The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

She’d heard somewhere that pride came before the fall. But she wasn’t going to fall. She was going to climb.

But that had been based on Em being rational. This wasn’t rational. This was madness.

She had never been down here. She had killed twenty-seven people chasing nothing. She’d just been a voice in their ears, the promise of coming topside once more. Whispering them to their deaths.

She’d gotten lucky, in a sense. With all the lies she’d told to get here, she could have been handed something she couldn’t handle—climbs that were beyond her ability, teams that expected her to be half scientist, half explorer, an entirely submerged expedition. Instead, all she had to deal with was her now-absent, lying handler and an impossible death curse.

Gyre’s mind raced through the possibilities, conjuring images of herself being wedged into tight crevices, unable to free herself, waiting until her battery ran out of power—or of the crevice closing on her in a snap, flowing around her as the Tunneler passed nearby.

“I’m saying I’m not doing this for the money. I’m doing this because I have to. And at least, for every suit and scanner I help perfect by field-testing this way, even if my caver dies, ten, twenty, maybe more will survive, will get the chance to use the system like my mother did. When I pack up, maybe it’ll turn out that my net impact was nothing. I know that lives aren’t some finite value, I know that better than anybody, and ten don’t outweigh one, just like my mother and father don’t outweigh the—the twenty-seven people I’ve led to their deaths since. There just isn’t math for that. Can’t be.” She looked upward, brow furrowing with a hint of pain, then continued.

That calculus was as raw as Isolde’s pain in that exit interview, and Gyre couldn’t fight the feeling of Em’s grief being a living thing, as inexorable as a Tunneler but with a beating heart, a pulse that throbbed and curdled in the vein.

Good thing I didn’t let go, she thought. Then: I’m as far as any of them ever made it. She wasn’t sure if she was savagely proud or overwhelmingly scared. It was all running together.

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.

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.

She needed to shut Em out long enough for her to get down to the ground, check the whole chamber. She needed Em out of her suit, her display, her head. It was like Em lived there now, deep in the recesses, in the folds and valleys of gray matter, a voice riding shotgun in her brain. Maybe it hadn’t been stress, back in the tunnel. Maybe when she’d felt that sick sensation that she was being watched, it was because she could hear Em’s breathing, the faint sound of her shifting at her desk. Em, always there but not there, necessary but ultimately useless, so useless. Worse than useless. Dangerous.

There was a sloping passage leading down from the far right side of the chamber, and she followed it, fighting the urge to look over her shoulder every five steps. Her helmet trapped the sound of her breathing, of her snorting phlegm back into her sinuses, of her heart in her ears. She could almost hear words in the noise, words in her own voice. Exhortations, accusations, her thoughts twisting into audible reality. 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. She clapped her hands over her ears only to hear them bang off her helmet. Shit.

Again and again, she found new paths, a honeycomb impossible to map without tools. She tried to mark her way, eliminated false starts, pushed onward. She moved blindly through the warren, drawing closer to death with every step, every tick of her battery indicator, and fighting to ignore that fact.

Isolation did this to her. Weeks with only Em’s voice in her ear, only Em’s face in front of her, her whole life orbiting around her, and now days without anybody at all. She hadn’t been able to picture her mother’s face in years, but now even her dad’s felt different, as did the few people she counted as colleagues, even if she would never call them friends. Em was the only memory left to her, the only real person, and her imagination built a shrine to her.

She wanted that objectivity. She wanted to be reminded to hate her, or to be forgiven for needing her. She had nothing.

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.

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.

Her words twisted between Gyre’s ribs, prying them apart. Leave it to Em to pair her best instincts with her most heinous.

All her anger and rage were layered meters thick over the pain. It was an old song, an old scar. But it was there and she could feel it now, her bleeding soul and bludgeoned heart. The pain had followed her this far, walking in the outline of the hole her mother had carved in her when she left. When her mother looked around herself and saw that she didn’t want this life, that she deserved better, that she’d give up everything else to be comfortable again. A horrible certainty settled over her. “I’m her,” Gyre whispered.

Without her mother, without the promise of some vindication, what did she want? Comfort? Independence? It all felt so far away, so distant. The cave didn’t feel distant, though. The cave was her whole world, her past and her future. She pictured herself walking back down to Camp Six, diving in, severing her connection to Em and just giving in. No. No, that wasn’t what she wanted. Even if she couldn’t think of a single thing she desired, she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want to be alone. She didn’t want to be dead. She didn’t want to be lost and forgotten. Gyre stuffed the dark impulse to follow Isolde back into the far reaches of her heart that it had crept from, blossoming out of the wreckage like fungus out of Adrian Purcell’s suit. She knew what she wanted. “I want to be out of this cave. I want to see the sun.”

“Time to climb back up,” she said, and began walking. Em blinked. Frowned. “What?” “Climbing up. To the surface?” “That’s not what you said.” Gyre stopped, listening to the water sliding from her suit, pattering against the shallow pool she stood in. “Of course it is. What else would I have said?” “You said time to climb back down.” She went very still, the siren call of Isolde’s fate echoing in her mind. No. No, she had rejected that for what it was—the fevered exhaustion of a desperate heart.

She could hear death calling to her, whispering that it could take away the pain, take away the last shreds of what remained to her. It was the urge to walk back into the cave and follow Isolde; it was the fungus growing from Jennie Mercer’s face, growing from the rot in her heart where her mother had been. She fought against it out of reflex and stubbornness, struggling to remember what was still dragging her forward. The surface. The sun. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t real anymore. What was sunlight to the desaturated lines of her readout, to the engulfing darkness beyond? What was open air overhead but another threat?

“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.

Climb down, climb down. Gyre could hear the call. She could feel it buzzing in the air around her, cold and damp and dark. Walk into the cave and don’t turn back. Stay with us. Stay with all of us. This is where you belong.

She shook her head. “I don’t want to go back down.” That was a lie. She could still see Isolde sometimes when she closed her eyes. She could feel the rot in her stomach and the cool, dank air of the cavern on her face. She could still feel the pull, the relentless tug, the invitation to climb back down and forget the world above, give in and close off all the pain and the struggle and the loneliness.

The card rested like a leash in Gyre’s hand, a leash that wrapped around her horrible, beautiful monster’s throat. And Em had placed it there willingly.

“Come with me,” she repeated. She couldn’t articulate the rest of it, how Em leaving would hurt, how her staying would hurt, how there was no way either of them could ever win. But she wanted Em there, with her. She wanted to experience the pain together, to struggle together, to hate each other and need each other, maybe even to love each other when the rubble cleared.

But it was the truest thing she had left. 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.

Em had fought for her even though death was Em’s thesis, was her conclusion, was the only thing that should have waited for Gyre. Even though the twisted rot that had destroyed so much had already destroyed the both of them, almost to the core.