“Everest,” Tim said.

“What?”

“You asked, before,” he explained. “What my favourite death was. It was Everest.”

Nola rolled her eyes. She remembered Everest. “Why are you telling me this all of a sudden?”

“You ever reached the death zone?” Tim asked instead.

She scoffed. “Of course I have; I was the one who recovered your fuckin’ body.”

Tim laughed. “They say the altitude does things to your head, messes with your brain. It’s like…” He trailed off for a moment. Nola stayed silent.

“It puts you in a trace. Once you hit twenty-six thousand, two-hundred feet… it’s like, like the mountain possesses you… Did you feel it?”

Nola remembered the feeling of her lungs expanding and no air coming to fill, of her energy being drained merely by breathing. She remembered the labour of her muscles as she struggled to put one foot before the other, the dizziness that came with the pressure of the sky as it bore down from above, as if she alone held it in place.

And yet, even when she thought she’d, too, perish atop the world’s largest open graveyard, the mountain’s peak pulled her, forced her onwards, through the rainbow valley of what remained of those before her.

Of her party of three, Nola was the only one to return alive; Tim’s mummified corpse draped across her back like tired luggage.

“Y’know,” Tim said, his voice tainted by wistful remembrance, “it was summer when I died. I froze to death in summer.”

Everest lacked mountaineers in the monsoon season, but that day had been particularly clear. Breathing through his oxygen mask felt like breathing through a straw. Eventually, with the summit in his gaze, Tim was able to feel each cell in his body as they excruciatingly began to crystallise and die.

The sky was clear over Everest’s peak, although clouds had begun to gather.

“Do you remember Elijah, or was he too long after your time?” Tim asked. It was the first time he said that name aloud in years.

“Heard of him,” Nola grunted, preoccupied as she felt around for a cigarette.

“I saw him. About a thousand feet from the top. He was there.” His time in the death zone had been plagued by ghosts; people who no longer existed, visions of the past. Friends who had only died once, for one time had been enough.

However, when Eli appeared in front of him, alive and well, Tim knew he had neared the end.

Eli helped him reach the summit and, knowing he would never be able to stand again, he sat upon its rocky peak. There, they overlooked the Himalayas; almost thirty-thousand feet in the air, the world looked small. Despite the lack of oxygen, and his neurons finally suffocating, Tim found a tranquility that was rare in his life of bloodshed and misery.

For once, the wind held still, and with the air so thin, Tim felt like he was floating in a vacuum. The sun was bright as it shone down on them, it’s warmth radiating through his skin, settling into his bones; the icicles on his skin told him it was probably the hypothermia setting in.

“I sat down on the peak. I didn’t want to get up. I only brought four tanks.”

“We only found three.”

Tim smiled. “I’m sure someone took my last one. I didn’t need it.” In his last moments, he had discarded his oxygen; he wanted to die with pure summit air in his lungs.

Beside him, Eli sat as well. With his dying breath in the summer sun, they spoke about old things, and with this dying breath still, Tim had confessed his sins, of what had become of him under his new life.

Beneath the Himalayas’s clear sky, the sun’s healing shine, Elijah had not vilified him, but had forgiven him instead.

Nola realised her cigarettes had been confiscated. She finally snapped, and repeated: “Why are you telling me this?”

“Well, when this whole thing-“ Tim gestured around the dull, musty cell they were in, “-blows over, I want to die on Everest again. The one that sticks, I want it to be on Everest.”