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eases back into the seventies and she puts the rope away in her pack.
    Her mechanics are brutal, ruthless. Every move carries her higher. Her thoughts don’t stray. The music flails her eardrums. She hits blank rock and, minutes later, has a pendulum rigged. She swings left—instinct says so—and her headlamp digs up a rock corner plastered with snow and filled by a glittering black coal seam of old ice.
    Higher, back on rotted, grainy ice with the rope stashed again in her pack, her left tool rips out of the ice. She catches herself withthe right. She waits a beat, prepping for an adrenaline storm, expecting her heart rate to jack up through the top of her skull. Her pulse comes and goes, steady as a bass line, and she . . . giggles. She has ice for blood. She’s inside the mountain looking out. She presses her lips, seals her thoughts, before anything else slithers out. DPO, DPO. She still has to prove up. But she can’t help smiling.
    The short night turns blue, then yellow. Shallow ice, about as deep as a piss on a wall, dribbles down over vertical rock leading up to the chimney that splits the last headwall. Sunlight streams by overhead. Wind rattles through her. Somewhere down below, a thunderclap of released snow reaches her through her music. Speed , she says to herself, imagining a two-man team fucking around with ropes and anchors and getting creamed.
    She’s been in a deep groove all morning. She keeps her rope in her pack, reaches up, and hooks an edge with one tool, whangs the center of a plaque of ice with the other. The climbing is delicate, kinetic, a hatchet fight with a monster. Her hand keeps twitching toward the rope, but there are no gear placements, and she has already committed. She blocks out the summit and the ground and the thought of falling.
    Each move fractures her resolve, a crack here, a chip there. Her brain wanders. She wonders if she—pieces of her anyway—will make it all the way to the ground if she falls now. It looks that sheer. Maybe she’ll just burn up on reentry, turn into a bloody mist. Her hands, arms, brain scream for the rope, but the rope means nothing without a crack for a pin or a patch of ice deep enough for a screw.
    Her muscles are on fire. She forces a long reach to an eyebrow of rock and nearly blows it when her crampon skates, shooting sparks.The eyebrow is nothing. She sees, knows, it shouldn’t hold. Part of her already seems to be falling. She cuts that part away, lets it fall. She is fucking here , fucking now . Like fleeing a burning building, she forces herself under the smoke in her mind, down to the floor of thought. Do , she tells herself, and she locks the eyebrow off at her hip, reaches up, spears a scum of ice. Do again .
    When the top half of Ann’s brain re-hooks itself to the rest of her, she is up in the chimney. She seems to be coming out of a trance, though she remembers every move. She’s never gone so deep into the reptilian bottom of her consciousness. Another weapon . She feels vacated and shaky. Better not use it often . But it’s good to know what’s down there.
    The chimney is deep, dark. Strange children of the mountain live inside. Hanging curtains of rock creak when Ann presses her back against them. Fungoid shelves of ice crawl out from cracks. She fishes for holds under liquid powder snow.
    And then she is on the summit ridge, in the sunshine. The actual summit is a fin of crusty snow that feels unstable, a trap for puffed up climbers with lowered defenses. Ann straddles it anyway, hanging one leg over the north face and the other over the south, just long enough to give the mountain the finger and blow a few kisses at the wind. The mountain looks evil, deadly, goat-ugly. It suits her perfectly. Past her right leg she can see six thousand feet down the face she has climbed. It’s hers now. Others have come. They brought their hopes and ropes and balls. No one else has sent the