Awakening (19 page)

Moving out of sight of Abran, Kayla found Feyda, the warehouse manager, just outside her office. The medium-skinned GEN woman nodded as Kayla approached. “Want to double-check your records. You might have taken cargo intended for Mendin sector.”

That likely meant Feyda had a datapod upload for Kayla. Sometimes Kayla could just take the datapod itself and upload in the privacy of the lorry, but sometimes the datapod couldn’t be shared that way. Since the Kinship came by most of their datapods illegitimately, there were usually shortages of the device.

Unless it was just another Kinship membership roster, there didn’t seem to be much point in this particular upload. Kayla wouldn’t be able to use the safe house passwords since she wasn’t free to enter a safe house. Risa could deactivate the Kinship failsafe, then download Kayla and do the safe house runs herself. But that would present other problems.

Feyda led Kayla deeper into the warehouse, to what would be the one dead spot where the trueborn netcams didn’t cover. She and Feyda chatted inanities along the way, commenting on the weather, the new style of prayer mirrors that were too ornate for Feyda’s taste, the kel-grain shortages in Tinga and Jassa sectors.

They stopped just short of the front corner of the warehouse, just behind a tower of crates. Feyda kept up her
chatter; the cameras’ audio would record them even if the video couldn’t. She dropped the datapod in Kayla’s hand and waited while Kayla put the device to her cheek. So accustomed now to uploads, she barely paid attention to the stream of data and code.

She’d put up her hand so she could catch the datapod when its extendibles retracted when a last stream of code arrowed into her annexed brain. Just like the upload from Coria, it moved to a different location than where the rest of the data and programming had stored. About to trace that path to check the code, she heard footsteps approaching.

She fumbled the datapod off her cheek. It hadn’t quite retracted its extendibles and the little metal feet clawed at her tattooed cheek. Denk it, now she’d be bleeding and that could invite questions.

She quickly passed the datapod to Feyda, then rubbed her right cheek against the rough corner of one of the crates, hard enough to make the wound worse. Now her cheek really stung.

“Kayla?” Abran’s voice reached her an instant before he did.

She rounded on him, all her ire spilling into her words. “What are you doing here?”

He took a step back. “I brought you one of the pastries. What happened to your cheek?”

“Is that any of your business?”

His dark gaze hardened a little. “I’m just asking.”

She realized her evasiveness would just increase his suspicion. Using her circuitry, she heated her cheeks to feign embarrassment. “I stumbled and fell against the crates.” She pointed to the corner where a little of her blood was smeared.

He looked around at the floor, bare except for the towering
stacks of crates. “What could you have possibly have tripped on?”

Now real mortification flooded her. “I’m clumsy, okay? I don’t need something on the floor to tangle my feet.”

Even Feyda, as startled as Kayla at Abran’s intrusion, gave her an odd look at her sharpness with the GEN boy. Of course, Feyda didn’t know the strange circumstances of how he came to be with Kayla and Risa. Still, Tala would have given her a severe tongue lashing if someone witnessed her being so unforgivably rude.

“Sorry.” She took the pastry he held out to her. “Thank you.”

He held his palms toward her. They were angry red and slightly swollen. “You were right. Hurts like denking hell.”

“Learned your lesson,” she said, then when he seemed to want to wait for her, she added, “tell Risa I’ll be out in a few minutes.”

Finally he walked away. Now so hungry that the knots in her stomach vanished in anticipation of food, Kayla took a big bite. The sweet bread was dry and spiced too heavily with ground qerfa root, but it quieted the ravenous rumbling.

As she wound back around through the obstacle course of crates with Feyda, she returned her focus to that odd final upload. She tried to track where it had stored itself, but it wasn’t there. Had she forgotten the neural path? Or had it been another glitch like what had happened with the one Coria had loaded?

Or . . . could it be neither one was a glitch? Could the two programming uploads have hidden themselves? Gone somewhere in her annexed brain that even she couldn’t access? She denking well didn’t like the idea of the Kinship stuffing programs in her brain, then concealing where they’d been stored.

But how to ask Feyda with the netcams watching? It took her until they reached the warehouse entrance to work something out.

“That prayer mirror you were talking about,” Kayla said, “did the seller tell you anything about the decorations?”

Feyda looked at her blankly for a moment, then realization lit her hazel eyes. “I asked, but they wouldn’t say. A family secret.”

Of course Feyda didn’t know what had been in the datapod. Because the Kinship liked their secrets, at least with GENs. Trueborn and lowborn Kinship members who were given information had it spoken to them or sent over the network in written form via a wristlink or sekai reader. They might not understand it all, but at least they were conscious receivers.

But GENs just had the data and programming dumped into them. The upload content was often incomprehensible. Sometimes it seemed like GENs were nothing but pack-droms for the Kinship, drones to ferry information.

Kayla had lost her appetite, but she forced down the last of the pastry Abran had given her. She’d never shaken Tala’s admonitions not to waste food. As she swung down from the loading dock, she spotted Abran trotting down the alley toward the lorry with a bag tucked under his arm and three plasscine bottles in his hands.

“Those pastries were awfully dry,” he said as he caught up with her at the lorry. “I got some fruit-meld from that same vendor.”

More likely he’d wanted to see the pretty GEN girl again. She kept her uncharitable thoughts to herself. “You better get those splinters out. They’ll fester if you don’t.”

“Risa gave me tweezers.” He handed her a bottle filled with bright orange juice. Then his gaze fixed on her face. Could he see the tell-tale pricks of the datapod?

“You have a few crumbs.” He pointed in the direction of her right cheek.

She turned away to brush them off, heading to the front of the lorry. She kept her back to him to keep him from getting a closer look.

Risa was already behind the wheel. Kayla had to let Abran go in first, since he would be crawling through the hatch to share Nishi’s lair. As he passed her, she kept her face turned away. She wanted desperately to take a look at herself in her prayer mirror, but she’d left it stowed in one of the sleeper shelves. She’d have to wait until Abran was in the bay.

Kayla pulled herself up into the lorry after Abran and settled beside Risa. The lowborn woman spied the scrape on Kayla’s cheek, but at Kayla’s quick head shake, Risa waited until Abran squirmed his slender body through the hatch.

Once the hatch shut, Kayla said, “I had to hide the datapod marks from . . .” She hooked a thumb toward the bay.

“Made a hash of your tattoo.” Risa unearthed a sani-wipe from a storage pocket in the door.

Kayla took the wipe and dabbed at her face. “Just the surface. It’ll heal. Denking boy surprised me in the warehouse just as I was finishing.” She mimed applying a datapod to her tattoo.

“I tore into him for that. Shouldn’t have followed you.” Risa
turned her focus on the rear vid display as she backed from the alley. “As drom-headed as he is, he’s a hard worker. Tries.”

“Yeah,” Kayla admitted, then lowered her voice. “Still think it’s a bad idea having him along.”

Risa gave her a brusque nod. “Told Zul as much. But with him and the councilor taking Baadkar to trial, no real choice.”

Risa got the lorry out on Peq sector’s main street. As they rumbled along crowded Ciele Road, Kayla stared out the window at the passing warehouses and warrens, all too aware of Abran just on the other side of the hatch.

She was tired of thinking about the GEN boy. Tired of worrying about her every word, about revealing too much to him about Kinship business.

It was a two-day drive to their next destination, Skyloft, the most northeast on Svarga continent. And to minimize trueborn notice, Risa would have to stay close to the perimeter of Northeast Territory’s adhikar. That would keep them on the outskirts of the trueborn sectors along the way, which would make the trip even longer. They’d lay over in the northern tip of the GEN sector, Nafi.

Closing out thoughts of Abran, Kayla shut her eyes and made herself comfortable. Instead of fretting over the GEN boy, she’d puzzle over that disappearing string of code at the tail end of Feyda’s download.

In the last few weeks, she’d noticed changes in herself—a little better control over her body heat, the ability to trace individual strands of code and pockets of data within her annexed brain. She didn’t understand all the programming or what the data signified, but she could follow where it went within her annexed brain.

As much as she appreciated her new, sharpened abilities, she was uneasy about where they might have come from. Were they a consequence of the unusual number of uploads she received via the Kinship? Was her neural circuitry compensating for the near constant traffic by increasing efficiency? Or had specific Kinship programming been uploaded to cause the changes?

It ticked her off to think of Kinship trueborns subjecting her to uploads that mucked with her internal programming. Next chance she got to speak with Zul, she’d tell him no more denking changes to her without her express permission.

But for the moment, Kayla would take advantage of what she’d been given. She went within, only half-aware of the lorry bouncing along potholed Ciele Road, then steadying as Risa reached the well-paved highway. Methodically, Kayla followed strand after strand of the newly uploaded information. In her mind’s eye, each string of new code stood out from the older uploads, almost as if it glowed within her mind.

Was it possible she’d always had this ability to see uploads, but just didn’t know what to look for? Now the difference between old and new information seemed obvious. If it
had
been Kinship collusion, how did they think these abilities would help the cause?
And why not tell her?

At least this ability was useful to
her,
because she wanted to know what all those uploads were and where they got stored. She also wanted to add them to the mental checklist that she kept in her bare brain.

As they always did, the paths she tracked faded with her discovery of them. She could still find them, with time, patience, and those mental tags she’d stored, but it was more
of a challenge. But clearing that fresh information away would make it easier to find anything hidden.

Sure enough, there it was, a tiny grain of
newness.
She followed along her circuitry, diving deeper into her annexed brain than she ever had. The paths got so interwoven, she had to be extra careful to stay on the right one.

Deeper. Deeper. Closer. It seemed to get darker except for that one speck of bright newness she followed. She’d never been here before.

Her mental process slammed to a halt, as if a barrier stopped her progress. She could still sense the new fragment ahead, just on the other side.

Could she get through? She pushed against the mental wall and realized it was permeable, not as solid as she’d thought at first. She forced her way through.

The circuitry was gone. There was nothing in all directions but elusive, disorganized thoughts and memories. And that faint newness still ahead.

And then it hit her. No circuitry.

She was in her bare brain.

The upload had stored that hidden code in her bare brain.

It should have been impossible, but there it was. And one way or another, she was going to read what had been written.

It was harder here in her bare brain. The code she chased had been stored in scattered bits and pieces. Not knowing what she was looking at, she had no idea if she was even reading it in the right order.

Then she hit what she recognized as the header, the beginning. She’d read enough of the uploads to know what that looked like. It was three letters in a character string.

F. H. E.

It was her bare brain that figured out what that meant. She jolted upright, gasping, her eyes flying open.

Risa spared her a glance. “Bad dream?”

“Yeah,” Kayla lied.

She settled back in her seat, afraid to close her eyes again. The three letters felt like a brand burned into her bare brain.
F H. E.

Freedom. Humanity. Equality.

T
he first segment of the drive to Skyloft seemed endless, despite Risa’s decision to take the more direct northern route past the adhikar expanse rather than the southern way. The lowborn woman had sighed and glanced over at Kayla more than once, no doubt wishing Kayla could spell her during the ten hour driving stint. But they didn’t dare, not with Abran on board.