Escaping the Arrogant Dark Moon Alpha novel · Chapter 22 of 24

Chapter 22: April

We went up on Friday morning, the third of April, on foot.

The cook met us at the bottom of the lift with a thermos and two egg sandwiches.

"No raisins," she said, before I could ask.

The lift wasn't running.

Nobody was going to run it to the Crown again.

So we climbed the cat track, the way I'd driven it two weeks before, with our packs on our backs.

Tobin carried the markers.

The lift mechanic had made them in the mill shop.

Two flat slabs of river stone, with a brass plate bolted to each.

His brother's name on one.

The other man's name on the other.

At the top, the Crown was a long gray scoop of rock and old dirty snow.

The wind had already blown the summit bare.

Our rope line from March was still there, the poles leaning, the CLOSED signs flapping.

Nobody had taken it down.

We walked down into the bowl together, slowly, picking our way over the rubble.

The slide had scraped it all the way to the ground.

Halfway down, Tobin stopped and looked at the mountain around us.

"This is where the crown wall was," he said. "Last April. It broke right here, across the whole bowl."

He knelt and cleared a flat place in the gravel with his gloves.

He set the first stone down.

Then the second, beside it.

I knelt across from him.

The brass plates caught the sun.

I'd planned something to say.

I'd practiced it on the drive.

None of it came out.

"I'm sorry," I said instead, to the stones.

My voice sounded small up there.

"I'm sorry I pulled it. I'm sorry I kept quiet for eight months. I'm sorry I let him tell everybody it was the snow."

Tobin didn't say anything.

He didn't touch me.

He just stayed there, on his knees, across the stones from me.

I put both my hands flat on the cold rock between the markers.

I looked at them.

The burn scar on my knuckle.

The grease that never all came out.

These same hands had untied every knot on this slope.

Two weeks ago, they'd tied every knot back.

"I can't stop," I'd said on that video, sobbing.

I'd been saying it in my head for a year.

I took a breath of thin mountain air and let it out.

"I stopped," I said.

Then I sat back on my heels and cried.

Not the way I had on the video.

Like something heavy had finally been set down.

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