The Luminous Dead

by Caitlin Starling

The suit was her new skin, filled with sensors and support functions, dampening her heat and strengthening her already powerful muscles with an articulated exoskeleton designed to keep climbing as natural as possible. She wouldn’t even remove her helmet to eat or sleep. Her large intestine had been rerouted to collect waste for easy removal and a feeding tube had been implanted through her abdominal wall ten days ago.

Everything was painstakingly, extensively designed to protect her from . . . elements in the cave.

Far off, she thought she could hear water. The surface had been in a near-constant drought since she was a child, but most of the deep caves in this area still had water flowing through them, and would periodically flood from harsh, sudden storms that destroyed settlements and washed away topsoil and structures on the surface. This was the first time she’d personally set foot in a chamber this deep. It was beautiful. It was also unnerving.

Caving was lucrative, but ultimately a horrible job, and one you could only do for a few years at most before you were too injured to keep going, or you couldn’t take the isolation and the strain anymore, or the cave just straight up killed you. The smart ones cashed out early, with both their paycheck and their health. But there was always the allure of bigger, more lucrative, more dangerous jobs. The temptation was what dragged them all in; it didn’t let them go easily.

“I’m going to go take samples and scans. You are going to try to sell this route to a mining company, right?” “Sure.” Em sounded distracted, noncommittal. Gyre’s skin prickled in a mix of frustration and unease that was becoming too familiar, like a pinch in a bad pair of boots, rubbing a blister into her flesh. If you’re not going to sell it, what the hell am I doing down here?

On the surface, open spaces just meant more directions for people to come at you. Nobody had your back, and humans were nasty, sad creatures.

“Just how many times have you tried?” She didn’t expect a response. On the other end of the line, Em huffed out a breath. It was loud, like she was leaning forward over the microphone, maybe putting her head in her hands, raking her fingers across her scalp. Another exhale. Then she cleared her throat. “Thirty-five, not including you.”

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

“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?”

No matter what you think of me, I don’t want you to die. I didn’t want any of you to die.”

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

You have options. I recommend an overdose of morphine, but both sedatives will also work if they’re above these volumes.” The numbers flared yellow, throbbed. “Any less and it won’t definitely kill you, or it might make you suffer needlessly. There’s also a way to suffocate yourself. You could just turn off the exchanger fans, but I recommend coming here”—the screen shifted again and Gyre tried to turn away, but of course it followed her, hovering just in front of her eyes—“and using this command to make the suit shunt the helium it uses for your buoyancy sacs into your suit proper. It will displace the air and make for a much easier death.”

Tunneler. She was too numb, too exhausted, to be afraid. Too numb to hope. But maybe all she had to do was climb.

“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 want to be out of this cave. I want to see the sun.”

The throb suddenly became a roar, and Gyre stumbled back, staring, as across the gap a great wormlike thing swam out of the rock, stone moving impossibly like water around it. In the open air, it was too big to support itself, and she watched as it writhed up along the wall and into the ceiling, half submerging itself. Its gigantic conical head, if it was a head, swung around to face her. It had no mouth, no eyes, but thousands of slit-like pits covered its skin, pulsing open and closed as if breathing, smelling. In the light of her headlamp, its brilliantly colored scales flashed, iridescent and vibrant.