Excerpt from Crux by Gabriel Tallent, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Four

They went to school; they did school‑kid things, opened their lockers, put books away, took notes; Tamma sketched climbs in her lab notebook; Dan did homework; Tamma downloaded videos of Alex Johnson; Dan stooped over his textbook; they sat in brightly colored, molded‑plastic chairs; they walked vinyl‑tiled hallways, full of the feeling that life was somewhere, elsewhere; and on Monday, the fourteenth of November, Tamma was crimping up the overhang of Fingerbang Princess, her breath falling in evanescent plumes, sinking down into the last good hold, skittering her feet about on matchbook edges until she found the high, left, dice‑sized nub, and then she leapt. Going up on pointe like a dancer and then leaving her stage behind, out into the dark.

She caught Tinkerbell's Bandersnatch and her feet caromed left in an enormous swing, her shoulder packed, her hair fanning, and sneering with effort, she held it. For the first time ever. She was so surprised that she just dangled there, waiting to fall, holding the roof with one hand, nothing else. When she didn't fall, she kicked her heel up over the lip and, in one smooth, clean, desperate movement, boosted herself up onto the slab above.

Standing in the dust, Dan was thinking, Fuck me, but she is good. On the ground, Tamma was the clumsiest person he had ever met, but on the wall, she was breathtaking. People who didn't climb tended to imagine climbing as a series of Cliffhanger‑style pull‑ups, and indeed, that's how Dan climbed. Dan could solve entire boulder problems with his feet nowhere except in the way. But Tamma—Tamma set each hold gently, and rather than cranking with her arms, she stepped through the move, turning her hip to the wall, driving with her legs, extending for the next edge, so that it appeared effortless, tiptoeing up climbs with body english and devious footwork. If there was a big, pull‑up‑style move, she'd sling a heel above her head and pull through with her hamstrings. Watching her, he felt himself to be in the company of grace and courage such as most people went their entire lives without ever seeing. Everyone he knew seemed to think Tamma was trash, but he thought she was some kind of genius.

He waited, holding the flashlight, and in him moved the twinned, scissoring‑apart, scissoring‑together wantings, wanting to see her succeed, and a peeling‑back from her, a fear that she would do the boulder before him, and that with her having done it, the pressure would be on for him to do it too. Since his fall, he had been holding back, more concerned with not dying than topping out; he wasn't committing from one move to the next with the send‑or‑splatter intensity that Fingerbang Princess required. But if Tamma climbed this thing, then he'd have to put on his big‑girl panties and climb it next. And yet, he wanted that; he watched her, brimming with hope, and not sure what he hoped, maybe for something bigger, scarier, riskier, more wide open, for whatever came next if Tamma proved that they could actually, for real, finish this thing.

The slab above the roof was crossed by three slanting crystal dikes: outsloped rails like the crimped edges of a piecrust. The wall was otherwise featureless save for the subtle dishing of the rock, about as deep and positive as paper plates. Tamma climbed with hand‑foot matches going to intricate, balancy sequences, until she came to a blank place more than twenty‑five feet above the deck, her stance as high as she could get it on the last piecrust dike. Dan could see no footholds except a crystal shaped like a domino pasted onto the rock. It was high up by her hip. She had to leave the security of the dike behind, step left to a terrifying friction‑smear in a paper‑plate dish, and then right to the domino, which would be level with her groin. Her only handhold was a molar‑sized crystal, high and left, angled the wrong direction, which she would pry against with the pad of her left thumb.

Excerpted from Crux by Gabriel Tallent. Copyright © 2026 by Gabriel Tallent. Excerpted by permission of Riverhead Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.