The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  “Hopefully it was just an automated process. The system found an unknown suit on its channel, running on a different setup, and was making it conform. I’m not seeing any sign of fragmentary code, though. Hopefully it was a package update, and not piecemeal.”

  “What happens if it’s piecemeal?”

  “Your suit could begin malfunctioning. It could error out and lock up. It could—god damn it.”

  “What? What’s wrong?” Gyre sat up straight, fingers splayed on the ground on either side of her, ready to rocket to her feet. The channel must have done something to the suit, changed it, and Em was about to tell her that she was dying, this time for real, this time with no way out. The spasm that had broken the battery was just the first symptom.

  Or . . .

  Her eyes went to the green light still gleaming on her screen. The recording—she could have spotted the recording, and was realizing what Gyre had been planning on doing. She was going to abandon her again.

  What use was weighing one betrayal against another, if one person had all the power?

  She closed her eyes, trying to steel herself.

  “Your battery,” Em said, her voice pained.

  At first, Gyre couldn’t parse what Em had said. Her battery. Not the recorder. Em wasn’t about to cut her off. Em still cared. But her relief lived for only the briefest moment, replaced immediately by a horrible thought. “There were—text alerts, about my battery level. I switched out to the backup. That was the suit, right? Not some sick joke?”

  Em shook her head. “I’m looking at the log right now. You got dangerously low. You were right to switch. But I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”

  “What?”

  “You must have passed by the cache. Wasn’t it there?”

  Gyre sagged back into her suit. From one disaster to another, one shame to another. She was too tired to keep up. “It was.”

  “Then where is it? There’s no way you could’ve burned through two—”

  “The suit broke it.”

  “What?”

  “I was holding it, and the suit spasmed. My hand clenched, then my arm jerked. I threw it down, and it shattered.” She swallowed. “I think it was whoever initiated the signal controlling me.”

  Em grimaced. “It’s possible,” she said. “A tech could’ve seen the suit come online, but couldn’t make verbal contact, so they tried to establish physical control. But they should’ve left you alone while you were handing supplies. Or at least seen my imprint on the signal coming through and contacted me. Or stopped the download, at least, and used the limited connection to communicate by text with you. You didn’t see anything like that?”

  “No. There was nothing except for the static. I thought . . . I thought I was hallucinating. Like I was at the lake. If stress was causing all of that—”

  “It wasn’t all stress.”

  “What?” No. No, it had all been stress. It had all been stress, which meant it hadn’t been real, and the alternative meant . . .

  Isolde. Somewhere in this cave. Impossibly in this cave.

  More keystrokes. Then Em said, “I lied.”

  Gyre’s throat went dry, her brow furrowing. “Lied?”

  “About the spores. At Camp Six. You were right; I did keep you sedated for a long time. I was giving your body time to purge itself of the spores. You were erratic, highly agitated, and your hormone levels were all over the place. I only let you back up once you’d stabilized.” Em looked at the camera again, shame twisting her features. “I didn’t want you to panic again, and since everything seemed fine when you woke up . . .”

  Gyre should have felt anger. Instead, she felt relief, validation. It hadn’t all been stress, but it also hadn’t been real. Isolde wasn’t at Camp Five. Some weird system update made me crush the battery.

  I’m not doing this alone anymore.

  She could trust herself now. Probably.

  “I’m sorry. I should have told you,” Em said. She lifted a hand, as if to reach out for Gyre. Gyre almost responded in kind.

  “And the rations?”

  “Really fine. Really uncontaminated.”

  “Then at the lake—why was I—”

  “I do think that was stress. I won’t know for sure until you’re back topside and the doctors can run more tests, though.”

  Which meant Em wasn’t ruling out lasting damage from the spores. Gyre fought back a wave of nausea. She couldn’t think about that, not until she was somewhere safe. Here, now, Gyre just needed another few minutes of quiet. A few more minutes of leaning into the story that Em cared, that they could go forward as equals.

  Em let her have the time. Five minutes of them looking at each other, breathing, feeling.

  Finally, Em sat back in her seat. “How rested are you?”

  “Enough.” A lie, but one she was determined to live up to. She didn’t want to try to sleep here again, not even with Em watching over her.

  “Good,” Em said. “You’re not going to like this next part. I’m going to have to shut down communications again.”

  Gyre started forward. The words were a piercing blow, puncturing a lung. She couldn’t continue on alone anymore. “What?”

  “Talking to you, even video, doesn’t take that much power. But it piggybacks off the connection between my computer and your suit. That takes a large portion of your battery. Just reestablishing a signal with me, and talking with me, dropped you five points. Holding it open will keep draining it, although slower.”

  “But all I have to do is get to Camp Four, then back to Three.”

  Em winced.

  “What? What happened?”

  “The waterfall,” Em said.

  “Yeah?”

  “It’s your only way to get to Camp Four from here. It’s a hard climb in dry weather, but right now, it’s going to be a nightmare. It’s going to kill your battery charge, between your rebreather running and your suit withstanding the force of the water. By the time you reach Camp Four, you’ll be too low to safely dive the sump to Camp Three. You’ll be right up against the safety margin, and I’ve seen enough cavers lose that gamble to allow it to happen again. You’re going to have to go down, to Five, and resupply there.”

  She shook her head. “No. There’s no way this climb is going to take me that low. No . . .”

  “It might. And once you’re through, it will be far, far safer to go to Five instead.”

  No. She couldn’t risk the spores getting into her suit. Not again.

  “I’ll try for Three.”

  “You can’t,” Em said. “Are you listening? Your suit can get you through this climb, but the next time you go underwater, it could drop you to critical levels. If your battery dies, you have no backup. Your rebreather will stop working. You’ll die.”

  “And if my suit shuts down on the side of the Long Drop?”

  “The chances of that are much, much lower,” Em said. “Especially if our communications are off and you use only your headlamp whenever possible. The line is already laid; the route will be faster this time.”

  “And the spores?”

  “Came in through water recirculation, not your air filters.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Yes. I’m sure. Gyre, make for Camp Five. Do you understand?” Em’s expression had turned cold and impersonal. It hurt. Gyre wanted to fight, wanted to argue. Wanted to beg for Em to find a way to stay connected.

  But that didn’t help anything.

  “I want to be done,” she whispered.

  “I know,” Em said. “But you’re almost there. I know you can do this. You’ve faced worse odds.” Her voice dropped another few notes. “I know you, Gyre.”

  Gyre tried not to think about how those four words coursed through her, electric. You don’t. You can’t.

  She wanted Em to be right.

  “I’m uploading maps to your suit,” Em continued. “And if you need a dose of adrenaline, the system will walk you through the calcu
lations. Don’t be afraid to use it, but use less than you think you’ll need. Too much, and you’ll be sick.” There was a pause. Then: “Gyre.”

  “What?”

  “Keep pushing. I’ll be there on the other side.”

  Gyre kept her eyes fixed on Em’s face until the connection cut out and the line went dead, wishing she could keep her, wishing they had something more.

  Then the recording light blinked out.

  Em had seen it.

  She knew.

  Chapter Twenty

  Gyre stared at the map filling her display. She didn’t want to look; she wanted nothing more than to sit and worry about what Em would do now that she knew Gyre had been primed to blackmail her, but the only way to win space enough to do that was to get up and get out. And yet she couldn’t make herself care.

  How could she trust Em’s suggestions? If she knew about the recording, then wasn’t it better to lead Gyre to her death? Nobody would question an accident, especially not if it happened while Em, tragically, was unable to monitor her caver’s suit.

  Or did it make more sense to bring Gyre up, because Em could fight the contents of the black box in court and win? Was she even afraid of those recordings? Had Gyre captured enough to hurt her, or just recorded her own erratic paranoia?

  She couldn’t weigh either side of the scales. She wanted to give up, stop playing Em’s game. But she couldn’t stop, because if she was going to die, she was going to do it her way, doing what she did best: climbing.

  And trusting herself.

  First things first: get up the wall and through the chamber the water was flowing from, without getting caught in the waterfall and being snapped from her line—from there, Camp Five or Three was available to her. Of course, a wrong move and she’d fall down, straight through the gap in the floor that the surge raged through, and from there, she could end up anywhere, or simply die, smashed to bits on the way down.

  So she would make no wrong moves, and conserve as much battery charge as possible while she was at it.

  With a sharp boost, she pushed herself up one body length along the wall, then steadied herself to drive her first bolt, meters from the flow of water. She focused on the mechanism of it, pushing through the fear and exhaustion that nipped at her heels. She’d have to do this automatically, in the roaring chaos. First bolt driven, she clipped in, then wedged a few cams in as well to make sure this point was sturdy. If she fell . . .

  She couldn’t think like that. Couldn’t think like that again for as long as she was underground.

  She made her way up the wall, avoiding the waterfall and working up toward the side of the entrance. Halfway there, she turned off the reconstruction, but found the lamp wasn’t enough for her to work the bolts safely. Reconstruction it was; she would just have to do this faster to balance out the battery drain.

  Hand over hand, she scaled the wall. The edges of her mind were already starting to go hazy with exhaustion, and once her next bolt was in, she took a moment to rest while she keyed in a slow-release dose of adrenaline. The suit guided her through the calculation, and then she triggered half that amount. She still felt it immediately, her heart jumping, her stomach curdling. It made her feel sick, but she’d take sick over vague.

  The ground fell away beneath her, and the roar of the water grew louder.

  This was a new, special kind of torture, knowing Em was only a gesture away, but that gesture might mean the difference between making it to Camp Five and dying alone in the dark. She was so tired, so scared, so desperate to explain the recording, and the offer of relief, that company, that comfort, was so close at hand. It would be so easy. It took so much effort to resist, her willpower already struggling as she climbed up to just to the side of the entrance to the passage. Her display became fuzzier with the spray of water all around her. She could hear it and feel where the pressure of the great gouts of water met her suit, but she couldn’t see the droplets beading on her helmet, or feel them running down over her hands.

  Gyre’s fingers itched inside her carapace. Here, the suit was worse than useless. She needed tactile feedback to do this safely, needed to know by touch and split-second reaction how wet her handholds were, needed to see the small rivulets of water, needed to be able to predict what could go wrong. She was certain that the suit had readouts for that, but numbers on a screen or colored lines weren’t the same, especially without long practice and familiarity. She’d have to learn by doing, crash course it head-on.

  After securing herself in her current position, she reached out and felt the stone, trying to memorize in an instant a new litany of sensations: the way her suit glove dragged over wetter or drier stone, the way her knuckles flexed dry or underwater. She guessed at each gradation based on the macro-level changes her reconstruction showed.

  If only she’d had more battery power, she could have activated a textured film on her fingertips to help her grip. She’d never tried it before, had barely remembered it was an option, but she could see it in the settings now, and her mouth watered.

  But she didn’t turn it on, and she didn’t connect back to Em’s computer. With one last glance down at the pit beneath her, she edged around the corner into the above-water portion of the tunnel, smearing herself across the wall, just above the raging torrent.

  Below her, the water churned and roiled, moving fast and leaping up where it struck the stubborn edges of rocks that hadn’t been worn down as fast as everything around them. Maybe six or seven meters ahead of her the path hooked too far to the left for her to see around the bend. According to the map, there was a section soon that would go straight up, largely underwater, up through the waterfall itself.

  Her right calf muscle cramped in protest.

  At least I won’t be cold. If she was doing this without a suit, the water would have been quickly sapping her body heat, making her clumsy. The suit was, for all its abstractions and blocks to her normal methods, the better option. She wriggled her foot until her calf relaxed, then found another toehold, dragging herself along toward the bend.

  She’d made it to the midpoint of the turn, and could see the vertical climb coming up, when she paused to place a fresh anchor. She wedged her toes into small gaps in the rock only ten centimeters above the rapids, the water leaping at her heels. She found a crack that spared her the need to use up another bolt; she placed a few cams instead and was just about to clip her rope into it when her calf cramped again. Her foot slipped. She had half a second to shout before she dropped into the churning water and was swept down the tunnel, her side striking an outcropping and knocking the wind from her in a sudden, sharp burst of pain.

  Scrabbling, she grabbed hold of her line as it pulled taut, catching against the last anchor. Gyre fought her instinct to hold her breath against the onslaught of tumbling force, and dragged herself along the line back to the wall, struggling to walk on the fins that her suit had extended automatically on contact with the water. She gasped reflexively as her head broke the surface and the fins retracted.

  Right. Do it again.

  She took a moment and tried to quell her rampant shaking. She was lucky; she hadn’t hit her head or broken any bones. There would be bruises, yes, and she was on the panic edge of adrenaline instead of the strength side, but she was whole. She found the setting for the automatic extension of the fins and turned it off. Shifting her grip on the wall, she worked her right foot in a small, stretching circle, hoping this time it would stick. Then she crawled, carefully, back to the bolt. Clipped in. She skirted the foaming white head of the current and climbed onward into the crash of water meeting stone.

  It surged over and around her, and then she was in it, her entire body slammed by the current. It tried to drag her down into the bowels of the cave. She fought it, hanging back just inside the flow, her vision distorted by the wild spray around her, and stared upward, squinting, looking for a likely path. There wasn’t one.

  She’d make one, then.

  Gyre lifted up e
ach hand in turn, rotating it at the wrist, delaying the inevitable. Each stretch only made her feel more tired, the endless cacophony of the waterfall warping her thoughts, making them repeat in increasingly panicked rounds. The flow of water could short-circuit the suit or slam her head into rock or snap her neck, or, or, or . . .

  She wasn’t Jennie. She wasn’t going to trade technique for speed.

  She thought of her mother then, of the dossier still waiting unread, of her mother happy and healthy and so far away from this hell. Then she grabbed the image of emerging onto the surface, walking into the bar closest to her home, bragging and getting her pick of women. And then she pictured Em, pictured herself slapping her or kissing her, anything that might let her imagine herself alive after she was out of this cave.

  But all the images boiled away the instant she conjured them, and the more she tried, the more exhausted she felt. They were so far away, untouchable, unobtainable. Her only option was the simplest one. She had to go on because there was no other choice but to lie down and die, and Gyre wouldn’t give anybody that last bit of satisfaction.

  So she rolled her shoulders, took one last look up at the gap in the rock, and then pushed up into the deluge. She clung hard to the stone for the first few breaths, staying utterly still, adjusting to the weight of the water on her shoulders and head. Then, as soon as she had acclimated, she began to climb. The longer she stayed put, the easier it would be to simply let go.

  The moment her head reached the enclosed space at the top of the downpour, filled with rushing water and unpredictable outcroppings, overlapping currents and impenetrable visual noise generated by the few pockets of air constantly collapsing and reforming, her reconstruction went from disorienting to useless. No choice—she shut it off. Darkness fell around her, but without her screen dancing and wavering in front of her, she could see the shape of the rocks by touch alone. Gyre hauled herself up into the passage proper and groped in the dark, powering up the drill to set another bolt. It wasn’t safe, but she had no other option.

  Her battery edged another micrometer lower.