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back,” Mark said quietly and she nodded, wordless before the beauty of the night.
    Then he bent and began coiling up the rope.
    “Now what?” Ardeth asked.
    “Now we sit and enjoy the night for a while, until it’s time to hike down. There’s a path just behind us that goes to the main trail down to town.”
    “What time does the sun come up?”
    “About seven.” He checked his watch. “Plenty of time.”
    “I have to be home before dawn,” she pointed out uneasily, scanning the eastern sky automatically.
    “Me too. I have to go to work at ten.”
    “What would we have done if the moon hadn’t come back out?” She hadn’t allowed herself to ask that while they hung trapped on the cliff face.
    “Waited for the dawn.” He caught her shudder with a curious glance. “We could have bailed and rappelled down in the dark if we’d had to. Are you that sensitive to sunlight?”
    “I can stand a little, especially if my skin is covered up. But like this, in full sunlight . . .” She gestured to her T-shirt. “We would have had to rappel down.” His gaze grew speculative again and Ardeth suddenly regretted her motion. He had said nothing about her light clothing before, but she could tell that he was cold, even in his jacket. She was making slips even an amateur would be ashamed of; she would have to be more careful.
    To distract him, and herself, she moved to settle her back against a boulder, metal clattering against the rock. She began to strip his cams and carabiners from her harness. Mark shifted to sit beside her, unhooked his canteen and tipped it to his mouth. When he offered it, she swallowed two careful gulps of the clear water.
    “So, what did you think of your first climb?”
    “It was,” Ardeth tried to find the words, “what I needed.”
    “Delay included?”
    “Temporary delay included,” she acknowledged, dodging the curiosity in his voice. “How about you?”
    “It was what I needed too. To keep from worrying about whether I’d sent you off to break your neck.”
    “Fall included?”
    “Fall included. Besides, that wasn’t exactly the worst one I’ve ever had.”
    “What was?”
    “I fell off Mount Forbes once and broke my leg. Of course, I was on the way down. Then I fell in the river on my way back to camp and ended up with pneumonia.”
    “Sounds like fun,” she said and he laughed at the dubious tone in her voice.
    “Yeah. Climbers are notorious for bitching about how miserable everything was—cold, wet, rotten rock, running out of food, getting stuck halfway up—and then going out to do it again the next day.”
    “Why do they do it then?”
    “Different reasons, I guess. This kind of climbing is good for a rush. It takes strength, balance . . . that kind of thing. It’s not really as dangerous as it looks. Seriously,” he insisted, at her doubting glance. “You’re a lot more likely to die in an avalanche while mountaineering than you are falling off a rock. That’s my favourite type of climbing, though I don’t get to do it much. You have to climb rock and ice and snow. You’ve got to be strong
and
smart on a real mountain to climb. Judgment counts more than muscle, in many cases. And you’re so much closer to the real world. Out on the mountain, you can really see the bones of the world . . . not just its surface. In a way, you see the bones of life too—the deep-down things that really matter.”
    “Just before you get hit by an avalanche.”
    “That’s part of it, I suppose. We all need danger of some sort. It reminds us that we’re alive.”
    Ardeth shivered suddenly, remembering her nights on the streets of Toronto. That’s what I told myself, she thought. That I was the danger they were all looking for. Too bad for them if it killed them. Faces flashed in her mind; the street kid who had died during her first, clumsy feeding, the millionaire’s son who had tumbled to his death in an abandoned house when he tried to escape the truth he