The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Suited or suitless, they all seemed to suffer and die the same. Nobody should be down here.

  Canister spent and stowed, Gyre straightened up, her eyes still on the tunnel.

  “It should be stable, if you want to explore. It seems to go down in the direction of Camp Five. It may be an easier path.”

  The cliff was the simpler, known path, but Gyre didn’t like the idea of leaving the tunnel unexplored behind her. “I’ll take a quick look,” she said, stepping across the jumbled rock at the threshold into the smooth portion of the tunnel. It branched off to either side, ascending sharply on the right, arching down to her left in a gentle slope that looked more walkable. She went left, hugging the wall as she edged along.

  The floor was smooth, with a slight dip in the center, and the entire opening was a flattened oval, wide along the top and bottom, sharply curved at the walls.

  The shape of a Tunneler?

  She walked for about ten minutes before she saw the sudden drop-off, the sharp curve down where the Tunneler had changed course. She eased herself close to the corner, where the ground was buckled, almost wrinkled, pushed out into the open air of the tunnel when the creature had left it in its wake. She crouched, one hand on a ridge that jutted out over the shaft, peering down.

  It seemed to go on forever.

  “Is this still lining up with Camp Five?” she asked.

  “I think so, but not directly. Better to go the original route,” Em replied. Then she inhaled sharply. “That buckling—”

  “When it went down, it must have pushed some stone back behind it. Like dust on a road.”

  “It’s going the wrong way for that.”

  Gyre frowned. Em was right. If the Tunneler had been going down, behind it would have been up. It would have created a fence, not a shelf.

  “So it was coming up.” Gyre stood, then turned, looking back the way she’d come. “And it kept going—”

  “Toward Camp Four,” Em said. “Whatever attracted it must have been there. And recent.”

  “The cache?” Gyre said, her voice suddenly weak. But there had been no sign of a Tunneler breaking into Camp Four, near the cache or otherwise. The cache hadn’t attracted it. That left . . . “Whoever took the cache. That’s what you’re thinking, right?”

  “Somebody is in my cave,” Em whispered.

  “Was.” Was. Gyre had to believe that, or she’d turn tail and run, amendment or not. Because no matter what Em thought, right now it was Gyre’s cave, and she didn’t want to share it with anyone.

  So it had to be was.

  “We didn’t see any trace of them. They have to be gone by now. Maybe the Tunneler—”

  “If there’s another entrance now, I need to find it.” Em’s voice had gone cold. Mechanical.

  Gyre didn’t need this. She didn’t need Em to be distracted, and she certainly didn’t need to give her own imagination any fuel. Her skin was already beginning to prickle with the feeling of being watched once more. “No. Camp Five first.” I need to get this turned around. She couldn’t get dragged into this; she had to get out. But she also needed a better excuse than fear, something Em would listen to in her obsession. “I can’t—I can’t stage from here without more gear,” she stammered out, “and I can’t haul from Three easily without those dry bags—that’s why we kept pushing forward to begin with.” Gyre shook her head and began walking up the incline. “Camp Five marker,” she said. “Put it up.”

  Em muttered to herself, but the Camp Five marker appeared on her screen. Gyre took one last glance over her shoulder at the jagged ledge. Then she sped up to a trot, taking the gentle path up to the cliffside much faster than she had come down.

  The moment she stepped out of the smooth tunnel and back onto the rougher rock of the ledge, she shuddered in relief.

  She went out onto the ledge again and looked up at her leads from the day before. With the gear hauling—or the potential need for a fast escape—it would be best to leave them there for now even though it reduced how much line she had left. She toggled her next—and last—spool into place inside her suit.

  “Is this enough to get me down?”

  “Yes,” Em said. “There’s more at Five.”

  Gyre nodded, her lips pursed in thought. Even if Em was wrong, Gyre could always climb back up, make for Three again in a pinch. She’d have to keep an eye on it though, be ready to bail. There was no way she was going to try to outclimb the rope.

  She hooked herself into the line from the day before and made her way out to the original bolt, checking her cams as she went. Everything looked sturdy. She shouldn’t have needed Em to tell her that much. Once she had transferred to the vertical length of her old rope, she began to descend once more, hand over hand and step by step.

  * * *

  Half an hour in, her right arm felt almost normal again, and the work was easier. The lingering effects of the sedative had worn off, leaving her head clearer than it had been since before the sump at Camp Three. She increased her pace. Again, a few of the bolts had to be replaced, and again, Em’s overlaid calculations seemed correct. They worked together with a few words exchanged every ten to fifteen minutes. Em sounded distracted, and still angry.

  Gyre itched to dig into her suit’s workings and find the recorder, but she kept herself only to the climb. She was losing precious time to prod at Em’s defenses, but she couldn’t risk Em seeing her fussing with it.

  Then Em said, “I need to look into something. Wait for me when you get to the bottom.”

  Her line closed.

  Gyre swore loudly and thumped her fist into the rock wall. Her suit scraped against the stone, and the impact jarred yesterday’s injury. She sucked in deep breaths through her clenched teeth, then let go of the wall, hanging for a moment in her harness while she gestured angrily toward the surface.

  “Yeah, just leave me down here during a climb. Great handling!”

  There was no response, and as Gyre’s pounding heart quieted, she realized that, hanging there in the dark, she was entirely . . . Alone.

  Unless the cache thief is still here, her nerves whispered. She pushed the thought away. Better to be alone on the side of a sheer drop than on the side of a sheer drop with another climber somewhere else on the wall.

  She situated her toes back into holds on the wall and resumed her bouncing glide down toward her next bolt. Every time her rope nudged against an outcropping, or her spool released unevenly, her throat tightened. She could see the other climber up at the tunnel ledge, grabbing her rope, hauling it up hand over hand—or unfastening it, and letting her plummet. She swallowed a surge of panicked bile and looked down. There was still so far to go, longer if she did it safely enough to guard against company. And the climb back up would take—

  No, she couldn’t spook herself like this. The chances of the other climber still being alive were slim to none.

  If there even is another climber, she reminded herself.

  No, the thing to think about was how, if Em was still gone by the time she reached the base of this wall, she’d have time. Time to set up her trap, time to ensure she could get out safely. Cache thief or no.

  Camp Five’s marker burned steadily at the bottom of her screen. Oh, she thought. Em didn’t toggle it off before she left.

  That said something—that she was surprised that Em hadn’t screwed her over in her anger. That it seemed reasonable that she would have turned off the marker to strand her where she wanted her. Gyre laughed, helplessly, at how quickly things had gone from almost okay to nightmarish.

  If Em had ever wanted Gyre to trust her, she’d given up on the ledge. That cold look of hers when Gyre had told her to screw herself over administering the sedative—Gyre knew that look on a deep, intimate level. That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were. The self-awareness was no comfort, didn’t imply that Em wanted to or could be brought back to reality.

  All it meant was that she needed to get the recordi
ng going. If Em had given up on being trusted outside the bounds of a formal contract amendment, there was no telling how much further she’d go.

  She clipped into another bolt. The process was automatic now, the route easy enough, just long. Too much time for her mind to wander, to go all analytical on herself. She’d turned to caving as a way to escape all this thinking. And now this cave was forcing her to live inside her own head, and for the first time she could remember, she hated not being able to see the sky.

  She kept climbing, and Em’s line remained closed. The ground grew closer, and her rope was long enough. After what felt like days, but her HUD said had only been four and a half hours, she reached the end. Gyre let out a sigh of relief as she settled her weight onto her feet again. Solid ground after half a day’s descent felt like some kind of magic, and once her rope was secured and she had cut herself free of it, conserving the last length, she knelt and set up her feeding.

  After that, she had real work to do.

  Chapter Ten

  The ration canister was spent and the recording was running.

  Gyre paced, glancing at the comm line. Em was still gone, and the longer she was gone, the less Gyre could sit still. When Em returned, there was a strong chance she’d see the recording running. Gyre hadn’t found a way to hide it. And what then? Would she voluntarily scuttle the expedition? Would she reveal that the original recording had been a ploy? Or maybe, maybe, she’d miss it, overlook it in the sea of information streaming from Gyre’s suit to her computers.

  Camp Five wasn’t far off. Gyre could feel its presence like a rope tied around her ankle, tugging her farther into the cave. And like a noose tied around her neck.

  She could still feel the phantom sensation of impossible eyes bearing down on her from before.

  She managed to wait for the better part of an hour, pacing in tighter and tighter circles, her battery charge dwindling, until at last she came to the conclusion that it was pointless to sit and wait. Better to know if the supplies were there, better to know if she needed to turn back now to get to Three on her backup battery, better to know if she was going to have the time to pull what she needed out of Em.

  Gyre turned her attention to the marker to Camp Five, calling up the three-dimensional map Em had shown her before.

  There were no hard climbs in between her and it, no meandering paths that meant the straight shot to the marker wasn’t so straight after all. The camp itself was situated at the rim of another steep drop-off, and if she was understanding the key correctly, the drop-off was filled with water, another sump like the one she’d passed through two days ago.

  Or was it three? Planetary time was losing meaning down here. Whether the sun had risen and set two or three times made no difference to the rhythm of the climb. She’d slept twice since the sump, and that was all she knew, and all that mattered.

  At any rate, she didn’t have to swim it today—hopefully never would. The time she spent hauling gear should be all she needed before she could turn back. Committed, she began picking her way through the cavern. She wriggled her toes in her boots, the film encasing her flesh shifting with her, slimy and unavoidable. Her throat tightened but she kept moving, willing her body to acclimate again, forget the weight of her suit, the unnatural hole in her abdomen.

  The sensation faded. So far, a walk was all she needed to banish that awareness.

  And if Em asks, that’s exactly what I’m doing.

  The cavern and tunnels she passed through were much the same as the ones above the first sump. The stones weren’t worn smooth by water, and she supposed that even though the first sump was much closer to the surface than these, and even though the water levels rose in both at the same time, the upper sump got its water through a slightly different mechanism, which meant that the area between the two didn’t flood. Otherwise, she’d be underwater now, she supposed. What would it be like to explore an entirely underwater cave system? To know that if one single thing went wrong with her suit, she could drown?

  Just thinking about it made the suit feel even more restrictive, and she had to stop and remind herself that wasn’t the case.

  She’d gotten lucky, in a sense. With all the lies she’d told to get here, she could have been handed something she couldn’t handle—climbs that were beyond her ability, teams that expected her to be half scientist, half explorer, an entirely submerged expedition. Instead, all she had to deal with was her now-absent, lying handler and an impossible death curse.

  She shook her head to clear her thoughts and turned sideways to navigate along a ledge that was less than a meter wide. Strictly speaking, she should have clipped in, but she didn’t want to use up the last of her rope. The fall off the side wasn’t too bad, an uneven rocky slope but one that ended only a meter or so below her. She’d just be careful.

  As she reached the midway point, she glanced behind her.

  Something moved.

  Her heart rate quickened as she clawed her hands into the stone behind her, the rock face crumbling slightly at the pressure. Holding her breath, she stared out into the distance.

  Nothing.

  Nobody had followed her down the cliff face. She groaned. She had to get herself together; there were no other cavers here, and nothing but bugs, fungus, and Tunnelers could live this far below the surface. Of those, she only had to fear the Tunnelers, and she’d have heard it if one was close. She was safe. If she kept jumping at shadows, she was going to screw up.

  And I’m not going to screw up.

  Just a little farther . . .

  She hugged the wall as she traversed, then took a moment when she reached the other side to stretch, placing her hands at the small of her back just below her equipment hump. She looked around the passageway, which widened out like a horizontal funnel in front of her. Camp Five was at the end of this space, not far away at all. She couldn’t see the sump from here, but she could see protrusions along the floor, growing denser the closer to camp they came.

  Crouching, she toggled through the views her HUD gave her. The reconstruction just showed strange, lumpen shapes, but as she switched to her headlamp, she could see that they were glowing faintly, the same bioluminescence of the fungus up near Camp Two. These growths had no delicate flowers, though. They were uneven bulges along the ground, reminiscent of fleshy tumors, and she grimaced as she began picking her way between them. She vastly preferred the caves she’d explored when she was younger. They weren’t as deep or as wet, and so they were just—empty.

  Bone-dry and dead.

  As she approached the Camp Five marker, she could see the drop-off, but it was difficult to pay attention to. The fungal growths were getting bigger and closer together now, and she struggled to find safe areas to step. By the time she could see her first glimpses of water down below, she had given up on avoiding them, and instead began taking the most direct route to the lip of the almost circular hole. A fleshy bulb squelched beneath her boot, and then deflated in a sudden burst, bioluminescent dust—no, spores—erupting from it and coating the ankle of her other leg with a fine, glowing mist.

  Hope my air filters can handle that, she thought. Reflexively, she glanced over her shoulder up the wide, gently sloping field, back to the narrow ledge she’d come from.

  In the low light, she could barely see anything. She toggled back to her full reconstruction view, half expecting to see a figure at the end of the tunnel.

  There was nobody there.

  What the hell is wrong with me?

  She smothered a helpless, relieved, embarrassed laugh. Her, jumping at shadows. Afraid of monsters in the dark, just because the monster in her ear was away from her desk. Turning back, she squared her shoulders and crossed the rest of the ground to the rim of the cenote as quickly and authoritatively as she could. The reconstruction barely showed the spores, but Gyre could see the readouts in the corner of her screen going wild with new feedback as the powder coated the lower half of her suit and floated on the air up around her head.
No alerts flashed up in front of her, but she couldn’t resist the urge to hold her breath, only sucking in a deep gasp of air when her chest began to burn.

  These are probably always here, she reassured herself. Em knows about them. It’s safe. It’s safe. It’s . . .

  Where the fuck is Em?

  She reached the rim, then scanned along its circumference for the cache, a box of rafts Em had said would be there. She found it bolted to a nearby shelf of stone, under a hollowed-out feature, not tall enough to stand up in and barely tall enough to crouch below. She reached in and tried to drag it out, but it refused to move. She searched out the release button and pressed it. A compartment opened, revealing a line of tight, compressed packages, and nothing else.

  Hm.

  She took one package out and closed the box, then stood up and checked the label, embossed into the plastic housing so that it would show up on her feed. It was indeed a raft, and she walked back to the rim of the sump with it, wading through more ankle-high fungal growths. The spores hadn’t let up, despite the path she’d trampled. She ignored them. Coming to the edge, she peered over it. The level of the water was only four meters or so below her, and there, about halfway around the wall, was an anchor attached to two sturdy lines. The rest of the cache? Submerged—why? She glanced at the mushrooms again, wary. Batteries and canisters went directly into her suit. Maybe there was a contamination risk.

  The thought made her shiver. She hadn’t wanted to go down into the sump, but the longer she stood up here, exposed to both the spores and . . . whatever else there might be, the better the water sounded.

  There were a few bolts in the stone leading down, but she’d have to put in new line, and check the safety of each anchor. She only had a limited amount of rope left, though she guessed more was stashed in the cases in the sump. It was the safest option, to take the old route down, but the thought didn’t appeal to her, not least because for the first time in her life she was sick to death of climbing. Gyre considered the situation for a moment longer, then looked at the water. It was a clear fall, and her reconstruction was showing the pool extending much farther below her, based on previous scans of the area.