Snowstorm of Our Past novel · Chapter 12 of 32

Chapter 12: Recert

"Is that a threat?" I said.

Amber smiled.

"It's advice. From one mother to another."

"Then here's mine," I said. "Lies are dangerous too. They don't stay buried. Snow melts."

Her smile stayed exactly where it was.

But her hand tightened on the handle of the carrier until her knuckles went white.

She turned and walked back toward the vestibule.

Gabe was waiting by the truck with the engine running.

He looked at my face and didn't ask anything until we were off post.

When I told him, he drove for a mile with his jaw clenched.

"You're not going up anywhere alone," he said finally. "Not for a while."

"I'm a forecaster, Gabe. Going up alone is the job."

"Not this month, it isn't."

The sixteenth came in with a storm.

The recert was at the old training bowl off Fremont Pass, at eleven thousand feet.

Snow was falling sideways by the time I parked.

My old boss stood at the trailhead in a parka with a clipboard, next to two examiners from the board I'd never met.

"Weather's ugly," he said. "We can postpone."

"I'm not postponing."

He looked at me over his glasses.

"Your doctor signed off?"

"Yesterday. Six weeks exactly."

"Then let's go."

Gabe had driven up behind me with the dog in the back seat.

He wasn't allowed to help. He stood at the edge of the bowl with his hands in his pockets and his beanie pulled down.

I skinned up the slope on my old skis with my new beacon on my chest.

My legs burned for the first hundred yards. Then they remembered.

First, the snow pit.

I dug it on a north-facing slope, five feet deep, with a shovel I hadn't been allowed to lift for six weeks.

I cut the column clean. I tapped it, ten from the wrist, ten from the elbow, ten from the shoulder.

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