One by One(94)

Snoopscribers: 10

The sound when she hits is like nothing else I’ve ever heard.

It is the sound of skis snapping and bones breaking. It’s the sound of flesh hitting rock.

It’s wet and yielding, and it’s hard as stone all at once.

Was she wearing a helmet? Was she wearing a helmet?

There is silence. Total, unbroken silence.

“Liz?” I call shakily, but there is no answer, not even a whimper.

I try to stand, but I can’t. Pain roars up and down my leg and my ankle gives way.

I crouch on the snow, hunched on my side, trying not to throw up with the pain.

I know I should leave her, but I can’t do that either.

I think of Danny’s words before he left. I know you… Don’t be starting up with the bleeding-heart crap. Put yourself first.

And I know he’s right. But I can’t do it. I can’t leave her there to die, like Alex, like Will, alone in the snow.

I take off my poles. I unclip my ski boots from their bindings, and then I get onto my hands and knees and I begin to crawl, back up the pass, towards the turn.





LIZ


Snoop ID: ANON101

Listening to: Offline

Snoopers: 0

Snoopscribers: 1





ERIN


Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Offline Snoopers: 5

Snoopscribers: 10

When I get there, the silence is complete.

Liz is lying on her side at the foot of the cliff, a crumpled heap of red, white, and blue. The blue is her jumpsuit, the white is the snow, and the red… the red is everywhere.

She has been bleeding out over the snow, but it has stopped now. In the time it took me to crawl the twenty feet back up the pass, Liz has died. There is no breath coming from between her broken lips. When I put my fingers to the side of her neck, the skin is warm and slick with blood, but there is no pulse, not even a flicker.

For a minute I think about trying the impossible—chest compressions, mouth-to-mouth… but when I turn her very gently onto her back, what I see makes me fall back, choked with horror. The left-hand side of her skull is smashed in like an egg, and there is brain matter on the snow.

I feel faintness wash over me, a great wave of revulsion and nausea that leaves me crouched and rocking on the ground, hugging my own knees, a tearing sound in my ears that I know must be my own sobs, but which sound like they are coming from someone else completely.

I don’t know how much time passes. I only know that two things shake me out of my catatonic despair.

The first is that the sun is beginning to come up. The ravine is too deep for the rays to penetrate down here, but faint pink streaks of light are beginning to pattern the clouds above.

And the second… the second is that I can hear a buzzing.

For a minute I can’t think what it is. It sounds like a phone, but I don’t have one—my own phone is miles up in the mountains, back in Chalet Perce-Neige, with a battery as dead and cold as all the bodies Liz has left scattered behind her.

The buzzing stops, and then it starts again—and this time I realize. Liz. It’s coming from Liz’s pocket.

Her jumpsuit is soaked with frozen blood, but I know I have to do this, and I reach across, my arms stiff with cold, and touch her hip. I pull open the zip, my mittened fingers numb and clumsy, and something slithers out onto the snow, something bright as a jewel, with a jangling sound that makes tears start to my eyes.

It’s Elliot’s phone.

It is ringing.

And the caller is Danny.





ERIN


Snoop ID: LITTLEMY

Listening to: Pixies / Where Is My Mind

Snoopers: 8

Snoopscribers: 151

I don’t know how long I lay there, side by side with Liz in the slushy puddle of her fast-freezing blood. I only know that when the rescuers finally trekked up the gorge with their stretchers, I was almost hypothermic, and I couldn’t answer their questions.

It was Danny who kept me going through those long hours, his voice in my ear, talking, talking, telling me that they were on their way, that I just had to hang on, not to give up. But when the rescue party finally arrived and pried the phone from my frozen mitten, slicked over with a sheen of bloody ice, he couldn’t tell them what had happened either.

It wasn’t until two days later that I was finally able to piece it together for them—explain the abandoned chalet, the cryptic texts, and headlong flight down the treacherous couloir. But even I couldn’t explain everything. Because, how do you explain someone like Liz?

To explain is to assign a reason for something, to make sense of behavior, to justify it, in a way.

And I cannot, will not justify what Liz did.

I am discharged from hospital after a few days, but I can’t go home. Partly because I don’t want to—I am twenty-two. I don’t want to go back to my childhood bedroom, with its posters of long-forgotten bands, and its photographs, Will and Alex permanent ghosts hovering just out of the corner of my eye.

But partly because I literally can’t. The police haven’t finished processing the crime scene that Perce-Neige has become, and they’ve asked everyone concerned to remain in the area, at least until their preliminary investigations are complete. We aren’t suspects—at least, I don’t think we are, so there’s nothing legally preventing us from returning to the UK. But it would look very bad to be impeding the investigation, and everyone knows that.