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In the warm darkness of his sleeping bag, Kai stretches, breaking from the crooked-s position that his body had been in for seven hours prior. He flicks his hand vaguely upwards, activating a hanging lamp and filling his bivouac with dim red light. As the dry wind rattles outside, Kai lays on the floor in the impression his body has crushed into the snow, and squeezes some of last night’s cold pemmican into his mouth. Somewhere, in the back of his head, a voice tells him that he can’t stay like this forever. As diamond dust pelts the walls of the thin tent like an industrial sandblaster, he gives it five more minutes. After two midlayers, extra pairs of socks, boot covers, gaiters, artificial fleece insulation, and a fluffy false down jacket to top it all off, Kai unzips the double wall of his tiny shelter and steps out into the sideways-blowing night.
Even without the hand-cranked headlamp, the campsite is visible in the predawn alpenglow as it sits on its false peak in the mountainside. Absent-mindedly, Kai packs up his tent -forgetting to take his sleeping bag out in the process- and gazes at the crowded predawn sky. Off the right-hand side, a series of solar lanterns mark a daylong climb back down to the bright lights and salvaged domes of the Lodge, while the left side of the ridge plunges steeply, falling below the treeline and into the depths of a thick salmon fog. After he haphazardly stuffs the last straps of his tent into his pack, Kai crunches over to a pole, affixed in the fresh powder by him the previous night, and digs out a set of skis.
His breath puffing a tempo of crampons finding purchase, Kai moves up the slope like a salmon climbing up a waterfall. Though his pack is heavy, loaded up with specialty supplies and extra parts for the tower on the summit, and his hands are cold- damp even through the heavily insulating gloves, he can’t help but crack a smile. Here he is, Kai, Mongoose, standing on Whistling Peak. Though the world might have gone to hell years ago and he might not ever leave this mountain, and everyone might just all die in the middle of the night, it’s still the most beautiful place on Earth.
The ridge flattens out, and the radio tower comes into view. Cables, some of them the thickness of a large carnivore’s arm, spin outward from the ramshackle structure connecting to the remains of gondola anchorages, rock outcroppings, and airdropped shipping containers. The tower itself is crooked, built out of salvaged scrap and the reckless determination of the Whistlers to contact the orbiting Fleet. To Kai, however, it stands as a monument to his ability to cut almost eight hours off a two-day supply run.
Fingers of strawberry light race across frothy, reaching clouds, painting the mountain in the riotous colors of a rocket launch. Behind him and down, the shadow of the peak stretches across valleys filled with inflammation-colored cloud and lesser mountains, their wind-swept peaks barely cresting above the tree line. Beyond that, barely visible except for the flashing of emergency lights left long in disrepair, hung the glittering arch of the Loop. Once daily, a payload climbs the structure, riding a wave of electromagnetism from the invisible sea to the edge of orbit. Dawn is breaking on the Southern Face, and Kai has two thousand feet left to go before he can get a hot meal.
Shuffling along the now-lit path to the base of the gigantic radio tower, he clips into the framework of ropes surrounding the summit with a breath of sore-muscled relief, and stamps onwards into the wind, towards the collection of snow-drifted sheet-metal structures that surround the tower’s base like anthills around the stump of a tree. Three sharp knocks with an ungloved left hand, and the bulkhead-like door scrapes open, shuddering off ice and rust alike. Behind it, a greying hyena wearing a threadbare band t-shirt blocks the doorway, a massive radio headset hanging from her neck.
“Hey Mom.” Kai motions to doff his overloaded pack and step inside the shelter.
“Nope, nope, one second, let me check. You got my stuff?” Already elbow-deep in the backpack, she pulls out two bottles of honey. “Sick, dude. Thanks. I’ve been feeling it without this stuff from the nursery. Let me tell you, getting old is a trip! Never do it.”
“So, are you going to let me inside to warm up?”
She cracks a hyena’s gap-toothed smile. “Well, I’m not gonna let you freeze!”
The inside of the radio station can be warmly described as lived in. The atmosphere is humid, thanks to the small garden in one of the adjacent structures, and the walls are covered with condensation after a cold night. In one corner of the roughly hexagonal space sat a faux-down covered cot, backed up against the wall and barely large enough to stretch out on. Against the opposite wall, two tables and an assortment of grow-lamps showcased the latest mediocre attempt at transplanting some of the Lodge’s stock of marijuana to the freezing summit of a mountain. The space is dominated, though, by the Radio. An assortment of wires, buttons, switches, knobs, and monitors nearly three feet deep, it pulls the eye towards it like an event horizon of technological fascination. Once, Kai spent nearly two days in this room, attempting to decode the series of scribbled notes that his idiosyncratic adopted parents had left for him, before stumbling down the mountainside in a haze, defeated.
“Rex, Kai, don’t spill literal shit on my floor!”
Mumbling an apology, the mongoose grabs a brush and starts cleaning up one of his two bags of dropped fertilizer.
The garden is wonderful, for what it is. Identical rows of potato plants, beans, along with a couple small planters of peppers and spices- though they don’t grow well at this altitude, all straining upwards for the harsh fuchsia light of growing lamps from their homes in loamy, half-recycled soil. Even the air in the greenhouse seems to be more full of life, as the wind and noises of the harsh outside fade away, replaced by the piccolo percussion of hydroponics drips and the soft backing tone of low-power fluorescent bulbs. Kai can practically feel the tension leave him as he dumps the bags of processed animal waste he was hauling onto the central compost pile.
One pot of Lodge-dried tea and some reheated curry later, Kai was back on his feet, and practically vibrating with excitement for a record-breaking descent.
“Hey, snowball, hold up a sec.”
Hushed by a nickname he’d barely heard since childhood; Kai puts down a boot cover.
“I watched you come up here on the thermal. It was a great ascent! Your Yak technique needs a little work, but Mira, she-“
She stops, swallows, and tries again.
“You did great, really. That’s a record, right? They’ll love that at the Lodge.” A fine keening, as the hyena’s wavering claws scrape against the sides of her metal mug.
“When I watch you, I just- I just want you to be careful.”
The unsaid words hung between them, like the fringe of snow blown off the edge of a frozen peak.
I can’t lose both of you.
Kai stands, bringing the strap of his pack to his slanting shoulder. “I’m going back down. The usual way.”
Turning, he avoids his mother’s wavering gaze as he steps toward the bulkhead.
“I’ll be careful.”
The sheet metal door scrape-slams, and all that’s left is the distant crackling of the radio.
Indigo-dark, the afternoon sky of Whistling Peak suspends the mountain between oceans of sunburned-pink cloud and an overreaching depth that one could practically fall into. Shielding his eyes from the UV-bright sun, Kai crunches along a line of whipping flags, moving down and away from the peak.
Two clicks sound out in the mountain air, as skis and poles are released from their positions on the side of Kai’s bright yellow backpack. He faces a precipice- more dropping away than sloping, the exposed side of the mountain patterned with bright snowbanks and dark veins of rock. Another two clicks, this time the resonating stomp-clack of a boot clicking onto a binding, and with a hard shove, Kai hurls downwards off Whistling Peak, guided only by the practiced hands of mass and acceleration.
One second.
Two seconds.
The only noise is the hiss of powder against finely waxed ski surface, as the skier falls nearly parallel to the surface of the cliff.
Three seconds.
A groan and a shudder, as the fist of deceleration grips Kai’s body from goggled head to booted toe. He slaloms, shedding speed as the skis throw a great white cloud, coating him in fresh layers of snow. A hop over an outcrop and a jink to the left, and Kai, whooping the echoing excitement that only youth and a vast excess of velocity can provide slams out of the couloir and onto the shining midway slopes of Whistling Peak.
Creaking wind turbines and swaying powerlines fall to the wayside, as the Lodge expands from a miniscule collection of beetle shell-iridescent domes to a view spanning settlement, filled with all the noise and life of a city nestling precariously on a mountainside like eggs nestled on a branch.
Pulling into the final stretch, Kai waves to a lemming wearing a corroding exoskeleton, transporting spent batteries downhill with snowshoe feet. Bhors waves back, half a ton of construction-yellow metal shifting with every movement of his hands in the controls.
The lemming shouts, his voice distorted to a tinny clamor by the aging electronics of the machine. “Nice run, idiot! I saw you almost bite it going down the John. Going that fast you would have rolled all the way down here!”
Skiing parallel to the jogging mech, Kai leans back in his boots and pushes his goggles back towards his ears. “For someone who says they’ve had enough of mountains, you seem to spend a lot of time watching them.”
“Well, you’re now the only person who’s willing to take supplies up to Cass on the Peak. Both of the other guys quit after last night.” With a groan of metal, the suit enters into a one-handed slide down the hill, a surprisingly agile maneuver for an old man in an old machine.
“Catch you at the firepit, lazybones! I’ve got a project I wanna pitch to you!” Laughter and overstressed hydraulics intermingle as the lemming ricochets down the slope, as accustomed to his exoskeleton as a boxer is to their gloves.
Kai tucks inwards and accelerates down the final grade.
Two children make snowballs in darkened, oily snow as the hammering of repairmen echoes from inside of one of the massive greenhouse domes. A trail of smoke leads to a community firepit, where grandmothers stitch quilts out of fragments of ski coat and swap stories about black diamonds long past. In the stripped shell of the bygone lodge, an afternoon pot of daal bubbles, spooned out into waiting bowls- one of the few concessions to the original purpose of the structure. As icicles melt, the animals of Whistling Peak Safe Zone perform a dance that has been going since the beginning of time- the fast-tempoed waltz of a civilization in motion.
Having received a generous half-portion in a sheet metal bowl still bearing paint flecks, Bhors and Kai pace together down a rotting wood stairway slippery from the friction of hundreds of passing feet.
“So, you found a space suit?”
Kai pauses as Bhors nods, his whiskers still dripping lentils.
“Really? Like, seriously? This isn’t a left-handed screwdriver kind of thing, because if it is it would be kind of cruel.”
Bhors, having finished with his food, finally gets enough air to speak up.
“I never said I found a whole suit, I never said that! You’re putting words in my mouth. Me and a couple of the salvage crew were digging trucks out of the scree near Midway when we started finding these massive parachute cords- they must have been from right after the Eclosion hit, because the capsule was shredded and I mean shu-redded! Seriously, all I could pull from that piece of junk was a couple rolls of cloth and a helmet.”
The two round the corner, boots crunching on packed down snow, and come to a stop. In front of them sits a Quonset hut so incorporated into the layered foundations of surrounding structures that its domed form is barely visible. Kai helps Bhors hoist a garage door that is older than he is and, stepping forward, Bhors clicks on a failing incandescent bulb.
“Bhors, what is this?”
The lemming standing on the table waits, as Kai stares incredulously at what looks like a mixture between a skier and a scuba diver’s outfit, wrapped tightly in spare webbing and topped with a slightly singed golden dome.
“This is the only thing we have that can save us."
“Oh Rex. This was a joke. This entire time you drag me down here and show me the weird-ass mannequin for a fucked-up joke. Also,” Kai touches the getup, and slightly recoils “why is this -mess- covered in wax?”
Bhors stomps closer to Kai, his boots shaking the table he’s standing on.
“This is the one thing that I am serious about! Pull your head out of the snowbank it’s stuck in and look around. Remember when we started losing sections of highway to the clouds? I remember.”
The lemming is standing in Kai’s face now, screaming at him with all the rage he has in his small body.
“Every goddamn year we creep a little bit farther up the mountain, and soon we’re not gonna have any mountain left, but all that you’re doing is pretending that we still live in a fucking ski resort!”
The mongoose backs down, a barely audible apology thrown out from a head with downturned eyes and folded ears.
“What do I do?”
The sun is bright, the mountain air is clear, the snow is great, and Kai can barely move. Sitting on the remains of a lift chair like a starfish, he first attempts to wiggle his tightly wrapped legs into a vague semblance of a standing position. Then, with a herculean effort, he tips himself up onto two feet- and falls directly onto his face, an inch of treated plexiglass preventing him from getting a mouthful of snow. At least he didn’t roll off the cliff edge several feet in front of him.
A shadow descends from above, pinching the mass of panels and cables on his back and setting him up with all the gentleness of a child righting a downed action figure. Bhors grins down from within a cage of rusting alloy, and plants a tube into Kai’s helmet with a hiss of oxygen. The lemming shouts, and the words conduct through the helmet like water through absorbent cotton.
“Kai! Can you hear me?”
He lifts his arm to give a thumbs-up, succumbing at about halfway to the resistance of the layered suit.
“Alright, good enough!” Carabiners click on the back of the suit, and Bhors pats him on the helmet with a steel hand. “Your drogue and main chutes are packed about as well as I could get them. It all should come out as long as you’re going fast enough. Your watch working?”
Kai whaps the back of his left hand against his right, convincing the small bundle of wires and LEDs attached there to light up. Two sets of numbers are displayed, counting down in kitchen-timer fashion. 4 hours of oxygen. 30 minutes to hit the Loop.
Before he can stomp into his boots, Bhors taps him on the shoulder with a flaking yellow finger.
“Thanks. I don’t know if anyone else would have done this. Especially for me.”
One glove gives a slow thumbs-up.
With the screech of overstressed hydraulics, Bhors hurls Kai off the face of the mountain.
One second.
Two seconds.
The salmon clouds replace the near-violet sky replaces the grey-white cliff face in a dance that repeats itself a million times over.
Three seconds.
Shouldn’t something have happened by now?
Four seconds.
Kai tumbles through the air, and all he can see is the reflection of his terrified eyes filling the inside of his helmet.
Something is wrong with the drogue.
Five seconds.
Like a tire mascot doing a chest exercise, Kai strains to reach his left arm over to the handle on his right shoulder, his gloved fingers tapping the ends of the T-shaped handle as it oscillates in the inconsistent wind.
Six seconds.
One finger catches a grip, then two, and he pulls with all the adrenaline that terror can muster.
With a snap of compressed gas, two aramid lines deploy, supporting a wing-shaped canopy of patched graphene fabric.
Trailing cables like a broken piñata, Kai soars over meat-colored clouds that stretch and reach like fungus, sailing on thermals towards the silver arch of the Loop.
Now the Loop fills his field of view, a braided silver cable glowing like frozen lightning in the afternoon sun. Below him lies a vortex of eddies and thermals, a constant storm in reaction to such an affront to sane engineering, and above him the Loop curves away, dashing its electric trail beyond the atmosphere’s halting grasp. His watch blinks an angry red under a thin coating of pink slime. One minute until launch.
Kai leans sideways, moving as close to the gently humming cable as his airfoil will allow, and pulls into a dive.
The clock hits zero.
The Loop’s third-rail mutter rises to the screech of a braking railroad train.
Like M.C Escher’s morning commute, a shipping container emblazoned with a set of stylized antlers rises out of the vortex below, screaming, sparking and accelerating as the air around it thins. Fortunately, it only has one more obstacle in front of it on its way to orbit.
A would-be astronaut and his badly stitched paraglider.
It’s a bad landing, even for someone who’s used to bad landings, and Kai feels the weight of the shattered leg as he struggles to stand, even turn over, under the rapidly increasing acceleration. Rivulets of sweat drip off his forehead, tracking dart-quick paths to a pool on the inside of his helmet as he gasps for air like a drowning man, choking on the weight of his own spine.
Kai scrabbles face-down on the riveted roof of the container like an overturned beetle, tangled in layers of parachute and loose cable, slowly weakening as the screeching of the container fades into an airless vibration.
As a black tunnel closes around his consciousness one thought remains in his head, dragged out from the recesses of a mind choked by hypoxia.
The stars look beautiful tonight.
Flashlights, bright against a background of stars holding steady like holes poked in a paper bag.
Figures tethered to one another. Pointing. Kai reaches out with a hand as cold and brittle as a rose dipped in liquid nitrogen.
A rifle stock shatters his helmet, and the last traces of his awareness escape with his air.