Or rather it held, but it held in a raft of snow that had broken loose and was now sliding down the hill beneath me.

This was just plain bad luck; if we’d been traversing packed snow, the pick would have had something firm in which to get purchase, but yesterday’s storm had left the packed ice covered with powdery stuff that slid freely on top of it.

Another vicious jerk at my waist told me that the toboggan had just hurtled over the edge. I raised my face up out of this mini-avalanche and got the weird idea that I wasn’t actually moving—because, of course, the snow around me was moving at the same speed as I. Then there was nothing under my toes. Nothing under my ankles. Nothing under my knees. My hips. The rope jerked me straight down with the weight of three men. I guess I did a sort of back-flip into the crevasse. But I only got to experience the terror of free fall for a fraction of a second before something terrible happened to my back and I stopped. The rope’s force was pulling me down against something immobile and hard. Loose snow continued to pummel me for a while. I remembered a woolly story that Yul had told me about getting caught in an avalanche, the importance of swimming, of preserving air space in front of one’s face. I couldn’t swim, but I did get one arm up and crooked an elbow over my mouth and nose. The weight of snow on my body built steadily, the tension on the rope slackened. Most of the avalanche seemed to be parting around me—falling away to either side—as I remained stuck.

For some reason I heard Jesry’s voice in my head saying, “Oh, so you’re only being buried alive a little bit.” What a jerk!

Then it stopped. I could hear my own heart beating, and nothing else.

I pushed outwards with my elbow. The snow moved a little and gave me a void in front of my face—air for a moment. More importantly it kept me from panicking, and let me open my eyes. There was dim blue-grey light. I could hear Arsibalt saying “Just enough to read by!” and Lio answering “If only you’d thought to bring a book.”

For whatever reason, I was not falling any deeper into the crevasse. Yet. And I didn’t think I’d fallen too far into it. Something had stopped my fall. I guessed that the toboggan had gotten lodged sideways between the crevasse walls and I’d fallen on it. Hard. I took a moment to wiggle my toes and my ankles, just to verify that I hadn’t broken my spine. It would have been nice to explore with my hands but one was pinned at my side and the other—the one I’d crooked over my face—was hemmed in by snow. I was, however, able to move that one downwards over my body. I found the zipper pull for my front pocket and inched it open. Then I moved that hand up to my face and pulled my mitten off with my teeth. I reached my bare hand down into the open pocket and fished out my sphere.

Spheres don’t have controls as such. They recognize gestures. You talk to them with your hands. My hand was a little stiff but I was able to make the unscrewing gesture that caused the sphere to get bigger. After a while this became a little scary because the sphere was stealing my air supply, claiming the void in front of my face and pressing on my chest. But I had the idea that the snow over me wasn’t that deep. So I kept telling it to expand. And just when I thought my own sphere was going to squeeze the life out of me, I heard rushing noises—a small avalanche. I reversed the gesture. The sphere got small, the weight came off, and I found myself gazing up through clear air between walls of blue ice. The sky was visible. And so was Brajj, standing at the edge of the crevasse looking down at me. I’d fallen about twenty feet.

“You’re avout,” was the first thing he said to me.

“Yes.”

“Got anything else in your bag of tricks? Because I have no rope. It all went down with those two Gheeths.” He patted the length of yellow rope tied around his waist. Only a foot or so dangled below the knot. It had been severed at exactly the point where the blade of his sticker would have intercepted it in a moment of panic—or of calculation.

“I thought maybe you cut it,” I said. I don’t know why. I guess it was that weird avout compulsion to state facts.

“Maybe I did.”

We looked at each other for a while. It occurred to me that Brajj was an exceptionally rational man—more so than some avout. He was another like the Crades or Cord or Artisan Quin who was smart enough to be an avout but who for whatever reason had ended up extramuros. In his case it seemed that being alone out here with no bond to anyone else like him had made him utterly calculating and ruthless.

“Let’s say you don’t care whether I live or die,” I said. “Let’s say that every decision you’ve made has been based on self-interest. You kept us alive, brought us with you, and roped yourself to us because you knew that if you fell in we’d try to help you. But the minute one of us fell in you cut the rope to save yourself. You looked down into this crack out of simple curiosity. Nothing more. Then you saw my sphere. You know I’m avout. What’s your decision?”

Brajj had found all of this faintly amusing. He rarely heard intelligent people state things clearly and he sort of enjoyed its novelty. He pondered my question for a minute or so, turning away at one point to look down the slope. Then he turned back to scrutinize me. “Move your legs,” he said.

I did. “Arms.” I did.

“Those Gheeths were more trouble than they were worth,” he said.

“Is that an ethnic slur for what Laro and Dag are?”

“Ethnic slur? Yeah, it’s an ethnic slur,” he said in a mocking tone. “Gheeths are great for digging ditches and pulling weeds. Worse than useless up here. But you might keep me alive. How are you going to get out of there?”

For 3700 years, we had lived under a ban that prevented us from owning anything other than the bolt, the chord, and the sphere. Shelves of books had been written about the ingenious uses to which these objects had been put by avout who’d found themselves in trying circumstances. Many of the tricks had names: Saunt Ablavan’s Ratchet. Ramgad’s Contraption. The Lazy Fraa. I was no expert, but when we’d been younger, Jesry and I had leafed through some such books and practiced a few of those tricks, just for sport.

Chords and bolts were made of the same stuff: a fiber that could coil into a tight helix, becoming short and bulky and springy, or relax into a straight filament, becoming long, lean, and inelastic. In the winter we told the fibers in our bolts to coil up. They got much shorter but the bolt became thick and warm because of the pockets of air involved with those coils. In summer we straightened them and the bolts became long and sheer. Likewise the chord could be fat and yarn-like or long and thready.

I made my sphere about as big as my head, wrapped my bolt around it, and tied it together with my chord. Then I made the sphere get bigger and let the bolt expand with it. The sphere wedged itself between the walls. It could go up but it wouldn’t go down, because the crevasse was wider at the top and narrower below. I pushed it up a short distance and it found a new equilibrium, a little higher. Then I expanded and pushed, expanded and pushed, a few inches at a time. The walls were surprisingly irregular, so all of this was more complicated than I’m making it sound. But once I got the hang of it, it went fast.

“Got it!” Brajj called. The sphere moved away from me, scraping against the ice walls. A panic came over me until I found my chord with a flailing arm. Then I let it slide through my hand until Brajj had pulled the sphere all the way out of the crevasse. Brajj and I were now linked by the chord. He jammed his sticker into the ice up there and wrapped my chord around its handle—or so he claimed.

I didn’t want to lose our connection to the toboggan and to Laro and Dag, but I had to cut myself free of it to have any hope of bettering things. The end of my chord I joined to the loop of rope around my waist. Then I cut my way free from that loop. So I was free of the hundreds of pounds of stuff anchoring me to the bottom. The chord was now our only link to the toboggan and to Laro and Dag. I gave instructions to Brajj on how to make the sphere smaller. He threw it down to me. I wedged it between the crevasse walls again. This time—now that I had freedom to move—I was able to get astride it. For the first time since the accident I took my weight off whatever hard thing had stopped my fall and saved my life. Looking down at it, I verified that it was indeed the toboggan, wedged at an angle between the crevasse walls like a stick thrust between a monster’s jaws. When I took my weight off it, it shifted, and a moment later it fell, tumbling another ten feet before getting wedged again. Braj had anchored his loop of the chord to his sticker, jammed in the ice, so we didn’t lose it. I was able to extricate myself from the crevasse by expanding the sphere, which pushed me up as it inflated, while keeping the chord looped around one hand in case I fell off. Once I was out, we doubled the anchor by driving in my makeshift ice-axe, and secured the chord to that as well.