“Please state your name and age for the record.”
“Gyre Price, twenty-two years old.”
“And how long has it been since you were pulled out of cave designation Lethe, location undisclosed?”
“Three weeks. About.”
“Please give as exact an answer as you can, Ms. Price.”
Gyre met Em’s gaze, her lips twisting into a bitter smile. “You already know.”
“For the record.” Was Gyre imagining the apology in Em’s eyes?
“I think it’s been nineteen days. I don’t know. I’ve been unconscious for a lot of them.”
She had only seen Em a few times over those long weeks, brief meetings overseen by physicians, psychologists. Nobody knew all of what had passed between them, but everybody had seemed afraid to leave them in a room together unsupervised.
Apparently that had changed. Had the doctors given permission, or had Em decided she didn’t care?
The room they sat in was stark and clinical, the walls a bare white, the table between them simple and metal. Gyre sat on one side of it, a temporary prosthetic arm strapped to her stump and supported by a sling across her chest, a test to see how quickly she was healing and how soon she could be fitted with the real thing. On the other sat Em, and to her left a mirror hid any number of observers, concealed behind a twisted reflection of Isolde’s interview tape.
Em was sweating.
Gyre fixated on the thin beads of moisture dotting her hairline. The detail was so small her helmet’s display would have never rendered it, and so honest it made Gyre’s pulse speed up. Real. This was real.
How many nightmares had she had in the last nineteen days, where this exact scenario had played out in more monstrous ways?
“And how are you recovering from your injuries?” Em asked, her voice, so familiar, breaking through the brittle glass of Gyre’s worries. Focus on me, it said, and Gyre listened. She had been well trained.
“Fine,” she said, even as her hand went to her side. It hurt. She’d insisted they take her off painkillers for this interview. She hadn’t wanted to answer Em’s questions while out of her mind on drugs. She’d wanted to face her as her own person.
Her own person. Gyre wanted to laugh.
Em must have insisted on the comfortable chair they’d dragged into the room for this interview. It let her lean back slightly, and supported her abdomen, still weak from the rupture of her large intestine and stomach lining, and the ensuing infection. She was swathed in comfortable, easily laundered clothing, and her hair had been carefully combed and retwisted. Now more than ever, she was Em’s creature, dragged back to some form of half sanity from the precipice of the Long Drop, packed back into the shape of a woman.
The seconds ticked by, stretching into minutes, and Gyre realized that Em was struggling to find something to say, her eyes darting to the mirror.
Gyre watched as she took several deep breaths, her chest rising and falling beneath the tailored teal fabric of her dress. A thousand emotions flashed over Gyre’s brain, stoking her anxiety. She couldn’t endure for long, not with an audience. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Right.” Em forced a thin smile. And just like that, she rearranged her features into calm distance. But Gyre knew where to look now, knew where the cracks would show. It was in her breathing, as familiar as Gyre’s own. It was in the pursing of her lips, faint but undeniable. “This interview will specifically cover your encounters with the Tunneler, at the request of the biological research arm of Arasgain Technologies, working in cooperation with Oxsua Mining,” Em said, nodding to the mirror with only a slight grimace to betray her distaste of working with her mother’s employer. “Are you ready to begin?”
“Just the Tunneler?”
“Yes, we don’t need to discuss anything outside of that scope. They have a theory, something to do with life cycles, mating displays, and aquifers.”
“Good for them.”
“They would like to hear about the circumstances leading up to each sighting, from your perspective.”
“Then give them your records,” Gyre said.
Em recoiled, her self-control fracturing. “Those—”
“Are going to be more accurate than anything I could tell them.”
It was the truth; her memories of those last few days belowground were chaotic and twisted, warped by fever and pain and terror. She remembered everything in perfect clarity, and at the same time could only see brilliant, terrible moments, disconnected and overwhelming, when she tried to focus.
Em looked at her for a long time, then touched a button on her side of the table. Shutters slid down over the mirror. The camera aimed at Gyre went dead, its green light blinking out. “Gyre,” Em said, “if I give them those records, you’ll never climb again. I can’t take that option from you.”
That was the truth, too. Three days ago, she’d requested access to everything Em’s computers had on her, and Em had approved it. Despite her appointed psychologist’s best efforts, Gyre had gone through all of it. The recordings weren’t continuous and didn’t always have the video of what she’d been seeing through her reconstruction, but there had been enough. She’d listened to herself scream for Em to amputate her arm, listened to herself talk to the ghost of Isolde, listened to herself dying.
She’d wanted to understand what had happened to her. She’d failed.
Em was right. Nobody would ever hire her again after listening to that, not even if she successfully integrated with her prosthesis and got over her newfound fear of the dark.
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.
What would it feel like, to go back in? To find a different crack into the world below the ground? Even in a different cave, would she still hear its call?
What would it be like, to go down with a team of handlers, management, a reasonable plan?
To go down without Em?
“I don’t want you to go back down either,” Em said, interrupting the spiraling path of her thoughts, bringing her back to the surface. “But I—I can’t decide for you, not anymore. If I give them those records, I ruin you.”
Gyre laughed sharply. “Like you haven’t done that already.”
Em recoiled as if struck, and Gyre imagined how it would feel to punch her, to grab her, to hold her down. She shifted in her chair, then covered her face with her remaining hand. Skin against skin. It felt good. It felt like everything she’d wanted when she’d been down in that cave.
She was topside now. She held on to that fact, looking around at the room and its contents: all man-made, nothing out of stone. She felt the anger subside.
“I’m sorry,” Em murmured. “I’ll never be able to express how sorry I am, but I—look, I’ll give them those records if you ask me to, but in return, you need this.” She placed a card onto the table between them. “That’s your key to get to the black box. It opens in two days. It’s yours, all yours. The recordings will cover things my computers didn’t keep, and they’re unalterable, easily verifiable. You can access them for any purpose without needing permission from me. I’m going to destroy my own key.”
Gyre stared at the card, then picked it up, turning it over in her hand. She waited to feel something. Vindication, maybe. Empowerment. Even shame, whether for recording Em to blackmail her or for being afraid that Em would hate her for it, when it had been her best option.
But she felt hollow. “What do you think I should do with them?” she asked. Because, really, what could she do with them? Em had never admitted to breaking any laws, was on record being honest and human and broken, and every contract Eli and Jennie and all the rest had ever signed had been airtight. Legal. The bedrock on which the colony’s economy had functioned for almost its entire existence.
All the recordings proved was that she’d never had a chance, that she had signed up to be the plaything of a broken rich girl. And what could she gain from it? Tickets off-world waited for her as soon as she decided where she wanted to go. A fat paycheck sat in her account, transferred in before she ever left the cave. She already had more than she’d dreamed of when she took the job.
It was a useless relic of another time. A reminder of her ultimate powerlessness.
“If you make those files public, if you let everybody hear me explain not only what I did, but why I did it, you’ll give my competitors the ability to destroy me,” Em said.
Oh.
Those recordings would open Em up to criticism, hatred, even mockery for her weakness and madness. It couldn’t harm her in court, no, but it didn’t need to.
Em would never find an investor again, never hire a caver again. She would likely have to step down from her position in Arasgain. Who would trust her to run a business, when they knew how many lives, how many resources, she’d wasted not for profit but for grief?
A legal remedy paled in comparison.
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.
“What now?” Gyre whispered.
“Whatever you want. I’ll buy you your tickets before the box opens so you can make your choice freely. No more playing on a rigged board.”
She could leave. Take the money and go. Take the money and destroy Em anyway. She could get off this planet, get away from the siren call of the caves, get away from Isolde forever.
She could find her mother.
The thought stunned her momentarily, and then she said, “Buy two.”
“What?”
“Two tickets.” Her fractured memory blurred with the recordings. She’d been delirious with fever, and Em had said . . . “The two of us, walking into my mother’s boardroom, me in the suit. I want to do that. I want you to be there. I want you to be there at the end.”
Em reached across the table and took Gyre’s hand, lacing their fingers together. The touch was electric, racing through Gyre’s nerves and to her heart, which stammered in her chest. This was real.
“It’s not the end,” Em whispered. “You saw me at mine, and I’m still here. I haven’t left.”
“We walk back out of the cave,” Gyre said slowly.
Em nodded. She rose, circling around the table, sitting on its edge and clasping Gyre’s hand with both of hers. “Do you think you can do it? Put the suit on again?” Her eyes searched Gyre’s face. “You don’t have to. You never have to.”
“I can do it, to see the look on her face. Come with me.”
Em’s hands tightened again.
“Nobody else understands,” Gyre said. “Nobody else will ever know what it was like down there, not even if they watch the recordings a thousand times. If we’re apart, we’re alone. I don’t want to be alone.”
“I don’t want to hurt you again. Ever again,” Em whispered.
“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. She’d thought about it every day since waking up, and so many days before. It was foolish, and dangerous, and the Gyre of two months ago would have hated her for thinking this way about the woman whose obsession had brought them to this moment.
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.
Gyre slipped her hand from Em’s, set the card aside, and reached up to cup Em’s cheek.
Em slid from the table, going down on her knees in front of Gyre. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” she confessed. “But I can’t do it again. I can’t base my life around an obsession. I can’t follow you down into that cave, I can’t give up, I can’t—”
“I’m not asking you to give up.”
Gyre leaned down despite the pain and kissed Em, the briefest contact, sensation arcing down her spine. This was the woman who’d put her in that suit, who’d sent her down chasing ghosts knowing it would likely end in death, but who also had refused to let her die, over and over again. 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.
Gyre could see it, though: a small fleck of humanity, surrounded by a shell of pain that was beginning to crack, beginning to give way.
And she couldn’t be certain, when she got down to that point, whether she was thinking of herself or Em. They both had two options: fester and die, or take what they were given and grow.
“I’m asking,” Gyre said, pulling back only a few centimeters and meeting Em’s gaze, “for you to try.”