The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  The dripping of water.

  In a great rush, she became aware of how dry her mouth was and how her skin prickled inside of her suit, covered in a thin layer of old sweat and dead skin beneath the layer of feedback film that clung to her and allowed her suit to respond to and assist her in climbing. The suit “cleansed” internally every twelve hours or so, using body-temperature water recycled from her urine and introduced through her nutrient canisters, but it was a whisper of a sensation in the film, easily forgotten. The thirst, though . . . some of the water was available for sipping, but she hated drinking it, knowing where it had come from, and so even as her body remained hydrated from the intrusion of the feeding tube into her stomach, her throat itched. Since the last time she’d heard water at Camp One, five days ago, she’d learned to ignore the thirst, learned to ignore the feeding tube, the constant press of the suit on her flesh, the inability to touch her own skin.

  But the sound of water brought it all back.

  She left the wall to follow the sound. Should she let Em know? No, Em already knew if she was by her machines, and if she wasn’t, Gyre couldn’t reach her. She continued around a bend and down a steep but short drop-off.

  Her lamp glittered off the surface of a small pond. The liquid—she realized with a jolt that she shouldn’t simply assume it was water—filled the end of the narrow tunnel up to where Gyre stood, and she edged closer to it, then crouched. She reached out her hand. “Unknown liquid, sample,” she murmured. Nothing happened. Had the function been jarred in her fall? Her suit had shown no abnormalities, so it was more likely that she was misremembering the verbal command. “Sample, liquid,” she tried, and this time a tube snaked out from her ring finger’s armor. She touched it to the liquid and it sucked in a bead.

  Her readout flashed. Water. High in certain minerals, but its pH was close to neutral. It wouldn’t degrade her suit.

  She shuffled forward, the water sliding over her boots.

  There was no current, no ebb and flow, not even a coolness through the polymer of her suit, but just seeing herself touch water was soothing. She hadn’t seen more than a dry creek bed in years, and water in the settlements was strictly rationed, most of it going to the mining concerns, industry, and agriculture. Oh, if she could only wriggle out of her suit, go for a short swim—

  “Not good,” Em said.

  Gyre froze, startled. “Excuse me?”

  “This passage shouldn’t be flooded this time of year,” Em said, her voice clipped and slightly distant. “That means the other dives will be harder than usual, and longer. I might have to reroute around a few sumps, too.” Gyre thought she could hear Em’s fingers typing. “Normally, you wouldn’t be diving so soon.”

  Gyre frowned. Diving.

  Em noticed her silence. “Your file does say that you have diving experience.”

  “Swimming experience,” Gyre said, her face heating with embarrassment. Diving was an occasional issue in caves, but training for it was difficult, to say the least. She’d prioritized building strength and climbing skills, not trying to chase down pools she couldn’t afford to work in and equipment she couldn’t afford to rent. It had seemed like a small lie to tell, after padding her professional caving history.

  Diving.

  And she did know how to swim . . . for the most part. But it had been years. Years since her dad had made enough money and had enough jobs that they had traveled to the cities where there were pools for her to swim in. And she’d never been good. Her mother had, apparently, taken her swimming when she was a baby, relying on her natural instincts to teach her the basics. She could stay afloat, get to safety, but . . .

  But she wasn’t a swimmer. Those didn’t exist on Cassandra-V. There just wasn’t a need, and not enough money for it to be a hobby. She’d thought it would be fine.

  Now she wasn’t as sure. What if this was what ended their little dance?

  “In your suit, swimming and diving should be mostly equivalent,” Em replied at last. “Head back to Camp Three, and I’ll pull up a map for you. I need to rerun some numbers. Some of the caches might be flooded. I’ll need to check when they were put in, see what I stored everything in.”

  “Right.”

  Em wasn’t pulling her out.

  Gyre eyed the water a moment longer, then turned and heaved herself over the rise back to the main tunnel. The glimmer of her headlamp on the crystals prickled at her nerves, and she shut it down and keyed up the display. Everything was going to be fine. It was going to be fine.

  It didn’t feel fine.

  She hated feeling like this, uncertain and worried. It made her want to flee—or fight. The glimmering had dimmed but hadn’t disappeared entirely, due to a textural overlay the computer provided to indicate composition. With a strangled swear, she lashed out, slamming her armored fist into one of the larger outcrops.

  The noise was louder than she’d been expecting, booming out through the enclosed space. The crystals cracked, sprinkling her armor with fine, glittering dust. She took a deep breath.

  She was fine.

  She made her way back through the passage and over to the nook, carved out of the stone wall of the cavern. She maneuvered herself into a sitting position against the wall, then locked the bottom half of her suit and relaxed into it, looking out at the space before her.

  It was smaller than the Camp Two cavern. She’d always liked closer spaces more. The huge vaults were impressive, but they left her feeling almost as exposed as she felt topside. Cassandra-V was a population-overflow planet, a raw materials colony, and it had never attracted the best of people. Nobody moved there because they wanted to. The few good people—the empathetic people, the people who cared about social order—tended to die young and idealistic deaths, leave planet as soon as they could, or grow old and cynical, sand-whipped and exhausted by the weight of believing the other colonists could be better than human. Everybody did what they had to do to survive. She’d heard stories about how the main spaceport cities had children begging for any amount of coin, with their limbs broken or amputated just to evoke pity. After a kind, misguided soul tried to help, a block later they’d be mugged for all they had left.

  On the surface, open spaces just meant more directions for people to come at you. Nobody had your back, and humans were nasty, sad creatures. Her mother counted. Em counted double. And she was risking everything because . . .

  “Here,” Em said, interrupting her thoughts. A map glowed to life on the inside of her helmet, then appeared to project out slightly in front of her for easier viewing. The 3-D model rotated slowly, then condensed into a more legible cross section. “Here’s where we are now.” A blue light pulsed, roughly a quarter of the way down into the caves—vertically.

  There was still a lot of horizontal distance to traverse too, with winding dips and rises, a very long vertical shaft, several more caverns connected by a long passage, and then a deep, bowing tunnel.

  Green light began to fill in from the bottom, drowning the deepest tunnels. “This,” Em said, “is where the water usually is this time of year—its lowest point. Perfect for descent. This section”—the U-shaped tunnel near the end of the system, where the detail of the map became much rougher, as if she didn’t have enough data to fill it in—“is always flooded. There’s no way around that, but the section is generally navigable. Given the level of water we just saw,” she continued, the main flood rising up, “we can expect several more tunnels to be flooded. Either that, or something’s changed.”

  “Tunneler?” Gyre asked, grimacing.

  Em considered. “Possibly,” she said at last. “But nobody else has access to this system. They do move on their own, but usually not through existing caves. Still . . . if it came close, and weakened a passage that then filled with water . . .”

  “Just a natural disaster,” Gyre said, shaking her head. “Like a fucking earthquake.”

  “In this case, yes.”

  “So what? I just swim through?”
>
  “Exactly. Your suit is already equipped for it. It’s got a rebreather and can fill air sacs to counteract the weight of the suit itself. The bags you’ve carried this far will have several spools of diving line that we’ll load into your suit once you’ve finished hauling gear—you’ll hook that to the walls every so often so that you’ll be able to find your way back, if, for some reason, you get lost and I can’t help.”

  “Sounds great,” she muttered. “And does the suit help with the swimming?”

  “Aside from some fins you can extend, no. No motors or other direct help. Inefficient. I tried that.”

  Gyre wished she could tug at her hair or scrub at her face. Something. Anything. “Just how many times have you tried?”

  She didn’t expect a response. On the other end of the line, Em huffed out a breath. It was loud, like she was leaning forward over the microphone, maybe putting her head in her hands, raking her fingers across her scalp. Another exhale.

  Then she cleared her throat.

  “Thirty-five, not including you.”

  Thirty—

  Gyre couldn’t stop herself from looking back toward the path to Camp Two. That body had been fresh. How many more had there been? Thirty-five expeditions would have taken years.

  Thirty-five expeditions, and Em was still sending people back down?

  Doubting she’d get an answer but needing to try, Gyre asked, “You still haven’t found whatever it is you’re looking for?”

  “No,” Em said, sighing. Again, her breathing was loud. Gyre could picture her fisting her hair, scrunching up her brow. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Then how do you know it’s down here at all?”

  “Because before I started sending expeditions, I—went down there myself. All I need is somebody to get as far as I got, that first time.”

  Gyre frowned. “You were a caver?” Em had sounded strange when she said I, a slight hesitation that made Gyre uneasy.

  “Back when we still went down in teams, yes. As a team, we could make it down. But—”

  “But Tunnelers,” Gyre said softly.

  Em cleared her throat again. “Yes. ‘Like a fucking earthquake.’”

  The words hung in the air, as if they were outside her helmet altogether, hovering like a living thing just in front of her. Em had been down here, with a team. Teams didn’t make it. Teams never made it when they went deep. Hers couldn’t have.

  But Em had made it.

  Gyre looked back toward Camp Two again, wishing she could see through the walls, see the dead man in his broken suit. Em had done an abrupt one-eighty at the mention of a funeral, and . . .

  Her shoulders hunched up and she leaned forward, mirroring Em’s imagined posture, resting her helmet in her hands.

  “Do you want me to pull them out?” she asked softly.

  Em didn’t respond.

  “I’ve done rescue descents before in the bigger pseudocaves, you know. I told Moller that. That wasn’t a lie.”

  “I know,” Em murmured. “But no. It’s too dangerous. And there are—too many.”

  “How big was your team?”

  “Five people. Including me.” Her breathing filled up all the space in Gyre’s suit, but instead of letting her float, it weighed her down.

  Gyre was shaking now.

  This is too big. This is too dangerous.

  Even if she’d been able to stop the trembling, she knew Em could see the spike in her heart rate. Yet Em said nothing. Gyre couldn’t figure out if she loved her or hated her for that, loved her or hated her for finally—finally, so many days in—being halfway honest about something.

  “One out of five,” she said at last, trying her best to sound brave and flippant, “aren’t the best odds I’ve faced.” She couldn’t get the next words out of her mouth.

  But they’re not the worst.

  The tech had improved since then. Em had mapped out most of the route and set up caches. And Gyre—despite her lack of credentials—was very, very good at climbing, had worked toward this moment all her life.

  But she couldn’t say the words, couldn’t be brave and flippant for them both. Death was too thick in the air between them, the bodies—seen and unseen—following close behind.

  If there was one blessing, it was that while her head and chest hurt, she still had enough self-control that there was no burning prickle of tears in her eyes.

  Em said nothing.

  She had to get up and leave. This sudden turn to honesty made Gyre suspect that Em wouldn’t follow through on her threat of litigation. She might not even try to stop her. But instead of standing, Gyre remained frozen, dreading the climb back. She faced possible death if she continued, but that was no different from what waited for her if she ran. Here, she was prepared. Here, she could rely on herself. Up there? Up there, she’d have to find another way to earn enough money to survive, and the options she had left to her were poisonous. Manual labor, servitude, desperate crime. Or she could take other caving tours, more mundane tours, and have to survive two or three instead of just this one.

  And even after this job, there was still one last gamble before her: finding her mother at all in the wide expanse of systems beyond Cassandra-V, without the considerable resources Em clearly had.

  “But they’re not the worst odds I’ve faced,” she finally whispered.

  I’m screwed.

  Chapter Five

  The next four days were spent ferrying equipment and inventorying caches. Em didn’t say much, and Gyre did her best to enjoy the reprieve. The cave system was beautiful. The vaulted ceilings, the narrow crevices she eased herself through, the crystals and fungal growths on the walls—they all combined with the calm quiet of being deep underground to present a magical illusion that she was somewhere safe.

  She’d always been fine with the weight of thousands of tons of stone above her head.

  Still, every time she stopped at Two to load up, she couldn’t ignore the body. It made the weight harder to bear a little more each time. She almost asked Em to hide him again, but couldn’t bring herself to make the request.

  This cave killed people. It was best to remember that.

  On the fourth day, once she finished ferrying the equipment, she turned down the draw distance of her display and sat with just herself in a dim circle of light.

  Thirty-five.

  She was just one more caver after nearly three dozen others had come down here and failed to find whatever it was Em was looking for. That number had haunted her through all the days of climbing. Her one comfort had been that Em, for all her lies, was very good at the mechanical part of handling. Gyre’s computers did what they needed to, and Em drew her attention to details she needed, otherwise allowing her to work. It made sense; Em had been down here before, knew the challenges, knew what Gyre would be feeling, thinking, wanting.

  It made Gyre want to believe, in turn, that the others had failed through their own faults. That she could succeed where the others hadn’t. She could make peace with this. She was trapped, yes, but there were worse fates on offer back on the surface—and this might still pay off.

  Caves were always a means to an end for her first, but they’d also been more than that. They’d been where she was safe, where she was independent from a neglectful father and a wasteland world, where she could excel. Em’s history aside, this job provided her with a better suit than she’d ever thought she’d have a chance to wear. The cave itself was challenging and beautiful. And Em wanted her to go deep, deeper than anybody had been able to manage on their own.

  She’d heard somewhere that pride came before the fall. But she wasn’t going to fall.

  She was going to climb.

  * * *

  Birdsong filtered into her awareness, and Gyre stirred, shifting in the unlocked portions of her suit. She frowned, furrowing her brow against the nonsensical sound. It remained, grew slightly louder, then plateaued. Birdsong. Birds she’d never heard. She cracked open one eye, scowling.
<
br />   It was just the cave. It was just Camp Three. She hadn’t been magically whisked to her mother’s garden world.

  “Is that a better alternative to the adrenaline?” Em asked, her voice only slightly louder than the now-looping track of birdcalls.

  “Yeah,” Gyre grunted, loosening her suit and rolling onto her side. She pushed herself through a number of stretches on autopilot, then rummaged in her pack for a nutritional canister. As she screwed it into the side port of her suit, she yawned.

  “I’m glad,” Em said, as the sludge made its way into Gyre’s stomach. “I could also try music. What do you like?”

  Gyre shrugged, then waited to see if Em could read that expression from her command post.

  “I’ll download a few sample tracks to your suit, then,” Em said, her own response unreadable. Response to silence or to her shrug? It didn’t matter, Gyre decided.

  She screwed up her face at the still-alien sensation of the sludge coating her guts. She worked her jaw as if she were chewing and then swallowed. Sometimes it helped.

  “Are you ready to try the dive today?” Em asked.

  She was being solicitous again. Gyre wondered at the stark contrast with her usual harshness, at whether it was instinctual or forced. She swallowed her phantom meal again. “Yeah,” she said.

  “All your vitals are good,” Em said. “So I’ll clear it.”

  “You’ll clear it?” Gyre laughed sharply, incredulously. “Right. What would you do otherwise, lock my suit? Take me to court?”

  Em didn’t respond at first, then huffed a sigh. “No, I’d ask you nicely to take a break.”

  “Had to think about that.”

  “There were less-nice ways of phrasing it.”

  “Oh, feel free. I’ve heard worse.”

  “I’m sure.” Em’s voice had gone quickly from tight and frustrated to grudgingly amused, and Gyre found herself smiling.