Katix.
Will.
“Hey.”
The voice drifted into her body with the awareness that it had been speaking for a while. “Rosemary. Hey.” A hand on her shoulder. “Take a breath.”
She closed her eyes and tried. Her lungs burned. Her face was wet, the air coming through the door of the helicopter too cold. She shuddered.
“In through your nose. Out through your mouth.”
She tried.
Impossible.
“Come on.” An arm came around her shoulders, a weight of heavy tech fabric, red in her peripheral vision. “In through your nose.”
She tried again, concentrated. When she exhaled, her breath hitched, hitched, hitched. Three times.
“That’s perfect. Give me another one.”
“I can’t.”
“Yeah, you can.”
So she had to, and she could, she did, but only because he made her with the pressure of his heavy arm and his attention.
“Good girl.”
She looked at him, blinking. The Sherpa. Doctor Doom. Without anything covering his face, his hood pushed back, a black knit hat, he was unbearably attractive, unbearably alive.
He’d coordinated the rescue. Indira, bless her, had tried, but she hadn’t had the steady nerves, the knowledge to make sense of the radio transmissions. This man, though. He’d worked the radio, made the decisions, put her on the helicopter.
She didn’t want to be on a helicopter. Her escape was perverse. Her privilege, to be one of those spirited away, was indefensible. She wanted to be down there, doing something.
“I hate this.” She was surprised to hear her own voice. How flat she sounded. How removed.
“It’s what’s happening.” He squeezed her shoulder when he said it, and she wanted to be annoyed, but more than that she wanted to curl into his body and weep for Lisa, and Anders, and Scout, and Katix, and the bodies that couldn’t be counted, the ones she couldn’t name.
“It shouldn’t be what’s happening.”
It should not be.
It should not be.
They felt like the right words. The only words. She said them again. “It shouldn’t be.”
He nodded in agreement. Which made her angry. The roar of the helicopter was hateful. She wanted a button that would turn everything off. She stared through the hole punched through the side of the helicopter into space, watching Base Camp drop away into an undulating sea of rock and ice. A woman lifted through the air in a hydrocarbon-powered tin box, flesh no more worthy of survival and rescue than any other flesh.
“You’re from England, right?”
“Yes.”
“You have people to go home to there?”
She had people. Friends. She had a cottage in Harpenden, twenty-five miles north of London, easy to get to the city by train but far enough away that it felt like a retreat. She had a conservatory where she would grow oranges one day, a kitchen she planned to renovate with Spanish tile and new cupboards that she would paint the color of Drabware—just as soon as she’d climbed the Seven Summits and finished her book.
She had too much.