The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Be honest with me. Have you seen the recording running?

  “I didn’t know, actually. I didn’t check.”

  “Didn’t think to, or didn’t want to?”

  “I’m not appreciating the interrogation,” Em said, her tone warning—but not detached, nor outright angry.

  Baby steps toward being a person, Gyre thought. Then: I don’t need her to be a person.

  But she wanted her to be.

  Grimacing at her own weakness, Gyre shifted in place, trying to get comfortable. She hated this suit. She’d thought she’d been prepared, doing day jaunts in older models she’d been able to rent, but a day wasn’t a week. A catheter was still a catheter, but it wasn’t a resection of her bowel, a cannula in her gut. Most of the time, she could ignore the bigger indignities—a testament to the suit’s design, to the surgeon’s skill—but then there were moments like now. What she needed was to feel safe and to have a minimum of things needing her attention. She needed to clear her head, plan, think. Instead, when she went to comfort herself, soothe away the tension enough that she could hear her own thoughts, all she could think about was how she couldn’t rub her eyes, or even touch her fingers together.

  She would have given anything to rip the whole thing off her.

  And even if I turn back tomorrow, it’s still the better part of a week, she thought, and groaned out loud.

  “Is something the matter?”

  Everything.

  “I’d give anything for a hot shower,” she said instead. “And a beer.”

  Em chuckled. “I can only imagine. I’ve been in those suits a few times, but just for a day or two maximum. Testing it out to make sure changes I made . . .”

  “Weren’t going to immediately kill whoever you suited up? Thanks for the quality control.”

  Gyre realized the banter was relaxing her, and felt sick. This was the woman who had let twenty-seven people die. She was a mass murderer—or a serial killer. The distinction wasn’t exactly clear to Gyre.

  But this was also the woman who, so far, hadn’t shown any inadequacies that should have led to so many people dying in so many different ways. This was also the woman who, confronted with her own behavior . . . apologized.

  Who amended Gyre’s contract, who offered Gyre everything she had wanted for as long as she could remember, and who was willing to give up if Gyre wanted to take it and run.

  Not give up, she reminded herself. Try again with somebody who doesn’t know what she’s done.

  It felt hollow, just now. She wanted to believe Em cared, if only until she felt a little stronger, if only until she knew what she was going to do next.

  “If it would help,” Em said, her voice soft, barely intruding on her thoughts, “I can pass cooled water through your suit when you go into the sump, or into the lake. That can mimic the sensation of actually bathing.”

  “I said a hot shower,” she said.

  “I don’t think you’d like the feeling of warm water in your suit, given where it could be coming from.”

  Gyre made a face, then laughed. “Yeah, cold bath it is. If it’s like the fluid-exchange feature, it feels pretty nice.”

  Pause. “When did you do that?” Em asked.

  “Camp Five.”

  “Even with the spores?”

  Her stomach twisted.

  The spores.

  Fuck. She hadn’t even thought . . . but she was on the other side. She was fine. Right? I’m fine. I’m fine? Except she’d been spiraling for hours, afraid, jumping at shadows. I’m—

  Gyre took a second. “I don’t think it was a full recirculation, I got distracted. You’re . . . going to run those tests, right?”

  “I’ve got them running on another machine as we speak. I’ll have answers in about an hour. Gyre, you should have told me you had more exposure than just breathing recirculated air in that chamber.”

  “I didn’t stay long.”

  “No, you did a several-hours-long dive while possibly impaired.”

  “Maybe they messed with my judgment.” Maybe they made me see something in the dark.

  “Don’t do it again. Wait for me next time.”

  She snorted to cover her shame and fear. “Planning on abandoning me again?”

  Please don’t.

  “No,” Em said, and Gyre sagged with relief. “But that was so reckless, I can’t even—if I’d known, I would have been terrified.”

  Terrified. For her.

  Gyre tried not to react, but her thoughts immediately went back to the Long Drop, how her fall had triggered something in Em, changed something. After her fall, Em had wanted Gyre to see her. To understand. She’d been afraid of . . . what?

  Of starting over. Or . . . of losing her?

  The thought cleared away the grasping chaos of her panic. Em sighed. “Anyway, in the meantime, if you do want that bath, I recommend the lake, for obvious reasons.”

  “The currents.”

  “Mm-hm. It’s mostly quiet in the lake these days—much safer.”

  “Right.” As safe as anything down here.

  “And recirculating your entire water supply might be the best course of action. If anything, it could clear out any remaining spores. You know, I had one caver try to swim the sump with me running cool water through the suit. Thought it would help him handle the environment better.”

  Gyre bent her head. “I can guess how that turned out.”

  “He actually survived,” Em said softly. “But he bailed after the first encounter with the currents. Barely got out. I . . . couldn’t blame him. He’d given me enough information for the next push, so I pulled him out. Paid him the agreed-on wage.”

  “You—what?”

  “I’m not a complete monster,” Em replied. Her face appeared in the lower corner of Gyre’s screen, still young, still beautiful. Her hair was pulled back into a large bun at the top of her head, and she looked a little better rested, and more than a little worried. Gyre could see more of Isolde’s features in her now, including that particular set to her jaw that spoke of deep exhaustion, relentless determination, and inherited pain. Traumatic memories, passed down from mother to daughter. “You’re not the only person I’ve offered full pay for a half-finished job,” she said.

  “Nice to see you again,” Gyre said. It came out sounding more vulnerable than she’d intended.

  Em quirked a brow.

  “What makes you decide I need to see your face?”

  “I thought it was polite, now that we’re having actual conversations.”

  “Is that what this is?”

  “Isn’t it?” Em managed a smile and idly fiddled with a curl that had come loose from her bun. Gyre felt an immediate pang of envy—what she wouldn’t give to touch her own hair. “But to the point: everybody that comes back up gets paid, even if it’s a fraction of the full arrangement. Everybody who dies . . . their family gets paid. In full.”

  “It’s not in the contract.”

  “I know,” Em said. “People do read their contracts sometimes. It—”

  “Changes how people behave,” Gyre supplied.

  “Exactly.”

  Still a monstrous manipulation—how many of her cavers would have turned back instead of pushing onward? Gyre had come this far to protect herself, after all, and she knew that she should get out. The others hadn’t had that luxury.

  But it was difficult to feel the horror when she could see the humanity and the pain in Em’s face. She thought she was doing good. She thought she had no choice except to let them die, but she could at least make it better after.

  Monstrous. Human.

  Understandable.

  “Your mom really made that much off Oxsua?”

  Em visibly flinched at the name. “She made enough. Invested most of it. Built up the company with some of it, kept generating wealth with the rest. I inherited it all. And since then, a couple of my cavers have asked for other jobs, and I’ve given them lower-paying ones, but scouting actual plots.
Sold the rights, invested again. Half the tech I’ve invested in are things I use here, and you can see how advanced it’s gotten. I’m on the front lines, I guess.”

  “If you weren’t so obsessed, you’d be famous. Your company already makes the best tech. If you ran standard expeditions, everybody would want a job with you.”

  A job, Gyre reflected, that even in a normal cave system would still have what would be an unacceptable mortality rate on other planets, in other industries. The caves were soaked in death, just not . . . not like this.

  “Yeah.” Em shrugged. “I know. But I don’t like putting people down there. Not for profit.”

  Gyre swallowed, trying not to feel sympathy. “You’ve got a way higher failure rate than most surveying missions,” she pointed out. “The others aren’t safe, but the risks are obvious, and with the money people earn from them, they make better lives. Get off-world. Most of them survive, even if they don’t get out intact.”

  “And your point is?”

  “That companies like Oxsua serve a purpose. That you’re not better than them.”

  “Eventually, they’ll leave, you know.”

  Gyre snorted. “Yeah. We all know. Eventually, they’ll find the limit of what they can do without Tunnelers killing them all, then they’ll move planet. We all know. But it’s not like there’s anything we can do about it. And it’s not like you’re helping us prepare for that any more than they are.”

  “I’m not saying I am.” Em had leaned forward slightly, had her elbows on her desk and her hands folded before her, her chin resting on her knuckles. “I’m saying I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this because I have to. And at least, for every suit and scanner I help perfect by field-testing this way, even if my caver dies, ten, twenty, maybe more will survive, will get the chance to use the system like my mother did. When I pack up, maybe it’ll turn out that my net impact was nothing. I know that lives aren’t some finite value, I know that better than anybody, and ten don’t outweigh one, just like my mother and father don’t outweigh the—the twenty-seven people I’ve led to their deaths since. There just isn’t math for that. Can’t be.” She looked upward, brow furrowing with a hint of pain, then continued.

  “But at least the people who get involved in my mess know that this is a very dangerous mission, and at least the people who wear my tech outside this cave can feel a little more sure they’re bringing home the money they make themselves, and not as a crematory box.”

  Em fell silent then, looking uncomfortable now that all the words had poured out of her. Gyre found herself trembling slightly, trying to parse everything. That calculus was as raw as Isolde’s pain in that exit interview, and Gyre couldn’t fight the feeling of Em’s grief being a living thing, as inexorable as a Tunneler but with a beating heart, a pulse that throbbed and curdled in the vein.

  “I’m not a complete monster,” Em said once more, her voice quiet. “Just most of one.”

  “Drama queen,” Gyre shot back, but the words felt hollow. She understood Em—more than she wanted to.

  And with that understanding came the revelation:

  She wanted to help her.

  Fuck.

  Em shook her head but didn’t cut the feed. Instead, she left it up as she turned her attention to another screen, and Gyre could hear the faint clicking of her typing, watched her lift her hand every so often to manipulate the display. Gyre stretched her arms above her, then nestled herself against the battery and canister boxes, watching the play of light on Em’s face. It was soothing, watching somebody else work instead of working herself. Watching, instead of being watched.

  “You passed your neurological test,” Em said after a moment. “And so far, the results are coming back that your suit is undamaged. It’ll take longer to get results on if the spores affected your air scrubbers.”

  “Neurological test?”

  “Even if the exposure was impairing your judgment back at Five, you sound like you’re back to normal now. On edge, but I can’t blame you for that.”

  Gyre grimaced. That meant—that meant all her panic this side of the sump had been just her. Her racing thoughts, her wild swings of emotion, her eruptions of panic—all her. “Yeah. Guess not. Glad to hear I’m not dying.”

  She sat with that thought a moment, turning it over. She’d been so focused on Em, she’d forgotten that the cave was dangerous outside of her handler. She’d let it get into her head. She couldn’t let that happen again.

  She took a deep breath. “So . . . you really found my mom?”

  “Yes,” Em said with a glance at the camera. “Here, I’ll send what I found. You can look at it whenever you like.”

  Now, now, now, now—but she hesitated, looking at the file. If Em knew she’d seen Isolde, Em wouldn’t have been able to guide her out safely.

  If Gyre knew about her mother, could she keep it together enough to climb out?

  “Not yet,” she said, getting back up. Her feet took her, unthinking, to the sump entrance. It looked like a puddle from afar, but as she grew closer, she could see how deep it was. Still, it would be a tight entrance. Her skin pebbled into goose bumps.

  You don’t have to go in there. Gyre had a sinking sensation that even Em would say that much, if she asked. Em, worried about the spores, worried about her falling, sitting up there and watching that video of her mother, of all the other cavers dying—

  She did that to them, she reminded herself, but it rang hollow now. Em had set the stage, had invited in the players. She had set a goal that meant longer expeditions, but those weren’t any more dangerous for her withholding of information. Adrian Purcell had died from a freak rock collapse. Jennie Mercer had died because of bad caving practice and nature-damaged equipment. Who could Gyre truly blame? Em, Em, Em was the only person to blame, but it didn’t feel right.

  Em was an experienced handler. So far, she hadn’t led Gyre astray in any physically dangerous way outside of the incident on the Long Drop. This expedition shouldn’t be killing this many people.

  This cave is cursed.

  Beneath her feet, the sump roiled, ready to strip her lines and bash her against rock. But Isolde had made it out. It was manageable. It was doable.

  Why couldn’t anyone do it?

  “Gyre?”

  “Just thinking,” she murmured. Reluctantly, she turned her attention away from the sump and back to her readouts. The recorder indicator was still green, still steady. A black box up on the surface was storing all of this. If she took it before a court, what would they find?

  Nothing illegal. Nothing beyond the bounds of the contract. They’d get context, an explanation, and an unanswerable question. Who was at fault? Was Em a murderer, or just irresponsibly obsessed?

  Would a court even try to stop her?

  Never.

  She turned and made for the maw cavern.

  “Where are you going?” The words were bare of any accusation or anger, and a glance at the corner of her screen showed Em still working away, expression alert but placid.

  “To take that bath you suggested.” To clear her head. To get it back on straight.

  Because right now, right here, she was considering diving into that sump and finishing this herself, the way Em wanted her to. Finish the story, witness the dead, and then climb back out. If not for Em’s sake, then for Jennie’s. For all the cavers who had come before her, who would come after.

  Gyre levered herself up and over the barrier leading out of Camp Six, hissing as her sore, swollen muscles protested, then wove her way between the pillars toward the lake, up and down the shelflike sheets of stone that remained from the passage of floods. Em turned on a secondary marker for her, but Gyre knew where she was going already. She’d always had a sixth sense about the layout of caves—would it extend to the sump? Was Em right to trust her with diving, despite her lack of training? Could she handle the currents, make the right split-second decisions? She wasn’t a strong swimmer. Em knew that. Em should tell
her to stop.

  Em had brought her this far.

  Knowing Em, she’d already tried experienced cave divers—people as good as Hanmei. She’d probably tried every combination of skills she could find, searching for the one that would be right. The problem, as far as Gyre could see it—aside from this being a suicide mission to begin with—was that half of any success was luck. She’d always believed that. It scared a lot of people, and sometimes it made her angry, because of course she wanted to control her fate. But it was true. Luck had seen her born on this godforsaken rock, chance had led to her mother running away, pure providence had kept her from snapping her legs as a kid.

  Luck might let her finish this, for good.

  She passed into the luminous cavern again and dimmed her display to nearly true colors. She felt a pang of nerves, but it quickly subsided to the general level of unease she’d almost grown used to. Whatever phantom eyes she felt on her back, she could push away with the knowledge that Em was at her computer. Em was watching for her. Seeing Isolde at Camp Five—that had been chemical, a distortion created where the spores and her nerves and that video had met.

  Whatever had taken the missing cache, the others were fine.

  Everything was going to be fine.

  She approached what looked like an easy, gentle entrance to the water, and dipped her toes in.

  There was a few-second lag, but then Em tapped a key somewhere, and cool water ran over her foot. It wasn’t quite specific enough to mimic the feeling of dangling just her toes in the water, but it was a thoughtful, attentive touch. Gyre bit back a surprised sob of sudden relief and looked at Em’s image.

  Em was engrossed by her readouts, leaning forward slightly. She had no idea what that tiny gesture meant to her.

  Gyre watched her for a moment, transfixed by the gentle curve of her cheek, the slight parting of her lips, before she realized her heart was fluttering in her chest. Her pulse was quickening, and she hated it. It wasn’t fair. Not only was she—stupidly—considering helping the other woman, even after everything that had passed between them, but Em was just her type. She was smart and driven and beautiful, and so unreachable that she could’ve been halfway across the galaxy. Gyre wondered, just for a moment, if Em would have noticed her topside in any other situation. But no other situation mattered. There was only the cave, and this fucked-up tether between them, making them both desperate for contact, making her dream of something easier.