The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

  She couldn’t climb like this.

  “My arm,” she whispered.

  “It’s bad,” Em conceded. “But not—not irreversible. There’s a chance, once we get you back topside, that they’ll be able to restore some of it.”

  “It’s not that, Em. It’s not letting me climb. I need to climb!”

  “Gyre—”

  “It’s going to kill me,” she said, sinking onto her back, staring upward at the dancing ceiling. “I’m going to die; it’s going to kill me.”

  “It’s not.”

  “The suit’s going to kill me.”

  “It’s going to keep you alive. Gyre, listen to me. This is the shock talking.”

  “Shock. Shock, that’s going to kill me. If the arm dies, I die with it.”

  “You’ve still got blood flow,” Em said.

  “Then I’ll bleed out.” She couldn’t see, and her tears, hot as they were, were cooling quickly, so quickly, from the little tendrils of air that snaked into her suit. “Em, cut it off. Cut it off.”

  “No. Gyre, I’ve got you on antibiotics and blood-clotting agents. I can do this. You can do this. If I just give you pain medication, or anxiolytics—”

  “No drugs!” she cried. “I want to know when I’m dying. Don’t kill me, Em. Don’t kill me.” A prick of the needle, and she’d fade away. Em could put her down, end her pain, and Gyre would never know. She fought against the pull of her own exhaustion, her own pain. “No drugs.”

  “Gyre—”

  “Just cut it off. I won’t need the drugs.”

  “You’re not thinking straight—”

  “I don’t want to die!”

  “If I amputate your arm,” Em said, struggling to sound calm and failing, “you might never climb again. The suit will preserve it, but between the existing damage and the amputation, it will be useless. They won’t be able to reattach it. A responsive prosthesis, maybe, but—if you just wait, if you breathe through it—”

  “Do it! Listen to me! Listen to me, for once!” She fumbled through the options in her helmet desperately. If Em couldn’t do this for her, if Em wouldn’t, because she was too afraid to make a choice, then Gyre would do it for herself. She’d free herself. She’d stop the pain, and then she’d be able to keep moving, and she wouldn’t need the drugs. Em couldn’t kill her then.

  Her thoughts were jumbled, but she found it. The interface was complex and demanded actual anatomical knowledge that she didn’t possess. But she fumbled through it, queued it up.

  “This,” she said. “This. Do I have it right?”

  “Gyre, don’t do this. Just let me give you anxiolytics; we can talk this over—”

  “Is it right?”

  Em cried out, frustrated, then went quiet for one heartbeat, two. Gyre’s eyes bulged in her skull.

  “Yes,” she said at last. “But, Gyre, it’s going to—”

  She triggered the amputation. She felt pain, horrible pain, and sickness. Her stomach rebelled. She rolled over onto her belly, and she felt her left side swing up, weightless, unburdened.

  Then she vomited, and lost consciousness.

  * * *

  The rumbling of the Tunneler woke her.

  She surged up, surrounded by the stink of bile now inside her suit, the weight of her left arm tugging at her shoulder. But when she opened her eyes, she could see it, lying at her side. Still on the ground, unnaturally bent, the rigid wreckage of a limb. Where her left arm had been there was only a stump, covered in a dome of carbon polymer. The suit had sealed the wound completely, as if nothing had ever been there.

  She’d done it.

  Oh fuck. She’d done it. She’d been so afraid of death that she’d killed an entire piece of herself.

  Oh fuck. Em should have stopped her.

  Her stomach was a pit of agony as she sat up, and she could feel herself sweating. She felt cold, but the only gap remaining in her suit was the crack in her faceplate. She was running a fever. How long had she been out? Minutes? Hours?

  “Em?”

  “I’m here,” Em murmured.

  Why didn’t you stop me?

  Gyre couldn’t speak. Her throat felt dry and empty.

  “How are you feeling?” Em asked.

  “It hurts.”

  “I know,” Em said. “Are you ready to get up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t have much time. The cannula rupture isn’t responding to treatment the way I’d like. You need a doctor.”

  Gyre shivered.

  “And without that cannula, you can’t get any more calories or moisture into your system. With your injuries, you’ve got . . . you’ve got a day, tops. And that’s at the outside.”

  “Fuck,” Gyre whispered.

  “I know. And beyond that, there’s your battery. Your ports are jammed. You can’t swap out. The amputation and repairs took a lot of power.”

  Gyre choked back a sob. One day, nowhere to go, waiting to starve or stroke out or be consumed by the hunger of the cave.

  “But you bought yourself some time,” Em said. She sounded sick to her stomach. Pained. “The amputation was the right choice. Before, you only had four hours, six at the outside. A day’s enough. I’ve got a medical team ready and waiting for when you get out.”

  Gyre’s world slowed to a halt.

  She still thinks I’ll get out.

  She latched onto that detail and dragged herself to her feet. She was still in the pile of collapsed rubble, and that rubble was still vibrating beneath her feet, but at full height, she could see the far wall, where the ground was smoother, less disrupted.

  Slowly, she began staggering toward it.

  “But I should have medicated you beforehand, to lessen the shock and get you moving sooner.” Em was angry, viciously angry—at herself.

  Stop. Stop. If she was angry, she could shut down, she could leave. “Why didn’t you?”

  “You asked me not to.”

  Gyre paused, closing her eyes at the swell of tangled emotion in her throat. She wanted to scream at Em, wanted to hug her, wanted to lie down in her arms until the life slipped out of her.

  You asked me not to.

  They were ruined. They were broken.

  “Is there an exit?” she made herself ask.

  “I don’t know,” Em admitted. “I saw something that’s promising over by the far wall, but I can’t tell. Can you get there?”

  “Keep talking, and I’ll see,” she heard herself say as she struggled up the first small boulder.

  “What would you like me to talk about?” Her voice was so gummed with grief that Gyre could barely make out her words, but it was better than nothing, better than listening to the relentless thrum around her.

  “I don’t know.” She pushed herself into a gap between two rocks, smearing herself against them as she moved upward, sidling closer to their tops. As they spread apart, so did she. Then she jarred her arm, and she froze with a hiss, arching her back. It didn’t help.

  “Read a book, or something. Just keep talking. Please.”

  “I can’t read a book,” Em said. “Not while—Gyre, I can’t.”

  “Then recite the alphabet. Timetables for the spaceport. Anything. Anything.” If she lost that thread, that last hold, she was doomed. She was dead already.

  Em was silent for a moment. Gyre paused again in her ascent, bowing her head forward against the rock. She needed Em’s voice, needed it more than she could describe. Without Em, she wasn’t leaving this cave, alive or otherwise.

  And then Em cleared her throat again, and said, haltingly, “Yao Hanmei. Halian Foster. Julian Flores. Laurent Okeke. Guilherme Barbosa. Agnes Reynisdottir.”

  She kept up the list of the dead as Gyre shouted, forcing herself through the slot and out onto open ground. Beyond that point, she only had to edge around a few more rocks and fractures before she was up at the blocked top of the passage. She set her right hand on it, feeling it. It was still uneven, not like the smoo
th tunnel walls, but it looked and felt stretched, like the rock had been bowed out and its outcroppings had spread apart.

  “—Rose. Michael Doren. Francesca Clark,” Em continued.

  Gyre looked along the wall to the left, sagging against the stone. Her head spun. It was so hard to keep from drifting, to think. But there—there. A crack in the rock, into the bowed-out wall. She staggered toward it and found that it was big enough to get her head through.

  She was looking into a Tunneler’s abandoned path.

  “Em,” she said softly as she pulled her head back and sank to her knees.

  “Is that . . . ?”

  “It’s another path,” she whispered.

  Em laughed helplessly. “This is—you could still—Gyre,” Em said, excitement building in her voice. “It heads back toward Camp Four. It might come close enough to connect.”

  The tears came in a bitter rush, and she collapsed forward, resting her forehead against the rock just by the crevice. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make that climb, not with it leading only to her death. To Jennie Mercer. To the cliffside.

  She shook her head, the suit creaking as it dragged across rock. “I can’t make it up the shaft,” she mumbled.

  “No, you can’t.”

  It wasn’t an option. It looked like one; she could keep moving forward, the same as always. But it ended at the same place staying here did.

  “But, Gyre,” Em said softly, “if you can get there, somebody could make it down the shaft. I could make it down.”

  Hope blossomed painfully in her chest, but it couldn’t push up through the waves of desolate horror crashing down onto her, or the distant noise, a rumble instead of a throb, audible instead of tangible, that still echoed through her bones.

  “I can feel it, Em. The Tunneler is still here. It could collapse the chamber. It might not be navigable, even if I can get there.”

  “We don’t have any other choice. We go fast, Gyre, make it to Camp Four, and I’ll get a team and come down and get you. Stay with me. You just have to get to Camp Four.”

  “How long until sepsis sets in?”

  Em was silent.

  “You said I had a day on food. A day on the battery. Less, you said probably less. We don’t have enough time,” Gyre said bitterly. “I’m dead already.”

  She stared at her arm, too far across the unstable chamber for her to risk going to. But she wanted to. She wanted to hold the first piece of her to die. Apologize to it. To herself.

  “This cave wants me dead,” she whispered.

  “Gyre, listen to me,” Em said, desperation fracturing her voice. “Your mother. Picture your mother. The company she works for now, they invest in technology like mine. Imagine, walking into a boardroom in your suit. Imagine taking off your helmet. Imagine staring your mother in the eye and daring her to say something, say anything. You’d be magnificent. You’d be powerful. And then you could walk away from her, in turn. All you have to do is get to Camp Four. I’ll do the rest.”

  She could see it, but it all felt so far away, so impossible. Gray and wrong and unknowable. She wanted it to be true, so badly, wanted to feel Em at her side, wanted to feel powerful.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  She shook her head, her shoulders trembling.

  Em didn’t say anything for a moment, and all Gyre could hear was the rumble and her own sniveling, seizing sobs. Then her suit let out a low whine as the servos and supports tried to force her up.

  “Get on your feet,” Em said low in her ear, her voice cold. “And keep moving. You are going to Camp Four, caver, and I am going to bring you home. You signed a contract, Gyre.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “In a life-and-death situation, you agreed to defer to me. So do it.”

  Em’s clinical tone, so familiar but such a contrast to their last week together, broke through her panic. She pushed herself upright again. She forced herself through the crevice and out into the wide passage. She set off at as fast a pace as she could manage, staggering along the gently curving floor.

  But she was unsteady on her feet. She pitched from wall to wall, the floor tilting beneath her. She wouldn’t make it. Couldn’t make it—

  “Injecting anti-emetics and a local anesthetic,” Em said. She knew exactly what Gyre needed, using the contract to shore up them both. Gyre nodded, and felt the gel around her skin shudder, change, and a tiny bloom of fire flared by the roiling pit that was her gut. She breathed through it until the pain had faded and the tunnel stopped spinning.

  “Thank you,” she whispered.

  Em smiled. “Keep moving, Gyre. Fast as you can.”

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Her lungs and throat burned, and her muscles protested her every move. Her body was slick with sweat, the gel coating her skin too overused and damaged to properly compensate. It gaped from her flesh, allowing blisters to form, bruises to bloom and swell until each step was a struggle. She had been staggering along the smooth passage for hours now, feeling her time tick down, her body break and fall apart. The monotony of the passage was disrupted by her cracked screen, and from a damaged sensor that caused the reconstruction ahead of her to flicker and shift. Reality danced and swam just like her thoughts did. But Em still had access to most of her feeds, and every few minutes, she’d confirm for Gyre that she was moving in the right direction.

  That the Tunneler was far enough away that she was safe.

  “Gyre, stop. On your right.”

  She staggered to a halt, then twisted, looking. There was a crack in the stone wall, like the crack she’d entered through, like the crack above the shallow lake. It was hard to see, and she squinted, then reached out and touched the rock, her hand filling in the details where her display couldn’t. It was wide enough to fit her, wider than the break she’d entered through.

  “Go through,” Em said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “As sure as I can be. Go.”

  Gyre bit back a fevered argument. Em was clearer-headed than she was. All Gyre needed to do was follow directions and rely on her body to know how to move.

  But she hesitated.

  “Gyre?”

  “I’m afraid,” she whispered.

  So am I. She could hear Em’s voice saying those words, but the real woman hesitated. Gyre crumpled against the wall.

  “It’s okay,” Em said at last, gentler than Gyre could’ve imagined. “It’s okay, I know. Just a little more. Go through, come closer to me.”

  She dragged herself through the opening, dreaming of Em waiting for her on the other side. Instead, a cavern stretched out before her. To her right was a spit of smooth ground; to her left there was a great expanse of space where the floor dropped out and plunged into nothingness. A great font of water, larger by half than the waterfall on the way to Camp Four, crashed down into it from the far side of the gap, and below the fountain, her undulating readout showed a bare breadth of rock and more fractures in the wall.

  Scanning the chamber, she looked for any sign of Camp Four, but nothing looked familiar.

  She wanted to scream.

  “Are you sure this is it?” she asked instead, shivering with exhaustion.

  “Head inside, about five meters, then turn to your right,” Em said.

  Gyre eased into the cavern. Her gaze darted to every nook in the rock walls, searching for faces, but none presented themselves. Maybe, just maybe, the hallucinations were at an end. Maybe her brain had moved on. Maybe the cave had given up.

  To her right was a small opening, just large enough for a child to fit through, but not for her. The gap was between several boulders, not into smooth stone, and a marker Em set up glowed down inside of it.

  “I can’t fit,” she mumbled, her willpower wavering.

  “The rocks around it aren’t structural. I think. It widens right on the other side; it’s just a small collapse. If you could just move them—”

  “With one arm?” she bit out through gritted teeth.


  “Use your legs. That’s the path. The computers don’t lie. We’re taking it, and we’re going to get through it.”

  We. Gyre closed her eyes a moment, choked down a hysterical laugh, then looked around and approached the pile. She stared at the rocks blankly for a moment before she forced herself to concentrate, inspecting how the rocks sat on one another. The top bit she was able to wedge her right shoulder against and heave off, despite the howling pain it triggered in her gut. The stone crashed to the ground, and panic leaped in her chest as she remembered Camp Two and the falling boulder that had nearly killed her. Remembered the grinding roar of the tunnel collapse. She staggered back, the motion sparking a fresh blaze of agony in her stomach, distant through the anesthetic but worrying all the same.

  Em said nothing, and so Gyre chose to believe everything was okay. Em was right. She had no other option.

  Settling awkwardly onto her back, she placed her feet on the bigger stones at the bottom and pushed.

  It took over fifteen minutes of grunting effort, with Em encouraging her every time she flagged, for her to dislodge enough of the rocks for her to get through. When it was done, she remained on her back, staring straight up. Her chest burned. Her belly felt hot and swollen, even if she couldn’t feel the pain. How much longer did she have? Hours? Minutes? The chamber was spinning, wavering, and she thought that it couldn’t be much farther off.

  “Gyre?”

  Gyre focused on the sound of her voice. Her low, sweet, shivery voice. It was all she had left. “I need to rest,” Gyre mumbled. “Just a little bit. Don’t leave. Don’t leave.”

  “I’m here. Just don’t fall asleep.”

  “I won’t. Just . . . just keep talking. Read the names again. I need something to listen to that’s not me. And can you cut the reconstruction? It’s making me feel sick. I can’t think straight with it on.”

  Em made a sympathetic, small sound. “Of course,” she said, and the reconstruction blinked out, replaced with the warm, natural glow of her headlamp. She tensed at first, but the darkness welcomed her. It was less to keep track of. Less to think about. She sagged in relief, on the edge of tears.