Awakening (14 page)

“We’re safe here,” Kayla said.

Risa was the one with the problem. She’d either have to take a stupid risk with the bhimkay by going outside again, or use Kayla’s tight route back to the cab.

Kayla tipped her head toward Risa. “We’ve been talking about the explosion, and why he was there.”

“Boy had something to do with it?” Risa asked.

“No!” Abran said.

“So he says.”

Abran, trembling, groped for the hem of his shirt. That was where GEN boys tended to keep their prayer mirrors, and he looked to be searching for it.

He glanced up at her. “My prayer mirror. I had it in my hand when the explosion happened.”

“I found it,” Kayla said. “At least I’m guessing it’s yours. Why did you have it out like that?” Most GENs prayed in a safe, private place, to avoid exactly what had happened to Abran—loss of their mirror.

“I was . . . asking the Infinite for His protection.”

Risa leaned toward him. “Against the bomb you set?”

“I had nothing to do with it!”

“Still to be proved,” Kayla said. “Could be the Infinite didn’t grant you protection because you set the explosion.”

Abran’s dark eyes glittered with frustration. “Why would I stop to send a prayer to the Infinite if I’d just set a bomb nearby? Why wouldn’t I have waited and gotten far enough away to be safe?”

“Unless you’d intended to be a martyr,” Kayla said.

He threw up his hands. “For what cause? And how the denking hell could a GEN get explosives anyway?”

That, of course, was the sticky point. After the lowborn insurrection thirteen years ago, anything remotely explosive had come under tight trueborn control. A GEN was the least likely to be able to get their hands on the makings of a bomb.

“Still,” Kayla reached over and gave his shoulder another little squeeze. “When the lowborn downloads you, it won’t just be for your passkey. She’ll be pulling everything she can from your annexed brain.” For instance if he was connected to the graffiti she’d seen on the warehouse, that could give them clues to the source of those mysterious words.

Risa pulled the datapod from the bandeau around her breasts and held the device pinched between her fingers. Reflexively Abran slapped his hand over his left cheek.

Risa gestured with the datapod. “You know GEN girl here can pin you down. You want that?”

He shook his head and lowered his hand. But still his eyes tracked the datapod as it approached his tattooed cheek. He flinched as the extendibles bit into his skin, a reaction Kayla had finally learned to suppress. Still, he stared cross-eyed down at the device until the last moment when the light turned from green to red. Then his focus went blank as the datapod temporarily took control.

Kayla couldn’t suppress a shudder. “I hate downloads.”

“Wouldn’t like it either, datapod making me black out like that.”

“It’s not the blacking out. It’s the giving over control.”

After a few minutes, the green ready light flashed again. An instant later, the datapod fell into Risa’s hand. Abran’s eyes came alive again, and he gasped in a breath as if he’d been holding it the whole time.

Kayla gestured at the sani-wipes still in his lap. “You’ll want to clean the blood off that cheek.” The extendibles had left behind six little dots of red.

He fumbled for a sani-wipe with a shaking hand. She felt
a speck of grudging sympathy. Fishing his prayer mirror out from her waistband, she handed it over.

“It’s pretty damaged. So scratched up you can hardly see your reflection.” Which would make it harder to send the prayers up to the Infinite.

“I don’t mind.”

After using the mirror to clean his face, he tucked it under his shirt, in the pocket she’d guessed was there. Girls, if they weren’t allowed a carrysak, would slip a prayer mirror into their bandeau, or into a pocket in the waistband of their leggings, like Kayla did.

Risa stuffed the datapod away. “Left wristlink in the cab.”

She’d use the wristlink to upload whatever data she’d gleaned from Abran. But she’d also want to contact Zul to discuss what happened next with the GEN boy.

Risa rose, using the bay door for balance, and peered up at Nishi. The seycat was perfectly relaxed, licking its front paw.

“Bhimkay’s gone,” Risa said, unlatching the door.

Abran gasped, shrinking back against the tall stack of crates behind him. He seemed to vibrate with fear as Risa dropped to the ground and latched the door behind her.

“Risa trusts her seycat,” Kayla said. “If Nishi doesn’t sense a bhimkay, there’s no bhimkay nearby.” Still, Kayla listened for Risa’s retreating footsteps, the sound of the cab door opening and slamming shut.

Abran’s hands shook, and his red-brown skin had turned pasty. Being nearly blown up by a bomb hadn’t rattled him much, but he’d all but crumpled at the mention of the bhimkay.

Kayla still didn’t trust him one iota, but she gave in to an
impulse to distract him. “I can make you a new prayer mirror. Risa has some milled metal she uses for repairs. If you polish it, it makes a good mirror. You could get it blessed by an Intercessor later.”

“No thank you. My mother gave this one to me.”

Mother.
Not
nurture
mother. Kayla never referred to Tala as just plain mother. Tala hadn’t birthed her, she’d
nurtured
her, far more important. Since Kayla had been trueborn once, she had been birthed. But that woman, Aideen Kalu, meant nothing to Kayla beyond being a name Zul had once mentioned to her, nor did Elana Kalu, the trueborn child Kayla had once been.

How much could the woman who had nurtured Abran mean to him, if he called her only
mother
? Despite his sentimental attachment to the damaged prayer mirror, they couldn’t be as close as she and Tala were.

Risa would be learning plenty about Abran from the download, but it couldn’t hurt to confirm truth or lies from the boy himself. “Where were you nurtured? What sector?”

Color rose faintly in his cheeks. “In Jassa.”

His embarrassment made sense. Even by GEN standards, Jassa, with its muggy heat and prolific vermin, was the most unlivable sector on Svarga continent.

“I’ve never been to Jassa,” Kayla lied, “tell me about it.”

His mouth twisted as if in distaste, then he reeled off a description. “Thick with sticker bushes. I lived close to the Sheysa River and we were overrun with sewer toads in the winter and rat-snakes in the summer.”

Kayla and Risa had been in eastern Jassa a few months ago when it was still blistering hot. They’d thought to escape the
oppressive heat of the lorry cab by camping outside along the Sheysa River. It was just as stifling and they’d had to pick rat-snakes out of their blankets all night long.

But Jassa was legendary. His knowing about it didn’t prove anything.

“What’s your nurture mother’s name?” Kayla asked.

“The lowborn must know it by now from the download.”

“I want to hear it from you,” Kayla said. “To see how many lies you’ve told me.”

“I’m not lying!”

He said it stoutly enough, but there was a hint of hesitation. How much was truth then, and how much lie?

“You can’t stay on this lorry unless we know who you really are.” When he still hesitated, she said with exasperation, “Don’t you think we know how to ask the question without bringing the Brigade down on us?”

He pulled his knees to his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “My mother is Dieta.”

The lorry engine rumbled to life, and the lev-truck eased out onto the highway, rocking as it traveled from gravel shoulder to pavement. If Risa was on the move, that meant she’d uploaded the data to Zul. She couldn’t have talked to him yet, though, since not enough time had passed. Did she want Kayla to make the call?

She poked a thumb toward the cab. “The lowborn woman will want me up front. But one last question and you denking well better tell me the truth. Why were you stupid enough to run away from your Assignment in the first place?”

He barely hesitated with his answer. “My patron beats me. With his fists, with a club, whatever is handy. He’s burned me
too, on my skin and even on the inside by using a shockgun on my tattoo.”

Kayla scanned his unmarred face. “How do I know this isn’t just a story?”

His cheeks darkened. “I can show you.”

Kayla wasn’t sure she wanted to see, but she nodded.

He lifted his shirt. Scars, like white worms, crisscrossed the red-brown skin of his chest and belly. Some were as skinny as a bit of rat-snake web, some as wide as that scab on his forehead. The wounds had to have been bad if his circuitry couldn’t erase those scars.

“This too,” he said. He dropped his shirt and held out his left pinky finger. For the first time, she saw the end jogged outward at the joint. “After he broke it, he wouldn’t let the healer straighten it. He said he wanted it to heal that way so I would remember what he’d done.”

“But why?” Kayla asked. “Why keep hurting you that way if it could keep you from doing your Assignment?”

“The only thing I’m good at is numbers. My patron has me keep his books on an old sekai. I count things, keep track of stock,” Abran said. “As long as I can operate a sekai, his work gets done. But I was afraid he would kill me sooner or later, or hurt me so bad the gene-splicers would take me apart. I had to run.”

“Even so,” Kayla said with a twinge of regret. “We’ll be dropping you in Taq. The lowborn woman knows another driver who can take you back to Nitha.”

“No,” he all but whispered. “Please, no.”

Uneasy with the distress in his face, Kayla climbed the crates and made her way back to the cab. Nishi had already returned to her cubby and she was polite enough to express her
displeasure at Kayla’s passage with only a hiss. Kayla got back through the hatch without a new claw mark.

As she lowered herself from the sleeper to the cab, a sticker bush, ripped from its roots, rolled across the lorry’s path. Risa slammed on the brakes in reflex, although the bush bounced harmlessly up over the nose of the cab, past the windscreen and out of sight. Kayla barely avoided smacking into the dashboard.

“You already scared that boy with your bhimkay story,” Kayla said, settling into her seat. “Your driving may finish him.”

“Uploaded the data,” Risa said, tossing over the wristlink. “You call Zul. Wind’s throwing the lorry all over the road.” With the wristlink laid across her left palm, Kayla tapped its screen to wake it. To the unsuspecting eye, the device was a clunky older model a lowborn might typically own. It looked battered and well-worn, maybe a hand-me-down from Risa’s mother or father, or she’d scrimped to accumulate enough dhans to buy a used one.

But in reality, the thick four-centimeter square display on the wristlink boasted better resolution than what anyone less than high-status had access to. Despite the scratched and dented case, the wristlink’s internals were cutting edge, able to amplify even the weakest network signals out here in the back of beyond.

Kayla pressed in the code for Zul’s wristlink. The
Seeking Connection
displayed for so long, she wondered if even Risa’s high-tech wristlink was foiled by the lack of network out here in the barrens of Nafi sector.

Then the message vanished and the crystal clear display refreshed. Except it wasn’t Zul’s face on the small screen. It was Devak’s.

He seemed stunned for a moment, then something passed across his face she couldn’t decipher. He glanced to one side, then back at her. “Sorry, Pitamah left his wristlink behind. I thought I better answer it.”

“Is he gone again?” Emotions whipped through her, longing mixed with despair, frustration at her own weakness woven through.

“He’s meeting with Councilor Mohapatra, and they’re cooking up some kind of plan for that GEN boy.”

Devak’s image, despite the small screen, was beautifully rendered by the hi-res, from his expressive dark eyes to that perfect kelfa-colored skin. An ache settled in her heart and she wished she could hand the wristlink back to Risa. But as the lorry shook and fishtailed, she knew that wasn’t an option.

“Are you okay?” he asked. “I heard about the bombings in Qaf and Beqal.”

“We’re fine. We were plenty far away. But Abran—the GEN boy—was right in the middle of it.”

“I got the passkey and GEN ID Risa sent,” Devak said, “and got the GEN boy’s next ping extended out. It’s all forwarded to Pitamah and the councilor for their meeting.”

His tone was neutral and businesslike, but he kept looking away. She thought there might be someone else there, like Junjie, or the lovely trueborn girl Kayla had imagined. But his gaze went everywhere, up, down, left, right.

She burned to know what was running through his mind, but forced herself back to the problem with Abran. “I need to know if what he told me matches what you can find out from his download. He says he was abused.”

Now he looked straight at her. “Most GENs are, one way or another.”

True as it was, it surprised her to hear him say it. When she’d been Assigned to Devak’s family, his mother had never laid a hand on her, but she’d been cruel in other ways, belittling Kayla every chance she got, making clear her disgust at having a GEN in her house.

“In any case, we need to know what to do with him. Drop him off in Taq to have a Kinship driver return him? He can’t go to a safe house without being brought into the Kinship. I don’t know near enough about him to suggest that.”

“I’ll have Pitamah pass on what he and Councilor Mohapatra decide.” Another glance to the side, then squarely back at her. “Anything else?”

Devak’s gaze was so intent, it seemed to burn her. Why was he staring at her that way? Was he that eager to sign off?

Then a message displayed across the bottom of the small screen. Go private?

A mix of dread and anticipation churned in her stomach. She nodded, then glanced over at Risa.

“We’re going to talk a while longer,” Kayla said, “but I don’t want to disturb you. Okay if I take the wristlink into the bay?”

Risa smirked a little. “Yeah, GEN girl.”

Kayla scrambled across the bed and through the hatch again. She wedged herself in Nishi’s cubby, as far from the seycat as she could get. The feline had apparently become resigned to Kayla’s frequent intrusions into her territory and ignored her.