Chapter 3: The Ice Traverse

They spent eight days acclimatizing, making rotations between base camp and Camp One at seventeen thousand feet. The rhythm of high-altitude climbing is monotonous by design. You ascend, you descend, you eat, you sleep in thin air that leaves you gasping. The body adapts slowly, manufacturing red blood cells to compensate for the diminished oxygen. Conversations during these rotations were brief and functional. Pass the stove. Clip in here. Watch the edge. The siblings moved around each other like magnets of the same polarity, close but never quite touching. On the ninth day, they pushed to Camp Two and prepared for the traverse. The ice field stretched before them like a tilted white desert, scored with crevasses that gaped blue and bottomless. Dawa roped them together at thirty-foot intervals and led the way, probing the snow ahead with an aluminum pole. The sun was blinding. Rohan pulled his goggles down and focused on placing his crampons exactly where Dawa's boots had been. An hour into the traverse, Priya stopped. She was staring at something in the ice below her feet. Rohan moved closer and looked down. Beneath the translucent surface, frozen into the glacier like an insect in amber, was a tent. Orange fabric, still bright, pressed flat by thousands of tons of compacted snow. It belonged to the second expedition, the one that had ended in tragedy. The dead climber was somewhere nearby, preserved in the cold, waiting for the glacier to eventually deliver him to the valley below. Nobody spoke. They stepped carefully over the site and continued. That evening, huddled in Camp Two while the wind screamed outside, Aarav broke the silence. He asked if their father had known about the frozen tent. Dawa nodded. Vikram had not only known, he had been on that second expedition. The climber who died in the crevasse had been his partner. Before Dawa. Before any of them.