“Left arm has two full breaks as well as severe crush damage from the mid-humerus down. Your cannula has been completely dislodged. There are ruptures in your suit in twelve places that are taking longer than anticipated to close.”
“I don’t want morphine,” Gyre repeated. It had become her litany. It had taken her from Em’s panicked shouting, through her begging, to her cold, clinical recitation of every reason that Gyre was going to die. Neither of them had mentioned that the Tunneler was still close enough to hear. Neither of them had mentioned that Gyre had killed herself by opening her face mask to talk to nothing.
To talk to the cave, her addled brain corrected. And the cave had heard her, tempted her with Isolde. The cave had brought itself down on her head.
She’d managed to stand up—barely—about five minutes ago. Moving seemed less likely. The collapse had smashed parts of her suit open, her skin visible beneath debris and blood, and the left arm mechanism was too damaged to lock up and protect the bone. The parts that no longer had power were rigid, bracing her wrist and a few of her fingers into awkward positions. The rest of her pulped arm hung limp, screaming in agony. She hadn’t looked at any of it yet. Instead, Em had described the damage to her as she’d struggled to extract herself from the few—lucky her—rocks that had fallen on top of her, and on repeating I don’t want morphine every few minutes.
Her stomach was a blaze of agonizing wrongness, curdled by the adrenaline still storming her bloodstream and by the cannula, now painfully unseated, now allowing her stomach acid to burn through her insides. Infection would follow soon. Blood poisoning, sepsis. It was only a matter of time. Her vision was distorted and wavering, and she couldn’t tell if it was from pain or panic or the damage to her suit.
Morphine would be easy, would make everything better, and maybe she’d die less afraid.
She could hear death calling to her, whispering that it could take away the pain, take away the last shreds of what remained to her. It was the urge to walk back into the cave and follow Isolde; it was the fungus growing from Jennie Mercer’s face, growing from the rot in her heart where her mother had been. She fought against it out of reflex and stubbornness, struggling to remember what was still dragging her forward.
The surface. The sun. It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t real anymore. What was sunlight to the desaturated lines of her readout, to the engulfing darkness beyond? What was open air overhead but another threat?
And then she pictured Em, looking at the clinical readouts on her screen, hearing Gyre’s agonized cries. Em would sit her vigil, watch her die, watch as they were both chased down by the inevitable at last. Em would watch her die, just like all the others. Except this time, Gyre knew her. Gyre had come so close to saving her.
Gyre’s death would destroy her.
And it was that, more than anything else, that broke through to her. Fight it. Keep pushing. I’m not alone.
“I don’t want morphine,” she said, her lips swollen and numb.
She tried flexing her left hand and cried out as the simple motion made her entire mind go blank.
“I don’t want morphine,” she mumbled again, even though Em hadn’t said anything since the last time, or the time before that. She staggered forward, shin bumping into one of the rocks. She struggled to lift her foot up over it, her eyes fixed on the path ahead of her. It was barely a path now. The Tunneler had closed off the way back down to Camp Three, and had passed close enough in front of her that, from what she could see, the path to Camp Two had ceased to exist. It had cut her off from everything, past and future, depths and surface.
The cave had done this to her, using Eli and Isolde against her, trapping her in the labyrinth she had been so sure she could leave. The rumble remained, a constant invitation and threat.
But before she gave up, before she lay down and stopped moving forward like all the others, she had to know that there was no other option. She couldn’t give in if there was a way out. Her desperate pride wouldn’t let her, even now.
“Em, I don’t want morphine,” she sobbed.
“I know,” Em said. “I won’t give you any.”
Relief flooded through her, and she laughed, giddy from the stark disparity between the small pebble of relief in her stomach versus the great mass of fear and resignation howling in her head. She watched as one of the breaches over her leg knit itself together, the gel fusing with her blood and coating her skin, the polymer shifting, adjusting, extending scaffolding to cover the gap. It wouldn’t harden properly, but it was a shield.
She grappled for a hold with her right hand, her fingers struggling to close around the rock. With a groan, she heaved herself up and over.
Her screen was cracked. She could see it now, feel it, the cool, dank air of the cave filtering through. She could smell the air. Taste it. It was like a balm. It was real. With it came the need to have the suit off of her entirely. She wanted to be free of it. If it wasn’t on her, maybe she’d be whole again. Maybe she could live, staggering through the dark.
No. That was the cave talking to her again, her own self-annihilating impulse. She shut it out.
She stumbled down into a valley of buckled rock, trying to get to the far wall, moving to catch herself with her left arm. It didn’t respond, and she overbalanced, falling, her shoulder colliding with the stone. Her vision went white. She couldn’t move her arm, could barely maneuver it.
She couldn’t climb like this.
“My arm,” she whispered.
“It’s bad,” Em conceded. “But not—not irreversible. There’s a chance, once we get you back topside, that they’ll be able to restore some of it.”
“It’s not that, Em. It’s not letting me climb. I need to climb!”
“Gyre—”
“It’s going to kill me,” she said, sinking onto her back, staring upward at the dancing ceiling. “I’m going to die; it’s going to kill me.”
“It’s not.”
“The suit’s going to kill me.”
“It’s going to keep you alive. Gyre, listen to me. This is the shock talking.”
“Shock. Shock, that’s going to kill me. If the arm dies, I die with it.”
“You’ve still got blood flow,” Em said.
“Then I’ll bleed out.” She couldn’t see, and her tears, hot as they were, were cooling quickly, so quickly, from the little tendrils of air that snaked into her suit. “Em, cut it off. Cut it off.”
“No. Gyre, I’ve got you on antibiotics and blood-clotting agents. I can do this. You can do this. If I just give you pain medication, or anxiolytics—”
“No drugs!” she cried. “I want to know when I’m dying. Don’t kill me, Em. Don’t kill me.” A prick of the needle, and she’d fade away. Em could put her down, end her pain, and Gyre would never know. She fought against the pull of her own exhaustion, her own pain. “No drugs.”
“Gyre—”
“Just cut it off. I won’t need the drugs.”
“You’re not thinking straight—”
“I don’t want to die!”
“If I amputate your arm,” Em said, struggling to sound calm and failing, “you might never climb again. The suit will preserve it, but between the existing damage and the amputation, it will be useless. They won’t be able to reattach it. A responsive prosthesis, maybe, but—if you just wait, if you breathe through it—”
“Do it! Listen to me! Listen to me, for once!” She fumbled through the options in her helmet desperately. If Em couldn’t do this for her, if Em wouldn’t, because she was too afraid to make a choice, then Gyre would do it for herself. She’d free herself. She’d stop the pain, and then she’d be able to keep moving, and she wouldn’t need the drugs. Em couldn’t kill her then.
Her thoughts were jumbled, but she found it. The interface was complex and demanded actual anatomical knowledge that she didn’t possess. But she fumbled through it, queued it up.
“This,” she said. “This. Do I have it right?”
“Gyre, don’t do this. Just let me give you anxiolytics; we can talk this over—”
“Is it right?”
Em cried out, frustrated, then went quiet for one heartbeat, two. Gyre’s eyes bulged in her skull.
“Yes,” she said at last. “But, Gyre, it’s going to—”
She triggered the amputation. She felt pain, horrible pain, and sickness. Her stomach rebelled. She rolled over onto her belly, and she felt her left side swing up, weightless, unburdened.
Then she vomited, and lost consciousness.
* * *
The rumbling of the Tunneler woke her.
She surged up, surrounded by the stink of bile now inside her suit, the weight of her left arm tugging at her shoulder. But when she opened her eyes, she could see it, lying at her side. Still on the ground, unnaturally bent, the rigid wreckage of a limb. Where her left arm had been there was only a stump, covered in a dome of carbon polymer. The suit had sealed the wound completely, as if nothing had ever been there.
She’d done it.
Oh fuck. She’d done it. She’d been so afraid of death that she’d killed an entire piece of herself.
Oh fuck. Em should have stopped her.
Her stomach was a pit of agony as she sat up, and she could feel herself sweating. She felt cold, but the only gap remaining in her suit was the crack in her faceplate. She was running a fever. How long had she been out? Minutes? Hours?
“Em?”
“I’m here,” Em murmured.
Why didn’t you stop me?
Gyre couldn’t speak. Her throat felt dry and empty.
“How are you feeling?” Em asked.
“It hurts.”
“I know,” Em said. “Are you ready to get up?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t have much time. The cannula rupture isn’t responding to treatment the way I’d like. You need a doctor.”
Gyre shivered.
“And without that cannula, you can’t get any more calories or moisture into your system. With your injuries, you’ve got . . . you’ve got a day, tops. And that’s at the outside.”
“Fuck,” Gyre whispered.
“I know. And beyond that, there’s your battery. Your ports are jammed. You can’t swap out. The amputation and repairs took a lot of power.”
Gyre choked back a sob. One day, nowhere to go, waiting to starve or stroke out or be consumed by the hunger of the cave.
“But you bought yourself some time,” Em said. She sounded sick to her stomach. Pained. “The amputation was the right choice. Before, you only had four hours, six at the outside. A day’s enough. I’ve got a medical team ready and waiting for when you get out.”
Gyre’s world slowed to a halt.
She still thinks I’ll get out.
She latched onto that detail and dragged herself to her feet. She was still in the pile of collapsed rubble, and that rubble was still vibrating beneath her feet, but at full height, she could see the far wall, where the ground was smoother, less disrupted.
Slowly, she began staggering toward it.
“But I should have medicated you beforehand, to lessen the shock and get you moving sooner.” Em was angry, viciously angry—at herself.
Stop. Stop. If she was angry, she could shut down, she could leave. “Why didn’t you?”
“You asked me not to.”
Gyre paused, closing her eyes at the swell of tangled emotion in her throat. She wanted to scream at Em, wanted to hug her, wanted to lie down in her arms until the life slipped out of her.
You asked me not to.
They were ruined. They were broken.
“Is there an exit?” she made herself ask.
“I don’t know,” Em admitted. “I saw something that’s promising over by the far wall, but I can’t tell. Can you get there?”
“Keep talking, and I’ll see,” she heard herself say as she struggled up the first small boulder.
“What would you like me to talk about?” Her voice was so gummed with grief that Gyre could barely make out her words, but it was better than nothing, better than listening to the relentless thrum around her.
“I don’t know.” She pushed herself into a gap between two rocks, smearing herself against them as she moved upward, sidling closer to their tops. As they spread apart, so did she. Then she jarred her arm, and she froze with a hiss, arching her back. It didn’t help.
“Read a book, or something. Just keep talking. Please.”
“I can’t read a book,” Em said. “Not while—Gyre, I can’t.”
“Then recite the alphabet. Timetables for the spaceport. Anything. Anything.” If she lost that thread, that last hold, she was doomed. She was dead already.
Em was silent for a moment. Gyre paused again in her ascent, bowing her head forward against the rock. She needed Em’s voice, needed it more than she could describe. Without Em, she wasn’t leaving this cave, alive or otherwise.
And then Em cleared her throat again, and said, haltingly, “Yao Hanmei. Halian Foster. Julian Flores. Laurent Okeke. Guilherme Barbosa. Agnes Reynisdottir.”
She kept up the list of the dead as Gyre shouted, forcing herself through the slot and out onto open ground. Beyond that point, she only had to edge around a few more rocks and fractures before she was up at the blocked top of the passage. She set her right hand on it, feeling it. It was still uneven, not like the smooth tunnel walls, but it looked and felt stretched, like the rock had been bowed out and its outcroppings had spread apart.
“—Rose. Michael Doren. Francesca Clark,” Em continued.
Gyre looked along the wall to the left, sagging against the stone. Her head spun. It was so hard to keep from drifting, to think. But there—there. A crack in the rock, into the bowed-out wall. She staggered toward it and found that it was big enough to get her head through.
She was looking into a Tunneler’s abandoned path.
“Em,” she said softly as she pulled her head back and sank to her knees.
“Is that . . . ?”
“It’s another path,” she whispered.
Em laughed helplessly. “This is—you could still—Gyre,” Em said, excitement building in her voice. “It heads back toward Camp Four. It might come close enough to connect.”
The tears came in a bitter rush, and she collapsed forward, resting her forehead against the rock just by the crevice. She couldn’t do it. She couldn’t make that climb, not with it leading only to her death. To Jennie Mercer. To the cliffside.
She shook her head, the suit creaking as it dragged across rock. “I can’t make it up the shaft,” she mumbled.
“No, you can’t.”
It wasn’t an option. It looked like one; she could keep moving forward, the same as always. But it ended at the same place staying here did.
“But, Gyre,” Em said softly, “if you can get there, somebody could make it down the shaft. I could make it down.”
Hope blossomed painfully in her chest, but it couldn’t push up through the waves of desolate horror crashing down onto her, or the distant noise, a rumble instead of a throb, audible instead of tangible, that still echoed through her bones.
“I can feel it, Em. The Tunneler is still here. It could collapse the chamber. It might not be navigable, even if I can get there.”
“We don’t have any other choice. We go fast, Gyre, make it to Camp Four, and I’ll get a team and come down and get you. Stay with me. You just have to get to Camp Four.”
“How long until sepsis sets in?”
Em was silent.
“You said I had a day on food. A day on the battery. Less, you said probably less. We don’t have enough time,” Gyre said bitterly. “I’m dead already.”
She stared at her arm, too far across the unstable chamber for her to risk going to. But she wanted to. She wanted to hold the first piece of her to die. Apologize to it. To herself.
“This cave wants me dead,” she whispered.
“Gyre, listen to me,” Em said, desperation fracturing her voice. “Your mother. Picture your mother. The company she works for now, they invest in technology like mine. Imagine, walking into a boardroom in your suit. Imagine taking off your helmet. Imagine staring your mother in the eye and daring her to say something, say anything. You’d be magnificent. You’d be powerful. And then you could walk away from her, in turn. All you have to do is get to Camp Four. I’ll do the rest.”
She could see it, but it all felt so far away, so impossible. Gray and wrong and unknowable. She wanted it to be true, so badly, wanted to feel Em at her side, wanted to feel powerful.
But it wasn’t enough.
She shook her head, her shoulders trembling.
Em didn’t say anything for a moment, and all Gyre could hear was the rumble and her own sniveling, seizing sobs. Then her suit let out a low whine as the servos and supports tried to force her up.
“Get on your feet,” Em said low in her ear, her voice cold. “And keep moving. You are going to Camp Four, caver, and I am going to bring you home. You signed a contract, Gyre.”
“Fuck you.”
“In a life-and-death situation, you agreed to defer to me. So do it.”
Em’s clinical tone, so familiar but such a contrast to their last week together, broke through her panic. She pushed herself upright again. She forced herself through the crevice and out into the wide passage. She set off at as fast a pace as she could manage, staggering along the gently curving floor.
But she was unsteady on her feet. She pitched from wall to wall, the floor tilting beneath her. She wouldn’t make it. Couldn’t make it—
“Injecting anti-emetics and a local anesthetic,” Em said. She knew exactly what Gyre needed, using the contract to shore up them both. Gyre nodded, and felt the gel around her skin shudder, change, and a tiny bloom of fire flared by the roiling pit that was her gut. She breathed through it until the pain had faded and the tunnel stopped spinning.
“Thank you,” she whispered.
Em smiled. “Keep moving, Gyre. Fast as you can.”