Hiran recoiled at the sound of his name. It had been uttered in a voice that he’d yearned, yet also dreaded, to hear for so long, and it carried inflections of a distinct Chedi dialect.

But it had also been said the way a stranger might have said it.

No. Whoever the dark-haired woman wreathed in ribbons of white light standing before him was, she wasn’t Keyi. She was someone else.

“Who are you?” Hiran found himself blurting. He took another step back as she advanced, the streams of white radiance around her body swirling even more rapidly.

“I…” The woman frowned and clasped her forehead. Blood oozed from the corners of her eyes and trickled down her cheeks. She met his gaze. “My name is Anika.”

What? Hiran reeled inwardly in confusion. “But how…”

The light vanished. Her eyes rolled upward in their sockets. She fell, her body suddenly limp and nerveless.

Hiran caught her before she could hit the floor and cradled her gently in his arms. She weighed almost nothing at all to his Starforged muscles. Her eyes fluttered open momentarily to look up at him, and a faint smile tugged at the corner of her mouth.

“Pleased to meet you,” she mumbled, before falling comatose.

Shaking his head in disbelief, Hiran stood up straight, still holding the strange woman. He turned to Lila and Maxwell as they raced toward him, obviously having pushed their way past the throng of coverall-wearing Shanians.

“What’s going on?” he asked the Savant, glancing meaningfully down at the woman in his arms.

“I do not have enough information available to formulate any reasonable hypothesis,” Lila replied, her single black eye wide and her crimson lens whirring and clicking frantically. She was as confused and as astounded as Hiran had ever seen her. “Let us first stick to the facts at hand. The clone in Cargo Hold Beta has spontaneously awoken from suspension. It is capable of speech, though my auditory receptors were not able to perceive the exact nature of its utterances. It—”

“She,” Hiran corrected, in a gentle voice. “She said ‘hello’ to me, and then she told me her name was ‘Anika’ and that she was pleased to meet me.”

“Seems like a polite and friendly young lady to me,” Maxwell commented. The mercenary whistled through his teeth as he glanced past Hiran and at Chaoswing. “Hopefully she didn’t break too much stuff on her way out here.”

“That is impossible,” Lila said, after a moment of frantically blinking her black eye. “Clones are cultured from cells and then put through protein infusions that rapidly age their bodies to the desired age prior to their release from suspension. They should have no memories. It… she should not have a name. Nor could she have known yours, Hiran.”

“So this lady isn’t a clone,” Maxwell reasoned. “Either that, or she got out of her tank as a babe and grew up the same way the rest of us did.”

“She looks a lot like Keyi,” Hiran said. “The resemblance is too strong… too identical for her to be merely one of Keyi’s relatives. I think she is a clone.”

“Her genetic parameters are completely identical to the Lady of Light’s,” Lila said. “She is a clone. But her memories and self-awareness are… unprecedented.”

“Could they have been implanted, like the skills and knowledge you put into my head?” Hiran asked. He turned his Ajna Interface on the woman in his arms and quickly registered the presence of a similar implant in her skull, though it was currently in its dormant mode.

“Proficiencies and data require an identity base for them to take effective root in,” Lila explained. “You are Hiran the Godbreaker, and you know who you are, so it was a matter of some simple programming on my part to implant skills in your hippocampus. This is not the case for freshly created clones in suspension. Also, memories cannot be implanted, not in this way. Deceptive fabrications can be woven into an individual’s recollections by various means, but only if said individual is a fully-realized and self-aware person in the first place.”

“So that means she got out of her tank as a babe and grew up,” Maxwell concluded. “And then she got put back into a tank again, probably by Mister Maruti.”

“Loremaster Maruti,” Lila corrected the mercenary, her voice laden with far more acridity than Hiran had ever heard. The Savant then lowered her head. “Apologies, Maxwell. I was uncouth. Your reasoning is flawless. Loremaster Maruti must have done exactly what you said he did. I am just… confused as to why.”

“He did it to minimize soul-vessel synchronization deficiency syndrome,” Bei Feng said, as he strode past his servants and toward Hiran. Men wearing olive-hued uniforms and body armor, who could only be the Scholar’s personal guards, were ushering the workers back to their posts. Bei Feng gestured hurriedly for Hiran to follow him. “Come, my friends. Let us withdraw to a more private venue, one devoid of many prying eyes and their owners, whose lips are looser than they should be.”

“Good idea,” Hiran agreed. “Lead the way, Bei Feng.”

The scholar nodded, before ushering Hiran and his companions out of the hangar’s backdoor, down a stone path overhung with lush greenery, and toward a seemingly blank wall on his manor’s eastern face.

Bei Feng hurried to the wall and placed his palm on it. Multi-colored lights flashed briefly upon its surface, and a panel slid open to reveal a keypad. The scholar tapped on it several times, obviously inputting a combination, and a cunningly hidden door slid open, revealing a shadow-shrouded corridor.

Hiran and his companions followed Bei Feng into the corridor. Ceiling lights lit up as they walked underneath them, shedding their soft and warm radiance over the luxurious wood-paneled walls. Sandalwood incense suffused the air, dispensed from vents interspersed at regular intervals down the corridor’s length.

Bei Feng was a man who enjoyed his comforts, it seemed, even in the passageway leading to his secretive inner sanctum.

The scholar led Hiran to a door of finely carved and lacquered wood. Shanian letters adorned its surface, written in crimson ink. Hiran felt his skin crawl when he looked at them. Bei Feng waved his right hand, waggled his fingers, and uttered a few words under his breath.

The door swung open quietly. Hiran winced at the faint trace of sulfur that tickled his nostrils. A quick glance at Maxwell and Lila told him that neither had registered the smell, probably because their senses weren’t anywhere near as keen as his own Starforged ones.

A door sealed with sorcery, Hiran thought, returning his focus back to Bei Feng, as the scholar strode into a room drenched in soft, amber-hued light and beckoned everyone else in.

Bei Feng waved his right hand and muttered a few words as Lila and Maxwell entered the room after Hiran. The door swung shut noiselessly. Faint violet light pulsed briefly around its seams. Hiran suspected that nothing short of more powerful sorcery or a plasma lance would breach the door now.

The scholar’s inner sanctum was an expansive chamber with a high ceiling and unadorned walls painted with a curious shade that Hiran could only describe as a cross between blue and black. Columns of crimson Shanian words ran over their surfaces.

The floor was plain white marble. A dais of smoothly carved granite sat in the middle of the room, its sides adorned by intricate gold-filled etchings and discs of engraved jade. The light suffusing the room’s interior came from ceiling lamps of brass carved into the likeness of massive candles held aloft upon interwoven nets of brazen chains.

“This is my meditation chamber,” Bei Feng explained. “Its main entrance is under guard at all hours by at least a dozen of my house guards. We came in through the secondary one, which only I can use. The columns of writing you see on the walls are Containment Wards. In this room, no Void Entity can manifest itself. No sorcerer can spy on us here either, no matter how powerful his divination and clairvoyance spells might be.”

“We’re here because the lady was manifesting some spooky Void stuff back there just now,” Maxwell reasoned. He swept his gaze over the room and shuddered. “I reckon this is just how things got to be, fighting fire with fire and all that.”

This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

“In this room, no Void Corruption or Taint can befall this clone,” Lila said. “If we can transfer some of the diagnostic equipment on board Chaoswing here, I can perform a complete medical examination of her.”

“I have already informed my staff to bring some supplies to my meditation chamber,” Bei Feng said. “If need be, they can set up a fully equipped medical suite. But while we wait for them to arrive, please put down the young lady over there and make yourselves comfortable in the meantime.”

The scholar gestured to a collection of lushly padded couches in the corner of the room. Hiran walked over to them and put the unconscious woman down on a suitably sizable couch. Without thinking about it, he brushed her brow comfortingly, causing a faint but tired smile to tug at her lips.

Hiran then stepped away, allowing Lila to approach. The Savant extended a cluster of delicate limbs from her torso, most of them tipped with tiny, multi-jointed digits and one bearing a small flashlight. She nodded to Hiran and leaned over the woman.

“Beginning cursory examination,” Lila said, pressing several digits against the side of the woman’s neck. “Pulse rate is lower than normal but expected to accelerate into acceptable parameters. Heartbeat is strong. No visible wounds are present. No fractures have been sustained.”

“Why is she out anyway?” Maxwell asked, plopping himself down on a single-seater and leaning back against its cushions.

“Post-suspension fatigue,” Lila explained. “When Hiran was removed from his vessel, it took hours before he awakened.”

“But by then, you’d already put in my Samsara Core and all these Circuits, right?” Hiran flexed his bare hands, bringing the lines of gold and silver running over their surface into clear visibility.

“Loremaster Maruti was your primary operator, Hiran, while I assisted, but yes, you are correct,” Lila said. “The Core Implantation and Circuitry Inlay procedures had to be completed during suspension and prior to ensoulment with the Soul Bridge.”

“So what are we going to do with her, now?” Hiran asked, waving at the unconscious woman upon the couch. “We can’t put a Core or any Circuits into her, unless we want to stick her into another tank, and we will need another tank, since I doubt the one on Chaoswing is still intact. And we can’t put Keyi’s soul into her, since she already has a soul.”

“No, we cannot,” Lila agreed. She stepped away from the couch, withdrawing her delicate limbs from the woman as she did so, and turned to Bei Feng. “Scholar Bei Feng, you mentioned soul-vessel synchronization deficiency syndrome just now. Could you please elaborate?”

“Gladly.” Bei Feng put his hands together in front of his midriff, so that they were completely enveloped by his voluminous silken sleeves. “Soul-implantation is cutting edge Shanian technology, only developed within the last decade or so and reserved for only the greatest of Shanian luminaries. My patron, Prince Zhang, has kindly given me license to share it with anyone I deem worthy, and one of those individuals was my late friend, Loremaster Maruti.”

“As you know, Lila, souls and their physical vessels must be suitably synchronized for them to be compatible. This isn’t an issue for the natural-born, since their souls and their bodies were meant for one another, thus precluding soul-vessel synchronization deficiency syndrome,” the scholar went on. “However, things are different when it comes to soul-implantation procedures.”

“I get it!” Maxwell piped up. “My soul fits my body perfectly, because they’re naturally each other’s. Hiran isn’t still quite comfortable in his skin yet, because his body doesn’t belong to his soul, at least not yet.”

Hiran nodded, more than a little surprised at Maxwell’s perceptiveness. The mercenary was able to pick up on Hiran’s physical unease and the slight but subtle tics that rendered him unable to enact full control over his body. Maxwell is a lot smarter than many people think he is, I bet.

Bei Feng clicked his tongue irritably at Maxwell, obviously unimpressed by the mercenary’s interruption. “As I was saying, soul-vessel synchronization deficiency syndrome is an obstacle. If unaddressed, it can lead to a complete rejection on either the soul’s or the body’s part, which could be disastrous, if not lethal. Fortunately, there are many ways to minimize its effect and optimize the odds of a successful soul-implantation.”

“Loremaster Maruti told me that simply having a freshly grown clone would minimize the syndrome. He likened it to writing upon a blank slate,” Lila said. She pointed at the woman. “This is obviously not a blank slate.”

“As far as Shanian technological consensus states, my late friend was correct when he said that.” Bei Feng stroked his mustache and furrowed his brow in thought. “But he must have also wanted to maximize the chances of success while also minimizing the possibility of failure, and one way to do that is by using a physical host that has undergone similar experiences with the intended soul.”

“That is a worker’s serial code from one of Anava’s manufactories,” Hiran said, pointing to a small barcode tattooed upon the inside of the woman’s left wrist. It was a tenth the size of a mortal’s smallest toenail. “She was a manufactory worker. So was Keyi in her early years.”

“Anava…” Maxwell scratched the back of his head. “I remember reading about the other Ghandarnian planets. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Chedi is the one with all the manufactories, while Anava is the one with all the farms, right? So—”

“That is not correct,” Lila said. “It is true that Anava produces the vast majority of agricultural output in the Ghandarna System, but the planet also has a small but sizable manufactory output. The reverse is true of Chedi, which focuses on planetary industry, but also has a non-insignificant patch of its territory devoted to agricultural development.”

“Maruti created a clone, then tried to have this clone grow up the way Keyi did,” Hiran said. He clenched his fists as anger welled in his heart. “And when she did grow up, he collected her and then what? Was he going to remove her soul and replace it with Keyi’s?”

“I believe that was his intention,” Bei Feng said. “For a soul as powerful and as volatile as the Lady of Light’s, that must have been necessary to minimize soul-vessel synchronization deficiency syndrome.”

“Stars!” Maxwell grunted in horror. “This Maruti fella was going to kill an innocent young girl and have this Lady of Light wear her flesh like a skin suit! That’s cold! Very cold!”

“No, no, no…” Lila trembled. She clutched her head with her limbs. “Loremaster Maruti was a hero! He was an ethical paragon! He would never do something as heinous as this! He…”

Hiran placed a gentle hand on the Savant’s shoulder. Her dismay had driven every last vestige of anger from his heart. “I don’t know him like you did, Lila, and I’m sure that to you, he was everything you said he was. But you also know that Maruti carried a lot of hatred in his heart, and that can change people and make them do things they normally wouldn’t.”

Lila shuddered and nodded to Hiran. “Thank you for comforting me. It has not allayed my emotional distress, but I do appreciate your words very much. Now, let us return to the facts… and the facts dictate a nigh-certainty that Loremaster Maruti did intend to maximize the possibility of the soul-implantation’s success, even if that meant cold-blooded murder.”

“Stars, little missy!” Maxwell walked over and gave the Savant a hug. “You’re as strong as my mom, and that’s saying something! I would be a blubbering mess if I were in your shoes now.”

“I do not wear shoes, Maxwell.” Lila returned the embrace by wrapping a limb awkwardly around the mercenary’s torso for a brief moment. “But I enjoyed the compliment. I would very much like to meet your mother someday.”

“That can be arranged!” Maxwell said, laughing. He grinned at Hiran. “And you can come, too! We’ll have a good old fry-up in my mom’s yard. She’ll be glad to have you both, that’s for sure!”

That might not be such a bad idea, Hiran thought. I’m considering just leaving all this behind. Ghandarna, the Starforged, the Rebellion… all of this nonsense… And then I can start afresh in Asharica.

He dismissed the thought as soon as it crossed his head. He couldn’t leave Ghandarna, not without finding out about Keyi, first.

“Why did this lady wake up all of a sudden?” Maxwell asked, as he returned to his single-seater. “It seems mightily inopportune to me.”

“I took the liberty of examining the exterior of the cargo hold in which the clone was stored,” Bei Feng said. “And I noticed weak Containment Wards etched into the doorway. If I’d gone in, I would have probably seen more of them on the walls or floor. Loremaster Maruti was likely responsible for their presence. But the Containment Wards on the doorway have been broken, probably because a Void-sensitive person breached their perimeter.”

“That would be me,” Hiran said, shaking his head. “I should have just left things alone.”

“You could not have known,” Lila said. “I was not aware of the presence of such wards, either.”

“As you all saw, this clone possesses a strong, inherent connection to the Void,” Bei Feng continued. The scholar stroked his mustache again and sighed. “Though it is raw and untrained, it was capable of responding to your connection to the Void, Hiran, and it began to awaken its host.”

“Maybe dropping down into Pragha, where there are Purification Shrines everywhere you look, shook her fully awake,” Maxwell suggested. He nodded at the unconscious woman. “Either way, how and why she woke up isn’t that important now. What’s important is figuring out how to deal with her.”

“Knowing what we now know, I deem her ineligible for soul-implantation,” Lila said. “Fortunately, there is still some of the Lady of Light’s genetic material on Chaoswing. With the proper facilities, I can culture another fresh clone for her.”

“I will be more than happy to provide you with the monetary resources needed for said facilities, of course,” Bei Feng said. “But in the meantime, here…”

He reached into his left sleeve and retrieved a small piece of jade. It was roughly the size and shape of a mortal man’s thumbnail, and there was a length of red string threaded through a hole in its uppermost corner. The scholar gently lifted the woman’s head and slipped the pendant around her neck.

“This amulet should mask her connection to the Void, even beyond the confines of this chamber,” he said. “But I believe it would be prudent to keep her here first, at least until she attains better control over her gifts.”

I wouldn’t call that a gift. Hiran frowned at Bei Feng. “And just how is she going to do that?”

“Why, by undergoing training alongside you, of course,” the scholar replied. “Though I can hardly claim to be the best tutor in the galaxy, I am confident I can help you and this lady become competent sorcerers, at the very least.”