The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  “The one straight ahead of you. The side branches on your left narrow too much to pass through. The one on your right—that’s the one the caver who went in before you—”

  “Eli,” Gyre supplied, the dossier vivid in her memory.

  “Eli,” Em repeated, then cleared her throat. “That’s the one Eli was swept down. I don’t know where it goes, but it’s not worth the risk.”

  Gyre swallowed and oriented herself toward the tunnel ahead. She couldn’t argue with Em’s logic. “Swimming forward.”

  “Swim on,” Em said.

  Gyre wished she could have pushed off the wall, but she couldn’t risk more silt skewing the reconstruction. Just the motion of her arms and legs as she crept forward disturbed her sight, and her head began to ache at the constantly changing landscape. Her line unspooled behind her, smoothly.

  Then the fin on her left foot hit it on a downward kick, and she lost her grip on the reel. She swore and twisted, but the effect on the silt erased the reel from sight. She dove toward where it should have been, hand outstretched, hoping, hoping—

  Her fingers caught line, and she followed it, hand over hand, trying not to unspool any more line than she’d already lost. She went down, and down, and—

  “Gyre,” Em snapped. “Gyre.”

  “If I don’t catch it, it will keep—”

  “Follow the line back to your anchor,” Em said. “Tie on a new line. Reel in the old one.”

  Gyre was gasping from the sudden fear and exertion, and it took a moment to process what Em had said. And her tone of voice—had she been shouting her name, and Gyre hadn’t even heard her? Her heart was pounding in her ears loud enough that it was possible. She swallowed down her panic and then carefully turned, following the line back in the other direction.

  She reached the anchor in a few minutes and took a moment there to close her eyes and calm down. Then she clipped in and began pulling in the unspooled line, gathering it up in her hands as she floated. It felt like it took an eternity, but at last she had the reel in hand.

  At least it had been a short line.

  Instead of hooking in a new line, Gyre unclipped and followed the old one up. Surfacing, she gasped as if she’d been holding her breath. Her sight stabilized, and she tossed the reel and tangled coil of line toward the camp cache, then held herself on the rim of the sump, just breathing.

  “Shit,” Gyre said.

  “We can be done for the day.”

  “Hold on,” she said. “I’m just—just freaked out.”

  “That’s an especially valid reason for resting. More than.”

  “I want to lay more line than that.”

  “This is the easy part,” Em said softly.

  “I know,” Gyre snapped. Then she stopped, shook her head, and took a long, deep breath, holding it in her belly for a moment. She let it out slowly, and turned to look back down at the sump. “Let me try it without the sonar reconstruction.”

  “No.”

  “My head is already pounding and I was only down there for—what, fifteen minutes? Twenty? The way that it represents the uncertainty with the silt—I can’t think.”

  “Then maybe you should just pull back!”

  Gyre’s breath hissed out of her angrily. “Let me try it with a headlamp,” she said slowly. “Just until the next anchor.”

  “I’ve already tried it that way; it doesn’t work. If you go down there, you go down there with everything I can give you.”

  “Em, what you’re giving me isn’t useful. I’m going back under, and I’m going to—”

  “Hold on,” Em muttered.

  Gyre hauled herself from the sump and sloshed out of the standing water over to where the extra spools of line were, her lips curled into something bordering on a snarl. She had a fresh spool and was halfway back to the sump when Em spoke again.

  “There,” Em said. “Go under. Try that.”

  Gyre reached the pool and stepped into the darkness, letting herself sink down. Her suit’s lamp switched on, and the reconstruction was no longer bright like daylight. Instead, it was overlaid on what she could see naturally, the shifting of the computer readouts hidden somewhat by the silt and darkness. The overlay gave her more information, and made the currents visible, but she could match it up with real landmarks now, hazy though they were.

  Because the cavern was filled with roiling silt.

  She’d known it, but seeing it as the dark, murky hellscape it was . . .

  Gyre took a deep breath. “That should work,” she said. “Much better. Less overwhelming.”

  “Let me know if at any time you want the reconstruction to be clearer.”

  “Got it. Following the line down to anchor two now.”

  “Swim on.”

  Gyre followed the line down to the anchor. She attached the spool to her wrist, in case she dropped it again, then clipped the line onto the bolt. Carefully, she swam forward, keeping an eye on how she held the reel and how her body moved in relation to it. What had been easy on her first dive, and so far down her priority list on her second, was now all-important. Once she was comfortable, and not much farther out than she’d been when she lost the first reel, she turned her attention back to the space in front of her.

  This section of the sump was narrowing quickly and dipping down. For a moment, it looked like there was only a solid wall in front of her. But a few kicks forward made the image resolve itself. Down, and then up again; that should do it.

  “Still forward, right?” Gyre said. “Not straight down into that pit back there, where I lost the spool?”

  “Forward.”

  She angled herself down only as far as the forward path led, and toward the nearest side wall of it. There, before the path turned upward once more, she paused to drill in another anchor. The bolt drill made the silt shift and seethe, blurring and darkening her readout for a moment, and pushed her back even as she kicked against it, until the bit caught and dragged her closer to the wall as it cut in.

  The drill stilled and the silt settled. She pulled her wrist away, then hooked her line through the new anchor and set a plastic marker on it.

  “All right, I’m going down and around this outcropping,” she said.

  “Go slowly. Look here,” Em said, and the colored lines marking a current flow brightened. There were two different colors. “On your side is a pushing current. The suction-return current to stabilize the chamber you’re in is on the other side. Both are weak here, but they’ll grow stronger in this passage. The last time it was mapped, it was very narrow.”

  “Which side should I take, then?”

  “I recommend the pushing one; you’re less likely to lose control on it, but take it at an angle and tack back and forth. Stay away from the suction. There’s no telling where it could take you. Or turn back for the day.”

  Gyre swallowed, hoping to loosen her dry throat. She refused to consider Em’s second option. If she got out of the sump again, she’d turn tail and run.

  Em waited a moment, then continued, “On the way back, you’ll take the other side. We’ll lay line for that when the time comes, on a different reel. Are you ready?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I think so.”

  “Take your time,” Em said.

  Gyre nodded inside her helmet. After watching the swirling colored lines for a moment, she turned back to her rope and checked the distance markers. They were painted on, outside of the reconstruction, but they’d been visible even without light input, which Gyre supposed meant they were made of acoustically distinct materials. Smart.

  She was distracting herself to avoid what came next. She chewed at her lip and checked her reel, made sure she had a good grip on it.

  “If it would help, I can brighten the colors on the pulling current,” Em said. “Make it a Do Not Cross situation.”

  “Yeah, that would help.”

  The suction grew more vibrant on her screen, until her brain saw it as a solid wall. Better. She’d still have
to be careful and controlled, but it was a lot easier to avoid smashing into something that looked impassable.

  And if things got bad . . .

  I’ll just stop swimming. The current should push her back to here. She’d have to protect her head and as much of the suit as possible in case she scraped along or banged into the rock walls, but the current would lead back here, and then she could plan her next move.

  “All right, starting,” Gyre said, and began swimming at an angle into the narrow gap, toward the brightly colored wall. The effect of the current was light at first, a nudge against her leading shoulder. But by the time she drew close to the wall marking the shift in the current, she was having to kick harder, could feel the pressure of the water like a weight on her head and shoulders.

  “Turn,” Em said as Gyre was already beginning to reorient herself. She was mostly through the slot now, and turned sharply up, her body curving around the edge of the outcropping. As she turned back toward the other wall of the passage, her left hand connected with the bottom of the slot, and her readout went dark as a plume of silt rushed past her, dislodged by the light touch.

  She hesitated, and the current started to push her back down the passage. Panicking, she kicked again; more silt, but she launched from the bottom and up against the stream. She made her way to the ghostly outline of the far wall that her readout had shown before the silt obstructed everything, swimming hard, her hand outstretched.

  The current grew stronger, and her muscles burned with the effort. Her hand found rock, and she grasped at it, but her fingers slipped off the surface worn smooth by the powerful, continuous flow of water, the thin layer of silt or whatever else covered the rock in the face of the current slick and unforgiving. Gyre gritted her teeth, kicking hard just to stay in contact with the wall.

  “Gyre—”

  “I’m thinking,” she snapped.

  “Listen—go toward the back of the passage. Turn ninety degrees to your right, instead of the entire way around. The slot’s opened up enough that there should be some distance there.”

  Right. She tried to turn, but the break in her momentum let the current take control of her. With a shout, she surged forward, her shoulder brushing the rock as she turned, her foot catching and slipping on the wall but giving her just enough force to shoot back toward that end of the passage. Her body screamed at her as she powered her way forward, but her readout began to clear, her blindness dissipating into the same roiling, dark, murky hellscape as before.

  She reached the back of the passage. The suction current grew brilliant on her screen again.

  It was less than ten centimeters from her.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Em swore, and Gyre wished she could mute the feed. She needed to think. She was barely clinging to the rock, like a lamprey hanging on desperately by just its mouth. She grappled for a hold in the stone, and her fingers found a small crack not yet worn smooth. She clawed her fingertips into it and locked that part of her suit, effectively clamping her on the rock for the time being. She then curled up, bringing her feet to rest against the wall nearby. Craning her head back as far as it could go, she looked around and took stock.

  Em was now, blessedly, silent.

  Her sense of direction was horribly skewed by the changes in angle, but she was fairly certain she was looking up, and to the left of where she’d entered. The passage was definitely getting bigger, which meant that the current should lessen the farther from the slot she was. If she pushed off and swam like hell for where the passage began bending back on itself again, the current would be broken. She could rest there.

  Probably.

  But she definitely couldn’t stay here; the suit’s grip on the crack wasn’t perfect, and eventually the current would knock her free. Driving a new anchor was out of the question, with the force of the current pushing so hard on her. Any action now was better than dangling, feeling her grip slip millimeter by millimeter. Carefully, she aligned herself toward that probable bend and shimmied a few centimeters farther from the suction. Then she pushed off and put everything she had into swimming hard and fast against the current, her body as heavy as lead from the pressure against it. Her muscles screamed, her head ached, and her lungs burned, but she crawled bit by bit through the water until, suddenly, there was no resistance, and she shot through the water to her target.

  Gyre slowed as she reached the apex of the curve in the passage. There were handholds here, and she wrapped her fingers around one, panting. The rebreather built into her suit was working on overdrive, barely able to keep up with her oxygen needs. She could hear it straining over the roar of blood in her ears, her cheeks tight and heavy from her exertion.

  If those scrubbers fail—

  On the other end of the line, Em sighed in relief.

  “That enough for the day?” Gyre got out.

  “Almost,” Em said. “Although . . .”

  Gyre’s blood spiked with familiar anger at Em’s single-mindedness, before fading again as she realized Em was right. It will always be that bad, getting through. The line would barely help at this point. In fact—

  “How do I lay the line? With all those turns?”

  “I . . . it’s almost impossible to do it properly,” Em said. “With that current. Just leave slack in it, and put directional markers on it.”

  “Does this point work as an anchor?”

  “That point will lead you to the correct side of the opening, so yes. Just leave enough slack that you can hold on to it while working back and forth.”

  “Right,” Gyre said. She looked at her reel, where the line was taut. Caught on something, or just not enough of it? She’d almost forgotten it was in her hand during the swim. If she’d dropped it, she might not have noticed that, either. The thought terrified her.

  She manually unspooled another several meters, then drilled the new bolt. Slowly, her muscles stopped burning, and her heart rate returned to normal. Almost in concert, her mind stopped racing too, and she was able to consider what to do next.

  Going back now would mean she hadn’t accomplished anything, apart from scaring herself. She looked around the bend.

  There were multiple paths from here, it looked like: the bubble of a chamber bent off in different directions, and the whole room was a mess of current lines, though none as strong as the ones she’d just come through.

  “You should place the anchor for your return trip before you do anything else,” Em said. “Connect it with a jump line.”

  Gyre pulled her attention back to her anchor and finished tying off to it. “What?”

  “You should have a short—very short—spool located just below where your third ration canister is stored. Release it,” Em said.

  One hand on the reel and anchor, she twisted, reaching back and fumbling for the release. The smaller reel came free into her hand, and she attached the line, a different color and diameter, to the anchor.

  “So your goal is to swim across this neck of the passage, to right before where the pushing current that will lead back is.”

  “Why not come out the way I came in, since we know where the current leads?”

  “Too little control. That current . . . two divers have died on that specific swim. Where the tunnel does its sharp bend up, the current slams divers into that shelf.”

  Good thing I didn’t let go, she thought. Then: I’m as far as any of them ever made it.

  She wasn’t sure if she was savagely proud or overwhelmingly scared. It was all running together.

  Gyre pushed away from the wall, using the exertion to quell the shaking that threatened to consume her. It was blessedly free of silt, thanks to the current and the bolt drill. She swam carefully around the marked edge of the current’s range. Reaching the other side, she focused on placing the bolt instead of the effort ahead of her just to get out safely.

  She was glad Em hadn’t given her all the excruciating details beforehand, glad she hadn’t scoured the dossiers anew before diving in.
She knew she would have overthought it, fixating on the shelf and not on her own direct survival. There was only so much the mind could parse at once.

  Em . . . had gotten her through that passage.

  Bolt in, she attached just the short reel.

  “You can cut this line,” Em said. “Store the rest.”

  “Got it,” she replied, and obeyed. Then she followed the line back to her original anchor and took in the excess slack in her main reel. After a second’s thought, she attached the diving line that came directly from her suit to the original line, then cut it and stored the spool. That way, she couldn’t risk dropping it if she was overwhelmed again.

  “Do you think you can take a break? You’re in a neutral section, right now. It’s the safest place, if you need to rest. You could even sleep here, if you tied into a safe part of the wall.”

  Gyre looked down at her dangling, floating legs. Sleep, where one malfunction could kill her in a matter of seconds? Fuck no. “Tell me what you know about the next part,” she said.

  “Not much. It’s . . . the farthest anybody’s gotten.”

  The words sent a shiver through Gyre, a heady mixture of panic and pride.

  “Do you have any of those tunnels mapped yet?”

  “A few. But things change.”

  “Give me one of the unmapped ones, then.”

  A marker appeared at the entrance to one of them, that headed back in the direction that she thought was the sump opening. A quick check on the map Em was building up confirmed it. It had no currents around it, but also seemed unlikely to be helpful. She kept herself from demanding another tunnel. An easy swim would be good right now.

  She took it slow, putting in anchors as she navigated the edge of the cavern toward the chosen tunnel. She saw other bolts in the walls with scraps of line between them, and ignored them, as if they were ghosts sent to waylay her. She spent the next hour mapping the tunnel, which quickly turned out to be a dead end, but she and Em both knew it was a good opportunity for her to rest without feeling impotent. Or trapped. Em didn’t speak much. Gyre supposed it was out of fear, and out of readiness for everything to end, just like it always did when people got this far.