"They what!"
Jabaani's desk deleted its integrity the moment her fist hit it. The impact sent a localized tremor through the floor, leaving a perfect, circular crater in what Logun knew to be very expensive tile.
"They attacked him while I was busy retrieving your blade, by the way," Logun said casually. He hooked his boot under the crate of remaining hormones and sent it skidding across the floor toward her.
Jabaani scowled at him, her fingers working at the blood-stiffened bandages on her left arm.
Despite the rage simmering in her orange eyes, her expression softened for a fraction of a second. Even in the meat-grinder of Salaam, even at his lowest point, Logun had remembered her blade.
The Shiear moved around the jagged, splintered remains of her desk.
She dropped to one knee before the crate, her good hand sorting through the glass canisters with a practiced, clinical silence. She stopped abruptly, her eyes snapping up to meet Logun's.
"Wyva cooked a batch for Vanqis," Logun sighed, his voice dropping an octave, "I've already told him about it."
"He shot him with an entire canister?"
Logun confirmed with a sharp nod.
"The bastard's going to be a vegetable for another month, at least."
A flicker of genuine shock crossed her face before she returned her attention to the crate.
"But I know Vanqis, and because of that I'm sure you didn't catch the original. He's probably lying face-down in a gutter somewhere in the capital, waiting for his pathways to reconnect."
Logun chuckled, though there was no humor in it, "the point is, we have one month of silence. One month to take control of the narrative before he wakes up screaming for our heads."
"I swear, no one went through all this trouble for me when I was seventeen," Jabaani muttered. She rolled up her left sleeve, exposing the truth of her condition. The arm was a ghost the muscles had atrophied into thin, corded strings, the skin pale and unresponsive.
Logun watched her, a deep-seated dissatisfaction churning in his gut. It was a cruel irony of their world: she had to mutilate her own flesh just to regain the normalcy she had sacrificed for the city.
She pressed the bolt-gun against the hollow of her shoulder.
Crack.
The sound was sharp, like a dry branch snapping. Logun knew the agony that followed a direct injection into atrophied tissue, but he ignored it as stoically as she did.
Next, she moved the nozzle to the basin of her elbow.
Crack.
Logun's mind drifted back to the Blood River. He had been seven years old, a terrified speck in a world of red, and Jabaani had been right there beside him.
She had been the big sister to every child in Rému, a protector who didn't just lead, but bled.
She moved the gun down her arm, burying the cold nozzle into the center of her palm.
Crack.
She was the kind of sister who would trade an entire limb to ensure he reached tomorrow.
"That's the good stuff," she wheezed, her voice tight with suppressed pain as she began to flex both arms. The color was already returning to the pale limb, the Iké-starved muscles twitching back to life under the chemical onslaught.
Logun offered her a rare, genuine smile, his green eyes lighting up with a spark of hope.
"Good," she said, leaning over the remains of her desk, "so here's how we spin this."
_______________________________________
The priests of Rému's Temple moved over her proding with a terrifying softness.
To Souki, their kindness felt like a new brand of silk-lined captivity.
They spoke in hushed tones of salvation and recovery, but all she could see were the walls, higher than the glass of her cylinder, but walls nonetheless.
She had been a prisoner for over a month. Not just of Vanqis, but of a system that viewed her as a utility rather than a soul.
Her mind was a fractured record, skipping over the same serrated grooves.
Jabaani's face kept appearing in her thoughts, the Shiear's all-encompassing warmth now appearing as nothing more than the calculated mask of a broker. Jabaani had to have known.
She was the protector of this city and its people, the one who kept the lights on and the canals flowing. You didn't trade a girl like Souki into the service of a Shiear like Vanqis without knowing the price.
Every drop of comfort Jabaani offered now felt like blood money.
And then there was his voice.
Vanqis.
Why would you eat bread when you can drink the light that made the grain grow?
The words were a parasite in her skull.
They whispered of the "logic of the universe," a cold, mathematical perfection that had no room for the warmth of skin or the mess of breathing.
In the cylinder, she had anchored herself with numbers to stay sane, but now the numbers were turning on her. They were counting the seconds she had been "free," and the sum still felt like zero.
The hopelessness wasn't a sudden weight; it was a slow, rising tide of lead in her veins. She wanted the thoughts to stop. She wanted the Peace to reascend and smother the frantic belows of her mind that kept her heart beating in a rhythm she no longer wanted to own.
She squeezed her eyes shut, wishing for a void deeper than the one she had lived in. She focused on the heat of her own Iké, the humming power that had once fed a city, and willed herself to simply... not be here.
When she opened her eyes, the scent of Temple incense was gone.
The air was sharp, smelling of salt and the brackish rot of the low-tide canals. She wasn't lying on a cot of bleached linen; she was sitting on the rough-hewn stone of a shoreline wall.
Souki didn't move.
She didn't question the impossible physics of the shift.
For the first time in an eternity, the mathematics of her reality made sense. She was no longer a battery, she was a girl again.
A girl sitting at the edge of the world.
To her back, the canals of Rému groaned with the slow, rhythmic movement of the city's lifeblood. But in front of her, the sun was a physical weight against her face, real light, not the artificial glow of a Temple or the filtered spectrum of a glass cylinder.
It was the light that made the grain grow, and for once, she didn't want to drink it. She just wanted to feel it burn.
She basked in the silence, letting it finally take root in the only place she felt safe; the thin line between the empire's wall and the infinite sea.
________________________________________
There was a calm before the storm, and a localized peace within the eye of it. Yet people rarely highlighted the state that came after.
The hollow, ringing silence that followed the crash. It wasn't a silence that brought even a slight sense of security. It was a state of anticipation, a nagging feeling that lingered in the afterthought of a much greater punishment.
It was the anxiety of reality bending to ruin them the moment they dared to seek comfort, making it impossible to see beyond the dark clouds of the past.
This was the state of mind Relik had adopted by force.
They had defeated Vanqis almost two weeks ago, successfully slipping back into the warm, radiant walls of Rému just intime to see the sunset.
Yet Relik remained convinced that no matter how much time bled away, he would remain tethered to what had transpired in Salaam. Physical recovery was a simple matter of biology; he bore no permanent scars, and his Gainer abilities had long since knit his skin back together.
What bothered him, what kept his pulse elevated even in the safety of the apartment, was the potential political fallout.
From the Sar's perspective, three Hands and an Insinyur had marched into the heart of the Desert Whistle and systematically dismantled a Shiear.
They had ganged up on a protector of that city, decimated Temple infrastructure, and left a repair bill that would cost the Empire a fortune. They had both fought the man and insulted the system he represented all within the same evening.
Relik spent an uncomfortable amount of time staring at himself in the mirror, searching for a stranger in his own reflection.
Perhaps the fear of his world folding in on itself served as a necessary distraction. It was far easier to occupy his mind with the grinding mechanisms of a society he could not change than to accept the cold truth he had learned about himself.
His markings, the very geometry of his soul, were uniquely ancient. His Vesselling method predated the Empire's written language, a relic of a time before the world had been civilized by Astra himself. Something was inside of him, old and indifferent, simply enjoying its life behind his ribs.
And then there was that word.
Nuke.
Vanqis had spat it out like a curse and a compliment all at once. It was the first time Relik had heard it, and the syllables felt heavy and poisonous in his mind.
What exactly was a nuke?
Was it a beast?
A bomb?
Or was it simply a name for something so destructive that the world had no choice but to fear it?
On the bright side, Lady Jabaani had given him the following day off, a rare window to right his bearings and find an efficient way to suffocate his problems before they suffocated him.
Until then, he needed to sleep. But as he stared at the ceiling, he realized that sleep was just another form of silence he wasn't sure he could trust.