The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Focus. She needed to eat, to recuperate, to plan.

  But her stomach cramped at the thought of food. The blister on her leg had gotten worse even during the climb; what if her stomach hadn’t improved either? Weeks of irritation at the cannula site as she moved and stretched and climbed couldn’t account for this; the surgery was finely honed to guard against that.

  But could vomiting do this? Or was it a consequence of her first surgery? A surgeon willing to fake a suit-hookup colostomy and feeding line could just as easily fuck it up. Her hand went to her side, hovering, unsure.

  Wouldn’t that just be perfect, if she couldn’t climb back out, not because of Em or the sump or her own mind—but her stomach?

  No. She couldn’t afford to think like this, not even so close to the surface. Especially so close to the surface. Two more days, and she was out. Two more days, and she could figure out what came next.

  Two more days, and then she could let herself fall apart.

  “How long is the hospital stay going to be, after?” she asked to distract herself.

  Em considered. “A week at most, I think. Immediate aftercare, followed by surgical reversal in your gut, then recovery and evaluation. Longer if you’d be more comfortable that way.”

  Gyre plugged in a ration canister, and clenched her teeth, fighting to ignore the cramping, burning pain as the paste shunted into her gut. “Good. This is starting to hurt,” she said, when her willpower failed.

  “The suit?”

  “The feedings,” Gyre said. “Since I threw up at Camp Six. I think I jarred something.”

  “It’s very possible.” Em tapped a few keys, let out a soft, unhappy noise. “Yes, it does look like it’s been pulled out a few millimeters. Not enough to cause damage on its own, but your stomach is raw again, like when it was first installed. And with the previous scar tissue from your first surgery, it could tear more before you’re out. How’s your leg?”

  “Doesn’t feel great, but it’s just a blister.” A blister she couldn’t dry out. A blister she couldn’t treat. Could it become infected? Had the failure of the contact film broken a sterile seal?

  “Right. This is a full rest stop, then,” Em said, arresting her panic spiral. “Eight or ten hours will give me time to tweak things, get you patched up enough to be comfortable.”

  “No sedatives,” she said preemptively. There had been no trace of the Tunneler’s rumble in the past several hours. Small mercies.

  “Of course not,” Em replied.

  The feeding finished, and she stowed the canister. Slowly, eyeing the rock that hid Jennie from sight, Gyre eased herself down onto her good side, opposite the port. It meant her back was to the chamber, and a sudden burst of terror nearly made her sit straight up.

  She waited it out. Em could see all around her. “Don’t leave,” she said. “Keep watch. Just . . . just in case.”

  Em’s breath whispered over the comm line. “Of course.”

  “We never did find that cache,” Gyre pointed out, grimacing. “We still don’t know what took it. Who took it.”

  “I know,” Em said. “But as far as I can tell, you’re alone, and have been the whole time. I’ll stay here, though. I’ll stay here the whole night.”

  “Good,” she said. “I need you there.”

  Chapter Thirty

  She woke up trapped in her suit.

  Her first fumbling attempts to move it failed, her limbs leaden inside the carapace, lips too numb to trigger commands. Her body refused to obey her, refused to so much as twitch.

  “Em?” Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.

  Nothing. Panic rose, pooling beneath her sternum. She tried to control her breathing, tried to wiggle her fingers, her toes. Every twitch took an eternity, as if she were being crushed, as if each gesture had to push up through a meter of stone. She could see only a fraction of the cave surrounding her, and she couldn’t be sure it was Camp Four. Camp Four wasn’t a maw of stone fangs. Camp Four didn’t glow faintly.

  But Camp Five did.

  Her pulse quickened. Had she turned back, somehow? Had she hallucinated the climb up the Long Drop? Dread pooled in her gut and she tried again to lift her hand, but the suit refused to cooperate. Had Em locked her in place to keep her from pushing still further into the bowels of the cave?

  There—a fingertip budged. But she could sense something, out beyond her helmet. Out in the darkness she couldn’t see. It was close. It was coming closer. Jennie? Or the cache thief? Isolde. She could almost see her against the glow, pale and desperate, and rushing, rushing—

  She woke up again, sitting straight up, the familiar vault of Camp Four above her.

  “Em!”

  Movement on the other end of the line. “Gyre—is something wrong?” Em asked, concerned, a little confused.

  Gyre hunched forward, her hand on her chest, willing her pulse to slow. She was safe. Safe. Right where she’d left herself. “Where were you?” she growled.

  “Right here,” Em said, then yawned. “The whole time.”

  “Awake?”

  “Awake. It’s only been an hour.”

  Gyre checked her clock; it matched what Em was saying.

  She’d only managed an hour.

  “Sorry. Bad dreams,” she muttered.

  She shoved herself to her feet, rolling her shoulders, trying to forget that terror. She hadn’t wanted to ever feel that helplessness again, but it had been just like the fear she’d felt hanging over the lake, and at Camp Six when she couldn’t breathe. It was the panic of being near death.

  Her brain was conjuring it in her nightmares.

  “You should go back to sleep,” Em said. “An hour isn’t nearly enough.”

  Em was right, but the thought of lying back down, closing her eyes, made her sweat. “Can’t sleep,” Gyre said. “Not here.”

  Grimacing, she paced the chamber, trying not to look at Jennie’s flowering corpse. There was no sign of anybody else, no sign that anybody had been there since she had passed through. The cavern was still.

  She was safe.

  But she knew she wouldn’t do any better if she tried to close her eyes again. If it wasn’t a nightmare about being trapped down below, it would be a nightmare of drowning, or of the cache thief stealing up on her while she slept. She could ask Em to drug her, but her skin crawled at the thought. No, no sleep. Sleep wasn’t an option.

  She had to keep going.

  She could get to the next camp on an hour of sleep. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but she could do it. Just rappel down into the small sump, swim it, get into that tight, protected nook she’d bedded down in before . . .

  “I’m heading to Camp Three.”

  After a second’s hesitation, Em said, “Sounds good.” She brought up the marker, and Gyre set off, favoring her bad calf. Her pacing had taken her almost to the Long Drop, and she hugged the far wall of the chamber as she walked back around toward the path to Camp Three, desperate to avoid seeing Jennie one last time.

  “Wait.”

  Gyre drew up short, body coiling, ready to react. Her eyes darted across her screen, searching for movement, before she realized Em probably only needed to adjust her suit. Her calf was burning still, whatever reparative process Em had started while she slept unfinished.

  But Em didn’t say anything else. She just typed, quickly at first, then slowly. Hesitantly.

  “What the fuck is that?” Em finally whispered.

  “Where?” Gyre asked, shuddering as she twisted, searching for whatever it was Em had spotted. “Where are you—”

  “Up,” Em said.

  Gyre looked up.

  There, tucked into a narrow crevice two body lengths above her was Jennie.

  No.

  There was no way. Jennie was under the shelf, was behind her. It couldn’t be Jennie.

  Chest tightening, she made herself step back, far enough to get a better look at the body curled up, crumpled, shoved into a gap in the stone that didn’t
extend more than a meter into the wall.

  No, not a body.

  A suit.

  As she stared, transfixed, she realized the helmet was in pieces scattered around it, only the back curve of the head still in place, bowed forward enough to obscure the missing faceplate. The seams at the shoulders and along the sides had been opened too. She could see the chaos of wires and tubes that had connected whoever had worn it to its interface.

  “That’s—” She couldn’t finish the thought.

  “That’s not possible,” Em whispered.

  “An empty suit.” Somebody else in the cave. Gyre took a step back, twisted, looked over her shoulder. But she saw nothing. No naked form dashing from the shadows, no face hovering at the edge of her reconstruction.

  But this meant it could all have been real. There could have been somebody down here. Isolde? No, it couldn’t be. And yet—and yet—

  “Gyre, look.”

  A green light appeared on her screen. It was just behind the suit, but she couldn’t see it from where she stood. She returned to the wall and clawed her fingers into the stone, boosting herself up to the bottom of the crevice. This close, she could see the cracked armor matched hers detail for detail, just like Jennie’s did. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, to move it out of her way.

  But she could see what was behind it now.

  It was a box.

  It was a cache.

  “Camp Four,” Gyre whispered.

  “Fuck.”

  “Why didn’t we see this last time? Why didn’t we see the box?” She looked around the cavern; she’d walked this way herself on that long night, reading the dossiers.

  “It wasn’t here,” Em said, voice strangled with pain. “I scanned the cavern. It wasn’t here.”

  Gyre’s pulse pounded in her ears. It hadn’t been here, which meant someone had taken it and then brought it back, someone in one of Em’s suits.

  They had been here recently.

  Where had they gone? All she could think about was pale faces in the darkness, motion in the corner of her eye, a figure haunting her up and down the Long Drop and to the rim of Camp Five.

  A brief, sharp whine snaked from Em’s throat.

  “Em, who was this?” Gyre whispered, muscles trembling as she held herself perched on the rim of the crack.

  “The serial number,” Em managed, voice high and thin. She was terrified. No, horrified. Imagining one of her cavers dying alone, not connected to her computer, not able to hear her voice. “Read me the serial number. Back of the neck, base of the skull,” Em said. “But the timing . . . That model of suit . . . Shit.”

  Gyre finally pushed herself up into the gap, shuddering as she nudged the motionless husk to the side. It felt light. Wrong. The discarded skin of some deep cavern arthropod.

  The serial number was invisible in the light of her reconstruction. It was printed, low relief at best. She switched to her headlamp.

  “Serial number ends in HX047,” Gyre said.

  “It’s him,” Em whispered. “Shit, it is him.”

  “Who?” Gyre toggled back to her reconstruction, sagging with relief as the room sprang back to full light and was blessedly, blessedly empty.

  “Eli Abramsson,” Em said. Gyre stiffened at the name, remembering the funeral cavern, the missing body. “He went in nine weeks before you.”

  “You lost him in the sump,” Gyre said. And I never found him when I found the others.

  Em nodded. “His signal started degrading, and the last I saw, he’d been caught up in a current. Swept away. I assumed—I assumed the signal had cut out, finally, because the suit had—I thought he was dead. He had to be dead. Back snapped like the others, or—or—oh fuck.”

  Gyre rocked back on her heels and hugged her knees to her chest, staring at the empty husk. “He didn’t die,” she whispered. “He was just cut off from you, like I was. Washed up, like I did. Climbed back here, like I did. But why? Why not just climb out?”

  “Maybe he couldn’t,” Em said. “I don’t know. He was suspicious of me by Camp Five, almost as much as you were, but I hadn’t told him anything, and he hadn’t seen the bodies. Maybe when he came back up, he saw Jennie. Maybe he thought I’d sabotaged his suit. He got back up here, thinking I’d tried to kill him. He took the cache and tried to find another way out, one I wasn’t looking for.”

  “Em,” she whispered. “Em, when did you lose contact with his suit?”

  “Five weeks ago.”

  Oh god. “How long would the cache have lasted him?” she asked, not wanting to know the answer, fearing she already did. The cache had been gone when she first reached Camp Four, and now it was back.

  “Five weeks,” Em said. “If he kept the suit in low power mode, five weeks. He’d fully stocked it at Six.”

  Gyre trembled, staring at the suit and at the cache behind it. “He was here. Em, he was here.” When she’d felt like she was being watched, was this why? Had he been there, somehow? But no, he couldn’t have been. Not beyond the sump. The events didn’t line up, didn’t add up, and some of it had been the spores, had been her own exhausted mind.

  Right?

  Em bit back a weak noise. “Check the cache.”

  “No. No. I need to get moving.”

  “Check it.”

  Gyre reached behind the suit, but despite her care, she jarred it loose from the crevice. It collapsed below her, its polymer plates clattering against the ground. She opened the supply box, nudged its lid up.

  The battery kit had one remaining ampule. The ration kit had more.

  “He didn’t use it all.” But there had been that overlap. He had passed through here. The rope on the side of the Long Drop—

  “It’s possible his suit was going unresponsive,” Em said. Whispered. “The same issue that made me lose contact. And then, when it wasn’t working, he came back this way, but his suit was failing. He clawed his way out, stashed it out of the way so you wouldn’t find him. So I wouldn’t find him. Tried to get out on foot. But with the ambient temperature at seven Celsius . . .”

  “Hypothermia.”

  Em hummed assent. “Probably within a day. Much faster after swimming the sump, if it had already filled by then. And he would have had to rig a harness for himself, for the climbs.”

  Gyre stared at the husk. Em’s story didn’t make sense, but the only other explanation Gyre could invent was worse. Maybe he hadn’t tried the sump at all. Instead, he’d felt a tug, a feeling of forgetting something, and he’d turned back toward Camp Five.

  On the ledge on the Long Drop, she’d seen rope attached to a bolt that she didn’t think had been there before. A face, in the darkness. What if it hadn’t been Isolde at all?

  What if she’d killed him?

  She shuddered, forced the thought aside. She’d never seen the body. She’d never heard it hit the ground.

  “I should keep moving,” Gyre said, and tried to ease herself back down the wall.

  She couldn’t.

  Her muscles were louder than the shouting of her panic, or maybe they were in on it. She couldn’t move.

  “He’s why the Tunneler came,” Em said, her voice wondering and horrified. “The Tunneler sensed him up here in Camp Four, when he took the cache, and it came up, close enough to breach the side of the Long Drop. But then it left again. Something must have happened. He’s gone.”

  Pain twisted her words, and Gyre closed her eyes, trying to feel that pain, trying to let it goad her.

  You can’t be him; you have to keep moving.

  There—it was enough, and she could push off the stone, drop down beside the wreckage of Eli’s abandoned suit.

  And then she ran, refusing to look over her shoulder in case she saw the half-frozen, starved, ravaged man staggering down the tunnel behind her.

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Gyre stood at the top of the cliff that had taken her four pitches to climb, the last cliff that had led where they’d expected, the last marker of
normalcy she’d seen in weeks. The anchor bolt that she’d placed at the top edge was still there, her line hanging down from it just as she’d left it. She knelt to check it, and found it was still secure. Professionally done, unaltered.

  She clipped in, and made quick work down to the bottom, slowing only to navigate each bolt her line was clipped to, and to give Em’s computers time to work their magic. Her display remained clear, and there were no sounds or movement above or below her.

  He’s dead. He’s dead, somewhere in the cave, and you don’t need to find him.

  If that meant he was lying dead at the bottom of the Long Drop, so be it. If that was the reality she needed to believe to keep moving, she would relive it over and over again.

  She broke the surface with a splash, sinking quickly down. There was no waiting thrum below the water, no vibrations pushing through her suit and becoming part of her.

  No Eli.

  Silt bloomed around her as her feet touched the bottom, and she waited for it to settle, keeping an eye out for the guideline she’d run that first dive. It appeared out of the murky water, wavering in the sonar reconstruction, and her suit flagged it with glowing green light. She floated up, buoyancy smoothly adjusting to just above neutral for the few seconds needed to bring her level with the path, then stabilizing as she grabbed hold of the line.

  Easy. This was easy. Even the tightness around her lungs and heart was easy to ignore, now that she was down here, now that nothing was out of the ordinary.

  “Any sign of new currents?” she asked.

  “None,” Em said. “No obstructions, either. Everything is just like we left it.”

  Em was thinking what she was thinking, then. They were both scared.

  She half expected to find Eli’s body floating in the sump as she rounded the bottom of the bend. When he wasn’t there, and when she could see the curve that led to the surface was totally empty, she finally began to relax. It was still just a small U-bend that had flooded too early, and she had an easier time of the dive than that first attempt, now that she had more experience at moving weightlessly. It took the pressure off her swollen calf, too. It was like coming down from high altitude, everything moving faster and more smoothly than it had before.