Into the Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

announced that she did not, and interrogated him about his work experience.
    Things had gone downhill from there.
    Now she planted her boots on the rocky ground and waited. When he spotted her, she gestured him to come up and report. Turning her back, she finished her hike to the flat where she’d pitched her tent.
    A tiny fire of dried yak dung burned in a fire pit dug into the ground. The spiral of smoke rose straight toward the bright blue sky.
    Mingma handed her a cup of hot, milky, sweet tea.
    ‘‘Thank you.’’ Karen wrapped her hands around the cup and sipped, trying to warm the coldness in her belly.
    ‘‘Eat.’’ Mingma indicated the small, clean bowl of potatoes, meat, and vegetables mixed with spices and colored green by . . . something.
    Karen didn’t care what the something was. During the course of her work, she had eaten spoiled meat, rancid cheese, and artfully prepared insects. She was thin, she was muscled, she knew how to survive under the roughest conditions. She could take care of herself, but she didn’t have to—she had Mingma.
    Sitting on the camp stool, she ate with a spoon made of yak horn. She’d packed her own equipment, but the night she’d arrived a freak storm blew through, taking one entire box of necessities down into a gorge and scattering them into crevasses and into the raging torrent that formed in an instant and disappeared by the next afternoon. Since then, Karen had discovered that freak storms were the norm here. Freak rainstorms, freak snow-storms, freak windstorms, freak storms that formed on the mountain and reached down to flick her away like a gnat off its massive flank.
    She wouldn’t be flicked. She couldn’t.
    She paid no attention when Phil presented himself. While he fidgeted, she finished eating, and only when she put down her spoon did she say, ‘‘Phil, give me one good reason I shouldn’t fire you right now.’’
    ‘‘Haven’t got one. I was just ill last night, but I should have come to work anyway—’’
    ‘‘Last night? You were ill?’’ She stared him right in the eyes. ‘‘That’s why you were out visiting your girlfriend?’’
    He cast a resentful glance at Mingma. ‘‘Yeah, I didn’t . . . I mean, I was looking for someone to help me get better so I could work today.’’ He used a damp whitish handkerchief to dab at the sweat that dripped off his broad forehead.
    ‘‘One more chance, Phil. One chance, or you’ll be kicking shit down the road.’’ Karen jerked her head toward the site. ‘‘Now go to work.’’
    She didn’t watch him leave, but she could hear him shrieking orders as he descended the slope.
    Standing, she walked over the edge and looked down on the site. The workers swarmed like ants, moving the boulders loosened by the blast. The backhoes moved the largest stones, while huge black-and-white yaks lumbered after their trainers, dragging rubble into a pile.
    When she had been a little girl in her bedroom in Montana, dreaming of princesses and happily-ever-afters, this was not the life she had envisioned.
    Mingma joined her on the edge, and the two women stood in silence.
    Finally Karen asked, ‘‘How is Sonam?’’ One of her workers had been moving a boulder with his yak when a huge rock had tumbled down the slope, hit his shoulder, then bounced up and struck his yak. Sonam’s collarbone was broken, his yak was dead, and he was terrified.
    ‘‘His bones are mending.’’ Mingma puffed on her cigar, and smoke eased from between her lips. ‘‘But he will not come back to work. You seek to build on the heart of evil.’’
    Karen had heard that so many times since coming here. The heart of evil. Everyone seemed to know what it meant. Everyone except her, and she didn’t want to know. By remaining ignorant, she hoped to beat Mount Anaya.
    Now, driven by the same defiant impulse that made her meet every challenge life and her father flung at her, she lifted her arms to the mountain. ‘‘You can’t