She walked for five more hours, the incline staying shallow enough that there were only two occasions where she put bolts in to scale sudden pitches, too smooth to climb without a rope. Still, by the end of the day, she was exhausted and weak, brain fried by the constant evenness of her environment. It was as if she could feel the thrum of a Tunneler on some back channel of her brain, an echo off the stone it had bored through as it passed. Without input, her brain seemed bent on creating its own stimulation. There were no more skittering insects, but she had songs stuck in her head that sounded like they came from far away, and the movement of her hand at the edge of her display became a distant figure more than once. It wasn’t constant, but it was relentless.
And then the feeling of being watched came back.
It had been a prickle, a crawling in the back of her mind just after the bugs had passed her, making their way down to the sump. Now it was a bone-deep dread, a sickness in her stomach. It strengthened in waves, and the more she fought it, the stronger it grew. She felt it like a presence, like a tug at her center, like she was forgetting something she shouldn’t be. If she just turned around, she would see them: Isolde, or some other stranger—perhaps Hanmei, waterlogged, or Jennie, legs broken into impossible angles—waiting for her. It didn’t matter that there were no hiding places in this passage, that it was impossible for anybody to have followed her. Down here, she could imagine them emerging from the blankness of the walls, as phantom-thin as the insects.
She clamped down with as much willpower as she could muster, refusing to let herself look over her shoulder or signal to Em in any way that she was losing her grip on reality.
Maybe something in her suit was breaking down. Maybe Em had been wrong about Camp Five’s spores, and they’d gotten through the suit’s filtration. Just because they hadn’t been in her bloodstream by the time Em had checked didn’t mean they hadn’t done irreparable damage. She could see it now, scans of her brain marked by great black holes where the spores had eaten away at her. Or maybe the chemicals in that final, horrible sump had started some slow rotting of the suit itself. She tried to remember if Em had gone into detail about the tests she’d run. Had she tested Gyre’s blood? She couldn’t remember the feeling of blood being taken, but would she have even noticed? Em had said she was clear, that she was fine, but . . . Can I trust what she said?
Can I trust that she even said it?
Gyre pictured the commands that would take her to the medical readouts in her suit. She could look at the log, look at how much of each drug was left, look at test results—if Em had run them. If she hadn’t scrubbed them.
But she was too afraid to look. If Em had run the tests, if it hadn’t been the spores, then Gyre had seen Isolde, and that meant that Gyre could be sensing something real. Something impossible, following just behind her.
She made camp after seven hours of mindless walking. Em had tried starting conversations several times over the course of the day, but Gyre had only grunted in reply, too nervous that her unease and growing panic would seep into anything she said, too afraid that what she was hearing wasn’t Em at all. It had made the climb feel like an eternity.
“It looks like there’s a change up ahead,” Em said as Gyre sat back, her head against the rock, staring at nothing and wondering if she wanted to use up one of her remaining meals.
Real? Not real? She didn’t lose anything for looking, she decided. Heart thudding in her chest, Gyre turned her head toward whatever it was Em was seeing. Her reconstruction showed only the curved walls of the tunnel. She hesitated a moment, then took a leap, desperate for interaction. “Don’t see it,” she said.
“It’s not clear enough for the computer to shunt it to you,” Em said. “Lots of uncertainty. Can you get closer?”
A new terror bubbled up into her throat, threatening to choke her as she staggered to her feet and took two lurching steps up the passage. Not clear enough for the computer to shunt it to you. How often did that happen? 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?
Computers didn’t work like that, she reminded herself. Not clear enough meant that it was far away, or at a weird angle. There wasn’t anything lurking just at the limits of her sonar.
There couldn’t be.
“There’s a branch-off,” Em said, interrupting her thoughts. “It could lead back into the main system.”
“Or nowhere.” Gyre straddled a deep crack in the rock, then stopped, staring down.
It was the first change in the tunnel all day.
The reconstruction expanded, mapping out all the gaps and dips and uneven patches of stone until, finally, she reached a jagged gap in the rock. It was a drop through the bottom left of the tunnel, out into a large cavern. Much of the floor below appeared to be covered in water, but across the cavern there looked like there were a few accessible banks. Large, divot-topped, tiered pillars stretched toward the ceiling from the water.
Gyre braced her hands on either side of the opening, staring. She knew those pillars. She knew that water. It called to her, and she nearly fell to her knees.
“Is that—”
“It’s not the lake by Camp Six,” Em said.
Her heart fell and frustrated tears welled up behind her eyes with fierce pressure. She fought it down. Wrong, wrong, this is all wrong.
“But I might know where you are now,” Em continued cautiously. “I’ll need you to go down there for a better look, though. If it’s where I think you are, I can get you back to the surface. And there should be older caches nearby.”
The surface.
She could barely think, picturing the sun, the cracked soil, her tiny cot. The surface. If she climbed down there, if she made her way back up to the cave entrance, it would all be over. Screw Jennie and the others, screw trying to fix this. Screw whoever came down next—that had never been her responsibility.
She was the only responsibility she’d ever had.
Gyre backed away from the crack in the stone. “Should I eat, then?” she rasped. Her voice sounded strained, barely human. She cleared her throat. “Before I rappel down there?” She didn’t like the thought of using one of her few remaining rations, not so soon after having two others, but the less she ate, the weaker she’d get. She couldn’t be weak. And Em’s answer should give her a good idea of how safe Em thought she really was. Hold off, and Em was worried. Go ahead, and everything would be fine.
“I think so,” Em said.
Everything will be fine.
Gyre settled down heavily, gut uncramping at Em’s permission. When she reached for her ration, she realized her hand was shaking. 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.
Her eyes went back to the crack. Or, she thought. Or we keep pushing, and I fall apart later.
That was what the Gyre from before the sump would have done. What she would have done.
She seated the canister into the port on her side, then let her head drop forward into her hands. The sludge pushed through the cannula and into her gut, and as it flowed, she became aware of every centimeter of her skin covered by the barely there whisper of sticky, body-warm gel. The electrodes coming from her flesh, her scalp; the unrelenting structure of the suit polymers and machines; the distance between her cheeks and her palms. She fought the urge to take her helmet off or rip the canister from her side. Each feeding was getting harder to bear, half because of fear and hunger, half because of this growing physical irritation. She couldn’t tell if it was only in her head, or if something was beginning to go wrong. Her skin itched. Her joints hurt.
She wanted to be done.
“Gyre.”
“Don’t want to talk,” she muttered.
Her video feed blinked on, and Gyre stared at it, too tired to turn it off. Em looked pristine. She’d changed her clothing at some point, and her hair was pulled back neatly at the nape of her neck. “You’ve gone past stressed. You sound terrified.”
“I’m trying to ignore that,” Gyre said, scowling. Em couldn’t know. If Em knew, she’d give up on her, write her off—as good as dead, another failure.
“I’ve seen this before, once the shock starts to fade. Once you start to feel trapped.”
“I am trapped!”
Nothing.
“I don’t need to be psychoanalyzed,” Gyre muttered. “I need to get out of this stupid suit, I need to see the fucking sun.”
Em rested her chin on her fist, gazing at the screen that Gyre assumed had her face on it. Maybe it didn’t. Maybe it was just a bland readout of her hormone levels. Cortisol high. Adrenaline high. Was there even a camera inside her helmet, or was she just a static headshot in a dossier?
“I need you to concentrate on only the next step in front of you,” Em said. “I’ll manage your resources; I’ll keep you going. I’m going to get you out of there—myself, if I have to.”
Em, climbing down into this hellhole. The thought was perversely pleasing.
“If down there is where you think it is,” Gyre said, “how bad is the climb out?” Em was right. If she focused on the next steps, one at a time, they’d be manageable. Tasks she knew she could do. One foot in front of the other. She rubbed at the surface of her helmet, wishing she could massage her temples through the polymer.
Em hesitated, then conceded, “Bad. Part of it is through an active waterfall. There’s also only one cache you’re going to be able to reach easily. It’s half empty, and has been sitting there a long time. Not everything will be usable. But it’s still rations, a few batteries, more line.”
Gyre grimaced. “Will it even still be there?”
“Unless there’s been more Tunneler activity that I don’t know about, it should be.”
Or unless it was stolen like the other one.
“This route, it rejoins the route I took?”
“Yes. Near Camp Four.”
No resources she could count on, then, if this cache that was on the way was as depleted as Em was saying. She groaned, sat back, stretched out her spine. But at least it would cut off the ascent up the Long Drop. It could be worse. “And then the dive to Camp Three.”
“Yes.”
“And it’s worth it? Instead of just going forward?”
“I still don’t know if this tunnel leads to that ledge. And if you refuse to sleep in here, things could—deteriorate.”
Gyre winced. Deteriorate. Em could tell, could see what was happening to her. If Gyre could just trust her, rely on her, lean a little bit into . . . what? Em wasn’t here to put a hand on her shoulder, to hold her tight. She was just a voice in her helmet.
A current of drugs in her arm.
Was Em beginning to feed her anxiety meds again, to counteract her irrationality? If she focused, would she feel the fog creeping in at the edge of her thoughts, just enough to make her reliable again?
Gyre hesitated, then toggled the medical interface. Nothing was active. There was the counter for the anxiolytics, and a log showing one dose used, dated to the sump. Adrenaline, one dose. Sedatives . . .
Three.
Gyre stared.
Three doses. One on its own, then two in succession. She checked the log on the double dose; it had been spread out over more than sixteen hours. And there were other logs too—blood samples taken, tests run, all in the same time frame. At Camp Six.
She’d felt like she’d slept for days because she had.
Her stomach lurched, spasming against the feeding tube. Em hadn’t said she was sedating her. Em hadn’t said she’d been out for over a day, unprotected and vulnerable. Em had told her everything had been fine.
But everything hadn’t been fine. Em had broken her promise—again. Gyre should never have trusted her.
Should she trust her now?
“Gyre?” Em murmured. “Feeding’s done.”
“Right,” she said, shivering. “Better get climbing.” Gyre tried to sound cheerful as she unhooked the canister, but even she could tell it sounded brittle and wrong. She stared down at her hands, at the metal tube that had held a terrifyingly high portion of all the food left to her. Had she taken this one from Camp Five’s cache?
Had the seal protected it from the spores?
“You can rest before the descent,” Em said, her voice so soft, so gentle.
Gyre jerked forward, a whole-body response to the idea, then covered the involuntary twitch by rolling up to her knees, putting away the spent ration. “Absolutely not,” she said. “I’m not sleeping up here.” I’m not letting you sedate me again. Her legs quivered as she stood up, but her hands didn’t shake as she began putting in bolts. The stone was already fractured, so she put in multiple anchors, silently thanking herself for insisting on taking them with her.
If she hadn’t swapped the climbing anchors into her suit, what would she have done? The silt screws couldn’t take her weight. More proof that all she needed to do was trust her instincts; they’d brought her this far.
Everything seemed stable, but she didn’t want to risk a fall from this height, even—perhaps especially—into water. She had no idea what currents were lurking beneath that lake, though she could certainly hope for none, since Em had said this didn’t lead back to the sump.
If Em was right. If the computers were right.
Once the anchors were in and her ropes were set up, she checked her attachments to the line. One hand twitched, threatening to descend into full-blown tremors, but as she stared at it, it firmed up. If she was lucky, it would just be an adrenaline-pumping free-air descent—enough to ground her in her body again—then a brief swim, and hopefully an easy walk up to dry land. Then she could try to sleep.
She hoped she hadn’t used up all her luck surviving the sump.
She hoped she’d been hallucinating at Camp Five. She hoped Em had gotten the spores out of her system. Because beyond everything else, she hoped she wasn’t really being followed. A few quick tugs, or a blade, and the ropes—
She hoped, she hoped, she hoped, she hoped.
No. Gyre steadied herself, forcing away the thoughts, then began walking backward down the edge of the hole. From there, she swung out into the open air, fingers gripping vice-like around the bars of her rappel device.
Her equipment held. She sighed in relief, and heard an echoing exhale on Em’s line. “Nervous?” Gyre asked, chancing a glance at the screen, her old bravado rearing up reflexively and snugging tight around her like a crusted bandage.
“Watch your hands,” Em said.
Gyre’s smirk faded. She concentrated on working her rappel device, easing her fingers apart by degrees, making sure the rope was feeding through smoothly. She could see the approach of the water from the corner of her eye, the surface rendered a placid, unmoving dark blue to set it apart from the surrounding stone. The wrongness resting in her gut eased. This was familiar, this was good. Hanging from the rope, she could think straight again. The pull of gravity, tugging her down, felt strong, and right.
Get to the ground, climb back out. She’d done this before.
She toggled through the display options reflexively, learning the cavern, memorizing the layout. The last known depth of the pool was only a meter where she was headed, so there shouldn’t be any swimming needed. Good—her legs burned too much to be useful in the water. The composition of the rock here was similar to Camp Four. And her headlamp showed a blue luminescence beneath the surface of the water, familiar and comforting.
Her headlamp also showed a figure standing in the water.
The figure sank below the surface.
“Em?” she whispered.
There were no ripples, no sign that anything had been there. But she’d seen it, the darkened outline of shoulders, of a head, disappearing into the surrounding gloom. Her heart stuttered in her chest, and she closed one hand around the rope in reflexive fear. There—again. It was just a flash, a shadow in the glow. It looked like a body, floating just below the surface of the water. Moving. Impossible.
No. No, no, no. “Em!” she shouted, fumbling and turning the reconstruction back on. The cavern was bathed in analytical gray light, every feature marked out, every object unmoving. The surface of the water was once again rendered in flat blue, impenetrable. She tried the other settings.
Nothing.
“What is it?”
There was nothing out of the ordinary. Everything around her was static. Erased? Had the computer removed the “confusing” input? Or was whoever it was too far below the surface for the sonar to find?
Or was it another figment? Was she contaminated, her mind already twisting into knots?
“Did you see that?” she asked, turning her head from side to side, searching.
“Did I see what?”
“The—the reconstruction feed, it records, right? Even if it’s not displayed? Can you—”
“Yes, but it will take a minute to pull up. Gyre, what’s going on?” Her voice had gone from tired and distracted to alert, sharp.
“I saw somebody,” Gyre whispered.
Em said nothing.
“Em, there’s somebody down there. I saw them, in the water. Out in the deeper part of the lake. It was a person; it was definitely a person.” Her panic was growing, taking physical form in her chest, sitting on her and pressing down with all its weight. She wrapped both arms around the rope, hugging tight to it, eyes fixed on the ground below.
“You turned off the reconstruction.”
“I know. My headlamp—”
Em shook her head, the motion drawing Gyre’s attention through her panic. “Breathe, Gyre. Your lamp doesn’t reach that far. It’s probably just the nerves and exhaustion, combined with the darkness.”
“I saw it against the glow! There’s somebody there!”
“The human brain projects stimuli where there are none, when it’s overworked or deprived.”
“What, like your humming?” Gyre snapped.
“Exactly like the humming. It’s a known phenomenon. Under stress, people hear things, or sometimes see darting shadows. Sensory deprivation chambers induce very realistic hallucinations of flashing lights and presences. It usually happens in places that would be distressing. Like this. There could even be infrasonic noise, maybe from the Tunneler, making you uneasy. It’s fixable.”
Fixable. Fixable, unless all her food was contaminated—how had she missed that until now? “My feeding—it’s from Camp Five—”
“It’s fine,” Em said. “You’re fine.”
“Was I fine when you had me sedated at Camp Six?” Gyre asked, her voice cracking.
Em didn’t respond.
“I saw. I saw the logs,” Gyre hissed, hoping she was ashamed. Hoping it hurt.
“It was a safety precaution,” Em said, voice strangled at first. But when she spoke again, she’d regained her footing, her tone firm. Arrogant. She leaned in toward the camera. “I’ve run every diagnostic I can. I checked all your food. You were fine. You are fine, just under too much pressure.”
Gyre’s lip curled. If it wasn’t the spores, then it was her. Crazy, Em was saying. Unreliable. “Em—”
“I already checked,” Em said firmly. “Your sonar didn’t pick up any trace of a living thing down there. There are no other concerns with people mapping this cave system, or anywhere within at least sixty kilometers. You’re alone.”
“And the cache at Camp Four? I didn’t hallucinate that.”
“No, you didn’t,” Em admitted. “But whoever or whatever moved it couldn’t have used those supplies without one of my suits. They couldn’t have made it this far. It’s impossible. You’re alone, Gyre. You’re seeing things.”
“And why should I believe that? From you?” Gyre growled, one hand releasing from the rope, fingers scrambling over the outside of her helmet as if she could shut out Em’s voice by covering her ears, or take the whole fucking thing off. Her skin crawled beneath the feedback film. “If there’s somebody else down here—”
“There’s not!”
“—you’d hide them in the name of caver management; you’d keep me blind to them until the second they came up behind me if you thought it’d save your precious, insane mission—”
“Gyre, you’re spiraling. I’ll give you another injection of anxiolytics. It’ll help.”
“The fuck you will,” Gyre snarled. She sucked in air, desperate to quell her shaking, then puffed out her breath to cycle through the options displayed inside her helmet. 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.
“Gyre, what are you doing?” Em asked. Her fear was just a small note over careful, flat affect, but it was growing stronger. Her eyes had widened, her cheeks paled. Good. Let her be afraid, not for Gyre, but for herself. Let her marinate in it, even if it was only the fear of failure, of having to start over again, of having to live with that guilt added to the pile.
If Gyre was going to die down here, let Em feel it. Let it break her.
Gyre closed the comm line, and then reopened it to a different frequency. She couldn’t lock communications closed altogether, but she could leave Em behind, and commit herself to a nonexistent line, a ghost channel. Silence expanded around her, only broken by the heaving of her breast. The lower corner of her display was replaced by the cave.
“What now?” she asked the emptiness, then laughed, sitting down heavily. “Lock my suit, drug me—but you’re on your own now, just like I am.”
Nothing answered her.
She waited for retaliation, for the fuzzying of the world from antianxiety drugs, or maybe a sedative, for her suit to lock up, securing her on the rope, for Em to find a way around the communications block. But nothing happened. Slowly, she cycled through her display options, illuminating the motionless cavern and the pool below in varied colors and textures until, finally, she switched back to her headlamp.
There had been nothing, no signs of movement, but she had to be sure. She didn’t want the smallest chance of interference.
She opened her faceplate, getting rid of the HUD entirely. The air was cool. Real.
She could feel the cave on her flesh.
All her training screamed for her to close her helmet again, to stop venting heat, to restore the integrity of the suit that was the only thing keeping her safe and alive down here, but she couldn’t do it. For the first time in weeks, she could feel the real world, curling against her cheek, filling her lungs.
For the first time in a long time, she could trust everything she was perceiving.
The water waited below her, the faint, ghostly glow beckoning. A meter deep. She could stand in a meter, could see the bottom.
Gyre began descending again, her fingers clumsy on the rappel rack. She went slowly, craning her head in every direction, pausing every few meters to check for movement. Nothing shifted. Nothing changed as she slid down the line, as her feet broke the surface of the water, as she sank in up to her hips. As she fumbled to unclip herself, her heart raced, and she couldn’t stand still, couldn’t think. She could almost feel the closing of fingers around her ankle, and she worked blindly, looking only at the water around her. She felt trapped, tethered, until she closed the rappel device back into her suit and began staggering for the nearby shore. The sound of sloshing water filled her ears, no longer filtered through her helmet. It was so loud, so sharp. It made her want to lie down and feel the water lapping against her skin.
But there was somebody in here. She needed to stay alert. She needed to find them.
Nothing moved but the shadows racing away from her lamp, and the ripples of the water as she passed. No faces peered out at her from crevices in the rock as she hauled herself from the water. She paced away from the shore, and slowly walked the perimeter of the lake, clambering over smooth outcroppings, skirting the edge.
She checked every niche, every hollow.
She waded into the shallow inlets, searching the bottom of the lake until all that was left were the darker, deeper regions. For those, she would have to dive. The water of the lake beckoned again, but she fought the urge to plunge below. The glowing fungus in the water stopped her.
Even if she could see unimpeded without her faceplate, she could still be contaminated. Fuck. What had she done?
She closed her helmet and took several deep, steadying breaths, then bent double, pushing her head below the surface above the darker, deeper reaches. Her light pierced through the water, marrying with the soft glow. She could see everything, and all she could find was rock, huge pillars and worn-down boulders.
She was alone.
Gyre hauled herself back out onto land. A low moan built in the back of her throat, and she crawled away from the bank. She tried to feel relief, to feel safe, but there was only numbness there, emptiness. What did it matter, feeling safe, if there had never been a threat to begin with?
Em had been right. Isolation, stress, whatever lingering effects those spores might be having on her brain . . . she couldn’t be left on her own, unmonitored. She was compromised. What had she been thinking? That Em would be disgusted with her, would hate her, would abandon her. That, given proof of Gyre’s weakness, she’d leave.
And now Gyre was alone anyway. Alone, foolish, and humiliated.
Gyre pulled up the communications settings, face burning. It rankled, crawling back apologetic for her broken brain, but this wasn’t a day’s descent. This wasn’t easy. This wasn’t something she could do by herself, no matter how much she wanted to.
She tried to close the silent comm line.
It refused.