Yan hesitantly took the blade from Iris’s hand, tossing the orb back into the monk’s hands. “What will it cut through?”
“Anything, really, as long as it’s got the right angle. It’s more of a slashing weapon than a stabbing one.”
Yan stared at the small blade for a while, then went to the fuse box near the door, and shimmied the blade between the two halves of the box’s panel, where the lock was. The pulsar blade passed through the lock like a hot knife through butter, and Yan made a startled and joyousaha!“Can’t we just cut through the door?”
“We can cut through it easily, but could you move a two-tonne door?” Iris asked, watching from the other corner of the maintenance room. It was easier to be present now. He forced all his focus on Yan’s motions as he pried opened the fuse box and dug around the hundreds of wires inside. The pulsar blade provided only a little light as Yan rummaged through the cables.
“Get over here with that ball of yours,” Yan called.
Iris could do that. Holding the orb above Yan’s shoulder, he watched the engineer concoct an improvised escape plan. “I’m trying to manually override the door from here,” Yan explained. “Usually, any signal to the door gets sent from one of the ship’s ‘brains,’ and the door reacts, but if I can nudge itjustright, it’ll pop open like it’s supposed to.”
“Brains? As in, more than one?”
“Yeah,” Yan replied like Iris had asked the dumbest question in existence. “A ship this size can’t operate from a single terminal. Plus, if one goes down, the ship still has to keep the rest of itself running. Don’t they teach you anything in monk school?”
Of course, they had taught Iris plenty inmonk school, but none of it had much use when it came to entrapment on generation ships. Whatever he knew about ships came from books and media Iris managed to request from the library and the brief loans from kind passengers he met during his travels. Unfortunately, he had yet to come across any engineering textbooks in his years as a Vessel, or any engineers. Although the latter might have been a blessing.
Yet even his limited knowledge was enough for Iris to have an unpleasant thought. “Then, hypothetically speaking, if the ship didn’t want you to open this door, it could just order it shut, even if the terminal that short-circuited in the first place is inactive?”
Yan muttered an aggravatedno. He looked over his shoulder to where Iris was and glared unapologetically. “This is more like—like when a doctor hits your knee with a mallet. Reactionary. The ship can’t help it.” He went back to pulling apart the wires. “And anyway, why would the ship not want to open the door?”
I can think of a few reasons, Iris and VIFAI said at once.
As the minutes dragged on, and Yan worked away at the wires, the air around them grew thick with carbon dioxide. The cracks in the vent scales were doing a poor job of sustaining air circulation. Only an hour into their ordeal, and Iris was already sweating, partially from the static exertion of holding up the orb over Yan’s shoulder. Partially from the exertion of keeping himself in the present instead of slipping away into kind oblivion. The conversation had long died out as Yan preferred to work in silence and had only given Iris affirmative grunts for responses.
“Stay awake.”
Iris jolted himself into awareness. His arm, the one holding the orb, was trailing downwards and taking the light with it. “My apologies.” He quickly brought his arm to eye level again.
“What thehellis happening to you, Vessel?” Yan was beginning to strip the insulation on the wires. “Are you claustrophobic or something?”
Iris didn’t say. He didn’t like the edge in Yan’s voice and didn’t feel compelled to explain himself to the engineer while he held the pulsar blade. “I’m fine. I’m perfectly all right,” Iris said instead, doing his best to exude calm.
“No, you’re not,” Yan retorted, face buried in the fuse box, his own sweat a dark stain between his shoulder blades. “You’re panicking because you’ve never been stressed for a single moment in your life, and you have absolutely zero coping skills. They don’t teach you to perform under pressure at monk school.”
Iris wanted to say thatno, he was, in fact, stressed every waking minute of his life, except for about thirty seconds when, during sunrise prayer, he could shut out everything that was excruciatingly wrong with him and be blissfully numb. But Yan’s tone remained confrontational, and Iris held no desire to have a confrontation. What Iris wanted, more than anything, was to bealone. Alone with the bones of theNicaea’s passengers, alone in their silent company and their stories. Mercifully alone, with only VIFAI’s soothing voice and the occasional song chirping away in a distant corner of his mind. He could sit then and meditate. He could breathe, really breathe, without worrying that he was wasting precious oxygen that would be better spared for the person who was actually working towards freeing them.
“Vessel!” Now, Yan was properly angry, but instead of hurling an insult, he changed his expression to one of worrisome calm. “Your turn,” he said, handing Iris the blade. “Start stripping the wires that still have insulation. Get on with it.” He held out his hand expectantly for the glowing orb. “Come on. Hopefully, your Vessel-ness isn’t too holy to do some actual labour.”
No, he wasn’t. Iris got to it. Having worked the pulsar blade before, his movements were much more precise than Yan’s, and his fingers glided effortlessly along the convoluted wires. The engineer peered over his shoulder as he worked, holding the orb just above Iris’s head and teeming with impatience.
“How does the blade work?” Yan asked, his voice so close that Iris had to consciously restrain himself from jumping headfirst into the fuse box. He was effectively trapped between the engineer’s towering frame and the box, forced to answer pestering questions. Stuck in this tiny maintenance room, quickly running out of air, Iris became painfully aware of the positions of their bodies in relation to one another, to the sound of their breaths, and how each one drove the temperature of the room higher. He could think of nothing else.
At least you’re not drifting anymore,VIFAI said, and Iris nearly jumped at its voice. He had been ignoring it again, lost in the delicate work of stripping wires. He had never been able toignore VIFAI before, but then again, he had never been this engrossed in anything he was doing.
It was impossible to dissociate from the moment when, in one hand, Iris held the sharpest blade ever made in all of humanity’s history and the other was bent at the elbow, carving out a shred of personal space for himself. Somehow, in this newfound discomfort, Iris had regained a fragile balance, a deep and painful awareness of the present moment.
“It’s biometrics,” he told Yan after a long pause.
“It’s more than that. You did something else with it when you were turned around.”
Iris closed his eyes and counted to ten. It didn’t help. “Why is it that you want to know so badly, engineer Yan?”
“It’s athing.” Yan shrugged. “I want to know how it works.”
Of course he did. Yan sounded like the sort of person who, as a jubilant child, cut frogs open to see what made them hop. Iris finished stripping the last wire. It was then, with no lack of humour, Iris was reminded that in his experience, the Light truly did not love or care about anyone in particular because otherwise his penance and work with the Starlit would have spared him from this entrapment. Neither salvation nor reward was coming to him. He was well finished with the wires, but Yan hadn’t moved and instead, casually and methodically, began explaining the next steps. “Now you’re going to systematically engage each of these circuits. See the silvery part where you stripped the wire? Take that—No.”
Iris’s hand froze in midair, his index finger poised a millimetre from the copper wire.
