“Jesi was right, the doors are dead. We managed to override the ones in the corridor, but the airlock won’t listen. Something’s sending it a signal to stay shut.”
“Just like the maintenance room,” Iris said, loud enough for Yan to hear what he meant.You lied.
“That would be the second piece of bad news,” Yan said without a moment’s hesitation, ignoring Iris’s comment outright, ignoring Iris. “The maintenance room is locked again.”
Whoever wanted them stranded aboard theNicaeawas set on keeping them contained, isolated from the rest of the body of the ship. What secrets awaited them in theNicaea’s belly?
“We can try cutting through the door again,” Tev suggested.
“Alternator’s gonna bust,” Jesi muttered and tipped back the rest of her coffee like a shot. “We’re running out of tools and options.” She looked up at Yan expectantly.
Everyone looked to Yan. Yan, in turn, shoved his hands in the pockets of his trousers. “I’ve got nothing,” he admitted.
In their brief three hours locked together in the maintenance room, slowly asphyxiating, Iris had learned that Yan rarelyhad nothingand that he immediately moved on to the next solution after one failed.
“Looks like we’re stuck here overnight, at least,” Riyu, who had yet to say anything, said. “We have some food, and our Vessel here can always gather more apples. At least we know they’re safe.” She waved to all of Yan. “We better settle in, get the tea and coffee going. Someone on Doshua will notice when we don’t come back and send a shuttle over. Maybe the airlockwill open for them from the outside, or we try again after we’ve rested.”
“We’ll take shifts,” one of the station security guards said. “One of us per shift and whoever else can stay up.” Everyone agreed. How could they not? Options were few and biding their time was by far not the worst one.
Excluded from the conversation and with dwindling interest in its resolution, Iris slipped away from the room and trotted down towards his cargo bay. Already it had begun to feel like a kind of reprieve. It washis:hispile of bones,hisduffel bag lying neatly in the corner,hispartially assembled skeletons. Those, he would get to once the crisis had been averted.
Despite only having had four hours of sleep, Iris’s body buzzed with nervous energy. It flowed through every tendon and muscle fibre, still riled from the close call in the maintenance room. Begrudgingly, he conceded that it was Yan’s calm that had gotten him through it, and at once, a larger realisation hit.
“Well, that’s just not fair,” Iris said out loud.
If he would have told you, you would have panicked, VIFAI said. He needed you to stay calm, so he gave you something to do. It was good thinking. You must agree. Sometimes, justsometimes, Iris wished VIFAI performed a little worse. In response, his construct gave Iris a small electric jolt along the brain stem.
“He could have told me,” Iris protested, ignoring the sting of his pride, knowing full well that he had been of little use in that room. “But still—”
Say it, VIFAI nudged playfully.
Back in the maintenance room, Iris had wished for nothing more than to lose himself in the soothing numbness of dissociation. But VIFAI was right. Yan’s presence had been a comfort, a strange, abrasive kind of comfort, like a thick wool blanket thatirritated the skin, but kept you warm. Iris could think of no one else who would have handled their predicament better. Where to place those two seemingly contradictory feelings? Iris chose to store them in a distant corner of his mind so he could revisit them when VIFAI wasn’t watching and wouldn’t make snide remarks at this change of heart. “Still, I’m glad he was there to keep me calm,” Iris said.
That wasn’t so hard.
Iris rolled his eyes. A deep rumbling in his stomach drowned out his remaining thoughts. He didn’t have a watch, but the internal cue was more than enough to let him know that nearly a whole day had passed without food. Once the time was right, and everyone had gone to bed, he would sneak away to the orchard. But for now, he would remain here, alone, with his skeletons and the electronic voice in his mind. He could assemble a few more bones. He could recite the sutras over the bodies. He could, at the very least, return these people to the One Beginning and be a little bit less of a failure.
He would not, however, under any circumstances, think about the fact that they were all trapped inside a ship, that VIFAI had no way of communicating with the outside world, and that the chances of someone from Doshua coming to get them were slim at best.
Artifacts like theNicaeawere expected to be in disarray. Faulty doors and flickering lights were only the tip of the disrepair they all should have expected. And even if a hostile takeover were to come from Doshua or from a research institute, it would befinanciallyhostile. It was highly unlikely someone would murder a Starlit monk or a handful of academics over a generation ship.Highlyunlikely. Unless … unless the takeover wouldn’t be financial, and the interests of an institute or a station outweighed the value of human life. No, he would not,under any circumstances, add to the panic that was already dangerously close to spilling over.
Decisively, Iris pulled a smooth skull from the bone pile and held it up in his outstretched hand. A perfect, round hole in the glabella stared back at Iris. “That’s not natural,” Iris noted, and passed the skull from one hand to another, never breaking eye contact with the hollow sockets.
What? Humans don’t usually develop holes in their heads?
Iris winced. Death was familiar. It had been his close companion since childhood, and he had no strong feelings about it one way or another. Starlit preached that death was a mere illusion, not any less or more real than living itself.
Death is the shift in the tide, the crashing of a wave, never, even for a moment, apart from the whole ocean.
When he was just a boy, Mother Nova had informed him that while he quickly had intellectualised this idea, he was still many years frominternalisingit. Hypothetically, the ocean of nonexistence was a comforting thought. Even at the age of ten, Iris found the idea to be one that was soothing, but it wasn’t until much later that Iris had embraced it in every single one of his cells. While death itself held no sacred meaning for him, the violence that often preceded death still confused Iris, angered him in a way that things should never anger a Vessel.
Gingerly, he placed the skull atop the carpet of green moss. Hollow eyes watched him, penetrating to the very core of him. It was theviolence. It was always the violence he couldn’t stand, the last gasping breaths, the curled, paled fingers, the way people always searched for something to say as they passed. It wasn’t death that bothered Iris, it was the dying. How soon would his own last breath fill a silent room with parting rasps?How soon would he too search for useless words that only amounted to more grief and confusion to those remaining? No need to worry about that last part.
As Iris continued his staring match with the skull, the cargo bay around him settled into a gentle quiet. From afar, the dull, muffled voices of the academics, now sharing in a modest meal, echoed through to the cargo bay—a tether stretched from the solitary monk to the living. Iris took a curved rib and placed it in its rightful place below the skull. He ached to sever that fragile tether. Most days, it was a reminder of a world that had moved on without him, a world that he could visit from time to time, but never be at home with.
Your vitals indicate—VIFAI started, but Iris silenced it with a wave of a hand. He was well aware of what his vitals indicated. Yet, there was still the last bit of frantic energy racing along his tendons, granting him no reprieve. Left unattended, it could turn to frustration, to anger, and eventually could turn to rash action. Given the circumstances, he couldn’t afford any rash action. The energy required a different outlet.
First, Iris double- and triple-checked that the door to the cargo bay was firmly shut. Seeing that he was safe, he untied the side of his robes and slid them from his shoulders. Heavy silk pooled by his feet, chasing towards the ground in a pearl waterfall. He folded the robes into a neat square, then reached up and undid the tall collar of his undershirt. His fingers danced along the left side where the edges met in dozens of small knots. The fabric here was as white and delicate as the main robes, and Iris honoured it just the same, folding it in a neat square, creased meticulously along each edge.
