Chapter Twelve
I needn’t have worried about being in close quarters with Luke: Global’s large size and the separation of the four different teams into sub-camps made it so Luke and I wouldn’t cross paths that much. In fact, in the past twenty-four hours we hadn’t crossed paths at all. I was content to let this be, but at the same time, I couldn’t stop replaying the expressions on his face at lunch yesterday. No matter how well everything else was going, I would not be at ease working for Global Adventurers until I patched things up between us.
I’d spent the rest of yesterday moving into my Global tent and filling out new-hire paperwork with the base camp manager. Today, I’d been stuck in the command center tent all morning, going through a mandatory company training, followed by a live-chat session with the human resources department to set up my accounts and finish the hiring process.
It was midafternoon by the time I caught up with the rest of the expedition out at the Nuptse ice field. All forty clients and a few of the yellow-jacketed guides were fanned out across the slope practicing self-arrests with their ice axes. Some of the Walkabout crew were out on the slope with cameras, and their big drone was flying overhead.
I walked toward the circle of guides gathered at the edge of the slope. Even though I now wore a handsome new Yellow Yeti jacket like the rest of them, it was going to take a long time to kick this feeling of joining a circus on opening day instead of traveling and training with the crew. Luke, I noticed, was not in the circle.
“Welcome to Global, Emily,” said a man with a blond beard who was standing next to Norbu, the sirdar. “I’m Thom, the lead on-mountain guide.” Unlike Winslowe Expeditions, where Dad was a part of the summit team, at Global, Jim stayed down in Base Camp to keep command and control of all four teams, hence the on-mountain lead guide position.
Thom introduced me to the rest of the guides and Sherpas in the huddle. It was one big blur of men in yellow jackets. By the time he finished, I was seeing double.
Literally.
Tyler, the last guy introduced, could be Thom’s twin.
The man next to me laughed. He was the one I would be able to remember—Luke’s behemoth friend who Thom had introduced as Hulk. Like me, he was one of the A-Team guides.
“Yes, they’re twins,” Hulk whispered as I looked back and forth between Thom and Tyler. “Tyler guides A-Team with us.”
Of the Sherpas who were standing in the group, there were two Phurbas, plus a Dawa Lama and Ang Dawa. I’d have to ask the base camp manager for a roster to help me memorize names and faces.
“Phurba Sherpa is with A-Team, too,” Hulk said, indicating the younger of the Phurbas, the one with the megawatt grin and the NASCAR bandana around his neck. “Phurba Lama is with the UW team.”
I nodded to the Phurbas, then listened to the guys’ conversation for a while as I scanned across the hill to figure out which of the guides up there was Luke. He was the one farthest from us, going over the avalanche probing steps with a bunch of purple-hatted clients.
“Are all four groups going to be together on the mountain like this when we start rotations?” I asked Hulk.
“Kind of. The Cuban team will always be first because their climbers are fast and that keeps everyone else out of the way so the Walkabout crew can get their shots. The fourth team is the low-support group. They paid less, have fewer guides, and operate independently, though still under Jim’s watch. A-Team and the UW team are the ones that have the most overlap on the mountain.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught one of the clients sprinting down the slope and then jumping onto his bottom to go flying the rest of the way down the hill. I panicked for a second because he didn’t have an ice ax in his hands, but then I realized his yells were more like whoops, and he was doing it on purpose. He was glissading, which is basically sledding without a sled. He wasn’t gaining speed this way, so he tried rolling over to his stomach, looking like a penguin on a Slip ’N Slide.
If he had been trying to show off for the drone that had been overhead, it didn’t work, because the minute he started messing around, the drone flew in the opposite direction.
“Meet Glen,” Hulk said, nodding toward the client. “He’s on A-Team.”
“Glissading Glen,” I said.
“Yep, that pretty much says it.”
Hulk pointed out a few of the other A-Team clients, starting with the group of four businessmen who were all on second or third attempts to climb Everest. And then there was John Smith, which Hulk pronounced Johnsmith, who was “somehow related” to Global Adventurers’s chief financial officer. Old Man Phil was the only client up on the hill who seemed to be taking the exercise seriously. “Cancer survivor,” Hulk said. “He’s a little off, but a nice guy, and he’s worked hard to get here.”
Jim arrived then from Base Camp and gathered everyone in. After a break to reapply sunscreen, he talked the clients through what to do if they fell into a crevasse while on the fixed line. Each of us guides took three clients and spread out along a practice crevasse that, unlike most real crevasses, had an actual bottom. While the clients put on their harnesses, I twisted some ice screws into the glacier and set up an anchor.
Luke’s group was one away from mine, and I stealthily watched him for a minute as he finished building his group’s anchor.
I guess I wasn’t as stealthy as I thought because he looked directly at me. And even though his dark, side-paneled glacier sunglasses blocked his eyes completely, there was no mistaking that the anger was still there. My stomach churned.
I tried to catch Luke after we finished crevasse rescue practice, but he jetted out ahead with Hulk and Thom. I then tried to approach him after he filled his plate for dinner, but he pointedly walked in the opposite direction and went to sit with Glissading Glen at a two-person table.
Now I was back in my tent, sick with the knowledge that not crossing paths with Luke yesterday had not been coincidence but purposeful on his part. It made perfect sense for him to be mad. He shouldn’t have had to find out about me working for Global from Jim’s public announcement; he was my friend, and I should have made an effort to tell him as soon as I got the job despite being embarrassed about how I’d acted in his tent. Tomorrow at daybreak we’d both be at Global’s puja ceremony. I’d catch him afterward, even if it meant doing something extreme to get him to talk to me.
I turned off my headlamp, but I was too restless to sleep, so I flipped over onto my back and stared up into the dark of the tent. The inside of this tent was exactly the same as my tent with Winslowe Expeditions, down to the clothesline of pictures across the ceiling and the waxed lettuce-box shelves. I should feel as much at home here as I did there. But I didn’t. Not with unfamiliar clients in the tents surrounding me and my peers being guides I’d never been on a mountain with before. Not with that huge and intimidating main tent being the place where I’d be eating all meals when we were in Base Camp. And especially not while Luke was angry with me.
Tonight, I was as alone as after Amy’s arrest, when the police had delivered me to that cold cement building with the metal bunk beds.
I felt around for my jacket and the front pocket where I kept my knife. On the end of the knife, looped through the eyehole at the bottom, was the very bracelet Luke had made me the day of the earthquake. I’d tied it there when it had fallen off.
I pulled the knife into my sleeping bag with me, twisting my fingers around and around the familiar cord. And that night, like so many others, I fell asleep thinking about what might have happened between the two of us if not for the earthquake.