The map was upside down.
Ishaan had been holding it upside down for the better part of ten minutes, and the only reason anyone knew was that Estella had finally snatched it out of his hands, turned it around, and held it back up next to his face in silence.
"...Oh," Ishaan said.
"Oh," Estella repeated.
"In my defence—"
"There is no defence."
"I was interpreting it from a different angle—"
"It had a compass on it, Ishaan. The arrow was pointing down."
Aaron was standing a few feet ahead on the trail, pinching the bridge of his nose with the focused energy of someone trying very hard not to say something. Isabella stood beside him with the particular expression of someone who had already decided this was going to be a long day and made peace with it.
"Right," Aaron said finally. "Now that we've established which way is north — can we move?"
They moved.
The trail wound upward through pine forest, the morning air cool and sharp with the smell of resin and wet stone. It was the kind of morning that made you feel like you'd earned it just by being awake — the light coming through the trees at a low angle, everything still and unhurried. Estella had been up at dawn, apparently, and had already consulted two different trail maps, packed the emergency kit, and memorised the waypoints. She mentioned this casually, once, then never again. Ishaan had woken up when Aaron physically removed his blanket and had been operating on spite and trail mix ever since.
"How much further to the viewpoint?" Ishaan asked, approximately four minutes after they'd started.
"Three hours," Isabella said.
A pause.
"And the halfway point?"
"An hour and a half."
Another pause.
"And the nearest place to sit down that isn't the ground?"
"Ishaan."
"I'm asking for logistical reasons—"
"Walk."
He walked.
The thing was — once Ishaan stopped complaining and started actually looking, he went quiet in a different way. Not the exhausted quiet. The other kind. The trail broke out of the treeline briefly around the first ridge, and the valley opened up below them — green and wide and impossibly still, the kind of view that made the noise in your head just stop for a second.
Ishaan stood there with his mouth slightly open.
"Okay," he said. "Okay, fine. I'll allow it."
Aaron, beside him, said nothing. Just looked. His sketchbook was in his hand, but he hadn't opened it yet — just held it, the way he held it when he wasn't sure a drawing could do what he was seeing any justice.
"Come on," Isabella said, but gently. "We can stop properly at the top."
They kept climbing.
They found the girl about forty minutes from the summit.
She was sitting on a flat rock just off the main trail, arms wrapped around her knees, not crying — which was almost worse, somehow, than if she had been. The kind of stillness that meant she'd already been frightened past the crying stage and was now just waiting.
She looked up when she heard them coming. Her eyes went straight to Estella.
"Hey." Estella crouched down immediately, unhurried, voice even. "Hey, you're okay. We've got you."
The girl — seven, maybe eight — didn't move. But her shoulders dropped slightly.
"What's your name?" Estella asked.
A small voice. "Mira."
"Mira. Good name." Estella sat down fully on the rock beside her, not looming, not rushing. "I'm Estella. That one yawning is Ishaan. The tall, quiet one is Aaron; don't let him scare you; he's harmless. And that's Isabella."
Mira looked at each of them in turn. Then, with the blunt directness of a child who has decided to trust someone: "My mama and papa fell."
The four of them went still.
"Fell where?" Aaron said, already moving closer, his voice careful and level.
Mira pointed down the slope — off-trail, through the undergrowth, toward a section of the hillside that dropped away into a natural shelf of rock. "There's a crack," she said. "They went to look at something, and then they fell in, and they can't get out, and I couldn't find anyone, and I've been sitting here for a long time."
Aaron and Ishaan were already moving before she finished the sentence.
The crevice was about thirty metres off the trail, hidden by a shelf of overhanging rock that made it invisible until you were almost on top of it. A natural split in the hillside, maybe a metre wide at the top, narrowing as it went down. Deep enough that the light didn't reach the bottom properly.
Aaron lay flat at the edge and looked down.
Two adults. A man and a woman, standing on a narrow ledge about four metres down, not injured, from what he could see, but wedged in on a shelf barely wide enough for both of them. The walls on either side pressed close. Not enough air to be dangerous yet. But the ledge they were standing on was crumbling at the edges, and the drop below it was not shallow.
"Can you hear me?" he called down.
"Yes." The man's voice was steady but tight. "We're alright. For now. The ledge — it's not stable."
Aaron pulled back and stood up. His face was the same as always — calm, unreadable. But his eyes were moving fast, scanning everything around them. The trees. The rope in Estella's pack. The angle of the slope. The distance back to the trail.
"Estella," he said. "What's in the emergency kit — exactly?"
She already had it open. "Rope, twenty metres. Torch. Whistle. Basic first aid. Emergency foil blanket. Lighter."
"How much rope?"
"Twenty metres."
He did the maths in his head. "That's enough to reach them. Not enough to pull both of them up safely with just us." He turned to Ishaan. "How's your back?"
Ishaan blinked. "My back?"
"The gap's about a metre. Can you fit?"
Ishaan looked at the crevice. Then back at Aaron. "...You want me to go down there."
"I want you to go far enough down that you can brace against both walls and take some of the woman's weight off that ledge. If we tie off the rope to that tree—" he pointed, "— and you anchor yourself, we buy them time until the rangers get here."
"And how exactly are the rangers getting here?" Isabella asked.
Aaron turned around, looked at the tree line, then at the angle of the sun. "They patrol this section. I saw the waypoint markers on the way up — regular intervals, maintained trail. That means active patrol route." He looked at Isabella. "How far back was the last marker?"
"Twenty minutes, maybe."
"So the patrol comes through here within the next hour, probably less." He was already pulling the emergency torch apart as he spoke. "But we're not waiting on probably." He looked at the foil blanket. At the lighter. At the angle of light through the trees. "Estella. I need the foil blanket and about two minutes."
She handed it over without asking why.
He didn't explain. He just worked.
What he built, in under three minutes, was not complicated — a reflective signal using the foil stretched between two branches at the high point of the ridge, angled to catch the direct sunlight and throw it wide across the valley below. Not a fire. Not a flare. Just geometry and whatever light the afternoon was willing to give them.
It wasn't guaranteed.
But it was something.
"Ishaan," he said. "Ready?"
Ishaan had already tied the rope around his waist and was eyeing the crevice with the focused expression of someone who had decided not to think too hard about what they were about to do. "Born ready," he said. Then: "That's a lie, I'm slightly terrified, but let's go."
Getting Ishaan down was not graceful.
It involved a great deal of rope management, two moments where he slipped and said things Aaron later pretended not to have heard, and one point where he wedged himself at an angle that seemed physically improbable and had to be talked back into position by the man on the ledge below him — which was, Aaron noted privately, somewhat impressive considering the man's situation.
But Ishaan got there. Braced sideways across the gap, feet against one wall, back against the other, rope taut above him — and got his arms around the woman just enough to take her weight off the crumbling edge of the ledge.
"Hi," he said to her, slightly out of breath, wedged in a crevice four metres underground. "I'm Ishaan. Sorry about all this."
She stared at him. "You're a child."
"Thirteen," he said. "But I've been told I have an old soul."
Above, Isabella had taken Mira a little way back from the edge — not far, just enough. She sat with her on a flat stone, the girl pressed close against her side, and talked to her in a low, even voice about nothing in particular. What the summit looked like. What they'd had for breakfast. Whether Mira had ever seen a valley from above. Small things. Real things. The kind of talking that isn't really about the words.
Mira didn't say much back. But she stopped looking toward the crevice every thirty seconds. That was enough.
Estella, meanwhile, had not been still for a single moment. She'd found the trail back to the main path and marked it visibly — jacket tied to a branch, bright enough to catch a ranger's eye from a distance. She'd located a second trail marker further up the slope and confirmed the patrol direction. She'd done a circuit of the area and come back with the information laid out clean: patrol comes from the north, approximately forty minutes out based on the marker intervals, and there's a ranger post visible from the ridge if Aaron's signal catches the right angle.
She relayed all of this in about ninety seconds, then went to help Aaron manage the rope.
"You've done this before," Aaron said. Not a question.
"Emergency preparedness was part of our curriculum," Estella said. "I actually paid attention in that one."
"Just that one?"
"Don't push it."
The rangers came in thirty-seven minutes.
Two of them, moving fast, had caught the flash of the signal from the valley path and followed it up. They took in the scene with the practised efficiency of people who had seen worse, asked three questions, and went to work.
Getting the parents out took another twenty minutes, a proper harness, and a pulley system the rangers had in their packs. The ledge gave way entirely about four seconds after the woman's feet cleared the edge. Nobody said anything about that.
When it was over — both parents out, shaken but whole, Mira running at her mother before the woman had fully found her footing — Aaron sat down on the nearest flat rock and didn't move for a moment.
Ishaan dropped down beside him, rope burns on both palms, hair a complete disaster, covered in a thin layer of rock dust.
"We're never doing that again," Ishaan said.
"Agreed."
"My back is going to be angry at me tomorrow."
"Agreed."
A pause.
"That signal thing was smart," Ishaan said.
Aaron didn't answer. But something in his face settled.
Mira's father found them a few minutes later. He looked at the four of them — two Indian teenagers, two girls who had clearly been doing serious logistical work for the past hour — and seemed genuinely at a loss for words.
"I don't know how to—" he started.
"You don't have to," Isabella said simply.
He looked at her for a moment. Then nodded. The kind of nod that means more than it looks like.
They made the summit anyway.
It was later than planned, the sky already starting to shift toward evening, the light going golden and long across the valley. They pitched the tents in the kind of tired silence that isn't uncomfortable — the silence of people who have been through something together and don't need to discuss it.
Ishaan built the campfire. He was better at it than expected, which he was very vocal about.
The stew was Isabella's — produced from their pack supplies with a quiet competence that surprised Ishaan and didn't surprise Aaron at all. She cooked without fuss, didn't announce it, just handed bowls around when it was ready.
They ate. The valley below them went dark slowly, lights appearing one by one in the distance.
"Okay," Estella said eventually, staring into the fire. "Embarrassing stories. We've earned it."
"Define embarrassing," Ishaan said.
"Something that, if anyone outside this mountain knew about it, you would have to move countries."
"Oh, I've got several of those."
And so it started — Ishaan's cookie theft story, which escalated to involve a dog, a broken shelf, and a cover story that lasted three years before collapsing. Estella's stage incident, which turned out to involve not just falling asleep but also snoring, audibly, during a cello solo. Aaron's portrait of his mother, which Ishaan had vandalised with horns and a moustache, which Aaron had then accidentally gifted to her anyway because he hadn't checked before wrapping it.
His mother had kept it.
Still had it, apparently.
"She said it was the most honest portrait anyone had ever done of her," Aaron said.
The fire crackled. Estella was shaking with laughter. Ishaan looked deeply offended on behalf of his artistic vision.
Isabella, who had been listening with a quiet smile for most of it, looked at Aaron across the fire.
"Your family sounds wonderful," she said.
Aaron looked back at her. Something in the firelight, or maybe in the day they'd just had, made him answer honestly instead of deflecting.
"They are," he said. "Loud and ridiculous and — ya. They are."
Isabella nodded. She looked back at the fire, and her expression did something small and complicated that she didn't explain, and he didn't ask about.
But he noticed. Filed it away. Said nothing.
The valley was dark now, the stars coming out above the treeline, the fire the only warm thing for miles.
None of them moved to go to sleep.
Not yet.