Chapter 1: Suspended Animation
The wind bit through the layers of Gore-Tex and fleece, a sharp, insistent teeth that found every gap. Valerie grinned into it, the cold flushing her cheeks. Below, the pristine white slope carved its way between dark pines, empty and waiting.
“Last run of the day,” Mark shouted over the gale, his voice muffled by his scarf. “You sure your legs are up for it? Not too… brittle?”
“Ha,” Valerie said, shifting in the worn vinyl seat of the chairlift. The safety bar was a cold, reassuring press against her thighs. “The doctor cleared me last week. Said the bones are stronger than ever. Something about… compensatory density.” She thumped her right thigh with a mittened fist. “See? Fully operational. No more casts, no more crutches. Just… me.”
The chairlift gave a metallic groan, the sound shuddering up through the frame and into their seats. It was an old double, painted a cheerful red that was flecked and bleeding rust. The cable above them, thick as a wrist, swayed gently.
“This thing sounds like my granddad’s knees,” Mark observed, peering up at the fraying steel.
“It’s character,” Valerie insisted, leaning out to look down at the dizzying drop. The rocks below were pillows of snow, the jagged edges softened but not hidden. “Adds to the adventure. After the year I’ve had, a little creaking is nothing.”
Her year. It had started with a twisted ankle from a misjudged curb, graduated to a broken wrist from a spectacularly failed attempt at rollerblading, and peaked with a spiraling fracture of the tibia from a seemingly innocuous slip on a wet kitchen floor. Each accident had been met with her relentless, buoyant optimism. Just a detour, she’d say. Builds character, she’d insist, smiling from a new nest of pillows as Mark delivered another stack of terrible movies.
The lift climbed past the last of the lower pines. The wind picked up, howling now through the skeletal stands of trees at the treeline. It carried a scent—pine, yes, but underneath it, the dry, metallic smell of old snow and something else, like ozone after a lightning strike.
“Smells weird up here,” Mark said, wrinkling his nose.
“Smells like victory,” Valerie declared. “I’m telling you, Mark. This is the turnaround. Back on the horse. Or, you know, the skis.”
She was still smiling when the lift jerked.
It wasn’t a smooth stop. It was a violent, lurching halt that slammed the safety bar into their stomachs. The entire frame shuddered, and a series of alarming bangs echoed down the line from the motor house far below. Then silence, broken only by the moan of the wind.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Valerie muttered.
They swung gently, sixty feet above a particularly nasty-looking boulder field. The chairs ahead and behind were empty. The mountain below was deserted, the last of the daylight beginning to bleed from the sky.
“Okay,” Mark said, his voice carefully calm. “Okay. It’ll restart. They probably just need to clear something from the line.”
Valerie shifted, trying to peer down the mountain. The movement was slight, but the chair swayed. The safety bar, that cold tube of painted steel pressed against her legs, gave a quiet, high-pitched ping.
Neither of them spoke.
Then, with a sound like a tired sigh, the latch mechanism gave way. The bar snapped upward, swinging open and away, leaving them exposed to the vast, empty air.
Valerie’s stomach dropped faster than the chair ever could. Instinctively, she flailed, her upper body tipping forward. The sudden shift of weight was all wrong.
Mark’s hand shot out, a blur of black glove, and fisted itself in the bulky fabric of her jacket collar. He hauled back, his own weight counterbalancing hers. “Don’t move!” he barked, the calm gone from his voice.
She froze, suspended partly by the seat, partly by his white-knuckled grip on her collar. Her skis, still pointed at the distant slope below, felt suddenly like incredibly heavy pendulums.
“Just sit back,” Mark whispered, each word tight. “Easy. Easy.”
Valerie tried. She willed her muscles to relax, to lean back into the seat. It was a minute adjustment.
The sound it made was not loud. It was a dry, decisive snap, like stepping on a thick branch hidden under frozen snow. It came from inside her, a vibration more than a noise. For a split second, she felt nothing. Then the pain arrived, a white-hot iron jamming itself up through her thigh, searing into her hip. A sharp, wounded gasp escaped her.
Her right leg, the one she’d thumped with such confidence, collapsed outward, bending at a nauseating, impossible angle.
The sudden, dead weight of it was the final trigger. The toes of her ski boots, still locked into the bindings, twisted. The bindings, designed to release under force, did their job with perfect, brutal efficiency.
POP. POP.
Two dull, mechanical thuds. Her skis, with her boots still attached, pinwheeled away into the void below, clattering against the rocks before disappearing into a deep drift.
Valerie was now dangling by one hand. Mark’s grip on her collar, and the tense press of her own legs against the seat were all that kept her from following her skis.
She hung there, one leg bent normally under her, the other splayed and useless, a firework of agony exploding in rhythmic waves from her femur. The world narrowed to the ache in Mark’s arm, the bite of the wind on her exposed face, and the distant, mocking beauty of the sunset.
“Val,” Mark grunted, his face pale. “Listen to me. You are not going to fall. I am not letting go. Do you hear me?”
Tears streamed from her eyes, freezing instantly on her cheeks. She tried to nod. A sob hitched in her throat, which she forced into something like a laugh. It came out as a strangled croak. “Compensatory… density,” she managed to wheeze.
“Shut up,” he said, but there was no heat in it, only terror. He was scanning the slope below, his breath pluming in frantic clouds. “Help! Hey! Someone!”
Minutes bled together, measured in heartbeats and the creak of the stationary chair. The pain was a living thing, gnawing at the edges of her consciousness. Just as the cold began to seep into her bones, a new sound cut through the wind: the deep-throated growl of a snowmobile.
A Ski Patrol sled emerged from the trees below, carving a swift path toward the rocks beneath their chair. The driver killed the engine. A figure in a red jacket and helmet looked up, shielding his eyes.
“Hey!” Mark screamed, voice raw. “Up here! She’s falling!”
The patroller waved an acknowledgment. He didn’t yell questions. He simply turned and unlatched a small, heavy-looking sled being towed behind the snowmobile. He began pulling equipment out.
Valerie, hazily watching through a glaze of pain, saw it. A bulky, white, wheeled cart. She recognized the shape, the purpose of it from the many hours spent in hospital corridors. It was a plaster cart, loaded with rolls of casting material, bandages, and buckets.
A fresh, hysterical bubble of laughter choked her. She’d joked about it with Mark in the lodge, sipping cocoa. Better not break anything, they’ve got the plaster cart warmed up.
The patroller looked up again, his movements methodical, prepared, and utterly without surprise. He gave them a thumbs-up.
Mark’s grip tightened on her collar. “Hold on, Val,” he whispered, his eyes locked on the patroller now unpacking a backboard and a rope system. “The cavalry’s here.”
Valerie looked down at the patroller, then at the wrong angle of her own leg, and finally back at Mark. The optimism, that stubborn, fearless flame, guttered low, smothered by the sheer, ridiculous weight of what was happening. It wasn’t gone. But for the first time, it felt thin.
“Oh,” she said quietly, the word lost to the wind. “He’s got the cart.”
The wind seemed to still for a second, holding its breath. Mark’s arm burned with the strain, muscles trembling as he fought gravity and Valerie’s dead weight. Below, the patroller—a guy with a calm, bearded face—was swiftly assembling a rope and harness system, his movements efficient, almost rehearsed.
“Okay!” the patroller yelled up, his voice cutting through the groan of the cables. “I’m coming up! Just hold on! Don’t move!”
“Not… going… anywhere,” Mark grunted through clenched teeth, his smile a grimace of effort.
Valerie focused on his face, on the freckle just below his left eye. It was better than focusing on the dizzying drop, or the wrongness of her leg, or the plaster cart. She could see it so clearly from here: the pristine white rolls of fiberglass, the buckets, the shears. A whole little mobile fracture unit. Just for her.
“Hey,” she whispered, her voice shaky. “At least… he’s prepared.”
“Only you,” Mark panted, “could look at a disaster and see… good customer service.”
There was a sharp zing and a thud. A weighted rope shot up past them, arced over the cable above their chair, and fell back down. The patroller caught it, quickly attaching a complex harness and a second, thicker line. He began threading it through.
“Almost there!” he called.
The harness inched its way up the cable toward them, a promise of solid ground. Valerie felt a sliver of that old, stubborn hope wedge itself into the panic. See? Help. Systems. They had protocols for this.
The harness reached their level, dangling just beyond Mark’s reach. He needed to let go of her collar to grab it.
“Val,” he said, his eyes locked on hers. “I’m gonna grab that. It’ll be two seconds. You have to hold on to the seat with everything you’ve got. Just two seconds.”
She nodded, a sharp, jerky motion. Using her good leg and her one free hand, she wedged herself as best she could against the cold vinyl. The pressure sent a fresh lance of nausea through her from the other leg. “Ready,” she breathed.
Mark took a deep breath. “Now!”
He released her collar.
For a glorious, terrible fraction of a second, she held. Her fingers clawed into the seat edge. Her good leg pressed down.
Then the chair, as if offended by the sudden shift in weight, gave a violent, sideways shudder.
Valerie’s frozen, pain-shocked muscles betrayed her. Her grip slipped.
She didn’t scream. There was no time. There was only the sudden, silent lurch into empty space, the world tilting, Mark’s horrified face receding above her, his hand outstretched but already too far away.
The sixty feet wasn’t a fall. It was a swift, hard pull by an invisible giant.
She hit the deep snowdrift that had swallowed her skis with a sound like a giant pillow being ripped apart. The air exploded from her lungs in a white cloud. The impact was immense, a full-body slam that jarred every bone, that drowned the specific fire in her femur in a tsunami of blunt, general agony.
Instinct took over. A survival reflex as old as bipedalism. As she crashed through the snow crust and into the softer powder beneath, her body tried to right itself, tried to find footing, to stand up from the catastrophe.
Her left leg, her good leg, snapped down, searching for purchase.
It found only the hidden, unforgiving surface of a glacial rock beneath the three-foot drift.
The sound was different this time. Not a dry snap, but a damp, solid crunch, like a celery stalk wrapped in wet cloth. It vibrated up through her skeleton into her teeth.
The pain was immediate and spectacular, a twin to the first, a symphony of ruin. She didn’t black out. She wished she would. She simply lay splayed in the crater of snow, looking up at the pale evening sky, at the still, dangling chairlift, at Mark’s tiny, silhouetted head poking over the edge. The cold seeped through her clothes, a shocking contrast to the white-hot lines of pain radiating from both legs.
A groan escaped her, long and low and utterly drained.
Boots crunched through snow. The patroller’s face appeared above her, blocking out the sky. His calm professionalism had cracked. His eyes were wide. “Holy shit,” he breathed, the words clouding in the cold air.
Valerie blinked up at him. She heard Mark screaming her name from above, the sound thin and distant. She focused on the patroller’s beard, on a single, crystallized droplet of ice caught in it.
She moved her head slightly, a weak nod toward the white, wheeled cart a few yards away. Her voice, when it came, was a raspy, broken thing, but it carried a flicker of her old, beleaguered spirit.
“Told you,” she whispered, a trickle of blood from a split lip staining the snow. “You’d… need the cart.”