“Only touch the insulation, Vessel, otherwise you will quickly go and meet your maker.”
Iris heeded the warning.
“Now, make sure you’re only crossing two wires at a time. We’re going to go through all of them one by one—No.”
Something wrong again. Iris set his jaw and waited for Yan to take over and do the job himself,correctly, but the engineer muttered a curse and started over. “It’s important that we do these in a systematic way, so, before you touch anything,listen, Vessel. All the wires are colour coded. We will start with the green and match it to another green, then we will match the green to the yellow, then to the red. When we’re done with the green, we will move on to the yellow, and so forth. Is that clear?”
Iris gave Yan a curt nod. “Why would jamming a circuit make the door open?”
“We’re not jamming anything. The door, as is, is dead. ‘No signal’ is closed by default,” Yan explained. “Always is on ships. Something about it being important to keep air inside when things go poorly. But you can always manually override the door if you try hard enough. We’re just going to give it a little jolt to get it going. The right circuit will do just that.”
That sounded reasonable enough. Circuit by circuit, Iris pressed the wires together, hoping the right combination would trigger the door to open. Sweat ran freely down his bare head and under the collar of his robes. If for a moment he became mindful of his breathing, he would find it laborious and a mostly useless endeavour. Air was running out. Behind him, Yan continued to provide his instructions in the same slightly irritated yet reassuring voice. Every couple of minutes, the engineer would run his free hand through his hair, slicking it back with the sweat beading along his hairline.
“How long have we been in here?” Iris asked. That single question took most of the air from his lungs.
There was a delay to Yan’s answer, and Iris knew he was looking down at his wristwatch for far too long for it to be justabout reading time. “Don’t bother with time,” Yan said at last. “Just keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t get distracted. Don’t they teach you to focus on things in monk school?” There was a twinge of desperation to his voice that Iris did his best to immediately forget.
Their time was running out after all. They would fall unconscious first, before the breathing got too difficult and too painful, before they turned blue and everything came to its natural end. It wouldn’t be the worst way to depart, nothing like drowning, nothing like being burned alive. No violence, no resistance. Iris’s biggest regret was that he hadn’tdoneenough in his life, done enough of anything he deemed valuable. But the wires needed crossing, and he had no time to dwell on his inevitable demise. He touched a red wire to a green. The door twitched, so slightly that Iris convinced himself it was a hallucination, but Yan wasn’t as easily convinced.
“There she goes,” he hissed victoriously. “Do it again.”
Iris touched the wires together, and the door twitched once more, this time a few centimetres before slamming back down against the floor and sending a short wave of cool air into the room.
“OK, move.” Yan tossed the orb to Iris and shimmied past him. “Now, I just have to get this thing to output an uninterrupted current, and it should free us right out of here. Vessel, pocketknife, give it.” Yan held out his hand, and Iris begrudgingly dropped the pulsar blade in it. After a few seconds of rummaging inside the fuse box, he called for Iris to come back over. “Just do the exact same thing you did before.”
Iris touched the wires together, and the door slowly slid open, this time all the way, and stayed open—for good. A fresh wave of ship-circulated air flooded the small space. For the first time in two and a half hours, Iris allowed himself a full breath.Behind him, Yan took an equally liberating breath. To their mutual surprise, there was no one on the other side waiting for them. Tev, Jesi, and station security were gone.
“Well, this bodes well,” Yan said. “OK, stay there and keep those wires crossed while I go and figure out what’s going on.”
“I’m coming with you,” Iris said firmly.
Yan stepped in the threshold between the maintenance room and the corridor. “You can’t. If you let go of the wires, the door will shut. Sorry.”
“I beg your pardon?”
But Yan was gone, already hurrying down the corridor. With growing panic, Iris watched the engineer round the corner, his muffled steps on the mossy floor quickly fading from earshot. Iris was about to call out after him when Yan’s head popped around the curve of the wall. “I’m just fucking with you. Why on earth would it do that?” His head disappeared again.
Breath hitched, Iris slowly let go of the wires holding him hostage and took a single step back. The door remained open, and with quick prayer and a stiff curse, he scurried across the threshold and chased after the engineer.
6
I am a Vessel of the Light. I am a comfort to those welcoming death and those remaining in its wake. I have been called upon this most revered duty and accepted it with an open and pure heart.
Then why, O, Infinite Light, am I so afraid?
From the unabridged diaries of Vessel Iris, Volume Eight
Judging from the atmosphere, Iris had stumbled into a wake. Tev had been crying and was doing a poor job of hiding it. He wasn’t the only one either. His gangly arms were tightly wrapped around Yan’s shoulders, and Yan, calmly and begrudgingly, was reciting something to him under his breath. When Iris entered the room, six pairs of eyes, red to various degrees, shot up to greet him. Both Ishtan and Riyu jolted upright from where they were sitting on the ground.
Unsure of what to say, Iris bowed instead, lightly, to avoid any further concern.
“We thought you died,” Jesi said. Her nose was swollen and raw from wiping it with the rough sleeve of her navy coveralls. The proclamation rang out clear and hung in the silent air, echoing in the open space of the common room.
“Took you long enough,” Yan muttered into the silence, Tev’s soggy nose still pressed against his chest. Iris sensed somethingelse had occurred while Yan and he were locked inside the maintenance room and that Yan, despite his current entrapment, was eager to go sort it out.
“I’m quite all right, I assure you,” Iris said, rising from the bow. “Engineer Yan and I were never in any serious danger,” he lied. But really, it strongly depended on one’s definition ofserious danger.
“That’s not what Yan said,” Tev said, fresh tears bubbling up.
