Chapter Text
Agent Juno in
THIN ICE – Part One (The fourth story of Agent Juno Hayes)
Chapter One: A Little Altitude, A Little Attitude
"Well, Agent Juno, you’ll never guess who is planning to cut off communication to the International Space Station in a bid to rule the world."
Juno Hayes arched one brow—her left, the only visible one—while sipping slow and easy from the crystal glass of cognac. She was perched, rather comfortably, in the same leather armchair she’d nearly been fired from three times before. Across from her, Chief Debora Pattranelli sat in her usual place: behind a fortress of mahogany, hands folded, eyes cold.
Juno smiled, almost fondly. "Doctor Ernst Valther?"
Pattranelli didn’t flinch. "The same."
Juno leaned back slightly, legs crossed, black pencil skirt precisely one regulation inch too short. "And where is he hoping to conduct his business from this time? Another Venezuelan tepui? A desert island? The government buildings of a rogue nation?"
Pattranelli’s lips were a tight line. "The summit of Mount Everest."
Juno snorted—almost laughed. Then stopped.
She remembered that Debora Pattranelli had been born without a sense of humour.
"Mount Everest," Juno repeated slowly, swirling the remains of her drink. "Of course. Where else? Plenty of air, zero Wi-Fi, just the right amount of drama."
Pattranelli didn’t rise to the sarcasm. "We need you to beat him to the summit, make contact with the Space Station by satellite phone, lock out all other access, and eliminate Valther. He will be taking the standard route to the top, so, in order to remain undetected, you will climb Everest the hard way—via the 1975 British Southwest Face route."
Juno set her glass down with a gentle clink. "Do I need to pack lunch?"
"You may find this amusing, Commander," Pattranelli said, her voice now carrying the lethal edge of bureaucracy armed with global consequences, "but there’s a problem. You have no high-altitude mountaineering experience."
"With respect, Ma’am," Juno said, folding her hands neatly in her lap, "I have solo climbed the North Wall of the Eiger with one ice dagger and two bottles of whiskey."
"Yes, well, this is not a mountaineering vacation," Pattranelli replied dryly. "Or, indeed, an undergraduate birthday party. This is about the International Space Station—belonging to Europe, America, Japan, and Russia, among others. And Moscow says you need a mountain guide."
Juno raised an eyebrow, unimpressed. Then she drained the last of her cognac. "Moscow? Since when do we take orders from our friends in the East? You do know they’re born with snow in their veins and a lie on their lips?"
Pattranelli, unbothered, poured her a second glass. "Commander, the Cold War ended before you were born. Anyway, your partner will be here any minute: Captain of the Second Rank Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov. Ex-Spetsnaz. Specialist in high-altitude mountaineering."
Juno blinked. "Captain of the Second Rank? He outranks me?"
There was a knock at the door.
"Ah," Pattranelli said, standing. "That will be him now. Come."
Juno slouched further back in her chair, glass in hand, eye narrowing toward the door. "Probably taking a break from toppling Western democracies."
The door opened.
He stepped in with military precision. Six foot four, cut from granite, blonde hair like a wolf’s in winter, face carved by Russian discipline and Siberian pack-ice. He wore full Russian naval uniform—sleek, immaculate, so sharply tailored it might have doubled as body armor. His expression was unreadable, but his blue eyes landed squarely on Juno with a curious intensity.
Juno did a double take.
She sat up a little straighter, smoothed the front of her blue blouse, and—only slightly—adjusted the strap of her black eye-patch.
Pattranelli moved between them, the consummate diplomat. “Lieutenant-Commander Juno Hayes, meet Captain of the Second Rank Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov.”
Aleksei extended his hand. "It is a pleasure to meet you, Lieutenant-Commander."
Juno, still seated, took it. His grip was strong and dry, his tone cool but not unfriendly.
For once, she had no immediate comeback. Lieutenant-Commander? Not quite a correction—but maybe just enough of one. She found her voice.
"Likewise, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov."
"You may call me Alyosha," he said, with a small nod.
Juno gave him a sidelong glance. "Don’t worry, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov, I’ve read War and Peace. I know how you guys love your triple-barrel names."
Pattranelli closed her eyes briefly, rubbing her brow.
Then she composed herself again and turned to Aleksei. "Would you care for a drink?"
"No, thank you, Chief Pattranelli," he said. "I don’t drink."
Juno arched a brow again, this time in mock horror. "A Russian who doesn’t drink! I suppose you don’t want to dislodge the cyanide capsule in your molar?"
Aleksei blinked. "Cyanide?"
Juno raised her glass of cognac, smirking. "No thanks. I’ve already got my poison."
Chapter Two: High Spirits, Low Oxygen
Three weeks to reach Base Camp.
Three weeks of goat tracks, mule trains, and the kind of toilets that made you question your commitment to international security.
It had taken Juno Hayes only four days to regret not faking a knee injury.
Now, somewhere near the millionth vertical metre, her boots ground against the dust of a brutal uphill switchback. Her T-shirt was clinging somewhat provocatively with sweat, her tight denim shorts felt like sandpaper, and her backpack—nearly as tall as she was—had developed a sadistic personality of its own.
A small crowd of Himalayan goats had overtaken her twenty minutes earlier, effortlessly trotting up the rocky incline with their smug little beards.
At the top of the slope, Juno dropped her pack with an unceremonious thump, collapsed onto it, and reached for the only cure she trusted at altitude: her hip flask.
The whisky hit her like a warm slap. She exhaled slowly, ignoring the whisper of wind coming off the glacier high above. Her lungs were burning, her thighs on strike, and her brain somewhere near sea level and refusing to rejoin the expedition.
Up ahead, Aleksei paused mid-stride and turned. His posture, annoyingly perfect. His breath, entirely unlaboured. Not a drop of sweat dared mar his inhuman cheekbones.
“We can’t rest yet,” he called down. “Our next camp is still 14.3 kilometres away.”
Juno lowered the flask and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Unreasonably, it annoyed her that he used European kilometres and not British miles.
“That’s the trouble with guys,” she said, grinning up at him. “You’re always rushin’.”
Aleksei stared at her blankly.
She raised her eyebrow. “You see what I did there? Always rushin’—like Russian? … Because you’re from Russia?”
He looked her up and down with the cool detachment of a tailor sizing up a suit.
“You need to eat more before we get onto the mountain,” he said flatly. “Your body is too skinny. At high altitude, you lose weight quickly, so you need to build up some body weight, so that your muscles don’t waste away.”
Juno blinked at him with her single eye.
“I’m sorry my body doesn’t meet your exacting standards, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov,” she said sweetly. “Let me guess—your other job is as a guard in the Gulags?”
“Let’s get going.”
He turned and walked on without waiting.
Juno sighed and dragged herself to her feet. The flask went back in her pocket. The backpack was hoisted unwillingly onto her shoulders.
“Always rushin’,” she muttered again, this time to herself. She chuckled. “That was a good one.”
________________________________________
That evening, they made camp in a narrow valley ringed by jagged cliffs, tucked between the clouds and the stars. Juno sat on a stone, finishing off some kind of lentil and cabbage nightmare of a stew. She was about to put down her empty bowl when she looked up, sensing Alexei’s gaze on her. His eyes flicked to large pot of stew simmering on the campfire, and then back up to her.
“Fine,” she relented, getting up and scooping a second helping of the grey glop out of the pot “but it’s because I want it, not because you say so.”
From across the fire, Aleksei returned to the task of methodically shovelling stew into his mouth.
He swallowed, still looking down into his bowl: “Noted.”
Chapter Three: Cold Facts, Warm Rum
The view from Base Camp was a paradox: beautiful, terrifying, and quietly indifferent to human ambition. At 5,000 metres above sea level, even the wind moved like it was struggling to breathe.
Juno Hayes lay sprawled on a fold-out camp chair in black thermal leggings and a fleece that smelled faintly of yak. A bottle of rum sat on her lap, half-capped, half-finished. She stared out at the looming mass of Everest’s Southwest Face—an impossibly steep sheet of rock and ice that climbed beyond the clouds like a stairway for dead gods.
Somewhere on the far side of the mountain, Doctor Ernst Valther was already climbing. She should’ve been nervous. Maybe she was. Hard to tell through the altitude headache and the rum.
Across the clearing, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov sat cross-legged on a canvas mat, a long hunting knife in his hand and a half-sculpted block of wood in the other. The blade moved with slow, practiced care, carving delicate curves from the grain. He was whittling a figurine of a ballerina, frozen in mid-pirouette, impossibly fragile, her limbs as slender as matchsticks, her skirt flared as though caught in a gust of Alpine wind.
Juno took a swig and squinted at him through the rim of the bottle.
“What you got there, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov?”
He didn’t look up. “A block of wood.”
She grinned, cocked her head. “Is it a communist bloc?”
Silence.
The grin slid off her face. The joke had come out more acidic than clever.
She leaned forward, peering. “Oh, I see—it’s a ballerina. Is she dancing or running?”
Aleksei’s knife paused. “She’s falling.”
Juno blinked. “Well. That’s… not ominous at all. Let’s try again: tell me about the Southwest Face.”
Aleksei’s knife paused. Then resumed its work. “How much do you know about it?”
“Not much,” she admitted. “It was first climbed in ’75 by Bonington’s British expedition. At the time, considered the most daunting mountaineering challenge in the world.”
He finally looked up—past her, really—gazing at the wall of ice and shadow rising above them.
“Do you see the broad ice gully running up the centre of the face?”
Juno followed his eyes and nodded slowly. “The Central Couloir.”
“It climbs for two thousand metres. Two-thirds of the way up. Technically not too difficult—forty-five degrees. But the top of it sits at eight thousand metres. Up there, the air is so thin most climbers need bottled oxygen just to tie their laces.”
He set the half-formed ballerina figurine aside.
“To ice-climb at that altitude is almost beyond human capacity. We won’t have oxygen.”
Juno blinked. “Avalanches?”
He nodded. “Frequent.”
Her mouth opened. Then closed. Then opened again.
“That’s incredible.”
Aleksei turned to her, expression unreadable. “It gets worse.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No, I meant it’s incredible that you just said that many words in one go. I didn’t realize you did consecutive sentences.”
He gave no sign of noticing the dig.
He pointed toward the upper section of the face. “In ’75, Bonington’s team reached the top of the couloir. But as you can see—” he traced the skyline with a gloved finger, “—there’s a five-hundred metre band of nearly vertical rock. Impassable.”
Juno stared at the jagged wall slicing through the clouds like an executioner’s blade.
“They avoided it by climbing a hidden gully on the left, skirting around to the summit snowfield.”
“And us?” she asked.
He met her eyes, deadpan. “We go straight up. The rock band. Direct ascent.”
Juno laughed once, like she couldn’t believe it. “Wait. You’re telling me we’re going to climb an unclimbed five-hundred metre vertical rock wall, starting at an altitude that is already higher than almost every mountain in the world?”
“Yes.”
“No oxygen?”
“No oxygen.”
There was a long silence.
Then Aleksei added, “Don’t worry, Lieutenant-Commander. Getting back down is the hard part.”
She stared.
Then—slowly, suspiciously—a smile spread across her face. “Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov. Did you just make… a joke?”
He looked back at her evenly.
“I don’t joke.”
Juno took another sip of rum, savoring the burn. “That’s what makes it so special.”
Chapter Four: The Jump
They were halfway up the Central Couloir, a frozen artery of the Southwest Face that rose in a near-straight line into cloud and thin air. The slope beneath Juno Hayes angled like a cathedral roof—forty-five degrees of bulletproof ice, blue and ancient. Wind whispered across it, dragging spindrift in thin, ghostly ribbons.
Juno knelt in her crampons, anchored to a pair of ice screws, paying off loops of rope with gloved care. Above her, Aleksei Mikhailovich Reznikov moved with the steady rhythm of someone who did not intend to fall. His silhouette carved a dark figure against the blinding surface as he kicked his front-points into the ice, one after the other, each footfall a small assertion of life against gravity. Twin ice axes bit higher, then pulled his lean body up in a clockwork dance of ascent.
He was fifty metres above her when he heard it.
A low, guttural rumble. Like a throat clearing in the sky.
Aleksei’s head snapped upward.
“Avalanche!” he barked, voice cutting clean through the thinning air.
He didn’t panic. He did not look back. He simply buried both axes into the ice, slammed his crampons deeper, and hunched low, bracing himself.
Juno looked up. For a single, lucid instant she saw it—a vast curtain of white detaching from the heights above, a rushing, roaring wall of snow and ice descending fast, too fast.
Then she saw something else.
One of Aleksei’s axes, struck by a tumbling chunk of ice, jolted free. It twisted, airborne—blade gleaming in a somersault—and began to fall.
Straight down.
Towards her.
Juno’s heart jammed. The axe was coming fast, spinning like a thrown knife, bouncing once off the ice slope and sailing again, way beyond reach.
She didn’t think.
Her hands unclipped the carabiner from her harness. The rope snapped free.
Her feet pushed down hard on the ice and she leapt.
In that insane second she became all instinct and timing—arms stretched, body arched like a ballerina mid-flight. The falling axe seemed to slow, impossibly, and she snatched it out of the air with one hand just as the avalanche slammed into her like a freight train of snow.
She disappeared.
Aleksei, above, was slammed by the wave but held. Just barely. The second axe gone, he was left clinging to a single tool. He saw Juno vanish in the maelstrom, saw nothing but the white chaos rolling downwards.
He let go.
The ice rushed past him as he dropped. The slope became a blur, the rope hissing in his harness. Then, timing like a metronome, he drove his single axe into the slope.
He angled his weight precisely—head low, chest down, feet lifted to keep the crampon spikes from catching and flipping him. The blade cut into the ice. He ground to a halt just above the anchor point, precisely on line.
Below him, the rope screamed, unraveling from the anchor coil by coil like a spooling engine.
Aleksei didn’t flinch.
He reached out, wrapped one gloved hand around a slack coil, and tied a clove hitch to the anchor.
The moment it bit, the rope snapped taut with a vicious tug—and held.
Far below, tumbling through the tail-end of the avalanche, Juno jerked to a halt with a jolt that would have yanked the soul from a lesser climber. The snow continued thundering past her, surging down the couloir and vanishing into the white throat of the glacier below.
Juno dangled in its wake, breathing hard. One hand gripped the caught axe. The other clawed for stability. She got her feet under her. Kicked. The crampons bit.
A voice, distant but clear, floated down from above.
“Are you hurt?”
She looked up. Her voice cracked through the cold. “I’m fine!”
“I have you anchored safely. Climb when you are ready.”
Juno nodded to no one. Then she began the long, shaking ascent.
When she reached the anchor, she found Aleksei calmly coiling the rope. He didn’t look up. His gloves moved with clinical efficiency, checking the ice screws, the hitches, the gear—all of it, as if nothing unusual had happened.
For the first time in her adult life, Juno Hayes was impressed.
Still without meeting her eyes, Aleksei said, “I have never seen that before.”
She blinked some tiny icicles off the long lashes of her left eye. “What? An avalanche?”
“No.” He paused. “I have never seen a person jump off a mountain into an avalanche to catch a flying ice axe in mid-air. With one hand.”
Juno tried not to smile. She failed. Her cheeks coloured slightly. “You weren’t too bad yourself.”
Aleksei didn’t answer. He finished coiling the rope, clipped it to his harness, and took out a fresh ice screw.
Then, without a word, he started climbing again.
Chapter Five: The Rock Band
Advanced Base Camp. A snow shelf at the top of the Central Couloir, where ice gave way to towering rock. The wall wasn't steep—but it was endless. It rose five hundred metres, broken granite and welded ice, not quite vertical, but relentless. Nothing obvious. No clean lines. Just slabs leaning against one another like collapsed shelves in a frozen library.
To the left, Juno could see the 1975 route, the key to the Southwest Face: a narrow gully, tucked out of sight, crusted with old ice and the ghost-prints of climbers from fifty years ago.
But that was not Aleksei’s route. Already, the Russian was high above, leading the first rock pitch. Then she was high on the wall, looking straight down to the Advance Base Camp, struggling to remember how she got there.
Juno didn’t ask questions. Not anymore. She had no more jokes, either. At 8000 metes, they were deep in the Death Zone, where the oxygen in the air was so thin, that the human body is slowly dying. They moved like sleepwalkers, unfinished sentences echoing like a dream, until they wondered if they had said or heard anything at all, until speech became unnecessary.
They moved by rhythm, not words. Each morning, they climbed a little higher, re-clipping into the fixed lines that Aleksei had placed the day before. Each evening, they abseiled back to the ledge they'd hacked into the ice—a cracked, wind-hollowed shelf the size of a coffin lid. They ate in silence. Slept in turns. Dreamt, if at all, of sea level.
There was no banter now. Just a shared economy of effort: Juno would hand Aleksei the next piton before he looked back. He would pause the rope just long enough for her to rest her forearms, and nothing more. Necessity had made them a single creature: two minds split by a rope and the whine of the wind.
On the third morning, the wall steepened.
Aleksei led, always. Juno belayed in the hollow of an alcove, watching snow plume from his tools. His movements were slow, precise, almost reverent—like a man reading scripture.
She didn’t understand him. Not really. She knew he wasn't in this for the ISS. Or The Russian Federation, the navy, international relations … none of that interested him. But when he spoke of this route, The Southwest Face Direct, although his face maintained its parade-ground rigidity, he could not conceal the glint in his eye. He would speak of “the greatest unclimbed challenge”, “this purest of all lines to the top of the world” – and then he would catch himself accidentally being human, and shut down like an iron curtain.
These were Juno’s thoughts as she followed another pitch of fractured slabs and wind-fused snow, locked in an endless, painful, exhausting vertical slog between snow and sky.
She reached for yet another rock ledge, pulled up and found herself peering over the lip of the cliff.
And there he was.
Sitting in the snow, one arm braced around a buried axe, the rope slack at his waist. For the first time in three days, he wasn’t moving. Wasn’t thinking. Just staring west, where the sun was draining gold across the shoulder of Lhotse.
Alekei Reznikov turned to her as she emerged from the abyss, and he smiled, wide and stupid and unguarded.
For a moment, Juno forgot that couldn’t feel her hands. Forgot the climb. Forgot the summit still hulking above.
She realised she was laughing, and so was he. Juno dragged herself onto the snow and staggered over to him.
He stood, held out his hand: “Congratulations, Lieutenant-Commander. You have just climbed Everest’s Southwest Face Direct – The Last Great Problem in modern mountaineering.”
They formally shook hands, frost flaking from their sleeves.
Juno searched for her voice, but found herself looking up at his beaming face, giggling foolishly, and she didn’t care.
Chapter Six: The Traverse
There was no warning.
Just the sharp intake of breath. A lurch of rope. A blur of movement in the corner of her eye—and then Aleksei was gone.
The line snapped taut with a crack like a gunshot. Juno grunted, braced hard against the snow, crampons biting into nothing. She was flattened, one gloved hand looped in the belay, the other groping wildly for the flimsy anchor point. The impact pulled her half over the lip—but the gear held.
Below, against the black ribs of the Rock Band, Aleksei swung like a pendulum.
She couldn’t see him. Just the frayed line trembling under tension and a faint red smear slashed against the granite below. She shouted his name. Nothing. The wind tore the word from her mouth and flung it down the mountain.
Juno drew a breath. Then another. She checked the anchors, rigged her system fast, and began to descend.
The world narrowed to motion and sound: the squeal of the belay, the crunch of crampons, the soft slide of rope. She dropped through powder and ghosts, through the gaping void where moments ago they'd stood triumphant. It didn’t feel triumphant now.
She found him twenty metres below, crumpled against a snow-plastered ledge, one ice axe jammed haphazardly into a crack. His helmet was split. Blood bloomed sluggishly across one cheek.
“Aleksei,” she said.
A flicker of movement. His eyes opened—barely. “British… woman,” he slurred.
“That’s me,” she said, voice thick. “Stop flirting. You’ve had a knock.”
“I fell,” he said, as though she might not have noticed.
She cut his pack loose, checked him fast. Skull laceration. Likely concussion. One wrist possibly sprained. But he was alive. And awake. That was more than she’d dared hope.
“You’re not dead,” she said, tapping his cheek gently. “Which is very annoying, because I’m going to have to get you to the top after all.”
He winced. “It is—impossible.”
She looked up.
The summit snowfield waited above. It should have been easy. A final, glorious stroll across the sky. But the storm had dumped a metre of loose powder, piled steep and vertical, like a wedding cake turned on its side, and clearly this had collapsed under Aleksei’s weight.
It would be like shoveling icing sugar. Uphill.
They moved in slow, stuttering silence.
Juno broke trail, carving steps into a slope that wanted nothing more than to collapse under her. Every second step slid away. Every breath came with effort. She kicked in, planted axes, and heaved.
Behind her, Aleksei followed like a ghost—roped in, off-balance, silent. He leaned heavily on her, one hand still capable, the other curled stiff at his chest. His eyes were half-closed now, his lips grey.
They were barely climbing anymore. They were crawling. Shoveling. Surviving.
Above them, the sky darkened by degrees.
To the west, vast thunderclouds rolled upwards. Below, the face fell away into silence. Wind began to moan across the traverse, high and low like something grieving. Daylight was running out.
At last, the slope eased. The gradient shifted under Juno’s boots. And then—
Nothing.
Just space.
And a crooked metal pole poking out of the snow.
The summit.
She stopped. Her shoulders slumped. She didn’t cry. She didn’t laugh. She simply turned and let Aleksei catch up—if you could call what he was doing catching up. He stumbled, fell to his knees, and she caught him under one arm.
They stood together on the top of the world, leaning into one another, exhausted and empty.
There was no celebration. Only necessity.
Chapter 7: The Summit
Juno crouched, dragging the satellite phone from her pack. Her gloves fumbled with the latch. The cold was chewing through her limbs now, bone-deep. She powered the unit, flipped open the screen, and activated the secure channel to the International Space Station. Just as they’d planned.
“Commencing lockout,” she murmured, fingers flying. “Secure uplink. One-time passcode. Five minutes of connection, and only from here.”
She entered the final code.
Behind her, Aleksei knelt, head bowed.
Below them, a figure moved against the slope.
Dr Ernst Valther, storm-shadowed and wolf-paced, was making his final approach.
They had beaten him. Barely.
They hadn’t heard him approach—the wind masked everything. One moment it was just the two of them on the roof of the world. The next, a blur of red and silver staggered over the summit ridge.
Juno blinked snow from her lashes.
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
Dr Ernst Valther straightened with theatrical effort, chest heaving. His goggles were cracked, his oxygen mask dangling uselessly from one ear. He looked like a cross-country skiing skeleton—gaunt, ancient, and absurdly nimble.
“Well, well,” he rasped, spotting her. “CSIB. We meet again. It seems you’ve been busy.”
“Valther,” Juno said coldly. “This is your idea of a comeback?”
He grinned, teeth flashing pale against frostbitten lips. “There’s more than one way to reach the International Space Station, my dear. Your satellite lockdown won’t hold from the South Col. I have fallback frequencies—don’t worry, I’m quite resourceful.”
Then, with a sudden leap, he turned on his skis and launched himself down the summit ridge, vanishing into the blowing spindrift like a cartoon villain fleeing a crime scene.
Juno rolled her eyes: “Jerk.”
Aleksei, already staggering under the altitude and blood loss, clutched the satellite phone. “One of us has to stay here. Keep the link locked. Block him.”
“I’ll do that. You need to get to a lower altitude with that injury. Go.”
Alexei reached for the phone: “I will stay. You go.”
Their eyes met—and the silence was immediate, charged.
Chapter 8: A Tall Order
The wind shrieked against the summit pole. Snow scoured sideways across the ridge. Tibet was vanishing from sight.
“There’s no way you’re staying up here,” Juno said, fighting to be heard. “You’re injured. You need to get down.”
Aleksei didn’t look at her. His lips were cracked, the blood on his cheek already crystallising. He held the satellite phone with both hands, like a relic.
“Hand it over,” she said. “I’ll stay. I’ll hold the line.”
He turned at last. “You don’t have the experience to survive up here. Not in a storm. Not at night.” His voice was steady, but quieter now. “You’re already staggering. Look at you.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“And you are?” She gestured to the matted bandage at his temple, the red seeping through. “You’re still bleeding, Aleksei.”
“I will slow you down. I am not good with skis.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You Russians are born on skis.”
A beat of silence. The kind of silence that stretches too long to be comfortable. Then, softly—
“Lieutenant-Commander.” His voice took on an edge of formality. “I’m giving you an order. Go down. Catch Valther if you can. Get to safety.”
Juno looked away, toward the storm swelling over the horizon. Lightning flashed deep in the gut of it. Then she looked at the sky—fading already.
“Forget the mission,” she said. Her voice cracked. “Come down with me.”
He didn’t answer. The wind roared between them.
She swallowed. Her throat burned. “Alyosha…”
He turned his face away.
No salute, No handshake. No goodbye.
Juno clipped on her skis.
And without another word, she pushed off from the summit, the tears freezing on her cheeks before they could fall.
Chapter 9: A Phone Call
Juno made it to the commercial base camp just before nightfall, skis abandoned in the slush somewhere near Camp II. Her face was wind-burnt, her fingers half-frozen, and she hadn’t cried since leaving Aleksei on the summit. She knew if she started, she might not stop.
The camp bustled with guides, climbers, and chatter in ten different languages, but it all blurred together under the buzz of floodlights and the low drone of generators. Doctors took her in. Someone gave her sweet tea with yak’s milk. A nurse cleaned the gash above her eyebrow, asked polite questions, and left the answers to Juno’s silence.
That night, in a borrowed sleeping bag inside a yellow hospital tent, she called Pattranelli from a satellite-linked cellphone. She picked up on the first ring.
“He got away,” she said.
There was a pause.
“Understood,” Pattranelli replied. “Intel suggests Valther is moving east. Rural Sichuan. Possibly Chengdu. You’ll receive coordinates. Mission continues.”
“I need to wait for Aleksei,” she said.
Another pause.
“Agent Juno, it’s been three days.”
“I’m aware.”
She hung up before Pattranelli could point out the obvious.
Chapter 10: The Monsoon Breaks
The monsoon arrived on the fourth day. Snow battered the upper camps, rain lashed the lower valleys. Helicopters were grounded. Porters vanished down-mountain with packs balanced like temples on their backs. Juno waited.
On the fifth day, she packed up. Her orders were clear. The walk-out would take three weeks—if the rivers didn’t rise too high, if the roads weren’t washed out.
The morning she left, the sky wept endlessly, and the trail turned south. Mud sucked at her boots. Her body ached. Her heart—numb.
Then her radio crackled.
She stopped dead, dropping her pack in the middle of the trail. The voice was distorted by static.
“—enant-Commander?”
Her breath caught.
She gripped the radio with both hands. “Please repeat. Over.”
“Lieutenant-Commander?”
“Aleksei?” Her voice cracked.
Silence. Then—
“I have reached base camp.”
Juno's knees buckled slightly. She leaned forward, forehead against the radio.
He added, with a breathless edge of amusement:
“I almost left the ballerina behind.”
--------------------------------------------------- END ------------------------------------------ (Let me know in the comments if you're ready for part two.)