The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  It was the dossier of a young man, complete with the same records she’d just been viewing of herself: biometrics, cache levels, location in the cave system. It was dated two years ago, and, while the narrative was terse, it described his first week and a half in the cave in exacting detail.

  He’d made it as far as the sump, full by that point in the season, but something had gone wrong. His suit had malfunctioned, according to the notes. Its filter canisters had failed less than fifteen minutes into the dive, and he’d drowned, panicking and opening his helmet when he realized he wasn’t getting any more air.

  According to the notes, his body had been retrieved on a cache resupply at the start of the next season.

  This was it. The list of Em’s failures. Gyre’s throat closed up as she stared at the thirty-five files.

  How many? How many cavers had died before her? How many of the thirty-five had made it out?

  Had any?

  She skimmed through the other dossiers and found the one for the man at Camp Two. Adrian Purcell. He’d likely be retrieved at the start of next season, she thought. And the caver here? Had they been from the start of this season too, or was retrieving them too difficult, too dangerous? Obviously something or somebody restocked the caches, but was it equipped to pull bodies through numerous sumps, and up and down the ascents and drops she’d found?

  If I die down here, will she even try to get me out?

  “Em?” she asked.

  No response. She was still away from her console.

  Gyre kept one eye on the rest of the cavern as she read through the dossiers. There were still at least two sumps ahead of her, depending on the path Em wanted her to take, and nobody had made it past the last. Two more caches were supposed to be between her and that last camp. Five to six cavers made an attempt every year, and only eight had survived in seven years. It was a horrific number. Twenty-seven dead, in total.

  Twenty-seven dead out of thirty-five.

  She was going to be sick.

  Gyre staggered to her feet, leaning on the nearby wall and taking deep breaths. She closed her eyes against the files still open on her screen. Twenty-seven out of thirty-five. Fuck, she was going to die, just like the rest of them. And Em hadn’t seen fit to tell her any of this, not after Gyre had found Adrian’s corpse in Camp Two, not after she’d told Gyre about her own team.

  Because she’d known she would turn back. Known she would panic. Panicked cavers made mistakes, rushed their tie-ins, died. It would have been dangerous to tell me, she thought, then slammed her hand against the stone hard enough to jar her arm, because why was she making excuses for the woman?

  The nausea faded, replaced with anger, with fear.

  Slowly, she opened her eyes again and then sat back down, staring at the file. Em had left this for her as a stopgap against the paranoia she’d felt during her dive, a peace offering, but it could be more than that. If she was going to survive this, if she had any hope at all, she needed every scrap of information she could glean.

  She’d need it as a defense against Em.

  As Gyre read through the files again, she learned the name of each caver before her—and forgot half of them again just as quickly as she moved between each record. Some had died from equipment malfunction, some from human error, some from horrible luck. Some had turned and run—the smarter, smaller portion. Only five had made it down to what was marked as the final camp. Two had survived that, turned and fled.

  The other three had died, two with their spines broken, one simply losing contact with Em’s computer as he was swept away.

  The climber under the ledge was named Jennie Mercer. She’d been the second to try the shaft entrance. The first attempt had gone well enough, though there had been a close call on the way in with what Em suspected was the nearby passing of a Tunneler. That caver had turned back of their own accord.

  Jennie had been bold, and fast, almost as quick with the routes as Gyre. She’d been rappelling down, clipping in to bolts the previous caver had left as she went. When she ran out of rope, she should have attached the fresh line to her original one. Instead, she’d decided to make the last bolt she’d passed her new anchor bolt, tied into it and off the old rope, and continued down from there.

  She was taking a rest not attached to anything else for just a moment—stupid, stupid, she should have known better—hanging close to the bottom of the shaft, maybe nine or ten meters from the cavern floor, when her anchor bolt came loose from the stone. Apparently, there had been out-of-season rains earlier that year. Water had collected just above the bolt, and it had gotten into the crevice formed when the bolt was driven in. It hadn’t been done right, or the material had been faulty.

  Whatever the reason, the bolt had given way and Jennie had fallen. Her legs had been smashed to pulp. Gyre could feel the panic, imagine the pain and terror. Unable to walk, barely able to think, the cavern dome stretching too far above her, leaving her unprotected and vulnerable, Jennie had done what Gyre would have.

  She’d crawled under the shelf and waited for the end.

  That could have been her, ten years ago. She could remember the feeling of falling, the darkness, the rush of water. She could see it happening to her here, just like the others. Adrian, Jennie, all the dossiers spread out before her.

  Two more sumps. Nobody’s made it past the last one.

  Yet, even after so many deaths, Gyre wanted to believe Em had a plan. She wanted to believe Em had picked Gyre for a reason, that she wasn’t just meat for the grinder. She wanted to believe that Em had seen through Gyre’s lies and her short professional history and trusted what Gyre always had, that she was good, very good.

  But that would be naïve. Em hadn’t even explained why she was down here, beyond vague mentions of her dead team. Everything was extrapolation spackled with hope and desperation.

  It was those two things that drove her now. But she had to keep her guard up. To evaluate Em’s every move. To stay alive. To get paid and to take advantage of all Em’s resources in the process.

  And to take down Em when this was all over, so that there would never be another Jennie Mercer, dying in terror, abandoned by the woman she’d thought she could trust.

  * * *

  “Good morning,” Em said. She sounded well rested, less blasted out and hollow than Gyre felt. “I see you found the new material I downloaded to your suit.”

  Gyre chose her words carefully. If she was going to beat Em at her own game, she had to be as smart, as incisive, as subtle. “I didn’t think you’d really have a list.” She paused. “I found Jennie last night. Jennie Mercer?”

  Em was silent for a moment, and Gyre supposed she must be calling up the dossier on her end—a thought that immediately disgusted her. Can’t you even remember the people you killed? “I see,” Em said after another few heartbeats. “How do you feel about it?”

  “It would be difficult to get her body out,” Gyre said, getting to her feet. Her anger roiled patiently.

  “The easiest way is probably back up the way she came,” Em agreed, her voice carefully controlled.

  “But you’d have to redrill all your bolts,” Gyre supplied. “If that one failed, then others could as well.”

  “Exactly. The way you came in is more difficult, but there’s less risk of equipment failure that I can’t see coming.”

  Just what she’d expected Em to say. Gyre shook her head, and considered plugging in another nutritional canister, but her stomach immediately protested the idea. Instead, she began stretching. Her muscles were sore, stiff, and under-rested. She shouldn’t have pushed so hard on the previous day’s climb, and she should have slept longer the night before.

  She needed to be at the top of her game. No mistakes.

  “There are a lot of failures in those dossiers,” she said after a minute as she slowly leaned back, reaching for the wall with her hands to brace herself and stretching out her lower back. What she said was a statement, but what she wanted to do was ask
, What are you going to do about it, Em?

  “I know.”

  “Twenty-seven out of thirty-five.”

  “Sometimes I feel like the job is cursed.”

  “You could say that,” she said, wanting to shout it instead. “You could always have another handler, you know. So you could get enough sleep.”

  “I already told— No, Gyre, I’ve tried that. It’s . . . hard to keep the mission’s focus that way. You’ve already passed substantial ore deposits, and when other handlers see that, they start fighting with me to end the mission. Once ore is found, the risk of continuing farther is outweighed by the existing success. That leads to varying messages to the caver, which can lead to mistakes.”

  Gyre scowled as she straightened up, then stretched forward, wiggling her hips to loosen up her pelvis. “I know. I read about what happened to Agnes Boyle.” Em inhaled sharply. “But that’s a lot of people, Em. And a lot of years without success. At some point, you have to admit that you don’t know how to beat this.”

  “I know it’s too many,” she confessed, her voice softer. “Too many failures, too many deaths. You asked if I felt computer errors were my fault.”

  Gyre canted her head, frowning.

  “Of course I feel like they’re my fault,” Em said, “and every gear malfunction, too. I just—can only do it better the next time. Even the times it’s been pure climber error, I wonder if maybe I just picked the wrong person. I wonder if I should have known better. So I go back and refine my screening tools.”

  “‘Screening tools’! As if these errors are just defects on an assembly line. People are dying!” Gyre said. “Maybe you should try a different way, Em.”

  “I do! Every time! I’ve tried every entrance, picked cavers with different backgrounds, enhanced the equipment I send in. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t, but I’m getting closer.”

  “I’m glad you’re getting closer. But what about us? The last four cavers before me died, Em! That’s not closer.”

  Em made a strangled sound. “I know it doesn’t seem like it, but—”

  “No. Don’t give me that shit,” Gyre said. “Just tell me—what’s different this time?”

  Silence. Then: “Your physical strength is in the top tier of cavers I’ve sent down. You’re younger than most by a few years as well. You don’t have a family waiting for you. And then there are the variables that are less directly related to success: Your psych tests suggested that you do this for the rush, and for your pride, not just for money. You don’t have any previous expedition experience and you were willing to lie about it, but you weren’t very good at it. You’re still good at the job, despite that. They could all have no effect, or they could make you better or worse suited to the job. In each aspect, you’re not different from all the previous attempts, but combined you are.”

  “Em, that sounds—”

  “Weak, I know. But things are changing. Evolving.”

  “You’re sharing information with me,” Gyre said.

  “Exactly.”

  Gyre grimaced. “And you’ve agreed to my requests. I’m sure that’s different too. Think that will be enough?” It has to be, she left unsaid. Because I’m not dying here, not for you. Because I need you to keep talking, keep giving me the whole picture. The more she knew, the safer she’d be—and the more she could guard against Em sabotaging the mission, inadvertently or otherwise. The more she knew, the greater her chance to get back topside.

  The more she knew, the more she could use against Em when the time came.

  And who knew? Maybe with enough information, she’d learn something that meant she didn’t have to go the full distance for her paycheck. It felt like the better choice than standing here in the dark, no cache in sight.

  Em said nothing at first, leaving Gyre to stew in her thoughts. Then she sighed. “Up until yesterday, I thought that would be enough. But now a cache is missing, and I checked the logs. It was restocked three weeks and five days ago.” Her exhale shivered over her microphone, long and slow. “I still think you knowing all this will make a difference, but . . . Too many variables are changing.”

  Too many variables. Me—I’m one of those variables. That’s all I am to her. Shaking her head, Gyre eyed the rest of the chamber again. She still had the uneasy feeling that she wasn’t alone, and was certain somebody—not a flood, not a Tunneler—had moved that cache.

  Nothing else made sense.

  But neither did turning back. No, she needed to keep going, take the risk for the better reward.

  Push just a little more and find a way to win this.

  “I’m not going back,” she said.

  “I’m glad.” Em didn’t sound happy, though. She sounded desperate.

  “Who does the restocking?” Gyre asked.

  “You, mostly. Especially for the deeper caches—it’s why you ferry the gear. It’s for yourself, and for the next attempts. Sometimes I can get somebody to hire on just to stock the first two caches, but it’s rare.”

  “So you need me. You need me to keep going, as far as I can.”

  “I do.”

  She had to get moving, or the fear would eat her alive.

  “If you can get back to sleep,” Em said, “you still have two hours on the clock.”

  “I’d rather conserve the battery charge. Marker to Camp Five.”

  “Gyre, you should reestablish Four as best you can, haul gear—”

  “Let’s get this over and done with, Em. You wanted me to press on last night, and whatever happened here, it’s not a good spot for a cache anymore.” It’s not safe. “I’ll stage from the next camp. And whatever else happens, maybe you should start considering this climb the last one.

  “Ever.”

  Em was silent.

  “Marker on.”

  For just a moment, there was nothing. Then the marker flared to life.

  Gyre started walking.

  Chapter Seven

  Camp Five was two days away, down a very steep drop.

  Gyre worked efficiently and methodically through the morning, locating each bolt that Em flagged on her screen and carefully testing it before hooking in. Occasionally, she opted to put in a new bolt rather than trust an old one, or to load a cam or two into a good crack in the wall, and she watched as Em flagged the ones she passed over as unsafe. A few Gyre decided to trust, but not completely; she added more cams nearby as a safeguard.

  Her stock of gear dwindled, but it was better to be safe with such a long fall below her.

  It wasn’t sheer cliffside for all of it, but it was too steep of an incline to stand easily on. She rappelled down it slowly until, finally, she passed over its edge and perched above the void, fingers clawed tight against the stone. Her heart pounded as she navigated to the first of several ledges Em had called out for her. There, she found a stable position facing out into the gap and locked the bottom half of her suit, standing with three quarters of her feet on solid rock. She set up her midday nutritional canister as she did her best not to look down.

  Instead, she looked out across the space in front of her. It was more open here than it had been above, where in a few spots it had narrowed to a slit barely large enough for a human to pass through. Here, the other wall was a good fifteen meters away, and the expanded pocket continued down for quite a while. Lichen clung to the roof the sudden flare had created, and as she waited for the canister to finish unloading and worked her fingers in her suit’s gloves, she momentarily turned off her simulation screen and looked up in the darkness to the pale glow. They looked like stars.

  She turned her reconstruction back on when a few pinpricks began to look more like watchful eyes. Nothing was there, nothing but lichen. She tamped down the irrational fear. Better to spend her energy on the rational ones: the climbs, Em, her resources.

  Herself.

  Her body was still exhausted from the day before, and the lack of sleep was beginning to make her sluggish, but the ledge she was on was too narrow to
sleep on. The suit would continue to hold her upright if she needed it, but the display and route showed a much larger ledge not too far below her. Her canister depleted and stored away, Gyre unlocked the legs of her suit.

  She pitched forward.

  “Shit!” she shouted as she lost her footing on the narrow ledge and swung out into the gap, her line too long to help hold her in place. She twisted desperately on the rope, trying to get back around to facing the wall, but her momentum brought her smashing into it before she could turn. Her arm struck the ledge and pain exploded up through her shoulder and neck, knocking her breath from her lungs. She gasped for air as she scrabbled for a handhold, but the fingers of her right hand were clumsy, fumbling, half numb. Her left hand caught hold of the edge at last and she was able to dig her toes in to stop herself from swinging out again.

  “Gyre? Gyre, are you okay?”

  Her chestplate scraped against the cliffside as she clung close to it.

  “Gyre!”

  Em’s voice was distant over the rush of blood in her ears, and the throbbing pain in her arm. She forced herself to pause for a moment and wiggle the fingers on her right hand. They all responded.

  “Gyre, I’m not showing a bone break. Gyre, can you hear me?”

  “Yeah,” she grunted. “Just—give me a moment.”

  “I can shunt in pain medicine—”

  “No,” Gyre gasped. “Absolutely not. I need to get down to that next ledge. I need my head for that.” She licked at her lips and took stock. She was holding on to the edge of the thin ledge, her feet planted strongly in the stone below it. Her line was taut now. Why hadn’t she shortened it up while she was resting? Jennie had made almost the same mistake, and it had killed her. Gyre knew better. This was what she was good at; this was her life.

  How could she have screwed up?

  Em. Maybe she should have been better than that, but Em had cost her sleep, had made her paranoid enough to push on instead of staging thoroughly for this climb.

  Her head spun, but her right arm was beginning to hurt less. Not enough, but at least it wasn’t getting worse.