Chapter 4
Possessiveness is in your nature, down to the bones.
To touch, to lay claim to it. Bare your teeth, shake with anticipation, lest someone takes what is rightfully yours.
You can’t simply marvel at the butterfly;
you must pin it down to the board.
I have no stomach for such violence of desire, and yet it clings to me.
From the unabridged diaries of Vessel Iris, Volume Thirteen
When Iris woke, the world was on fire.
Raging flames engulfed his legs and tore mercilessly at his back.
The suffocating scent of burning hair and flesh washed over him, seizing up his lungs.
It ate its way into his nostrils, smothered him in its putrid musk.
All Iris could do was cry out in pain and clutch his hands over his head while the scorching air lashed against his face.
It’s psychosomatic. It’s not real. A rushed voice cut through the pain, loud enough to reach through Iris’s panicked thoughts. You’re fine. You’re safe. Open your eyes.
With a wince, Iris peeled one eye open and stared straight ahead.
The left side of his face was pressed against the wet moss, hard enough that the individual tendrils left imprints on his skin.
His white robes were steeped in green and brown from the dirt, and he had wrapped them around his head defensively in his sleep.
Not half a metre away lay a bare human skull, glaring back at him with hollow eye sockets.
Iris forced a deep breath into his lungs. He was safe.
“Psychosomatic,” he repeated after VIFAI.
It always happened in new places, like clockwork.
He had hoped to avoid the nightmares by avoiding sleep altogether, but that had been a foolish and ineffective coping strategy.
He knew this now. His calves and forearms ached from the powerful spasms that had claimed every muscle in his body amid the nightmare.
Iris sat up and stretched his right leg.
His calf protested and then gave in, the cramp subsiding.
You’re OK, VIFAI reassured him, its earlier anger and frustration forgotten.
“I’m fine,” Iris echoed back and rolled his shoulders through the tension.
The academics are on their way.
With another deliberate breath, Iris rocked to his feet and stretched his arms high above his head.
He had been asleep for four hours, which left him less than an hour to make himself presentable for his new companions.
He would begin with shaving, the same way he began his mornings each and every day since he had turned thirteen.
A palm-sized, wooden basin from his shaving kit was filled with water squeezed from the moss.
Along the whetstone went the blade, five strokes on each side, the sound lulling his rattled nerves into gentle ease.
No need for a mirror. The motion of running the blade against his skin from Iris’s forehead to the nape of his neck, from his jaw and down his throat had been long committed to muscle memory.
He had rehearsed the action thousands of times as part of his morning routine.
No matter where he was, no matter what assignment he had, there was the blade, cool and delicate, gliding along his skin, erasing the stubble that had accumulated since his last shave.
Iris could no longer remember what the natural texture of his hair was, nor the exact reason for why it was required that he shave it off every morning.
Yet the routine was comforting, and it marked him as belonging to something, and that in itself was worth the effort.
“Good morning,” Riyu called out. Iris’s hand flinched, his jaw responding with a sharp sting.
Someone’s here.
“Blessed morning, Dr. Alo,” Iris kept his back to the door.
A trickle of blood ran along his neck, and he didn’t want to alarm Riyu, lest she linger and apologise.
Like a starved mosquito, the white silk of his robe pressed on the cut greedily soaked up the blood, turning redder by the second.
“It’s great to have you back. I’ll be right with you, if that’s all right. ”
“Of course, of course,” Riyu said. “We brought coffee and food. I didn’t know if you drink coffee, but it’s there if you want it. I saw you took the sandwiches. Hope you liked them. Oh, and thanks for the apples. I’m going to have them tested, and if they’re not poisonous, we’ll have some.”
“They’re quite all right,” Iris assured her, sleeve still pressed against his jaw. “I had some and survived the night, if that’s worth anything.”
Riyu just laughed. “You’re a funny monk,” she called out over her shoulder as the featherlight patter of her feet disappeared down the corridor.
“Are we still bleeding?”
Only a little.
Iris pulled his sleeve from his jaw. The cut still stung, enough to notice, but not enough to tend to.
The sleeve of his robe, however, was completely ruined.
Fresh blood would soon curdle, brown, and become impossible to wash out.
He undid the knot at his waist and peeled the fabric from his shoulders and his back, avoiding his still-bleeding neck. Getting one stain out was work enough.
With his robes pooled on the ground, Iris traced his fingers along his ribcage, counting each rib with waning interest. He had been purposely neglecting food again for weeks now, leaving bites of it untouched and whole meals avoided altogether.
It was a practice he couldn’t help, an obsessive one, especially at the temple, where any and all restraint was encouraged, if not revered.
All of it in vain, now that he had binged on sandwiches and fruit.
This compulsion had followed him from his youth, the only secret he held private when nothing at all about him was private.
He wasn’t sure when it had started. He couldn’t remember a time when he wasn’t torn between overindulgence and extreme asceticism, between committing himself completely to the Starlit practice and finding cracks in it for him to escape through.
During his most pronounced episodes, he’d eliminate his food intake completely.
He’d meditate for twelve hours a day, surviving on nothing but reserved sips of tea.
He would retreat further and further into the caverns of his mind where even VIFAI couldn’t reach him, where nothing could reach him.
But then, ignoring his demands for privacy, Bacai would rudely barge in with stolen peaches from the orchard, or worse yet, some strange dessert she’d picked up on her latest assignment.
She’d make a show of savouring it before his starving eyes, and Iris would give in and stumble, because no matter how cavernous the corners of his mind, he still had a sweet tooth, and Bacai was annoyingly persistent.
And then summons would arrive from Primary Temple, and Iris would rush to serve.
He would devour whatever food was offered to him, savour every crumb, and become intoxicated by any delicacies available.
He would drink juices and even sometimes partake of alcohol when no one was there to witness his transgressions.
And now there were sandwiches with ham, coffee, and real apples to sink his teeth into.
There were scholars and engineers, and hundreds of mouthwatering distractions around every corner. No degree of discipline would save him.
He was no longer an idle watcher of the tapestry of life unfolding before him, but rather a hesitant thread running through its very middle.
Iris had inadvertently become enmeshed in the lives of these people who were very deliberately pulling him deeper in still.
It was an alluring tug to be once again part of a moving, breathing community of ordinary people with ordinary rules.
It was a blessing to be invited in from the cold.
Rushing, Iris pulled a fresh set of robes from his duffel bag and finished changing.
The cut had stopped bleeding, finally, thankfully.
The clean, high collar sat just below his sharp jawline, free of stubble.
Reflecting on the rising rumbling in his stomach, Iris asked VIFAI, knowing that it had kept a close eye on his thoughts, Do you think I lack faith? Discipline?
I think you’re not done with this life, nor is it finished with you.
A gentle yet firm response. Iris wondered if today would be a day free of quarrels with his inorganic companion.
Spirits marginally lifted by clean robes, Iris left the cargo bay to snag some coffee and whatever it was the academics had brought with them for breakfast. If he were to falter in his convictions, he would at least do it on a full stomach.
Loud voices echoed far down the corridor, and Iris could clearly make out the words even halfway down.
“This is a priceless archaeological artifact,” Ishtan’s voice rang out. “It belongs to the archaeology department. That’s final. I will not be taking questions.”
Riyu’s crystalline laughter cut through the last sentence. “You’re going to claim a generation ship for your department, Ishtan? Isn’t it a little too big? Where are you going to put it?”
Iris pressed his back against the mossy wall, a shoulder-width away from the doorway and listened, his mouth watering. Scents of fresh coffee, bold and bitter, wafted through the entrance, beckoning him inside.
“I’d like to remind everyone that the ship falls under Doshua Station jurisdiction,” a voice Iris didn’t recognise said. “Our gate, our ship. You’re all here on a permit and nothing more.”
“You’re here on a permit,” Jesi mocked in a high-pitched tone.