Lost Girls Read Online Free PDF

physical challenges of identifying foot-and handholds on a brittle wall of ice, the nearly intoxicating rewards of personal achievement. This was nature and self-awareness at the extreme.
    Metcalf’s immediate concern was clearing the corpse’s hand of ice and getting Sherry situated next to the body, making sure she was comfortable enough on her lines so she could forget about her physical situation and focus on what she came to do. Metcalf kept chipping away with the butt of his survival knife at the man’s glove, which was hanging below his body. Once it was clear, he used a chemical pack to thaw and remove it. It took fifteen minutes before he was guiding Sherry into position alongside the inverted corpse.
    Removing her own glove was tedious, but at last it was off, and she gently exercised her stiff fingers. Once more she thought about how the climber’s end must have come. He would have tried to upright himself several times before the effort became too much. Then he would have relaxed into his fate, remembering, thinking, ruminating about loved ones. Perhaps, if Metcalf was right, he would also have been thinking about the people he set out to save. She hoped he would have considered them one last time before he drifted into eternal sleep, hoped that bringing her here was not time wasted. Still, she could not imagine what the dead man might have been thinking that would lead the climbers to a cave buried under a literal mountain of snow.
    Metcalf rested on his lines, feet against the mountain wall, and wrapped his arms around her as she reached for the dead man’s hand. She felt Metcalf’s cheek brush against hers. His arms encircled her waist and pulled her body tight into his. She could feel him taking the weight off her line. Then he reached for the dead man’s hand and pulled it toward them, guiding it to her hand.
    There was a full moment when she was thinking about nothing but Metcalf’s arms around her, his warm breath on her neck as he took the weight off her harness. She had to make herself concentrate as she worked the cold fingers with her own until the hand was pliable and soft, and at last she felt the familiar transformation taking place.
    …a woman’s face, her lips were bleeding beneath patches of darkening skin. She was lying on red cloth, candlelight flickering on a brass zipper and all the white snow that surrounded her. A small electronic device was propped by her head, it looked cold and useless; now he looked up at the chin of a man and a tightly knotted necktie, olive skin and starched white shirt, gold cuff links on his wrists. His own little hand on the arm of a white wicker chair, the man was rocking him, they were on a green lawn above a crystal-blue sea; a woman now, a beautiful woman with hair pulled into a bun. She wore a two-piece bathing suit beneath a short cotton robe, turned to face a cortege of uniformed servants, one of them holding his hand; a man was sitting across from him, a black man with one white eye like a doll’s, he was drinking something amber and smoking a long cigar; a procession of black limousines, a white casket buried under flowers, men in suits wearing sunglasses; bright-colored flags snapping across a vista of low clouds, a pretty girl with long dark hair, she was wearing a snowsuit and had sunscreen on her nose; numbers floating on a small disk of black space; the girl again, she was laughing, her lips had not yet cracked, were not yet bleeding; there were arrows on the black disk, one red pointed to a letter, an N, the other to three white digits, a one, a nine, and another one; looking down from the sky through the windshield of a helicopter, it was landing in front of a massive stone castle in a dense jungle. The building had spires and buttresses and was surrounded by tall security fencing. Guards were posted at gates and next to the landing pad.
    He was inside now, there was a circle of black men wearing black uniforms, the room was large and damp