“Did he go with you?”
“No. We had an argument at the edge of the sump about it. I told him that one of us had to make it out, for Emogene. I finally promised that I’d just go and attach new line, and I’d come back after the first spool. It was going to take at least six. That way, I’d definitely come back, and we’d have a better sense of what was happening.”
“Why didn’t the team approach it this way on the first attempt?”
“We didn’t know the lines had broken. We were racing to get out. When we realized what had happened, I put some line in, and Hanmei did too, and we tried two different paths, but everything was so chaotic. I don’t know. Hanmei went first, Julian following her. Laurent was with me; that’s why I went after him when he got swept away. Julian said that Hanmei signaled for him to go back when he was injured—a current smacked him into a jagged outcropping that hadn’t been there before, ripped his suit open too—”
“I understand. What happened on your second attempt?”
“I went in by myself, and I put in anchors, all hard anchors, twice as often as I needed to, took out the old ones to make sure I didn’t get confused. I was down there for maybe—maybe four hours that day.”
“On one spool?”
“No, I started on the second. Checked in with Julian and Laurent. I didn’t—I didn’t see any sign of Hanmei at that point, didn’t see much of anything. Then, on my second line, I hit an unexpected current and lost my grip. It took me maybe an hour to find my way back to the line. I thought—I thought I was going to die. I was blind, and everything was dark and loud, and I could hear those tremors still; they were beating on my eardrums.”
“But you found the line.”
“Yeah. Somehow, I found the line.”
“That’s very lucky.”
Isolde shook her head. “I got back out, and Laurent wasn’t there. I went back to camp. He was kneeling over Julian’s body.”
“Was Mr. Flores dead at that point?”
“Yeah. He was. He’d overdosed on the pain medication we had with us.”
“Do you believe it was deliberate?”
“He took all of it. Yeah, I think it was deliberate.”
“Do you have any reason to think that Mr. Okeke . . . helped? Or caused it?”
“No,” Isolde snapped, “and I don’t think that matters, even if he did. Julian—he’d done it while Laurent was waiting for me to surface again, while I was lost. Laurent thought he’d lost both of us. When I found him, he was screaming.”
“I . . . understand. Isolde—”
“We were still feeling the tremors,” she said, ignoring the interviewer’s attempts at comfort. “We both knew we had to get out soon. We were afraid the rest of the cavern would collapse. So I left Laurent and I kept laying line. When I got to the last spool, I told him to pack up and follow me out. I got—I got to the end, somehow. I almost lost the line another four times, and I couldn’t find an exit at first—I panicked—but I got out. I hauled myself out at one of the other openings we’d found way back at the beginning. I barely recognized that section, but I knew it reconnected with the path we’d taken down and . . .”
“And did you find Ms. Yao?”
“No. I never saw her body.”
“Did Mr. Okeke join you?”
“No,” she said.
“Did you go back for him?”
“I waited. I waited for two days. But on the first day, the tremors got loud again. When they got quieter, I tried going back. The currents were different. The lines—the lines had gone.”
“And at that point what did you do?”
“I told you, I waited. I waited until I started worrying that I’d run out of food on the return climb. So I left the heavier gear there, and I loaded up with food, and I . . . I left.”
“When did you reestablish contact with the Oxsua surface team?”
“Two days later, past the other sump—that one hadn’t changed. I was climbing up the—the long fall, the one that’s almost a kilometer straight down. I told them what happened. A team met me halfway to the surface a few days after that.”
“Did anything else of note occur during that period?”
“I broke my collarbone, my arm, on a fall. A couple ribs, too. Kept—kept hearing the tremors. But nobody else died. I didn’t die.”
“Did you ever see what caused the tremors?”
“No.”
“Had any other part of the cave system changed?”
“I don’t know. Surface crew told me that they were getting different readings, so I guess something did. Are we done here?”
“I . . . Yes, I think we have everything we need. Thank you, Ms. Arasgain. Your compensation should be available by the end of the week. Oxsua Mining does apologize for the unforeseen risks of your expedition.”
Isolde looked up at the interviewer, then at the camera. She managed a thin, brittle mockery of a smile before the recording ended.
Chapter Twelve
Gyre shut down the video, numb, her breathing loud in the confines of her suit.
She’d heard of people dying in collapses caused by near misses with Tunnelers, or getting swallowed in a direct pass, but to think of Halian, crushed, cut in half because of that thing . . .
In the Tunneler path she’d walked through, some of the stone had been removed, but some of it had been compressed, smoothed out, shoved into a smaller space than it should have been. If a Tunneler had passed by and there had been a gap for the stone to go into—
She couldn’t think about it. This was no established mine, where controlled cave-ins sealed off the main chambers and somehow created a buffer wide enough to keep Tunnelers from sensing human activity. But compared to Isolde’s team, she was as safe as if she were back on the surface. For all Em’s faults, she’d taken every precaution. Gyre’s suit vented no heat save for the little generated by her headlamp. Her nutritional canisters gave off no scent.
She was safe.
Her hand hung in the air as she tried to bring herself to close the video, the list of all the rest. But she craved them too. If she went back to the earlier videos, she could see them laughing, see them smiling. Shake the emptiness inside her.
But then she thought of the look on Isolde’s face as she’d gone over exactly how every member of that team had died, including her husband—how dead she’d looked as she talked about her child—
She couldn’t watch another one of those. Em had watched all of them, over and over again. She was sure of it. They were all Em had left.
They’re why twenty-seven cavers had died.
Gyre stood up to stretch, the raft rocking beneath her, supply box at her side nudging against her shin. Still no sign of Em. Whatever she was looking into had taken her well over six hours now. She’s probably asleep, Gyre thought, then looked around the cenote. She needed a task, something to occupy her and shake off her nerves. Pursing her lips, she knelt down on the edge of the raft and placed her hand just above the water. “Sample, liquid,” she murmured, and watched the tube emerge from above her ring finger, watched the bead of liquid it retrieved pass up into her suit.
WATER. POTABLE. NEUTRAL ACIDITY. CANDIDATE FOR REPLACEMENT OF RECIRCULATION.
“Yeah, let’s do that,” she said, then fumbled for another minute to find the option to start the process. It required her to stick her arm down into the pool, and so she flattened out on her stomach, both arms hanging over the side. Chin propped on the edge of the raft, she peered down into the depths, thinking about the coming dive. Both Em and Isolde had said this one was simple, straightforward. Just long. She’d managed the first sump easily enough, but that was before. Before she knew Hanmei had drowned in a sump, and so had several of Em’s cavers, and the thought of diving again made her skin crawl.
She glanced up at the rim of the pool. Chances were good that Em would be back, but she had to consider the possibility that she’d be on her own for the foreseeable future. Something might have happened to
Em, or maybe she’d just given up and fled, now that her cave was compromised, now that one of her precious human sacrifices knew the truth of what was going on here. Now that Gyre knew she was being led by a woman who’d never been down here herself, who was chasing ghosts just like she was chasing her own mother. Em had at least been right about that part. They were the same.
If she didn’t hear from Em soon, she decided, she’d rest and then stage her return climb to the surface. Maybe it was better that way—if she could prove that Em had abandoned the expedition, couldn’t she countersue? There must be some avenue there, some option. Evidence of what Em had done was optimal, but stubbornness could only take her so far.
And she didn’t want to stay down here a second longer than she had to if it turned out she wasn’t the only person in this cave.
Lying prone, unable to see anything but the water below her, Gyre grew uneasy. She could feel eyes burning into her back, and she couldn’t force the fear away entirely this time. Fear twisted in her belly, helped along by Isolde’s stricken description of the Tunneler, of what it could do, and of the helplessness she’d felt down here.
Gyre had thought she never felt helpless below the surface, but now she could see that it was an act. Bravado. Necessary, too, because now that it was wavering, she couldn’t think straight. Her neck prickled again, and this time she jerked her head up as much as she could, trying to see above the lip of the hole.
Something’s there.
She stared for ten seconds, thirty—but, as ever, there was nothing. Her back screamed at her unnatural posture, and she grudgingly lowered down to the raft, arms still stuck below the surface as her old waste water was removed from the suit and fresh new water was brought in. She could barely feel it, a coolness spreading across the film that covered her skin. But when she took a sip of water, it was cold and clear and tasted like minerals. She took another sip, then another, then froze.
This time she could hear something from above the rim.
It was faint, a bare whisper, a distant popping that sounded like the fungal growths releasing more spores into the air. She looked up, squinting. Was the luminescent rain of powder growing thicker? She couldn’t tell for sure with the reconstruction on, and she craned her neck, fighting through the pain, searching from the far rim of the pool to just above her.
Isolde stared back down at her.
The shock of seeing another person, another face, stabbed through her. It was so much more real, so much closer than a face in a video. She scrambled to stop the exchange of water, the interface forcing her to look away for just a second. She was on her feet in another gasping, desperate breath, the raft rocking dangerously beneath her. The open battery cache almost slid into the water. She looked back up, rushing to the stone wall, ready to climb.
There was no one there.
Gyre stood, shaking, fingers clawing into the rock. Had it just been an afterimage from the videos? It would only take a few minutes to climb back up and search the cavern if she did it without anchors, but the longer she stood there, the raft bobbing and pitching beneath her feet from the waves she’d created, the more her shock turned to fear. Nobody was down here. Nobody could be down here. Em had been certain.
But there was the missing cache, still unaccounted for.
Something took it. Someone took it.
She made herself crouch and fumble the battery box closed, before pushing it off into the water, where it would be safe. Her eyes never left the rim, scanning for any hint of life.
It couldn’t be Isolde. Isolde was dead. Em had said that both her parents were dead. Gyre, her eyes still riveted on the spot along the rim where she’d seen the impossible face, searched for any kind of dossier on Isolde Arasgain. “Come on, Em. Come on.” There, a small obituary. Scanning the article, Gyre read that Isolde Arasgain was last seen nine years ago near the entry point for this cave. No sign of her, body or otherwise, had ever been seen again.
She didn’t die.
She’s down here.
But she had to be dead by now. She had to be. Nobody could survive down here for almost a decade, not through the season changes that made parts of this cave impassable, not without a suit that could use the food in the caches, not while Em was sending down caver after caver searching.
Searching for . . .
“Oh no, Em,” she said, her throat tight. “Don’t tell me I’m here to find her. Don’t tell me you’re hoping it was her who took the cache.”
Even as she said it, though, Gyre knew she would’ve hoped for the same thing. It was impossible, but what else could Em cling to? Sure, Gyre believed that Em wanted to say goodbye to her dad, too, but that couldn’t justify so many deaths, not even for Em. But if Isolde had simply left Em nine years ago, and walked back into this cave . . .
She watched the rim for another minute, her heart pounding, but Isolde’s face didn’t appear again. Swallowing thickly, Gyre keyed her external speaker. “Isolde? Anybody?”
Her voice echoed across the chamber. Her vision blurred from staring too hard without blinking. She closed her eyes, then cracked them open again immediately.
Nothing.
Hands shaking, she turned off the reconstruction. Maybe—maybe Em was back at her computer. Maybe Em had hidden the face. But in the darkness, the room lit only by the glow of mushrooms up around the rim, a faint, rocking layer of spores on the surface of the water, and her small headlamp, she was still alone. Her light barely reached the rim, but there were no faces, no hulking, lurking shadows. She turned her reconstruction back on. The brightly lit, desaturated shapes were familiar and welcome.
She could see five easy spots to place anchors. She could still climb up, see for herself that there was nobody else there. Or she could trust it, sleep here, wait for Em. But what if she was wrong—or right? That it wasn’t Isolde, but that something was down here, with her, waiting?
She needed to dive. It would be safer below the water. She pulled up her map; Camp Six was just through the large tunnel below the surface. The sump was longer than the first one had been, like Em had said it would be, and more convoluted than the simple U-bend she’d already faced, but there were no true branch points, and no tight squeezes. Em wouldn’t have let her swim it on her own, or press on without a rest, but Gyre couldn’t sit here without looking back at the lip of the cliff every twenty seconds. She sure as hell wasn’t going to be able to sleep.
She needed to move. She always went forward. She’d get through this sump, and then she’d be safe from—whatever it was. Isolde, an afterimage, or something else. Then she could regroup.
It would take her one step closer to the final test of the cave, but she had to risk it.
She checked her line and underwater anchor reserves, then plunged into the sump without giving herself time to argue.
* * *
Gyre swam. She swam for hours, at times clinging to her brightly lit reconstruction and at times turning it off in a panic, afraid that she was looking at a lie. They always matched, though, and she always retreated back to the reconstruction. She methodically drove her anchors, laid her line, and checked her readouts, afraid of seeing movement in the water behind her. But as time passed, and everything remained the same, she began wondering if she’d seen anything at all.
Except she’d heard the fungus bursting; she’d seen the spores thicken. Surely something had caused that. Which meant something had moved up there—or she was going mad.
Which is worse?
She swam through the tunnel, its widenings and narrowings, maneuvering around jutting rock and old stalactites that were slowly eroding as time crept on. There were small living things in the water, little fish and crawling arthropods, and they all scattered as she came close. These were the things that fed the fungus up by Camp Five, and they in turn fed on things so small she couldn’t see them.
The sump had one bell in it, a pocket where there was air, and she marked it on her line, just in case. A plastic arrow that gleamed
red on her reconstruction, pointing up. Then she moved on, the path turning slowly upward.
Finally, she broke the surface of the water. She anchored her line and cut herself free, then hauled herself onto the stone bank. There was no hard climb here, just a wide shoreline. The chamber she’d emerged into was full of rocky outgrowths, from both the sloping ceiling and the ground, forming an overlapping toothed maw, a complex pattern flattened into chaos by her colorless reconstruction. It made her uneasy, but she pushed through the feeling, changing her visual filters to restore some shadow, some sense of depth.
She paced around one of the nearby stalagmites, which had a base over a meter across. Another set of filaments grew here, a lichen instead of the fleshy masses behind her, no doubt nourished by the dripping water and the yearly flooding she expected came from the sump.
Her readout indicated that the lichen was emitting trace amounts of light, so she powered down her simulator. The light was faint, but there. It was different from the white fungus flowers of the upper chambers and the globular masses by Camp Five, casting a more ghostly blue glow from where it extended fanlike protrusions.
The lichen was beautiful, but she found she didn’t care at all. The wonder from the first encounter with the flowers was gone, replaced with leaden dread.
She checked her line to Em. Still closed. Just a little farther, then. Camp Six, and she’d be calm enough to settle down for the night.
Turning her head, she saw more of the glow farther down the chamber, growing incrementally brighter. She turned the simulation back on and made her way toward it, stretching her legs out as she went. She was tired, bone tired, and her head swam as she moved. The optical illusions and impossible geometry of the outcroppings danced and twined together in front of her, no matter how she fussed with her settings. She shook her head to try to untangle it all, then paused to change the simulation again, this time to show an approximation of the room as if she had her lamp on. It was harder to pull off, but a welcome alternative to actually turning her light on where somebody—anybody—might see it. In the more realistic colors and shadows, the space once more resolved into something comprehensible. The artificial light source in her reconstruction mixed with the overlay of the lichen’s luminescence made everything appear delicate. The lichen covered every surface around her, shimmering, and grew stronger toward the left-hand side of the cavern. Her marker for Camp Six was almost obliterated by the pulsing glow.
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