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“Shh!”

“I will not have you shushing me! And I won’t have you—”

There is the sound of a sleeping bag being adjusted, and then the voices become lower and softer.

“I will not have you leaving this—”

And the voice dips below audibility.

Shelly is awake now, too. She has been listening, and gives Rita a raised eyebrow. Rita reciprocates, and begins searching through her duffel bag for what to wear today. She has brought three pairs of pants, two shorts, five shirts, two fleece sweatshirts, and her parka. Putting on her socks, wool and shaped like her foot, the ankle area reinforced and double-lined, she wonders if Mike will actually be going down so soon. There is a spare garbage bag into which she shoves her dirty socks, yesterday’s shirt, and her jogging bra, which she can smell—rain and trees and her.

“You’d have to break my leg,” Shelly whispers. She is still in her sleeping bag, only her face visible. Rita suddenly thinks she looks like someone. An actress. Jill Clayburgh. Jane Curtin? Kathleen Turner.

“Break my leg and cut my tendons. You’d have to. I’m doing this climb.”

Rita nods and heads toward the tent’s door flap.

“If you’re going outside,” Shelly says, “give me a weather report.”

Rita pokes her head through the flaps and is facing fifteen porters. They are all standing in the fog, just across the campsite, under the drizzle, some holding cups, all in the clothes they were wearing yesterday. They are outside the cooking tent, and they are all staring at her face through the flap. She quickly pulls it back into the tent.

“What’s it like?” Shelly asks.

“Same,” Rita says.

Breakfast is porridge and tea and orange slices that have been left in the open air too long and are now dry, almost brown. There is toast, cold and hard and with hard butter needing to be applied with great force. Again the five paying hikers are hunched over the small card table, and they eat everything they can. They pass the brown sugar and dump it into their porridge, and they pass the milk for their coffee, and they worry that the caffeine will give them the runs and they’ll have to make excessive trips to the toilet tent, which now everyone dreads. Rita had wondered if the trip might be too soft, too easy, but now, so soon after getting here, she knows that she is somewhere else. It’s something very different.

“How was that tent of yours?” Frank asks, directing his chin toward Grant. “Not too warm, eh?”

“It was a little cool, you’re right, Frank.” Grant is pouring himself a third cup of tea.

“Grant thinks his dad’s old canvas army tent was the way to go,” Frank says. “But he didn’t count on this rain, didja, Grant? Your dad could dry his out next to the fire, but that ain’t happening up here, friend.”

Grant’s hands are clasped in front of him, as if arm-wrestling with himself. He is listening and looking at Frank without any sort of emotion.

“That thing ain’t dry tonight, you’re gonna be bunking with me or someone else, Grant.” Frank is scratching his beard in a way that looks painful. “Otherwise the rain and wind will make an icebox of that tent. You’ll freeze in your sleep, and you won’t even know it. You’ll wake up dead.”

The trail winds like a narrow river up through an hour of rain forest, drier today, and then cuts through a hillside cleared by fire. Everyone is walking together now, the ground is bare and black. There are twisted remnants of trees straining from the soil, their extremities gone but their roots almost intact.

“There’s your forest fire,” Frank says.

The fog is finally clearing. Though the pace is slow, around a field of round rocks knee-high, it is not as slow as the day before, and because Rita is tired and her legs are sore in every place, from ankle to upper thigh, she accepts the reduced speed. Grant is behind her and also seems resigned.

But Mike is far more ill today. The five paying hikers know this because it has become the habit of all to monitor the health of everyone else. The words “How are you?” on this mountain do not form an innocuous or rhetorical