“Welcome back,” Gyre said.
“You’re already on your way to Camp Five?”
“Nearly halfway,” she said. “Did you sleep?” She hadn’t sat there pouting, at least. Otherwise, she would have known exactly where Gyre was.
She stopped swimming and bobbed in the water, rubbing at her chest. Her reconstruction was fuzzy. The vibrations of the Tunneler were dislodging a fine layer of silt, shaking it up throughout the chamber.
“I did, yes. I—does that feel stronger?”
“Yeah, I think it’s the water.”
Em’s fingers tapped keys. “No, it’s stronger. And it’s growing.”
Gyre cursed and kicked, her fingers skimming along her line as she shot through the water. “How close is it?”
“Very. Gyre—”
“Don’t have time to talk.” She kicked harder, then let go of the line entirely so that she could swim with both arms. The vibration was growing stronger, as if it had heard them talking about it. No, you’re panicking. Keep moving.
She inhaled, desperate for air as her muscles burned.
Her chest spasmed, knocked out of rhythm by the thrumming. It was everywhere. It was in her head, in her bones, in her stomach. Panic, it’s just panic, keep breathing, keep breathing—
The roar was immense, all-consuming, all-possessing, and her entire body thrummed with it. Bone, blood, flesh, all hummed in tune, even as she felt herself give way to it.
“I have to dampen your suit!” Em shouted. The words were barely audible and didn’t make sense. “Or it could kill you! You’re in a fluid—the sound waves are transmitting through you!”
It wasn’t beautiful, wasn’t horrible—it only was, and it was all around her, inside of her. She didn’t have room for terror or for panic or for anger. It was just the roar, the thrum, the throb, the pulsing vibration that was shattering her apart.
“You won’t be able to see or feel or hear anything, but I’m here! I’m here, okay? Gyre!”
“Okay,” she said, gasping. The sound barely left her lungs.
Then everything went quiet.
It was a strange sort of quiet, not entirely soundless but something far worse. She could still hear her blood in her ears, but it was faint, far away. At first, she heard ringing. Then, her breathing. Then, nothing. Nothing registered. Her screen was black, and she floated in a void, neither warm nor cold, here nor there. Her first instinct was to thrash in revolt, but though she could feel her muscles shift, she couldn’t feel herself move. There was no sense of an outside, of anything beyond herself. And that, too, was terrifying. Locked. Moving but to no purpose.
And then she felt one, single thing: suction.
The walls of the sump must have broken. The water was moving, draining, taking her with it.
She felt the sudden tug in one direction, and then nothingness again. But she knew she was moving, flowing, being stolen away. She curled up, instinctively, and waited for her bones to strike rock, but impact didn’t come.
“Em?”
Nothing. Blankness. She couldn’t feel anything beyond herself. Not water, not movement, not the vibrations of the Tunneler. There was only herself.
Then her screen turned back on.
And then she felt the buoyancy of her air sacs.
And then she heard Em’s voice.
“Okay. Okay. Gyre, can you hear me?”
Around her, there was only water, too much water, filled with overlaid current lines. She knew this. “Oh fuck, we’re back in the hell sump,” Gyre whispered.
“No. No, I don’t think so.”
“This wasn’t supposed to happen! We’re lost, we’re—”
“Shh, calm. Hang on. Let me look.”
“Fuck,” Gyre whispered. “Fuck! Are you happy now? I’m back down here, I’m—”
“Gyre, listen to me,” Em said. “You haven’t gone far. Those currents you’re seeing are stabilizing; they’re not that strong. From what I can tell, the Tunneler passed under the sump, close enough to weaken the rock. It broke through because of the weight of the water, and the water took you with it, but you haven’t gone far. We’ll get you out.”
“I can’t keep doing this.” Her voice came out as a whine.
“I know. I know. Hang on. Breathe.”
She sounded so calm, so confident, so in control, like she could only function when Gyre’s life was at risk. Gyre wanted to shout at her, wanted to beat her fists against Em’s chest. But she made herself cling to Em’s words, her voice. The anger, the panic, all fell away.
She’d done this before. She’d do it again. Even if the thought brought her to tears.
“I just ran an inventory of your suit. Everything looks fine. Somehow.”
“I’m a lucky one,” Gyre managed, desperately trying to sound light and easy. “Is your computer showing if I can swim back up?”
“You should be able to. The currents you’re seeing are very weak. There’s even a chance the rest of the sump will be empty now, if this space is big enough. You’ll be able to walk right out. You might have to climb to get all the way up there, though.”
“Of course.” She took a deep, steadying breath. Just climbing. You’re good at that; you can do that. “The universe has owed me for a while now,” she said, and slowly, slowly uncurled, lifted her head. She looked around her as the reconstruction filled her screen.
Then she frowned, closed her eyes, opened them again.
What she was seeing didn’t make any sense.
It was a hallucination. Otherwise, Em would have said something by now. Would have screamed. Gyre licked her lips. “Are you seeing this?”
“Am I seeing wh—fuck.”
It wasn’t a hallucination.
Just in front of her was a body, floating, weightless, perfectly preserved in an old-fashioned wetsuit, its mouthpiece dislodged, the face bare. She was close enough that she could reach out and touch him, and close enough to make out his features, even rendered gray by her sonar.
She recognized the line of his nose, of his jaw.
It was Laurent. It was Em’s father.
“That’s . . . that’s not possible,” Em said, her voice cracking. “That’s not—Gyre, get away from him. Get—oh shit. Oh—”
“What is it?” Gyre asked, tearing her gaze away, kicking back from the corpse instinctively. And then she saw them. Other bodies—three of them. One wore a wetsuit. The other two were in suits that looked exactly like her own, cavers who had descended before her. Em’s dead floated all around her, scattered throughout the waterlogged chamber.
She’d been dragged back here, as if she could no more abandon them than Em could.
As if the cave wanted her to join them.
Em let out a broken sob, and Gyre heard her retch and then softly whimper, “Dad.”
Gyre looked back at Laurent. It had been almost twenty years since he’d died, but he looked almost as if he were sleeping. He wasn’t withered. He wasn’t bloated. He was whole, and so were the others. His skin no longer looked like skin, but like smooth volcanic glass, but she couldn’t be sure that wasn’t an effect of the reconstruction. She’d never really looked at flesh with it before, aside from the impossible specters of Isolde and Hanmei, and those weren’t real enough to trust. Sonar or not, though, she could see he hadn’t decayed.
“Em, is it the water? The—the chemical composition of it, is it the same as that one tunnel? Is it water? Am I in water?”
“I can’t do this,” Em said, gasping over the line. “I—fuck, find a way out. Please, Gyre. Go back. Climb out. I can’t do this. Please.”
The pain in Em’s voice cut through to her, through her numb horror, and she swam away from Laurent. She twisted, intending to swim up and back toward the sump to Camp Five, but then she was face-to-face with the other figure in a wetsuit. She could make out the curve of breasts, and even though the mouthpiece obscured the lower half of the body’s face, she could still recognize her.
Hanmei.<
br />
Em’s muffled sobs filled her helmet. Where was the exit? She kicked out, into the heart of the chamber, and spun around, watching as her sonar filled in the rest of the shapes. She watched for the telltale blue sheet effect. There—a possible surface. Maybe just an air bubble, but it could also be the way back up to the original sump passage. She kicked toward it, hoping, desperately, that she was right. Her head broke the surface. Her screen quickly brightened, displaying a full model of the surrounding room. There was even a bank nearby, the opening widening quickly at the water’s surface.
It wasn’t the way back to Camp Five, or even the lake at Six. But with Hanmei and Laurent so close, could that mean . . .
“Em,” she said.
Nothing.
“Em, I’m going to climb out of the water.” She waited for a protest, for another outcry of pain, but none came. Em didn’t respond. Her sobbing had stopped. As Gyre watched, the voice line shut off.
Em had run away.
Shaking, she went through the menus and confirmed that her suit was still connected to the surface. Em had simply left, and it felt like a blow, even though Gyre could understand.
This was the chamber where everything had fallen apart.
She hauled herself from the sump, her legs trembling as she tried to remember how to stand. She looked at the high ceiling, the gaps in the wall over to her left. It certainly looked like the chamber Isolde had described. And it made sense that only a small bit of rock separated the hell sump from the sump to Camp Five, with the nearby lake the original team had entered through so close to both. She made for the platform near the center of the room, and as she got closer, she could see the scattered shapes of what looked like equipment. Staggering, she reached the edge and hauled herself up onto it.
There was a tipped-over camp stove, several dry bags that hadn’t been sealed before they’d been abandoned. And a body.
Julian.
He was little more than a skeleton, some gear, and a dark stain on the rock mottled with the imprint of long-gone fungus. His remains looked far more real than the eerie preserved bodies in the sump. She turned to a duffel and dug through it until she found a sleeping bag, still packed tight after so many years. It must have been an extra set of gear that they’d ferried in, that they couldn’t take with them when they ran. Or maybe it had been Halian’s.
She unrolled the bag and settled it over the bones.
And then she settled in to wait for Em to come back.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Em didn’t come back.
Her voice line remained closed, and Gyre’s suit hadn’t moved outside of Gyre’s control for hours. She’d checked the uplink again and again, the fear that their connection had been fully severed still lurking at the back of her mind. But it was always there, always steady.
Em was just a coward.
Here Gyre was, at the end. At the goal. At everything Em had worked toward for nearly ten years. This was what Em would have had Gyre break herself for.
And Em had run away.
Gyre paced the perimeter of the cavern, her eyes always drawn back to the small lump of Julian’s bones beneath the sleeping bag, and to the blue-slate of the surface of the sump. She could just leave. Em had gotten what she wanted—she’d seen them. She’d been ready to stop before this, and now had no reason to continue. And if Em wasn’t going to come back, Gyre had no reason to wait. She could swim out, start the climb. Move on.
But she didn’t want to go back in the water. Not yet.
What if it took her somewhere else? What if the cave wasn’t ready to let her go?
So instead, she sat down, her back propped up against the platform wall. She fed herself, wincing as the paste began to flow. The side of her abdomen itched where the cannula went in. That was new, and unsettling. How long had she been down here? How long until her feeding tube gave out? How long until she could no longer live in this suit, powered or not?
The itch spread over her skin, and she fought down the urge to take her helmet off. She couldn’t risk it. She had called the Tunneler before, and if she called it again, here, in this cave . . . she knew how bad it could be.
What she needed was a distraction. Her body was benefiting from the additional rest Em’s absence was imposing, and it was only her mind that was on fire.
She tried to read her mother’s dossier, but she still couldn’t bring herself to open it. It felt too much like inviting a piece of Em’s madness into her, letting herself be drawn into a cycle like Em’s search for Isolde. She wanted to find her mother, she did, but just how far was she willing to go?
If she looked at that file, what would it ask of her?
But beyond the dossier, what did she have left? Music that would just become background noise as soon as she started it. Readouts of her own body, possible proof that something was going wrong. Her skin crawled at the thought, shimmied inside its gel coating that didn’t feel quite right anymore. Ever since it had gone slack without power, it had re-formed strangely around her flesh. It felt worn. Used. It had seeped into the braided knots of her hair, making her scalp a web of sensations that shouldn’t be there.
She couldn’t look at the medical panel.
That left only the videos of Isolde’s team.
She didn’t want to witness their pain, but before the disasters, before it had all played out, they had seemed . . . happy. They had trusted one another. She wanted that. Craved it, now.
Gyre started a random video about a third of the way through the expedition and settled in. Isolde, whole and healthy, filled her screen.
* * *
It was like tasting water for the first time in days, water that was too hot and burned her mouth, but water she sucked down despite the pain. All she could think about was her parched throat, her scorched heart. All she wanted was more.
Fuck. This had been exactly what she’d wanted, but she hadn’t realized it would hurt. Even knowing what was coming for them, she wanted to be there, with them, the urge crawling down her spine and squeezing at her lungs. She wanted to explore the cave without a suit, like she had as a girl. She wanted to walk with another person, to hear their breathing at night as they slept on their bedroll, close enough that she could reach out and touch them. Jealousy crashed over her, bringing her close to tears.
She shut the vids off, too weak to continue through the pain.
But the ghosts of Isolde’s team refused to leave her. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair that they’d had one another, and she had only herself and Em . . . and now even Em was gone. She would have given anything to swap places with one of them, even knowing it meant certain death. She’d face the Tunneler again, give it all up, because at least then she would be dying with all of them rather than dying by herself.
They wouldn’t have abandoned her, not like Em. They wouldn’t have had the choice.
That sealed it.
She looked at the blue surface of the sump and hauled herself to her feet.
She had to get them out.
It wasn’t about Em when she waded back out into the water. It wasn’t about giving them a funeral so that Em could be at peace, or about stopping Em from sending somebody else down here, now that she knew how to find this place. It was because she needed to see their faces, and because she needed to take them out of the purgatory that the foul, twisted sump had become. The solid blue slate of the surface covering her boots made the panic rise in the back of her throat, but she pushed it away.
It was just water.
They were just bodies.
Her suit would keep her safe.
She touched the surface with her fingertips, hesitating for just a moment. And then she pushed out into the sump and dove under.
Her reconstruction lit the chamber in bright, unreal shapes, a few whispers of color here and there laying out the currents. She went around them, working methodically, placing bolts and line just in case. She made her way to Laurent first, then paused, floating, staring at him.<
br />
However he had died, he looked peaceful now, and like not a single day had passed. Whatever was in the water, it was a powerful preservative. Grimacing, she wrapped one arm around him and swam back along her line, then hauled him out of the water and laid him out by Julian’s bones.
Three to go.
Hanmei took half an hour. The other cavers took longer. Their suits were rigid and locked, and they were heavy with all the gear packed into them. But one by one, she dragged them from the water and arranged them on the platform. She removed Hanmei’s mouthpiece, opened the two cavers’ helmets. Her battery ticked down as she worked, ten percent lost in her rescue efforts. Her chest tightened, until she felt for the two extras she was carrying. She had time; she could do this for them.
Kneeling at their feet, she pulled up the files Em had given her as a sign of trust weeks back. She needed their names.
One was Michael Doren. The other was Jensen Liao. Absent was Eli Abramsson, the young man who’d come in just before her, who’d been swept away in the currents at the start of the hell sump and lost contact with Em entirely. She mouthed their names to herself until she had them memorized. It didn’t take long.
And then she looked at the side tunnels.
She wanted to assume that there was nothing left of Halian, but Isolde’s interview had been specific. She’d described how the rock had closed on him, and all they could see were his legs. But if that were true, if he hadn’t just been crushed into paste, if there was still something of him left, wouldn’t Isolde and Hanmei have brought him out?
But why should they have? It would have been horrible to leave him, but abominable to bring him back.
He would be only bones now. Gyre stood and left the platform. She almost pulled up the interview video to check that it had been the northeast tunnel that had collapsed, but she couldn’t bring herself to. She could never open that one again.
She decided she’d been correct when she saw the tunnel blocked off by solid, smooth stone, an unlikely formation in a tunnel like this, a formation that was distressingly familiar now. And there, at its base, were a pair of shoes and the long bones of his shins. There were his kneecaps, discarded, loose against the rock, and then—
The Luminous Dead Page 27
