The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  It didn’t make sense.

  “We need to push forward,” Em said softly.

  “Like hell we do,” Gyre spat. “That climb took four pitches, Em. Four.” Four pitches that took upward of twelve hours, clipping in to an anchor on each one, going back down to retrieve the gear that she could, then climbing back up and drawing up her line to reuse it. Em had told her to stop, to rest for the day suspended on her line, or to go back to Camp Three to rest and resupply, but the cache should’ve been right at the top. She should have been able to sleep, then use the top line she’d attached at the summit of the climb to ferry gear the next day. It should have made everything that much easier, that much faster.

  But the cache wasn’t here.

  She was exhausted. She’d thought she was numb. But numb implied no feeling. And Gyre definitely felt something.

  Anger.

  “If this cache is . . . gone—” Em was saying, her voice pained.

  “How could it be gone, Em? How? Nobody knows about this cave, right? And last I heard, Tunnelers don’t eat caches.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” Em muttered. She sounded vulnerable. Almost hopeful.

  That didn’t make sense. Nothing about this mission made sense. Gyre shook her head. “Maybe you made a mistake. Forgot to leave something here. Sent me down the wrong tunnel.”

  “No. The last caver in before you, Eli, he stocked this. Just like you, he hauled gear, he filled it. And even if he hadn’t, I’ve had caches in there last years.”

  Gyre sank down to her knees with a strangled curse. She pressed her hands to her helmet, wishing she could rip the thing off and dig her fingers into her hair, could massage at her skin, could press against her eyes until her bone-deep exhaustion and anger and fear melted out of her.

  “Press forward, Gyre,” Em said, her voice softening. “I know you’re tired. I know you’re hungry. But your suit can only run on the batteries you’re carrying for another six days, and the next cache is two, maybe three away. If there’s another sump, or a tunnel collapse, we’ll need that three-day buffer.”

  “And I suppose going back is out of the question? Going to Camp Three, or—or a cache we bypassed?”

  “We didn’t bypass any caches.”

  “I don’t believe you,” she snapped. “I’ve known you for over a week now, and if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that you’re a control freak. You may not have any human backup up there with you, but you can lock this suit up with a button, you use adrenaline injections to wake people up, you modify my sight readout—you have other caches for when things go wrong.”

  That seemed to strike a chord. When Em spoke, her voice was back to normal, alert and affronted instead of pained and distracted. “Are you implying that I engineered this?”

  “I’m going back to Camp Three,” Gyre said. “Restocking.”

  “You can’t carry more than you already are, and you can’t pull batteries through the sump outside your suit without shorting them. Keep moving.”

  “Fuck you.”

  She sat down, hoping it pissed Em off. But as she waited for Em’s next salvo, her panic ebbed until she could face the problem more clearly. This was bad, but it could be worse. Em was right; the faster she got to Camp Five, the better.

  Em was just wrong on the particulars. Getting to Five fast meant resting now, not pushing forward. A few hours wasn’t going to make a difference to her battery levels, but it was going to impact how safely she could climb.

  “I’ll sleep here,” she muttered, and pushed herself up.

  “A happy medium,” Em said, bitterness tingeing her voice. She sighed, perhaps rubbed at her temples in frustration. Gyre staggered over to a niche in the wall that she could see the rest of the cavern from, and hunkered down inside of it, wishing hard for a bed of some kind, or a hot meal. Instead, she methodically began setting up her next feeding.

  “This has never happened before,” Em murmured. “I’m sorry.”

  Gyre grunted.

  “You—you did that climb faster than anybody else I’ve ever hired,” Em said.

  “I don’t want your flattery right now.”

  “Did you learn from your parents?”

  She snorted. “No.”

  “So this really is just to get the money to find your mother, then? Not the continuation of some—family adventuring tradition?”

  Gyre shifted, grimacing as her cannula protested. She shook her head, her lips threatening to curl into a smile. “Been telling yourself stories?”

  “I didn’t think you’d appreciate it if I looked her up. Without your direct say-so, anyway. Would you like me to start?”

  She hadn’t planned on taking advantage of Em’s resources now, here, before she was out and had more bargaining power, but why not? “Yeah,” she said.

  “What was her name?”

  “Peregrine. Peregrine Price.”

  “Do you have any other information on her?”

  “No. Not even an ID number or what colony she was originally from.” No connection at all, other than our genetics.

  “That’s fine.” There was no pity in her voice, and Gyre was glad. “Anything else?”

  “Like?”

  “What did she look like?”

  “Like me. Light brown skin, freckles, red hair. Brown eyes. Tall. She dyed her hair blond the last few years she was here, though. Maybe she still does.”

  “What was her job?”

  Gyre opened her mouth to respond, then hesitated, staring out at the rock wall of the niche. She closed her mouth, licked her lips. “I . . . barely remember,” she said after a moment. “She left a long time ago.”

  “I see,” Em murmured. “How old were you?”

  “It was a long time ago,” Gyre repeated.

  Em didn’t respond, and Gyre sank into the silence like she would have a soft foam bed. It was reassuring, that Em now felt bad enough that Gyre could shut her up with a few clipped words. If it took being an ornery smart-ass, dragging every order of hers through a wringer out loud so Em could hear it . . .

  Her stomach cramps eased as her body adjusted to the flow of paste and began to soak up the calories. The fog in her head began to clear. Her muscles ached, but they relaxed somewhat, trusting in the suit to support them.

  Em finding her mother was everything she could have wanted. It would be a blessing. It would make everything easier. Cheaper. She needed to cooperate.

  “I think she was a teacher,” Gyre said at last. “Or—a nanny? I remember being jealous of her, when I was very young. She was always around other people’s kids. But that stopped when I was maybe five. I guess fewer people were having kids by then, and most were sending them away if they could.” She licked her lips again, then nudged the toggle on her wrist that extended a drinking straw. Most of her hydration was taken care of directly by the suit and her meals, but sometimes she needed to wet her throat. She took a long pull of the filtered water, then leaned her head back against her helmet, looking up at nothingness. “For the next few years I barely saw her, even before she left. I’ve talked about it with my dad. He won’t tell me what she was doing.”

  “Do you have any theories?” Em asked. The gentleness was gone, replaced by concentration. It was gratifying. Was she already plugging data points into her computer?

  “The usual. That she was—involved in drug manufacturing or strike breaking or something else nasty. Something that meant she had to leave.” Gyre closed her eyes, squirming into a comfortable-enough position and locking her suit so she could go full-body limp in it. “Sometimes I thought that she fell in love with some rich man, that he took her away from her miserable life on this miserable planet. But that’s . . .”

  “Not miserable enough for Cassandra Five?”

  “Exactly,” Gyre said with a short, huffed laugh. “You almost sound like a native now.”

  “How do you know she went to a garden world?”

  “Wouldn’t you, after this?” Gyre asked.
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  Em was quiet.

  “She left a note behind,” Gyre said. “It was short. Just said, I’m going somewhere green. Follow me when you can. Love, Peregrine.”

  Gyre could faintly hear the rustle of fabric as Em shifted on the other end of the line. “The note was for your father,” she said. “Not you. Otherwise she would have signed it ‘Mom.’”

  “Probably,” Gyre said, shrugging with a bitter smile. And you’d think a mother would have at least mentioned her child.

  “Strange, though, that she wouldn’t give a place if she meant for him to follow.”

  “I’ve always thought she didn’t know where she was going,” Gyre said. “Or maybe she meant it as a challenge. I don’t know. The letter pisses me off, either way. If she wanted us to follow her, she should have given us something more. Money, a plan, or just the damn tickets to go with her. Instead, we got three sentences.” The corner of her mouth twitched as her feeding finished, and she grudgingly unlocked one arm of the suit and fiddled with the canister lock, twisting until it released. The suit had already sealed at the port site, and the canister sealed itself as soon as it was exposed to air. The scent of waste or food—even the nasty, lab-built sludge in the container—was another Tunneler-attraction theory, though it was one that didn’t make any sense to her. Nobody had ever seen one eating, and the caches usually survived just fine.

  Still, better safe than dead.

  “Why do you want to find her?” Em asked.

  “Because she’s my mother,” Gyre said.

  “But she left you. And you’ve said you don’t think she had a good reason.”

  “I never said that.”

  “Okay, let me rephrase: all the reasons you’ve told me have been good for her, but they haven’t taken you or your father into account at all. And before you tell me that your father wasn’t a good reason to stay anyway, and she made the right decision abandoning you—”

  “I never said—”

  “I have some experience with reading people, Gyre, and I know that twisted-up mess is part of the story.” Em didn’t sound like she was smiling, or self-satisfied. She sounded tired, and that pain had crept back into her voice. Was she familiar with the feelings herself? The thought made Gyre uncomfortable, desperate to be understood and angry that Em could see through her, all at once. “Before you tell me all of that,” Em continued after a moment, “just tell me what you want when you find her again.”

  “I want . . . answers,” Gyre said. “I want to hear it from her. And maybe I want to punch her, I don’t know. I don’t know what I want to do.”

  Em hummed softly. “Losing people is hard,” she said. There was an odd roughness to her voice that made Gyre shift in her suit, that went beyond how Em talked about the other dead cavers. “Sometimes you just need to see them again, to be sure it’s really over.”

  She was talking about her team.

  And she wasn’t wrong. But beyond that, Gyre wanted proof that her mother was healthy and happy, so Gyre could hate her for it. If she found her mother, and her mother was half dead in some hole, with the only green in her life the blanket she’d bought for a narrow cot . . .

  Hating her for leaving wouldn’t feel so good.

  “You should get to sleep,” Em said after a moment. “I’ll wake you up in six hours, if you last that long. Do you want any assistance?”

  Gyre looked at the flat expanse of floor where the cache should have been, and shuddered. “No. If somebody took it—”

  “Nobody took it.”

  “If somebody took it,” Gyre repeated, her skin crawling at the base of her neck, “then I don’t want to be drugged when they come back.”

  Em was quiet for a long stretch, and then she sighed. “Understood. I’ll wake you up in six.”

  Gyre didn’t respond, instead surveying the cavern one last time, concentrating on the unmoving walls and the towering vault above her. It felt too open in here, but everything remained steady. Her sonar detected no sounds beyond her own.

  She was alone, at least.

  Slowly, she settled into something like sleep, thoughts drifting and turning hazy. Her display darkened, then went black, and she was too far gone to feel panic at being trapped inside her suit, relying only on Em to keep watch. Her eyes closed.

  * * *

  Gyre frowned at the time readout in her helmet. It had only been two hours since she’d begun drifting off, and she groaned, unlocking her suit and trying a different position. It didn’t help; despite the long day, her mind refused to completely quiet. Grudgingly, she stood up and stretched.

  Em didn’t greet her over her comm.

  Panic spiked through her, and she scanned the cavern. Alone. She was alone. Em had said that she would try to sleep when Gyre went down for the night, but here? Now? With the cache missing?

  Not to mention, Em had been down here before; she knew the risks better than most topside teams. And she still worked solo. Why? If she was so desperate to get somebody down here safely, she should be using every advantage her money could buy. It didn’t make sense, and it smelled rotten.

  And where the hell was the cache?

  She increased the field of view on her helmet’s simulation until she had the equivalent of a fully lit room. A shaft stretched away overhead, and the stone floor was level for a few meters before gently dropping off down to her right. Lichen grew here, too, a soft texture restricted to the crevices.

  Gyre craned her head back and stared up the shaft. A shaft like that could lead up to the surface, or to nowhere at all, and even her sonar reconstruction couldn’t map high enough up it to tell her. There was a tiny stream of water coming down one side, dripping from the edge once every thirty seconds or so; could rains have flooded this entire part of the cave, washing away the cache? Maybe . . . but there hadn’t been any rains in the last few months, as far as Gyre knew. And even if there had somehow been a flash storm strong enough to flood this room, there would have been other signs. Trash washed in from a nearby settlement, lingering puddles, lusher plant growth up the walls than half-dead lichen. There was nothing.

  So that ruled out flooding.

  Gyre was just about to turn away from the shaft when she made out a faint, familiar bump in the rock.

  That’s a bolt, she thought, quickly followed by, No, can’t be. The simulation her helmet provided didn’t allow for the glint of light on metal, so maybe it was just a small stone wedged in a crevice. She squinted and moved closer to that edge of the shaft, but it was so far above her that she couldn’t hope to reach it without an actual climb.

  Still, if it was a bolt, then there were probably others farther up the shaft. Em probably already knew about the shaft, in that case. So why hadn’t she mentioned it? If it went up to the surface, or even close, it could cut this initial staging time in half.

  Maybe it wasn’t that simple. Or maybe Em didn’t know about it at all.

  Maybe this was why the cache was missing.

  The thought made her skin crawl, and she looked over her shoulder, surveying the perimeter of the chamber. Nothing. But that didn’t stop the sudden feeling that she was being watched. If somebody else was in the cave, and Em didn’t know about them . . .

  Gyre began pacing the limits of the camp. There were no signs that anybody had been there recently, but that didn’t mean anything; a caver in a suit didn’t leave much trace, by design. What did stand out was the lack of rope attached to the bolt in the shaft. If somebody else had come down that way and taken the cache, they’d left the way they came and taken their line with them.

  But that didn’t mean they couldn’t come back.

  Gyre circled around toward the slope leading away from the direction of the sump, wrapping her arms around herself. Down that way was the path to the next cache. She paused at the foot of the slope, then turned, looking up at the shaft again.

  Then she looked lower, and right in front of her was a small shelf created by water and weak stone, half the width of t
he tunnel leading farther away. It was easy to miss on the way down, easy to step over. But something about it was off—even in the simulation, the colors didn’t quite seem right. She moved closer, crouching down, holding her breath.

  Under the stone ledge was a climbing suit.

  Gyre’s heart stopped, then began to hammer frantically in her chest once more. Another caver. She dropped to her knees and grabbed the caver’s ankles. The suit was rigid, forming braces over two badly broken legs. Her hands shook as she hauled the corpse out, and then she laughed, helplessly, as she saw the same logo on the breast of the suit that she wore on her own.

  Not an intruder, then. Not whoever stole the cache. The simulation couldn’t see through the helmet’s mask, but then again, Gyre didn’t want to.

  This was another caver who Em had left to die.

  She could see, clearly, what must have happened: the climber had come down the shaft. Maybe one of the bolts had failed, or maybe it was simply climber error, but either way, they’d fallen. They’d broken their body and their suit.

  There was no choice but to await death. With starvation and shock beating at them, even with all the drugs Em could pump into them, they wouldn’t have been able to ascend the shaft again, or clear the sump and make it out the way Gyre had come.

  And then what? Em had removed the line, and abandoned the shaft?

  But that still didn’t explain the missing cache.

  Gyre sat beside the body, at a loss of what to do. Finally, she shook her head and tucked the body back under the stone lip, then returned to where she’d slept. She sat down, dimming the view in her helmet. She called up readouts and skimmed through them: current depth, current external temperature, her body temperature, her blood-sugar levels.

  She was paging through the inventories of the caches she’d already passed when she noticed a new file, separate from the ones she’d flipped through over the last several days. It was a larger file, and when she opened it, she could see it was neatly subdivided based on a code that appeared to contain the date, among other identifiers. She opened one.