Awakening (13 page)

But the gaping gash across his forehead into his hair, the pasty look to his red-brown skin, and his rapid, shallow breathing told her he hadn’t much time before he’d be stepping into the Infinite’s broad hand. The Brigade would take his body to the gene-splicers and recycle it into future GENs. Even if he wasn’t dead yet, the gene-splicers would just take his “meat” as they wished. So it was worth the risk to get him out of here in a hurry.

Kayla lifted him as carefully as she could in her arms. She gritted her teeth against his shout of pain.

When she turned toward the lorry, he rasped out, “Carrysak.”

She went down on one knee to hook the carrysak strap in her fingers. As she was about to straighten, a silvery glint caught her eye. She spotted a prayer mirror wedged under some of the rubble. The palm-sized metallic mirror had to be the boy’s.

She pinched it between two fingers of her other hand,
registered that it was oddly thick and heavier than the usual prayer mirror. Clutching it tightly, she ran for the lorry. Risa had one of the bay doors open and there was just enough room between the door and the stacks of crates to put the boy.

Kayla set him down, then squeezed inside with him, dropping the carrysak at his feet. His prayer mirror she tucked in her waistband pocket. She rolled him toward her to keep him out of the way of the door while Risa shut it and closed them in darkness. A few moments later, the lorry started to move, then the bay illuminators came on.

The boy thrashed in the narrow space, muttering, “Chut it. Chut it.”

“It’ll be okay,” Kayla said, even knowing it wasn’t. “We’ll get you to a healer.”

The lorry shuddered as Risa must have reached a rougher road. Kayla slammed a hand against the inside of the door to keep her balance. The GEN boy grunted, squeezing his eyes shut, his pain clear.

“I’m Kayla 6982,” she said. “What’s your name?”

“Abran 9416,” the boy said, his voice slurred.

Not a GEN name she’d heard before. “Are you from Beqal sector, Abran, or just Assigned here?”

He didn’t answer. His chest rose as he inhaled, taking in a stuttering breath. She stared, sure it would stop at any moment. Blood glistened across his forehead and nearly covered one eye.

Kayla unlocked and shifted a few crates aside so she could sit. Leaning against the tower of crates beside her, she was glad they’d taken the boy with them. His last minutes should be in friendly hands, not on a rubble-strewn street, or stuffed in the boot of a Brigade Dagger.

She considered searching his carrysak to see if there was any evidence of who he was, but she was uncomfortable going through a stranger’s personal things. Once he died, she would. But while he was alive, he deserved his privacy. She’d had her personal things searched far too often by the Brigade to feel right doing it herself.

The blood dripped slowly, stickily toward his ear. She wanted dearly to clean his face. But what if she went up to the cab for sani-wipes and he died while she was gone? Tala’s partner Xan had passed into the Infinite’s hands that way, breathing his last just after Tala and Kayla left the room. Kayla had felt bad about that, but Tala said sometimes the souls wait until they’re alone. They want to save the family that final pain.

She should give the boy that chance to die in private safety. Meanwhile, she’d go up and get the sani-wipes, so she could clean him after death if not before.

She scaled the stack of crates, then squirmed through the slim space between the top of the stacks and the bay’s ceiling. They’d left an area clear around the hatch, both to give them quick access between the bay and cab, but also to leave a space for Nishi to curl up. Risa must have let the seycat into the bay because the five-legged feline was there in her cubby, spitting at Kayla.

No help for it, Kayla had to drop down next to Nishi to crawl through the hatch. Usually the seycat tolerated Kayla, but the creature must have been agitated by Abran’s presence. Nishi lashed out, two painful love taps that would likely bleed into Kayla’s leggings.

As Kayla twitched aside the sleeper curtains, Risa glanced back over her shoulder. “How is he?”

“Breathing, barely.” Kayla found the first aid box tucked into one of the built-in shelves surrounding the sleeper bed. “Took a denking big ride when the bomb went off. Bleeding from the head, and his wrist is broken, I think. Who knows what kind of internal injuries.”

Risa’s jaw worked at a hunk of devil leaf. “Long as he’s alive, Grid could ping him. Send the Brigade after us.”

“Do you think we’re already outside his Assignment area?” Kayla peered through the windscreen to orient herself. They were hurtling along on a cross-sector road, already back out in the scrap grasslands. Beqal central ward shrank in the rear display.

“Depending on his Assignment, could be,” Risa said. “Either he dies soon, or we find a place to leave him.”

Kayla, digging through the first aid box for the packet of sani-wipes, turned back toward Risa. “We can’t just drop him at the side of the road.”

Risa looked back over her shoulder. “Could have left him in the street.”

Her attention back on her driving, the lowborn woman exhaled heavily, flecks of devil leaf spattering the back of her hand on the wheel. “We’ll keep him for now. Until he dies or we talk to Zul. But if Brigade boards us, I won’t hide the boy. Just turn him over. Tell ’em we just found him, couldn’t get signal to call Brigade.”

Anger burned inside Kayla at the necessity of that, but what else could they do? They had to protect themselves. “I did get his name and ID. Abran 9416. Maybe that’ll help when you contact Zul. At least find his nurture parent so we can notify him or her about his death.”

Kayla scooted over to the hatch, swinging her legs through into the bay. “Call off Nishi, would you? She already got me once.”

Risa whistled. Nishi didn’t obey the summons, but when Kayla dropped down into the cubby, the seycat didn’t claw her again either.

She squirmed her way back through the narrow passageway between the crates and the lorry ceiling. Before she came into view of Abran, she steeled herself for him already being gone. As much peril it put them in if Abran was still living, she realized she wanted quite desperately to be at his side when he breathed his last, as she hadn’t been able to with Xan.

She swung off the crates, still not looking. So when she turned to face Abran, she nearly lost her grip and fell.

He was alive. He was
sitting up.
And he looked a long way from a boy about to die.

H
er first response was joy, the next worry. She stripped a sani-wipe from the packet and started cleaning blood from Abran’s face.

“Hey!” the boy protested.

Abran tried to ward off her hand but she persisted. She cleared away the blood from his cheek, exposing his uninjured GEN tattoo. When she cleaned what had been a gaping head wound on his forehead, she saw it was now closed into a fat, black scab nearly as long and as wide as her index finger.

Great Infinite, he’d been healed at as rapid a pace as she’d been. What did it mean that GENs were suddenly healing faster?

Without finesse, she snatched up his right arm. Hadn’t it been bent wrong at the wrist? She’d been sure it was broken.

“Can you move it?” she asked.

He flapped his hand up, then down, wincing a little. It clearly still hurt, but although it was badly bruised and swollen, it was only slightly crooked. And if he could move it like that, it wasn’t broken.

She poked at his head wound. “Does this hurt?”

“Not much.”

She squeezed his belly, and his red-brown face flushed redder. “Any pain here?”

“No!” He grabbed her wrist. “Can you lay off?”

“Denk it,” she muttered. “I’ve gotten us all into trouble.” She dropped the packet of sani-wipes in his lap.

She scaled the crates again and hustled back toward the cab, thoughts tumbling in her mind. Yes, she was glad the boy wouldn’t die, but what would they do with him now? Every option put all of them or at least the boy at risk.

The bay rocked from side to side, the crates groaning with the motion. Good thing the stacks were locked together and crammed in so tight they couldn’t tumble and take Kayla with them.

In response to Nishi’s hiss, Kayla gave the seycat a warning growl before dropping into the cubby. Her quick, careless squirm through the hatch netted her a scraped elbow. With a kick, she slammed the hatch shut before dropping into the seat beside Risa.

“He’s alive,” Kayla said.

“You mean, still alive?” Risa asked.

“I mean he’s awake, sitting up, and in no real pain,” Kayla clarified. “He must not have been hurt as much as it looked at first.” Yet he’d looked nearly dead. How could her judgment have been so wrong?

“Chut it.” Risa rubbed at her face with one hand. “Big problem, then.”

“We can take him back to Beqal,” Kayla said. “There’s still time to get him back to his Assignment area.”

Risa laughed darkly. “Zul checked. Boy’s Assignment area isn’t Beqal. It’s Nitha.”

Nitha, nearly a hundred kilometers from Beqal. A roaring started up in Kayla’s ears and panic clutched her throat. “A runaway? The boy’s a denking runaway?”

Risa nodded. “Zul had Devak check. Boy was pinged four days ago.”

Which meant he’d be pinged again in another day, discovered missing, and tracked to the lorry. “What do we do with him?”

Risa was polite enough not to point out that Kayla’s impulse had gotten them into this mess. “Devak can push out the next ping another five days. Give us time to drop him in Taq.” Taq was a GEN sector next over from Beqal. “Zul can arrange Kinship transport back to Nitha.”

“But Devak will need his passkey to change the Grid database,” Kayla said. “Which means you’ll have to download him.”

Kayla knew how to operate a datapod and could have done it. But GENs weren’t allowed to use datapods, so it would be stupid to let a non-Kinship GEN like Abran see her handling one.

While Risa looked for a wide enough shoulder to pull the lorry over, Kayla made her way back to Abran, simmering with a mix of irritation at the GEN boy and self-contrition for her part in creating their current crisis. As she climbed down the crates, she blasted him. “Are you so sanaki stupid you didn’t think they’d find you on the Grid?”

His eyes widened. “How did you know—”

“The lowborn driver has to protect my patron’s interests.” Kayla sat on the crates and faced him, her diminutiveness and his lanky height bringing them nearly eye to eye. “She used your name and ID to check on you.”

“How dare you—” He clamped his mouth shut, stopping the flow of words. “I left Nitha three days ago, the day after I’d last been pinged.”

“Stop your lying. GENs can’t sense a Grid ping.”

“I was a few centimeters outside my area that day. Grid tech reported it to my patron, and my patron punished me. Leaving the next day seemed like my best chance to get somewhere safe.”

The bay swayed as Risa pulled the lorry over, and Kayla had to grab the crates on either side to stay upright. Still sitting on the floor, Abran flung out his right hand at the bay door to balance himself, banging his wrist on the latch. He sucked in a breath, wincing in pain.

Kayla refused to let herself feel sympathy. “There’s nowhere a GEN is safe from the Grid, GEN boy. Sometime tomorrow, they’re going to ping you. They’ll track your movements back to where you’ve been since you left Nitha, and then they’ll find you here with us.”

“The Humane Edicts—”

“—forbid GENs being monitored by the Grid every moment,” Kayla said. “Except they do monitor you. And store that data away. They just don’t look at it until you go missing.”

“But after that explosion, they might think I’m dead,” Abran said. “Wouldn’t I be safe then?”

“Them
thinking
you’re dead won’t help you,” Kayla said, exasperated by his ignorance. “The Grid will still be monitoring you.”

Suddenly, a suspicion sprouted in her mind. She gripped his shoulder hard enough that it had to hurt. “Did you have something to do with that bomb? Is that why they might think you were dead? Did they expect you to kill yourself?”

“They? Who’s they? I had nothing to do with the bomb!” He tried to shove her hand away, but she held fast.

Outside, Risa’s footsteps approached, crunching in the roadside gravel. Kayla heard a hiss above her and spotted Nishi crouched on top of the crates, her tail whipping.

Sure the seycat would bolt outside the moment the bay door opened, Kayla released Abran and tried to catch the door before it swung too wide. But even though her fingers missed the latch and the door yawned open enough to allow Risa to heave herself inside, Nishi didn’t move.

Risa straddled Abran in the small space as she latched the door again. She spied Nishi hunkered down on the crates above. “Seycat’s got better sense than me.”

Kayla settled back on her crate seat. “Cold outside?”

“Bhimkay.” Risa shivered as she shifted to sit beside Kayla. “Already had its prey—wild drom. Lucky.”

“They can’t get in here, can they?” Abran asked, his voice rough.

Now Kayla saw his face had paled, turning the ruddy color of his skin gray and pasty. She considered a dark joke about leaving him off in the scrap grass and letting him take his chances with the massive spider predator. But Abran looked truly terrified.