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BATTERY APPROACHING TOTAL SHUTDOWN
CAVER, SWAP TO BACKUP
But there was no backup. There wasn't even light. Gyre had shut her headlamp almost right after she'd leapt into the water. Flailed through meters of sump in total darkness, the only sensation the pull of gravity and current against her suit. There was no backup. There was no light.
Gyre was lost.
Her hands flattened against the sump wall again and again. She found stone ridges and horrifying gaps where water had worn away the edge of the sump. Every couple of meters Gyre's hand would dip into a dent in the stone and her entire body shuddered. She rattled inside the suit and felt like a skeleton being banged around a long fall.
CAVER, SWAP TO BACKUP
Gyre swiped the warning away. Blaring across her display, it glowed bright and blinding, less a warning than a foretelling. There was no backup here. There was only Gyre and the sump.
She slammed her open palms against the stone wall and her left hand entered one of the terrifying gaps again. This one was so deep that her arm went in all the way to the elbow before she could stop herself and yank it back. This was wrong. This was all wrong.
None of this should be here. Gyre's hands should have found the line by now, not just hole after hole in the sump wall. The sump between Camp Five and Camp Six couldn't possibly be this long. She had to be halfway through. More than halfway through. Nearly ten minutes ago her hands had lost the line and she'd fallen down, down, tumbled through dark water and clouds of confusing silt, but she hadn't swum backwards. She would know if she'd swum backwards. She would have passed the air bell. It would be impossible to miss the air bell.
Wouldn't it? Wouldn't she know?
The sump cut through the cave in a straight line. It was a straight line. Even if Gyre had swum backward, somehow, without noticing, she should have come out on one end of the sump or the other.
Camp Five, useless and empty and laden with swirling hypnotic spores. Camp Six, with the only cache she had any hope of reaching… The cache she couldn't have ruined with her carelessness.
Gyre tried one more time. She ran her hands up and down the sump wall, desperately searching for the line. If she found the line, she could find her way out. She had to be so close to the end. All she needed was one directional arrow. She shuddered as her hand tried to slide into that deep gap again, its soft and sucking current pulling at her arm, and reached up above her head.
The line had to be here somewhere. It had to be. All the branch offs in the sump went nowhere. The map said so. Gyre's own swim through here, earlier, with no care for her power levels and no idea what was yet to happen to her, said so.
If she had flailed into a branch off the way her arm kept slipping into gaps in the wall, she would have found her way out by now. None of them were bigger than a meter or so.
Her fingertips reached the arcing ceiling of the sump and she howled inside her suit.
It shook the water around her. It shook her skull in her head. Gyre could hear the scream bouncing off the inside of her helmet and burrowing into her ears, but she couldn't stop herself. It was like listening to someone else scream. It was far off and so full of grief it threatened to burst her ears and break through the center of her chest. Gyre wailed, and heard herself, and heard her fists pound against stone.
Then her left arm froze. Her right kept going. Her fury, her grief, was so strong that it took a moment to stop herself even with panic swelling in her gut. It wasn't until the terror punched through to her chest that Gyre stopped beating the sump wall. And by then it was too late.
She couldn't see either of her hands in the dark, not without her headlamp, but she could feel her fingers straining. Gyre couldn't open either of her hands.
Her battery was dying.
She felt wetness against her face. The entire sump lurched. Her helmet had cracked. She was going to drown, not suffocate - Her eyes were wet, her cheeks were wet, she felt water against her lips and she pressed them closed against her teeth. Gyre didn't want to drown. She didn't want to die here alone in the dark.
The faint taste of salt penetrated through her haze. The water pulled her away from the sump wall and down. Her legs, still extended, brushed against stone as her suit dragged her toward the bottom of the sump.
Gyre's battery had died. Her suit was locked. Her hands were fists and she was crying inside her helmet, not drowning.
She started to laugh. It bubbled up out of her and broke past her clenched teeth. She shook in her suit again. Sinking like a stone and using up the last of her stale air on hysterical laughter. Gyre was going to die with her hands welded into fists and she couldn't stop laughing.
Her back fell against something soft and thicker than water. A thud rolled through her as her shoulders hit the bottom of the sump. A layer of silt bloomed around her. Gyre could see it even in the dark - It felt like she could see it, murky black against clear black. It had to be there even if she couldn't see it. Her shoulders sank down into the silt, and then her back, and then her feet hit the soft sand.
The bottom of a sump in the bottom of a cave at the bottom of an awful, miserable planet, and Gyre was going to suffocate in a metal tin.
She gasped. Gray blobs burst in her vision, shrank into points, and burst again. The air in her lungs was stale. It burned the inside of her throat. Gyre exhaled and tried to suck the same breath back in.
Nothing came. All she could feel were spent tears on her lips. Her head swam.
Some part of her thought to try summoning the medical panel. But her vision was spotty, her lungs burned, and Gyre couldn't find it. The light in her HUD was weak. Silt opened up beneath her. Her body sank another quarter inch. Water sloshed back and forth above her. Gyre flipped through setting after setting, desperate. She didn't want to suffocate. One injection and it would be over. She wouldn't even know…
Communications settings appeared. Gyre froze. Or she would have, if she could've moved.
Em.
Some part of her initiated contact before she could even register the option. That was it. Whatever residual power was left in her battery went into establishing that connection, pulling up an image of Em's face, wide-eyed and worried.
Nothing left to find the medical panel. Nothing left to pump morphine into her blood.
"Em," Gyre mouthed, soundless. Her chest hurt so much.
"Gyre?" Em's dark eyes flicked back and forth. "What happened? Why aren't you moving - Oh, shit."
If she'd had any air left, Gyre would have laughed. She couldn't even say Em's name. Couldn't say anything. Couldn't tell Em anything.
"No, no, no." Poor Em. Her hands flew across her keyboard. She sucked her lower lip between her teeth, gnawing. "You're getting some power, but it's almost nothing. A trickle. The connection is fucked. The battery isn't seated right. Gyre, how did this happen?"
Gyre strained to pull the corners of her mouth up, hoping Em could tell or see somehow, hoping the bitter smile translated on one of Em's monitors. She couldn't answer. But she had Em's face. Gyre had Em's face, and the suit Em had designed to bring her down into this place. It had locked up around her joints and its weight pinned her here at the bottom of the sump, but it was almost like not being alone. It was almost like being held.
"How…" Em shook her head. Her hair shifted, and she did something else to her computers. "You shouldn't be there. You shouldn't have gone that way. How did you even find it?"
More gray bursts. Gyre let her eyes start to drift shut. It wouldn't be long now.
She'd found the sump the way she had the first time, of course. Em would realize that eventually. This wouldn't be one more unanswered question.
"Did you lose the line? Stupid!" Em whispered. Her face scrunched up. Her shoulders had gone tense. She kept biting her lip, between sentences, and it was swollen and cut from the worry. "Why were you in the sump in the first place, Gyre? You never should've gone back in there without me!"
But Em wouldn't burn herself up trying to solve this mystery. She had already figured it out - Gyre had fucked up. She'd fucked up and she'd died for it.
"Piece of shit," Em muttered under her breath. "This wasn't the plan."
Glad to know her dying in the water had never been the plan. Gyre closed her eyes all the way.
Any second now.
The light from her HUD flared so bright it cut through Gyre's eyelids. She opened her eyes and gasped.
Cool, fresh air slid over her lips. Her lungs swelled with it.
BACK-UP POWER SOURCE ACTIVATED
The spots began to fade, and Gyre felt the suit release her fists. Her fingers stretched out.
100% CHARGE REMAINING
Reflex jerked her body. Her legs kicked, driving her further down into the silt, and then she drove her elbows back and powered herself upright. Her suit moved. It moved, and on her display, swirls of cool and cold water were painted in blues and purples, the silt a confusing cloud of neon swirling around her body.
PRIMARY BATTERY DEPLETED
What?
CAVER, REPLACE PRIMARY BATTERY AT SOONEST CONVENIENCE
"What?"
Em looked at her, stone faced. "Caver," she said, her voice flat. "Swim up."
Gyre opened her mouth. She breathed in, and out, and in again, pulling in so much air it made her lungs hurt. The last few minutes started to fade. Her awareness filtered in as sharp as the light from her HUD. Air. Clean air. Her hands, flexing in the water. Not locked into fists.
Primary battery. Back-up power source.
"Swim up, caver," Em repeated. "We're done here."
Gyre's body responded without her. As far as she could tell, all her brainpower was going toward gaping like a fish inside her helmet. Breathing in amazing, impossible air. Her legs moved. Her arms moved. She kicked and floated upward. Her hands found the sump wall, and she climbed, air in the bottom of her lungs and questions tumbling around her mind like silt in the water.
"To the right," Em told her, after she had crawled up about four meters.
"What?" Was that the only word she could say now?
Em sighed. A map replaced her face on the HUD. The map of the cave, zoomed into the stretch of Camp Five to Camp Six. Except instead of the straight line of the sump, interrupted in the middle with that precious air bell, there was a long, skinny diversion branching off the bottom of the sump. It went straight down for several meters before curving to the side and cutting through the stone perpendicular to the direction of the rest of the sump. A small yellow light indicated Gyre was there. In the diversion.
Gyre had gotten lost, after all. There had always been more to the sump.
There had always been more to the map.
Her hand slipped into one of those gaps in the stone. It startled her, but she was too tired to do anything but pull her arm out and pull herself up another foot. She said, "You knew where I was."
"No. I didn't have my map up," Em said. Her map.
Not Gyre's. Not the one Em had given Gyre. Not the one that had gotten Gyre lost.
Em's map.
"We cut off communication for a reason," Em said, her voice tight. "Keep going this way. Turn." She paused, waited for Gyre to follow her directions, and then continued. "Knowing what you were doing would mean I wouldn't be surprised. It's hard to fake surprise."
"Unlike everything else?" Gyre said. Her voice came out grinding.
She didn't wait for Em to answer, or to order her upward. The indicator light on the map said she was back in the sump. She kicked and swam straight up, then to the right. She'd been within meters of Camp Six when she'd lost the line. If she had just turned to the right when her hand had slipped, she could have swum out. Found a new battery on her own.
Never known about the back-up power source. Never known the map Em gave her had been deliberately edited.
Gyre had known Em was willing to alter what she saw. She'd known that from the beginning, or nearly, when Em had tried to hide the body of the other caver. But to change the map… It was like cutting Gyre's line halfway through the Long Drop. There was no way she could've ever navigated this place without Em's help.
As she finally emerged from the sump, hauling herself up the incline to dry air and toward Camp Six, Em decided to speak.
"If you had known about the back-up power circuit, you never would have pushed yourself so hard. If you had known about the dead ends on the map, maybe you would have insisted on exploring them. Some of the others did," Em told her. Bitterness made her voice fragile. "They wouldn't listen. Resisted going down paths I wanted to explore because maybe the dead ends lead further. Sometimes they did."
Em's image appeared on Gyre's HUD again, a small square in the corner. Not enough to obscure the reconstruction or to keep Gyre from walking through the stone columns to Camp Six. Em's eyes pointed down. Gyre would have taken it as shame, before. Would have read emotion into it. Now Gyre read nothing. Just like Em's voice, her face was empty. Her eyes were probably fixed on some readout from Gyre's suit. The suit that clearly mattered more than Gyre herself ever had.
Gyre kept her chin up and walked.
Em's lip curled. "But the dead ends never lead where I need them to. That's why I took them off the map."
"Like a directional arrow," Gyre said, and then realized she had spoken it out loud.
"Yes." Em raised her head, briefly, her dark eyes lighting on Gyre's face. Then she went back to what she'd been doing. Reading something. "That's why I hid the back-up power."
"How long will it last?"
"You're in Camp Six again," Em said. It took Gyre a moment to figure out why. By the time her mind put it together, Em was speaking. Rushing on. Pressing the point home before Gyre could wriggle out of it. "We know which direction to go this time. With the cache, you can replace your primary battery, and you'll have more than enough power to swim through the sump-"
"The Hell sump," Gyre snapped.
"My father is on the other end of that sump," Em snapped back. "You're right there, Gyre. You have to keep going. You have to. I'll never forgive myself if you don't."
Gyre came to a halt. She was in the middle of Camp Six. There was the cache, with the extra batteries. If she put one in her primary slot and put another two into the back-up, the back-up she had known about all along and not the surprise one, she would be set for power for ages. Em hadn't answered when she'd asked how long this back-up power source would last. Which either meant it wouldn't last as long as a battery, or that it would last even longer.
The map had been a lie the whole time. The suit had been a lie the whole time.
Gyre looked at the cache and felt her gut churn. She swallowed sourness against the back of her tongue. How long had Em planned on her being down here?
Was there even supposed to be enough power to get Gyre back out again? Or had Em always planned on flinging her back down into different tunnels, different diversions? Had Em planned on Gyre getting lost?
"You lied to me," Gyre said. But it was weak.
There was so much stone above her. Between her and Em. Days' worth of stone. Gyre had suddenly lost hold of what she knew, the way she'd lost hold of the line in the sump, but she knew exactly how far underground she was. She thought she knew. If Em hadn't lied about that, if Em hadn't altered the meter count on the map, but surely there would have been no point in doing that. Like lying about the bodies in the cave. The dead ends in the sump. The battery.
"Yes. I lied." Em's voice was strong. It was loud in Gyre's ears. "I've been doing this longer than you, Gyre. I've been doing this longer than anyone. I know what happens when I don't lie, and it's lost cavers, and dropped lines, and wasted trips. It's dead bodies and dead batteries. It's failure."
"You lied to me," Gyre repeated. She shook her head. She yelled, "You lied to me!"
Em went quiet.
"I'm not going back down there. I won't! What happens if I get swept down the tunnel? I can't hold a line in there any better than I could hold the line in the sump behind me," Gyre said.
Her voice shook. She felt like she was losing the line all over again. Her hands flexed. She held them in tight fists and still felt like she was falling. She'd thought - She'd thought she'd had Em on her side. But she'd been climbing down in the dark alone all along. It had always been a lie.
She thought she'd been so smart.
"If you need this so badly, you do it," Gyre said. She tried to make it an order, but her voice broke. She trembled, and she tasted tears on her lips again. "You come down here and die for it."
"I won't let you die." Em leaned forward, then looked at the camera again. Reached up for it, so it looked like her hand was reaching to catch Gyre. Em's eyes widened again. The flat fury and lines of disappointment in her face faded. She was just a woman, looking at Gyre, her hand outstretched. "I won't let you die. Haven't I proved that much? I'll do whatever I have to, to keep you alive. Even if it means lying to you. You can do this, Gyre. I'm sure of it. I think you're the only one who could."
Gyre swallowed. A knot swelled in her throat. Pride burned in the center of her chest and she hated herself for it.
Maybe Em did believe Gyre could do it. Was the only one who could. Or maybe she was so desperate to get a little further that she would burn through all the power and food Gyre could carry just to learn a little bit more about the Hell sump. Just to find out where it ended, so she could direct the next person there.
Em said, "I'll give you anything, Gyre. Just try one more time. You can push through. When you get up I'll give you anything you ask for. I'll give you everything you ask for."
Gyre knelt in front of the cache. She pulled out batteries to slot into storage. One more to replace the dead one in her suit. Her display read BATTERY AT 100%. The suit must automatically switch away from the back-up power when a battery was inserted. Which meant that the only way to measure how long back-up power lasted would be to remove the battery and see how many hours passed before it was hard to breathe.
"What else did you lie about?"
"What?" Em leaned back.
Gyre exhaled. "What else did you lie about?" she asked.
Em hesitated. Then the map reappeared, replacing her face on the HUD. Several tunnels, drops, and even a new sump appeared. The cave looked like it had been holding a breath the entire time Gyre was down here, and it had just let it out. The map sprawled. There were so many places Gyre hadn't been. So many places she'd walked past without knowing they were there.
The Hell sump didn't get any bigger. It still ended abruptly where Gyre knew it couldn't. If it really ended where the map drew the lines, then there would be no current. It wouldn't be so dangerous.
But Em could be lying about that, too.
"Well," Em said, brittle. Her face reappeared, a small corner in the edge of the screen. Not nearly as important as the map. "Now you know."
"Everything?" Gyre asked.
Em didn't answer.
The map sat on Gyre's display.
There were days of stone between Gyre and the surface. If she cut off communication again, kept open that dead channel, Em wouldn't be able to talk to her. Couldn't fill Gyre's head with nonsense and the sweet melody of her voice as Gyre tried to escape. Or maybe she could. Maybe she could've reached out all along. And if she could reach out, she could control the suit. All it took was a connection. The morphine was still there, along with all the other drugs Em had loaded into the suit.
No one knew where Gyre was. Except Em.
Finally, Gyre said, "If I don't come back from this, I'm going to haunt the shit out of you."
Both corners of Em's mouth went up. It made her face look bright. But her picture was so small, shoved into the corner of Gyre's display, not even half the size of the map. It was hard to see much more than an impression. Her face looked bright, but at that size, her eyes looked shadowed and empty.
"I'm already haunted, caver," Em said.
When Gyre got back to the surface - If she got back to the surface - Gyre would ask to meet Em in person. Alone. That was it, that was all she wanted anymore. To be alone in a room with Em. To be face-to-face with the person who had trapped her down here.
Gyre turned toward the Hell sump.
One more time.
A lot could happen when two people were alone.