The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Must have just smacked a nerve. Better than the alternative. Gyre moved her right hand, toggling the retraction of her line. Slowly, she walked herself back up to where she’d started.

  Feet back on solid ground, she considered her options. Her arm still throbbed and would probably be useless for at least half an hour. But the larger ledge below her was big enough to lie down on, and was recessed slightly into the wall. Softer stone must have been there, once, and dissolved before the rest of the cliffside. If she could just get down there . . .

  But to do that, she’d either need to trust the old bolts or go through the painstaking process of finding new cracks or driving pitons. It could take over half an hour, if she was clipping in at reliably safe distances and favoring her arm.

  Or she could fudge the safety parameters again, and rappel down with less security. It was within range of her current rope.

  “I’m going to descend,” she said.

  “Gyre, return to Camp Four. Use your ascender.” Em still sounded on edge, panicked, and for a moment, Gyre hated that reaction even more than she hated Em. Em had put her in this position; if somebody should be panicking, it was Gyre.

  After reading all those dossiers, Gyre could almost understand, though. Em didn’t want to lose another one.

  No—she doesn’t want to restart.

  And that only made it worse. Em wasn’t afraid of Gyre dying; she was afraid of wasting the money. Of finding a new victim.

  She made herself count her breaths, up to ten inhales, then ten again. Finally, she said, “I can’t climb up with my arm like this.” She kept her words slow, her tone steady. “Even with the ascender, it’s not safe.”

  “Then keep your rope short and lock your suit. You need rest.”

  “I’m not going to get it dangling from a rope. I’m going to descend,” Gyre said.

  Em was silent for a moment, and then Gyre’s helmet screen brightened in the lower left corner. She looked to it, and found a dark-skinned, very tired woman not much older than she was looking back at her.

  She was too young to have been down here with a team.

  She’d lied.

  Again.

  But before Gyre could protest, before she could even really get angry, Em said, “If you fall, I can’t get your body out.” Her voice was soft, her mouth moving in time with the words. Gyre’s heart stopped mid-beat. “Please do this safely, Gyre.”

  The face disappeared.

  This had been different—easier—without a face to the voice. Without knowing how similar they were. She’d already known Em was a liar, but to know that she couldn’t be older than her twenties? And to see how she was so scared and exhausted and human—

  She took a deep breath and looked up, forcing her mind to clear. They could talk it through later—if there was a later. If Em had enough experience to get her out.

  Oh fuck. What if Em had lied about her experience, just like Gyre had?

  “Gyre?”

  She was fucked. But she couldn’t think about what that meant until she was off the side of the cliff. She ignored Em—and the persistent throb in her arm—and thought through her next steps. Before she could do anything else, she had to get off the side of this cliff. She had enough rope. The anchor above her had to be treated as compromised now, after taking her fall. Even if she could have climbed up to check and reinforce it, it was better to just put in a new anchor.

  She moved to the edge of the ledge most in line with the platform below. After locking her suit legs again, she surveyed the stone in front of her. There were no good cracks for cams, but she needed to conserve bolts. She thought it over a moment and then cleared her throat.

  “Suggestions?” she asked, her face burning with embarrassment and anger.

  Em turned on the analytic overlay. “Didn’t want to distract you,” she said, her voice tight.

  “Just checking my work.” Gyre managed a smile, as if it would reassure either of them. She didn’t want to admit that she didn’t trust her brain one hundred percent at the moment, given the earlier fall. That she had to trust Em more than she trusted herself, even knowing that Em must have blatantly lied about her own experience. So she picked the spot Em had marked as the best combination of within reach and sturdy. She placed her left palm against the stone, then paused.

  “Is something wrong?” Em asked.

  “We’ve been putting in a lot of bolts,” Gyre said, glancing down the drop-off. “If it is vibration through the rock that calls them—”

  “A lot more mining operations would have already been wiped out. It’s safe.”

  That all made sense, and she’d even believed it herself for a long, long time. Just because Em had lied about her experience didn’t mean she was incompetent. Her help until now proved that. The quality of her suit proved that. The other dead cavers—

  Get out of your head, Gyre. “Right. But we could also run out, couldn’t we?” she said. She hated being this rattled.

  “Your gear levels look good.”

  Right. She needed to trust Em. Just for now, until she got control of herself again.

  She started up the drill, and it slipped the bolt into the new hole almost before she registered that the drilling had stopped. She took a moment to test the bolt from all angles until she was certain it was wedged in firmly. It took her weight as she sat down hard toward the ledge.

  “Descending,” she said.

  “Descend,” Em replied, and Gyre walked herself out against the wall. She waited a handful of breaths clinging to the wall like a spider, then began walking herself down the cliffside, fingers poised to trigger the rappel rack. This model, hooked into the chest of her suit, was far more reliable than the one she’d nearly broken her legs with when she was younger. Still, she kept all her attention on it and the passage of stone beneath her feet. Nothing else mattered, until she was finally almost level with the new ledge.

  The ledge wasn’t directly below where she’d placed the bolt, though, and so she needed to pause to add a cam before she could crawl her way across to solid ground again. Her right hand was still half numb, and she fumbled to work the cam into the nearest serviceable crevice. By the time she’d clipped in, her endurance was almost gone, arrested by the uselessness of her arm and the ebbing tide of adrenaline in her system.

  “Can you look at this for me?” Gyre asked, grimacing.

  There was no change in her display, but after a moment, Em said, “You’re good. Climb on, Gyre.”

  Gyre sagged in relief, the cam taking her weight easily. So close—just a little farther, and then she could rest. She traversed the last few meters to the ledge, her good arm trembling, her toes feeling clumsy against the rock. Once she was safely over the protrusion, she dropped down, released and anchored her line, and then sat down heavily.

  “This is new,” Em said.

  Leave me alone, Gyre thought first, before she pushed down her exhaustion again and frowned, looking around. “What’s new?”

  “This tunnel.”

  Tunnel? Gyre twisted sharply, looking over her shoulder to the depression in the rock. What she’d expected to be a maybe meter-deep indentation went back much farther. A short ways in, the ground became level and oddly smooth.

  “It’s new?” she repeated numbly.

  “It wasn’t here last time.” Gyre could hear fast typing on the other end of the comm. “And it’s too big to be a natural formation.”

  “And too deep to be from another mine?” Gyre asked.

  “And too far away from other concerns,” Em agreed.

  “Shit,” she whispered.

  “Tunneler.”

  “No.” Gyre leaned her head back against the wall, staring up at the underside of the ledge above. “No.” Tunnelers were one of the few disasters her skill couldn’t prevent.

  “It doesn’t mean you’re in danger,” Em said. “It’s probably long gone, or we would have heard it today, or yesterday. And that, combined with other information your suit�
��s been sending me, supports my theory that the flooding between Camps Three and Four is the result of a Tunneler-caused change in the layout of the caverns, not off-season flooding. It should mean Camp Five is still manageable.

  “In any case, you need to rest. Now that I know you have this much room here, this is going to be a way point between Camps Three and Five, for gear ferrying.”

  “No,” Gyre said, the sharp syllable bitten off before she could stop herself. Gear ferrying would add at least a week, going back and forth through the sump, then up that pitch, then all the way down here. It would give her more time to prod at Em’s story, find what she needed to protect herself, but she wasn’t sure she could manage it. Seeing the same passages over and over, climbing past where she’d fallen today, hauling gear through the unsettling Camp Four cavern. She was tired and she was angry and she just wanted to keep going.

  Besides, Em didn’t want her stocking caches just for herself. She sat up straighter and glared at the impersonal display inside her helmet. “I meant what I said at Camp Four,” Gyre said. “I’m not ferrying gear. This is your last expedition.”

  Em didn’t say anything for a moment, before stating, “Your contract requires you to transport the supplies. Gyre, it’s for your own safety. Running out of food or power down there would be—”

  “Are the other caches depleted? Or gone?”

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe,” she conceded. “But even if they’re not, you should only go forward with the best I can offer you. That means as many supplies as you can carry. The Camp Five cache is the second to last one I have on this route, with a long dive between there and Camp Six, and it might . . . take longer from there.”

  “From there to your mysterious goal?” she asked. While she talked, she eyed the tunnel warily. It seemed more stable the farther away from the ledge she got, but if Em was wrong . . .

  Focus. The tunnel didn’t matter. What mattered was that Em still sounded worried, maybe even contrite. Gyre had to strike, drive the wedge in and pry loose a few more secrets.

  She sat up straight and addressed the tunnel as if Em were sitting just inside it. “You lied about your team.”

  “I did.”

  “I don’t suppose I could make a case that your own falsehoods have undermined the expedition,” she said, and was vindicated by a sharp, shuddering breath on the other end of the line.

  “I want you to look me in the eye,” Gyre said, her voice low and harsh, “and tell me why you lied about the team. About what you’ve killed twenty-seven people for. Cameras on, boss.”

  Em remained silent, long enough that Gyre began to grind her teeth. Her shoulders were back and straight despite the lingering pain, despite her exhaustion. If Em was looking at her stats, she wanted Em to see how very serious she was.

  “All right,” Em said.

  Yes. Relief flooded through her and she tucked herself more fully into the mouth of the tunnel, away from the cliff face. She even smiled, a vicious little thing.

  At first, nothing changed. Then Em’s face appeared in the lower left corner of her helmet.

  For a moment, Gyre couldn’t think. There Em was again, in full, living color, so different from the flat tones the reconstruction used to help her understand depth and material. It was surreal, mesmerizing to see another person, to see her. She searched Em’s face for any sign of incompetence, but instead, she only saw a focused, hyperaware woman. A beautiful woman, at that. It didn’t seem possible, and her mouth gaped open for a few heartbeats. But then her frustration punched through, and Gyre managed a thin, bitter smile. “Well?”

  Em’s eyes darted from side to side, too ashamed or panicked to meet Gyre’s gaze. She had dark circles under her eyes that looked like they had been there long before Gyre had entered the cave. Her hair was thick, pure black, haloing around her face in a mess of tight curls. Her skin was darker than Gyre’s, a rich, warm brown without freckles or moles. She was stunning, even in her exhaustion, even though her full, doll-like lips were chapped and torn from chewing at them. She pursed them as she thought about what to say next, the motion deepening the small cleft in her chin.

  “There was still a team,” Em said at last. “Before they knew the Tunnelers were a real thing. I didn’t lie about that.”

  “Whose team?” Gyre pushed.

  “My parents’,” Em said tightly, “but it—feels like mine. That’s why I said . . . it doesn’t matter. I was six when they went down. My father was an experienced climber; my mother was just getting started.”

  Em’s gaze finally settled on one point, hopefully where Gyre’s image or statistics floated on her screen. After only a moment, though, Em’s eyes lost focus, making the illusion of her presence all the less convincing, all the more unnatural. “They were hired by one of the original mining concerns and sent down there. They reported all the ore closer to the surface, but the company wanted more. Wanted to tell their shareholders how rich of a plot it was. So they kept going down. Past where you are now. They went through a—an extensive sump, and . . . you know what? I’ll just upload the videos for you. You can see for yourself.”

  That didn’t sound good.

  “The important thing,” Em said, “is that they didn’t all come back up. That’s the long and short of it.”

  It also didn’t add up to anything at all.

  Gyre scowled. “So you want me to—what? Get the bodies out?”

  Em shook her head. “Too dangerous,” she said. “I just want to give them a funeral. And formally map everything they found. I just want it to not be in vain.”

  Her mouth dropped open, disbelieving.

  That’s it?

  Gyre thought back to the dossiers, of the horrible ways all of those other cavers had died. She had almost understood it when it was Em who had survived this cave and lost her team. She could have understood other reasons—a huge mineral deposit deep in the cave, say, or even a way in to sabotage another concern. She could have understood a lot of things.

  She didn’t understand this.

  “How can you think this is worth it?” she asked in disbelief.

  “That’s my father down there, with three other good people.”

  “You’ve killed twenty-seven other people trying to get to a bunch of corpses! And in seven years you haven’t gotten close once! And you think that’s something I can accept because those corpses belonged to good people?”

  “This is why I don’t tell people.”

  “You mean this is why you lead people to their graves. You have no idea what you’re doing. And more importantly, you have no idea what it’s like down here.”

  Em’s lip curled in anger, a muscle jumping in her throat and fracturing the illusion of a beautiful, sad girl. Her gaze focused again, and she stared directly into the camera. “I never lied about how dangerous this mission is. I’m paying more than enough money. My reasons are just that: mine. You all knew you were risking death. You all did the math for yourselves. I just let your decision-making stay objective. Nobody needs to think about my personal motivations when theirs are all that should matter. And, for the record, I grew up running topside missions. My mother founded Arasgain Technologies, which developed the suit you’re wearing. I pushed the development of all the new models in the last nine years. This is my life, Gyre, and I am very, very good at what I do.”

  Arasgain Technologies. Arasgain was—the best. It was small, brilliant, and independent of all the mining concerns. The logo on her suit had had no small part in getting her to sign up. And Em was saying it was her, all her.

  Maybe so, but that didn’t make Em infallible.

  Gyre shook her head again. “You’re a real piece of work, you know?”

  “I’m aware,” Em growled. “My mother got a lot of money for that mission and she used it to start this company. She wanted to say goodbye to my father and the others, too, and now I’m doing what she couldn’t finish. I’m going to do what she wasn’t able to. And I inherited everything, so in
the meantime, I’m using most of the money to keep developing tech to keep you cavers safe, just like she did. What I want to do with the rest of my money and my time is my business. How is that any different from you chasing the fantasy of your mother?”

  Her heart jumped at that, twisted into a tight little ball. “Shut up. I’m not killing anybody to get there.”

  “You’re still sacrificing everything for a ghost.”

  “What are you sacrificing? Your hoard of money you didn’t even earn?”

  “My entire life, Gyre! This is all it’s been for years now,” Em hissed. “I barely sleep, I barely eat, I just try to keep people like you alive, and you all keep dying!” Her face had gone stormy and dark, her brow shining with beaded sweat. She was shaking.

  Gyre stared back, unflinching, uncaring if the helmet had its own camera feed. “This is fucked,” she said slowly, as calmly as she could. “You’re a goddamn murderer, Em. There’s no excuse, no reason that anybody else would ever accept. You’re not trying to get money; you’re not trying to save people. All you’re doing is trying to change somebody else’s past. Living in somebody else’s pain.”

  Em’s face flushed with fury. “So what, then—are you going to turn around now? You didn’t turn back when you found out how many were dead, when you thought it was my team that had died down there. That I’d been down there. What’s different?”

  What’s different? Knowing Em was ignoring reality to try to save people who didn’t need saving. Knowing that Em could never succeed, that this would never end. Knowing that Em didn’t see how pointless and horrific this was.

  “I’m leaving,” Gyre said, and stood up.

  Em’s eyes deadened, and she sat back in her seat. Her face slackened into blankness, calm control. “Sit back down, Gyre. Think this through. You can’t win against me in court.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “I can make sure you’re blacklisted from other caving jobs.”

  “I’ll take the risk.”

  “It’s unsafe for you to climb back up without rest,” she said, as if she cared. “Sit down, sleep, climb out in the morning.”

  “Fuck you! I told you that you don’t get to control me anymore.” Gyre reached for her rope, ready to clip in.