As it turned out, sight was of little value to two climbers who barely had the strength to walk. They had only descended a hundred feet when they found themselves in a steep rock depression, plowing through thigh-deep powder. Each step was a wrestling match — a war against snow, against fatigue, against breathlessness, against pain. Pain — there’s plenty of that. Dominic’s sprained ankle stiffened with every movement.
The ditch seemed endless, cutting diagonally to their left before disappearing into the mist a thousand feet below. The morning disappeared with it, hour by hour, swallowed up by this interminable descent from light into fog.
Struggling a few yards ahead, the figure of Ethan suddenly blurred as Dominic began to sob. The feeling of hopelessness that came over him was so all-consuming that he was left completely hollow. He was less than an empty shell; he was nothing — the faintest wisp of life force propelling two robotic legs through deep snow.
“Hey, Dominic!” Ethan was pointing.
But Dominic had retreated inside himself. At that moment, he was only the sound of his footsteps. Crunch … crunch …
“Dominic, look!”
And there it was, appearing out of the haze like a ghostly, jagged highway — a great rocky ridge.
“It must be the north ridge!” cried Ethan.
But to Dominic it was much, much more.
It was hope.
* * *
Perry awoke to two kinds of ache. Broken ribs and …
Tilt.
This time he didn’t cry. There had been plenty of tears last night — from climbers and guides alike. They had all heard the whole terrifying process over the radio: the comfortable warmth, the lethargy, the sense of well-being — right up to the moment when Tilt had spoken no more. According to Dr. Oberman, death would have come within hours in the unimaginable cold.
Perry’s sorrow was made anxious, edgy as his thoughts turned to Dominic, somewhere on the north side with Ethan Zaph. Two teenagers, lost on unfamiliar ground, far beyond the rescue range of anyone on the Col.
But Tilt! If anybody was bulletproof, I would have guessed him.
In the months Perry had known the boy, he had experienced many emotions toward him — rage, hurt, envy, even admiration. Mourning — that had caught him off guard. Tilt was the best of them. The biggest, the strongest, the most determined. And yet, Perry was going home, while Tilt would remain on the mountain.
Cicero and Babu had searched until four o’clock in the morning. The team leader would have been out there still if Babu hadn’t physically dragged him back to Camp Four. Perry was still haunted by their heated conversation, inadvertently broadcast to the Col by a walkie-talkie frozen in speak mode:
“Killing yourself won’t bring Tilt back!” Babu had shouted. “People die here, Cap! You know that better than anybody!”
“Fourteen-year-old kids don’t!” came the exhausted reply.
“Only because nobody ever brought them before!”
It had seemed heartless last night. Now Perry understood that Babu had been merely stating a fact. If kids were going to attempt Everest, it stood to reason that sooner or later one of them would perish on the mountain.
It turned out to be sooner rather than later. It turned out to be Tilt Crowley.
I never even said good-bye.
But of course, no alpinist ever knew in advance when he or she would be saying a final farewell to a teammate.
Perry thought of his school chess club back home. He had always enjoyed the game for its mental challenge. Now he appreciated its predictability more than anything else. Chess was governed by a set of rules that applied to all players. But to tackle Everest was to take on an opponent with a pocket full of extra queens that could appear anywhere on the board at a moment’s notice. Poor Tilt had suddenly found himself surrounded by an overwhelming show of Everest’s hidden firepower. He was checkmated before he knew what hit him.
Cicero and Babu slept for just ninety minutes. Babu set out to organize a team to look for Tilt’s body. Every Sherpa on the Col volunteered to help, even Pasang, who had just recovered from snow blindness.
Cicero would be unavailable for the search party. In yet another cruel twist of fate, the forecasting services had officially called the start of the summer monsoon. Last night’s storm was just the beginning, they said. It was time to get off the mountain. So the expedition leader’s first responsibility became guiding Sammi and Perry down to Base Camp.
“Which happens right now,” Cicero said firmly. “The weather only gets worse from here on in.”
“But we can’t — ” Perry left the rest of his protest unsaid. No one had particularly liked Tilt Crowley. But leaving the Col felt like abandoning their teammate.
Cicero blew his stack. “Since when is this expedition a democracy? I decide when you climb! I decide when you don’t! I decide when you eat, sleep, and go to the bathroom! And right now I decide that you shut up!”
The SummitQuest climbers and guides regarded him uneasily. Ever since Tilt’s death, their leader had been as volatile as nitro. He had just gotten off the radio with the British North Face expedition. Four Sherpas were now on their way to the high camp to bring down Ethan and Dominic — if the lost summit party had even made it.
The strain seemed to be getting to Cap Cicero. Would the legendary alpinist be brought down by the very mountain that had made him famous?
* * *
Descent. The SummitQuest team’s climb was far from over. The wind had died down, but it was foggy and bitter cold. Slogging through this freezer of misery, they would be tackling several of Everest’s most celebrated nightmares — the Geneva Spur, the Yellow Band, and below that, the mile-high sloped ice of the Lhotse Face.
They were approaching Camp Three, hanging off the rope like a frost-nipped procession of clothespins, when the grim word came over Cicero’s walkie-talkie. Babu, Pasang, and two other Sherpas had located Tilt’s body. Their teammate had died only a few hundred yards from the rock gully that led back down to the Col. But in the zero visibility of last night’s howling blizzard, he might as well have been on the moon.
He’d be better off on the moon, Perry thought bitterly. At least then NASA could send a rocket to bring his body back to his family.
At twenty-seven thousand feet, Tilt’s remains could never be safely removed from the mountain. Even the most skilled Sherpas could not maneuver so much weight on a six-foot frame down two vertical miles of the toughest descent in the Himalayas. It was too much of a risk for the living to recover the dead. Babu and Pasang wrapped the frozen body in the fabric of a small tent they had salvaged from Camp Four. It was all the burial that Tilt Crowley would ever receive.
SummitQuest reached the upper Cwm around three o’clock, and the temperature jumped seventy degrees. Shedding clothing and stuffing snow under their hats, they staggered into ABC late in the afternoon. The British North Face expedition was already trying to radio them.
A team of four Sherpas had ascended to twenty-seven thousand feet to look for Ethan and Dominic. They found the high camp deserted. There was no sign that anyone had been there for at least a week.
The ridge was notched and craggy — an exhausting series of rock climbs. Cruel and unusual punishment for two teenagers already pushed beyond the limit of human endurance. Was some malevolent god reshaping Everest just to destroy them?
No conversation had passed between Ethan and Dominic since they had reached the ridge. It wasn’t that they had nothing to say to each other. Dominic had been formulating the sentences for the past three hours: I’m done. I have to stop. Tell Chris I got his sand to the top. The image of his grieving family brought a sharp stabbing pain to a body that fatigue had dipped in Novocain. Picturing them — Mom, Dad, and Chris — drove his stumbling progress. I can’t quit. Not yet. His gas tank was bone-dry. He had nothing more to give to this mountain.
Below them, a massive snow-covered shoulder was appearing out of the thinning mist. It had been a shoc
k at first, but now he recognized it for what it really was — a death sentence. There was no North Shoulder of Everest. Which meant this was not the north ridge. They were still lost — they had always been so. And lost they would remain. Forever.
Ethan was also bewildered by the titanic bulge in the mountain’s bulk, but he lacked the strength to wrestle his confusion into the form of a question. Where were they? What was going on? What was this colossal buttress — itself the equal of all but the world’s highest peaks?
The two boys continued to climb down. It made no sense; this was clearly the wrong path. But there was no thinking anymore, no logic. Only will — the will to keep moving.
Finally, they dropped to the shoulder, staggering together in an awkward embrace. It was not a celebration — they fell into each other for support, and found that neither had the power to offer any. After twelve hours of descent, this relatively flat ground seemed strange and disorienting.
Twenty-four thousand feet. They had left the summit a vertical mile above them. Yet Base Camp lay farther still in the opposite direction. They were nowhere — a place that was likely to be their tomb.
Reeling, Ethan and Dominic wobbled arm in arm across the shoulder and gazed through the mist over the valley below.
It was … Dominic blinked —
It was … no, impossible! It’s a mirage — the final hallucination of a dying climber!
The Western Cwm!
Ethan saw it, too. The expression on his famous face spoke volumes, but all he could manage aloud was a croaked “How?”
And Dominic had the answer. Oxygen-starved and close to shutdown, his fevered brain made the leap almost immediately. They had never been on the north ridge! Somehow in the storm, they had gotten themselves turned around and traversed to the west ridge — the most difficult, least traveled route up Everest! And now they were on the West Shoulder, a vertical half mile above the Cwm!
No wonder we never hit the second cliff. We were off the North Face!
He wanted to explain it to Ethan, to scream it all over the mountain. But there was so much to say, so much to do — and so little energy left. They were right above Camp Two, but the tents looked like Monopoly houses twenty-seven hundred feet below. It would be a challenging descent for a well-equipped climber on two days’ rest. They were out of rope and out of strength.
At last, Dominic found the only words worth wasting precious breath on. “We can do it,” he barely whispered.
“We can do it.” Ethan nodded.
They started down the rounded crest of the West Shoulder.
* * *
In all his years of climbing, Cap Cicero had never known such bottomless despair. Sure, he had lost teammates before — friends, even a couple of clients.
No kids. Never kids.
And now the mountain had devoured three teenagers, two of them under his care.
He didn’t blame himself. Years of experience had taught him that. Everest chose when and where it would exact its toll, and from whom. The youth of these three victims had nothing to do with their fate. Ethan and Tilt had the size and strength of adults. And Dominic? He was small, but his smarts and stamina made him the toughest alpinist Cicero had ever seen.
I wish I could blame myself. Three kids are dead. Somebody should have to pay for it. Savagely, he drove his ax into the hard ice where he sat, feeling the temperature plunge minute by minute as the sun set on the Western Cwm.
His emotion went far beyond finger-pointing and recrimination. He was staring at this mountain he knew so well as if he had never laid eyes on it before. What are we doing here? What’s the point of it all? What kind of people are we if we think it’s worth this sacrifice to stand on the summit and take pictures with frozen fingers?
“It doesn’t make sense,” he muttered aloud.
“Probably not,” came a soft voice.
For the first time Cicero realized that Sammi was sitting beside him. She added, “But if it made sense to anybody, it would have been those three.” She gave him a watery smile. “At least that’s what I tell myself every time I think I’m going to lose it.”
It’s not enough, he said to himself. At a certain point the price is just too high. “Get some rest,” he told her. “We’ve got the Icefall tomorrow.”
“Okay.” She stood up. “Cap? This Way Up, the Germans, and us — that’s all there is on this side of the mountain, right?”
He looked at her. “So?”
“So who are those two guys up there?”
His eyes followed her pointing finger. There, halfway down the hulking West Shoulder, two tiny figures were descending. They looked like ants against a vast expanse of white.
Cicero wrenched the binoculars from his pack. The magnification brought the alpinists closer, but he could not make out faces. Yet he knew. A big guy and a little guy, their movements labored, their exhaustion plain. An extra-small red wind suit.
Unbelievable — no, that wasn’t strong enough. Miracle! It was the kid, back from the dead! Dominic, and Zaph with him!
“Andrea!” he bellowed. “Lenny!”
And they were climbing, a blur of pure purpose. Cicero could not remember strapping on crampons, but there they were on his boots, biting into the ice and snow of the West Shoulder. Nor could he recall picking up rope. But an entire coil was slung over his shoulder. As he sprinted ahead of his guides, tears streamed down his cheeks. Cap Cicero had never wept at any tragedy on any mountain in a legendary thirty-one-year career. But the emotion of this moment welled up inside of him until a single body could not contain it anymore. Mighty Everest had given one back.
He could see their faces now — two young people, aged decades in forty-eight tumultuous hours. He shouted; they didn’t. They couldn’t. They were close to collapse.
Cicero reached for Dominic’s harness, and brought the boy to his embrace. Dr. Oberman and Sneezy flanked Ethan, each supporting an arm. The ordeal was over.
Camp Two waited below. Hot food, warm sleeping bags — life.
The memorial service was crowded. Tilt had come friendless to SummitQuest. He left the expedition much mourned by his teammates, the climbing world, and a nation that had read on the front pages of newspapers about his achievements and tragic death. The fourteen-year-old had reached his goal. Tilt Crowley was a household word.
There were more than a hundred people jammed into the small chapel, and that didn’t include the horde of media camped in the parking lot outside. The SummitQuest team had been mobbed by reporters upon their arrival. Dominic, in particular, found himself besieged by cameras and microphones.
“Dominic, how does it feel to be the youngest human to stand on top of the world?”
“Do you think your new record has been overshadowed by Tilt’s death?”
“Are you haunted by the fact that Tilt died trying to rescue you?”
Cap Cicero handled all questions for the team, and his message was short, if not sweet. “Bug off!” And he slammed the door in the reporters’ faces, shattering the long telephoto lens belonging to the photographer from the National Daily.
“Nice shot,” whispered Sammi. “Hey, Cap, did you ever find out who was spying on us for those jerks?”
Cicero regarded his three surviving climbers. “No,” he said evenly. “I guess we’ll never know.” Tilt Crowley had been no angel. But what was to be gained by speaking ill of the dead? The boy had paid for his crimes. And then some.
Dominic barely heard a word of the brief service. His mind still reeled from his introduction to Tilt’s grief-stricken mother an hour before. The bereaved woman had looked at him with horrified loathing. He could tell that she held him responsible for her son’s fate. Even now, seated in the second row of uncomfortable wooden chairs, he could feel her accusations filtering through the black lace kerchief that covered her hair.
A sympathetic hand patted Dominic’s shoulder. Chris sat behind his younger brother, his shirt and tie concealing his vial of sand from the Dead S
ea, now a few grains lighter. To his left were Ethan Zaph and Nestor Ali of This Way Up, and Bryn Fiedler, a former SummitQuest teammate. On the other side, Mr. Alexis, Sammi’s parents, and Joe Sullivan himself paid their respects. As the sponsor of the ill-fated expedition, the billionaire CEO was also under fire from the media. But he had hardly left his nephew’s side since Perry’s return from Kathmandu.
The last of the speakers was Cap Cicero. He pointed to the life-size photograph of an exultant Tilt on the summit of Everest. “Look at that face and tell me Tilt Crowley was a victim. Not in a million years. He beat the mountain, not the other way around.” He turned to the poster and flashed Tilt a thumbs-up, the alpinist’s signal for success. “Congratulations, kid. You always told us you could do it.”
An uncomfortable, almost hostile murmur rippled through the chapel. That was it? That was all this man had to say about the terrible death of a child entrusted to his care? What kind of callous monster was this so-called legend?
But the climbers in the room understood perfectly. Their backs straightened and their jaws set. Dominic could feel his right hand curling to the grip of an imaginary ice ax. Inside his stiff dress shoes, his feet formed to the contours of heavy mountaineering boots.
He was aware of a flicker deep inside that was half forgotten, yet instantly familiar. It had been extinguished during his descent of the West Shoulder — at the awful moment when Cicero had told him the news about Tilt.
It was the urge to turn the axis of motion vertical. To defy gravity and leave the ground in search of some impossibly distant summit.
To climb.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
GORDON KORMAN started writing novels when he was about the same age as the characters in this book, with his first novel, This Can’t Be Happening at Macdonald Hall!, published when he was fourteen. Since then, his novels have sold millions of copies around the world. Most recently, he is the author of Swindle, Zoobreak, and Framed, the trilogies Island, Everest, Dive, and Kidnapped, and the series On the Run. His other novels include No More Dead Dogs and Son of the Mob. He lives in New York with his family, and can be found on the web at www.gordonkorman.com.