Warm, humid air brushed against his bare skin as he laced his fingers together and stretched his arms high above his head. The wide band of his trousers sat flush against his lean core,right beneath the first protruding rib, and it stretched with him, matching Iris’s movements. His left clavicle sat too high from when he had separated his shoulder as an overzealous youth. Something in that shoulder creaked with every rotation. It would until its very last one.
Everything eventually rejoined the Light. Everything, including Iris’s body, was impermanent, but that was a poor excuse for not maintaining it in proper working order. It had been a few days since Iris had stretched or moved in any sort of disciplined way. It would burn off some of that nervous energy too; maybe silence VIFAI, maybe, even, silence his own mind for a while.
With a deep sigh, Iris placed his palms on the ground, shoulder-width apart, did fifty push-ups, paused to catch his breath, and did another fifty. When his triceps protested, he did ten more, then sat back on his heels. His chest rose and fell rapidly, his breathing a little heavier than he was proud of. He followed up with one hundred sit-ups and then one hundred squats until the burning in both his shoulder and his core could no longer be ignored. It was satisfying to move, to push his own weight, to feel the pain from exertion. Iris lowered himself to the floor again and tried for another one hundred push-ups. He made a valiant effort, hitting seventy before his arms gave out, and he fell face-first onto the moss.
You’re getting weak.
“Age comes for me.” Iris rolled onto his back, panting. He welcomed the prickling of the cool moss against his flushed skin along of back and shoulders. Spreading his arms out, Iris dug his fingers into its soft, organic tapestry and gathered it into tight fists. The energy was tamed, briefly, and so his low-grade anxiety was rendered manageable. If not for the gnawing in his stomach, he could sleep. Breathing slowed, he listened forthe now-welcome hum of the others’ voices and heard nothing. Having eaten what was left, they must have wandered off to get their own rest.
Still half dressed, Iris finished assembling the skeleton. Then, he slid on his undershirt, aligning each button with outmost precision, donned his robes, and ventured out. Between him and the orchard lay a long corridor and the wide-open communal space. Iris prayed that the academics and the engineers had decided to sleep elsewhere, and he could continue on in his much-appreciated solitude without making empty excuses or bowing unnecessarily. Placing one bare foot ahead of the other, Iris tiptoed through the corridor. Ahead of him, the room lay blissfully empty, submerged in twilight.
“Where are you off to, Vessel?” Yan asked, his voice booming in the otherwise reverent silence. Iris jumped. He wasn’t proud of being so easily startled and reflexively reeled back a mixture of fear and reactionary anger. Yan had been managed, in an enclosed space no less. He could do it again.
Willing his expression into a habitual benevolent half smile, Iris said, with a small bow “Off to gather some apples, engineer Yan. Where has everyone else gone to?”
Yan swiveled around in his chair. His hair, usually pulled back with a hair tie, hung disheveled around his face in long, black strands. He ruefully sipped on what Iris thought to be cold coffee, grimacing every time his mouth touched the lip of the mug. “Gone to sleep. Security is walking the perimeter, like it’s doing us any good.” A half-smoked cigarette was tucked behind his right ear, and Yan reached for it repeatedly as he spoke, but never once took it out. “Ishtan told you about the maintenance room.” He finally pulled the cigarette from behind his ear and rolled it between his fingers absentmindedly.
Iris nodded. “I wish you would have told me at the time.”
Yan took a sip of his coffee and winced with disgust. “You weren’t exactly doing great to begin with, Vessel. I didn’t need you having a full-blown meltdown in there. Although …” He tucked the cigarette into the breast pocket of his shirt and pulled out the pulsar blade. Iris willed himself still. “I am still quite curious about how this works. It’s biometrics for sure, like you said, but I can’t figure out what else you did to it to get it to go all sharp.”
“If we manage to get off this ship intact, I’ll show you,” Iris said and was taken aback by the lighthearted tone of his own voice. The expectation was for Yan to mock him, to riposte with some hurtful reply or jab that he certainly kept in his back pocket so they could continue with the already well-established pattern of communication. Engineer on offense, Vessel on reluctant defense. This would, of course, go on until either one of them died or they were allowed to leave and never see one another again. Iris silently prayed for the latter.
But instead, Yan scrunched his face and twirled the pulsar blade around in his hand. The faint light from the console flickered along the gold handle. “And you can’t give me a hint?” he asked, matching the lightness of Iris’s tone.
Iris took a single, cautious step towards the console. “What have you got figured out so far?” He treaded lightly. A fragile truce was settling between them, hinging solely on the pulsar blade and Yan’s growing interest in it.
“Like you said, this is nanotech. It’s incredibly light, which works well given how you’re, well …” He gestured to all of Iris. “I’m guessing the blade extends as far as you instruct it to, andthathas something to do with whatever it is you did to turn it on in the first place.”
Iris nodded. He watched the engineer’s forehead wrinkle as he ran his fingers along the Starlit crest. Yan appeared to have stopped breathing. The naive curiosity was endearing, but only somewhat.
“The indentation here is for your thumb. That’s where the biometrics are taken. The blade won’t open for anyone other than you, I’m sure of that. I’ve tried.Trust me,I’ve tried. I’m just unsure of what else it uses for dual-factor authentication. It does dothat, I’m certain. Maybe your heartbeat?”
“Is that a final guess, engineer Yan?”
Yan frowned and glared at the pulsar blade in his hand, like he had suddenly developed X-ray vision. “Yes.”
With a patient smile, Iris crossed the remainder of the space and offered the engineer his thumb. Yan pressed the indentation in the blade’s handle against his thumb pad, but nothing happened. Yan cursed softly under his breath. With as wide of a smile as Iris would allow himself, he took his hand back. “Would you like to take another guess, engineer Yan?”
With a long sigh, Yan shook his headnoand voluntarily surrendered the weapon. Utterly defeated, he reached into his breast pocket and retrieved the cigarette. Jamming it between his teeth, Yan ignited a single match and lit the stick. After one satisfying drag, he puffed a plume of smoke high into the air. “You don’t mind, do you, Vessel?”
Iris minded very much. He vividly recalled the three times in his life he had smoked a cigarette. First was at age eleven when some boys at the temple had brought a pack back from their visit of the local town. At midnight, despite having to be up at four in the morning for sunrise prayer, the four of them had gathered in the courtyard, and each lit a cigarette. The taste was bitter and foul, and it had flooded Iris’s senses as he tookhis first drag. The head-spinning nausea came soon after. He threw up into one of the flowerpots and didn’t sleep all night.
The second time Iris smoked was at nineteen, after his first official trip as a Vessel. He had been called to the sudden death of an elderly gentleman who had passed while in transit from one arm of the galaxy to the other. When Iris got there, he was greeted by the man’s grandchildren of varying ages. After the rites were finished and the body sent to the One Beginning, the grandchildren all had pulled out hand-rolled cigarettes, as per their family tradition, and offered one to Iris. It would have been rude to decline. The fifteen of them had smoked in silence, the cabin of the shuttle bursting with aromatic tobacco smoke. It was solemn and beautiful, and Iris’s head had spun faster and faster until he could no longer stand.
The last time was not even a year ago, when Mother Nova asked him to join her on a walk, long after sunset prayer. A rare occasion. It was a clear night, and they had watched the constellations appear one by one from the terraces of the Northern Temple. From the cream folds of her robes, Mother Nova produced a pack of cigarettes and offered Iris one. They lit them on some smoldering incense, muttering apologies and promising to never do it again. When Mother Nova said she would be passing soon, Iris didn’t say anything. He took a deep drag of his cigarette and let the smoke spin his head like it always did. Why was the Starlit Order so against smoking? Maybe because it quickly became a vice, maybe because it altered the natural state, maybe, Iris thought with bitter irony, because it was sodamn good. It was not a year prior that she only had a year left. There was a fair chance Iris would return from theNicaeato find her gone, replaced by a starkly different person in the same cream-coloured robes he would learn to call Mother Nova. He had never asked her what ailment was bringing forth her end—not that it mattered.
Iris’s eyes followed the glowing red tip of Yan’s cigarette. “Would you happen to have another one, engineer Yan?” he asked. Such a grievous error, but Yan didn’t seem to notice or if he did, he let it slide, just this once. He patted the pockets of his pants and shirt and shruggedsorry.
“Probably for the best, anyway,” Iris said, deeply regretting the absence of the tongue bite that would sting at his bottom lip with every inhale. The room fell into a heavy silence. Unsure of what to do or where to sit, Iris lowered himself to the floor and leaned back on his heels. Yan was seemingly ignoring him, but every few seconds, Iris sensed a sharp glance graze his shoulder between puffs of smoke. Their fragile truce was holding.
Alone and unlikely to be interrupted, Iris didn’t know when he would have such an opportunity again. Willing his voice still against his nerves, Iris shut his eyes and said, “There is something alive on this ship.”
“Sure, trees and crabs and, if you believe Tev, then snakes.”
“No,” Iris insisted, carefully choosing his next words. “Somethingalive, engineer Yan. Something moreawarethan a crab.”
Iris expected Yan to burst out laughing, or at the very least quip back, but the engineer’s face grew pensive. He took a final drag of his cigarette then stomped it out with the heel of his boot. Arms folded across his chest, he said, “That’s a very tenuous theory, Vessel. Do you have any proof?”
