I hadn't listened when the guide introduced herself. I'd been trying to get a signal so I could send a photograph of the mountain to the office.
By the time I wanted her name, she had gone ahead into the snow.
There were five of us on the retreat. The company had promised discomfort in controlled conditions: enough to make us feel capable, never enough to endanger people whose calendars were full. The guide had argued with the organizer that morning. I remembered being annoyed by the delay.
The organizer had taken the minibus down before the snow closed the pass. Now the guide was leading us toward a light.
It came from a hut that hadn't appeared on the route map.
Inside, an old woman sat beside a stove. The heat made my hands hurt. Robin lay down as soon as we entered. His wet gloves had frozen to the ends of his sleeves.
The old woman gave us a blanket and said the fire would last another ten minutes.
"We can pay," I told her.
She looked at my watch.
"That won't burn."
The guide searched the hut for wood. There was none. The old woman let her open every cupboard, then pointed to a ledger on the table.
Its pages were covered in names, each written once and crossed out.
"One living name," she said. "One night of heat. The person goes into the fire wherever they happen to be."
I laughed because there were only two possible responses and I wasn't ready for the other.
The guide didn't laugh. She looked at the stove.
A wedding ring lay beneath the grate. The fire moved around it in the shape of fingers.
"No," she said.
The old woman nodded as though she'd declined a second cup of tea.
We tried our phones. The guide climbed onto the roof with the emergency beacon, securing it where the snow wouldn't bury it. It had sent our position before the storm, but rescue couldn't reach the ridge until the wind dropped. She said we needed to keep Robin warm for several hours.
He was no longer shivering. I knew enough to be afraid of that.
The guide took off her dry base layer and put it around Robin. She made the rest of us share blankets and move our feet. She fed paper from the route folder into the stove.
It blackened without burning.
"Don't waste your map," the old woman said.
Someone suggested a man from the news, a man we all agreed had done terrible things. Another guest said we couldn't know whether the name would reach the right person.
"You must mean them," the old woman said. "That's enough."
I thought of a former business partner. I was ashamed of how quickly the face arrived.
The guide watched us looking away from one another.
"You don't know what this is."
"We know what cold is," said the guest beside Robin.
The last flame drew down into a small blue point. The heat left the hut with alarming speed. Frost gathered on the inside of the window. Robin began to mumble about a meeting he was late for.
The guide knelt beside him and checked his breathing. Then she looked at the old woman's ledger again.
I saw a familiar surname on the most recent page. The same name had been engraved on a memorial at the trailhead: a climber who'd disappeared the previous winter. His wife had been rescued from the ridge.
I looked back at the ring beneath the grate.
"There has to be another way," I said.
The guide didn't answer. She tried the radio once more. Through the static came a voice telling us to remain sheltered. Four hours, perhaps five.
She looked around the hut. She'd counted us at every turn in the path. She counted us again now.
Then she asked the old woman whether her own name would do.
"If you mean yourself."
I stood up.
"Wait."
The guide leaned toward the stove and spoke too softly for me to hear.
Heat struck my face.
Her jacket began to smoke. She pulled it off and dropped it beside Robin so it wouldn't burn him. Beneath her skin, light moved from her chest into her throat.
I tried to cover her with the blanket. The old woman caught my wrist.
"You'll only lose the blanket."
The guide sat on the floor. She had begun to make a sound. I knelt beside her, but the heat kept forcing me back. It filled the hut, thawing the ice from our clothes. Water dripped from the rafters as she burned.
Robin began to shiver again. Someone said that was good. I nodded.
The fire lasted until dawn.
When the rescuers reached us, the hut was an empty stone shelter with no stove. The guide's jacket lay beside Robin, intact. Her boots stood together against the wall, still warm inside.
A rescuer asked me who was missing.
"Our guide."
"Her name?"
I looked at the others. Nobody answered. Somewhere below us, an office had her contract, her emergency contact, the amount she'd been paid to keep us alive.
I took out my phone. The photograph I'd meant to send was still on the screen. The guide stood at its edge, cropped at the shoulder, her mouth open as she told us her name.
