Gyre woke up disoriented. Her thoughts were sluggish, her vision blurred. Her mouth tasted like death and her stomach ached. She tried to move, and couldn’t. Her heart stammered in her chest. She jerked against whatever was holding her—it didn’t budge.
The panic took over before she could think. She couldn’t even ball her hands into fists, couldn’t turn her head, and she knew—she knew—that she was being watched. She remembered eyes in the darkness, or had it been a broken suit mask?
No, wait. That had been a dream. She’d had a nightmare about Jennie Mercer following her down, her suit locked into an unnatural shape as she staggered into the tunnel.
Her suit.
She nearly vomited. She drugged me.
Again.
Fury riding just under her skin, Gyre unlocked her suit and sat up. She pulled up her reconstruction to full draw distance, which simulated a brightly lit cavern. There were no eyes in the darkness, no ghosts there to terrify her. Her fear faded as she took stock of her state. Her right arm was feeling better, but it was stiff. She stretched it, rotating the joints, and then locked the arm of her suit with it tucked up by her chest, as if it were in a sling. The change in position seemed to help.
Another hour to warm up, and she’d be good to climb. Climb to Camp Four, swim the dive again . . . if she pushed, she could get halfway to Camp Two before she needed to sleep again. Two days, three tops, and she’d be out.
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.
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.
Gyre paused, then checked the feed of documents Em had shared to her suit. There were the videos, like she’d said. Gyre scrolled through them with a flick of her eyes, until she found the one with the earliest chronological date.
It didn’t matter. She had already decided to turn back, and as soon as she was out of this cave, she’d be free of this nightmare, of Em’s ghosts.
And yet . . .
She wanted to see them, see normal people, see somebody who wasn’t Em. Wanted to see who could be so important that their deaths could break a little girl and rebuild her into . . . whatever her handler was.
She activated the first video.
Four people sat around a small campfire. Gyre frowned at the open flame, before she remembered Em saying that their team had been one of the first. This must have been back when they were treating these expeditions like recreational spelunking on other planets. They all were wearing topside clothing, heavy enough to ward off the pervasive chill, a few with harnesses still on. Their packs sat nearby. They were laughing.
It was a strange sound to hear, down in the caves. It made her heart ache, her skin itch. 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.
There was one woman and three men. They ranged in age from a boy maybe Gyre’s age to a man that she guessed was in his late forties, and they all looked excited. Tired, after a long day’s climb, but excited. It was strange, seeing the cave lit only by the fire and a few headlamps still on and propped nearby, but if she had to guess, they were at Camp Two. She could see the talus pile behind the older guy.
“No, what I’m saying is that—what if there’s, like, an entire underground city down here? Wouldn’t that be cool?” said the youngest of them, the one who couldn’t have been more than a year or two older than Gyre. He had long dark hair pulled back into a low braid, and his skin was a dark russet from a combination of heritage and long sun exposure.
“Yeah, and what if there’s buried treasure?” replied the woman, who Gyre judged to be in her mid-thirties or so, with broad cheekbones and a wicked grin. When she turned, Gyre thought she could see a tattoo peeking out above the neck of her shirt and curling up behind her ear, along her shaved scalp, but maybe that was a comm cord. Em’s mother?
Then a voice very similar to Em’s came from directly behind the camera. “That would be the find of a century. Not the treasure—a city. We haven’t found traces of another sentient race in—”
“And what if there are traps?” the kid cut in. “Like those old movies—traps to keep grave robbers out!”
“So now it’s a tomb?” the older guy said, and shook his head, reaching out with a gloved hand to pull a can out of the fire. Real food—her mouth watered.
“I mean, if it’s a city, they have to have dead people too, right?”
“Unless it’s full of enlightened immortals,” almost-Em supplied. The third man, who hadn’t spoken yet, cracked a smile as she continued speaking. “If we’re going to go full drama vid.”
“I like buried treasure more,” said the man with the can. He was tall, stringy, with close-cropped dirt-brown hair.
“Ore’s buried treasure enough,” the third man said. He had a smooth voice with a rich, lilting accent. He smiled again, his teeth flashing against his nearly black skin. “With what we’ve found so far, we’re going to be rich.”
The camera shifted, Em’s mother turning it around to face herself. She looked like she was in her mid-twenties, maybe the same age Em was now, and looked eager and happy, foreign expressions on her daughter’s face. She was pale-skinned, her blond hair curling gently against her cheeks, and her green eyes glittered. She had the same small notch in her chin as her daughter. “You hear that? Laurent says we’re all going to be rich.”
“We’re the dream team!” the kid shouted. “And when we find our ancient city—”
He was cut off by a low rumble. The woman’s expression froze, her gaze going past the camera. “Is that—”
“It’s too early in the season for rain,” Laurent said, and Gyre could hear some of the others standing up.
“A drill? Maybe another company is trying to horn in—” the kid started.
“Doesn’t make sense, Halian,” the stringy man snapped. “What are they going to do, destabilize the caves and then hope they can still get the ore out safely? I—”
“Both of you, shut up,” the woman with the shaved head said. Em’s mother’s expression had changed to alert trepidation, her lips slightly parted, the camera forgotten.
The low rumble had stopped, but it took another minute of pained silence before she murmured, “Maybe it’s nothing.”
“Yeah,” Halian said. “Yeah. Nothing.”
One of the other men grunted.
Em’s mother looked back at the camera at last, and managed a small smile. “Dream team, signing off.”
The video ended.