The Eighth Switchback

Rain on the tent fly sounds like somebody dumping gravel on a drum. That's what I was thinking about, seven thousand feet up Mount Jornada, wedged against my own duffel bag while Cyrus Suarez folded a map the way a surgeon folds a towel.

"This tent leaks," I said.

"It doesn't leak. The fly is sagging because you staked it crooked."

"I staked it crooked?"

"You always stake the windward corners too shallow. I've watched you do it on four trails now."

Okay. So. Background, quick. I'm Annika Stein, I'm twenty-nine, and until two years ago my biggest professional achievement was getting a hotel in Silver City through a health inspection with zero marks. Housekeeping. Nine years of it, starting when I was eighteen and needed rent money. Then I got lost on a day hike, survived a night out, decided I liked it, and badgered the forest service into letting me test for trail steward. Passed on the second try. Tatiana Kerr, my district ranger, says I'm "keen." She says it in the tone you'd use for a dog that herds sheep too hard.

Cyrus Suarez is thirty-nine, ten years my senior on paper, and has been doing assessments in the Gila since before I owned real shoes. He is slow. He is quiet. He stops mid-trail to look at rocks like they owe him money. On day one of this trip I told him his pace was going to sink us, and he told me my pace was going to get somebody's ankle broken in scree. We have been having this argument, in one form or another, for about thirty-six hours.

"You want to stake it again?" I said. "In this? Go ahead. Take the rain jacket."

"No need. The fly will shed once the wind shifts." He set the map down. Calm. He was always so calm. I have met boulders with more give.

"You know what, we wouldn't even be pinned down here if we'd pushed the last mile and a half."

"We'd have been caught on the switchbacks. Open ground. Above treeline."

"We'd have been at the saddle. There's a windbreak at the saddle."

"There's a windbreak at the saddle in July. This is September."

I hate when people are right in that flat voice. I really do. I started digging through my pack for the stove, because I was cold, and cold plus irritation makes me want hot food, and hot food was the only thing in that tent I had full control over.

"You packed the fuel on the bottom," I said, pulling cans out one by one. "Under the rain fly. Under everything."

"It's the densest item. Bottom of the load is correct technique."

"Correct technique means the thing you need isn't at the bottom of the bag when it's forty-one degrees and raining sideways!"

"Annika." He didn't raise his voice. He never raised his voice. "The stove is in the side pocket. It has been in the side pocket the entire trip. You checked that pocket this morning and then accused me of moving it."

I had, in fairness, checked that pocket. And then, in fairness to me, I'd accused him anyway, because it felt right at the time.

"Fine," I said. "Fine. Fine." I wrenched the side pocket open and there was the stove, sitting there, smug. I yanked it out and my elbow caught the pot, which caught my thermos, which went over, and I lunged for it and my fist drove straight into his arm.

Not hard. Honestly, not even that hard. A bump. A knuckle-bump, the kind you'd give a brother. But his sleeve was shoved up, don't ask me how, the cuff had ridden clear up past his elbow, and my fist landed bare on his forearm.

And the skin tore.

Not like skin tears. Like shale. Like when you flip a flat rock off a trail cut and the layers just... lift. A flap of him peeled back along my knuckle line and underneath, where there should have been red and white and that yellow fat stuff from the first aid posters, there was this seam. Glittering. Mica, I would say, though I'm no geologist. Little plates of it, silver and gold and rose, all packed tight, and they caught the lantern light and threw it back in sparks.

I froze. My fist was still resting on his arm. On the arm. On the seam.

The rain kept hammering. The tent ticked and snapped. Somewhere below us, water was running down the switchbacks I hadn't finished assessing.

Cyrus looked at my fist. Then at me. Then he did the most amazing thing. He sighed, as a man whose cat has knocked a glass off the counter.

"Well," he said. "I wondered when this would happen."

"What." My voice came out about a foot wide. "What. What is. Your arm."

"You cut me. Barely. The edge of your thermos lid did most of it when you swung." He turned his forearm over, patient, like he was showing me a watch. The torn flap settled back down and pressed flat and sealed. Sealed. The glitter dimmed under his ordinary tan skin and then it was gone, and there was just his arm again, with a faint silvery line like an old scar.

"Say something," he said.

"I'm. I don't. What."

"Take a breath. You're doing the thing where you breathe like a kettle."

"I am NOT." I breathed like a kettle. I scooted backward until I hit the tent wall and the cold of the wet nylon came through my shirt. "Okay. Okay. Okay. Either I'm altitude sick or you're about to tell me something that makes sense, and I don't believe either one is on the table."

He folded his hands in his lap. He looked, for the first time since I'd met him, uncomfortable.

"I'm part of the mountain," he said. "That's the shortest version."

"Part of it."

"The rock kind of part. Not the scenery kind."

I looked at the tent wall, at the ground under it, at the whole mass of Jornada holding us up in the rain. "You're... stone."

"Granite, mostly, with what you'd call inclusions. I've been conscious for a long time. Centuries. I don't count them anymore, it gets depressing." He rubbed his thumb along the fake scar line. "Away from bedrock I hold this shape. Human-shaped. It takes effort, like holding your breath, except I've had a lot of practice. Skin, blood where it counts, everything works. But the layers underneath never stop being layers. Hit me hard enough and I flake."

"Your blood."

"Pressure and mineral fluid. It looks red when I want it to. Convenience."

I thought about every dumb thing I'd ever said around him. Every complaint about his pace. Every time I'd kicked a rock off the trail and he'd winced and I'd assumed he was squeamish. "The rocks. On day one. You picked that chunk of granite up off the tread and put it back and said 'mind where you throw things.'"

"He was a cousin," Cyrus said, completely straight-faced, and I laughed, one wild bark, before I remembered I was supposed to be having a crisis.

"This is insane," I said. "You know that. You know how insane this is. You're telling me my trail partner is a rock man."

"Geologic-shapeshifter is the term one person used. I didn't like it."

"Who used it?"

"A geologist. Eleven years ago." Something crossed his face and shut again, fast, like a drawer. "That's not tonight's story."

"Eleven years ago you were twenty-eight," I said, doing the math off his paperwork automatically, because numbers were the only thing holding me up right then.

"On paper," he said quietly. The rain filled the pause. "Annika. You're the first person to see this since her. I've been careful for eleven years. You caught me tired and soaked and I let my guard down on the third day of a trip I could have soloed."

"Why didn't you solo it?"

"Because Tatiana assigned you. And because I liked your reports." He almost smiled. "And because I'm a coward about this and having a partner meant nobody would ever get close enough to find out."

The stove sat between us, still unassembled. My thermos was somewhere in the wet gear. My knuckles ached, faintly, like I'd punched a wall instead of a man.

"So," I said, and my voice cracked and I hated it. "The trail assessment. The slow pace. Looking at rocks like they owe you money."

"That's just looking at rocks. I like rocks."

"You're the most patient person on this mountain because you ARE the mountain."

"I'm a piece of it," he said. "The piece that got bored."

I pulled my knees up to my chest. Outside, thunder rolled down from the saddle, the saddle I'd wanted so badly to reach, and I realized I could feel it in my teeth, and I wondered if he could feel it everywhere.

"So Cyrus Suarez," I said. "Is that even your name?"

"It's the name I filed the paperwork under. The mountain doesn't issue them."

I sat with that for a while. Rain on the fly. Stove parts between us. A rock man doing my paperwork.

"Can I see it again?" I asked.

He looked up. "See what?"

"The arm. The real part."

"Annika."

"You just showed me. It'd be rude of me to un-see it." I uncurled from my knees. "I'm not freaking out. Okay, I'm freaking out, but not the running kind. The curious kind. There's a difference. I was a housekeeper for nine years and I've been a trail steward for two and I have never once been bored on this trail until you started walking it slow, and now this. This is the most interesting thing that has ever happened to me on a mountain."

"That's a low bar," he said. "You got lost out here once."

"That's exactly my point." I held out my hand, palm up, like you do with a horse.