“My fucking friend is out there,” he spits over the scream of the alarm. “So if you want to stop me, mate, come and try.”

He shoves again. The door gives with a shriek of protest, and a mass of snow and ice comes skittering into the lobby. The doorway is still blocked four feet deep, but Danny clambers up the bank and over the top, sinking into the debris. The last I see of him is his legs as he staggers off into the storm.

“Oh my God,” Miranda is saying. She is holding on to Rik like she is drowning. “Oh my God. Oh my God. What if Eva’s still out there?”

There is no answer. I don’t think anyone can bring themselves to say what they are thinking—which is that if Eva is still out there, she is dead. She must be.

And maybe Erin too.

“Is the building safe?” Rik says, with sudden practicality. “We don’t want to stay here if it’s about to collapse.”

“I’ll go and turn off that alarm,” Tiger says, and she disappears into the kitchen. I hear her dragging a chair across tiles, and then the alarm stops. There is a sudden, shocking silence.

“Okay,” Topher says. His voice is shaking, but it is so natural for him to take charge that he slips into the role. “Um, we should—we should check. We should check the building.”

“The kitchen side isn’t too bad,” Tiger says as she comes back into the lobby. “I looked out the window. There’s a couple of windows broken in the den but the snow isn’t particularly high. It’ll be the living room side that’s suffered, and the pool extension.”

“We should go upstairs,” Topher says. “Get an overview.”

Tiger nods, and we all troop upstairs to look out one of the upper windows. What we see makes my knees go weak. We have been extremely lucky.

The long single-story building to the rear of the chalet, which housed the swimming pool, has been crushed and obliterated. The roof has caved in like an empty eggshell. Beams and planks are sticking out of the huge snowdrift that has engulfed the extension. But the chalet itself is still standing. There is a mass of snow, sticks, and rubble piled up against the north side, but the structure has held firm. Just a few meters more, and Perce-Neige would have been matchsticks, like the swimming pool building. I can’t see any of the other chalets. The path to the funicular is covered with fallen trees and rumpled snow. The funicular itself is out of sight in the gusting snow. Erin is nowhere to be seen.

And then I notice a movement around the side of the building. It is Erin. She is holding onto Danny and they are limping over the uneven, debris-covered surface, stumbling on the hard-packed lumps of snow scattered across what used to be the track to the funicular.

They go out of sight beneath the shadow of the building. From downstairs I hear the screech of the buckled front door scraping against the tiles, and Erin’s sob of pain as she squeezes over the drift and down, inside the house.

“Is it broken?” I hear Danny saying, breathlessly. As if instructed, we all file down the spiral stairs to stand in a concerned circle around Erin.

“Is she okay?” Miranda asks, frowning.

“What do you think?” Danny snaps. Erin doesn’t seem able to speak, but she holds up her hand. I’m not sure what she means, but her signal clearly conveys something to Danny, and he shakes his head angrily and stamps off to the kitchen.

“I’m gonna get you some ice,” he calls back over his shoulder. “See if we can get the swelling down.”

“I’ve got some arnica in my bag,” Tiger calls after him. I cannot hear Danny’s reply. It does not sound complimentary.

“I don’t think arnica is going to cut it, Tig,” Rik says quietly.

Erin is slumped on the floor of the lobby. Her face is gray. She looks like she is going into shock.

“What happened?” Tiger crouches beside her, putting her hand on her arm. Erin looks up at her. She blinks dazedly. She looks like she is unsure why she is here.

“Erin? Are you okay?”

“I don’t know,” Erin manages. Her voice is shaking. “I was walking towards the f-funicular and I heard this n-noise and then it was like—it was like the mountain just came and swallowed the lift.”

“You mean—the funicular is gone?”

There is horror in Tiger’s voice, but her tone only echoes the shock I can see reverberating around the room.

“Not gone,” Danny says, coming back with a bag of frozen peas. He scowls around the group. “But… yeah, buried. A big chunk of glass has been stove in. Shit. There might have been people in there.”

“We should, like, call 999?” Ani says, and Topher nods emphatically.

“Seventeen,” Erin says tiredly.

“What?”

“Seventeen,” Danny echoes. “That’s the French number for the police. But I reckon you should try one-one-two. That’s the international number, they’ll have English speakers.”

Ani takes out her phone and then frowns.

“I’ve got no reception.”

“Transmitter’s probably down,” Danny says shortly. He is pressing the peas very gently onto Erin’s ankle. Her face has gone a strange yellowish white and her eyes are closed. “Try the phone on the desk.”

Ani nods and goes across to the landline phone on the desk next to the stairs, but when she picks up the receiver her face falls.

“There’s no dial tone.”

“Fuck.” Carl speaks for the first time. His broad face is red. He looks angry. “Fucking hell, that’s all we need. Avalanche took the line out I guess. Has anyone got any reception? Anything at all?”

There’s a momentary shuffle. Everyone feels for their phones. I get out mine too. The reception bars are grayed out.

“Nothing,” Topher says. Others are shaking their heads.

“No, wait.” It’s Inigo, his voice cracking with excitement. “I just got a bar! I’ve got one bar!”

He dials and then waits, holding up his hand for silence. We all stay totally still, listening.

“Hello?” he says. And then “Hello? Hello? Shit, they can’t hear me!”

“Go upstairs,” Miranda says sharply. “You might get better reception with the extra height.”

Obediently Inigo climbs the spiral staircase and goes to stand at the end of the corridor, at the long window that overlooks the valley, as if the visibility might somehow translate into better reception.

“Hello?” we can hear him saying, and then “Yes,” and “Okay,” and “Chalet Blanche-Neige,” followed by some information about our situation. There are long pauses, and many times he says “Can you repeat that? I’m sorry, the reception is really poor, you’re breaking up. Hello? Hello?”

At last he comes back down looking grave.

“I lost reception in the end, but I spoke to the police operator, and I think I managed to give them all the details before I got cut off.”

“Did you tell them about Eva?” Topher shoves in, and Inigo nods.

“Yes, I told them that we lost our friend right before the avalanche and we don’t know if she’s still out on the mountain.”

“Is someone coming to rescue us?”