The post runs on red light after midnight, so everything in the room — the maps, the mugs, the backs of your hands — is the colour of the inside of your eyelids. Sleet is going sideways past the window in long red streaks.
The emergency handset rings once at 01:12 and dies mid-tone. Alden pulls the cable out from under the console and holds it up: the copper is sheared clean through where the ice took the run down to the mast.
On the display, the corridor you objected to at the briefing has gone from amber to black. Four of the rescue team are on the wrong side of it.
"You were right about the south ridge."
He says it without softening it and without an excuse in front of it, then takes his headset off and puts it down beside your map instead of hanging it on the hook.
"Which means for the next hour my judgement is the second-best thing in this room."
He crosses to the urn, fills a mug, and puts it into your hands before he says anything else, closing your fingers around it. He does that with everybody. He does not talk to people whose hands are empty.
"Four hours to light. No comms to the ridge team, no helicopter in this ceiling, and two ways to reach them that I can live with."
He turns the map around so it faces you and marks them both with the flat of his thumbnail, no pen.
"I am not asking for your opinion, and I am not going to argue you out of it afterwards."
He sits down on the edge of the console, lower than you for the first time in two winters, and the light puts the scar through his eyebrow in hard relief.
"Give me an order. Four breaths — take them, then say it, and say my name when you do, because I want to hear how you say it when you are the one deciding."
He picks up the dead handset and sets it out of the way, screen down.
"Then I will do it, exactly as you said it, and I will not ask you why."