Tev pursed his lips in concentration, his youthful face taking on a far more mature expression. “Your diction is perfect, almost academic, like you’ve been studying hard to get it right.”
The girl beside him, Jesi, looked up quizzically. “What gave him away, then?”
“His inflection. His tone …” Tev’s eyes widened for a flash. “I know where you come from, but—”
How simple were the things that could expose him. Iris instinctively tightened his robes around himself. He had learned the right words and the right ways to say them, and yet this boy could undo years of work in hearing him utter a few rehearsed phrases. With one wrongly placed emphasis, his whole life could begin to unwind, word by word, memory by memory.
Like a hand extended to the drowning, beside him, Riyu cleared her throat. “Yan, you should show him where we moved the bones.”
Iris would need to thank her later, when such an opportunity arose. Relief began to wash over him, only to be replaced a split second later as all her words registered. “You moved the bones?”
“Well, yeah,” Jesi said matter-of-factly. “We needed to clear out some space here to set up camp, so we moved them to a different room.”
This place is a lawless wasteland.
Iris, instead of replying, imagined a pile of human bones as tall as him, carelessly sitting in a damp corner of some abandoned room, all mixed together, indiscernible. His stomach sank. Iris could, of course, just say the words over the mixed pile and be done with it in one swoop. Many other Vessels would, but it wasimproper. It was lazy. Every individual deserved his time, his care, his words.
“You go and show him, Jesi. I still have to clear out the ports,” Yan said, but the girl shook her head vigorously.
“No, nope, no way I’m going there. Neither is Tev. It’s dark and creepy.Nope.” Jesi grabbed a small metal chisel from Yan’s hand and went to aggressively scrape lichen from the console cover. On theNicaea, it seemed to grow everywhere, searching and making a home in the most inconvenient of places. Jesi nodded forcefully at Yan and then towards Iris. “Well, would you, please, fearless leader?”
The shipwasbeginning to feel a bit cramped.
It would take uttermost restraint to continue his work here and avoid getting tangled in the interpersonal dramas of the people Iris had just met. No one had bowed to him or requested they pray together. No one offered to light incense. Was this what it was like to travel among laypersons? He liked all of them already. Riyu, especially, was someone whose brain he would love to pick about the flowers and the vines and the shrubs, and everything that grew in between them, but only once his work was underway. Jesi and Tev were nearly children in his eyes, at least ten years his junior, yet already they were trusted with a generation ship. They had to be at least somewhat special. Even Yan, who now trudged ahead of him, cursing at the entanglements of vines and ripping them from the walls, was somewhat of a volatile curiosity.
“How long have you been working aboard the ship?” Iris asked when there was a sufficient break in Yan’s cursing. The engineer didn’t reply right away, but Iris noticed a slight tensing of the shoulders through the navy sweatshirt.
“A week,” Yan said after a long silence, punctuating his reply by tearing another vine from the wall. His steel-toed boots left heavy footprints in the moss, and Iris made a game of following in them, placing his bare feet inside the indents.
“And what is an engineer’s task on a ship such as this one?”
Yan spun around and caught Iris mid-step. “You sure are a nosy monk.” He glanced down at Iris’s bare feet, one planted squarely inside his boot print and the other in midair, and scowled. “You’d do everyone here a favor to work quickly and stay out of our way.”
“Of course.” The corners of Iris’s lips curled in a polite smile. Yan wasn’t the first to let him know that his presence was unwelcome; he wouldn’t be the last. No harm done. No offense taken.
A rare, utterly unpleasant human.
Iris laughed silently.Maybe,he told VIFAI,but that doesn’t mean we should stoop to his level.Iris followed Yan down the corridor in silence for a few moments. The farther they ventured into the entrails of the ship, the thicker grew the moss and vines along the walls. Insulated by both, the corridor fell into an ear-ringing silence. Even Yan stopped his cursing. Iris looked forward to exploring these corridors alone when the others had grown bored of his presence.
He’s taking us to a cargo bay,VIFAI said, tracking their movements along the ship’s map.
“Sychi Institute sent us to figure out why the ship did what it did,” Yan said at last, quieter than he had ever spoken until now. “Well, to figure out how it came out of the gate since it doesn’t have an onboard AI or anything. I don’t think this ship has intent. We’re looking for a basic smart navigation system at most, nothing fancy, something that would allow the ship to pilot itself autonomously out of gate space and establish a shallow orbit. Currently, we have a limited understanding of First Earth tech. This is the only ship that’s in good enough condition to work on, which means we gotta move fast so the other institutes don’t get their permits through. Being first is all that matters.”
See? Not completely unpleasant,Iris thought at VIFAI, following at a safe distance.
“Well, here are your bones,” Yan said, pointing to the door at the end of the corridor. Once within reach, he yanked on the handle, then gave the door a hefty kick. The door swung open.
A strangled cry escaped Iris: half horror, half glee. Inside, scattered across the moss-covered floor lay a pile of bones taller than he was. There must have been at least two hundred complete skeletons there. It would take him forever to reassemble all the remains. It would take himmonths. Noticing the Vessel’s reaction, Yan shrugged, admiring his handiwork. “Yeah, it took us a good three days to move everything in here.”
Iris swallowed the hard lump in his throat and fought back a sudden and unwelcome pang of anger that overshadowed the excitement of upcoming work. “And you didn’t think you were desecrating a grave?”
“We had work to do, and they’ve been dead for years, decades maybe. There’s nothing we could have done for them.”
“I beg to differ. A little respect goes a long way.”
Yan scoffed. “What do you know of respect, Vessel? You are a charlatan at best, the lot of you. You dress the dead up and say a few words, and then you leave. What do you know about the consequence of death, about its hold on everyone left behind? What good do you even do?” Yan was awfully close now, towering over Iris. The sparse lighting of the corridor further carved his features with deep shadows. His aristocratic nose now took on a beaklike shape, giving his face a predatory gleam. Iris’s blood pressure rose in response, flushing his ears red.
Not everyone he met expressed pro-Vessel sentiment, but most laypersons who didn’t simply dismissed his presence and ignored him. At worst, ship captains with especially strongconvictions denied Iris free passage on their crafts, but even then, there was always another ship ready to take him to his destination. Arguably, it was the Starlit lay practitioners who caused him most trouble, bowing their heads to him, asking him to stop and pray with them, inviting him for meals, derailing whatever schedule he was attempting to stick to. But this stranger, so dismayed by Iris’s very existence and itching for a confrontation, was a new occurrence.
