The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Right?

  She needed to pose a direct question, then, ask for help. Maybe . . . maybe apologize.

  The ground beneath her feet was smooth and hard. There was no dust to write in. The lake, on the other hand, likely had silt at its bottom. With a grimace, Gyre edged toward the still margin of the pool, then waded out ankle-deep into it, watching for the bloom of uncertainty as her sensors picked up roiling silt. There had been silt, right? She stomped and slid her feet, but nothing changed.

  She flipped through filters, but they all showed the same thing. The water was clear. She could see straight to the bottom. The only difference was that, when she switched to the beam of her headlamp and looked at the water from an angle, she saw the glow.

  The glow. The glow that had convinced her there was a body somewhere in the lake. Of course.

  It was the same hue as the growths in the lake by Camp Six, and it was strong. She crouched and ran her fingers over the bottom, then pulled her hand back above the water. Her fingertips glowed. An image of the fungus eating through her suit seized her, but she ignored it and instead plunged both hands into the pool, gathering and scooping until she had a handful of spongy luminescence.

  She took it to the nearest flat expanse of rock and hunkered down, mounding her paint beside her work space. What should she write? Start with the apology, or keep it simple? She went back and forth between each option, until she realized that the glow was beginning to fade. The fungi were dying, or already dead, and their light didn’t last long.

  Gyre pushed it against the stone, scrawling out PLEASE on the ground in front of her. She fumbled through her sampling options and took a still image of the message.

  And then she realized that she couldn’t send it.

  Voice communications were down. The video link had gone with them. She didn’t know how to upload a photo, so how could she get it in front of Em? She could wait for Em to find it, scraping through all the data from her suit, or she could keep staring at it until she faded, but what if it wasn’t enough?

  What if communications meant all communications between the suit and base?

  No. Impossible. Em had closed the line before, and she hadn’t lost all ability to contact Gyre. But Gyre had done it through settings she didn’t understand, had established a connection with the yawning silence of the empty channel.

  What if Em couldn’t see anything?

  Gyre heard a high-pitched whine, then realized it was coming through her own throat. As if emboldened by the acknowledgment, it grew louder, until she was part of it, keening and dropping her head between her knees.

  You arrogant fuck-up, what have you done? It was her thought, but she heard it in her dad’s voice. Her mother’s.

  Her mother.

  She closed her mouth, swallowed hard. The dossier Em had delivered on her mother was still there in her suit, still beckoning. Em had found her. Had found the planet she lived on.

  She was down here to get to her mother. Even if everything else faded away, even if Jennie Mercer and Isolde and all the rest didn’t matter anymore, she could cling to that. Had to cling to that.

  Your fault, your fault.

  She wasn’t sure who she was addressing.

  * * *

  If she could get back to Camp Four, she knew the way home. And she couldn’t sit here and rely on Em to fix the problem from her end. That had become clear as soon as she’d woken up that morning, after a fitful, fearful sleep. If Em hadn’t been able to solve the problem in what her suit’s clock said was nearly twelve hours since Gyre had jammed the comm line, she might not be able to do it at all. And Gyre certainly had no chance of fixing it herself, though she tried three more times to shut down the open line, to no avail.

  So. Camp Four.

  If Em had downloaded a map to her suit, Gyre couldn’t find it. That meant no hints as to the locations of caches, no markers except the lake she was at and the waterfall she was headed for. There was no flow of water into the pool that Gyre could see, which ruled out following the stream back to its source. That left her with an unknown distance to cover, sixteen meals and, given the remaining power readout from her current battery, one day plus another one to four on the backup. It all depended on how active she was, how inefficient. She didn’t have room to wait, and she didn’t have room to make mistakes. Didn’t have room to panic. At most, she had five days to get back to Camp Three.

  Possible as few as two.

  The suit battery giving out was a much bigger problem than the rations, and would kill her far faster. If the suit shut down, she wouldn’t be able to move or see. She didn’t know if she’d still be able to get air, if the exchange fans would lock open as a safety measure, but she knew she’d eventually starve, if nothing else.

  She started walking.

  If her suit could generate its own map, she couldn’t find the setting, so she marked her path with loose rubble, leaving marker stones by each passage she entered. The first two she found narrowed down to bare slits, and she abandoned them. The third required her to climb through a thin slot, then attach anchors on the far side where the ground dropped off abruptly into a ten-meter-deep shaft. Across the way was another crack, though, and she spidered her way along the wall, driving anchor after anchor, running out meters of line. When she reached the other side, she looked at it, chewing her lip. Was it more important to conserve her resources or make a retreat easy? Save the rope, or save her precious battery power?

  Gyre landed on the latter and left the rope behind.

  It was very possible, she realized as she eased her way through the crevice and into a longer, still narrow tunnel, that the path to Camp Four through here was closed or collapsed from the same movements of the Tunneler that had taken her this far. If she didn’t find the waterfall in the next day, she’d have to ascend that rope and keep walking, and hope to meet up with the Long Drop. Or was it better to commit to one path the whole way? She paused, braced herself against the stone, and let her forehead rest against the pitted wall.

  Why won’t Em fix this?

  She pushed the childish, desperate thought aside. She could do this alone. She had done this alone all her life.

  And if it came down to it, if her battery got low, she could always try to strip the suit off. It was dangerous to do it in the field, without assistance. The cannula in her stomach was reason enough not to try, not to mention her lack of traditional gear. The air wasn’t cold enough to kill her fast, but it would kill her eventually if she tried to go on without clothing, without protection. But if the moment came . . .

  She’d figure it out when it came.

  For now, she made herself pay attention to what was in front of her: stacked shelves of rock leading up at a steep angle, with no way to go around them. They led up to the ceiling but didn’t quite reach it. She climbed the first without tools, then the second. Her muscles burned as she scaled the wall, her pulse pounding in her skull.

  As she reached the top, she could see that there was a gap, and that she could descend the other side. But the other side was much steeper, and she was going to have to put in at least one anchor, run at least five meters of rope to get down safely and leave a way back up. As she considered, she felt the hairs on the back of her neck rise up. She paused, then turned, slowly, looking back over her shoulder.

  Hanmei stood in the tunnel she’d entered through.

  She was hard to make out, missing details at this distance. Gyre’s reconstruction wasn’t able to show the expression on her face, or even to differentiate her much from the rock behind her. But Gyre recognized her hairless scalp, her wiry frame. She stood, motionless, staring up at Gyre.

  Gyre couldn’t breathe. Impossible.

  Impossible!

  And though the fear would have been bad enough, beneath it Gyre ached for the dead woman. Needed her. Even with the missing data, even with the inhuman coloring, she looked so real, so solid, and Gyre struggled not to scream. Not to cry. Seeing another person, a body
, taking up space not fifty meters from her, made her want to shout. She wanted to rush down, reach out, hold the other woman.

  She wanted to not be alone.

  As she watched, Hanmei took a step backward, then another. Fragments of her fell away, eliding into the rock around her as she left Gyre’s sonar range. And then she was gone, as impossibly as she had arrived. Gyre was moving before she could stop herself, scrambling down the shelves, racing for the tunnel, chasing better data. She ran and she stared and she waited, waited—

  And there was nothing. There was nowhere Hanmei could have gone.

  It had been an artifact, a misfired synapse, an over-interpretation of a wavering of a signal. She’d been so afraid of the computer hiding things from her, but was this the alternative? Without Em to help manage the flow of data, would she keep seeing the impossible?

  Hanmei had died nineteen years ago. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Em’s voice. Not real, not real, all of this is normal. Unless it was real. Em had said she hadn’t been affected by the spores at Camp Five. Which meant . . .

  No. No, she couldn’t believe that, not here, not now.

  When she opened her eyes again, everything was still. Everything was silent. The empty channel was still open, status light glowing, speakers offering nothing. She stared at the indicator, her jaw trembling until she clenched it.

  If the communication channel was more than speech, if it was the whole connection of the surface computers to her suit, then what was she connected to? What was interpreting her data for her? She lurched forward as she pulled up the communications options screen, tried to force the channel closed again.

  Nothing changed. The green light continuing to glow beside its ever-present recording twin.

  No. No. She didn’t have time for this, didn’t have the resources to be distracted. She made herself turn away and walk back to the stacked shelves, made herself climb even though, on a different day, in a different place, it would have been too dangerous to ascend without a rope with the way her body trembled. She did it anyway. Twice, her foot slipped. A third time her body simply refused to summon the force needed to get up to the next plateau. But she didn’t fall. She had some luck left to her; she didn’t fall.

  She hauled herself to the top and once there, didn’t pause more than it took to drive the anchor into the crest and tie into a rope before walking down the smooth side.

  There was a sloping passage leading down from the far right side of the chamber, and she followed it, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder every five steps. Her helmet trapped the sound of her breathing, of her snorting phlegm back into her sinuses, of her heart in her ears. She could almost hear words in the noise, words in her own voice. Exhortations, accusations, her thoughts twisting into audible reality.

  And then she felt it, that same feeling she’d had back in the Tunneler path. Not quite the feeling of being watched; instead, that feeling of forgetting something, of ignoring something important. A tug, a longing that didn’t feel like hers, pulling at her spine. It was like a whisper against her ear, a distant cry that begged her to come back, come home.

  She clapped her hands over her ears only to hear them bang off her helmet. Shit.

  She kept walking, thankful for the gentle slope.

  Two hours later, she ducked under an overhang and stepped out to the base of the stacked shelf wall.

  The pull lessened.

  Gyre didn’t cry. She didn’t curse. She just slowly, slowly, sank to the ground, took out a ration canister, and plugged it into the port in her side. It was necessary, but it was also another one gone. She sat, unmoving, staring at the shelf. Her stomach cramped and crawled, but the nausea didn’t make it up to her throat. She sat and she stared for the next half hour.

  It should be simple. One foot in front of the other, mark the paths she checked, and she’d have to find the exit. But what if she’d missed something? What if she’d turned around and somehow hadn’t noticed it? Figures in the distance, impossible bodies, were obvious. Distressing, but obvious. But what if there were smaller breaks, subtler failures of her brain? How much had Em been keeping her walking in the right direction?

  No. She could do this. She’d done this before, done this without help. She was deeper, and she was in a suit, but she was still just fundamentally in a cave on her own, and she’d spent far more of her life in those circumstances than she had attached to Em.

  Gyre stood, paced the length of the room, found the crevice she’d originally entered by, and marked it. Came back and marked the overhang, which she hadn’t seen the first time. She climbed up the shelves, then walked herself down the other side. She tried again.

  The tunnels weren’t straightforward, and the easiest path, the one she’d clung to her first time through, wasn’t the only one. Thirty meters in, there was a fork, but the tunnel turned up instead of to the side. She had ignored it. But now she made herself scale the wall, climb up into the shaft, ignoring how her fingers ached and the muscles along her spine trembled. A few meters up, there was a slot. She took it, on her belly, dragging herself through. Again and again, she found new paths, a honeycomb impossible to map without tools. She tried to mark her way, eliminated false starts, pushed onward. She moved blindly through the warren, drawing closer to death with every step, every tick of her battery indicator, and fighting to ignore that fact.

  The whole time, the empty channel was silent in her ear. The quiet drew out her thoughts, amplified her breathing, made her think she could hear things in the distance. The music was back, then the humming, and once a bang that she realized only after she jerked and twisted around that she hadn’t heard at all. It was an overwhelming cacophony, until suddenly it wasn’t anything.

  The honeycomb drew down, narrowed, until there was only one path. It grew in height, in width, into a sloping hall.

  She stumbled out of it, straining forward, listening for the distant crash of water. Instead, she saw only the lake, placid and broken periodically by the stone pillars.

  Gyre fell to her knees and cried.

  Eight hours, and all she’d done was rule out two options—maybe. All she’d done was run her battery down to twenty-three percent. There were still a few branch-offs in the honeycomb that she hadn’t checked. Did she go back? Try the next one? The only thing she couldn’t do was stop, and yet she dragged herself across the rock to the same nook she’d spent the previous night in, then hugged her knees to her chest, struggling to breathe.

  And thinking of Em.

  It made the tears come harder, but she couldn’t stop. It was like picking at a scab, or digging a finger into a wound trying to understand it, understand the pain and the extent of the damage. She thought of Em and her voice and her instructions. She’d ended up relying on Em, even when she thought she was pushing against her. The give-and-take, the company, just having her close at hand to double-check Gyre’s thinking . . . She’d needed it.

  And now, she needed it even more. She craved the sight of Em’s face, the sound of her voice. She even wanted the warmth of her touch, too, the solidity of her body curled around Gyre’s own. She could practically feel it. Her cheeks burned at the thought, from longing and shame. She wanted to laugh at herself, at her own stupidity.

  Longing for Em. Beautiful, selfish, cruel Em—who she needed desperately, who she relied on. It was everything she’d never wanted. She’d been weak. She’d traded her independence, the only thing that had kept her safe for so many years, for the company of a monster.

  And what would they think of her, the silent, watching dead, who she’d promised she would help, only to witness her back off out of terror?

  Would Jennie have understood? Had she felt the same way, longing for Em’s voice as she crawled beneath her shelf to die? Had Adrian Purcell cried out for her while he lay crushed beneath the boulder at Camp Two, wanting more than salvation?

  Isolation did this to her. Weeks with only Em’s voice in her ear, only Em’s face in front of her,
her whole life orbiting around her, and now days without anybody at all. She hadn’t been able to picture her mother’s face in years, but now even her dad’s felt different, as did the few people she counted as colleagues, even if she would never call them friends. Em was the only memory left to her, the only real person, and her imagination built a shrine to her.

  Em, who had been so afraid of losing her.

  She stared at the recording light for what felt like hours. Em had said it would go to a black box, inaccessible until she was above the surface. But oh, what she would have given to be able to access it, to play back all their conversations. If she listened back to Em’s confessions at Camp Six, would she still believe them? If she listened to their arguments on the Tunneler path, would she see Em manipulating her, or trying to help her?

  She wanted that objectivity. She wanted to be reminded to hate her, or to be forgiven for needing her.

  She had nothing.

  Gyre settled down onto her side and tried to push away the thought of Em, worried for her, wanting her to come back. But it wouldn’t leave—it was now one more figure with her in the cave, haunting her—and she couldn’t stop the tears from rolling down her cheeks.

  Chapter Nineteen

  BATTERY LEVEL CRITICAL

  The warning had been flashing red on her screen for the last two hours, but Gyre was holding out, waiting until the last minute possible before she swapped to her backup. She was trudging up a passage that was almost a hallway, with an even incline broken only by a few short scrambles. Easy. It was easy. Not so easy as the Tunneler passage, but close. Which meant her suit was using less power to help her traverse it, and which also meant she’d been able to turn off the sonar reconstruction and work by just her headlamp, slowing the inexorable drain just that small fraction.

  That morning, she’d thought of turning off the recording. The ghost channel connection still refused to close, but the recording could have been severed easily.