The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  But it was her last link to Em. A useless link, maybe, but turning it off was too close to giving up.

  She had just pulled herself up over the edge of a three-meter climb, taken without ropes or anchors, when she saw it: a duffel bag, tucked into a crevice not twenty paces from her. She stopped, staring, then cycled through her various displays. Damn the battery usage; if that was what it looked like, if it was real—

  And it was. It was real. It was there in every display mode she had. She shouted and stumbled toward it, falling to her knees.

  A cache. It was a cache.

  That meant this was the route.

  That meant she wasn’t going in circles anymore.

  She wanted to kiss the ground, the ripstop fiber of the bag itself, every ration canister she pulled from it. She unloaded her used canisters from their storage area, setting them up in a careful row at the back of the niche, and then hefted the first fresh one, and carefully fitted it into place.

  It locked in, and she could have cried from joy at the feeling of sludge moving through the cannula. They fit.

  And if the rations fit, the batteries would too. Right? It was an old cache, but not that old. She rifled through the bag, pulling out anchors, line, other resources she could use. Finally, at the bottom, she found the hard case that housed the batteries. She pulled it free and hugged it to her chest.

  Almost, almost.

  She got the latch open on the second try. Inside, nestled in the high-density foam, was only one battery, the other slots empty. This cache had never been restocked since its last use. Understandable. But one was enough; it bought her three more days to get to Camp Three, to home.

  She picked it up, holding it reverently, and reached back with her free hand to remove her backup from its slot. That slot could run diagnostics, could confirm if it still had charge. She set the backup aside, then moved to shift the fresh battery to her other hand.

  As she did, though, her fingers tightened around it, then spasmed. Her hand jerked. Her arm moved as if on its own accord, smashing the battery against the ground. The housing bent and the glass crunched into dust.

  Its glow died.

  She stared at her hand. She hadn’t twitched a single muscle. She hadn’t tried to do that. Her muscles hadn’t seized, she hadn’t flinched—it hadn’t been her.

  But did it matter? Did how it happened matter, with the wreckage at her feet?

  Trembling, she regarded her backup. She didn’t dare reach for it, even though her charge was running out. She had to swap it out with the dying one, and soon, but as long as she didn’t touch it, she couldn’t break it as well.

  Gyre wedged herself back into the crevice of rock. She couldn’t think past the pounding in her skull.

  There was a tiny shard of glass on her fingertip, rendered flat green in her display. It had scratched the coating. She’d done that.

  I’ve killed myself.

  A faint humming filled her helmet, followed by a low crackling. It didn’t sound like the drone that she’d heard when the quiet was too much. Desperately hopeful, she looked at the comm line indicator. “Em? Em, is that you?” she whispered.

  No response.

  The line was open, but when she toggled to settings, it was still stuck on that empty channel. She tried to close it, but it refused, like it had the last ten times she’d tried over the past day. It stayed open, susurrations washing over her eardrums, and she realized that it must be connected to something, some computer, somewhere. If somebody was sitting at that computer on the surface, watching her, changing her readouts, couldn’t they control her suit? Move her hand?

  Em had been able to.

  “I can hear you,” she said. “Who’s there?”

  No response.

  “Close the line!” she said, almost shouted, and then she bit back a wretched sob. “Leave me alone. Just leave me alone, whoever you are.”

  No response.

  She turned her left hand over, clenched her fist, released it. “Was it you?” she asked. “Did you make me do that?” That was what it had felt like, like when Em had made her grasp the rock, down in the sump, or when she’d locked Gyre’s suit at Camp Two. External control. It hadn’t been her, hadn’t been her at all.

  She hadn’t killed herself. Whoever it was on the empty channel had.

  No. The channel was empty. She was hearing feedback now, nothing else. Nobody sat at a desk, somewhere topside, watching her suffer, laughing at her, destroying her chance at life. Locking Em out.

  She had to believe it was ridiculous. She had to believe she was on her own.

  She had—

  Her HUD dinged. Her meal was done. She unscrewed the canister from the port and set it aside with the others, then, trembling, began loading up her suit. She needed to run line on every climb going forward. Needed to be overly secure. If whatever that was happened again, she needed to be clipped in and protected. It didn’t matter if it was her or some ghost on the empty channel.

  BATTERY APPROACHING TOTAL SHUTDOWN

  CAVER, SWAP TO BACKUP

  Her hands stilled, and she stared at the text. It sounded like Em. It sounded like Em, and the thought made her want to laugh. Of course it would sound like Em. No doubt Em had written all the alerts, if she hadn’t programmed them in herself.

  She nodded. “Right, Em,” she murmured to herself. “Whatever you say.” It was time, no matter the risk of her spasming again. If she waited, she was dead, the same as if she shattered the battery. Her lamp was already beginning to dim. She could hear her air filter’s fans slowing to conserve the charge; without power, she’d suffocate first after all. She used her right hand to lift the backup, cradling it gently. With the suit, it hardly mattered, but topside it was her weaker hand by just a hair. Then, holding her breath, she released her dying battery. Her HUD flashed with a timer, the seconds remaining until she had to put in the fresh one.

  She’d done this several times now. She knew the motions. She picked up the replacement, slotted it in.

  Her suit restored to full power and the timer disappeared.

  She sagged against the rock, drawing her knees up to her chest. She should keep moving, couldn’t afford to break down again like she had six hours ago. But she was so tired, and for now she had one hundred percent power. For now, she could pretend it would last all four days.

  The whispering static prickled at her eardrums.

  She was tired, but her fear outweighed it. She rocked forward on her knees and quickly swapped what remained of her swimming gear with what was in the duffel. And then she was on her feet again, staggering forward.

  * * *

  She heard the waterfall half an hour before she saw it. At first, it was far enough away to be a distant rumble, and she froze where she was, half over the top edge of a short climb, waiting for the passing of the Tunneler. But it didn’t come, and as she hauled herself up onto stable ground and began walking, she made out the rush inside the rumble, the flow of water, heavy and relentless. She followed the sound. When faced with branching paths, she marked the one the sound came from the most loudly, then made for it.

  And half an hour later, she turned around a bend and saw it. Great gouts of water surged from a gap high in the facing wall, crashing down to the ground, where it had worn a hole clear through the stone. Gyre stopped where she stood and stared up at it, at the raw force on display. She’d have to climb through that to get home. If the cave hadn’t shifted, hadn’t flooded the sump by Camp Three, it might have been drier, maybe even just a trickle, but now it was nearly a sump of its own. Her battery readout hovered close to ninety-eight percent full. It should be enough. But her scrubbers would be working overtime to keep up with her oxygen needs on a climb instead of a dive, and her suit would be withstanding a lot more pressure. She would be withstanding it.

  The bigger problem was that she needed sleep. Continuing forward now was impossible. But she could already tell she was too keyed up, too unsteady in her exhaustion. Slee
p would be long in coming, and difficult. Useless, when it came. If only she had Em at hand to figure out the dosage of sedative that was best for the current situation . . .

  But she didn’t, and that left Gyre to her own devices, and to whatever was lurking on the ghost channel. The static had died down over the last two hours, but with the roar of the waterfall, she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t still there, soft and omnipresent. If she fell asleep, what might it do to her suit? If somebody was on the other line, what could they do to her?

  She shuddered, but made herself walk forward anyway, to a spot up along the curvature of the wall that was almost a nook. Almost protected.

  She hunkered down, knees tucked tight to her chest.

  There was movement in the corner of her eye; she ignored it. More darting shadows. They’d grown more frequent, now that she knew to look for them. The murmurings from the ghost channel, too, had nearly turned to song at some points, and if she paid too much attention to them, they seemed as if they could whisper her name at any moment.

  More movement.

  She squeezed her eyes shut. Counted her breaths.

  She opened her eyes again.

  More movement.

  Groaning, she gave in and turned her head, brought that corner into full view. Cycled through her display settings.

  There was nothing there.

  There was never anything there.

  It was always there.

  Slowly, Gyre shifted onto her side, remaining curled up. She locked her suit in place along the bottom edge to provide a couch for herself and dimmed the lights. Sleep. She needed sleep. She hadn’t slept properly since before the sump. Hadn’t slept properly since she’d thrown Em out. Sluggishly, she tabbed through the options on her HUD, looking for the medical readouts.

  She found the dossier on her mother first.

  Gyre pursed her lips, then paged away. Not yet. She didn’t want to die down here, suffering and afraid, knowing her mother was happy. She didn’t want to be able to imagine the details. Sedatives, that was what she needed. Sedatives, not facts. Not answers.

  There. She pulled up the medical interface, looking at everything still available to her. The levels hadn’t changed since she’d noticed the triple dose of sedatives missing. It brought her fight with Em back in full detail, filling her with a rush of self-loathing.

  She wished Em had loaded some kind of antipsychotic into the suit. Maybe then this wouldn’t have happened.

  She selected the sedative Em had used on her before. Along with an array of information on its chemical makeup and the dosage history, there were terse calculation instructions, as well as a guide of how to administer.

  Gyre’s fingers hovered in midair, poised to select the options that would knock her out. But she couldn’t do it. As she hovered over the dosage information, she tensed, drawing in on herself. Her gaze shifted through the text on her HUD to the room surrounding her. Em sedating her was horrible, but it meant there had been somebody to keep watch over her. If she sedated herself, she was vulnerable. It would be hard to wake up. It might be impossible, for a short period of time. If the ghost channel made a move, or if she had really seen motion down by the lake, or in the shelf chamber . . .

  If the Tunneler came . . .

  No—no sedatives. Not without Em.

  She could have laughed at the irony of it.

  She closed the menu, then unlocked her suit to shift her position, curling up tighter. Relocked. Dimmed the lights some more. She went through the motions as if they were a ritual, as if they’d bring sleep all on their own.

  But her exhaustion did that for her, finally winning out over her fear.

  * * *

  She slept, fitfully, but if she dreamed, she couldn’t remember it. It was only four hours later when she gave up and checked the time, sitting up and reaching for a meal. Four hours wasn’t enough, but her battery was down to ninety-three percent. Five percent in four hours, without her doing a single thing but living. It wasn’t faster than it was supposed to be, but now, this time, it felt final. A countdown clock.

  An alert flashed on her HUD.

  SIGNAL LOST

  DOWNLOAD ABORTED

  It pulsed purple for a few seconds, then faded to nothing. She stared at where it had been a few breaths longer, then sat bolt upright and pulled up the communications settings. There—the ghost channel was still toggled, but the line showed dead now, like it had when Em had closed voice communication for a time. She filled her cheeks with air, then exhaled sharply, and closed the line.

  It closed. It stayed closed. And, heart in her throat, she toggled to the line that led to Em and blew it open.

  The indicator flicked green. The signal connected. She let out a broken, half-sobbed laugh and fell backward, stretching out over the hump of equipment on her back. “I’m here,” she whispered. “I’m here.” Her voice cracked.

  At first, she heard nothing. Then the rattle of equipment and furniture. A sharp inhale, a harsh, shaking exhale.

  “Gyre?” Em asked.

  “Hey,” Gyre replied, her voice weak with uncertain relief.

  No words, just more rustling, more breathing.

  “I’m alive,” Gyre offered.

  Nothing. Then—“Fuck. Fuck. I thought—my computer lost all connection to the suit. I thought something had happened. I thought—” Em’s words failed her, and Gyre thought she could hear crying.

  Em, crying for her.

  No. For herself. For her almost failure. It couldn’t be for her.

  “What happened?” Em managed after only a moment, her voice still clotted with tears. “Are you okay?”

  A riot of emotions flashed through her—relief, fear, anger—because how could Em not know what had happened? But the one that settled firmly into her chest was shame.

  Shame, because, for the first time, hadn’t it been her who put herself in danger?

  She didn’t want to admit it, didn’t want to cede that little bit of righteous power she’d accumulated. Couldn’t handle the thought of Em using it against her, using it to prop up her desire to control everything that happened down in the cave.

  “I did what I had to,” Gyre said, and sat up a little straighter, lifting her chin. “I wanted to think.” I wanted to hurt you. “You were telling me I was going crazy, and I needed . . . space.” Em’s face appeared in her screen. The other woman was leaning in, so close to the camera, as if there were only glass between them. Her hair was wild, her face ashen, her eyes bloodshot.

  Gyre’s heart thudded in her chest, arrested once again by the humanity of her, and for a moment, she lost her words. Then: “I needed to see for myself that I was alone in there.”

  “You were alone,” Em murmured, but it wasn’t a correction. Just a murmur of understanding.

  “Yeah. You were right,” Gyre conceded, wincing.

  “But what happened, Gyre? You severed the connection, I get that, but if that was all you had done, I would have been able to reestablish it,” Em said. “At some point in the last two days, my system would have pinged your suit, and it would have responded, and I would have had you back. Instead, you stayed dark.” She looked away from the camera, wrapping one arm around herself. “And do you know what else stays dark? Broken suits. Dead cavers.”

  Gyre went very still. “I suppose you know what that looks like better than most.”

  “That’s not—Gyre—”

  “Did you start looking at new applications already?” Her gaze flicked to the recording indicator, still glowing cheerfully. She could push here, claw her fingers into the cracks in Em’s self-control and wrench it apart. She imagined the anger pouring out of Em, the confessions, the cold, inhuman distance on full display.

  Em choked down words, visibly struggling to control herself. Then she said, “No. I was too terrified I’d lost you. Not another caver. You.”

  Gyre’s anger fractured. I was too terrified I’d lost you. The pain in Em’s voice made Gyre believe Em had feare
d for her with every inch of her being. Made her want to believe.

  That was it. The tears tracked heavy and hot down her own cheeks, and she couldn’t stop shaking. She laughed, too, the hysterical laugh of the desperate, the dying, and her hands worked, stretching out into the empty air, spidering along the stone, as if she could take Em’s hand in hers. She fought it all, tried to tamp it back down inside of her, but it was useless.

  In that moment, more than anything else, she wanted the worst thing she had ever known:

  The woman who had waited two long days by her computer, hoping to reestablish a signal with her.

  I’m losing my mind.

  Em waited, patient through her sobs.

  “I don’t know what happened,” Gyre muttered, once she’d dragged herself back together. “I . . . I opened another communications channel. And then I couldn’t close it. It just closed on its own a minute ago, said something about an aborted download.”

  “Shit,” Em said. Gyre heard keystrokes, slow at first, then growing frantic. She looked back at Em’s image to see her composing herself again, frowning at a screen that wasn’t the camera. “Stay put,” Em said. “I need to run diagnostics. You must have been within range of one of the nearby concerns. Did you hear anything? Talk to anybody?”

  She shivered. It wasn’t my imagination. It wasn’t a glitch. She didn’t know if that made her feel relieved, or more terrified. Something had been downloading to her suit. Someone else had really been able to control her movements. Her breathing.

  Oh fuck. She’d been right.

  “I tried,” Gyre said. Her lips felt swollen, heavy. “I heard static. Nobody ever responded.”

  “You were probably just on the edge of the range,” Em replied. “That would explain why you couldn’t close the channel. Your suit is designed to not terminate a connection during data transfer, if at all possible, especially transfers of the rough size of a software update. It’s a safety feature.”

  Panic flared in her chest again, racing along the now-familiar pathways of her veins and sinews. “Why would another mining concern try to update my suit?”