Yan thought for a moment, his whole body taut as a string, ready to snap into action at any moment, or snap itself in half. His latent panic had completely dissipated, his breathing now coming in slow and deliberate waves. Black eyes glistenedfeverishly in the orb’s dim light. “Find anything we can use to wedge into the vents,” he said. “Anything I can use as a screwdriver. If the vents are a no-go, I’d like to pry open the console by the door and see if I can manually override it. No one makes a ship this big without manual overrides at each segment.” Yan gave a nod, seemingly more for his own benefit than Iris’s. “Because that would be dumb.” Without another word of wasted air, he hopped on to the console and reached up towards the vents.
The maintenance room ceiling was low enough that someone of Yan’s height could reach the flaps of the vents while balancing on the console. Groping his way to where the orb’s light failed to reach, he found the edges of the vent flaps, pressed shut against one another. There was little room between each one, not even wide enough for Yan to jam a fingernail in. He traced the vents again for good measure and hopped down to the floor empty-handed. “Good news,” Yan said. “Well, bad newsandgood news. Bad news is that I doubt we can work anything in there to pry the vent flaps open. Good news is, it’s not airtight. I don’t know just how much air is getting in, butsomethingis. It buys us a little more time.”
For a moment, Iris contemplated why, despite the good news, he felt no great relief.
“Did you find anything I can use?”
Iris blinked and when his eyes opened, Yan’s face was much closer than it had been a moment ago. It was difficult to stayinthe awfulness of the moment. To sit along the wall and meditate would have been simpler. As his body grew distant and cold, Iris’s mind retreated into the safety of the empty meditative space. He swayed a little, and the orb tumbled from his open fingers. It never hit the floor. When his consciousness retreated from the comforting void that was the Infinite Light, Yan’s facewas closer still—and angrier. The engineer was clutching the glow sphere in his hand. There were maybe ten centimetres between them.
Yet even then, Yan graciously allowed Iris to stand on his own and left enough space between their bodies so they wouldn’t accidentally touch. “Where the hell did you just go? Your eyes are glazing over.”
Iris didn’t reply. The allure of the void was too great, and he fell again, slipping from the moment one fluttering thought at a time.
“Wake up!”
Here, the moment washere, in the crowded, hot room, running out of air. Here, in the company of an angry engineer who, on a different day, would have struck Iris for his softness, but today, of all days, was not only tolerating it, but also was respecting the boundary Iris had placed in the space before him. Something struck Iris’s forehead, and he instinctively reached out to catch it. The falling orb landed in his palm.
“Where are you disappearing to? Stop fucking around, Vessel, and be useful.” Yan nodded at the door. “Now, do you have anything I can use to get us out of here?”
For a moment, Iris was silent. Then, without any warning, he tossed the glowing sphere into the air. The engineer caught it at the apex of the toss and looked to Iris expectantly. In an outstretched hand, Iris held a golden rectangle, adorned with the rays of the Starlit Order inlaid with mother-of-pearl. The gold finish flickered in the orb’s light, dancing like the tongues of a raging flame against the surrounding darkness.
“A pocketknife?” Yan asked.
Oh, to live an oblivious life, VIFAI said.
Iris turned towards the wall. His thumb found a faint indentation in the centre of the handle.How kind of you to join me.
I never left. You’re the one ignoring me.
Iris bit back a defensive thought and instead said,Nonsense. I don’t have the capacity to ignore you.He turned his attention back to the weapon in his hand. Just right, he had to do it just right, just as hours of training had engrained in him. He let out a slow breath. Yan watched over his shoulder, with the orb held high, keeping his distance, curiosity palpable.
The pulsar blade required two levels of authentication. First, the blade would only respond to Iris’s fingerprint. This was programmed in when he was still a youth as fingerprints had the habit of remaining the same as people aged. The second level of authentication was more precise. The sensor, located in the indentation in the handle, was also a biometrics scanner, set to read Iris’s personal and unforgeable stress response. Given the situation, all he had to do was speculate about what it would be like to die in this enclosed space, with only the engineer for company. An unkind end, turning blue in the long-abandoned maintenance room. Better yet, Yan would probably kill him even sooner. He would wring Iris’s neck or smash his head against the controls to buy himself more air and time. Under any other circumstances, those were stressful enough images. Yet the blade remained sheathed.
Performance anxiety?
Iris told VIFAI to mind its own business in the most impolite terms he could muster.
“What are you doing over there?” Yan’s voice came from Iris’s left. He was too close, so close, in fact, that the hot air from his mouth brushed Iris’s earlobe. The pulsar blade extended at once with a faint blue glow, one-and-a-half metres in length on each end. Iris nearly dropped the damn thing.
“What the hell isthat?” With the vigour of a child about to be burned for the first time, Yan reached for the blade.
To spare the engineer any injuries, Iris removed his thumb from the indentation, and the blade disappeared instantly. Yan’s bewilderment was enough to breathe some life back into Iris, and with a minute trace of amusement, he said, “I’ll tell you what it is if you promise not to go grabbing it.”
Yan acceded with blatant disappointment.
It would be easy to provoke a stress response now that Iris had something explicit and immediate to work with. The mere idea of Yan’s closeness triggered the blade from its sheath with no effort on Iris’s part. He shortened the pulsar blade to only two centimetres in length on one end and turned back around to face the engineer.
“This is a pulsar blade,” Iris said, holding it gently in his outstretched palm. “Every monk of the Starlit Order is given one, once they show an aptitude for wielding it.” He hadsomeaptitude. Nothing compared to Bacai’s deadly grace and precision. Nothing at all to Mother Nova’s skill, honed over the decades. Iris could fight to protect his life, or, if the occasion called for it, and the lives of others, but he was not a fighter.
When the blade was first bestowed upon him at the age of thirteen, he had been both reckless and skittish with the new weapon. Within minutes of holding the blade in his hands, Iris was already missing the tip of his thumb, much to Bacai’s amusement, who was eleven and already far more skilled than him. The blade had instantly cauterised the wound, but the embarrassment burned greater than the injury, so much so that Iris hadn’t touched the blade for the next month.
Yan leaned in closer and watched the blade’s glow with considerable interest. “Thought the Starlit would frown on you stabbing people.”
“The pulsar blade is a defensive weapon. It does not need to be lethal.” Then, after a laden pause, Iris added, “As long as Iask for forgiveness, wrists and ankles are fair game if such need arises.”
“How come it’s shorter now? Can you control its length through your monk mind powers?” Yan was grasping the parameters of the weapon quickly. He watched it now with unbridled curiosity, and Iris wondered how long it would take for the engineer to unapologetically ask for the blade, and how much longer it would take him to take it apart to see what made it tick.
“Nanobots and biometrics, engineer Yan.” Iris extended the handle of the blade to Yan, smiling when the engineer instinctively drew back. “It won’t bite. I have locked it in place now. Keep holding on to the handle, and you’ll be able to use it like a very sharp knife. But remember, it’s incredibly thin and brittle. It can cut, but you can’t use it to wedge anything open.”
