The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

The suit had some limited internal padding and support; it served as a moving sleeping roll as well as armor and structural enhancement. But that was like saying a metal stool was furniture, and therefore equivalent to a bed.

Now, though, she was starting to suspect she’d been played. She’d been lulled by how kind he looked. Good clothing, a soft voice. Salt-and-pepper hair. And yet he’d stuck her with a single handler—why? Why increase the odds of failure so much? Some sort of arcane tax-evasion scheme? Or maybe he got off on watching a woman flail in the darkness, struggling to survive.

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

This had been different—easier—without a face to the voice. Without knowing how similar they were. She’d already known Em was a liar, but to know that she couldn’t be older than her twenties? And to see how she was so scared and exhausted and human—