Awakening (2 page)

Usually Shona hoarded sugarfruit. She gladly handed a whole one to Wen, only taking a moment to cut away a bruise in the juicy red fruit. Then she threw a blanket around Wen’s shoulders and set him on a stool by the door.

She went back to the GEN female. Shona wasn’t like the trueborns who refused to touch a GEN skin to skin. Lowborns like her didn’t believe in that superstition, and it didn’t bother her a bit to press her fingertips to the back of the GEN’s hand. The female’s skin looked even darker contrasted with Shona’s pale flesh. Even as she registered the cold lifelessness of the GEN’s hand, heat tingled up Shona’s arm, across her shoulders, and down her body with a syrupy warmth.

Shona glanced at the female’s chest, waiting for a breath to lift it. None did. Shona shifted her fingers to the GEN’s wrist, but no pulse beat. The GEN was dead, had died right here in Shona’s bhaile.

But not before she’d touched Wen. And now Wen was whole, his foot completely healed, his life saved.

She had to go outside, send a prayer up to the brother suns, Iyenku and Kas. Give her thanks to the dual god.

She leapt to her feet, tearing off the nightshirt, throwing on a blouse and skirt just as quickly. She was shoving her feet into shoes, plaiting her gray-dulled red hair when it hit her.

No pain. Not in her wrists. Nor her hips or knees. She bent each joint in turn; they moved freely. As if the joint-ache had been wiped from her body.

With a smothered cry, she scooped up Wen, still sticky from the overripe sugarfruit, and hurried outside. Along
the way to the headman’s bhaile, she flung her prayer up to Iyenkas. She could swear that Kas, the younger, lazy brother-sun, burned brighter in the sky in response.

“Aed!” she shouted. “Aed, come quick!” Every eye turned toward her—the women washing at the Chadi River, the sleepy children calling out their counting lesson, the old man repairing a boot in the sunshine.

The headman emerged from his bhaile, his hair still rumpled from his bed. Shona grabbed his arm and dragged the long-legged headman along, whispering to him what had happened. She carried the evidence on her hip, a laughing Wen who tangled strong, sticky fingers in her hair.

Aed had to crouch a little to get through her door. He knelt on Wen’s pallet and did as Shona had, checking for pulse and breath.

“Dead,” Aed confirmed. “And based on those welts”—he gestured at the long streaks of raised flesh—“from Scratch.”

Shona clutched Wen closer. “Has she given it to him, then? Will he catch the Scratch?”

“It’s a GEN disease, not a lowborn one,” Aed said. “Wen is safe. But the enforcers will want her body.”

Shona felt a little sick at the thought of a Brigade enforcer taking the GEN. “Gene-splicers will break her apart. Make new GENs of her.”

“It’s trueborn law. They want the body.”

“She saved Wen’s life. Took away my joint-ache.”

Aed sat back on his heels and looked up at Shona. “What would you have me do?”

Shona considered. Throwing the GEN into the Chadi would do no good. Someone would fish her out eventually
and the end would be the same. They couldn’t burn her—an enforcer might notice the smell and smoke and see it was a GEN and not a lowborn they were sending up to the fiery embrace of Iyenkas, two-gods-become-one.

“Bury her,” Shona said. “Dig the hole tonight after dark.”

She could see from the pinched look around Aed’s mouth that he disapproved of the primitive sacrilege of a burial. The lowborn believers of the Lord Creator buried their dead, but those who followed the true path of Iyenkas purified their dead with fire.

Still, Aed nodded, no doubt seeing the necessity of a burial. “The body will have to stay hidden in your bhaile until then.”

At least the day would be cool enough to hold off decay. She threw Wen’s blanket over the GEN to conceal it. She’d burn the death shroud later.

She and Aed stepped from her bhaile. Wen wriggled from her arms and dashed off to play with one of his friends.

Before Aed could walk away, she tugged his sleeve. “Did you feel anything? When you touched the GEN?”

Aed shook his head. “Just cold flesh.”

Then that fire was gone with the GEN female’s spirit, if a non-human had such a thing. Only she and Wen had received Iyenkas’s miracle.

Shona stayed clear of her bhaile for the day, finding plenty of chores to keep her busy—her own washing, organizing the communal food stores, helping to prepare the evening meal that the village would share. That was another way Iyenkas’s true believers differed from the lowborns who followed the Lord Creator. The others went their separate ways in their
larger villages. Iyenkans united in fellowship with nearly every activity.

Aed had waited until the primary sun, Iyenku, had set and the brother-sun, Kas, lingered on the horizon before he told the other men. They didn’t question the need, just picked up their shovels, paced out a kilometer downstream of the village and started to dig.

Shona whispered to a few of the women that she needed their help, asked them to bring whatever rags they could spare. She explained along the way about the GEN. They’d all seen Wen dashing along the riverbank with his friends and didn’t question Shona’s account.

They reached Shona’s bhaile, arms laden with torn, stained cloths. Shona opened the door and went first.

She screamed and stumbled backward into the others.

The GEN was sitting up in her death bed. Most certainly, emphatically, alive.

O
ne moment Kayla was deep in a dream, trueborn Devak Manel reaching for her with a smile on his dark, beautiful face. The next she was jolted awake, tossed half off the seat of Risa Mandoza’s lorry as it hit a pothole. As Kayla tried to right herself, the lorry jounced again and she whacked her elbow and bit her tongue. The sudden pain drove the last forbidden image of Devak from her mind. Just as well—a GEN girl like her had no business mooning over trueborns.

Still muzzy from sleep, Kayla looked out the lorry’s windscreen. Were they in Falt sector? No, it was Qaf. She recognized the grubby warehouses along Abur Street, the main thoroughfare of Qaf’s central ward. Through her half-open window she could smell the rank Plator River just beyond the warehouses to their right. She could hear the river’s roar too, as fat as it was with the recent heavy rains.

“What happened to our stop in Plator sector?” Kayla asked.

She’d been looking forward to a visit with Mishalla, her life-long friend. Mishalla, unlike Kayla, was no longer a GEN,
her circuitry dissolved by the Kinship’s treatment. Mishalla lived as a lowborn now.

“Zul called,” Risa said. “Had to cut the Plator stop. Qaf warehouse pickup got moved earlier.”

Resentment pricked inside Kayla. “I haven’t seen Mishalla since her wedding a month ago. Nearly that since we’ve been to Chadi sector.” Kayla’s nurture mother and brother lived in Chadi and she missed them terribly.

“Next trip south,” Risa said. “I promise.”

Except Risa couldn’t promise since it was the Kinship that pulled their strings. When Zul had set Kayla on her mission with Risa, he’d assured her that her new-found freedom would allow her frequent visits to her family and Mishalla. But Kinship business had taken precedence over Kayla’s personal wishes, and visits home had been far and few between.

Kayla checked her internal clock. Nearly noon, but you’d never know it the way the twin suns hid behind thick clouds. She’d never lived through such a wet autumn in all her fifteen years.

The foodstores warehouse where they’d make their first delivery was just ahead, and Risa slowed the wide, boxy lorry to a crawl. A lorry as big as Risa’s was ideal considering how much time they spent on the road. It was essentially a portable flat for the two of them, with its broad bench seat in front and sleeper bed and tiny washroom at the back. There was plenty of storage beneath and above the bed for clothing, medical supplies, food stores, and sundries.

But narrow GEN sector roadways, like Qaf’s main street, barely accommodated the fifteen-meter long lev-truck and its big cab. The alley alongside the warehouse would take some
tricky driving. But Risa squeaked into the alley with practiced care.

The lowborn woman couldn’t avoid another tooth-rattling pothole that shook the lorry. “Gonna break a denking control relay,” she muttered. “Chutting GEN streets.”

The lowborn woman glanced Kayla’s way, sending a silent apology for her language. An improvement over how she and Risa had started out four months ago. Back then,
GEN
would have been
jik
or
tat-face,
the epithets spewing from Risa’s mouth as frequently as the juice from the devil leaf the lowborn woman chewed. The tension was made worse by the fact that they lived together in such close quarters.

Then two weeks into their too-close-for-comfort partnership, one foul word too many broke Kayla’s patience. A shouting match followed, Kayla demanding that Risa stop, all the while shaking with fear that the lowborn woman would have Kayla ejected from the Kinship and maybe reset to boot. Instead, Risa respected Kayla for standing up for herself and her people. After that night Risa did her best to watch her tongue.

As Risa negotiated the small apron behind the warehouse, Kayla caught a glimpse of graffiti scrawled across the big plassteel door, dark blue words written diagonally from corner to corner.

Risa scrutinized the jaggedly written words in the lorry’s console vid screen. “What’s it say? Not any script I’ve ever seen.”

Kayla grinned. “That’s GENscrib. Compares the local Grid supervisor to the back end of a drom.”

“Not the whole back end.” Risa creaked her rusty laugh. “I’da been more specific.”

One eye on the vid screen, Risa got the big lev-truck backed up to the loading dock and killed the suspension engine. Kayla shut her window and grabbed her rain hat in deference to the glowering sky, then slid from the cab. She scanned for signs of enforcers along the row of warehouses backing up to the Plator River. “The graffiti must be fresh or the Brigade would’ve had it painted over by now. Can’t risk GENs passing messages that way.”

Risa smirked at that. Thanks to the Kinship, messages were flying from GEN to GEN and it wasn’t through words scribbled on warehouse walls.

Kayla pulled herself up on the loading dock using the gene-splicer-augmented strength of her arms. Risa took the long way around to use the steps.

A few more words were drawn on the door’s lower right corner. The jagged script was so small Kayla had to crouch and just about press her nose to the door to have any hope of reading it. It was GENscrib, but a variation she’d never seen before. It reminded her of the hand-written script in a decades-old journal she’d once found. It had been written by Zul, the elderly trueborn who’d helped start the Kinship. Zul called that kind of script
longhand.

“What’s that?” Risa asked, using the toe of her boot to tap the corner.

Kayla had learned to read longhand pretty well, so she studied the GENscrib with that style of writing in mind. “Free—” Kayla cut off her answer as she scanned all three words and their meaning sank in.

FREEDOM. HUMANITY. EQUALITY.

Great Infinite, who would be reckless enough to write
that where it could be seen by anyone? If an enforcer spotted her even reading the message, she could be reset for potential sedition. The Kinship might be fighting for those very things for GENs, but no one spoke that mission out loud, let alone wrote the words in public view.

GENs weren’t free. They weren’t human, at least according to trueborn law, let alone equal to anyone higher status than a rat-snake.

She backed away from the dangerous words just as the door rattled then rose with the grind of gears. Relief washed over her when the message rolled out of view.

“What?” Risa asked.

Kayla forced a laugh. “Something about free rat-snake meat. All you can eat.”

Risa made a face, diverted by Kayla’s lie. She could have told the lowborn woman—she trusted Risa with her life, why not the truth? But Zul and the rest of the Kinship were always telling them that the less any one of them knew, the less they could reveal at the Brigade’s hands. Better to keep that message from Risa.

And what did it mean, anyway? No one from the Kinship would have dared write something so inflammatory in a GEN sector. It was probably nothing more than words written on a dare by some under-fifteen GEN.

Two brawny GEN boys, maybe a couple years older than Kayla, stepped out onto the loading dock. She considered asking them if they’d read the graffiti on the door, all of it. But likely they’d been genned the same as most dock workers. Stronger than average—though nowhere near her extraordinary strength—and with little imagination, better to keep them
from balking at the dull work. She doubted they’d even noticed those dangerous words.

Risa’s seycat, Nishi, streaked out of the lorry’s cargo bay the moment the doors were open, hissing and snarling at the GEN boys, who scrambled out of Nishi’s way. A flash of red-gray, she dashed into the brush along the riverbank, running as quickly on five legs as another seycat might on the usual six.