The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  Still, even then, the best way out was through. Finish the job, and then be able to talk up a real, legitimate expedition, trade on having actual experience under her belt.

  As long as Em doesn’t get me killed.

  Gyre tried to calm herself by clambering along the breakdown pile. Her long limbs came in handy as she slipped over large, rounded boulders, digging her fingers into the tiny pitted holds on the surface. The carbon plating on the palms of her gloves was textured and never slick from sweat, while inside her skin was coated with a reactive, body-temperature gel, giving her a superior grip that still felt almost natural.

  She dropped down to another boulder, then began sidling along the face of the rock she’d just dropped from, making her way over to another part of the descent. She pressed herself flat against the rock, unable to look down to where she balanced on her toes on a thin ledge. She felt her way along, shuffling step by step, dogged by thoughts of coming topside to nothing. If Em’s company folded—

  Her foot slipped.

  She skidded down the too-smooth face of the boulder, reaching for the ledge. Her fingers caught once, twice, but didn’t hold, and she couldn’t find purchase with her toes or knees, either. Her suit screeched across the rock, and then abruptly stopped making noise.

  She was falling through the open air.

  Gyre twisted, trying to protect herself, but her hip struck a rock and spun her. Her back hit next, and while the shielding and stabilization of the suit kept her spine from snapping, it didn’t stop the pain of the impact. She shouted, then rolled, sliding off another boulder. A low, grinding noise filled the air, coming from above her, and she swore, jamming her fingers into a crack, fighting to keep her grip. She dragged herself hard to her right just as one of the boulders above her came loose with a roar and tumbled down several meters.

  It would have killed her.

  “Caver!”

  Her vitals were no doubt flashing on Em’s screen now, though her own screen had gone perfectly clear, allowing her an unobscured range of vision. Gyre pulled herself up with a groan, then began checking over her armor. A few surface scratches, nothing structural. She leaned back, letting the relief rush through her as her screen returned to normal.

  “Gyre!” Em didn’t sound worried, Gyre reflected.

  Just mad.

  “I’m fine, thanks for asking,” she bit out. She kept her eyes closed a moment longer, then sat up and surveyed the chamber from her new position.

  There was something below her, on the next flat surface. Something white. Past the breakdown pile. She frowned: there was something white, and the readout seemed impossible.

  Then it disappeared.

  She blinked rapidly. It didn’t come back.

  “Gyre, go back to Camp Two.” Em’s voice was booming, harsh. Authoritative. Definitely not worried for her health.

  Gyre ignored her, sliding carefully down another few boulders, closer to the flat expanse. She toggled through modes on her HUD. Nothing. Whatever she’d seen was gone.

  Gone.

  That wasn’t—that couldn’t have—

  “Caver, that was an order.”

  “I saw something,” she responded, speaking half to herself.

  “Your sensor readings were jarred from the fall,” Em said. “I’ve reset them. There is nothing down there. I repeat, return to Camp Two.”

  Fuck off, Gyre thought, anger flooding through her. No more going along without question. She dropped the last half meter to the flat expanse. Then, her heart still racing, she turned off her reconstruction view and switched on her headlamp.

  The cave looked remarkably similar. The difference between real sight and the reconstruction was minimal, except that she’d lost some of her field of view and subtle pieces of information about her surroundings. The colors she could see—a dirty pale gray for the stone, with various iridescent whorls of inclusions, and the surrounding, oppressive dark—those were different. But the lines were the same. The features, the same. Nothing had changed.

  Except for the body at her feet.

  She stared down at the wreckage. The suit had been half crushed. The mask was off, revealing pits where eyes had been, and tight, dried skin stretched over a prominent, masculine chin. The caver’s chest had been split open, and filamentous white fungus grew from the hole. His legs disappeared below a boulder that had tumbled from the pile, much like the one that had almost killed Gyre.

  Bile rose in the back of her throat, and she turned away.

  That had been what she’d seen on her HUD. The white, the strange readings that suggested high concentrations of carbon ahead of her—

  And Em had hidden it.

  Her stomach spasmed, and she turned away, bracing herself on the nearest boulder. She squeezed her eyes shut, fighting the urge to vomit.

  “Gyre?”

  Cavers died all the time. Cavers on established routes died all the time. She had just narrowly avoided the same fate that had killed that man.

  There was nothing strange about finding a dead caver.

  There was nothing strange about finding a dead caver—but there was something strange about the owner of the expedition manipulating her reconstruction display, hiding things from her, injecting her with adrenaline just to get her moving in the morning.

  Paying her way too much.

  “Gyre? Gyre, respond.”

  “What the fuck do you want?” she rasped.

  “Gyre, get back to Camp Two.”

  “Fuck you.”

  This wasn’t worth it. No matter how much she needed to get off-world, this wasn’t worth it. There would be other expeditions, other options. Em could try to blacklist her for failing to finish the expedition, but Gyre had been lying around obstacles for so long, she’d find a way to get past that. Gyre cursed again and began dragging herself back up the breakdown pile, refusing to turn her reconstructed view back on.

  She’d go back to Camp Two. And then she’d just keep going back to Camp One.

  “I don’t appreciate being lied to,” she hissed at Em as she hauled herself up. She skirted the boulder she’d displaced, giving the entire section a wide berth.

  “I didn’t want to disturb you.”

  “The hell you didn’t!” Gyre spat, surmounting the lip of Camp Two. She straightened, then grabbed up one of the duffels, searching through it for a meal canister. She found one and jammed it into its port. It was supposed to be a careful, slow process. She didn’t care, and triggered a fast release, wincing as the paste flooded her gut, her stomach twisting and heaving at the intrusion. She choked down bile again. She was uncomfortably full, the fresh meal too soon after her morning feeding, but she didn’t intend to stop moving until she was out. She needed the calories.

  Em stayed quiet the whole time.

  Fed, she cast the canister aside. It bounced down the pile of boulders as she took off toward Camp One, calling up the HUD marker, waiting for it to appear over the circle of light cast by her headlamp.

  It didn’t come.

  “I’m done!” Gyre shouted. “I’m done! This expedition is over.”

  Em said nothing, and the HUD marker still didn’t appear.

  “Marker!”

  Nothing.

  Gyre’s blood boiled, her muscles trembling with the urge to strike out, to hit Em somehow. She bent double, fighting to remain in control of herself. “Em,” she whispered. “Em, pull up the marker.”

  Nothing.

  She closed her eyes, taking another long, slow breath, then tried to straighten up.

  Her suit refused to move.

  “Em, what are you doing?”

  Gyre tried to move her fingers—just her fingers!—but nothing happened. Then she tried to kick, balling up her thigh muscles and lashing out as hard as she could. The suit didn’t even groan.

  Her headlamp turned off.

  She’d never felt claustrophobic in her life, not even the night she’d spent trapped in a slot cavern. But now she could feel h
erself trembling. Her thoughts raced.

  “Em,” she whispered. “Don’t do this.”

  “We should talk,” Em said.

  “Unlock my suit.”

  “Not yet.”

  “Em, this is a safety hazard. What if a Tunneler—or something else—what if there’s a cave-in—”

  “Nothing on my readings suggests any of that.”

  “And I’m supposed to believe you?”

  Em didn’t respond for a moment, then huffed into her microphone. It was the single greatest expression of emotion Gyre had heard out of her, and it added to her panic.

  “Em, unlock my suit. Please.”

  “I don’t want you heading back to Camp One,” Em said. “The caches I have set up in here will, in addition to what’s in your duffels, last you at least two months, but that’s without any accidents or emergencies. Any unnecessary doubling back might mean you don’t reach our goal.”

  “Our goal? And what goal is that? I don’t recall being briefed on our goal before you dropped me down here!”

  “Calm down, Gyre. Your heart rate and blood pressure are getting dangerously high. I would prefer not to administer anxiolytics.”

  “Then tell me what your goal is. Because if it’s mineral veins, I guarantee you we’ve passed at least two or three already.”

  “I don’t need to explain myself to a caver who lied about her experience.”

  The words took a moment to register. She knows. Yet instead of being worried, Gyre felt relieved—and angry. No more dancing around the truth. Her lips drew back in a snarl. “Even more reason for you to let me leave, then.”

  “Even more reason for you to calm down. I’m willing to keep you on this job and not sue you for false representation.”

  Gyre stopped struggling, going very still. Fuck. A black mark was bad enough. Being sued would mean she’d lose what little she had, too. She’d be publicly dragged through hell in the courts, and then nobody would ever trust her after that, even the lowest-paying climbs. She’d never be able to get away from it.

  Never get away from here.

  She closed her eyes against the flare of rage and hopelessness in her chest.

  “I don’t need you to trust me, Gyre,” Em said. “I need you to climb. And that, at least, you can do, based on what I was able to verify about you.”

  “Actually,” Gyre snapped, “you do need me to trust you. Because if I don’t, I don’t want to be down here. I’m not dying because of you.” Her breathing was fast and ragged in the close blackness of her suit. She knew Em was watching it on her readouts, knew Em could see everything about her.

  It made her want to tear the suit right off.

  “I’m—sorry about the adrenaline,” Em said at last, the words clearly awkward in her mouth.

  She turned the headlamp back on.

  “Thanks,” Gyre spat. The light took the edge off her panic, but not her anger. “Apology not accepted.”

  Her comm line crackled with Em’s frustrated growl. Gyre hoped she was tearing out her hair at the thought of losing the contract, of having to start all over again.

  “I don’t enjoy sending people down there,” Em said at last.

  Gyre snorted. “Then what’s it about?”

  “I need somebody to get deep into this cave system,” Em said slowly, as if picking every word with care. “It’s a hard trek, harder than most expeditions, and much longer, with less support. It’s more dangerous by definition. So I need, if not your trust, then your permission to intervene on your behalf. More than the average expedition.”

  Gyre looked up at the vault above her, trying to think of how to respond to that. Em’s threat still echoed in her head, a knife at her back prodding her onward. Forcing her to agree, to trust Em, to rely on her.

  She didn’t have much of a choice, did she?

  “I’d feel a lot more comfortable knowing what I was trying to find down there,” Gyre said.

  “And I’d feel a lot more comfortable if you concentrated on the cave. Treat it as an exploration mission. If everything goes well, you’ll see things nobody else has ever seen.”

  Gyre refused to take the bait. Em was mimicking, almost exactly, one of the personality and motivation questions she’d answered when she signed up for this job. It was underhanded, a distraction.

  Like so much of what she did.

  “If it’s so hard, you should have briefed me before I came in. Walked me through the challenges.”

  “I don’t know all of them.”

  “But you know this part. The caches, the anchors—”

  “I’ve done this before,” Em said, “unlike you. I know what I’m doing. I’ll also note you didn’t ask for a briefing.”

  Gyre hadn’t asked because she hadn’t thought to, had assumed it would happen to her eventually, and then it had been too late. Maybe, if she’d actually had the experience she’d claimed too—

  No. This was not about her. It was about Em, about this cave, about how she’d done this before. Gyre swallowed. This wasn’t just her.

  “So the body I saw?”

  “Was from a failed attempt four months ago, at the start of this season.”

  “What was his name?”

  Em didn’t respond.

  “Em, unlock my suit and tell me his name so that I can—give him a funeral. Or something.”

  Em inhaled sharply at that, and the suit released.

  Gyre dropped to her knees in relief, relishing the feeling of her suit sagging with her. She flexed each of her fingers and twisted around in place. It was like she could breathe again. Then she stood and went over to the lip of the plateau, staring down toward the body.

  She’s done this before.

  “What was his name?” she asked again.

  More silence. Then Em cleared her throat. “I would have to pull up his contract.”

  Her heart sank, twisted around in her chest. “You don’t even remember.”

  “We weren’t on a first-name basis,” Em replied softly. To her credit, it didn’t sound like a threat, or a promise that Gyre was special.

  Gyre was fairly certain that she wasn’t special at all.

  She was fairly certain she was just another body.

  “When this is all over,” Em said, her voice gentler than it had ever been, “I’ll get you off-world. To one of your favorite garden worlds. That’s on top of your pay.”

  Gyre closed her eyes, pressing her hands to her helmet. For just a moment, she could picture it. Broad foliage, gentle rains, a different life. But it wasn’t enough. She wished she could rub at her eyes. Her fingers slid over the screen and the bump of her lamp, and with a sickening drop she realized that her headlamp would’ve been giving off heat and visible light for—what? Ten minutes? Fifteen? She shut it off and finally restored the reconstruction.

  The body didn’t change. It was a small gesture, and no doubt calculated, but it was effective.

  Trust me, it said. She shouldn’t, couldn’t, and yet . . . and yet she had no other choice.

  “We should get moving,” Gyre said, grimacing. “Before something follows the heat off my lamp.”

  “The funeral—”

  “I’ll do it on my way out,” she said, grabbing up a duffel, not pausing to wonder why Em cared. “And I don’t have a favorite garden world.”

  “Your file—”

  “My mother went to one of the garden worlds. That’s it. That’s just where I start looking.”

  Em didn’t respond.

  “Marker to Camp Three,” Gyre said, her voice hard.

  “You’ll—you’re actually going forward?” Em asked, and she had the decency to sound shocked.

  “You aren’t giving me much of a choice,” Gyre said. “But the way I see it, you do need me to perform well. You need me to engage. So here are some ground rules: You don’t take control of my suit unless it’s an emergency. You don’t inject me with anything unless it’s an emergency or I beg you to. If you do either of those th
ings again just because it fits your agenda or schedule, I’m opening my helmet and letting the Tunneler come for me and your mission is scrubbed. I get that you need control down here, but you hired me for a reason.”

  “Yes—you were willing to take a less-documented job,” Em said. “You were willing to lie to get it.”

  “For that pay, almost anybody would. I’m sure you know that better than I do.”

  Em didn’t respond.

  “You don’t take control of my suit, and you don’t lie to me. I’ll check. I expect access to my headlamp whenever I want it, so I can make sure that we’re looking at the same things. I can’t do my part if I can’t trust what I see. If me getting through this is so important to you, then you need to trust me. And in return, I don’t need your help getting to a garden world. What I do need is your help tracking down my mother.” With as much money as Em had poured into Gyre’s suit, it should be easy enough for her. Easier, at least, than it would be for Gyre. “Agreed?”

  “Agreed.” Em cleared her throat. “Camp Three marker on.”

  “Proceeding.”

  Chapter Four

  She reached Camp Three after a long day’s hike and was relieved to find that it had zero dead bodies. She checked, toggling off her display and turning on her lamp, pacing the nook that Em had led her to. All she found were a few small, slow-moving, translucent-bodied bugs that ducked away from her light when she came close. After maybe a half hour of watching the whisper-thin, ghostlike things, she lost interest and began to explore. Out of all the crevices within easy walking distance of camp, only one turned into a small tunnel. She wandered down from the nook and peered in. Em said nothing. She’d returned to her earlier reticence, most of her interactions limited to markers that appeared on Gyre’s screen and readouts she now shared with Gyre directly instead of parsing into speech.

  With no response from Em, Gyre explored further. She followed the winding, narrow tunnel that was barely tall enough to walk upright in, her light bouncing off the walls and casting eerie shadows. The walls themselves were studded with murky, crystalline outgrowths, and she paused at one of them, wondering if she should take a sample. She was peering at the refraction of her headlamp’s glow in its cloudy interior when she heard it.