Yan conceded. When the engineer finished devouring the potato in three bites, Iris gave him the apples from his bag aswell and settled himself in the dusk to the sounds of vigorous chewing. He had gloated too soon. His temples were splintering from the waves of a migraine and his balance was shaky at best. He was soft and awfully out of practice, and the sounds of Yan’s chewing was setting off a deep ache in his core.
Your brain uses exclusively glucose, VIFAI said with no little worry.That means our communication is dependent on glucose, sugar. Do we have any?
Iris gave a small nod yes.I can create glucose out of whatever is left in my body. I understand there is a limit to that. Please, try to rest as much as you can. Only communicate if it’s absolutely needed.
VIFAI pinged an affirmative and curled up into a shallow sleep in its place in Iris’s brain stem. It would be quiet in Iris’s mind for the next few days, beyond which he didn’t bother planning. If they failed to escape theNicaeaby then, food would no longer be of concern to him or anyone else there.
“Do you feel better?” Iris asked, sensing a large presence in front of him. He had closed his eyes and slipped into a shallow meditation to conserve energy, just enough reprieve from the hunger. It was a useful trick for when he couldn’t sleep much. He could easily cruise for weeks with such fractured retreats. Iris opened his right eye.
Yan awkwardly shifted on his feet. Apologising came far easier to Yan than giving thanks, Iris had already learned. With a wide smile, he hopped to his feet, swayed a little as the blood rushed from his head, and steadied himself against the wall. “Shall we go?”
Yan gave a hesitant nod, then he reached into the pocket of his trousers, took out Iris’s pulsar blade, and held it out. “This was on the ground where I found you.” He was stalling in handing the blade over and folded his fingers around it.“Did you …” He looked away and cleared his throat. It was a now-obvious nervous habit, a tic to buy himself more time when Yan needed to say something he very much did not want to say. “It looked like you were going to, well, use it on yourself. Were you? Like some sort of ceremonial killing? I’m not saying you were. It just looked like that.”
Dreadful honesty could flow from Iris like a river grown too full for its banks.You wished for me to die alone. You wished for me to live and die alone, and I wanted to grant you that wish. Iris let the thought swell and grow until it pressed at his temples, drowning out the migraine. “Of course not,” he said. “Starlit frowns very heavily upon suicide. It would be foolish of me to hasten my end, against what the Light has intended for me. I will admit, I didn’t know if I would live, and so I placed the pulsar blade for someone to find. It’s a valuable thing. Someone like yourself could make quite a bit of money if you were to sell it.” Iris couldn’t help himself; he had grown fond of the taste of venom that came along with such callous words. Maybe it was the fasting bringing out the edge in him.
He watched Yan’s face for any trace of anger or irritation, but the engineer appeared deep in thought. “All right then,” Yan said and dropped the pulsar blade into Iris’s open hand. “As long as you weren’t thinking of killing yourself.”
“Of course not,” Iris repeated, but Yan had already started off again, and Iris had to scurry after him. They walked the rest of the way in heavy silence. After a few hollow minutes, Iris slipped into a walking meditation to avoid the awkwardness. His mind was hauntingly silent and far too spacious. In his years shared in VIFAI’s company, he had forgotten just how expansive the human mind was, how boundless. Unlike the abyss that was the Light, neutral and welcoming, here there were monsters.
“The Three Original Fears Sutra,” Yan noted when the flickering of a friendly fire reached them, shining from the end of the corridor, where the walls parted into a wide-open hall. “You were reciting it the whole way here. Twice over. I couldn’t remember the name until now.” Without looking back at Iris, he quickened his step to join the small figure already running towards him from the fire. Yan waved both arms over his head and yelled outhello.
“Of course you would know,” Iris whispered.
Jesi threw her arms around Yan, pulling him down to her height, barely five feet off the ground. “We thought something got you. I was going to go look if you didn’t come back in the next ten minutes.” She glanced over at Iris, and her faced turned sullen. “I don’t think I can do with you dying too.”
“No one was going to go anywhere,” Eli shouted from the fire. “Good to have you back, but a lot of this could have been prevented if fewer people went looking for things alone.” He and Ishtan kept to the fire. Ishtan especially avoided looking at Iris and instead pushed a few potatoes into the glowing heart of the fire. The archaeologist had remained uncharacteristically silent since he had rejoined the group.
Shrugging off Jesi’s embrace, Yan said, “I wasn’t gone too long. Anything strange happen while I was away?”
Jesi glanced over at Iris again, this time in confusion. “You better ask Ishtan and Eli. I was asleep mostly. I didn’t hear much of it.”
Carefully, Iris asked, “What would they say if we asked them?”
Yan could singe paper, staring at Iris like he was, but he didn’t say anything. He motioned for Jesi to continue.
“They’d say the ship was talking,” she whispered. “You better ask them yourself, Vessel. No offense, Yan, I don’t think they’ll want to talk to you about it. It’s a strange thing, not a scholarly thing. I don’t think we’d be of much help.”
Iris would ask when the time was right. For now, he followed Yan and Jesi towards the fire, watching as everyone pulled out the baked potatoes from the heat and ate in silence.
“Vessel, are you not going to eat?” Eli asked, handing Iris a potato.
Iris declined with a smile. “I’m quite all right.”
“You should eat. I don’t want you blacking out mid-trek,” Eli persisted.
“He knows what he’s doing,” Yan snapped from across the fire. He gave Iris a reassuring look, but his lips gave away his internal conflict.Worried.Scared.Last time Iris had seen lips folded in such a straight line was when Mother Nova told him she would be seeking a successor to watch over the temple, only moments after she had told him she would pass in a year’s time. He had had no comforting words for her then, and he didn’t have any for Yan now, but he returned his look and gave the engineer a small bow of the head.
“What happens now?” Ishtan asked, the first words Iris had heard him say since they had arrived. The archaeologist had aged a decade in the day Iris and Yan had been gone. Greys littered his hair, and his beard had turned snow white.
“Now, we go and find whoever it is that’s been spying on us. They can’t be better armed than we are, so we’ll have the upper hand. The main control room is not two kilometres from here. We’ll rest a few hours and move out soon as we can.”
It was a terrible plan.
Iris dreaded the moment the doors to the main control room would open, and Yan would see no living thing inside. Nothingthat he would deem living. That is, if they even reached the control room at all. Since they’d returned, Iris had sensed a steady pulse against the balls of his feet, running beneath him. The ship was awake and aware; it was listening to them, learning from them. It would strike when they transgressed again, he was certain.
While everyone settled down to rest, Iris threw another log onto the fire and prepared for a long night. He would take the first watch, but he had no intention of sleeping at all, not in the coming days, not the regular kind of sleep.
“Make sure she’s safe,” Yan whispered, his lips far too close to Iris’s ear. Jesi had declared she would take the first watch too, far too enthusiastically. “If anything happens, wake everyone up. No excuses, no heroics. I’m not losing anyone else here, you understand?”
