The interior of the Beem was filled with a noise that felt entirely too bright for the blurred greys of the Empire's tunnels.
Logun and Wyva were leaning into each other, their voices clashing in a rhythmic, drunken harmony as they belted out a traditional sailor's jig. It was the same staggering beat Relik had heard when he first found Logun dancing in the streets.
A song about "dancing naked at the stern of a broken ship". Apparently sung to represent that Rému would have good times regardless of how dire things seemed. Unfortunately the song had no apparent end and all passengers were forced to listen for the last eight hours.
Veech, the Hand charged with providing security, sat happily clapping along with a cordial, toothy smile, his massive palms sounding like local thunder.
This matched with the fact that both Logun and Wyva couldn't keep beat to save a life, all made for the perfect torture.
"Death could not be worse than this," Relik whispered, leaning his head against the cold vibrating wall of the transport.
"You don't have the current ability to find out so," Vanqis remarked, not looking up from a translucent tablet. Relik caught a look at the screen, seeing what appeared to be vitals.
The man noticed his peering and immediately collapsed the device into a slim metal rod.
Relik sought to distract from it, "Why are we going all the way to Salaam? Why can't we just go back to Rému?"
"Because I don't have the facilities to read your markings in Rému," Vanqis said, finally looking at him. His eyes were analytically sharp, "I need to reference your markings against older written texts. I've seen the oldest of Vesselling script and what you have is far more ancestral than that."
"And?" Relik pressed, "How long is this process going to take? I'm getting tired of being passed around like this."
"Just a scan. That's all," Vanqis waved a hand dismissively, "once your pattern is in the system, you can take the next Beem back to your little village. But until then..." He leaned in, his voice dropping into a rapid, excited ramble.
"See I'm interested in the ways that Iké can be manipulated and that means finding the oldest usage of it linking it to modern adaptability."
The Shiear grinned at his own musings, "your markings seem to be older than anything I could have predicted, Relik! Which means that there's thousands of years that you could help me understand."
Relik stared back his bemusement taking to the forefront of his expression. Vanqis realising that this did not pique the interest of his audience, and quickly decided on a different approach.
" The Empire began using Vesselling the year I was born. It was supposed to be a refinement, a way to make the Iké of Shahari and the Hurc more... precise. More elegant."
Vanqis began to gesture wildly, his hands tracing invisible lines in the air.
"I used those same principles to invent Lakayah gear," he continued, his eyes glowing with a manic pride, "Though most people use it just as armor. It isn't. It's a biological shunt. It can boost physical energy by injecting stabilized hormones directly into the bloodstream, forcing a temporary burst of high-quality Iké from even the most unbalanced spiritual energies."
Relik blinked, trying to follow the science, "So it can match Alven with higher spiritual energy, than physical?"
"In bursts, yes. But the body is a bit weirder than the spirit. It erodes a lot faster, and becomes more reliant on the crutch. It starts to crave the shunt more than its own heart. That's why the gutter-trash call it 'blading' because every time you trigger the gear, it dulls the effectiveness of your hormonal system to feed the fire. Eventually, there's nothing left to dull."
Relik opened his mouth to ask another question, but the words died in his throat.
A sound sharp, thin, and piercing drilled into his skull. It was a high-pitched ringing, like a finger being ran across the rim of a glass. Yet it carried the same physical irk of a wet finger being spun in an ear.
"Do you hear that?" Relik winced as he fell to his knees.
"Hear what?" Wyva stopped mid-verse, grinning wickedly, "the sound of air rushing in one ear and out the other?"
The younger boy's eyelids twitched unable to prevent himself from hearing anything.
Strangely enough Vanqis was the first to provide aid, quickly undoing Relik's restraints.
His hands rushed to the sides of his head clutching at his ears. Silently pleading for whatever it was to stop.
It didn't.
The sound was not coming from the outside.
It was his own Iké reacting on his behalf, but to what.
The Beem came to a stop as they settled in Salaam's temple.
"What the hell's going on?" Logun yelled.
Wyva moved to help Relik to his feet so they could exit the Beem.
Logun looked back at Vanqis holding his eyes as everyone else cleared the transport. His eyebrows twisted themselves with detest. The object of his observation greeted him with a warm smile and a dismissive wave.
Throughout The Astran Empire, every city was given a nickname that served as a description borne out of its existence.
Haraan, the capital, was Astra's footprint.
Potaan, a port city, the iron jaw.
Rému, was the Blood river.
Salaam, a city that existed only for Vanqis' amusement, the desert whistle.
Before now, Logun had always written it off as just posturing to make the city wound intimidating.
Perhaps there was more.
He knew Salaam's Shiear well enough to assume that this man had something to do with Relik's pain. Unfortunately, action against The Empire's most prized researcher meant more trouble than it was worth.
________________________________________
The first one came as a small tug, which she immediately pulled back against.
Then there was a stronger tug that she didn't have enough time before a third tug seemed to open the flood gates.
The edges of her very consciousness appeared to be locked in an invisible battle. Though she had grown used to her Iké being extracted from her, it was usually small enough that she could never get a strong enough grip on it to pull back.
This however, could not be ignored.
She felt it in her marrow, a low-frequency hunger that seemed to be scouring the city streets.
Something is here.
It wasn't a person, or at least, it didn't feel like one. It felt like a localized collapse of the air itself. Every time she pulled back the desire spiked and Souki felt her Iké being lanced. Then drawn toward a singular point that was currently moving through the Temple's lower transit tunnels.
She gasped, her bubbles rising in a frantic silver chain. She tried to coil her energy inward, pulling her Iké back into the core of her chest, desperate to cut off the connection. She imagined it as a physical manifestation, and tried slamming her pathways shut.
A method that failed.
"It's no use fighting the resonance, Souki," Vanqis said, his voice echoing through the glass with a terrifying clarity.
He was at his console moving from screen to screen as his system seemed to suffer as well.
He bit off a curse then stepped back realising that there was nothing he could do from inside the lab.
Vanqis moved to the center of the room, feet away from Souki's prison. His head tilted toward the heavy reinforced doors. For the first time, the clinical boredom had left his face, replaced by a sharp, jagged spark of genuine predatory instinct.
"You feel it, don't you?" he mused, his eyes tracing the frantic rhythm of her escaping energy, "it's a pity I don't quite understand why certain Vessels react like this when entering my city for the first time. If I did you would be in far less pain."
Souki tried to reach for the glass, her lungs, unused to air, burning with the phantom sensation of a scream.
Then, the world tilted.
Vanqis didn't move toward the door. Instead, he simply breathed in.
Then, while being observed, his body began to vibrate. The edges of his silhouette blurring until he looked like a smudge of charcoal against the white laboratory tile. Souki watched in silent horror as a vertical fissure opened down the center of his chest, not a wound of blood, but a rift of pure, shimmering Iké.
With a sound like wet parchment being torn in two, Vanqis split.
Where there had been one Shiear, there were now two identical beings, perfect in every detail down to the embroidery on their coats. They stood shoulder-to-shoulder for a singular heartbeat, a biological miracle that defied Souki's understanding.
The "oldest" of the two, the one who carried the original ledger, didn't offer a word. He simply turned and vanished through the lab doors with a casual, terrifying grace, moving toward the source of the resonance.
The second Vanqis remained. He turned back to the tank, adjusting his cuffs as if he hadn't just undergone a cellular divorce. He looked up at Souki, his smile unchanged.
"Don't look so surprised, dear," the clone remarked, tapping the glass. "I told you: food is a crude way to sustain a system. Why bother with a single perspective when you can be in two places at once?"
Souki's jaw hung loose, her mind racing to categorize what she had just seen. Cloning. Not an illusion, not a shadow, a literal physical fissure.
Iké usage, just as the energies that made it were split into two branches: AdrInas and Mistus; physical and spiritual respectively. With the dominant energy predicting whether or not one would be better at physical or spiritual energy.
For the Adrinas, one could only manipulate their own body, they could enhance what already exists or change it in a way that helps them to accomplish specific tasks. For her entire life, the pinnacle of Adrinas were self-healing techniques.
What Vanqis had done was take the principle of mitosis and applied it to a specific group of atoms so that he could split his being.
This was unheard of, and sufficiently distracting that she forgot she was being drained.
She at least hoped that he was on his way to make this stop.