She woke up trapped in her suit.
Her first fumbling attempts to move it failed, her limbs leaden inside the carapace, lips too numb to trigger commands. Her body refused to obey her, refused to so much as twitch.
“Em?” Her voice came out as a hoarse whisper.
Nothing. Panic rose, pooling beneath her sternum. She tried to control her breathing, tried to wiggle her fingers, her toes. Every twitch took an eternity, as if she were being crushed, as if each gesture had to push up through a meter of stone. She could see only a fraction of the cave surrounding her, and she couldn’t be sure it was Camp Four. Camp Four wasn’t a maw of stone fangs. Camp Four didn’t glow faintly.
But Camp Five did.
Her pulse quickened. Had she turned back, somehow? Had she hallucinated the climb up the Long Drop? Dread pooled in her gut and she tried again to lift her hand, but the suit refused to cooperate. Had Em locked her in place to keep her from pushing still further into the bowels of the cave?
There—a fingertip budged. But she could sense something, out beyond her helmet. Out in the darkness she couldn’t see. It was close. It was coming closer. Jennie? Or the cache thief? Isolde. She could almost see her against the glow, pale and desperate, and rushing, rushing—
She woke up again, sitting straight up, the familiar vault of Camp Four above her.
“Em!”
Movement on the other end of the line. “Gyre—is something wrong?” Em asked, concerned, a little confused.
Gyre hunched forward, her hand on her chest, willing her pulse to slow. She was safe. Safe. Right where she’d left herself. “Where were you?” she growled.
“Right here,” Em said, then yawned. “The whole time.”
“Awake?”
“Awake. It’s only been an hour.”
Gyre checked her clock; it matched what Em was saying.
She’d only managed an hour.
“Sorry. Bad dreams,” she muttered.
She shoved herself to her feet, rolling her shoulders, trying to forget that terror. She hadn’t wanted to ever feel that helplessness again, but it had been just like the fear she’d felt hanging over the lake, and at Camp Six when she couldn’t breathe. It was the panic of being near death.
Her brain was conjuring it in her nightmares.
“You should go back to sleep,” Em said. “An hour isn’t nearly enough.”
Em was right, but the thought of lying back down, closing her eyes, made her sweat. “Can’t sleep,” Gyre said. “Not here.”
Grimacing, she paced the chamber, trying not to look at Jennie’s flowering corpse. There was no sign of anybody else, no sign that anybody had been there since she had passed through. The cavern was still.
She was safe.
But she knew she wouldn’t do any better if she tried to close her eyes again. If it wasn’t a nightmare about being trapped down below, it would be a nightmare of drowning, or of the cache thief stealing up on her while she slept. She could ask Em to drug her, but her skin crawled at the thought. No, no sleep. Sleep wasn’t an option.
She had to keep going.
She could get to the next camp on an hour of sleep. It wouldn’t be comfortable, but she could do it. Just rappel down into the small sump, swim it, get into that tight, protected nook she’d bedded down in before . . .
“I’m heading to Camp Three.”
After a second’s hesitation, Em said, “Sounds good.” She brought up the marker, and Gyre set off, favoring her bad calf. Her pacing had taken her almost to the Long Drop, and she hugged the far wall of the chamber as she walked back around toward the path to Camp Three, desperate to avoid seeing Jennie one last time.
“Wait.”
Gyre drew up short, body coiling, ready to react. Her eyes darted across her screen, searching for movement, before she realized Em probably only needed to adjust her suit. Her calf was burning still, whatever reparative process Em had started while she slept unfinished.
But Em didn’t say anything else. She just typed, quickly at first, then slowly. Hesitantly.
“What the fuck is that?” Em finally whispered.
“Where?” Gyre asked, shuddering as she twisted, searching for whatever it was Em had spotted. “Where are you—”
“Up,” Em said.
Gyre looked up.
There, tucked into a narrow crevice two body lengths above her was Jennie.
No.
There was no way. Jennie was under the shelf, was behind her. It couldn’t be Jennie.
Chest tightening, she made herself step back, far enough to get a better look at the body curled up, crumpled, shoved into a gap in the stone that didn’t extend more than a meter into the wall.
No, not a body.
A suit.
As she stared, transfixed, she realized the helmet was in pieces scattered around it, only the back curve of the head still in place, bowed forward enough to obscure the missing faceplate. The seams at the shoulders and along the sides had been opened too. She could see the chaos of wires and tubes that had connected whoever had worn it to its interface.
“That’s—” She couldn’t finish the thought.
“That’s not possible,” Em whispered.
“An empty suit.” Somebody else in the cave. Gyre took a step back, twisted, looked over her shoulder. But she saw nothing. No naked form dashing from the shadows, no face hovering at the edge of her reconstruction.
But this meant it could all have been real. There could have been somebody down here. Isolde? No, it couldn’t be. And yet—and yet—
“Gyre, look.”
A green light appeared on her screen. It was just behind the suit, but she couldn’t see it from where she stood. She returned to the wall and clawed her fingers into the stone, boosting herself up to the bottom of the crevice. This close, she could see the cracked armor matched hers detail for detail, just like Jennie’s did. She couldn’t bring herself to touch it, to move it out of her way.
But she could see what was behind it now.
It was a box.
It was a cache.
“Camp Four,” Gyre whispered.
“Fuck.”
“Why didn’t we see this last time? Why didn’t we see the box?” She looked around the cavern; she’d walked this way herself on that long night, reading the dossiers.
“It wasn’t here,” Em said, voice strangled with pain. “I scanned the cavern. It wasn’t here.”
Gyre’s pulse pounded in her ears. It hadn’t been here, which meant someone had taken it and then brought it back, someone in one of Em’s suits.
They had been here recently.
Where had they gone? All she could think about was pale faces in the darkness, motion in the corner of her eye, a figure haunting her up and down the Long Drop and to the rim of Camp Five.
A brief, sharp whine snaked from Em’s throat.
“Em, who was this?” Gyre whispered, muscles trembling as she held herself perched on the rim of the crack.
“The serial number,” Em managed, voice high and thin. She was terrified. No, horrified. Imagining one of her cavers dying alone, not connected to her computer, not able to hear her voice. “Read me the serial number. Back of the neck, base of the skull,” Em said. “But the timing . . . That model of suit . . . Shit.”
Gyre finally pushed herself up into the gap, shuddering as she nudged the motionless husk to the side. It felt light. Wrong. The discarded skin of some deep cavern arthropod.
The serial number was invisible in the light of her reconstruction. It was printed, low relief at best. She switched to her headlamp.
“Serial number ends in HX047,” Gyre said.
“It’s him,” Em whispered. “Shit, it is him.”
“Who?” Gyre toggled back to her reconstruction, sagging with relief as the room sprang back to full light and was blessedly, blessedly empty.
“Eli Abramsson,” Em said. Gyre stiffened at the name, remembering the funeral cavern, the missing body. “He went in nine weeks before you.”
“You lost him in the sump,” Gyre said. And I never found him when I found the others.
Em nodded. “His signal started degrading, and the last I saw, he’d been caught up in a current. Swept away. I assumed—I assumed the signal had cut out, finally, because the suit had—I thought he was dead. He had to be dead. Back snapped like the others, or—or—oh fuck.”
Gyre rocked back on her heels and hugged her knees to her chest, staring at the empty husk. “He didn’t die,” she whispered. “He was just cut off from you, like I was. Washed up, like I did. Climbed back here, like I did. But why? Why not just climb out?”
“Maybe he couldn’t,” Em said. “I don’t know. He was suspicious of me by Camp Five, almost as much as you were, but I hadn’t told him anything, and he hadn’t seen the bodies. Maybe when he came back up, he saw Jennie. Maybe he thought I’d sabotaged his suit. He got back up here, thinking I’d tried to kill him. He took the cache and tried to find another way out, one I wasn’t looking for.”
“Em,” she whispered. “Em, when did you lose contact with his suit?”
“Five weeks ago.”
Oh god. “How long would the cache have lasted him?” she asked, not wanting to know the answer, fearing she already did. The cache had been gone when she first reached Camp Four, and now it was back.
“Five weeks,” Em said. “If he kept the suit in low power mode, five weeks. He’d fully stocked it at Six.”
Gyre trembled, staring at the suit and at the cache behind it. “He was here. Em, he was here.” When she’d felt like she was being watched, was this why? Had he been there, somehow? But no, he couldn’t have been. Not beyond the sump. The events didn’t line up, didn’t add up, and some of it had been the spores, had been her own exhausted mind.
Right?
Em bit back a weak noise. “Check the cache.”
“No. No. I need to get moving.”
“Check it.”
Gyre reached behind the suit, but despite her care, she jarred it loose from the crevice. It collapsed below her, its polymer plates clattering against the ground. She opened the supply box, nudged its lid up.
The battery kit had one remaining ampule. The ration kit had more.
“He didn’t use it all.” But there had been that overlap. He had passed through here. The rope on the side of the Long Drop—
“It’s possible his suit was going unresponsive,” Em said. Whispered. “The same issue that made me lose contact. And then, when it wasn’t working, he came back this way, but his suit was failing. He clawed his way out, stashed it out of the way so you wouldn’t find him. So I wouldn’t find him. Tried to get out on foot. But with the ambient temperature at seven Celsius . . .”
“Hypothermia.”
Em hummed assent. “Probably within a day. Much faster after swimming the sump, if it had already filled by then. And he would have had to rig a harness for himself, for the climbs.”
Gyre stared at the husk. Em’s story didn’t make sense, but the only other explanation Gyre could invent was worse. Maybe he hadn’t tried the sump at all. Instead, he’d felt a tug, a feeling of forgetting something, and he’d turned back toward Camp Five.
On the ledge on the Long Drop, she’d seen rope attached to a bolt that she didn’t think had been there before. A face, in the darkness. What if it hadn’t been Isolde at all?
What if she’d killed him?
She shuddered, forced the thought aside. She’d never seen the body. She’d never heard it hit the ground.
“I should keep moving,” Gyre said, and tried to ease herself back down the wall.
She couldn’t.
Her muscles were louder than the shouting of her panic, or maybe they were in on it. She couldn’t move.
“He’s why the Tunneler came,” Em said, her voice wondering and horrified. “The Tunneler sensed him up here in Camp Four, when he took the cache, and it came up, close enough to breach the side of the Long Drop. But then it left again. Something must have happened. He’s gone.”
Pain twisted her words, and Gyre closed her eyes, trying to feel that pain, trying to let it goad her.
You can’t be him; you have to keep moving.
There—it was enough, and she could push off the stone, drop down beside the wreckage of Eli’s abandoned suit.
And then she ran, refusing to look over her shoulder in case she saw the half-frozen, starved, ravaged man staggering down the tunnel behind her.