The Pass (Wattys 2019)

Chapter Twenty

The weather had cleared up some by the next morning. Snow was falling by the bucket, was on the verge of collapsing their tent, but the wind had at least let up. They'd be able to make up for the distance they'd lost the other day.

Of course, though, the distance they had to go was the last thing on anybody's mind. That was certainly the case for Nika.

All she could think about were the lights. Those strange, glowing orbs that had danced in the skies above their heads, last night. That was all she could see in her mind's eye, as if she were looking at a color photograph every time she closed her eyes. While she'd researched the incident, she'd written all of the stories about the lights off. She'd been confident that the Mansi had simply been confused about a plane flying overhead: most of them had probably never even heard of a plane, before. And the mystery surrounding it all had made the stories of the lights even more fantastic.

Now, though, she was starting to wonder. Nothing about those lights had been right. They made no sounds, didn't seem to be attached to anything. They just were.

Everyone in the camp was silent as they ate their breakfast. Their eyes were distant, their minds apparently somewhere else. Nika had a pretty good idea of just where their minds were.

"So... are we not going to talk about the elephant in the room?" Peter asked.

Finally, everyone looked at each other. Finally acknowledging one another.

"What's there to talk about?" Arisha asked, going back to her breakfast.

"You're kidding, right?"

Arisha shrugged. Nobody pipped up in Peter's defense.

"Has everyone just forgotten what we saw, last night?" Peter asked. "Am I going crazy? Was I just dreaming all of that?"

"I don't think I could ever forget that," Rufina said quietly.

"Then why won't anybody talk about it?" Peter asked. "I feel like I'm going insane."

"You're not the only one," Nika said. "I... think we're all just a little shaken up, is all."

Everyone nodded in agreement.

"So, we're just going to pretend that nothing happened, last night?" Peter asked. His entire body sagged like a deflated balloon.

"Yep," Nika said. "That's exactly what we're going to do."

Peter sighed. "I can't believe this. All that big talk about finding out what happened, but now that we're seeing the same things they did - the first lead in five years - you guys are ready to turn tail and run?"

"The threat of imminent, mysterious, painful death tends to do that to a man," Yuri said.

Peter looked at Yuri like he'd just spoken in tongues. Then, he looked around at everyone else. "What's wrong with you guys? Maybe those lights really are aliens: I'm starting to think that my friends were all abducted and replaced with changelings! Since when are you, Yuri, afraid of death? You haven't seemed to care either way up until now."

Yuri bristled.

"As for you, ladies," Peter continued, "since when are any of you afraid of danger? Nika, I watched you near fall off of a cliff on K2, and you hardly batted an eye. Rufina, Arisha: I haven't known you for very long, but you don't strike me as the types to back down from a challenge, either."

Rufina and Arisha didn't say anything.

"Let's get the tent down and head out," Nika said. "We have a lot of ground to cover if we want to make up for yesterday."