Completely (New York 3)

Kal ripped his gaze off her body and brought it to her eyes. She blinked. He shifted the wine bottle to his left hand and snapped his fingers. She blinked again. Looked down at herself. “Oh.”

Jesus. The princess had left the building.

This was exactly why he’d ordered a meal sent up and dragged his ass over here—the alarm bell that had started going off in his head when he thought about that blankness in her face on the helicopter. Afterward, she’d been questioned by the local Nepalese authorities and cleared by a busy medic with too much on his plate to give much thought to an Englishwoman whose ever-present composure easily disguised the signs of stress.

“I brought you something to eat.”

Her eyes darted to his, and a flush began to creep up her neck. She covered her breasts with one arm, then brought the door forward to hide the rest of herself. “Thank you.”

That was more like it. Always polite, this one, with her round English vowels, her crisp consonants. The princess.

He’d carried her a cup of tea once, and when he handed it to her she looked right into his eyes and thanked him with the sincerity of a woman who’d learned young that it wasn’t enough just to say the words—you had to pay attention, to think about the person you were saying them to.

She glanced at the covered tray, the wine bottle. His face. Helpless to figure out what came next.

“Why don’t you close the door?” he suggested. “Find something to wear. Get a towel and dry your hair.”

“I don’t…” Her hand fluttered beside her hip, a gesture that didn’t mean anything, a purple bruise the size of a fist on her thigh. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what I…”

Kal gave it a beat, but she didn’t finish the sentence. “Nothing to be sorry about. Just close the door.” He spoke slowly, holding her gaze. “Find something to wear. Get a towel and dry your hair. When you’re ready, open the door again. We’ll eat, if you want to.”

She bit her lip, then nodded and shut the door in his face.

Kal let out a long breath. He set the tray down on the carpet and sank to the ground with his back to the wall, wrapping his fingers around the glass neck of the wine bottle.

There was nothing else to do.

He’d been to the makeshift medical clinic where they were triaging the wounded and found it fully staffed. All the critical cases had already been transported to better facilities in Kathmandu, the less critical cared for and kept comfortable.

He’d called home and talked to his mom. He’d checked the news and stopped at a bar that was serving as an information center for the rescue operation. He’d told the people who needed to know everything he had to say.

Kal had been here before, when it was a thousand times worse. Two years ago, the avalanche at Everest came courtesy of an earthquake that had destroyed so many lives and so much property, Nepal still hadn’t begun to recover.

Kal was off the mountain in Pheriche that day, where the earthquake knocked down buildings, knocked people around, scared the shit out of everyone, caused bruises and lacerations, but somehow, miraculously, resulted in only one death. He’d stuck around the village afterward, helping where he could, connecting people who had resources to people who needed them.

He knew what to do. There just wasn’t all that much he could do.

Story of his life.

He ran his fingers up and down the neck of the wine bottle. The green color of the carpet looked wrong beneath his legs. Like maybe it was the wrong green, or maybe he’d forgotten what green looked like.

Just before he left his room, he’d checked the news: the Nepalese government had already canceled the open permits for the season. Everyone who could help was at Base Camp or on their way there. They would find the dead, give them names and burials, carry their effects down the trail to pass along to their families.

The guides and cooks, the people who carried loads and supplied dung to burn and delivered packages and fresh vegetables and milk for coffee—they would service the cleanup until there was no one left to service, and afterward they’d take whatever wages they’d managed to salvage from the canceled season and go home.

No one would ask whether all this death could have been prevented. No one would ask whether it was a good idea to start the machine back up again next year.

Kal had given a lot of time to asking those questions, pushing them on people who didn’t want to hear them. But that kind of work took faith, and he didn’t have any left.

He’d failed.

One mountain in the world had to be tallest. It would never run out of people ready to pay for the right to die on it. Kal couldn’t save any of them. They didn’t want to be saved.

“Only two kinds of people climb Everest,” he told the empty hallway. His voice bounced off the walls and came back to him from the corners. Ghost voice. Haunted.

Maybe he was feeling a little weird, himself.

Only two kinds of people—he’d come to the realization a long time ago. Every spring, his parents traveled to Everest Base Camp from their place in Queens. When he was younger, he and Tashi stayed with relatives in the villages of the Khumbu, but when he turned ten they let him come along.