The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  The banter was . . . nice. Especially after the silence of the four days before.

  Her readout blinked purple on the bottom right edge: CANISTER DEPLETED. She keyed the port closed, then unscrewed the spent canister and stored it with the rest of the cache. As she went through the full-suit check, swapping out the nearly drained onboard battery with a fresh one and inventorying every spot where she’d scraped against the wall or fallen down the breakdown pile at Camp Two for further damage, she hummed to herself.

  “You sound happy,” Em said. “Good dreams?”

  She stopped humming. “Don’t remember.”

  No dreams to speak of, which was a good thing. She was especially glad there hadn’t been a return to the nightmares she’d had the previous three nights while ferrying gear, where she’d seen herself drowning again and again, or being caught, the servos of her suit dead and her muscles exhausted, to starve in some rocky crevice beneath the water.

  She didn’t voice those concerns. Instead, she went over to the gear duffels. “You said I’d need to change my load-out?”

  “Yes. Get the smaller duffel. Take one of the small spools and load it into the secondary line compartment.”

  She fished it out, then paused when it glimmered in her reconstruction. “It’s different?”

  “It will show up on your sensors in everything but the worst silt-out.”

  Silt-outs. She’d read about those, heard other cavers talk about them. If she kicked against the bottom, or any horizontal shelves, she’d start a cascade of muck that would make it physically impossible to see, and that would seriously limit what her sonar and other sensors could do. She’d be blind.

  She tamped down her panic at the thought.

  “Right.”

  “I have a full map of this flooded section, but with the out-of-season wetness, something might have changed,” Em said. Gyre did her best to pay attention as she cinched up the bags.

  “What about the gear? These don’t look waterproof.”

  Em sighed. “The fabric is water-resistant, but no, the seals aren’t waterproof. Later in the season, I send people in with dry bags for this sump, but the cache at Camp Four has some too for the sump between Four and Five. We’ll use those to carry the extra batteries over from Three.”

  “Sounds tedious.”

  “It is.”

  Great. More time down here. More trips through the sump. Gyre tried not to groan as she made herself start moving toward the crystal passageway, with just one last look around.

  “Before we get that far, though, you’ll need to swim it the first time,” Em continued. “The main things to keep in mind are to obviously stay away from the bottom, and attach the line as you go. You don’t need to get all the way through the passage on the first try. You can treat it as a training run.”

  “I’d rather just get it over with.”

  “Wait until you’re down there to decide. With where the water level is on this side, I estimate that this flooded section is probably just over a hundred meters. Doable in one push, but long enough to be disorienting.”

  She waited for Gyre to protest, but Gyre said nothing.

  “Regardless of how many dives you do to cross it, it’s long enough that you should run a line.”

  “Yeah? What’s the usual cutoff?”

  “Sixty or so meters before you use a line at all. More if you come across branching paths and aren’t sure which is which. With the line, you’ll peg it to the wall every fifty meters or less, as needed.”

  “And I’ve got enough for this?”

  “Yes, the spool you loaded in will get you through the whole way. There’s also more stashed farther on. So: attach it to the rock right before you go under. That way the line won’t disturb anything.”

  Gyre had reached the edge of the water, and she crouched down, looking at it. The suit’s rebreather would keep her safe, and she likely wouldn’t even feel the change in temperature. It should be easier than free swimming.

  But a lot of people had died in this cave.

  Not me, she thought, repeating it over and over like a promise until she felt her nerves settle.

  “Ready,” Gyre said.

  “Here, first,” Em said, and brought up the 3-D model of the section of flooded cave, which appeared to hover a half a meter or so in front of Gyre. A movement of her hand made it turn. She squinted at it, noting its shape—a basic U-bend—and its length, and hoped that any other important features would magically stand out to her. It remained just a model.

  “Ready,” she said again.

  “Continue,” Em replied. “Wade on in.”

  “The silt—”

  “No choice. The sump doesn’t get deep enough to jump into until after the wall in front of you. Walk slowly. Lift up and step down cleanly. No dragging your feet.”

  “Right.” Gyre reached out her leg as far as she could without losing her balance, then put it down carefully. The silt that Em had mentioned was slick and Gyre stiffened as her foot threatened to slip out from under her. Once she was stable, she straightened, and brought her other leg into the water. She couldn’t feel it, couldn’t tell where it was lapping against her knees. She took another step, looking down the whole time, wishing she could see the eddies of silt rising and spiraling around her calves. Instead, her display showed a blank blue sheet, marking the surface of the water, an adjustment no doubt designed to help diving.

  She moved forward.

  This time, the water came up to her thighs. A glance up showed her that the wall was less than a meter ahead of her, but the model had shown a sharp drop-off nearly in line with it. She adjusted her display until she could see below the surface.

  There. It didn’t exactly yawn open beneath her, but it definitely looked more like a swimming pool and less like a bathtub.

  She crouched and settled her palm against the stone below her, beneath the water, hand bent back to trigger the drill to drop down below her wrist. Once she was sure the positioning was where she wanted it, she blew sharply to the bottom left of her helmet. The drill whirred to life, cutting into the rock like it was thick mud instead of stone. Silt bloomed up around it, clouding the water and obscuring her hand. She kept working by touch.

  When it reached optimal depth, it stopped, placed an anchor bolt, then withdrew. The drill retracted and flattened against her arm once more. The silt settled. She fished the line from its spool opening along her flank and hooked in, then looked down.

  That was a lot of water. A lot of open, drowning water, with no way to get to air between here and her end point. She would have to trust the suit, trust Em. Trust herself to learn fast.

  She could do this.

  Gyre stepped out beyond the drop-off and sank beneath the surface.

  Em adjusted the buoyancy of the suit for her; her descent slowed just shy of the bottom, which looked like it had a much deeper deposit of muck than the entry pool. Her chest burned as she slowly rotated to horizontal, and she tried to open her mouth, exhale. Her instinctual lizard-brain screamed at her that she would drown if she did, even without the feeling of water on her skin, even with the way her helmet made her surroundings look like air.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe her lizard-brain thought she was in space. Outer atmosphere. She deliberately opened her mouth wide, and when nothing rushed in but air—recycled, tinny air but air all the same—her lungs gasped and adjusted, and she could breathe again.

  “Your O2 stats dropped.”

  “Just making a wish,” she murmured, her lips still half closed against her pointless fear. It seemed wrong to speak, down in the water. You couldn’t speak underwater even if you could somehow breathe. Sound would be muffled by the fluid and the shroud of silt hanging film-like around her. If she turned off her display, her headlamp would only illuminate a meter or two in any direction. She shook herself in her suit, wiggling her fingers, then slowly began kicking her legs. From the toes of her boots, small fins extended, making each kick a little more fl
uid, more powerful.

  The line spooled out behind her, smooth and slow, and Gyre practiced keeping herself equidistant from the tunnel walls, hovering between floor and ceiling. The tunnel continued to arc downward, but even without her kicking, she sank in modulated bursts.

  “Stop that,” she said, stilling. “I want to be in control of this.” She was adapting quickly, her nerves giving way to the actions, and she needed the training wheels off. She needed to know that she could do this herself.

  “It’s more exact this way,” Em replied.

  “As long as your computers spit out the correct math.”

  “That is what they’re designed to do.”

  “Em.”

  There was silence on the other end of the line, followed by a faint beep. “Right. You’re set to stay at neutral buoyancy even while moving. If you need help—”

  “I’ll say,” Gyre said, and resumed her descent.

  She’d been warned about this—ground teams who thought that the suit readouts told them everything. But suit readouts were just numbers and models. The people doing the interpreting were still people, and their own personalities and particular brands of screwed-up informed how they interpreted those numbers. Em could see where she was on a map, and could read her adrenaline levels, her blood pressure, her suit’s buoyancy, but she couldn’t read Gyre’s independence or need for autonomy.

  Or her love of tight, claustrophobic spaces.

  If she turned her display off, she would be floating in a vast expanse of nothing—terrifying, horrifying nothing, beyond the glare of her light. But with the display on, she could see how close the walls were. The tunnel itself was barely three meters tall, with almost a quarter of its bottom covered up in silt. The walls were even closer together. As she approached an upward spiral that would’ve taken fancy linework and scrambling if it had been dry, she simply rotated her body and pushed up, feeling the ghost of the sensation of a nearby object that just barely didn’t brush her suit.

  She didn’t need a practice run at all. It was like she’d been in water all her life.

  “Gyre. Line,” Em said, breaking her reverie.

  “Fuck off,” she spat reflexively.

  “Anchor your line or abort,” Em replied, with what sounded like an exasperated sigh. “Do this safely or not at all, please.”

  Please.

  Gyre frowned and slowed, reaching out for a side wall. “Should I go back? To before the spiral?”

  “Best practice says yes, but just wrap it here and move on.” Em sighed again, this time without trying to hide it. It was followed by a yawn. “You’re going too fast.”

  “Turns out I like this. It’s therapeutic. Lucky you,” she said, bracing herself by stretching out across a narrow part of the tunnel, catching her toes on one stone wall. “I could use the drill, too, yeah?” she asked, her hand hovering by where the line emerged from the suit.

  “A hard anchor isn’t needed here and would disturb too much silt. Usually, I’d have you use silt screws, but those aren’t currently stocked in your suit,” she said, no note of apology or embarrassment in her voice. Instead, she yawned again. “See that outcrop to your left? Wrap your line three times around it.”

  Gyre frowned as she kicked gently and drifted over to the knob of protruding rock, not yet worn down by the passage of water. She looped the line around as advised, then tugged at it. It held.

  “Tired?”

  “Caffeine drip,” Em replied.

  “Bad choice,” Gyre said. “You’ll still crash eventually. When do you sleep, anyway? When I’m asleep? Who watches the computers?” The loop of line blinked green in her HUD, signaling that Em’s computers had also confirmed it was secure. She pushed up and off her ledge.

  “I do.”

  “Don’t tell me,” Gyre said, grimacing. “You’re some sort of cybernetic hybrid who’s actually plugged in to her monitoring computers.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Em said. “You’re coming to the end of your first bit of line.”

  “Already?”

  “You were in a bit of a zone through the descent. Didn’t want to interrupt. You’re picking this up quickly.”

  “It’s one of my better traits. Besides, small tunnels are my favorite.”

  “Mr. Moller did note that on your intake,” Em agreed.

  “So how do you do it?” she said, once again slowing as she prepared to swap to a new spool. “How can you watch me all the time?”

  “I try to sleep when you do, when possible. You’re not the only one with an adrenaline shunt into your system. Given certain inputs from your sensors, the computer will wake me up immediately.”

  “And today? I just woke up. Shouldn’t you have slept recently?”

  “Something came up. I’ll be fine. Once you’re through or you’re done for the day, I’ll crash for a bit.”

  Gyre finished combining the line, thinking, frowning, chewing at her lip. “You really need a better system,” she said finally, as she began ascending again. “If you want to keep running these excursions, anyway. And you need to stop lying.”

  “It won’t get me better people,” Em said. “I have tried that, you know. I was completely up-front at the start. But it turns out desperate people do a better job. I guess we . . . sense something the same in each other.”

  “I’m not seeing many similarities, from where I’m sitting.”

  “Anchor on the right wall, Gyre.”

  She dutifully stopped and braced herself, looping the line three times around a smaller protrusion. “I’m just saying,” she said, “you should train your guy to watch the screens while you sleep or something. It’s not going to cost you that much more, proportionally.” Anchored, she pushed off again, kicking up.

  “Different people have different priorities. I prefer to be the only one steering things.”

  “And when things go wrong?”

  “It has never been my failure in leadership or analysis when a caver dies, if that’s what you’re asking. You’re approaching the surface.”

  She wanted to press Em further, but she could see the end of the sump, and she was caught up in relief and the urge to get out of the water and onto solid rock again. Gyre began swimming in earnest, legs pumping. Em didn’t speak again until Gyre broke the surface of the sump.

  “Good. Now put an anchor on the wall above the waterline. Tie it instead of clipping, then cut the excess.” Gyre set to work as Em talked, activating the bolt drill again. “When you’re ready, turn right. There’s your best exit. You’ll have to climb, though. Usually you’d have an inflatable raft here to make a small camp on the water, but those are stashed farther in at this point in the season. That’ll make the climb harder to start. Since you’re here, though, I want you to take at least one run at it. Make progress for when you pick up again tomorrow.”

  On the other end of the line, Em cleared her throat. “Before you start,” she added, voice a little softer, “I have to say: You’ve covered a lot of ground today, especially given that you had to learn a new skill. You’re doing well.”

  Gyre glanced up, ignoring the dig on her experience and the uncomfortable kindness. “Let’s just get it over with. There’s a ledge over there I can brace myself on to get started. Turn up my buoyancy?”

  The sacs in her suit inflated slowly, and soon it took effort to push down. A few long reaches and she hauled herself up and out of the water, and safely over the edge. From there, she stood and wriggled, adjusting to the feel of a buoyant suit in normal atmosphere and gravity. The sacs deflated, but only partway, insurance against any falls over open water.

  When she was settled, she braced a hand on the wall and finally asked, “So whose failure was it?” She inspected the wall before her and tested a few initial handholds distractedly. “Are you going to tell me all those cavers just couldn’t hack it? Or is a computer failure on your end not your failure?”

  “I could give you a list. I’d rather you stay focused on what you’re d
oing, however.”

  “I’d like to be focused too, and that means knowing the risks of the job. You don’t think I’m going to end up paranoid? Obsessed? Distracted?”

  I’m halfway there already, she almost said, but shook her head and made herself pay attention to the climb.

  “No, you’re not the type. You’re a mastiff, not a neurotic lapdog.”

  Gyre snorted. “Fascinating comparison,” she muttered. She looked around for old anchors and found none, so she hauled herself up the stone one body length. “Climbing,” she added belatedly.

  “Climb on,” Em said. After a second, she added, “I meant it as a compliment.”

  The muscles between her shoulders bunched in irritation. She wasn’t sure what she’d really expected from Em—it wasn’t ever going to be a satisfying answer. Gyre ran her fingers along the stone, searching for a good crack for her main anchor. Her display lit up with helpful suggestions from Em, which she only glanced at, trusting her instincts more than whatever algorithm Em was using. If Em was going to be asleep on the job, she couldn’t let her natural skills get rusty. She couldn’t relax into the suit’s support.

  She felt a surge of vindication, hot in her belly, as she wedged the first cam into what her visor color-coded a “third-tier” crack and watched as it blinked once, twice, then flipped to “optimal.”

  Grinning, she added another cam and a nut, then tied onto the anchor and tested it with her weight. It held.

  “Good find,” Em said.

  Huh—she hadn’t expected the woman to acknowledge her success. Gyre checked and double-checked the anchor and her belay and adjusted the feed of her rope.

  And then she began climbing.

  Chapter Six

  “Gyre.”

  “Don’t say a word.”

  Em didn’t say anything, but by the sound in Gyre’s helmet, she did bring her fist down on her desk. Gyre fought the urge to snap, or to find something to throw.

  Except there was nothing. Absolutely nothing.

  Her muscles burned and her head ached, and where there should have been a cache with more batteries for her suit, more nutritional canisters, more gear, there was nothing. The cache wasn’t just empty: it was gone.