The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling

Author:Caitlin Starling
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Published: 2019-04-01T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter Seventeen

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.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.