

Chapter Fifteen

The ride to Vizhay from Ivdel was long. Long and cold. They braved the ride from the back of Zima's truck, the wind stabbing into them. At first, the sky was black above them, with only the stars to keep them company. Nika stared up at them for as long as they were there, remembering the nights spent with her grandfather out in the wilds around Sverdlovsk. And then, the sun began to rise over the distant horizon, turning the snow and the skies a brilliant orange.

"Beautiful," Peter commented as they drove. He was sitting next to Nika. Right next to Nika: all of them were huddled in the truck to keep warm. "I've never seen a sunrise like that."

Rufina looked to him, frowning. "What are you talking about? You've seen the sunrise from the top of one of the tallest mountains in the world!"

Peter shrugged. "It's different."

"You might just be saying that because you can breathe, this time," Nika said. "Honestly: I'm surprised you didn't die with how resistant you were to using your oxygen."

"Not my fault that the masks were uncomfortable. Those things rubbed me raw!"

"You know, the two of you really haven't said much about K2," Yuri said.

"Couldn't have been too bad, if you two managed to come down alive," Rufina said. "I heard that most of the American team died. And they didn't even make it to the summit."

Arisha was frowning. "Where's K2?"

Everyone turned to look at her, shocked. But, it didn't take long for the looks on their faces to soften: it was easy to forget that she'd lived her life secluded in the mountains.

"The border of China and Pakistan," Nika explained to her. "It's the second tallest mountain in the world, with Everest being the tallest. Peter and I were able to be the first Russians to summit it."

Arisha was still frowning; there was something that still didn't make sense to her, it seemed. "And yet, you're coming out here to go hiking? When you could go anywhere in the world?"

Nika shrugged. "Why go anywhere in the world when I can run around my own backyard? Besides: I didn't exactly have the funds to go anywhere else."

"That, and we didn't know of any other mountain that has the tendency to kill people quite like this mountain," Peter joked.

Nobody was laughing.

Rufina looked out towards the sun, a sad look on her face. "I can see why Igor liked coming out here as much as he did." She looked to Yuri. "Was it like this when... five years ago?"

Yuri nodded. He looked miserable: his hands were shoved underneath his armpits, his shoulders hunched around his ears. "Yeah. It was a lot like this." He looked out at the sunrise, too. "'Bout as cold, even."

They didn't say much more than that until they arrived at Vizhay.

"Well, here's your stop," Zima announced after he'd turned the truck off.

Everyone began to pile out of the truck bed. Nika's legs felt like gelatin, her bones still vibrating from the humming of the truck's engine.

"Thanks, Zima," Nika said.

"Don't mention it," Zima said. "Good luck, and try not to die."

Nika tried to smile, but she couldn't quite bring herself to do it. In those words - work that she might've taken as a light-hearted joke under any other circumstance - was a terrible sense of foreboding. Dread. Fear. She'd faced death more than once in her life as a mountaineer - from Matveyev nearly dragging her off the side of K2 to the cold trying to take her in the night, and everything in between. That time, though, was different. There was something about Kholat Syakhl that was sinister. Dark. Evil. She'd had plenty of people tell her to try not to die, and she knew that all of them had meant it, but Zima... he really thought that the five of them were going to their deaths. He was trying to tell her that whenever whatever was killing people in those mountains came for them, he hoped that they'd escape with their lives.