The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Should stabilize. Gyre sagged in relief, pressing her palms to her faceplate. The discomfort during her feedings was likely the same thing; nothing to worry about, to dwell on. A feeding tube had to be able to withstand contractions of the stomach, right?

  “A rest sounds good.” It was a welcome respite from the sump.

  Em nodded, then pursed her lips in thought. Gyre watched her, trying to imagine what Em would have been like if Isolde had stayed with her, or if she’d been able to get to this chamber on her first expedition, her second. Gyre wanted desperately to have met that version of her instead. Beautiful, brilliant arrogance balanced with real ability. Functional. Not dangerous.

  “I want to do something for you, too,” Em said finally. She glanced at the camera. “I know I can’t adequately repay you, with money or otherwise, but . . . but that dossier.”

  Gyre stiffened. “I haven’t looked at it.”

  “I know. But maybe now is a good time. You’re almost back to the surface; you’ll need a plan. I still want to help you find her, if you’ll let me.”

  “Then make the plans for me,” Gyre said. “You read it. Fuck, didn’t you write it?”

  “I didn’t, no. I had some of my employees construct it. All I know are the basics. It didn’t feel—right to read more than the summary my team provided me. Especially with how you felt about me at the time.” Em winced. “Not that I expect that’s changed much.”

  It had. But Gyre didn’t really know how to describe it, or if she even wanted to tell Em. “Well, bring it up, then,” Gyre said, pushing past the awkwardness.

  Her screen went white, and then was filled with a page of text and a single image. A photograph of her mother. She was older, but though she had a few more wrinkles around her eyes, her skin looked softer than Gyre remembered it. Her hair was glossy and long, pulled back in a well-ordered braid that draped over her shoulder. She wore understated jewelry that looked expensive, well chosen. Whoever she’d married was obviously in an entirely different class from Gyre’s dad.

  From her.

  She’d expected to feel, at worst, annoyance. At best, relief and giddiness, excitement to finally have what she’d been seeking for so long.

  Instead, she felt pain.

  Gyre stared at that image for what felt like an eternity, nauseated. For all she’d dreamed of finding her one day, she realized that she’d actually spent her life thinking of her mother as ultimately gone. Maybe not dead, but unreachable. A fantasy, a ghost story, a fairy tale. Just like Em’s dream of finding Isolde. And just like seeing the reality of her father’s corpse had broken Em, seeing her mother alive, and different from how Gyre had known her, was going to break her. Her heart twisted in her chest with jealousy and rage, but her mother’s eyes didn’t change. They just looked at the camera, unseeing.

  Gyre dragged her eyes away from the photograph and over to the dossier’s text. It was as if she’d forgotten how to read. Her eyes skimmed over her mother’s address, the name of her mother’s husband, the names of her mother’s children. None of them pierced through the pounding fog filling her head.

  But a few words made their way in. Under her professional credentials, the dossier said that she was a well-known economist. A respected academic.

  Maybe it was the absurdity that helped the words punch through, but suddenly, she was devouring it all. She read the rest of the dossier, read her mother’s CV, read half of one of her publications before her head and her heart hurt too much to continue. Her mother, well before she’d moved to Cassandra-V and had a little girl named Gyre—a little girl who was barely a footnote, because while medical and legal records did make their way off-planet, they didn’t count for much in the wider galactic arena—had published several monographs on the impact of trade routes and resource extraction on the migrant colonial populations that were being settled on marginal worlds. More specifically, on their purchasing habits. Their consumer preferences. Their utter uselessness in the interplanetary market, because they rarely traveled from their new planets or brought the rest of their relatives to join them in their new, shitty homes, rarely bought much beyond food that was imported in, relying instead on locally produced goods and services. And then her mother had come to Cassandra-V on an assignment for one of the mining concerns, apparently to get a ground view of just what—aside from crushing poverty and lack of education and jobs—was causing money to dead-end in a few pockets on their planet. By the time her research had wrapped up, ending in a report that received little fanfare and had next to no economic impact, Peregrine Price was already pregnant. And so she’d stayed and stayed and stagnated and rotted in place, until finally . . .

  She’d done what she had recommended in that last paper.

  She’d left.

  Gyre sat in stunned silence long after she’d finished reading, unable to stop the single, echoing thought in her head:

  I wasn’t good enough for my own mother to take me with her.

  It was different, knowing it with certainty instead of assuming it. It cut deeper. Knowing that the letter had always been just a taunt, that her mother could easily have given an itinerary, and instead had chosen to give them a useless fiction. A dare. Are you worthy of the real me?

  Gyre pulled up her mother’s portrait again and searched her face for anything of the woman who had raised her, or the woman who could abandon her own child. She found neither. That woman was as dead and gone as Hanmei, as Laurent, as Isolde. The woman wearing her mother’s face, her mother’s name, was a woman who had never met Gyre. She had, perhaps, suffered a momentary lapse in her identity, in her good sense. She’d had an—

  Indiscretion.

  Gyre only realized she was crying when her suit’s environmental controls hummed to life, trying to dry her tears. She swore and tried to wipe them away herself, forgetting her helmet until her first bumped into it. In response, she shook her head violently, sobbing.

  “Gyre?” Em asked, softly. “Gyre, are you okay?”

  “I shouldn’t have looked. What am I even doing down here?”

  All her anger and rage were layered meters thick over the pain. It was an old song, an old scar. But it was there and she could feel it now, her bleeding soul and bludgeoned heart. The pain had followed her this far, walking in the outline of the hole her mother had carved in her when she left. When her mother looked around herself and saw that she didn’t want this life, that she deserved better, that she’d give up everything else to be comfortable again.

  A horrible certainty settled over her.

  “I’m her,” Gyre whispered.

  “Who? Your mother?”

  “All I wanted to do was leave. All I wanted to do was get out. I don’t have a child to abandon, but I still have a dad, and I fully intended to just . . . leave. I’m no better.”

  Em shook her head, sitting forward, her brow creasing in confusion. No doubt she had no clue what to do now, how to make this better. She couldn’t make this better. “That’s a false equivalence,” Em said, trying anyway. “You don’t intend to ignore everything that happened here once you’re gone. Right? You will always be the woman who reached the bottom of this cave system, who faced down the Tunneler and lived. That will always be you.”

  Gyre shuddered. “And it’ll always just be what happened before. I’ll be able to forget it, after a time.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  No, she didn’t. She expected to be deeply scarred by this, too. She already was. But if anything, that was worse. She’d seen what it had done to Isolde.

  “If you and your father were dying of thirst,” Em said gently, “and you found only enough water for one of you, it wouldn’t be wrong for you to be the one to drink it. We all prioritize our own survival. We have to. We can’t help others if we don’t.”

  “So is that the answer? Is that how this feels better? I give him money? I take him with me?”

  “Do you want to do either of those things?”

  No. “I
t’s not that simple.”

  “Do you know what you want?”

  She flinched. Get off-world, find my mother. That was it. That was all there was. It had meant she didn’t need to care about anything else, could always just claw her way toward the horizon. If she hadn’t gotten this job, she would have thrown herself into caves again and again, until it likely killed her. She hadn’t needed to plan anything beyond this moment, here.

  She hadn’t planned, because her goal hadn’t been in the future. It had always been behind her, pulling her back, pulling her down.

  There was no future beyond her mother.

  What was left to her, then? Open the suit? Let hypothermia take her, or starve? Neither was fast, but both were permanent. Would going back down into the depths end this? She couldn’t picture going forward, couldn’t see anything growing from the pain she was carrying in her breast.

  She didn’t want to become Em.

  Maybe Isolde had been right. Walking into the cave alone ended the cycle. Staying topside held them captive to it.

  “Gyre,” Em murmured. “Look at me.”

  Gyre looked back at the video feed, well-trained now.

  “Tell me what you want.”

  Without her mother, without the promise of some vindication, what did she want? Comfort? Independence? It all felt so far away, so distant.

  The cave didn’t feel distant, though. The cave was her whole world, her past and her future. She pictured herself walking back down to Camp Six, diving in, severing her connection to Em and just giving in.

  No. No, that wasn’t what she wanted. Even if she couldn’t think of a single thing she desired, she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to be dead. She didn’t want to be lost and forgotten.

  Gyre stuffed the dark impulse to follow Isolde back into the far reaches of her heart that it had crept from, blossoming out of the wreckage like fungus out of Adrian Purcell’s suit.

  She knew what she wanted.

  “I want to be out of this cave. I want to see the sun.”

  * * *

  Gyre waded back into the water, then dove beneath the surface, and swam.

  She followed the line she had laid while retrieving the bodies up to where Laurent had once floated, and then she rotated up and faced the puncture in the dome of the chamber. The Tunneler had passed directly above it, and directly below the sump that led away from Camp Five, boring a hole wide enough that it first cracked the dome, then left enough of a gap below the thinned bottom of the Camp Five sump that the weight of the water had broken through. The Tunneler passage had filled with water, and if the Tunneler had shifted left or down or any direction but up, the current would have taken Gyre far away from the funeral chamber.

  But the Tunneler had gone up, and Camp Five’s sump had drained almost entirely into its path, then stabilized. She could swim the whole way up to the collapsed floor of the Camp Five sump, then haul herself into the now-dry pathway.

  It was going to be easy.

  Her battery indicator glowed. She had days left on this one, and two fresh batteries left after that. She had enough food for a week. She had no more surprises ahead of her.

  She swam up, abandoning her line.

  “Gyre,” Em said.

  “I know where I’m going.”

  “You should still—”

  “I’m almost there.”

  She dragged her confidence around her like armor, shooting through the open, still water, heading for the blue plate of the surface meters above her. If she could have felt the rush of water over her cheeks, the slide of chill against her heated muscles, it would have been perfect. It would have made her feel truly, inarguably real outside the ghost of her mother. This was close, though, and she fought the urge to close her eyes as she rocketed up, up, and finally broke the surface into open air.

  The sump to Camp Five looked wrong, drained of nearly all its water. She recognized the walls from her reconstruction, but they felt fake as she hauled herself over the edge of the break in the stone, a set built more from memory than reality. Standing in the ankle-deep water, she shivered. Her knowledge of the space was dictated by how she had moved through it.

  At least she couldn’t drown down here anymore.

  “Time to climb back up,” she said, and began walking.

  Em blinked. Frowned. “What?”

  “Climbing up. To the surface?”

  “That’s not what you said.”

  Gyre stopped, listening to the water sliding from her suit, pattering against the shallow pool she stood in. “Of course it is. What else would I have said?”

  “You said time to climb back down.”

  She went very still, the siren call of Isolde’s fate echoing in her mind. No. No, she had rejected that for what it was—the fevered exhaustion of a desperate heart.

  “Yeah, no,” Gyre said, then barked a laugh. It was forced. “Not what I said.”

  “A slip of the tongue—”

  “I didn’t say it.” She had heard herself speak; she was trapped with herself in her helmet. She knew what she’d said. “Maybe the signal cut out a little. Maybe you misheard.”

  Em said nothing for a few seconds, then nodded. “You’re probably right. I’ll check the connection strength.”

  Gyre managed a thin smile as she began sloshing up the tunnel.

  “Other direction,” Em said.

  Gyre froze. Swallowed. Turned on her heel, remembering that strange pull she’d felt before diving into this sump, the call of the dead. But the dead were just below her, not back toward Camp Six. The dead had been laid to rest.

  She pasted on a grim, tight smile. “Right, just got turned around for a second.”

  What’s happening to me?

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  She still felt disoriented as she stood at the base of the Long Drop, staring up at her line. It hung, motionless, color-coded by her reconstruction. All the bolts within range were flagged green. Safe. Strong.

  The ascender was meant for situations like this. It attached to the front of her suit just like the rappel rack, and it would do the hard work of pulling her weight up the rope. Except for maneuvering around where the rope was still clipped into bolts, it would be like rappelling in reverse, walking up the cliffside.

  Her calf burned at the thought. The blister wasn’t healing; if anything it was spreading.

  And what if the ascender malfunctioned? Worse, what if the line above her snapped? It shouldn’t be possible, but then she thought of cutting that rope on the other side of the ledge. No matter if she’d hallucinated that face or not, the fact remained that the cache had gone missing somehow. If there really was something else in this cave beside her, it could drop her just as easily as she’d severed that rope.

  Spores from Camp Five glowed up at her from her boots and hands, whispering to her, asking how she could ever trust her own judgment again. She tried to wipe them off, her suit scraping loudly against itself.

  “Gyre?”

  “Sorry—just stretching out. That’s as good as it’ll get, I suppose,” she mumbled, and went back to the rope. “Time to let the equipment do the work, huh?”

  Em hummed agreement, and Gyre stepped up to the wall. She fiddled with the ascender, checking its connection with the suit for the fifth time. She’d been afraid like this before, but not anxious. Not this check and double-check, afraid to rely on herself to do simple things like go up. She made herself grab the rope and feed it through the slots. Then she fed it through a last-chance brake. It would protect her from all falls short of her rope being cut. It was also more insurance than she usually climbed with and would slow her down.

  Em didn’t comment.

  Finally, Gyre started the ascender, hearing its faint whine as it lifted her from the ground. She reached out, grabbing her first handholds, planting her boots against the wall.

  It was going to take about five hours to get to the top, barring any problems, accordin
g to Em’s calculations. That meant she could probably do it in one push. Get up, get out. As soon as she saw Camp Four again, things would be better.

  * * *

  Camp Four didn’t help.

  The chamber was just how she’d left it, Jennie’s body lying in its cracked-open suit near the entrance. Gyre flinched when she saw her, the wreckage standing out stark against the stone. She heard Em make a noise, wordless and pained.

  “She looks—more fragile than I expected,” Em said softly.

  “She’d look better if I hadn’t torn her suit open,” Gyre said, unable to walk by. Had she truly left her this way? In her memory, she’d laid Jennie down gently into her suit, opened her faceplate, given her dignity. But the reality was less neat, less kind. With the suit pulled apart at the seams, Jennie’s form was broken up by jagged, man-made angles. Her belly, visible now where the suit gave way, had distended. It pressed against the polymer, seeming close to bursting. Small tendrils snaked around the edges of the plates, nascent fungi already making their homes in her flesh like they had in Adrian Purcell. And her face, her face had lost the last traces of humanity. It wasn’t just the eyes that had sunken and decayed now. Her cheeks had caved in, her mouth hung open, her tongue was swollen.

  Better than being trapped in there, Gyre told herself, but the thought was hollow. It had been so clear to her at the time, that this was dignity.

  She thought she’d at least arranged the body. But the legs were still stiff and locked, spread apart from how Gyre had dragged her from beneath the shelf. Her arms were splayed at her sides. She’d done the bare minimum. All she’d done was scavenge what she needed and moved on.

  It had been necessary. It had saved her life. She turned away.

  “You should make camp,” Em said softly. “Sit down. Eat. Rest.”

  Gyre nodded. She moved mechanically to the far side of the chamber, to where she’d slept that first night, a safe distance away from where the cache should have been. Its absence still made her skin crawl, and she eyed that patch as she sat down, looking for drag marks, for any sign of what had taken it. There was nothing there, nothing she hadn’t seen before. Her gaze drifted then, to the stone that obscured Jennie’s body. To the shaft above, with its glint of remaining, unusable bolts. To nothing.