It wasn’t the ascent of Mount Everest that took my breath away, it was the suffocating pressure of breaking a record.. The title of “First Chinese National To Reach The Summit” had been taken, of course—something my mother never ceased to remind me of. However, the record for the first Chinese national to reach the summit without oxygen was still ripe for the taking. To my family, it was the only acceptable consolation prize. 

Andrew was eager to be a part of my ‘historical feat’ and had bankrolled the entire trip a few months prior, in exchange for being in the picture on the front page.

“Shi, if we don’t take our chances now, we’ll regret it. We’ll be old men before long, mate!” He slapped me on the back, the force of it ringing through me. Andrew was the bigger one between the two of us. 

We had met at the base camp of Kilimanjaro the previous Spring. He was fresh off a climb at Aconcagua in South America; I’d just climbed Denali in North America. He still had that ruddy tan that rubied the top of his cheeks, his golden curls and whiter-than-white teeth blinded. He had a rakish, debonair charm that was hard to ignore, and we bonded quickly over our time in the Americas.

“Argentina, mate,” he sighed, resting his hand on my shoulder. His grip was firm, his thumb pressed through my skin, near straight to the bone. “The place changes you. When I stood on that summit looking out at the sunset I thought, ‘Andrew, mate, you’re the luckiest man in the world’. And you know what, Shi?”

“What?”

“I was. Half of those sherpas think you’re a god if you share a scrap of rations with them. And there I was, jetting back to London in Business Class the next day. Ha-haw!”

The term ‘sherpas’ grated my nerves. Anyone privileged enough to take their cultural cues from Hollywood movies like ‘Everest’ were hard to stomach. It reduced native guides, like those from Solu-Khumbu, to a single unrepresentative character. When I climbed Lobuche East as a beginner, I socialized with many of the locals, who much preferred a tea-house or office suite to the summit of a glacial giant. When I tried to explain to Andrew how his oversimplification of such disparate cultures could embarrass us in front of the climbing guides who were responsible for our lives, he ruffled my hair and chuckled. For all his faults, he was still a good man at heart.

Growing up on the outskirts of Beijing, I knew poverty. Not the romanticized, gritty struggle of a Western novel, but the flat, grey kind thrust upon you by the communist regime. Ten people to a room, the air thick with the smell of coal dust and stinky tofu: the background smell of China. Anything your ancestors had owned—everything from jade pendants to the dirt beneath their fingernails—now belonged to the State. In those crowded tenements, you learned the most important lesson of survival: you don’t complain. Silence wasn’t just a virtue. It was a shield. You never knew which neighbour was hungry enough to trade your frustrations and your family’s dignity for an extra 10,000 RMB. 

Andrew, I supposed, had never known a moment of true silence in his life. His world was a constant roar of praise, engines, and ambition. Watching him, I began to understand silence differently. To him, it was a void to be filled. 

“You climbed anything I would have heard of?” Andrew dug at something in his teeth with his tongue.

“I did Ojos del Salado a few months ago. Largest volcano in the world.”

“6,893 metres.” He smirked. “Aconcagua is 6,961.”

Apparently, I couldn’t escape the one-upping even in the West. We called that shǒuzú zhī zhēng back home: the fighting between hands and feet. What belongs naturally together will find conflict, like siblings. My older brother is a doctor in Shanghai; my sister, a high-ranking barrister in Hong Kong. They had clawed their way out of the faceless tenements and turned poverty into prestige, taking us with them, and my parents never let me forget it.

When I was eight, I loitered around a local basketball ‘court’ whilst my mā picked up my siblings from tutoring. The orange ring hung naked, unnetted and rusted; the wooden backboard rotted inwards on itself. We couldn’t afford a ball, so I crumpled up my homework and threw it, ding thump, ding thump, ding thump at the ancient thing and it would splinter cracks of applause at me. If I was taller, I might have gone into professional basketball; instead, climbing came easier to me.

“Did you see me shoot in the hoop three times in a row, mā?” I implored, tugging at her sleeve as we marched home.

She ignored me all the way, tightening her grip on my wrist until my hand paled. My siblings walked in an orderly line behind us.

When we arrived, mā chastised me for embarrassing the family; Ms Su Zhen could have seen and the neighbours would say her son was a xióng háizi wild bear kid who had no respect, and without respect I would never be a CEO. Through stuttered inhales, I told her I didn’t want to work in an office, so she pulled my hair and washed my mouth out with soap for nearly an hour and my brother giggled in the doorway.

“Shù shù kǒu, shù shù kǒu, shù shù kǒu!”

Wash your mouth, wash your mouth, wash your mouth.

To my mother, “good” became merely a baseline and my life became a losing battle. If I brought home a Nobel Prize she’d ask why it wasn’t a diamond.

If Andrew needed 100 metres, he could have them. I didn’t need the glory. I needed to prove my athletic dedication was just as worthy as their intellectual ones. I needed the distance. I needed to be so far above the expectations of my family that the air became too thin for their disappointment to follow me. 

Everest was my diamond.

I didn’t realize yet what it would cost me. 

####

Picking up a third member hadn’t been part of the strategy; it was an accident of personality. Andrew, who was never quiet and rarely disciplined, had a predictable weakness for befriending any woman with a story. We had found Anjali in a London pub, leaning over a pockmarked table and telling the tale of her failed attempt to climb Everest the previous season with a fierce vigour to some college students who were kindly nodding, but also clearly nodding off.

Andrew, never one to let a vacuum of attention go unfilled, had moved in immediately. He loved a story and couldn’t resist sharing expedition tales, and by the third round of pints he had invited the dejected Anjali to join us. She couldn’t help but barrel into her story, an adorable beer froth moustache framed by golden dimples. 

“—Yeah, it was such a bummer! A meteor crashing straight into the side of the mountain, what were the chances? Got denied ‘cause of avalanche risks, yada yada.” She wiped her mouth with her hand. “The group just ahead of us were already halfway up when it happened.”

“That’s so unlucky.” I murmured.

“Right? What I wouldn’t give to be the first person up that mountain when they reopen the routes and get my hands on that rock. A woman in Michigan sold a piece of meteor for a hundred grand!”

I felt small sitting between them, upstaged by their shared frequency. Like the company of my brother and sister, I was currently the ‘extra’ in their shared stories of magnificence. If I wanted to outdo my siblings, I couldn’t just yield in this trio. I would have to rise to the occasion.

“Did that group get back down safely?” I asked, my voice wobbled. I cleared my throat.

“They must’ve. Didn’t hear anything about it in the news or nothin’.”

“Avalanche warnings? Bunch of bull, if you ask me. It’s the katabatic winds you need to look out for. Those sting. Could take your eyebrows off.” Andrew grabbed a handful of nuts from the bowl on the table. “So I’ve heard.”

“Maybe they never found ‘em. Just vanished into thin air. It happens.” Anjali shrugged.

Andrew puffed out his chest and spat through a mouthful of Nobby’s finest brazil nuts, “The mountain gives, but the mountain taketh away.” 

“Indeed.” I muttered, raising my eyebrows at Anjali. She giggled.

I knew the climb would be a challenge. What I didn’t know was that the higher we climbed, the more I would love her. And I certainly didn’t know that love was just one more thing the mountain would eventually demand I leave behind.

####

With logistics sorted and permits secured, Andrew, Anjali, and myself trekked to Base Camp from Lukla, where we’d meet our climbing guide. Anjali had bought me new hiking boots for my birthday. She told me to work them in a few weeks before we got our flight to Nepal. I didn’t have time, but I wanted to wear them to show her I appreciated them. 

From the dusty, wind-scoured outpost of Gorak Shep, the trail to Everest’s Base Camp snaked across the shifting, rock-strewn surface of the Khumbu Glacier. It was not a smooth path, boots constantly rising and falling over glacial moraines that groaned underfoot, I tried not to stare into the fractured sapphire veins along its glassy skin.

My big toe, heel, and the side of my foot were already burning and my vision paled as the snowpack pinched at me. Anjali looked back in my direction, her almond eyes creased as she gave me a reassuring smile and a swollen gloved attempt at a thumbs up. I gnashed a wide simper, a stinging grimace. I hoped she couldn’t tell. A knot formed in my stomach, the same one that always does when I’m hiding pain. I’d known it since I was ten in the alleyways of Hebei.

Bells clanged discordantly with the low hum of chanting, tolling me from my memory, as climbing guides ritually performed a Puja ceremony that took us over the last snowbank. Clouds roiled around sunbeams that set fire to a strange world of ice; I understood why gods of legend would choose mountains to perch upon as Everest shifted into a powdered sky. In the foreground, Anjali’s sable tresses shadowed her back. Everything stopped hurting.

We were the first ones to approach Everest since the route was reopened. Being the first trio to step onto the slopes after the route’s long closure wasn’t just an attempt at a record-breaking climb, it was an adrenaline-fueled reclamation of the mountain. Every frozen gust of wind coming off it was electric, charging us with the realization that we were moving through a pristine, untouched world that had been off-limits to humanity until this very morning.

As we stood at the threshold of the reopened route, the sight was jarringly beautiful. There were no notched lines of previous climbers, no muddied troughs, and—most strikingly—a solitary man.

“First ones!” his voice called.

We approached the figure waiting for us.

“Tashi Delek. Dawa.” A mittoned hand bounced off his padded coat breast. “Kasto cha?” A flat chapped nose peeked through a thick-lined hood. His tanned face was webbed with thin wrinkles that traced through full pale lips.

“Dawa? Nice to meet you.” I reached out to shake his hand, but Anjali grabbed my arm before I could get there. 

“We’re so excited! Thank you. We look forward to reaching the summit with you.” Anjali stuck out her palm and shook hands with Dawa.

“Ah-ha! Safe with me!” Dawa grinned and lifted both fists up in premature victory, before turning away to a nearby craft table to rummage through his backpack.

“What was that about?” I pulled at her arm, mimicking what she had done to me.

“Saving you from complete cultural ignorance, Shi.” Anjali grabbed my hand. I looked into her eyes, you could get stuck in those like honey. The air was just as thick. 

She continued, “It’s the right hand, silly. You shake with the right hand ‘round here. It’s the clean hand in himalayan culture.” 

“Not like this?” I held her left hand stacked on top of our still clasped right hands.

She chuckled. The warm kind, like the rumblings of rain or the nonsense of vocal jazz. I liked when I made her laugh.

“Not quite.”

“How are you feeling about the ascent tomorrow?” I asked.

“Nervous. In case it’s all a waste again. Also if we make it. Just because you get to the top doesn’t mean it’s over.”

“We’ll get you down.”

She leaned towards me and breathed, “I’ll get you down.”

A silhouette came crunching behind us. A strident raspy voice bellowed, “A’right, lovebirds, campfiresss’ready!”

Craning my neck, my body following, Andrew stood with his hands in bunched parka pockets. A fluffy hood framed giveaway blotchy red cheeks betraying a liaison with alcohol.

“Getting ahead of us, Andrew?”

“Eh, ‘sss-only Raksi.” He slurred.

“Only Raksi? That stuff’s the himalayan Moonshine.”

“S’alright, mate. ‘M just celebrating errly. Two best fr’nds conquering the beast sans oxygen together!” His voice lifted with his arm as he produced an empty disposable cup. 

“Okay, buddy, let’s get you sat down by that fire.”

I reached for his hand with my right.

He took it and we wandered slowly towards the warmth. Up the path, there was not a single footprint to mar the crystalline surface. It was as if the mountain had reset itself, offering us a blank, shimmering canvas, waiting for us to make the first mark.

####

Around the ‘campfire’, which was really just a small heater, the night sky felt impossibly close and decanted stars that spilled in an arc around us. Radios crackled and prayer flags snapped tightly in the wind. The tea in my metal mug steamed and warmed my hands.

“What are you going to do with the money, Anj? If you get a piece of that meteor.”

“Not if.” She retorted, “When.”

“Okay, when.”

“I’d like to settle down, have loads of kids. Being financially stable enough to do that isn’t exactly easy in this day and age.” The heat flushed her cheeks pink. “My Ma’s blood pressure would probably settle too if I stopped climbing.”

“Ah, yes, nothing like a few rambunctious grandkids to settle your blood pressure.” Andrew sputtered through a grin. Clearly he was feeling much better.

“What about you, Shi? Why take such a big risk? You don’t seem like the thrill-seeking type.” Anjali probed, ignoring Andrew.

“I’ve got the opposite problem, I’m trying to raise my mā’s blood pressure.” I let out a weak laugh. “My parents don’t take much interest in what I do. If it doesn’t require university then it’s no good.”

Andrew leant forward to squeeze my knee and his headlamp cast a golden halo above him onto the frost-furred fabric of our tent behind.

“Ah, mate. We’ll show them.” 

He carried on,  “As for me, thanks for asking, I want to fight the Yeti.”

Anjali and I raised our eyebrows and smiled at each other.

“Seriously, guys, it’s out there. They say he kidnaps lone climbers and takes them back to his cave for lunch. But have no fear, Andrew will protect you, I’ll be all bam-bam and he’ll be all aawwooough.”

“I didn’t realise Chewbacca was skiing in the mountains this time of year!” Anjali cried as we chuckled softly.

Laughter came easily, but as did silence.

Everest loomed over us, jagged and mammoth, faintly glowing from the light of the moon. My vision blurred as I ogled it, and shadows danced among the rocks.

Ascending and descending between Camp I and Camp II over a period of 2 weeks was laborious, especially for Andrew and I who were getting a sour foretaste for what the rest of the climb would be like without oxygen. Before sunrise, in pitch blackness, we would climb over tightly bound metal ladders to cross yawning crevasses just to set our tents down on moving sheets of ice and repeat it all again the next day. They call it the acclimatisation period. It gets your body used to the different altitudes, helps avoid Mountain Sickness, reduces your risk of dying—all that useful stuff. Our bodies were working harder than ever just to keep us alive.

When we reached Camp III, I noticed the tense pinch of my muscles. This was the highest altitude any of us had been at: 7,200 metres, and we’d have to camp on the steep face of The Lhotse. Our tents carved into the glacial wall and if it wasn’t for the fluffy apres-ski style mountain backdrop it would be indistinguishable from a littered New York pavement. 

The thin air was a combination of fuel and struggle. Looking down at the clouds drifting thousands of feet below, a fierce, soaring heat bloomed in my chest—it was the realization that the long shadow of my family’s skepticism was finally beginning to retreat. For years, I had been the underachiever, the one who didn’t quite fit the mold, but now I was perched on the edge of history. Every shallow breath I took was one step closer to a record that no one in my lineage could dismiss or claim for themselves. The summit wasn’t just a geographical point anymore, but the ultimate rebuttal. I could almost hear the silence that would fall over the dinner table when I returned, not just as a climber, but as the son who had survived the “Death Zone” to claim a title that was mine and mine alone. My pulse hammered against my ribs, a frantic, joyous rhythm that whispered: finally, they will see.

“You okay, Shi?” Andrew asked, his voice barely audible over the snapping fabric of the tent. I offered a sharp, silent nod.

Finally, they will see.

Crampons suck. They’re a torture rack for your feet. Metal spikes chained to the underside of your boot. Stops you from skidding on the ice, sure, but it’s a shame nobody has industrialised a sturdy pair of grippy slipper socks for mountaineering. I knelt down on one knee that cushioned into the thickly packed snow, and placed the front of my boot in the crampon. I tilted my chin up and lifted a few fingers to greet Andrew as he trundled by, my stomach felt queasy now the day had arrived, I had let him encourage this absurdity with such a paucity of information. My boot clunked into the heel piece and I felt around the rim to make sure there were no gaps between the crampon and my boot. I heard the lilt of Anjali’s voice chatting to Andrew and something jabbed my stomach. 

Was I being jealous? If Andrew and I were to share the feat of reaching the summit without oxygen then I had to keep up. More than that, I had to blaze the trail. The webbing strap was threaded through the front toe loop and into the rear heel bail, I yanked it tightly, as taut as a guitar string. I could feel the tension reverberating through my foot. Andrew had a rankling habit of making things about him, on this trip for his five minutes of fame, and for what? Not so he can say I did it, but so he can say he did. 

Aconcagua is 6,961.

I stood up and stamped my crampons, my left landed with a dull clink, the right with a stifled thud, spraying white shards from under me like a regrettable firework. Anjali threw her head back as she tittered at a classic Andrew quip. I gritted my teeth. We all wanted to be here. We all wanted to reach something.

Our group was getting ready for the summit ascent in a swarm of loud coats, the jarring zipping of layers, the clipping up waterproof trousers, the fastening of oxygen masks, and Andrew packing the essentials plus the emergency oxygen tank into his pack. I looked at the spares on the table, but decided against it, I was going to do this completely unaided just as I said I would.

“Flint, matches, torch, flares… anything else?” Andrew queried.

“Someone needs to take a radio.” I pointed out the rugged orange construction on the table.

Andrew palmed it, thumbing the rubber buttons.

“One of us can shoulder something, you don’t need to take it all.” I offered.

He held the walkie-talkie to his left ear.

“Break, break! This is And—” Beep! “This is Andrew, that’s a negative. Over.”

“You have to wait for the beep before you start talking, buddy.”

“Ro—” Beep! “Roger that.”

“You know what? Keep it, you need the practice.”

“…Over.”

The shrill beeping blared louder in the shadows of the early hours, the clouds scarred red raw from the sunrise. 

Dawa waved his hands at us and we all stood around shoulder-to-shoulder. Standing in a circle felt odd, shifting side-eyes made it clear that others thought so too but nobody wanted to break the ice and make the first move, like awkward school-children at a disco, the air fizzed with pre-climb jitters. 

“Important that you listen, okay?” Dawa shouted over the cacophonic chaos, and everything went silent. We were reminded of the power of Andrew’s financing, no other climbers had been up here since the incident that turned Anjali away and we were first in line. The Nepal Department of Tourism was bitter about coughing up the permits, but £75,000 is a toothsome sweetener. 

“We stay close, you follow me, if you fall behind do not go off path. Stay where you are, I come get you. Here is the route map we will take.” Dawa assured.

He handed out some small crinkled papers. I studied it, it’s important not to forget where you are. Andrew tore the page from me, rolled it up in his mouth and smoked it, blowing out chalky vapour that froze into a fractalled face of an old gent in the whiskey club in Mayfair, wallowing hoggishly, muddying up the air. 

I snatched it back and shook my head, unable to disguise a frown. Andrew made that face, the one where his eye narrowed and nose wrinkled, the one that jeered ‘Classic Spoil-Sport Shi’. I flattened out the paper. It was transparent and fragile in the centre where it had held residence between Andrew’s lips. Lovely.

Dawa continued, “Most important rule, okay? We have ten hours from here. We turn back by 2 PM, whether we are at the summit, midway, or if we’re one step off. No matter what. Back to Camp Three, then should be safe to rest before few weeks trek to Base Camp, okay?” He crossed and uncrossed his unstretched arms in front of his body, the universal sign for ‘absolutely no way, not if the world depended on it’.

“Why 2?” I snooped.

Dawa’s eyes widened for a moment, his mouth hanging open before he spoke, “After that, it would be too late.”

“Haven’t you heard the myth? Bad things happen up Everest after 2, Shi.” Andrew whispered, fluttering his fingers at me. Despite the obvious jest, I couldn’t help but wince.

            “And you two, the no oxygen men!” Dawa laughed, then his face set in stone, paralyzed as if he’d just seen a ghost, “You feel any headache or loss of consciousness you tell me, we go back. I see you acting off, we go back. You do not argue, you won’t have time to win. Record or no record. We’re understood?” 

             I nodded. 

“Good.” Dawa grinned widely, in a way that crumpled all of his features inside his tight hood, like I was peering at a secret through a locked door’s keyhole.

“Put a mask on if you need one, seriously, don’t be stupid.” Anjali urged.

“Don’t listen to her, mate.” Andrew ruffled my hair, “It’s brave to climb Everest at all, it’s damn near heroic to do it without oxygen.”

Anjali gave a measured nod as I caught her eyes staring at me, wide and gleaming. That was all I needed to decide I would do whatever it takes to reach the top without my mask.

“It’ll be one helluva story!” Andrew proclaimed, a fist in the air.

Our pod was set: Dawa leading, Andrew, Anjali, and me. The sky was muted as if the mountain overshadowed the entire world, the clouds were so densely packed together you couldn’t make out one from another. Dawa led the way and we filed into a line, the splush of our footsteps in the wet well-walked snow was our only applause as we set off. With each step, we ascended into the ether and became one with the clouds, and one with each other.

####

It took hours to climb the ice balcony that dominated Camp IV by headlamp, so by the afternoon we were already behind schedule. Every step felt like my boots were made of concrete, sinking further into the snow and further from the end. Breathing was a conscious effort, which felt strange considering you never need to think about it. 

I stumbled forwards as my boot fell lower than I was expecting. Scanning the edges of the ridge, we’d stumbled into a crater carved into the flayed white spine of Everest.

I fought the urge to remove my outer layer, as some remaining heat melted the snow around it and scorched the sooted earth, littered with glassy debris that caused our crampons to scrape over it with a shriek that echoed loudly. Nearby, tufts of green had begun to sprout where the ground had pitted from some intense ablation that might have screamed through the atmosphere and crashlanded.

Was this where the meteor struck?

“This is the spot. It has to be the spot.” Anjali grumbled, her eyes searching.

“It’s just a huge dent. Where’s the meteor?” I pondered aloud. In the centre of the crater was a simple, empty hole.

“Guess it burnt up?” Andrew suggested.

“No, it was here.” Anjali protested.

“Guess it disappeared.” I shrugged.

“Disappeared doesn’t happen! Rocks don’t just get up and leave. Oh my god. This was my chance. I was finally—”

“Hey, hey. Slow down. If it was still hot, or unstable, or… I don’t know, weird space-material stuff, maybe Andrew is right. Maybe it broke apart, or sank deeper, or—”

“Sank? I can’t sell ‘deep underground mystery rock’, can I?”

She took a breath and transitioned, “Sorry. I’m sorry. You’re right, something that big doesn’t just vanish. There’ll be fragments, or markings, or something we can track down.”

“Let’s look around, okay?”

The closer I looked at the ground, the more my vision would slide off and something would tug at my skull. The whirling continued beneath our feet, thrumming like an immense arrhythmic heartbeat and when I knelt towards the rocky floor, lodes of dull reddish light pulsed in that same slow cadence. The air felt wrong, too thick and too close, like we were breathing through a damp cloth. Across the opposite ridge of the crater, medium-sized mounds lay still. My heartbeat quickened as I half-skipped towards them, waving Anjali over to her prize.

But the mounds were not pieces of meteor, they were bodies.

They were splayed in opposite directions. A soothing hand clasped my upper arm as Anjali moved in behind me. I saw two, at first, both frozen but seeming to melt and mix with the webbing of snow. Burst cells punctured the dirtied waxy skin, frost crept outward from each body in delicate branching patterns, but it wasn’t the rough, crystalline frost of winter. It looked almost soft, like pale mold blooming across stone. One’s jaw contorted into a grin, cheeks pinched tight at the tops, but the lips parted only slightly as if their last scream had not been snatched from them, but emptied slowly and deliberately. 

“I recognise those bright green boots. Part of the last group to go up before everything shut down.” Dawa sighed.

When I was twelve years old, there was a homeless man who died in an alleyway near our home in Hebei. It was winter, he had drunk himself into a stupor, pissed on himself, then laid down and died in the cold. People walked by him like it was as routine as walking by a brick wall and I couldn’t understand. The next day, I ran down to see him, but he had been cleared away with no family, no friends, and no fanfare. I dropped the plum blossoms I had picked off the trees onto the stain on the street and shuffled home to my mother who yelled at me for stinking of death.

That was the first oddity that struck me, these bodies didn’t smell at all.

Andrew paced back and forth, lost for words.

“Om Mani Padme Hum.” Dawa prayed, wading through us to reach the dead.

Dawa knelt before the climbers, removed his glove, and with a bowed head he reached his bare hand to touch one’s forehead: a silent blessing for the spirit.

With a crack, the body’s head snapped towards him and Dawa recoiled like a shot. I also flinched backwards and noticed the dead man’s smirk bloomed inky blood, staining the teeth pink. A tang of copper filled my own mouth, curdling into a sickly almond. I smeared frantically at my lips, tongue, and chin as I choked on the scent of freshly picked plum blossoms.

Shù shù kǒu, wash your mouth.

“Not to worry. Is just the bodies settling.” Dawa soothed and replaced his glove, but I noticed his hand was shaking.

Cold took on a new meaning as we stared at the dead climber. What bit my fingers and stiffened my breath had finished its work here. The skin wasn’t frostbitten blue, but had transitioned into a translucent grey that seemed brittle. It looked less like death and more like absence. What warmth this man had once carried—from the memory of a summer hike to the last frantic beating of his heart—had been pulled into the thin air, leaving behind a husk that was more than dead.

Anjali held me up, “Hey. Come on, Shi, let’s just pay our respects and keep going.”

My chest tightened and I gasped, unable to fill my lungs. The first thing to take my breath away wasn’t climbing without an oxygen tank, but the bodies. I couldn’t bring myself to look back at the dead men we had to leave behind.

####

Traversing the basin for barely a few minutes, we came across three more bodies. The shock of finding more corpses was quickly replaced by a cold, prickling sense of wrongness that had nothing to do with the altitude. As we drew closer, the logic of a meteor-triggered avalanche began to unravel. These weren’t just fallen climbers—they were entirely nude, their skin turned to an umbral, marble-grey by the deep freeze.

A pocket knife lay nearby where they had cut off nearly all of their clothes. Seeing them so exposed, their faces turned toward a summit they would never reach, was a visceral reminder that sent a shiver down my spine. They were in such a rush, some had even cut themselves in the process, serrated chunks strung from them.

“If this was the impact site, would they have time to take all their layers off?” I uttered.

“If they survived and caught hypothermia, sure.” Anjali paused, her face scrunched into a grimace, “But they look like they were frantically running away from something, no? All facing different ways. It’s weird.” 

“If there was your meteor here, we would see it. Look around us, do you see big rock? This was natural causes, I’m afraid. It comes with the territory.” Dawa interjected, grim and sepulchral.

“That or some serious bad luck.” I muttered under my breath.

Darkness pooled under their skin like spilled wine. The thought of alcohol brought the raw sweetness of Raksi to my nostrils and my stomach lurched. Almost instantly, I saw Andrew bring a mitted fist to his lips.

“I can’t look, I’ll be over here.” Andrew bellowed as he stumbled away, waving a hand behind his back.

The edges of their mouths cracked like dry riverbeds, the flesh dappled yellow and verdant, inflamed with what looked like pustuled callouses. So hollow were their cheeks that they looked gnawingly half-starved. One man was bent over, arms on knees, head on hands, in a prayer position, as black nubs sprouted from his back like stunted angel wings. Swollen from a fall down the mountain, I rationalized. I leaned forward intending to cover the fallen hiker with the coat that was lying beside him, but as I did I saw how his steepled arms melted into the rock floor in spongy puddles of pink gunk—maybe some sort of frostbitten vessel had burst in his arms and frozen into the snow? 

A quick glance around revealed the group had made this area their camp: a sooted fire soiled the snow near two oxygen tanks leaning up against a small boulder. I continued scanning the campsite, disregarding the tanks as I remained resolute in sticking to the plan of climbing without oxygen-assistance. A pack off to the side was unbuckled, and a quick glance inside revealed they had plenty of rations left that remained unopened. We were already well past our schedule, if we grabbed a protein bar or two it couldn’t hurt, as a precaution. I grabbed the first protein bar I could see at the top. The wrapper crinkled as I pocketed it just as I caught eyes with Anjali, which made my heart stop and my cheeks burn. Bent over one of the corpses, she hurriedly pocketed something. We locked eyes.

“First aid kit.” She admitted, her eyes fluttering downwards. 

“Not like they’re going to use it anyway, Shi, mate.” Andrew whispered, having turned back around.

I managed a smile, but I noticed the dead man’s sunburnt wrist and the pale outline of a once-worn smartwatch.

“Wasn’t that one facing the other way when we came up?”

The smile dropped as every part of me froze still.

“That one there.” Andrew pointed, “Her head was facing up the mountain, now it’s facing back down at us.”

“Shut up, Andrew.” Anjali replied, although I noticed she also hadn’t moved to check.

“We go back, Mr Shao-Bin.” Dawa whimpered, addressing me, his voice barely competing with a screaming wind that had picked up.

“Back!” He begged.

I looked back at Anjali whose gaze shifted to me like two suns rising over her oxygen mask and I stepped forward again. 

“The summit can only be a few hours away, just a little further, Dawa. Then we’ll go back.”

I turned to Andrew and noticed his gaze was still locked to that of the corpse he had pointed at. My boot creeped closer to him until I could see his eyes. His black, black eyes. In them, I was distorted: my own pupils bulbous, my nose warped, my mouth made tight-lipped and tiny. I reached to shake his shoulder.

“You all right?”

Nothing.

“Radio check. Come in, Andrew.”

“Mm? Mmhmm.” Andrew replied, blinking the grogginess away. He grimaced and reached for his shoulder, kneading it as if he’d taken a bad fall.

When he raised his eyes to mine, he was grinning—the bottom half of his face was pulled upwards, his ample apple-cheeks cresting eyes that shone as moonlight does on the rocks: bright and cold.

“You have to say ‘Over’ when you finish on the talkie, Shi.”

I pursed my lips at Andrew. Enough ghost stories, we were losing time. I trudged forward, ice clumped on my eyelashes and pulled them shut like a camper fighting to hold their tent down against blustery storms. 

####

The snowstorm that had ravaged our group for the last five hours was ferociously stubborn, we had lost our direction and deviated west off the path.

Breath caught in my throat when I came across yet another body slumped stiff, blanketed by snow. Studying it closely, I saw this was a woman; almost mummified, her skin was leathery and shrunken, but not to the extremes of the bodies before. Blue goggles obscured most of her face, but she was recognisable as a human being. Pain stung my chest when I saw her laces were undone, so I bent down to tie them.

My mā would never help me tie the laces on my trainers. I didn’t get a new pair on my birthday, like my brother, but my bàba’s well-worn retro sneakers with the aglets so timeworn they frayed at the ends, making them impossible to weave through the eyelets.

“Nǐ zěnme zhème màn?” 

Why are you so slow?

After ten minutes of trying, I ran without the laces and let the heels flop off my ankles. When I fell over and scraped my knees, she hit me over the head with the old kicks and knotted the laces so tightly I couldn’t put them on again. I stood up just as the group reached me.

Dawa shouted, hunched, fiddling with his gloves. “Too late, too late.”

“I paid a lot of money to get us to the top. They said you were the best sherpa around!” Andrew demanded over the wail of the blizzard.

“Okay, okay.” Dawa’s furred head bounced up and down, “We get to top then straight back!”

 We trekked on and my breathing was shallowing further without an oxygen mask. Andrew was struggling too. I watched him step to the back of the group and grapple with the straps of his emergency oxygen mask, then his hands went limp at his sides. Stock stubbornness had won out, it seemed.

“Give me a minute.” He requested, sitting down on a nearby boulder.

Dawa and Anjali had donned their masks and resembled extraterrestrial executioners. The condensation in the pulsing fog of breath made the clear plastic resemble salivating fangs.

“Shi!” I heard Dawa yell. Or, maybe it was Anjali. I couldn’t tell. The voice was harmonizing with the shrill whistle of the wind. I motioned with my arm in a short and sharp motion. I could see the path to the top and I did not want to lose the altitude we had gained, especially when time was ticking.

A quiet satisfaction that we could actually make it just as the sun was coming up rose inside me. The soft cerulean vista stretched out in front of us like fields of cornflowers or blankets of bioluminescent sands.

We had reached the summit of Everest, and I had done it without oxygen. I could see the newspaper article framed on my parents wall next to my siblings’ Doctoral Degree certificates. My mā would kiss my head and my brother would hug me and my sister might even shake my hand. There was a pressure at the bridge of my nose and between my eyebrows as my eyes welled with tears, I smiled and my shoulders shook, I did it.

“You did it. Shi, we did it!” I recognised Anjali’s voice instantly, and paranoia prickled over my shoulder. I turned around and saw her there, but my heart still paused. He should be the one right behind me.

“Where’s Andrew?” I pushed.

“He’s struggling without the mask and I told him to put it on, but he’s being mulish. Dawa stayed with him.”

“He should be here.”

“He should be sensible.”

Nothing about this was sensible, but I could barely breathe to stay awake, let alone waste my energy on a pointless argument. We stared around at the mist on the ground, we were walking on clouds, and I put my arm around Anjali’s shoulders to anchor myself in this moment. Her head tilted towards mine.

“You didn’t think I’d let you—stand up there—without being at your side?” I hardly recognised Andrew’s raffish tone that wavered in the breeze of the summit.

If I hadn’t known Andrew for so long, I wouldn’t believe it was him who was hanging off the shoulder of Dawa who set him down. Andrew’s skin still held its warmth, but unevenly as if it was stretched over something colder underneath, but his eyes were the worst of it. They were still clear, still striking, but the brightness had glazed. The light didn’t settle in them anymore; it glanced off, like it would off ice or polished bone.

“I tell him rest, but he does not. One minute up here, I tell him, then we go back. We must go back.” Dawa lectured.

Anjali and I cupped our hands under Andrew’s armpits, helping him to stand, and I felt his fingers gripping my shoulder sharp and tense and to the bone. I laid my head against his, the only other face without an oxygen mask, and I was sure we both felt it concomitantly: what we had done was out of this world.

Andrew was laughing, then wheezing, then coughing. 

“Here, let me take your picture.” Anjali offered, taking her disposable camera out of her pack.

The flash flared my vision, and I felt Andrew slump his weight into me.

Dawa insisted that was enough and took him from my side, linking his arm under Andrew’s shoulder. Anjali took his other side and I watched the three of them scramble away from the summit.

Standing in a courtyard of silence, I tuned into the frequencies that vibrated and numbed everything. The blue flames of sky licked at me and my senses were shocked awake by the thinnest air on earth. The moment was fleeting as my party was already becoming a series of receding dots on the cliffside behind me, and I had to move. I let the early sunrays anoint me with gold, then I turned my back on Everest. 

As I moved to close the gap , ground suddenly gave way beneath me. 

I  flung out my hands to pad my sharp fall. My avalanche kit was at the bottom of my pack and I had no time to grab it. 

Shit. 

There was no impact—only the sickening give of a surface that sagged like living skin. Beneath the furious howl of the wind, I heard a low, viscous shifting. My right foot tried to lift, but the snow had turned into a sodden, grey marsh that swallowed me to the ankle. The surface caved like rotten ice, a churning slurry wrapping around my limbs like the mountain was breathing.

Quicksand? At twenty-nine thousand feet? Impossible.

Panic spiked as the pressure clamped tight around my left calf, pulling me inward. My toes burned as I tried to yank my legs free, but the suction was immense and in a few seconds had reached my chest. It squeezed until something deep inside let out a sharp, wet pop. Breathing became agony. All around me, the snow mounds undulated with porous holes, rhythmic and pulsing in time with my hammering heart. I tried to scream, but only a hoarse, broken rasp escaped. Metallic, gooey grains writhed against my skin, crawling over my wrists and neck like spores under a dead, colourless sky.

Twisting with everything I had left, I lurched sideways and the grip loosened, just for a second, but it was enough. I scrambled, dragging myself upslope until the surface beneath me was solid again. 

Desperate to blame the thin air, I needed it to be hypoxia. Call it the classic, merciful hallucination of a brain starved of oxygen. I watched porous holes in the snow slowly contract and begged my brain to make sense of what had to be a trick of the light or a flicker of failing neurons. But it felt so real; beneath the pristine white crust, something had tasted me. 

I pressed a hand to my ribs, shaking with a cold that had nothing to do with the temperature and stumbled to catch up with the group, before the thing beneath my feet could do the same.

####

I found the group about ten metres further down, deathly still. 

“We have to move,” I rasped as I caught up to them, my voice cracking against the wind. 

“There’s something under the—,” the altitude-thinned air burned my throat. Dawa and Anjali were hunched low, crouching over Andrew, who lay sprawled in the snow. 

“Mr Shi, we must go. He has the Mountain Sickness!” Dawa pleaded, his face screwed up in panic. The webbed wrinkles on his face deepened like cracks in a rock.

“How long has he been like this?” I interrogated, kneeling down to check Andrew’s pupils. Clearly Dawa had tried to put the emergency mask on him, but he’d fought it off; the indents clamped onto his cheekbones. His mouth hung open and his eyes hung wide, he just kept shaking his head. 

“I can hear them.”

I perked at the sound of his voice.

“What was that, buddy?”

“They’re following us, they’re whispering to me.”

He had that blank black gaze again, hallucinating, severe hypoxia. We both had to be.

“Run. Rock. Hot. Too hot.”

Andrew jolted his chest out to reach for his zipper.

The sun was rising now, its pink shadow reflected by the boundless white all around us, but it was not enough heat to warm anything. He clawed at his zipper again.

Dawa flitted around him, dabbing sweat off his brow and wrestling with him to keep the coat on. 

He thought he was burning up, but his nerves were dying. Mountain Sickness, more like Death Zone Madness. Paranoia, confusion, voices.

“Don’t be ridiculous, Andrew.” Anjali yelled.

She lunged forward to stab a finger into his chest, “You’re an idiot sometimes, but you’re not that much of an idiot. You’re on Everest, you’re cold, you keep that on. Got it?”

Andrew was almost catatonic. His eyes stared back, glazed and empty. In spurts, he pulled at his clothes, the veins on his neck strained, pulsed, bulged, as turquoise beat into violet. I stared at him and he transformed almost instantly, he was cragged and dull, not the bright hardy man who had supported me up the mountain.

Dawa pushed past me and I tumbled forwards, head first. His own coat was off, flying through the wind as he charged like some crazed mountaineering matador. He was soon on top of Andrew, wrapping his jacket around Andrew’s legs.

“Paradoxical undressing! We have to physically—intervene!” Dawa shouted back at us between dodging frenzied swings from Andrew, black bile dripped down his chin.

Anjali had her hands on her head, panting, “We have to get him down, we can’t just wrestle him here until we all end up like that.”

I pulled off my gloves with my teeth, shoving them under the right pit of my jacket to keep them warm, and got out my route paper that Dawa handed out before we left Base Camp. My fingers refused, blackening at the tips, but with determination I forced them to unfold the paper. Anjali paced back and forth, muttering under her breath. My heart thumped against my chest and my jaw clenched.

“Open, you son of a bitch.” I whispered.

“Here. Let me do it.”

The gooey foam frothing from Andrew’s mouth sputtered in my head.

Shhhhù shhhhù kǒuuuu.

“Stop—Just stop!” I snapped. Anjali’s eyebrows knotted and her amber eyes flared..

“No, n—” Dawa was cut off by a horrible snap.

Turning towards Andrew, we saw it. At first, I thought the snow had just sloughed—a small shifting pocket that collapsed under his weight, but undulating spongy holes dimpled around Andrew’s boots and sucked his leg downwards.

“What the hell—” He started.

I recognised the vapour that looked like spindrift, being whipped up by the wind that lurked under the snow, hunting us.

Long tendrils curled upward from the hole forming around Andrew’s leg. They were clear, like heat haze made visible, distorting everything around it.

“Get him out of it!” I yelled, fumbling for my ice axe.

Andrew wrenched, but we were already oxygen deprived. The realisation stoned in my stomach: we couldn’t win an all-out brawl. The more Andrew struggled, the more the surface collapsed, swallowing him to the knee.

“It’s cold… Jesus, it’s so—”

Frost bloomed aggressively across his coat, not in the gradual riming from the wind, but from something other. 

I moved without thinking, lunging the short distance between us, front points biting into the slope. Through his mask, I could see his face blanching, like the colour was being pulled out of him. His skin went waxy, then grey, his lips turning a deep, unnatural blue.

The ground bulged. Something was moving beneath the surface, surging upward underneath us and swallowing Andrew to the waist. I yanked on his harness with everything I had, but it was like trying to pull someone out of wet cement.

“Help!” I shouted back towards the others.

Anjali started forwards then hesitated.

I swung my ice axe. 

The pick drove into the churning surface beside Andrew’s leg. Instead of striking something solid, it passed through with a resistance like dense slush, then hit nothing. The reverberation up the shaft was wrong, muted, as if the force had been swallowed.

Andrew convulsed and his suit crinkled as more frost spread. Beneath it, his body seemed to shrink, as if whatever heat he had left was being stripped away in one continuous draw. I tore my jumar from my pack, wrapping rope around my waist, then Andrew’s, clipping us together as tightly as I could.

The thing below the snow rose sharply, and the ground around Andrew collapsed entirely, dropping him to his chest. The rope strained between us and jerked me forward. The last thing I saw was his hand reaching up, fingers rigid, as he was pulled straight down.

The surface closed over him with a wet, granular hiss, leaving nothing but a shallow depression that filled itself in seconds under the wind. The rope went slack.

The creature skulked away like a shark through the snowpack, avoiding the rocks nearby as it pulled Andrew with it.

Puffed arms wrapped around my waist and yanked me backwards, loosening my own feet from the forming sinkhole. I landed on top of a panicked Dawa, who let go and helped me stand.

Anjali remained in place, her hand shaking around the feeble pocket knife she had managed to draw out from her pocket.

“I—no, I—he was right there—” She stuttered.

“Hey. Hey, look at me—what are you doing?” I said, shaking her by the shoulders.

“I couldn’t—my legs—I couldn’t move—”

“Don’t. Don’t do that right now. It took him, okay? It just—grabbed him and—”

“We should’ve helped him! I just stood there!”

“And I didn’t, and he’s still gone! You want to be next?” My breath hitched in my throat.

“…Oh my god.”

“We need to move. Now.” Dawa ordered.

“I can’t stop seeing it—” Anjali whispered, her eyes glazed through me.

“Neither can I. But if we stay here, we’re dead. We break for the closest cliff edge and rappel down. Do you understand me?”

Every instinct screamed at me to dig for Andrew, to do something, but the trained climber in me knew we weren’t equipped for whatever that thing was.

“…Yeah.”

“Use the ropes. We stick together.” Dawa suggested, adjusting our harnesses with rumbling fear under his calm surface.

I re-clipped my jumar to Dawa and Anjali, checked the carabiner, then re-checked it. My gloves were clumsy and useless.

“Stay clipped at all times,” I tutored, “Single file, keep good spacing, watch your footing.”

They nodded, eyes wide behind their oxygen masks.

“Stick to the rock. If you’re on the snow, you’re exposed. And don’t rush..”

Each step was agonizing as I watched for any shifting of snow. We were bunching up and making too many mistakes., We scrambled downward, fingers bleeding against the ice.

Above us on the snowy ledge, something waited and then turned away.

It had begun its hunt.

####

“Let’s rest for five. Then we need to keep going.” I wheezed as we reached the rocky overhang.

“How the hell are we going to survive this?” Anjali asked.

“It’s like nothing I’ve ever seen, it drained the fucking life out of him.” I panted, visions of Andrew’s withered body circled my mind. 

I persisted, “It reminds me of a ghost story my sister used to tell me before bed. Nüba. She used her powers to drive away the rain but wasn’t allowed to return to heaven, turning her into a cursed demon. Wherever she went she brought such intense heat she dried up the earth.”

“Okay, so our creature likes heat, that’s what you’re saying?” Anjali urged.

“That’s what it looked like, it just absorbed all the heat from Andrew like he was a furnace.”

“Like an ectotherm. They have to absorb heat to survive.”

“Sure?”

“If it came from space, maybe it’s cold… Do you have a flare?”

I felt around my pack.

“Holy shit.” I half-whispered.

“What?”

“Andrew had all the supplies. Everything.”

“Even the radio?”

“Even the damn radio.” I said through bursts of short laughter.

After a brief moment of quiet, I came to a conclusion.

“We have to kill it.”

“What?” Dawa snapped.

“He’s right, Dawa. If we leave it here, more people will die.”

“No. We get down, we tell the authority.” 

“Who’s going to believe us, Dawa? They’ll just think we’re making shit up to cover our own asses. We’ll be locked up and climbers will still be sent up here like pigs to slaughter.” I argued.

“I don’t want to just stand by and do nothing… again.” Anjali stated.

“How we kill it? Have you got machine gun in your pack? You are both insane.”

“We’ll need a weapon. Something so powerful, we can be sure it will be destroyed for good.” I mumbled, pacing back and forth across the rock.

“What about our air tanks? If we can increase the pressure somehow, it would explode. Like a bomb.”

“You won’t make it back down without an air tank, Anj.”

She furrowed her brow and scrunched her lips to the side. A moment later, she spoke again.

“There’s spare tanks at the meteor site.”

“Anj, you’re a genius.” I grabbed her by the cheeks and kissed her forehead.

“It’ll be obliterated. That means no evidence, no… souvenirs.”

“You’re okay with that?”

“I’d rather be alive and broke than dead and loaded.” She asserted, her eyes stoic like fossilized resin.

Beyond the rocks, the snow swelled.

“We have to keep moving. If we keep to the limestone, we can get down there safely.”

“Did you see it again?” Dawa whispered, his breath frosting the inside of his oxygen mask.

I gripped our ropes and began to tie them around our waists, looping them through the clips.

“I saw it,” I replied, “I don’t want to see it any closer.”

A low, wet shifting sound moved beneath the snowfield behind Anjali—too deliberate to be wind, too heavy to be anything natural. Dawa leaned over the edge of the rocky shelf, scanning the sheer drop below, then glanced back toward the slow, rising bulge in the snow.

“We don’t have time for this,” Dawa said, voice steady but urgent. “We rappel. Twenty seconds down to that ledge. From there, we traverse and pray it loses us.”

“Twenty seconds?” Anjali began, “If we slip—”

“If we stay,” Dawa cut in, “We die.”

The snow convulsed. A long, pale shape pressed upward from beneath, stretching the surface like skin over bone.

I swung over the edge first, boots scraping against ice as I fed the creaking rope through the belay device. Anjali followed and the world dropped away below us.

Above, the snow ruptured. Something dragged itself free—limbs too long, joints bending the wrong way, its body half-liquid, half-solid, shedding the snow it had been swimming through. It moved with horrifying speed towards the edge.

“Faster!” I shouted.

“I’m going!” Anjali’s glove slipped on the rope and she choked back a cry as she corrected herself, forcing herself down, down, down—

A shadow passed overhead as Dawa peered over the edge, unmoving.

“Keep going, Mr Shi. Don’t stop!” He cried.

The creature reached him in a blur, but he didn’t rappel over the edge. Instead, he charged back towards the snow. With a roar, Dawa leapt forward, driving the spikes of his crampon into the thing’s slick, shifting surface.

I tugged on the rope that connected me to Anjali, forcing her lower, turning her from the horror I witnessed.

The creature shifted around Dawa, its body swallowing him like a snake inch by inch. Dawa struck it again and again, his crampon tearing uselessly at drifting pulp. The snow beneath them began to churn, collapsing inward as if the mountain itself were breathing him in. Hooked teeth in mismatched rows pushed upwards in wet ruptures. The creature’s mouth stretched and tore, merging into one another, then splitting again. Dawa watched as distended lidless orbs, the sclera twitching with thick carmine veins, rolled and swivelled independently, unfazed by his flurry of punches.

Dawa’s full cheeks were devoured into themselves and his tanned skin lost all its colour, like rock is bleached by the sun. His flesh thawed around his mask and sunk downwards before he gasped a hollow scream.  

Below, Anjali and I hit the narrow ledge hard and scrambled to unclip. My lungs were burning and my hands were shaking. The ridge was silent, as if nothing had ever been there.

“Move.” I rasped hoarsely.

This time, neither of us hesitated.

Both of us traversed the narrow ledge as fast as we could. 

Hunched over, hands on knees, I closed my eyes to battle off the nightmare wavering in the snow. My head was pounding, an invisible rubber band was tightening and tightening around my skull, blurring my vision.

“You okay? Breathe in for one, two, three, out for one, two three…” Anjali’s soothed, her voice velvet and low-pitched.

“Yī, èr, sān… Yī, èr, sān… One, two, three… One, two, three…”

I anchored my gaze on Anjali and my body wrested a rasping sob from me.

“You’re with me, Shi. You’re safe.”

“Why are we safe? Why did it take Andrew in front of all of us? ”

“If it’s desperate, that means it’s weak. It gave up on you because you were too strong, but Andrew was fragile and it wasn’t sturdy enough to take us all at once.”

“It’s fine enough to keep coming for us, though. One by one.”

“Maybe that’s a good thing? It’s ravenous… it’s desperate… so we lure it to the impact site by heating up the air tanks. Sure, it’ll take a few minutes, but if we can time it right, it will trap itself right where we want it.”

“And we’ll be out of the way when it goes boom.”

“Exactly.”

My breathing slowed and a divine calm washed over me. 

If I was on fire, I would never cool, but persist like heat trapped in stone—raging as blue as the mountain. 

####

Traversing the ledges down to the impact site was demanding, both of mental capacity and physical skill. The ledge was the width of a ribbon in places, tilting slightly outwards and testing our balance. Despite the hellish climb, fear gripped me tighter when I had to step onto the snow towards the impact crater.

When we arrived at the site, we were faced with the scrambling corpses—every cell of warmth in their bodies popped and siphoned from them, rupturing in black spicules across their flesh. The air tanks were still propped up against the small boulder, but we only had a few minutes before the creature caught up.

“How are we going to heat this thing up? All our supplies are gone.” I said.

Anjali said nothing, but hunted around the campsite floor, picking up bits of rock, twigs, and strange green stuff.

She cleared away a small ditch in the snow and arranged the twigs into a small platform.

“Chaga.” She declared, centering her focus on the green stuff, fluffing it up with her fingers, “It’s fungus, works great for tinder.”

“You’re making a fire.”

“Hell yeah.”

With a slow controlled strike, she hit a hard pebble against the back of her pocket knife, sparking the heat onto the fungus. After a few tries, it began to glow and she set it down onto the dry twigs with shaking hands.

She blew on the glowing fluff until it began to smoke, catching the dry twigs with a small flame.

In the distance, the snow began to pulse in uneven patterns.

We removed as many layers as we could without losing consciousness, dropping our temperatures enough to ensure the heat from the flame was an acute target. I laid the air tank next to the flame, and stepped back, motioning to Anjali to go as far as she could away from the crater. She squeezed my hand before she navigated herself away, the look in her eyes pleaded—don’t be long.

The flame guttered in the thin, starving air, licking uselessly at the metal tank as frost crept back over it faster than the heat could bite. Fingers numb, my eyes locked on the subtle ripple and the crunch of the snow as the creature circled the crater. It was close now. Too close. The tank wasn’t going to blow. The creature surged, a silent swell beneath the surface, coiling around the campsite, testing.

A familiar voice rang in my ear.  

Nǐ zěnme zhème màn? Why are you so slow?

 The flame sputtered out entirely. For a heartbeat, there was nothing but wind and the slow, inevitable approach. 

My eyes flicked from the smouldering tinder to the air tank. The tank had been weakened, at least a bit, by the warmth of the flame. All it needed was a rupture to get the pressure to drop and this thing would be a massive fireball. 

“Yī, èr, sān!”

With a strangled breath, I tore the tank free, cradling its bitter cold against my chest as the snow ahead bulged, rising and breaking.

Then, the creature broke the surface.

It breached like a whale through whitewater, shedding a massive plume of powder that hung in the air in slow-motion. In seconds that stretched out to the longest moment of my life, I watched it shift from a swim to a dive towards me, losing the fifty-yard gap in a blink.

The creature’s maw unhinged with a whirl of snowdust and fangs.

A sore, defiant sound was all that was left of the oxygen in my lungs, as I howled and hurled the tank down with everything I had.

It landed square inside the gullet, and physics took over. The sheer force of its jaw muscles acted like a hydraulic press, crushing the reinforced walls of the tank.

A thunderclap burst on the mountainside.

Light—heat—force—then nothing at all.

####

The train slowed when it reached Hebei and the fields blurred into familiarity: low houses, thin roads, the same pale sky that called me away to everything I wasn’t supposed to be. Colours muted around us for a few seconds as the train pierced the shadow of the Taihang Mountain and I looked down between the stutters of sunlight; my hands and arms were burned and scarred now, not the hands my family ever wanted me to have, not scholars’ hands.

Eventually, rescue climbers had found us. We had been interviewed about Andrew and the missing climbing guide Dawa, nobody would believe what we had met on the mountain so Anjali and I agreed; we would corroborate the investigation findings and avoid incarceration, it was all an accident. The inquest officially ceased the following month and files were sent to the Nepalese government archive. 

In the train seat next to me, Anjali entwined her fingers in mine, her hands were always slender but they were bony now, in spite of that they never lost their warmth. Anjali was diagnosed with cancer seven months after our Everest climb. It started with spontaneous nosebleeds, throbbing headaches, and memories that weren’t hers. By the time the NHS had navigated the unusual symptoms, they told us there was nothing more they could do. The options they mentioned were either experimental or impossibly expensive, and private healthcare was far beyond what we could afford.

She tried to carry herself the same way she always had—quietly composed, almost defiant—but the illness was already reshaping her. She wore a silk turban that nearly covered her balding head, the fabric soft and luminous in a way that contrasted sharply with the harshness of what was happening underneath. Stage 4 thyroid cancer. Advanced, metastatic. The kind that doesn’t leave much room for illusions.

The doctors had spoken in clinical fragments about malignancy, about aggressive progression, about probable origins—DNA damage from ionizing radiation exposure. It all sounded abstract, almost detached, as if they were describing a process even they couldn’t understand. But I could see it plainly: the proximity to a preternatural predator had poisoned her—gone, but still feeding, stripping her bare, while I wore my survival like a stolen coat I could never quite relax in.  .

That left us with one narrow path: returning to my family’s official residency area in China, where she might qualify for public health insurance. It wasn’t a hopeful plan so much as the only one we had left. Life had grown as complicated as home, but with Anjali by my side, I knew it was time to face it all again—just as we once had on a mountain.

My hometown welcomed us as unimpressed as when I left it, but the house looked smaller than I remembered. I asked the DiDi to drop us off further down the road, to be less intrusive, and we took the long way round reserved for guests rather than the family entrance to avoid any prying eyes in their exquisite inner courtyard. When I walked through the door, my brother stared at me with his heavy-lidded eyes that made him look tired of me already.

“You’re back.” He said.

“Yeah.” I answered.

Through the deep-set wrinkles and squinted gaze, I could still recognize that boyish charm, the way he used to snicker when I got in trouble. A knot constricted around my stomach preparing for the usual ego-bashing as we entered the dining room. My sister sat upright at the head of the table, poring over paperwork, sucking the end of a pen that coloured the edge of her upper lip blue.

“I heard about your record climb, dì di.” She said, a glint in her eye, my stomach a tight fist.

She continued, “Congratulations.”

It wasn’t much, but it was the most praise I had gotten out of her in living memory. My brother came up behind me and pulled out a chair, letting me sit with a pat on my shoulder.

I squeezed Anjali’s hand and she smiled at me, some colour wrestled to her cheeks.

My mā jostled through the kitchen door, handling bowls of soup and ladles, snaking through the waves of damp laundry musting in the corner. Her hair was gunmetal around her cocked chin. Her mouth contracted, readying her vitriol in the chamber.  

“A whole year gone by and you don’t even call your own mother. I have to hear about your climbing on the WeChat.” She scolded me.

“I’m Anjali, nice to meet you. Shi has told me so much about you.” Anjali said, reaching a hand out to my mother. My mā’s eyes moved on me, up and down, sizing me up..

“I never thought Shi would bring a girl home.”

“Thanks mā.”

“You must be proud of him, after everything he accomplished.” Anjali pressed.

“Ah well, now my guāi guāi is done with his little travels, he can get an apprenticeship at his jiějiě’s office.” She shrilled, motioning over to my sister.

“Little travels?” I blurted, “I climbed a mountain and fought a damn alien, and—‘little travels’?”

“You should eat while it’s hot.”

“It’s true, Ms Shao-Bin. Here, take a look.” Anjali reached into her purse and pulled out a small print. It was me and Andrew, shoulder-to-shoulder, on the summit of Everest without oxygen masks. We had done it.

“Who’s that?” My mā asked, flat and indifferent.

“That’s my best friend.”

“He didn’t make it.” Anjali added, “But your son did.”

Silence settled over the dining room table. After a few moments, I caught it in the pause before she spoke—the faint tightening at the corners of her mouth, not quite disapproval but something closer to reluctant understanding. Then mā’s voice, soft and pensive. 

“Tell me about your trip.”