Chapter 2 The Day That Broke Him

POV: Thessaly Vance

His hand was still on my arm when the tent light went out.

Just like that. One second there was a glow cutting through the dark up at camp, somebody awake, somebody watching, and the next second, nothing. Black again. Like it had never happened.

I yanked my arm free anyway. "Don't tell me what to do."

"Thessaly,"

"No." My voice came out shaking, and I hated it, hated that he could hear exactly how scared I still was underneath the anger. "You don't get to grab me and give me orders and disappear into the dark like some kind of ghost. Somebody just tried to kill me. I want answers, not a bedtime."

He didn't argue. He didn't even look surprised. He just stood there, hands open now at his sides, like he'd expected this exact reaction and had already decided not to fight it.

"Fair," he said. "Ask."

"Who are you? Really."

"I told you. Kester Hale. Camp medic."

"Camp doesn't run a medic shift after midnight. I asked at check-in. There's one doctor on call and her name's not Kester."

Something flickered across his face, there and gone so fast I almost missed it. Guilt, maybe. Or grief. I couldn't tell which, and both scared me more than a stranger with a headlamp ever could.

"I'm not lying about my name," he said carefully. "I'm not lying about being a medic either. I just... I'm not supposed to be out here tonight. Officially."

"Then why are you?"

"Because I knew you'd be on that wall."

The wind picked up between us, sharp enough to sting, and I wrapped my arms around myself without meaning to. Not from the cold. From the way he said it, flat and certain, like a man reading a weather report instead of confessing to stalking someone in the dark.

"That's insane," I said. "You don't know me. I got here four days ago."

"I know."

"Then how?"

"I can't explain it in a way that's going to make sense right now." He rubbed a hand over his jaw, and for the first time he looked tired instead of calm, worn down in a way that didn't match a man who'd only just met me. "I need you to answer something for me first. It's important. More important than it sounds."

"You don't get to change the subject."

"I'm not changing it. I promise you, this is the subject." He looked at me then, really looked, and there was something underneath his voice that pulled at me even though every smart part of my brain told me to walk away from this stranger and go straight to camp security. "What day is it?"

I almost laughed. Out of everything I expected him to ask after pulling a cut rope out of the dark and grabbing my arm as my life depended on it, that was not it.

"What?"

"The date. Today's date. Please."

"It's the fourteenth," I said slowly, watching him like he might be unraveling right in front of me. "It's been the fourteenth since midnight. Why does that?"

I never got to finish the sentence.

His face went white. Not pale, not startled, white, like every drop of blood had drained out of him in the space of one breath. He took a step back from me, and his hand came up to cover his mouth for a second like he was going to be sick, and I stood there frozen, watching a full-grown man come apart over a date on a calendar.

"Kester," I said his name without meaning to, and something about saying it out loud made this whole impossible night feel even more real. "What's wrong with the fourteenth?"

He didn't answer right away. He turned his back to me, just for a second, shoulders rigid, and when he turned around again his eyes were wet in a way he clearly hadn't planned on letting me see.

"It's early," he said, mostly to himself. "It's never been this early before."

"What's never been this early?"

"I told you not to climb the north face on the fourth day of your summit window." His voice was rough now, stripped of that calm control from before. "I told you that because I thought I had time. I thought I had at least until the fourth day to figure out how to stop this properly. But if it's already the fourteenth, and your window opens on the sixteenth,"

"Stop what," I said, and I heard my own voice crack right down the middle. "Stop what, Kester?"

He looked at me like the words physically hurt to say.

"You," he said quietly. "I'm trying to stop you from dying on that mountain."

I laughed, one short, ugly sound, because it was easier than screaming. "That's not funny."

"I'm not joking."

"You just met me an hour ago!"

"I know exactly how that sounds." His hands came up like he wanted to reach for me and stopped himself halfway, like he didn't think he had the right anymore, not after what he'd just said. "I know. But someone cut that rope on purpose tonight, and it wasn't supposed to happen for two more days, and now it's happening early, which means everything I thought I understood about this is wrong, and I don't, I don't know what that means for you anymore."

Understood about this. Like this had happened before. As he'd stood on this exact ledge, said these exact warnings, watched this exact rope fail before, and somehow I was the only one standing here who didn't remember any of it.

I should have run. Every instinct I had, the ones that kept me alive through nine years of solo climbing without a single serious fall, screamed at me to get away from this man and his impossible knowledge and his face gone white over a date on a calendar.

Instead I stepped closer.

Maybe it was the way he looked at me, like I was something he was terrified of losing before he'd even had the chance to know me properly. Maybe it was the ugly, twisting feeling in my chest that hadn't gone away since he grabbed my arm, something that felt dangerously close to wanting him to be telling the truth, just so I wouldn't have to be as alone on this mountain as I'd felt every single day since my father died on it.

"Prove it," I whispered. "Prove you're not just some lunatic who followed me out here. Tell me something you shouldn't know. Something real."

He looked at me for a long moment, jaw working like he was fighting himself over whether to answer at all.

"Your father used to check the anchor bolts twice," he said finally. "Once with his hands, once by ear, tapping each one like he was listening for something hollow inside the rock. You do the same thing. Every single time. You did it tonight, before you even started climbing, and you don't even know you're copying him anymore."

The world tilted sideways.

Nobody knew that. Nobody. Not Prudence, not Marisol, not a single soul at any camp I'd ever climbed with. It was a private thing, a small broken piece of grief I carried in my hands without ever saying it out loud to a living person.

"How," I breathed, "could you possibly know that?"

Behind him, up near the equipment shed, a flashlight beam cut sharply across the dark, moving fast, moving straight toward us.

Kester's whole body went rigid.

"That's not camp security," he said, voice dropping to almost nothing. "Security carries yellow beams. That one's white."

He grabbed my hand, and for one heartbeat neither of us moved, caught between the terror of whoever was coming and something electric passing between our fingers that had nothing to do with fear at all.

Then the beam swung directly onto us, freezing us both in its light, and a voice I didn't recognize called out across the dark, calm and pleasant and utterly wrong for this hour of the night.

"There you are, Miss Vance. I've been looking everywhere for you."