Chapter 7: Day 6 - Drama Uncontrolled
The air at Karanga was thin and carried a permanent chill, but the camp itself felt like a bustling frontier town compared to the barren heights of Barranco. The mess tent buzzed with a nervous energy. Summit night was a spectre haunting every conversation. Eli stood before them, his face grave in the lantern light.
“This is where the mountain wins or loses,” he said, his voice low. “Tonight, you rest. Truly rest. Tomorrow is a short walk to Barafu—the base camp. Then you sleep a few hours, and at midnight, you begin. You will walk for six, seven, maybe eight hours in complete darkness, with only your headlamp. You will question every life choice that brought you here.”
A nervous laugh rippled through the group. Julie caught Mark’s eye across the tent. The memory of his body against hers in the sleeping bag, the raw, whispered words on the windy plateau, was a live wire between them. The promise of another night in their private tent was the only thing making the looming summit feel possible.
Then Claire cleared her throat. She had been unusually quiet, picking at her rehydrated beef stew. “Eli,” she said, her voice strained but polite. “I have a request. For the final nights… I’d like my tent back. With Tim.” She didn’t look at Tim, who stared fixedly at his hands. “We’ve… talked. And we think it’s best if we stay apart from here on out.”
The silence was absolute. The crackle of the gas lantern sounded like gunfire.
Julie felt the bottom drop out of her stomach. Mark’s fork clattered softly against his plate.
Eli blinked, processing. This lady was killing him. “This is… unconventional,” he said slowly. “We already changed everything once for you…”
“I’ll help them switch,” Mark said, his voice unexpectedly firm, cutting through the tension. He offered a tight smile. “No trouble. I understand.”
The meal ended in a muffled, awkward shuffle. Outside, the African night was a vault of stars, so immense it felt suffocating. Julie helped Mark and a porter disassemble their green dome. Their hands brushed as they folded the stiff fabric, a touch that now felt illicit.
“Well,” Mark muttered, heaving the bundle into the porter’s arms. “This is a plot twist.”
“Did you see his face?” Julie whispered, nodding toward Tim, who was standing miserably outside his original tent. “He looks like a man marching to the gallows.”
“Maybe he is,” Mark said. There was no humour in it.
Later when she was packing her stuff “I feel like a teenager who just got caught,” Julie said, sitting on her pad.
Mark sighed, a long, weary sound. “I feel like a teenager who just had his favourite toy taken away.”
She threw a sock at him. It missed, landing softly on the tent floor. The feeble joke broke the dam.
“What are we doing, Mark?” she asked, her voice small.
He lay back, staring at the dark ceiling of his tent. “Surviving. Until tomorrow night. Then… I don’t know. Climbing a mountain in the dark, apparently.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“I know.”
"We'll find something"
Her new tent was identical, but it felt foreign. It smelled of Tim now. And maybe of sex too. They unrolled their sleeping pads in silence, the space between them feeling like a canyon. The intimacy of the past two nights now seemed like a dream, severed by Claire’s polite, devastating request.