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She wakes up, in the end.
For the first five seconds, it’s a beautiful feeling. Lingering in the warm safety of a fading dream. Then there’s dread, then pain, then anguish. The world so bright it burns her eyes, her face half numb, half chapped and searing. Underneath that, an awful tingling that makes her want to claw her skin off to scrape it out, but her fingers are rigid sticks pawing dumbly at her jaw until she tries to flex them, and feels their insides crack like a glowstick about to ignite. Only there’s no chemiluminescence, then. Just a new, nerve-deep pain. Radiating. Almost… warm.
She wasn’t supposed to wake up. Not here, not now, not like this. Not after everything it took to reach this godforsaken summit. Up here, it was finally supposed to end. There would be nothing else to want, nothing else to see, nothing left to push and push and push until the version of her she was at sea level was being driven mad with it, the ever present calling, the song playing behind one ear, the constant need to go.
But now she’s awake, in blinding daylight, in every kind of pain, on top of Kami.
And the feeling is still there.
She tries to let out another scream, but nothing comes—just tiny vertical tears opening in bursts of pain across more of her chapped and ragged lips and a feeling at the back of her throat like exhaling fire.
What now?
She can’t lie here like this in the snow, not with that feeling riding her, no more than she ever could commit to lying still next to Naomi each night for the rest of forever. Eventually, she’d always take out her bag. Pack up her tent and go.
But she can’t go anywhere from here. Her body is all but out of commission. Climbot can’t drag her down a descent. There’s no help coming, no one to retrieve so much as one desperately-placed piton.
Even as she thinks all of these fatal things, Aava rolls onto her knees in the snow.
Her head spins and thunders. There’s more pain. Nausea. More alarming tingles and an alarming lack thereof in equal concerning measures, various bits of the body which brought her here protesting or having already surrendered the fight. It is impossible to think what comes next, but it isn’t impossible to kneel.
It isn’t impossible to stand.
Climbot’s broken body rattles as it rolls away from her, teetering against the nearest drift-covered ridge cradling it back from gravity. She takes one step forward. Sways at the edge of the abyss. The world is a sea of clouds by daylight. A soft, welcoming thing. A different ending than the one she’d dreamt last night, but, surely, an ending. An answer. One more thing she could easily do.
But to end falling, after all this?
The clouds swell and move and breathe.
Is there anything else, anything at all, she’d ever wanted from reaching this peak?
Can’t this be enough? Surely this has to be enough?
Her bag weighs heavy on her shoulders, now that she’s up off the snow. Twice as heavy as she remembers, for the escape velocity of her intervening dream. It hadn’t been a burden then, when she’d been a thing of light. It shouldn’t be one now: It’s all but empty.
Although…
She shrugs it around to one shoulder, the motion almost enough to unbalance her after all, send her plummeting off the edge of the ice. With a pained gasp and a half-step back, she regains her footing, panting, shuffling her heels until she’s planted firmly in the snow. Then, she forces her way through the flap by brute force, no chance of these fingers managing buckles right now.
Inside: crumpled trash, a three-quarters empty thermos, a few pills. Letters. Mementos. Memorials.
And fireworks.
She’s been telling herself she never really cared, if anyone knew. From the moment she destroyed the camera to the day she tore Climbot’s antennae off and flung it into the void, she’d always believed this summit was… just for her. It would be enough, just to stretch out her hand and touch it, even if just for a breath, a heartbeat, a moment.
Yet here these are. She’s had plenty of opportunities to use them. Plenty of reasons to toss them out, leave them behind. Did some part of her…
If she had cared, if she had wanted someone to know, wouldn’t she have done everything… differently? It’s her fault Climbot isn’t relaying her journey, telegraphing her location back to her team so they could have cheered, last night, taken her moment of triumph all while she was screaming. It’s her own fault she could never say those final words to—
But maybe it isn’t for them. Maybe it’s… those lights, on the other mountains. Those paper strips dangling from trees. Those shadowy paintings, carvings, statues. The people long gone and those still clinging to the inhospitable slopes of the upward world, determined to see it as a place for life, a living place, not an end.
Her fingers don’t care that her mind is made up; they’re in agony long before she’s lit the fuse, cracked nerve endings glowing like white-hot embers embedded in her skin. She lets out more than one silent scream of frustration before her trembling hands can finish the task, but the last of them tears from her throat with a real sound—just as the connection takes, flame leaping to string, eating it away until, a moment later, fierce sparks arc up into the dawn.
They aren’t very bright against the sun. Maybe below, no one will see them. Maybe down there, the sky is only cloud.
But for one more instant, she feels it. Relief. The calling ease.
She sinks to her knees again, presses her fists against them, and sobs.
Tears burn in her eyes. Salt burns in the snow-chapped, sun-scorched, wind-torn seams of her face, and then what little water she has in her to spare dries up, her mouth screaming for moisture in a way she hadn’t even noticed at the start of this pained re-entry into the world. Part of her wants to unhinge her jaw and take great gulping bites out of the snow.
She’s too cold for that.
And now she has thoughts, like that one. She’s awake. Alive. And she’s done something with it. The air smells of gunpowder. The wind hasn’t torn that away.
What do you do when there’s not another dream? When there’s only kneeling, standing, completing some task, accepting more of the same: the next day, the next climb, the next moment you’re supposed to keep on living despite knowing there’s no instant of eternity on the other side. Knowing you’ll never come so close to it again.
Why would you?
Beside her, Climbot has already accumulated a tiny drift of snow. She looks at it in its little burial shroud, and remembers another. A little blue bot with frozen circuits, all the way down among the green, in the place where she was born, where there isn’t even a thought of winter.
That feeling is rising again. Clawing. Scratching. Screaming.
Calling. Singing.
Whispering in her ear, “What if you can do more?”
Eventually, Aava unearths a hand-sized rock with her numb, bruised toes. She places it atop Climbot, securing it as best she can in the drifts at the edge of the world. Then she remounts her backpack, turns, and faces down her own wavering path in the snow.