At this steep of an incline, one wrong step could start a fall with little hope of stopping. The idea of a pile of them plummeting down the mountainside made the hair on the back of River’s neck stand up.

Easton led them, with River behind, then Jessie and Bree. As usual, Ben took the last position, to make sure someone could help if one of them fell behind.

“Jessie,” Bree said when Easton’s back was turned. “Give me the handheld.”

“No, give it to me.” River beckoned him with a quick curl of her fingertips. “I’ll have the better shot. Only Easton will be in front of me.”

“Here,” Jessie muttered to River before he clipped onto the line, pushing the handheld camera into her hands.

River stepped into the path of the headwind. Almost instantly, the visibility went down to next to nothing. Ben hadn’t been lying when he called the Veil a wind tunnel. River felt like she was trying to walk into a hurricane, bent over to keep from being blown off her feet.

For the first few steps, she could almost make out Easton’s jacket, but despite the reflection off the ice canyon’s walls, the flurries of snow spinning through the Veil blocked him from view. Holding the camera up in one hand, River could barely see her fingers.

Turning it on, she fought her way forward a step, trying to keep the handheld secure against her chest with one arm and using the other hand to brace herself on the line. Every time she let go, the swirling snow immediately ruined her sense of direction.

The tug of the carabiner was her only sense of where the fixed line was. For the first time since the climb had started, River’s heart started to race, fear pumping adrenaline through her veins. And yes, the few moments of footage she’d gotten were probably going to be amazing. One didn’t need clear, bright footage to make a movie. Sometimes the raw, blurry, shakiness of a camera in a terrifying situation was perfect. But the deeper they went into the Veil, the steeper the climb. River needed both of her hands on this: one for the line and one for her ice ax.

Trying to juggle the handheld had been a mistake.

Falling behind put them all at risk, so River kept going, fumbling with the camera. Thick gloves and cold hands didn’t mix. All she had to do was turn off the handheld and put it in a side pocket of her now lighter pack.

A simple task…up until she dropped it.

Horrified, River froze in place. So much was on that camera. So many important shots. So much of her documentary they’d never recover. Yes, some had been backed up, but not what was on the memory card inside. They had the other camera, but the handheld couldn’t be gone.

“Easton, I dropped my camera!” River yelled, trying to get someone’s attention. There was no answer. “Jessie!”

From behind her, there was nothing. It was as if the Veil had swallowed her team whole, and there was no one left but her. Hunkering down, River scraped her glove along the ground, trying to find the handheld. Her fingers met ice and gravel but no camera.

“Okay, River,” she said to herself. “Don’t freak out. Think through this.”

She wanted the camera, and she needed to get it before Jessie reached her section of the line. The ground beneath her was steeply sloped, and the camera had been in her left hand when she dropped it. If it wasn’t at her feet, then the most logical explanation was it was on the ground behind her, or it had fallen to her left.

If she left her spot on the line and went backward, River doubted she’d be able to find it again. So she dug into her pocket for the foil wrapper her lunchtime protein bar had come in. Her gloves were too bulky to allow her to twist the wrapper into a knot around the line, so River pulled them off.

Wrapper tied—giving her something to find on her way back—River jerked her gloves back on. Praying the few seconds of exposure to the elements hadn’t caused lasting damage to her extremities, River went backward on the rope, counting each step before hunkering down and feeling for the camera. Nothing.

“Okay, stay calm. Go back to where you started.” The beating of the wind in her face was getting to her, and she couldn’t hear her own voice, the canyon was so loud. Following the line back to the wrapper, River stretched her arm out farther as she searched. Small movements on the rope told her Jessie had clipped onto her section. She was running out of time to find the handheld because everyone else would soon be there.

Ben wasn’t as stern as Easton, but she doubted he’d wave and merrily continue on the path with her stuck like a rock in the same place.

“Where are you, where are you?” River muttered, going as far as her tether would let her. Abruptly, her boot nudged something. Not as substantial as a rock but hard enough to feel it, even with limbs numb from the bitter cold. Unfortunately, her boot had knocked the thing out of reach.

There. The camera was right there, but no matter how hard she stretched, River couldn’t reach it. If she pulled too hard, she’d risk destabilizing the anchors for the line, leaving everyone behind her at risk.

But it was so close.

With a noise of frustration, she stretched out one last time, knowing the effort was pointless. Then River took a breath, took a chance, and unclipped her tether from the fixed line.

Freed from her restraint, River took two steps away from the line, memorizing the degrees she would have to turn to get back as she bent down. The camera found her hands, hard plastic filling her gloves. Before moving out of place, River tucked it safely in the pack on her back. Filled with relief, River turned to step back to the line when her foot slipped.

Sometimes a slip was only a slip. Sometimes a slip was the start of a fall.

When River fell, she kept falling.

Crying out in alarm as she slid faster, she reached for her ice ax, pulling it free of her belt. Rolling onto her stomach, she brought the ax down as hard as she could into the ground beneath her. The resultant catch of metal into ice wrenched her arm so badly, she almost let go, her whole body jerking to a sudden stop.

She lay still as a stone, hand clutching the ax, lost somewhere in the icy whiteout that was the Veil. “At least I found the camera,” she told herself, trying not to panic. “This is going to be a great story to add. Especially if Easton doesn’t kill me.”

River shifted her foot, and instantly, the snow beneath her boot gave, crumbling away. Then the snow beneath her calf and knee. She was over a crevasse, one of the carefully avoided pits that Easton had set the lines to circumvent, with half of her dangling and the other half about to fall too.

This time when River froze, the last thing she was worried about was a documentary.

• • •

Emerging from the Veil was always like coming out of the water, half drowned and desperate for that first deep breath of fresh air.

Even after these many trips through, Easton still hadn’t gotten used to the way the ice canyon could mess with his senses. Without his father’s expertise during Easton’s younger years, he would never have developed the skills to navigate the Veil. Now, when he set lines, it was a combination of experience and instinct that guided him.