The Luminous Dead

Gyre Price needs money badly enough to lie for it. She fakes her credentials to join a caving expedition on a remote planet, where the pay would change her life. The job is to map a treacherous, half-flooded cave system, alone, for weeks.

She cannot take off the high-tech suit she is sealed into. Em, a handler who speaks into her ear, controls the suit, the drugs it delivers, and much of what Gyre sees and feels. Em is the only link to the surface. The caves are also home to the Tunnelers, huge creatures nobody understands, which kill anything they sense.

Em has secrets of her own. As the descent gets harder, Gyre loses the ability to tell which threat is worst: the cave, the creatures, her own unraveling mind, or the voice that says it is keeping her alive.

This is science fiction horror with a very small cast, essentially two people, and most of it plays out in confined, dark spaces. It is claustrophobic and psychological, built on mounting pressure and a tense, uneasy relationship between two women who each have reasons to lie. Trust, control and obsession drive the story more than spectacle does.