Highest Point (The Hastings #3)

Prologue

Alec

I belong where the air is thin enough to kill you. One in four die on this mountain, but I climb anyway, because up here in the death zone—where no human should survive—I feel alive.

“We did it, Alec.” His hug knocks what little oxygen I’ve got left out of my chest. His mask fogs between us, his voice breaking through the hiss of tanks. “Look at us, high enough to touch the stars.”

From his jacket, he pulls out a battered Toblerone.

A tradition we started at nineteen on the summit of Denali, half-starved and giddy with frostbite.

Chocolate is the only thing we can choke down in the altitude of the death zone.

The bar’s frozen solid, a brick of sugar and ice.

Finn smashes it against his axe until a shard snaps off, and he presses it into my glove.

“To the last eight-thousander,” I rasp, my mask hanging loose, lips numb.

“The last one.”

We gnaw the frozen Toblerone, watching the planet curve beneath us. The Karakoram Range stretches endlessly between Pakistan and China.

“We need to move,” Nadra calls, crouched low against the wind, camera lens trained on Finn. Even now, half dead at 28,000 feet, our cameraman works the shot.

Finn bares his teeth in a grin, lips cracked and bloody, skin raw from the cold.

He looks straight into the camera. “Two Men On Top fucking did it,” he says, voice shredded by the wind.

“Fourteen eight-thousanders. Fourteen of the nastiest sons of bitches in the world. And we finish on K2.” He leans into the lens like he’s on a talk show instead of standing on the second-highest point on earth.

We’ve been doing stupid shit together since we were five and jumping off garage roofs with my mom’s silk sheets tied to our backs.

When we were sixteen, we got our driver’s licenses and celebrated by summiting Mount Shasta.

At the top, we made a pact. We’d climb the world’s fourteen highest mountains, the ones over 8,000 meters.

All or nothing. For sixteen years, we’ve been chasing summits like addicts.

Peaks that strip the flesh from your bones, where blood thickens, thoughts slow, and oxygen vanishes.

There were failures that hollowed us out, silences that nearly broke us.

Still we climbed. Fourteen mountains that reached higher than the gods, and somehow both of us lived to see K2, the monster we swore to finish or die trying.

And we’ve filmed every climb along the way.

Behind Nadra, the daylight flickers, like it knows it’s running out of time.

My watch buzzes—a brutal reminder that the mountain doesn’t give a damn about our victory lap. Numbers crawl across the screen, cold facts cutting through the euphoria.

Storm wall ETA: 6h 42m.

Hours awake: 58.

Wind chill: –33°F.

We have to get down to Base Camp Four before night falls and the storm rolls in.

“Wrap it up,” I tell Finn. He nods, never missing a beat.

“Huge thanks to our sponsors at The North Face,” he says into the lens. “These jackets kept us alive, even when somebody stole my sleeping bag.” He jerks a thumb at me. I elbow him, not softly. “Anything you want to add, big man?”

“First team to scale the North Face of K2. Couldn’t have done it without him.” My mouth stretches into a bloody smile.

“That’s all, folks!” Finn shouts, and Nadra’s already packing up, ropes out, trailing the Sherpas down the safer line.

I allow myself one heartbeat—just one—to turn and look out at the valley below.

There’s no sound up here, not really. No birdsong.

No engines. No people. Just the hiss of the wind, like the white noise between movements of a Beethoven symphony.

My lungs try to catch air that doesn’t want to be caught, each breath more borrowed than earned.

The sky above is a cathedral, endless and blue enough to hurt.

For a second, I forget I’m human. I forget the throbbing behind my eyes, the pins of altitude digging into my skull, and the exhaustion gnawing at every muscle. I forget that K2 could take me without hesitation, and it would be its right.

That is until my watch buzzes again, reminding me I still have to get to base camp.

We’ve been standing on the summit for five minutes and twenty-two seconds. That’s a minute longer than we’re allowed. I’ve been watching the barometer for days, studying the pressure. The jet stream shifted, cracked open this narrow window for us to summit, and I know it won’t stay open long.

There’s no getting greedy with K2.

I glance at our gauges. Both tanks quiver around 900 PSI. Enough oxygen to get us back to Base Camp Four if nothing goes wrong. Six hours, maybe more.

I run through the checklist in my head. Harnesses cinched. Anchors doubled. Fixed lines where I set them two days back, still holding. I kneel and tug Finn’s left crampon strap one notch tighter.

One more descent.

“Come on,” I huff, snapping my mask back into place and scraping the ice from my goggles.

Finn throws me a thumbs-up, shoulders his pack without a word, and heads for the ropes. I fall in behind him, crampons scraping against ice.

Time turns strange on descents. Almost liquid and elastic. You don’t want to measure it, but you have to. Every step has its own clock, and every decision its own weight. The ridge is narrow but manageable.

An hour, maybe more, bleeds away before we reach the section that has haunted me for weeks.

A five-hour descent over vertical terrain, loose snow, and too many places for the mountain to bite back.

Above us, a serac the size of a semitruck looms, a frozen ceiling waiting to collapse.

Below, a crevasse yawns open, a wound in the mountain deep enough to consume an entire city.

There’s no margin for error here. We have to be swift.

My axe buries itself into the frozen hide of the ice face. My body moves on muscle memory. Rappel. Anchor. Shift weight. I’ve done it a hundred times, a thousand. But every creak beneath me, every groan above me, sounds too close.

Two hours in. The wind howls at fifty knots now, and denial is a luxury we can’t afford—the storm is early.

Snow slashes sideways, white knives in the dark. My world shrinks to the hiss of wind, the rope in front of me, and the only command that matters. Don’t be hasty. I recite my family motto, the one I have inked into my skin.

The ground shakes; somewhere in the distance an avalanche roars. K2 is awake, but I’m not afraid. I glance sideways at Finn’s shadow, his headlamp flickering along the ridge. We move in rhythm, each step a pact, each breath proof we’re still alive.

Don’t stop. Don’t think. Just move.

I’m so cold, my skin has turned hot and itchy under my clothes.

My fingers are wood, my lungs sandpaper.

My muscles do the work, but my mind drifts, thin air gnawing holes in my thoughts.

I’ve been dreaming about this day for nearly my entire life, but now that I’m here, clinging onto this wall, I’m wondering why the hell I left my tent this morning.

As if K2 senses my regret, she speaks. A low grumbling comes from under me, like the earth’s bones are grinding together. My eyes snap up. But it’s too late. There’s nothing I can do, because the guillotine’s already being released.

The serac tears loose, slides from the slope, and falls with a sound older than language.

Don’t let go. Don’t you dare let go.

My head whips to Finn. I shout—at least, I think I do—but the wind shreds it.

The rope between us jerks. This can’t be happening.

I reach for it, but it’s too late. I grit my teeth and watch as my best friend is ripped from the slope.

One second flesh and blood, the next weightless, a scrap of dust flung into the storm.

“Finn!”

No, no, no.

Panic claws at my throat, and it’s as if my entire body has been hollowed out, stripped into nothingness.

I need to focus. If I don’t, they’ll find two bodies down there, or none at all.

I slam my axe into the ice, anchoring until my arm rattles, and all I can do is shut my eyes and wait for the world to stop ending.

Time stretches until it’s purgatory, hell, or just plain fear. Long enough to ask myself the question I swore I’d never ask: Why the fuck did we ever come here?

The blizzard assaults me, buries me, and eats the strength from my fingers. I shriek, slipping toward the crevasse, thighs screaming in pain as my crampons scrape for purchase along the slope.

I shouldn’t have kept us up on the summit for that extra minute. It was my call to make. If we die today, it’ll be my fucking fault.

I feel tiny, foolish, and achingly human.

I do the closest thing I’ve ever done to praying. Finally, air slashes my back, caressing my neck. A lull in the wind. I’m alive. But as soon as the relief washes over me, dread sets in.

Where is Finn?

I scramble sideways, boots skidding until I’m braced at the lip of the crevasse. “Finn!”

Nothing.

If the wind had pushed five more feet, I would’ve been—I don’t finish the thought. Instead, I clench my jaw hard. How far did he fall? Did he hit the bottom? Is he still breathing?

Ice needles into my jacket.

I’m in control. I repeat it over and over. K2 seems to laugh at that. The storm rages harder now, like it’s a living thing, howling, smothering, erasing him.

“Finn,” I rasp again, throat raw, lungs burning acid. I fling my bag to the ice at my feet, clawing frantically for the excess rope. I only have one choice. I have to go get him.

I suck in one breath, shaking the panic out of my limbs. Fear is death on the ice. If Finn is alive down there, I cannot give up. I’d rather die right here than abandon my best friend.

I scream his name until my voice frays, until my mouth tastes of blood, but the mountain swallows it whole.