Chapter 5 The Storm That Wasn't There

POV: Thessaly Vance

The climber's leg was bent the wrong way.

I saw it before I even reached the bottom of the scree, and my stomach dropped just like it had the night my rope snapped tight around my waist. A guide named Emmett Cole was down at the base of the north face, pale and shaking, his rope pooled beside him as it had just given up halfway through the job.

"Move!" Kester's voice cut through the shouting and the crackling radios. He dropped to his knees next to Emmett and started working, fast hands, steady voice, none of the panic everyone else had. "Talk to me. Where does it hurt?"

"My leg. My leg, oh god,"

"I've got you. Look at me, not your leg. Look at me."

I grabbed the first aid bag someone shoved into my hands and knelt beside him, because standing there useless wasn't an option, not after everything I'd already seen this week. Kester didn't even look up. He just held out his hand, and I put the gauze in it before he asked, like some part of me already knew exactly what he needed.

"His rope," I said, once Emmett was stable enough that my voice wouldn't send him into shock. "Kester, look at his rope."

He already had. I watched his jaw go tight the same way it had the night mine failed.

The cut was clean. Not frayed, not old, not an accident. Someone had done this on purpose, and it wasn't me this time.

"Two in one week," I whispered.

"Not two," Kester said quietly, so only I could hear it. "I've seen this before too. Just never on him."

I didn't understand what that meant, not fully, but the way he said it made my skin go cold in a way that had nothing to do with the wind.

Rutherford showed up right as the rescue team carried Emmett past on a stretcher, hands in his pockets, watching the whole thing like it was a show put on for his benefit. "Rough morning," he said, not to me, not really to anyone. His eyes landed on Kester a beat too long. "You always seem to be right where the trouble is, medic."

"So do you," Kester said, and didn't look up from tying off his kit.

Rutherford smiled like he'd won something and walked off before I could ask what that meant.

I told myself I didn't believe him. Not the loop, not the eleven times, not any of it. A man can't watch the same six days happen over and over. That's not real life; that's a fever dream, and I was too smart to fall for it.

But that night, lying in my tent with my eyes wide open, all I could think about was how close he'd stood over Emmett, how sure his hands were, how he never once looked scared even when everyone around him was falling apart. I kept replaying the moment his eyes met mine over Emmett's leg, quick and steady, as he trusted me to hold it together. Nobody had looked at me like that in years.

I hated how much I liked it.

A knock on my tent pole pulled me out of my own head so fast I nearly knocked my lantern over.

"It's me," Kester said, before I could ask. Of course it was him. Nobody else at this camp knocked like they were bracing for a door to slam in their face.

I unzipped the flap enough to see him standing there with a folded piece of paper, his face tighter than I'd seen it even during the rescue.

"There's a storm coming," he said, holding it out. "Tomorrow night. Bad one."

He was standing close enough that I could feel the warmth coming off him even in the cold, close enough that for one stupid second I forgot to be angry and just looked at him, at the tired lines around his eyes, at a mouth that looked like it wanted to say something softer than a warning. My heart did something traitorous and fast.

Then I remembered he'd told me, two days ago, that he'd watched me die more than once. Whatever this pull between us was, it came with a body count. That wasn't the kind of thing you got to feel good about.

I stepped back. "Where did you even get this?"

"I made it."

"You made it." I almost laughed, except nothing about his face was joking. "Kester, I checked the forecast myself an hour ago. Clear skies through the weekend. Every station says the same thing."

"Every station is wrong."

"That's not how weather works. You don't get to just decide the forecast is lying."

"I'm not deciding anything. I already lived through this storm, Thessaly. I know exactly when it hits and exactly how bad it gets, because I watched it flood the lower camp the last time this week happened."

Something in me snapped, quiet and final, like a rope finally giving out after holding on too long.

"Stop it," I said. "Just stop. You can't keep doing this, showing up with warnings nobody else can check, telling me to trust you while you hand me hand-drawn proof that looks like it came out of a conspiracy movie. I have a phone. I have five different apps telling me it's clear. You have a pencil and a story about a loop nobody else remembers."

"I know how it looks."

"You always know how it looks. That's the problem. You never actually prove anything; you just ask me to believe you anyway."

"Because proving it gets people hurt faster than not proving it does!"

His voice cracked on the last word, loud enough that I flinched, loud enough that for one second the mask he always wore slipped completely off his face. He looked wrecked. Not angry. Wrecked, like a man who'd said that same sentence to me before and watched it fail every single time.

"You're a liar," I said, even though some small, stupid, traitorous part of me wasn't sure I believed it anymore. "Or you're sick. I don't know which one scares me more."

I shoved the paper back into his hands and pushed past him out of the tent, needing air, needing distance, needing anything that wasn't the way he looked at me like I'd just broken something he couldn't fix.

Behind me, he didn't call out. He didn't chase me down like he had that first night by the wall.

He just said, so quietly I almost missed it, "You did this exact thing last time too."

I stopped walking.

Not because of the words. Because of how tired he sounded saying them, tired in a way that had nothing to do with one bad week and everything to do with living the same fight over and over until it wore a groove into him.

I turned around to tell him that wasn't fair, that he didn't get to make me feel guilty for not believing something impossible.

His tent flap was open. He wasn't inside it.

On his cot, sitting in plain sight where anyone walking by could have seen it, was a photograph.

Of me.

Not from this week. Not from camp. I was younger in it, maybe sixteen, standing at the base of a cliff I didn't recognize, wearing a jacket I remembered owning years before I ever heard the name, El Coronel.

I had never met Kester Hale before four days ago.

So how did he have a picture of me from a mountain neither of us had ever climbed together, taken before he could have possibly known I existed?

My hands were shaking when I picked it up. On the back, in the same pencil handwriting as the storm chart, somebody had written a date.

It was nine years old.

The same year my father died on El Coronel.