Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods (14 page)

The night is black. I can’t see O’Toole’s fire, nor Julian’s ice cave anymore. It is a miracle that she reached us.

I pick her up over my shoulder and carry her slowly through the snow drifts to the open area around our tent. She is shivering. I push through the questions of my pod. Now is not the time for questions. Quant pulls open the tent for me.

Snow falls out of the woman’s gloves. I take them off her hands, which are blue, and exchange them for my own. I check her boots and coat for more snow, and brush it out. By then, the rest of my pod has joined me, and I use them to access our survival instruction.

Hypothermia
.

The shivering, the disorientation, and the lack of response are all signs of body-temperature loss. Maybe some of the disorientation is from being separated from her pod.

Hospitalize.

One of us glances at the transceiver in the corner of the tent. It is defeat to use it.

“Where’s the rest of you?” I ask.

She doesn’t even look at me.

I take a coil of spider-silk rope and begin cinching it to my coat.

No
.

“Someone has to see what happened to the rest of her,” I say.

We can’t separate now
.

I feel the pull to stay and consense. To wait for rescue.

“Keep her warm. Huddle close to her. Don’t warm her quickly.”

I pull the tent door open and close it, but not before Quant follows me out.

“Be careful. It’s beginning to snow,” she says. She takes the rope end from me and ties it to one of the D-rings on our tent. The end wraps around itself and knits itself together.

“I will.”

The wind whips the snow into my face, needles of cold. I hunch over and try to make out Julian’s tracks from her camp to ours. Snow has already started to fill in the prints. The moon glooms through scudding gray clouds, making the mountainside gray on gray. I continue, making this task my focus, so that I do not remember that I have left my pod behind. Even so, I count the steps I take, marking the distance of our separation.

I have to keep my face up to follow the tracks, and when I do, the wind freezes my nasal passages. The cold is like a headache. There is no smell on the wind, no trace of Hagar Julian.

The woman has walked across a slide of broken slate. Her footprints end on the jagged mounds of rock. I pause, knowing I am close to their campsite; they had been no farther than three hundred meters when I’d spied them.

I turn my back to the wind and tuck my head a moment. Still the snow finds a way into my eyes. The weather is worsening. I take a moment to memorize the feeling, the sting, the sound for later.

I trudge on across the slate, slipping once and falling to one knee. The slate ends in a river of gray snow. I don’t remember seeing this before. Then I realize that it’s new. The snow bank above has collapsed, burying Hagar Julian’s campsite in an avalanche.

I stand there, ignoring the cold.

I take one step onto the snow and it crunches under my boots. An hour ago, this area was clear, and now it is under a flood of rocks and snow. I look up at the mountain, wondering if more will follow, but swirling snow obscures it.

I climb up the side of the hill of snow. Ten meters into the slide, I see a flap of cloth, half covered. I pull at it, but the rest is buried too deep for me to extract it.

“Julian!” Sifting flakes muffle my voice. I yell again for my classmate.

I hear no reply, though I doubt I would have heard anything either, unless the speaker was next to me.

I pull my hands out of my pockets, hoping to catch a whiff of something on the pads on my palm. Nothing but needling cold. I am cocooned in a frozen, white mask. As isolated as the one part of Julian who made it to our camp.

I turn back. We will need digging equipment and many people to find Julian’s corpses. I do not see how they could have survived. Except for the one.

But then I see something black against the gray of the swept snow. Just a smudge that catches my eye as I turn.

I stop and take one step up the slope, and I see that it is an arm. I am clawing at the ice, snow, and rock, hoping, praying that below is a breathing body.

I scoop huge armfuls of snow behind me and down the slope, tracing the arm down, reaching a torso, and finding a hooded head. I try to pull the body out, but the legs are still trapped. I pause, and slowly pull back the hood. Male, a part of Julian, face and cheeks splotchy pink, eyes shut. The snow swirls around his mouth, and I think that it means he’s breathing, but I can’t be sure. I pass my palm under his nose, tasting for any pheromone, but there is nothing. I feel for a pulse.

Nothing.

My mind struggles to remember how to revive a victim with a stopped heart. Moira would know. Quant would know. They all would know. Alone, I know nothing.

I panic and just grab the body about its torso and heave backward, trying to free it from the snow. I pull but the body remains embedded. I sweep at the man’s hips, feeling the futility of it. I’m useless here. Strength is useless now. I don’t know what to do.

But now he is free to his knees, and I pull again. He comes free in a cascade of snow. I stagger under his weight, then lay him down.

I kneel next to him, trying to remember. My hands are red and stinging, and I stuff them into my pockets, angry at myself. I am useless alone. Moira would . . . Then it comes to me, as if Moira had sent it to me in a ball of memory. Compressions and breathing. Clear the throat, five compressions and a breath, five and a breath. Repeat.

I push at the man’s coat, unsure if I am doing anything through the bundles of clothing. Then I squeeze his nose and breathe into his mouth. It’s cold, like a dead worm, and my stomach turns. Still I breathe into his mouth and then compress again, counting slowly.

The cycle repeats, and his chest rises when I breathe into him. I stop after a minute to check the pulse. I think I feel something, and I wonder if I should stop. Is that his own diaphragm moving or just the air I’ve forced into him leaving his lungs, like a bellows?

I can’t stop, and bend to the task again.

A cough, a spasm, but a reaction, and then he is breathing.

Alive!

The pulse is fast and reedy, but there.

Can he move? Can I get him back to the tent to warm him?

Then I hear the whine of the aircar, and realize I won’t have to carry him. Help is on the way. I fall back into the snow. Alive!

The whine of the car rises, and I see its lights coming up the valley, louder, too loud. I wonder at the fragility of the layers of snow on the ridges above and if the shrill engines will cause another wave of snow.

I can do nothing but wait. The aircar reaches the edge of our camp and lowers itself behind the trees.

The engines die, but the sound does not. There is a deep rumble all around me, and I know what is happening. I know that the snow is coming down the mountain again. The first avalanche has weakened the ledge of snow.

I stand, unsure. Then I see the wave of white in the aircar spotlights.

“No!” I take one step toward the camp, then stop. The Julian here will die if I leave him.

The snow slams into my pod’s campsite, flies up where it strikes the trees surrounding the tent. I see the twirling lights of the aircar thrown up into the air. My pod! My body tenses, my heart thudding. I take one step forward.

The rumble is a crashing roar now. I look up at the snow bank above me, fearing that ice is about to bury us. But the outcropping of snow that has fed the first avalanche has uncovered a jagged ledge that is shielding us. The river of snow flows twenty meters away, but comes no nearer. If it had taken me, I would not have cared. My pod is in the torrent, and my neck tightens so that I can barely breathe.

I see something snaking on the ground and think that the snow is chasing me uphill. I am jerked off my feet.

Dragged across the rock and ice, I realize that it is the line attached to my waist. The other end is attached to our tent, and it is dragging me down the mountain. Five, ten, twenty meters, I struggle to untie the rope, to find the nodule that will untwine the knot, but my chaffed, useless hands can grip nothing.

I fall on my face, feel something smash into my nose, and in a daze I slide another few meters, closer to the avalanche. I thought it was slowing, but this close, it still seems to be a cascade of flying rock and snow.

I stand, fall, then stand again and lunge toward the avalanche, hoping to slacken the rope. I run, and I see a tree, at the edge of the river. I dive at it, haul myself around it once, then once more, wedging the line.

I pull and brace, and then the line is steel-taut.

My legs are against the trunk and I am standing against it, holding on, or else I’ll be sucked into the vortex with my pod.

For a moment, the desperation whispers the question: how bad would that be? Is it better to die with my pod or live on alone, a singleton, useless? A moment before, I had been ready for the avalanche to take me too.

But I cannot let go. A part of Julian still needs my help. I hold on, listening for the rumble to lessen.

Seconds, and then a minute, then two. Still I hold on, and the storm of snow slows, and the pull on my arms decreases. Sweat rolls down my cheeks, though the air is frigid. My arms shake. When the rope finally falls limp, I slump down and lie below the tree, unable to move. I am spent, and it takes minutes for me to recover enough to remove the rope. My fingers are raw and weak, and the spider-silk will not separate. Finally, the end unknits.

I stand and fall.

I shove my face into the snow to cool it, then realize how foolish that is. I stand again, and this time I make several steps before my legs shudder out from beneath me.

The snow is as soft as a feather bed, and I resolve to rest just a few moments.

It would be easy to sleep. So easy.

But I don’t. The man is still on the mountain. A singleton just like me. He needs me. He needs someone strong to carry him down the mountain.

I glance at the rope. At the other end is my pod. How could they have survived the torrent? I stand and take one step onto the debris, but a cascade of tumbling snow drives me back. The snow ridge above is still unstable. I wipe my eyes with my raw hands, then turn and follow the trail I made as I was dragged down the mountain. It is easy to see the trail of blood I have left. I touch my lip and nose; I hadn’t realized I’d been bleeding.

The Julian is still there, still breathing. And I cry aloud to see him alive, bawling like a child. I am anything but strength.

“What . . . what are you . . . crying for?”

The Julian is looking up at me, his teeth chattering.

“I’m crying because we’re alive,” I say.

“Good.” His head drops back into the snow. His lips are blue and I know the chattering is a response to the cold and a precursor to hypothermia. We need to get him medical attention. We . . .

I am thinking as if I am still a pod. I cannot rely on Manuel to help me lift him. I cannot rely on Bola to show me the quickest way down. I am alone.

“We need to go.”

“No.”

“You need to get to warmth and medical aid.”

“My pod.”

I shrug, unsure how to tell him. “They’re buried under here.”

“I smell them. I hear them.”

I sniff. Maybe there’s a trace of thought on the wind, but I can’t be sure.

“Where?” I ask.

“Nearby. Help me up.”

I pull him to his feet and he leans against me, groaning. We take a step; he points.

I see the flap of cloth buried in the snow that I had noticed before.

He had survived several minutes in the snow. Perhaps his pod is trapped below. Perhaps they are in an air pocket, or in their hollowed-out snow cave.

I kneel and begin to scoop away the snow around the cloth flap. He rolls next to me and tries to help clear. But he slumps against a mound of snow, too weak, and watches me instead.

The cloth is a corner of a blanket and it seems to go straight down.

For a while the going is all ice, and I claw at it with my numb fingers, unable to move more than a handful at a time. Then I am through that and the digging is easier.

Clods of snow bounce off my hood, and I am leery of more snow falling on top of us. I take a moment to push away all the snow from around us.

Two more scoops and suddenly the snow gives way, and I see a cavern of ice and snow and canvas, and within the cave, three bodies, three more of Julian. They are alive, breathing, and one is conscious. I pull them one by one out of the cave and put them next to their podmate.

The two that are conscious cling to each other and lie there, gasping for breath, and I am so tired I want to collapse into the hole.

I check each one for hypothermia, for breaks and contusions. One of them, a female, has a broken arm, and she winces as I move her. I have a loop of rope on my belt, not spider-silk, and I bind her arm across her chest. The fourth is unhurt.

“Wake up,” I say. “Come on.” The fourth one opens his eyes, begins to cough. The third, with the broken arm, is still unconscious. I gently slap her face. She comes awake and lunges, then gasps as the pain hits her. Her pod, what is left of it, surrounds her, and I step back, fall back on the snow, looking up into the sky. I realize that the snow is coming down harder.

“We have to get down the mountain,” I say. If another aircar comes, it will start another avalanche. If another avalanche comes, we are doomed.

They don’t seem to hear me. They cling together, their teeth chattering.

“We have to get down the mountain!” I yell.

Despair floods the air, then a stench of incoherent emotions. The four are in shock.

“Come on!” I say and pull one of them up.

“We can’t . . . our . . . podmates,” he says, words interspersed with chemical thoughts that I don’t understand. The pod is degenerating.

“If we don’t go now, we will die on this mountain. We have no shelter, and we are freezing.”

They don’t reply, and I realize they would rather die than break their pod.

“There’s four of you,” I say. “You are nearly whole.”