Ahead lay a twenty-foot hangar door. Long cracks ran along the length of it where steel began losing out to nature. Its metal surface glistened with moisture. Water ran from some unseen force in a timid waterfall, originating somewhere right below the ceiling. Gnarled roots fought through any opening where the metal wasn’t flush against the floor. A patchwork of moss, and lichen, and mold reached across the walls.
But it was a little to the left that Iris’s eyes were drawn to. Along a segment of tall walls stripped of vines and moss stretched a mural. It ran from floor to ceiling in vibrant red, black, and orange. Broad strokes, preserved through time, spread colour and motion across the barren metal. Its shimmer, which appeared nearly fresh, played in the dim light and beckoned them closer.
Eli approached it cautiously and scraped a nail against the red. He stuck his finger in his mouth.
“What iswrongwith you?” Jesi hissed.
“Well, it’s not paint.” Eli shrugged. “It’s kind of sweet, actually. Not bad.”
Ishtan walked along the wall, squinting in the dim light. Iris watched as his mouth moved silently along reverent words, no longer in any pattern Iris could recognise. The mural depicted a similar scene from the ones Iris had beheld before. Battle. Death. He was growing quite tired of those themes.
Somehow, the death and battle so prominent in the murals had left little trace around the ship. There were no bones anywhere on the ship but the cargo bay and the one skeleton he had found in an individual room. So much death with so little evidence. It was a thought Iris returned to over and over again, every time he drifted to sleep. Surely there had to be evidence of the slaughter. It had to besomewhere.Keep an ear out for any new pings,Iris asked VIFAI.Don’t respond to anything. Stay as quiet as you can. Just listen.The AI confirmed.
Below Iris’s feet, the rhythmic pulsing carried on at an even pace. It merely hummed now, reminding him of its presence, still watching his every move. Iris searched the mural for any additional clues, anything at all to give him another piece of the already deadly puzzle.
“Iris, would you come here?” Ishtan called out from down the corridor. The archaeologist stood in front of a red-dominated stretch of the mural, his neck craned upwards. “What do you make of this?” he asked when Iris stopped to his right. The archaeologist spoke softly, out of earshot of everyone else. Without even looking up, Iris suspected the image he was about to see was not for everyone’s eyes. A wide trunk of an ancient tree ran up towards the ceiling. Its knotted branches spread for tens of metres in each direction. The roots too were depicted as running out in all directions, coming up from the ground asshrubbery and small plants, only to duck beneath the surface again.
“This is different,” Iris whispered. “Not good different.” He had the sense to crane his neck upwards, same as Ishtan, and follow the trunk towards the ceiling. There, within the hastily painted canopy, Iris noticed it: the same red, watchful eye. The very same eye that bore witness to all the other slaughter. This time it was buried in the lush greenery, barely visible to anyone who didn’t know what to look for—but Iris did.
“Violence on generation ships is not uncommon,” Ishtan said, head still tilted towards the ceiling, “but this appears as more than that. This all feels systemic.”
“This mural is remarkably well preserved,” Iris said, unsure of what it had to do with everything, but unable to discard the idea. The vibrancy of it was staggering.
Ishtan put his palm against the wall, leaned in, and examined the colour. “I don’t think all the murals were painted at the same time,” he said at last. “I think this one may be more recent. The ones downstairs are much, much older. By sight alone, I’d say there’s probably a hundred years between them, if not more. Eli said this isn’t paint; he’s partially right. This looks like paint made from flowers, maybe fruit. I’d say they’d run out of First Earth paints by this point. Very primitive. Very peculiar. I would love to get all this into a chemistry lab for analysis. Very,verypeculiar.”
Through the ball of his right foot, Iris sensed a rapid change in the rhythm of the ship’s pulse. Just there—the square inch beneath his foot skipped a beat. With no way to explain his premonition, Iris grabbed Ishtan by the shirt collar and yanked him backwards as hard as he could just as a vine pierced the ground and shot up through the air where Ishtan had been standing a moment earlier. The two of them tumbled to the floor.Immediately, Iris jumped to his feet, his pulsar blade extended in his hand, but the vine was gone as quickly as it had appeared.
“What the hell are you doing?” Eli shouted from up the corridor.
“Stop talking!” Iris shouted back and took a single step in Eli’s direction. A vine sprung out from the wall and coiled around Eli’s leg so quickly, Iris didn’t see it move. In the time it took Iris to take another step, Eli was already yanked off his feet and slammed against the ground. Miraculously, the gun was still in his hand, and he had somehow managed to discharge it at the spot where the vine had come from.
“Go,” Eli shouted, firing the gun twice more at the vine that held on to him, relentless, despite being fired at. “Everyone without a weapon, run.”
Iris was by Jesi’s side in half a second. While her and Yan stood frozen to the ground, Ishtan was already running by, up the corridor. Iris grabbed both Jesi and Yan by the shoulders and shoved them both after Ishtan. In his haste, Ishtan was whipped off his feet by a slashing vine. It took one precise slice with the pulsar blade for the vine to fall into two halves, each jerking towards the archaeologist. Ishtan scrambled to his feet and took off after Jesi and Yan without so much as an acknowledgement.
“Run!” Iris yelled to them. “I’ll get Eli.” Eli was still fighting, even though a second vine had grabbed hold of his left arm. He pressed the barrel of the gun against it and fired. Pieces of the vine showered him as it crumbled to the ground, motionless. The relief was momentary, as another vine shot out from the ceiling and pierced Eli’s right shoulder. He screamed, the gun falling just out of reach by his feet. Iris was beside him in an instant. With one swift motion, he sliced through both the vines around Eli’s leg and the one in his shoulder. The pieces fell to the floor twitching and reaching back for the guard.
“Took you long enough,” Eli groaned and picked up the gun. His shoulder was oozing blood, but the shock and adrenaline were enough to propel him forwards. Iris wrapped his left arm around Eli’s torso and dragged the man to his feet.
For a moment, Iris forgot the first rule of combat: Never turn your back on an opponent. He remembered a second later, but it was too late. Springing from the floor just a metre behind them, a vine, stiff as a spear, drew a clean line parallel to the ceiling, straight through Eli’s chest. There was no scream. Eli only exhaled softly. Iris turned his head only to see the guard’s empty eyes staring at him. A thin trickle of blood ran from his parted lips down his chin. With a single slice, Iris severed the vine from the floor.
He threw Eli to the ground and pressed his hands on his chest, but the red oozed and oozed between his fingers and from Eli’s back, forming a growing puddle around them. The man’s eyes stared at the ceiling, pale blue and glassy. “Stay alive,” Iris whispered and pressed one bloodied hand against Eli’s paling face. “Stay alive, please, please,please.” He returned his hand to Eli’s chest. He pressed down on the rib cage, once, twice. He could press on it for all eternity, and it would do no good. The knees of Iris’s trousers were soaked in blood. His toes slipped in it. He pressed on Eli’s chest again and again, and prayed out loud, forgetting about the vines that could come for him as well.
“Please, please,please, I can’t keep burying them. I can’t keep failing them.Please.” Iris lowered his forehead to Eli’s stationary chest, blood smearing across his eyebrows and his nose. “You can’t keep taking them. You can’t keep taking whatever you want,” he cried. “What is it that you even want? What can I give you so that you will stop? How do I make you stop?” Iris sat back on his heels and passed his sleeve over his eyes. “Whatis it that you want?” he shouted now, pure rage splitting his voice. His voice cracked, his throat dry and aching for water.
Silence. No sound reached him but his own erratic panting and the distant dripping of water.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
One of the speakers by the tall ceiling crackled.
“What do you want?” he asked again, resigned.
The speaker released a high-pitch squeal and died abruptly.
STRANDED. WE ARE STRANDED.
Iris snapped his neck in the direction of the sound, but it seemed to spill from everywhere at once, deafening and discordant. It was Ordan’s voice that spoke to him through the speakers. At least it sounded like Ordan, but beneath his voice were notes of Tev and Riyu. Ordan’s words, spoken by three distinct voices. Iris took a deep breath. If the ship wanted him dead, he would have been dead. It wanted something else altogether. “Why are you stranded? Who is stranded?”
