The silence in the sub-level was suddenly heavy.
A thick, pressurized quiet that seemed to close in on her every time the building shook. For Souki, silence had long since ceased to be the absence of sound; instead, the presence of her own failure echoing against her skull.
She floated in the suspension fluid, a gift for entertaining his equations Vanqis had said, She had agreed at first, but seeing her hair drift around her face like ink in water. Her opinion had morphed into discomfort.
To an outsider, she was a masterpiece of Astra engineering, Iké of neutrality, balanced so perfectly that she could act as a bridge between the physical and the ethereal.
If one was to strip away all the niceties they could clearly see that she was just a girl in a jar. The only living component in Vanqis's grand design.
And yet only the emergency alarms screamed for whatever conflict took place above them.
Belting out in the fluctuations of orange light bathing the room. Pulsing in a manner like that, the power grid hummed.
A slow predictable beat that inadvertently brought her back to the moment that Vanqis had found it necessary to leave her here for the first time.
Then the realisation surfaced, her eyes snapping open. The pulse of the emergency strobes, reflecting off her widened pupils.
The clone was gone.
The original was nowhere in sight.
She was for the first time in ages, alone.
Then she slowed herself for a moment, to reflect. Vanqis was a man who planned for every variable, and if he had left her unmonitored, it meant that he needed to address the issue upstairs in full tilt; or that he found her chances of escape so meager he didn't bother to take precautions.
However, what human would she be If she was still in this tank when he returned. She had to at least risk being caught halfway through an escape, something to make him tighten the bolts. Something external that challenged her inaction.
It was without a doubt any animal would try to escape and, currently, sitting naked in a tank she was nothing more than just an animal.
She began to move.
It was a slow, agonizing process.
In the fluid, her muscles had grown weak with a lack of stimulation, useless for any leverage. It could not go without mentioning that even though she now had something to kick off she still could not reach the glass. The cylinder was crafted to be just wide enough that it was virtually always out of reach.
So, she did the only other thing that someone in her position could do.
She gathered as much Iké she could sensibly muster and allowed the power grid to inhale all her conscious thoughts. She shoved against the resisting current, her veins standing out against her pale skin. The tank didn't even shiver. It was designed to withstand pressure ten times what she could put out.
She clawed at her own thoughts in desperation to gather them all in linear form.
She knew well that if there was any way to break out of this shell then who better than her to find it.
No one she had met had Iké as refined as hers and she knew that if someone of lesser control was locked in this same situation, they would have broken out ages ago. She felt that to be the case as if it were true. Believing in any perspective that was necessary to give her that extra push she needed.
Breaking the cage wasn't possible.
It was designed to both hold and discourage.
But if she couldn't break the physical cage.
Then she could take over it.
She closed her eyes and reached out with her mind, feeling for vulnerabilities before diving headfirst into the Salaam's power grid.
She could see the interface of the entire city, the feed of electricity flowing through thick subterranean cables that leeched off her. Every elevator, every gondola, every live wire in every home, were all extended from her soul.
As soon as she recognized her connection, she attempted stopping the flow from the ends, which she hoped would overload the central core.
What she found was that stopping her Iké was like trying to stop a waterfall with cheese cloth.
The moment she resisted, the system's automated stabilizers kicked in. A surge of counter-energy, literally the system forcing her own Iké against her. It all shot back through the feed, slamming into her nervous system.
A silent scream was stifled as she held her body back from convulsing. The pain was white-hot, a reminder that the cage extended with the reach of Salaam's walls.
She tried to reroute the flow in search of a fracture, a loose line, an underlying fault that Vanqis would have missed.
She rifled through the interface reviewing the blueprints of the network, her thoughts racing but held together by a calm that had no business being present in this situation.
She swept the elevator shafts.
The Gondola lines.
The room listed as observation; fully unresponsive.
She paused.
Unresponsive, but the circuits were still alive, the energy in that room was being wasted as though a switch to nothing was flicked on. It was this very leakage that gave birth to her most unstable idea yet.
Her Iké seemed to saturate the air in that area and she could feel Vanqis; well similar but separate black and corrupted signatures, four or even up to five. Along with that, she could pick up on four, or maybe three others that all seemed to be bouncing from one end of the corridor to another without much regard.
Sadly, the wistfulness of her Iké was only that, she could not grasp anything, much less request aid.
Every attempt to disconnect only resulted in more pain, more exhaustion. Her Iké was flagging.
She slumped in the fluid, her head hanging off her neck like a ball on a string.
The violence above was getting louder and it served as the only thing keeping her awake but did little to discourage her full surrender.
This was it.
She could see with suffocating certainty.
She was going to die here in a jar.
Souki was entrapped on all fronts and would be the last thing to burn when the temple fell, and no one would even know she was there. Just a flicker, not even a footnote, in the lights before they go out forever.
The thought should have broken her.
Instead, it triggered something even more primal than instinct. Something she had spent months, perhaps years, suppressing out of a desperate need to stay "sane."
She had confirmed that she was the battery, that she was the heart beating in the ribcage of Salaam and even then, she had treated herself as separated from it.
Her eyes let out a soft purple glow and grew itself into a fierce violent light.
She was the one who decided whether the city enjoyed such luxuries, not the other way around.
She stopped fighting the cables that leeched off her.
She stopped trying to pull away.
Instead, she pushed and this time with everything she could ever have, and with that she opened the floodgates.
Every drop of Iké she had, every bit of her history, her anger, her identity, she threw it into the grid surging into the lines, her consciousness surfing the current as though it was made to do so.
The sensation was terrifying. For a moment, she lost the feeling of her arms and legs, but her fear of losing that control brought her back. A sure sign that the livelihood of everything within her reach was held together only by her will.
Souki could feel thousands of people, the clinical, terrified citizens huddling in shelters. She could feel the heat of their breath as they offered prayers up to Astra, but she was searching for the one thing that had spoken to her earlier.
That emptiness that had called out to her.
She expanded her reach, her spiritual "fingers" brushing against every corner of the Temple. It was an agony of overextension, her physical brain struggling to process the data presented to it.
Then she found it; him.
Near the observation deck, she found it.
His Iké wasn't like the others. It wasn't a spark or a flame. It was a vacuum, a deep hunger that felt like a mirror to her own surplus.
She reached for him, but the grid was too rigid. She was the infrastructure, and the infrastructure was not meant to speak. A simple whisper was too much for her to ask of her current limitations.
But they had communicated once before so she did only what she could do.
Whistle.
Souki gathered the power of the entire Temple, the energy meant to keep the city standing, and channeled it into a single, focused burst.
Across the city of Salaam, the haunting, flutelike hum of the desert wind suddenly stopped.
In the ether there was only silence for those who could hear it.
Then, in one hollow swoop all of Salaam seemed to exhale through a needle's eye.
A simple chilly feeling to those unaffected but a deafening, unrefined scream to whoever could hear it.
It didn't take long for this to evolve into a rumble that shook the Temple itself. Whoever it was, she could tell that they received her message.