Awakening (12 page)

“It was her choice.” Zul started across the open space, threading through the crowd still gathering around the tables.

But he’d sworn he’d keep her out of the Kinship. Outrage flooded her at yet another broken trueborn promise.

She caught up with him. “You have to tell her she can’t join.” Her heart pounded in fear of Zul’s reaction to her defiance.

The old man spun back to her, an imperious light in his face. Most of the time, Zul treated her like an equal now, a
full member of the Kinship. But with him stretched to his full nearly two-meter height, she saw the difference between them was more than their disparate size. He was still a high-status trueborn, privileged from birth. And she was still just a nothing GEN.

No, not a
nothing
GEN, she acknowledged. Just a rude one, making demands of Zul when he’d had no part in Mishalla’s joining.

Zul could have dressed her down, but he didn’t. “I told Mishalla about the risks, but she made up her own mind.”

Kayla couldn’t leave it. “But why would she?”

“You’ll have to ask her that. She wouldn’t tell me.”

Whatever else he might have said was cut off by the beeping of his wristlink. He read the message on the device’s display, then turned away again. “I have to get to the meeting.”

He walked off. As he disappeared into the chamber beside the sick room for his meeting, Kayla realized she’d never told him about her circuitry problems. Should she ask one of the medics to check her out? Maybe one of the two was more tech oriented. But they were so busy with the Scratch victims. The sick needed the medics’ help more than she.

So she set off another self-check. As the check completed all thumbs up, her stomach rumbled. Despite Zul’s unsettling news, she found she was hungry after all. She returned to the trestle table to look for a place to sit.

The tables had been laid out in rows perpendicular to the kitchen alcove. Because of the limited space, there weren’t enough tables for everyone to eat at once. While Kayla stood wondering if she could squeeze in, three GENs vacated the bench in front of her. Before she thought to move, two boys
jumped for the space, and a third boy would have too if a golden-skinned GEN woman with chestnut hair hadn’t hissed at him to try elsewhere.

The woman patted the space beside her, inviting Kayla to sit. Then she called out, “Another bowl, Tisch!”

Tisch, a stocky lowborn man, hurried from the kitchen with a bowl mounded high with steaming kel-grain, synth-protein, and vegetables. The lowborn man not only didn’t scowl at a GEN’s demand, he gave the woman a one-armed hug and kissed her on the forehead.

“Yes, we’re joined,” the GEN woman told Kayla at her wondering glance. “At least we are here in the safe house, me being a GEN and him a lowborn. I’m Maia.”

“Kayla.” She put out a hand for Maia, then Tisch, to shake. “My friend Mishalla married a lowborn boy, but she’s been restored and isn’t a GEN anymore.”

Maia gave Kayla a once over. “You’re the one who was Assigned to Zul. The one who saved those lowborn children.”

“It wasn’t just me who saved them.”

Tisch’s gaze lingered a moment on Kayla’s tattoo. “Rumor is you haven’t always been a GEN. That you were trueborn.”

Kayla couldn’t help herself—she touched her right cheek. “I was almost four when they put me in the tank. So I really don’t remember being anything but a GEN.”

That wasn’t strictly true. Kayla used to have the occasional nightmare about her time as a minor-status trueborn, flashes of memory about her trueborn mother. Until Zul revealed the truth to her four months ago, Kayla thought those dreams and memories were just something her imagination concocted.

Tisch hurried away to answer another summons, but Maia
continued to stare at Kayla. “Why haven’t you been restored?” the redhead finally asked.

“Because the treatment isn’t available,” Kayla said.

“I would think you’d be top of the list,” Maia said. “Knowing Zul like you do. Being former trueborn. Not a real tankborn like me.”

Kayla bristled at the word
real
. “I have the same circuitry running through me as you do.”

“But I wager you’ll be restored long before the likes of me,” Maia said.

What could she say to that? Maia seemed ready to pick apart whatever defenses Kayla might come up with. She turned away from the redhead, focusing on her bowl of kel-grain instead.

The slivers of synth-protein that striped the top were a far more generous portion than her nurture mother, Tala, had ever been able to provide. Kayla felt a pang of homesickness, a longing to see Tala and her nurture brother, Jal, again. It had been nearly six weeks now since she’d seen them. Since neither Tala nor Jal were free to leave Chadi sector, Kayla would have to go there to see them. But after she and Risa left Beqal sector, they’d be going north, not south where Chadi lay.

Her appetite had faded again, but she could imagine Tala scolding her for refusing good food. So Kayla spooned up her breakfast, washing down the warm kel-grain with some soy milk she poured from a communal pitcher. Finally Maia left, replaced by a skinny GEN boy with light, close-cropped hair. Another boy, a scruffy GEN who looked to be an eleventh-year like her nurture brother Jal, sat opposite.

The skinny boy nodded and introduced himself as Beph and his scruffy friend as Fashi. “You new here?” Beph asked.

Kayla shook her head. “I’m just here to make a delivery. Are you here with family?”

“Nah,” Beph said. “Fashi and me, we were due for a reset. Fashi said one wrong thing too many to an enforcer, and I defended him.”

Fashi nodded. “Got a problem with my mouth.”

“How’d you get away?” Kayla asked.

“Kinship enforcer,” Beph said. “Stepped in and did this thing with a datapod.”

“Knocked us out,” Fashi said. “When it all went black, I thought I’d never wake up.”

“Came to here,” Beph said. “Been here two weeks.”

“Don’t know what’s next,” Fashi said. “We help with the Scratchies sometimes.”

Beph and Fashi then launched into a detailed description of a complicated gambling game they’d created to pass the time, something involving stones and squares of plass. Kayla’s attention drifted, so she was only half-listening to their chatter when something Beph said caught her interest.

“The lowborns think she’s some kind of goddess,” the boy said.

“Think who’s a goddess?” Fashi asked.

“Some GEN girl,” Beph said.

“Where’d you hear this?” Kayla asked.

A guilty look flashed across Beph’s face. “One of the Scratchies. That one that died this morning. Before he came here, he heard it from an allabain lowborn passing through.”

Kel-grain dribbled from Fashi’s mouth. He swiped it away, then shoved his thick hair away from his face. “Why would they think she’s a goddess?”

“How would I know?” Beph said, then he lowered his voice. “Those allabains believe some crazy stuff. Like the twin suns joined to become a god and the moons are their children.”

Fashi’s pale skin flushed. “My nurture-mother believes in Iyenkas.”

Beph guffawed. Kayla would have liked to hear more about the GEN girl goddess, given the rumor that Risa shared the other day, but the boys changed the subject back to the gambling game.

Risa had told Kayla that allabain lowborns didn’t believe in the Lord Creator, the god that trueborns and most lowborns worshipped. But other than mentioning the dual god, Iyenkas, a joining of the suns, Iyenku and Kas, Risa never said much else about allabain beliefs or which god she followed. She saw beliefs in a God or gods as a private thing, not something to be blaring to the world.

Kayla finished her kel-grain, then tracked down Zul just as he was about to leave. As Kayla handed Zul the DNA packet she’d brought, she tried to catch his eye, but he was deep in conversation with another high-status trueborn. She didn’t like leaving things between them the way they had, but she wasn’t about to force herself into a conversation between two trueborns.

She left the safe house via a different exit than the one she’d entered through, then zigzagged her way up and down the local streets and alleys back to the extrusion factory. The lorry was there, but no Risa. The back doors of the lorry bay were shut, although the left latch wasn’t quite pushed home. Odder still, the big roll-up door to the factory was still shut.

As Kayla puzzled over that, Risa came around the side of
the building. “Were you waiting for me?” Kayla asked. “If I’d known I would have gotten back sooner.”

“Can’t raise anyone. Pounded on that door three or four times.” She poked a thumb over her shoulder at the factory’s delivery door. “Was around to the front even, but no one here. Like they’ve all been sent on holiday.”

Kayla trotted down the alley to Beqal’s main street. When there should have been dozens of GENs abroad by now, the street was deserted. When she would have expected to hear voices, it was quiet and still.

A cold chill rushed through Kayla’s body. She ran back to the lorry. Her gaze shot to the loading dock door, scanned it quickly from top to bottom. A few GENscrib insults were scrawled in black on the beige paint, the same sort of thing they’d seen in Qaf.

Her heart pounding, she turned in a slow circle, looking around her. A mural decorated the wall of the building across the alley, a GEN worshipper with her hands extended up to paradise, prayer mirror shining in her hands.

There was something written on the silvery-white of the prayer mirror. “What’s that building?” Kayla asked Risa.

“Foodstores,” the lowborn woman said. “Problem?”

Kayla didn’t answer, just reached for the ladder she and Risa used to access the top of the lorry bay. Her hands shaking, she pulled it down and climbed up, then walked along toward the cab to get closer to the part of the mural featuring the mirror.

Even standing on the edge of the bay, she was still at least three meters away, and the letters were small. But the pattern was familiar now that she’d seen it twice before.

“We have to get out of here,” she shouted down to Risa as she ran back toward the ladder. “Now.”

Risa trusted Kayla enough not to ask questions. While Kayla hurried down the ladder and shoved it back into the storage position, Risa whistled for Nishi. Whether the seycat heard the urgency in Risa’s summons or was ready to return, Nishi appeared almost instantly, the tail of a rat-snake in her mouth.

Risa scooped up Nishi and both she and Kayla ran to the cab. Nishi growled with displeasure, but luckily the seycat didn’t struggle free. The moment they were all in the cab, Nishi leapt from Risa’s arms and into the sleeper.

Risa had the lorry engine started and in gear in seconds. She reversed out of the alley, turning in a backward arc into the access road. The lowborn woman gunned away, traveling fast along the narrow lane between the rows of warehouses and factories. They’d passed a half-dozen of the blocky buildings before Risa stopped, the Plator River crossing their path.

Risa switched on the console vid screen so they could see down the lane behind them. Kayla peered hard at the screen as someone emerged from the alley. Her heart seemed to freeze in her chest. It was the GEN boy she’d seen earlier, the one with the red-brown skin who’d smiled at her. He was steps away from the foodstores warehouse.

“Oh, no.” Kayla groped for her prayer mirror.

“Denk, denk, denk,” Risa muttered. “Are you sure—”

Cutting off whatever else Risa had been about to say, the foodstores warehouse exploded, sending debris high into the overcast sky. The GEN boy’s body flew with the debris and crashed into the unforgiving pavement.

K
ayla pushed open the lorry door. Before she could jump out, Risa grabbed her wrist. “Can’t get mixed up in this.”

Kayla could have wrenched free in an instant, but she only gave a token tug. “He’s hurt, Risa.”

“Someone else can help.”

“Like the Brigade?” Already she could hear the alarms from across the Plator in trueborn Tef sector. “The boy is either dead or dying. How can we leave him for the Brigade, let him get chopped up for his DNA?”

Risa’s grip loosened slightly. “Still not our business.”

“How is it different from rescuing a Scratch victim? Giving them a dignified death in safety?”

Risa mulled that over for a moment, then let go. “Be quick.”

Kayla raced toward the explosion site. Already GENs were reappearing on the street and staring at the destruction. The Brigade couldn’t be far behind.

If enforcers found her loitering there, they would arrest her first and ask questions later. They might download her on the
spot, setting off the Kinship failsafe. Destroy her in an instant.

Behind her she could hear the lorry engine as Risa backed the big vehicle along the access road. When she reached Kayla, Risa slowed enough that Kayla could jump onto the back bumper and ride the rest of the way.

The GEN boy moved a little and groaned. His face was smeared with blood, soaking into his shoulder-length black hair. His right wrist lay at an odd angle. The fingers of his left hand strained to reach a carrysak a meter away from him.

When she got to his side, Kayla hesitated. She’d done nothing wrong yet. Other GENs were starting to cluster closer. There was still time for her and Risa to escape.