The Thin Place

The air on the ridge was wrong, and Maya's body knew it before she did.

Her chest kept pulling, pulling, like it was drinking through a straw pinched shut. Every ten steps she had to stop. Her fingertips buzzed. When she looked at Soren he was breathing with his mouth open, both hands on his knees, and his lips had gone a color lips were not supposed to go.

"We rest here," said the tracking scientist, Ang Dolma, dropping her pack against a rock. She said it the way you'd say something obvious. She was not out of breath. She had lived at these heights her whole life, and her blood had thickened for it years ago. "Two hours. Then we go down, not up."

Maya sat. The valley fell away beneath them for what felt like forever, brown and folded and enormous, and the peaks above wore snow that never left. She had never in her life felt so small and so slow at the same time.

Ang Dolma's tablet lay on the rock, still awake. On the screen was a map, and across the map ran a bright orange line. It climbed straight up out of the lowlands, over the ridges, over a white shape labeled with a number Maya recognized.

"That's Everest," she said. Her voice came out thin.

"That's a goose," said Ang Dolma, not opening her eyes. "Bar-headed goose. Tagged her in the spring. She crossed last week."

Soren lifted his head. He looked at the line. He looked at the number. He looked at the sky, where a single cloud was tearing itself apart on a peak.

"Crossed," he said. "You mean she flew over it."

"Over. Seven thousand meters. Some of them do it in one night, eight hours, bottom to bottom." Ang Dolma yawned. "People pay a great deal of money and carry a great deal of oxygen to stand where that goose flapped past in the dark."

Maya stopped feeling the buzzing in her fingers for a moment. The map glowed. The orange line went up into a place where her own lungs were failing at half the height, and it did not slow down. It did not stop every ten steps. It went straight over the roof of the world like the roof of the world was nothing.

She pressed her hand flat against her own chest, feeling it heave.

"How," she said. Not a question really. More like the shape of one.

Soren had his notebook out. His pencil moved slow, because his hands were slow up here, everything was slow.

"There's less oxygen up there," he said. "Same amount of air kind of, but spread thinner. So each breath gets you less. That's why we're" — he gestured at both of them, at the open mouths, the blue lips — "like this."

"Right," said Ang Dolma.

"So the goose has to grab more out of less." He frowned at the page. "Two ways to do that. Grab harder, or grab more often."

Maya looked at the line again. "Both," she said.

Ang Dolma opened one eye.

"It has to be both," Maya said. Her breath dragged, but she kept going, one clause at a time. "Her blood. It has to hold oxygen tighter than ours. Because there's so little to hold, so whatever touches it, she can't let go of any." She stopped. Breathed. "But that's not enough. If her lungs work like ours, she still loses half of every breath."

"Why half," said Soren, testing her.

"Because we only pull oxygen on the way in." Maya's hand was still on her chest, rising and falling. "Breathe in, take some. Breathe out, waste the rest. The out breath does nothing. Half of everything, gone." She looked up the mountain. "She can't afford that. Not up there. She can't afford one wasted breath."

Soren stared at her. Then he did the thing he did, the thing where he took her leap and walked back along it to see if the ground held.

"So her out breath can't be empty," he said slowly. "Air can't just go in and come back out the same door. It'd have to go through. One direction. In one place, out another, and the lungs sitting in the middle pulling oxygen off it the whole way." His pencil stopped. "Coming and going. Both directions of the breath."

"Cross-current," said Ang Dolma quietly. She had sat up now. She was watching them the way you watch weather change. "That's the word for it. Their air flows through, not in and out like a bag. The blood runs across the flow the other way. Every part of the breath meets fresh blood. Nothing wasted. Yes."

Maya felt the whole thing land in her at once, the tight blood and the flow-through lungs, and the smallness of her own drinking-through-a-pinched-straw chest cracked open into something huge.

"We're built for down there." She pointed at the green far below, where the air was thick and easy and she had never once thought about breathing. "She's built for a place we can't even stand in."

"Same air," said Soren. "Same oxygen. Same everything. She just doesn't waste any of it."

The cloud on the far peak finished tearing apart. For a second Maya tried to picture it, the dark, the cold that would kill a person in an hour, the wind, and one goose beating steadily up through all of it toward a black sky, her blood clutching every molecule, her lungs missing nothing, her body a small warm machine crossing a place that was trying its whole self to stop her.

And the goose, somewhere on the map, did not care that it was impossible. It had done it in the dark last Tuesday.

Maya's breath was still ragged. But she looked at the orange line climbing over the number, and she did not feel small anymore. She felt like she was sitting next to a door.

"When," she said to Ang Dolma. "When do they come back over. Which way. What time."

Ang Dolma tapped the tablet. The screen filled with more orange lines, dozens of them, all the birds she'd tagged, all of them threaded over the top of the world and back.

Soren leaned in until his forehead nearly touched the glass, tracking one line with his finger up and over and down, up and over and down, breathing his thin useless human breaths, following her all the way across.