Em began to hum, instead of offering any useful input.
Gyre clenched her jaw and began walking again.
Her throat was dry, and she sipped at her straw, eyeing her display. With terrain so easy to traverse and so unchanging, maybe she could split her attention, find a distraction from the way her thoughts refused to flow in order, from the way the skin along her spine crawled from seemingly nothing. But her only options were videos of the team and the dossier on her mother. Just her mother’s name was enough to make her chest contract, and she closed the viewer.
Later. I’ll look at it later.
Once I’m safe again.
Em continued to hum, and said nothing.
Another hour crawled by as she continued walking to nowhere, her thoughts turning murky and thick. I’ll just be even farther from her when I die, is all.
The terrain remained unchanged, step by step. She barely looked anymore, barely saw at all, her eyes unfocused. Slowly, though, she began to notice small whisper-thin dots, fragments shifting along the right edge of her vision, and she turned, slowed.
Small specks glided past her, barely more than a ripple on the ground until she turned her full attention on them. They were the same density as the surrounding stone, or close to it, and her reconstruction couldn’t always differentiate them. At first there were only a few, and then more, and then a great wave of skittering motion. Gyre took a step back, toward the curved wall, fixated on them. Insects, all of them, some kind of tiny bug, and all going down, down, down, back the way she’d come. Her heart quickened. Her throat closed up. She hadn’t seen any sign of motile life since Camp Five with its tiny fish and crabs, and there could be nothing for them here. Nothing to eat, nothing to find. There wasn’t even lichen growing on the walls.
Yet they flooded past her, crawling over her boots.
Em said nothing, only hummed.
The flow began to thin, and then they were gone.
Gyre swallowed and started to walk again. She thought of asking Em if she had seen them, but she was too afraid to know the answer. If they had been real, wouldn’t Em have reacted? But if they weren’t, wouldn’t Gyre’s sudden pause have worried her? Wouldn’t Em have comforted her? And instead, it was just that droning. Not a song, not music, just an unending, rhythmless tune.
“Stop humming,” Gyre snapped, when she couldn’t stand it anymore.
“I’m not,” Em said.
“You’ve been humming for the last two hours.” Gyre shook her head, frustrated, then froze.
There was no humming.
But there was a ringing in her ears, soft and barely noticeable. It sounded a lot like Em’s humming, but not quite as real as the other woman’s sigh at the other end of the line. Gyre couldn’t help but drink up that sound.
“Probably a stress hallucination,” Em said.
“A hallucination,” Gyre repeated. She slowed, then stopped, leaning against one of the walls. She stared up at the stretch of tunnel before her, no different from the one behind. “No. I’m not hallucinating.” Not the sound—she hadn’t hallucinated the sound. The bugs, maybe, but not the sound. She couldn’t be hallucinating it all.
“A response to the environment, maybe. Tinnitus, in the absence of other input.”
“I heard you. The whole time. Why weren’t you talking to me? Keeping me occupied? If it’s a response to the environment—”
“This is normal, for what it’s worth,” Em responded, her voice carefully controlled to be comforting, gentle. “Given your circumstances.”
“Do you mean the isolation, the lack of food, or the certainty of death?” Gyre pictured Isolde’s face hovering in the darkness, then glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to see something—different. But there was only the unchanging, gentle slope. The same curved walls. “There’s nothing normal about this, Em!”
Em said nothing.
Gyre scowled and turned her attention back to the path.
“Have you heard or seen anything else?”
Your mother. Gyre forced the thought away. It had been the spores, hadn’t it? Except . . . Em had said that there had been no trace of any contamination in her suit. No indication that it had ever affected her at all.
Gyre swallowed thickly. “Shut up.”
“I need to know, for your safety.”
“My safety. Good one. No—I’m fine. There’s not much we can do if I’m not, anyway, right?” The back of her neck prickled; Gyre ignored it. The bugs had gone down, back to the sump, and for a moment it was like she wanted to follow them. Like they were drawing her back, plucking at her skin, her nerves.
“Medication,” Em suggested. “A longer rest.”
“I don’t want to sleep in here. And I definitely don’t want you dosing me anymore.”
Em turned on the video feed again and met Gyre’s eyes. She was exhausted herself, unwashed, her curls picked apart into frizz. “No drugs. But sleep—I’ll keep watch for you,” she said. How she sounded so confident, so in control, despite how destroyed she looked, Gyre couldn’t make sense of.
Because I’m hallucinating?
“At the very least, you should eat,” Em said.
Gyre shook her head. “I need to conserve rations. Walking isn’t hard.”
“But the sump was, and stress is.” Em shifted, her shoulder rising as if she were lifting a hand. Then she stopped, hesitated, grimaced, and lowered it again. What had she been about to do? Introduce more drugs? Force Gyre to sit down? Or maybe Gyre was just imagining the gesture.
Whatever it was, she hadn’t done it, Gyre reminded herself.
“Please,” Em said. “Please, for me?”
For her.
Gyre wanted to laugh, to shout. To cry. The tears were already there, waiting. “I don’t want to do anything for you right now,” she whispered, but she sank to her knees all the same. The last thing she wanted was to serve at Em’s will, but at the same time, it was such an easy win. Follow the command, feed her growling, taut stomach. If she followed every command Em laid out, wouldn’t it take her out of here?
Possibly not. But food was food. And she wasn’t ready to die yet.
“Gyre,” Em said softly.
“I know,” she said. “Stress. Sorry.” She loosened a canister from its slot. Two down, but she still had enough to last her the better part of a week, and Em was right. She’d need her strength. “Stop being so nice,” Gyre added.
Em’s lips tightened into a thin line, and she looked away. “I can do that,” she said after a moment. “But I—”
“I don’t want your guilt,” Gyre said. You caring is why I made the decision to go on. “Just—just treat this like it’s part of the expedition.”
“I thought you wanted me to be afraid. Or to be talking to you.”
“I don’t know what I want you to be! Just not . . . not this.” She groaned and let her head fall back against the wall, then fumbled with the port at her side. Started her meal. Shuddered. “I don’t know.”
“I almost lost you,” Em murmured.
“You still might.”
Em’s expression was stricken as Gyre looked at the little picture of her in the corner of her screen. She winced. Turned off the video feed.
She didn’t want to be feeling any of this.
Think about the pseudocave, she told herself. Think about the first time you almost died. She’d been terrified then, too, but she’d been giddy. Pumped up on adrenaline, excited to fight. It hadn’t lasted her all the way out, but it had gotten her up, kept her moving long enough. If she could just grasp on to that again . . .
“I’m not going to die,” Gyre murmured.
And then she sat back and waited for her feeding to finish.
Chapter Seventeen
She walked for five more hours, the incline staying shallow enough that there were only two occasions where she put bolts in to scale sudden pitches, too smooth to climb without a rope. Still, by the end of the day, she was exhausted and weak, br
ain fried by the constant evenness of her environment. It was as if she could feel the thrum of a Tunneler on some back channel of her brain, an echo off the stone it had bored through as it passed. Without input, her brain seemed bent on creating its own stimulation. There were no more skittering insects, but she had songs stuck in her head that sounded like they came from far away, and the movement of her hand at the edge of her display became a distant figure more than once. It wasn’t constant, but it was relentless.
And then the feeling of being watched came back.
It had been a prickle, a crawling in the back of her mind just after the bugs had passed her, making their way down to the sump. Now it was a bone-deep dread, a sickness in her stomach. It strengthened in waves, and the more she fought it, the stronger it grew. She felt it like a presence, like a tug at her center, like she was forgetting something she shouldn’t be. If she just turned around, she would see them: Isolde, or some other stranger—perhaps Hanmei, waterlogged, or Jennie, legs broken into impossible angles—waiting for her. It didn’t matter that there were no hiding places in this passage, that it was impossible for anybody to have followed her. Down here, she could imagine them emerging from the blankness of the walls, as phantom-thin as the insects.
She clamped down with as much willpower as she could muster, refusing to let herself look over her shoulder or signal to Em in any way that she was losing her grip on reality.
Maybe something in her suit was breaking down. Maybe Em had been wrong about Camp Five’s spores, and they’d gotten through the suit’s filtration. Just because they hadn’t been in her bloodstream by the time Em had checked didn’t mean they hadn’t done irreparable damage. She could see it now, scans of her brain marked by great black holes where the spores had eaten away at her. Or maybe the chemicals in that final, horrible sump had started some slow rotting of the suit itself. She tried to remember if Em had gone into detail about the tests she’d run. Had she tested Gyre’s blood? She couldn’t remember the feeling of blood being taken, but would she have even noticed? Em had said she was clear, that she was fine, but . . . Can I trust what she said?
Can I trust that she even said it?
Gyre pictured the commands that would take her to the medical readouts in her suit. She could look at the log, look at how much of each drug was left, look at test results—if Em had run them. If she hadn’t scrubbed them.
But she was too afraid to look. If Em had run the tests, if it hadn’t been the spores, then Gyre had seen Isolde, and that meant that Gyre could be sensing something real. Something impossible, following just behind her.
She made camp after seven hours of mindless walking. Em had tried starting conversations several times over the course of the day, but Gyre had only grunted in reply, too nervous that her unease and growing panic would seep into anything she said, too afraid that what she was hearing wasn’t Em at all. It had made the climb feel like an eternity.
“It looks like there’s a change up ahead,” Em said as Gyre sat back, her head against the rock, staring at nothing and wondering if she wanted to use up one of her remaining meals.
Real? Not real? She didn’t lose anything for looking, she decided. Heart thudding in her chest, Gyre turned her head toward whatever it was Em was seeing. Her reconstruction showed only the curved walls of the tunnel. She hesitated a moment, then took a leap, desperate for interaction. “Don’t see it,” she said.
“It’s not clear enough for the computer to shunt it to you,” Em said. “Lots of uncertainty. Can you get closer?”
A new terror bubbled up into her throat, threatening to choke her as she staggered to her feet and took two lurching steps up the passage. Not clear enough for the computer to shunt it to you. How often did that happen? She’d thought about Em deliberately hiding things from her, but not about the computer algorithms making sure she never saw confusing things. If the computer knew another person couldn’t be down there, would it hide movements? Signs?
Computers didn’t work like that, she reminded herself. Not clear enough meant that it was far away, or at a weird angle. There wasn’t anything lurking just at the limits of her sonar.
There couldn’t be.
“There’s a branch-off,” Em said, interrupting her thoughts. “It could lead back into the main system.”
“Or nowhere.” Gyre straddled a deep crack in the rock, then stopped, staring down.
It was the first change in the tunnel all day.
The reconstruction expanded, mapping out all the gaps and dips and uneven patches of stone until, finally, she reached a jagged gap in the rock. It was a drop through the bottom left of the tunnel, out into a large cavern. Much of the floor below appeared to be covered in water, but across the cavern there looked like there were a few accessible banks. Large, divot-topped, tiered pillars stretched toward the ceiling from the water.
Gyre braced her hands on either side of the opening, staring. She knew those pillars. She knew that water. It called to her, and she nearly fell to her knees.
“Is that—”
“It’s not the lake by Camp Six,” Em said.
Her heart fell and frustrated tears welled up behind her eyes with fierce pressure. She fought it down. Wrong, wrong, this is all wrong.
“But I might know where you are now,” Em continued cautiously. “I’ll need you to go down there for a better look, though. If it’s where I think you are, I can get you back to the surface. And there should be older caches nearby.”
The surface.
She could barely think, picturing the sun, the cracked soil, her tiny cot. The surface. If she climbed down there, if she made her way back up to the cave entrance, it would all be over. Screw Jennie and the others, screw trying to fix this. Screw whoever came down next—that had never been her responsibility.
She was the only responsibility she’d ever had.
Gyre backed away from the crack in the stone. “Should I eat, then?” she rasped. Her voice sounded strained, barely human. She cleared her throat. “Before I rappel down there?” She didn’t like the thought of using one of her few remaining rations, not so soon after having two others, but the less she ate, the weaker she’d get. She couldn’t be weak. And Em’s answer should give her a good idea of how safe Em thought she really was. Hold off, and Em was worried. Go ahead, and everything would be fine.
“I think so,” Em said.
Everything will be fine.
Gyre settled down heavily, gut uncramping at Em’s permission. When she reached for her ration, she realized her hand was shaking. She could feel herself swaying on a thin tightrope, clinging to the assumption that she wouldn’t die, while understanding that she almost certainly would. Too much confidence, and the balance would fall apart. Too much cynicism and she’d give up.
But that cynicism felt so good, so right, so inevitable. She was fucked, and she wanted to languish in it.
Her eyes went back to the crack. Or, she thought. Or we keep pushing, and I fall apart later.
That was what the Gyre from before the sump would have done. What she would have done.
She seated the canister into the port on her side, then let her head drop forward into her hands. The sludge pushed through the cannula and into her gut, and as it flowed, she became aware of every centimeter of her skin covered by the barely there whisper of sticky, body-warm gel. The electrodes coming from her flesh, her scalp; the unrelenting structure of the suit polymers and machines; the distance between her cheeks and her palms. She fought the urge to take her helmet off or rip the canister from her side. Each feeding was getting harder to bear, half because of fear and hunger, half because of this growing physical irritation. She couldn’t tell if it was only in her head, or if something was beginning to go wrong. Her skin itched. Her joints hurt.
She wanted to be done.
“Gyre.”
“Don’t want to talk,” she muttered.
Her video feed blinked on, and Gyre stared at it, too tired to turn it off. Em looked pris
tine. She’d changed her clothing at some point, and her hair was pulled back neatly at the nape of her neck. “You’ve gone past stressed. You sound terrified.”
“I’m trying to ignore that,” Gyre said, scowling. Em couldn’t know. If Em knew, she’d give up on her, write her off—as good as dead, another failure.
“I’ve seen this before, once the shock starts to fade. Once you start to feel trapped.”
“I am trapped!”
Nothing.
“I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed,” Gyre muttered. “I need to get out of this stupid suit, I need to see the fucking sun.”
Em rested her chin on her fist, gazing at the screen that Gyre assumed had her face on it. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was just a bland readout of her hormone levels. Cortisol high. Adrenaline high. Was there even a camera inside her helmet, or was she just a static headshot in a dossier?
“I need you to concentrate on only the next step in front of you,” Em said. “I’ll manage your resources; I’ll keep you going. I’m going to get you out of there—myself, if I have to.”
Em, climbing down into this hellhole. The thought was perversely pleasing.
“If down there is where you think it is,” Gyre said, “how bad is the climb out?” Em was right. If she focused on the next steps, one at a time, they’d be manageable. Tasks she knew she could do. One foot in front of the other. She rubbed at the surface of her helmet, wishing she could massage her temples through the polymer.
Em hesitated, then conceded, “Bad. Part of it is through an active waterfall. There’s also only one cache you’re going to be able to reach easily. It’s half empty, and has been sitting there a long time. Not everything will be usable. But it’s still rations, a few batteries, more line.”
Gyre grimaced. “Will it even still be there?”
The Luminous Dead Page 18