The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,101

the tragedy that had befallen the others—and she could barely take in the enormity of his achievement. But he had not wanted to talk about it. All the snippets that had not meant anything at the time but which could now be pieced together to form a new whole. Like that evening in October almost three years ago, when the boys had gone to sleep and Johannes had just been appointed Minister of Defence. They were sitting on the sofa at home in Stocksund, and he mentioned Klara Engelman in a new, disturbing tone of voice.

“I keep wondering what she was thinking,” he said.

“When?”

“When she was abandoned.”

She answered that in all likelihood Klara was not thinking at all—that she was probably already dead. But now, in the night, Rebecka understood what Johannes had meant, and it was more than she could bear.

CHAPTER 28

May 13, 2008

Klara Engelman was not thinking anything the first time she was abandoned. Her body temperature had dropped to eighty-two degrees and her heartbeat was by then slow and irregular. She heard neither the disappearing footsteps nor the howling storm.

She was deeply unconscious, not aware that she had put an arm around Viktor or even that the body she was holding on to was his. Her organs were shutting down as a last form of defence, and she would soon be dead. By then there was no doubt, and that was perhaps, in a way, what she had wanted.

Her husband, Stan, made no secret of his contempt and cheated on her quite openly, their twelve-year-old, Juliette, was going through a crisis too, and Klara had run away from it all, taken herself off to Everest and put on a cheerful face, just as she always did. She was, in fact, suffering from severe depression, and it was only in the last week that she had found a reason to live again. It was not just her love for Viktor. She had also begun to hope that she could bring Stan down, once and for all.

She was feeling strong again, even as she headed towards the summit, and she had drunk plenty of that blueberry soup which she had heard was so good for one. But before long her body began to feel strangely heavy and her eyelids kept closing, and she felt colder and colder until finally she collapsed. She slipped away and was oblivious to the storm which now came raging in from the north, endangering the whole expedition. For her, the hours simply vanished into darkness, and silence, and she heard nothing until an ice axe started picking away at her face.

Not that she really grasped what was going on. There was just this hacking right by her, close to her and yet still remote, as if in another world. But then…her airways had become freer and the footsteps had disappeared, and she opened her eyes. It was a miracle, in a way. Klara, who had been given up for dead, looked around and had no idea what was going on. Except that she found herself in some sort of hell. But little by little things came back to her, and she looked at her legs and her boots and then at an arm, without quite being able to understand whose arm it was. It was frozen stiff above her hip in the air. Then she realized it was hers, and tried to move it. But it would not budge. Her body was frozen. Then something happened which got her to her feet.

She saw her daughter in front of her. She saw her as clearly as if she could reach out and touch her, and after four or five attempts she stood up and began to stumble downhill, like a sleepwalker with hands stretched in front of her, and even though she barely knew which was left and which was right, she was guided by howls, inhuman screams which seemed to be showing her the way. It was a long time before she realized that the screams were her own.

* * *

—

Nima Rita was in a landscape he had always believed to be inhabited by spirits and ghosts, so he took no notice of the screams. Go on, he thought, scream as much as you like. Why on earth had he come back up here? He could not believe it himself. He had seen her and said his goodbyes. All hope was lost. But he also knew that he had listened too much