The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

“How can you think this is worth it?” she asked in disbelief. “That’s my father down there, with three other good people.” “You’ve killed twenty-seven other people trying to get to a bunch of corpses! And in seven years you haven’t gotten close once! And you think that’s something I can accept because those corpses belonged to good people?”

“This is fucked,” she said slowly, as calmly as she could. “You’re a goddamn murderer, Em. There’s no excuse, no reason that anybody else would ever accept. You’re not trying to get money; you’re not trying to save people. All you’re doing is trying to change somebody else’s past. Living in somebody else’s pain.” Em’s face flushed with fury. “So what, then—are you going to turn around now? You didn’t turn back when you found out how many were dead, when you thought it was my team that had died down there. That I’d been down there. What’s different?” What’s different? Knowing Em was ignoring reality to try to save people who didn’t need saving. Knowing that Em could never succeed, that this would never end. Knowing that Em didn’t see how pointless and horrific this was. “I’m leaving,” Gyre said, and stood up.

“You’re a fucking monster,” she managed. “I’m aware,” Em said, and then her face disappeared from view.

If she’d just turned back at Camp Two, or at Four, she’d already be back in the sun. Fuck, what had she been thinking? Get the money, that was what she’d been thinking. Find a way to blackmail or bully Em into paying her, and then leave as soon as she’d accomplished that. But that had been based on Em being rational. This wasn’t rational. This was madness.

One week down, and she was already coming close to tears over hearing laughter, over seeing faces. Other cavers talked about this, but she had been so sure she wouldn’t care. She cared.

That was the look of somebody resigned to being the monster they knew they were.

“And you?” “I just sat there mostly. How do you . . . What do you say? When you’ve lost two people in one day? When you don’t know if you’ll make it out, but you have your six-year-old daughter waiting for you to come home? Nothing would have helped.”

“I’m not appreciating the interrogation,” Em said, her tone warning—but not detached, nor outright angry. Baby steps toward being a person, Gyre thought. Then: I don’t need her to be a person. But she wanted her to be.

“I’m not a complete monster,” Em said once more, her voice quiet. “Just most of one.”

Em was an experienced handler. So far, she hadn’t led Gyre astray in any physically dangerous way outside of the incident on the Long Drop. This expedition shouldn’t be killing this many people. This cave is cursed. Beneath her feet, the sump roiled, ready to strip her lines and bash her against rock. But Isolde had made it out. It was manageable. It was doable. Why couldn’t anyone do it?

The problem, as far as Gyre could see it—aside from this being a suicide mission to begin with—was that half of any success was luck.

If Em could decide Gyre’s safety was more important than an answer, what did that mean?

“Hey—we could be close to the end. Yeah?” “Yeah.” “Trust me. I’ve never died on a mission yet.” Em snorted. “You’ve never been on an actual mission.” “Yeah, but I also haven’t died on one.”

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?

As she watched, Hanmei took a step backward, then another. Fragments of her fell away, eliding into the rock around her as she left Gyre’s sonar range. And then she was gone, as impossibly as she had arrived.

It had been an artifact, a misfired synapse, an over-interpretation of a wavering of a signal. She’d been so afraid of the computer hiding things from her, but was this the alternative? Without Em to help manage the flow of data, would she keep seeing the impossible? Hanmei had died nineteen years ago. She closed her eyes and tried to imagine Em’s voice. Not real, not real, all of this is normal.

No body no crime baby!

And then she felt it, that same feeling she’d had back in the Tunneler path. Not quite the feeling of being watched; instead, that feeling of forgetting something, of ignoring something important. A tug, a longing that didn’t feel like hers, pulling at her spine. It was like a whisper against her ear, a distant cry that begged her to come back, come home.

Longing for Em. Beautiful, selfish, cruel Em—who she needed desperately, who she relied on. It was everything she’d never wanted. She’d been weak. She’d traded her independence, the only thing that had kept her safe for so many years, for the company of a monster.

And what would they think of her, the silent, watching dead, who she’d promised she would help, only to witness her back off out of terror?

Would Jennie have understood? Had she felt the same way, longing for Em’s voice as she crawled beneath her shelf to die? Had Adrian Purcell cried out for her while he lay crushed beneath th...

There was nothing there. There was never anything there. It was always there.

She wished Em had loaded some kind of antipsychotic into the suit. Maybe then this wouldn’t have happened.

She thought of her mother then, of the dossier still waiting unread, of her mother happy and healthy and so far away from this hell. Then she grabbed the image of emerging onto the surface, walking into the bar closest to her home, bragging and getting her pick of women. And then she pictured Em, pictured herself slapping her or kissing her, anything that might let her imagine herself alive after she was out of this cave. But all the images boiled away the instant she conjured them, and the more she tried, the more exhausted she felt. They were so far away, untouchable, unobtainable. Her only option was the simplest one. She had to go on because there was no other choice but to lie down and die, and Gyre wouldn’t give anybody that last bit of satisfaction.

She couldn’t risk the battery usage, and she wasn’t ready to face Em now that she knew about the recording. There would be no consolation, no gentleness. She might not even answer. The thought almost broke her.

. I just wanted to tell you, in case I don’t get to talk to you again—” In case I don’t get to talk to anybody ever again— That what? I’m sorry for taking steps to protect myself and keep you from doing this to somebody else? I’ve been fantasizing about you, I hate what you’ve done to me, but I can’t stop needing you, I’m so angry, I’m so sorry, I wish we’d met some other way, I wish you weren’t crazy, I wish I wasn’t an idiot?

Dwelling was pointless, though, and she stepped out of the tunnel mouth and back onto the ledge proper. Isolde’s face stared back at her. She shouted in panic and fumbled with the rope, desperately trying to clip in. She had to get away. She had to— Not real. She stopped, panting, her eyes fixed on the apparition. Isolde’s pale face was drawn and exhausted; she was older, perhaps, than she had been in the video. She was also hard to see, doused in shadows. Gyre stared at her, waiting for her to vanish like Hanmei had, but she remained solid. Real. Impossibly real. Gyre reached out. Isolde retreated, backing away, away. Past where the ledge should have given out. And then Gyre blinked, and there was nothing. Gyre scrambled to the far end of the ledge, switching back to her reconstruction and peering over the rim. Nothing. There was nothing at all.

this is freaking me out!!!! can’t remember the last time a horror book managed that for me

With one jerking motion, she slashed across the line. It gave way, and aside from a quiet slither as it passed through the air close to her, there was no noise at all. Even two minutes later, Gyre holding her breath nearly the whole time, there was no thud of a body hitting the ground.

“I’m here,” Em said, when Gyre’s stomach had quieted and her chest had stopped seizing. The suit shifted again, just a little, just enough that it felt as if there was a hand on her shoulder. Without her faceplate, Gyre couldn’t see her, but it didn’t matter. The sight of her meant almost nothing compared to the feeling, undeniable and real, that she was there, at Camp Six, holding Gyre. It didn’t matter that she was using Gyre’s prison to do it, or that Gyre’s skin remained untouched, or that Gyre still had to climb out. There, in that moment, the most important fact was that Em was with her.

“If I’d lost you,” Em whispered, “I don’t know that I could have gone on.” Gyre stared at the small image of her. “Oh.”

But I don’t know that I could have gone on wrapped itself around her heart, nestled in her chest. She meant something. She was different from the other cavers. The warmth she felt was part rage on those other cavers’ accounts, but a lot of it was simply happiness at being seen. At being wanted.

Angry that after all this, Gyre wanted desperately for Em to have been a better person.

It was just water. They were just bodies. Her suit would keep her safe.

“You’re a monster,” Gyre agreed. Em’s flinch brought her no joy, no vindication. “But a human monster. People are selfish. You are. I am. Humans are selfish. It’s what we do. You loaded the gun, but Jennie Mercer, Michael Doren, me—we all pulled the trigger. We all decided the risk was worth it. You never forced us.”

I just took advantage of how this world drives people to do horrible things just to survive. I just—played the game, from the winner’s chair.

Gyre, I thought I was smart. I thought I was brilliant, that I was perfectly using my resources to chase this goal, and I never—the goal was the problem, wasn’t it? I solved the question as best I could, but I never stopped to ask myself if I should solve it.”

I want to stop running. I think I can stop running now.” “There’s not much left to run from.” “There’s you.”

And her face, her face had lost the last traces of humanity. It wasn’t just the eyes that had sunken and decayed now. Her cheeks had caved in, her mouth hung open, her tongue was swollen. Better than being trapped in there, Gyre told herself, but the thought was hollow. It had been so clear to her at the time, that this was dignity.

“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.

Em had been clear: the only thing unique about Gyre was the combination of her failures.

When Gyre had been ready to follow Isolde, Em had been there to carry her back into the sun. When Em had been forced to see the full horror of everything she’d done, Gyre had seen the humanity in her. They had broken each other open down in the dark, and now that their wreckage was splayed out in the light, Gyre recognized every inch of Em, and Em knew every inch of her.