Awakening (36 page)

The enforcer stood over Abran, his left cheek hidden from Kayla. No tattoo on his right, which made sense since few GENs had tattoos on their right cheek like Kayla did.

“You going to be able to make it back to that lorry?” the enforcer asked.

Abran didn’t lift his head or open his eyes. “I’ll manage.”

“Because I have to go,” the enforcer said. “Have a patrol to get to.”

“Go. Thanks.”

The enforcer turned and continued down the alley, away from Kayla, so she had no chance to check his left cheek for a tattoo. Not that it mattered now. Even a minor-status trueborn might deal drugs to a GEN if it meant a few extra dhans. It wasn’t as if the GEN would report him.

She had to confront Abran, as tempting as it was to leave him. Even knowing how terribly vulnerable he was, and how angry the councilor and Zul would be if Abran ended up being arrested if another enforcer found him, she was tempted to just walk away.

Just then, Abran’s voice drifted her way. “I sent him away so he wouldn’t see you. Maybe you could give me a hand in return.”

She stepped clear of the incinerator. “How’d you know I was here?”

“I heard your footsteps behind me earlier. Caught a glimpse of you.” He reached out for her.

She didn’t move. “You weren’t going to take the jaf anymore.”

He sighed, his outstretched arm sinking back down. “It’s not jaf. I swear.” He fumbled under his shirt. “Take a look.”

He tossed the unused vac-seal and she caught it. The third trinity moon, Ashiv, had risen, its three-quarter face adding to Abrahm’s half-circle. She stepped toward the end of the alley where the moonlight spilled in.

The only jaf buzz she’d seen had been at Doctrine school during a dull dry lecture about dangerous drugs. The teacher
had passed around a vac-seal of genuine jaf, let them handle the duraplass packaging under her watchful eye.

The lectures weren’t to warn them off using jaf—no GEN could afford to buy such a high-priced narcotic. Not to mention they’d be reset and their genetics recycled if they were caught using.

But their patron might take jaf, so a GEN would have to know the signs of overdose, know to get help right away. Zul had only started trying jaf after Kayla had left her Assignment with him, so this was the first time she’d seen the stuff outside of Doctrine school.

So she knew the vac-seal was circular, like this one. The drug was a creamy yellow, thick and opaque. It tasted sweet, but she wasn’t about to break the activator tab to test it.

“Hold it up to the moonlight,” Abran said.

She did as he asked. The pale yellow contents of the vac-seal was translucent, not opaque. It was more that light golden yellow of the vac-seals he’d had before. As she manipulated the vac-seal, the stuff felt thinner, almost watery.

“What is it, if it’s not jaf?” Kayla asked.

“Can you help me up?” Abran asked. “I’ll tell you on the way back to the lorry.”

“Why are you so much worse than when you took it back in Esa sector?”

“Was used to it then,” Abran mumbled. “Hits hard the first time. Or if you haven’t used in a while.”

Still half-tempted to abandon him in the alley, she nevertheless tucked the vac-seal into her own waistband and pulled him to his feet. His arm around her shoulders, they walked slowly from the alley. Not wanting to risk an
encounter with the Brigade, Kayla kept to the shadows.

As they neared the lorry, a blur of red and gray rushed past toward the rear of the bay. Nishi, with a rat-snake in her jaws. Kayla wondered if it was the one in the alley that had startled the enforcer.

Kayla helped Abran into the bay, the thick, rank funk of drom wool rolling over her. The bales of wool had been piled to either side, leaving a valley in the middle from the doors to the hatch ladder. Nishi had climbed the bales and started in on the rat-snake, its legs cracking as she broke them from the body.

Kayla let go of Abran to reach for the rear door, but he didn’t quite have his legs under him. As he swayed, she grabbed for him, ending up with a handful of shirt where his prayer mirror was hidden. The pocket tore loose and the mirror smashed to the floor of the bay.

“Oh, Infinite, I’m sorry,” Kayla said. She could just make out the pieces of the mirror in the moonlight that streamed through the open door.

Abran, half-slumped against the wool bales, flailed out with his foot at the fragments, as if to knock them closer to him. As angry as she’d been at him, she felt wretched having broken his prayer mirror.

Abran lost his balance and fell to his knees against the pile of bales. Kayla gathered up the two main halves of fractured glass, the thick, heavy backing. She brought them to the door to get a better look at the damage.

The two pieces of mirrored glass maybe could be patched together if glued to another piece of glass. The backing—

She sucked in a sharp breath when she saw inside it. The thick backing was packed with electronics.

“What is this?” Kayla asked.

Abran sagged against the oily drom wool. “Give it back, please.” He reached out.

Kayla marched past him, dropping the broken mirror pieces in his hand, but keeping the rest of it. As she mounted the hatch ladder, she felt explosive enough in that moment to hope he cut himself.

Once she had the hatch open, she shook Risa. The lowborn woman came instantly awake. “What is it?”

“Turn on the bay illuminators. We have a problem.”

Kayla jumped down to the bay floor as the illuminators flickered on. Keeping a secure grip on the prayer mirror backing and its electronic guts, she crossed the length of the bay again and latched the rear door.

Risa came through the hatch in her night clothes. Kayla brought Risa the bit of electronics in her hand. “Is this what I think it is?”

Risa looked it over, fingering the tiny transmitter and receiver. “Comm device.”

“Thought so,” Kayla said. “Even a non-tech like me learns a little bit about electronics in Doctrine school.” She rounded on Abran. “So you haven’t been praying to the Infinite. You’ve been . . . what? Spying on us?”

He stared at his feet. “I had to. Baadkar has my mother and sister.”

Risa came up beside Kayla and handed back Abran’s communicator. Kayla crushed the circuitry between her hands. A few broken bits fell to the floor.

Despair filled Abran’s face. “He has them trapped somewhere. Says he’ll kill them if I don’t do what he wants.”

“Why kill them?” Kayla asked. “Why not just reset them?”

Abran hesitated before answering. “He knows killing them would hurt me more.”

It seemed like a waste of GENs, from a trueborn’s point of view. But Baadkar had killed GENs before, so maybe it was worth it to control Abran.

“So you’ve used the communicator”—Kayla tossed aside the crushed case—“to keep tabs on us.”

“Yes.” There was something about the way he drew out the word that set off an alert inside her. Then Abran’s glance up at her throat clinched her suspicions.

His words that day he’d nearly drowned came back to her.
Lost it. Better that way.

“The necklace was part of it too, wasn’t it?” Denking hell. And she’d been sad that the gift had been lost. “What was it supposed to do?”

His gaze shifted away. “Track your movements since they couldn’t get access to your Grid data.”

The faintest gasp from Risa, but Kayla kept her voice cool. “Why wouldn’t they be able to access my Grid data?”

He shrugged. “Something about Baadkar being on the wrong side of Social Benevolence. He wasn’t allowed to request Grid locations anymore.”

So Baadkar didn’t know anything about the Kinship’s adjustments to her location data. If the trueborn had compared Kayla’s Grid location report with Abran’s first-hand account of where Kayla and the lorry really were, that would put an end to her Kinship mission. She’d be banned to a safe house.

“Why tag me and not Risa, if you only wanted to keep track of the lorry?” Kayla asked.

Abran flushed. “I couldn’t have given a lowborn woman a gift. Especially one so—” Discretion cut off the word
old.

Unoffended, Risa barked out a rusty laugh. She pulled a bale of drom wool off the pile, threw a plasscine blanket over it and sat on the tight-packed bale, knees close to Abran’s. “What’s Baadkar want with a lorry delivery driver and her GEN helper anyway?”

Abran sank farther against the bale he leaned against. “Because Baadkar collects Scratch-infected GENs. Gives them to a trueborn scientist he deals with, gets a couple hundred dhans a head.”

“Again, GEN boy,” Risa said, leaning even closer to Abran, “why us?”

“Because it came to Baadkar’s attention how often you’ve turned infected GENs over to the Brigade,” Abran told her. “The trueborn scientist Baadkar works with wants the Scratch GENs you find turned directly over to him. The Brigade doesn’t always follow orders and bring them to him, not if they get better bribes. I was supposed to report right away when you picked one up.”

Now Risa looked Kayla’s way, worry in her eyes. Kayla could almost read the lowborn woman’s mind—if Baadkar had noticed how often they picked up Scratch victims, they weren’t being nearly as careful as they thought they were.

Kayla dropped down on the bale next to Risa. “Haven’t had much to report to Baadkar since you started traveling with us, have you?” Thanks to the Kinship getting the word out that the Scratch-infected should stay away. “Looks like he had bad information.”

Abran shrugged. “And now he wants me back. I’m a waste of his time, he says.”

“Who’s the trueborn scientist?” Kayla asked.

“Akhilesh.”

Risa’s worried look deepened. “Head of GAMA? Don’t like GAMA knowing anything about us.”

Anxiety burned in Kayla’s gut. “What about your nurture mother and sister? Do they even exist, or was that another lie?”

“They’re real.” Abran’s despair deepened into desolation. “Baadkar won’t say where they are. He won’t even let me talk to them.”

“What about the drugs?” Kayla pressed. “The ones you say aren’t jaf buzz?”

At Risa’s startled look, Kayla handed over the vac-seal. The lowborn woman held the palm-sized circular packet up to the light. “Not jaf.”

“It’s called punarjanma,” Abran said. “It’s a substitute for GEN healing, to replace what my circuitry can’t do anymore.”

“I know he beat you,” Kayla said. “But I don’t see how that could damage your circuitry.”

“It wasn’t the beatings. Baadkar-Mar liked to use a shockgun on me.” His trembling hand went up to his left cheek. “Low power so he wouldn’t kill me. But he’d shoot the energy directly into my tattoo. Eventually, my circuitry stopped working.”

Horror filled Kayla at Baadkar’s cruelty. “It doesn’t work at all? Surely you can access your annexed brain?”

He glanced off to the left, then back to her. “Barely.”

“You can’t heal yourself?” He shook his head. “Warm yourself?” Another negative.

“That’s why I have to use the punarjanma,” Abran said.

“How’d you figure the enforcer could get you more?” Risa asked.

Abran’s shaky hand rubbed at his eyes. “I met him a few days ago when we passed through Mendin going south. I arranged with him about the drug then.”

“How did you even know about it?” Kayla asked. “That punarjanma even existed?”

He dropped his hand to his lap as if the weight was too much to hold up. “I heard about it from one of Baadkar-Mar’s other GENs. He’d been damaged too, so he knew about the drug.”

“But how did you get a whole carrysak full of it?”

“Told you.”

She remembered his story—how his patron had asked his son to transport four carrysaks to Shafti, how the son had brought along Abran to carry them, and the son had been killed by a bhimkay. In Abran’s previous version, the contents of the carrysaks had been jaf buzz and not this punarjanma.

But it didn’t make sense. How valuable could punarjanma be if it was only to be used for GENs? And only GENs whose healing systems didn’t work. There couldn’t be that many in that situation. Any why not just put the GEN back in the tank and fix him or her that way? Yet Baadkar had sent his son to go sell the punarjanma, in expectation of some profit.

Maybe the punarjanma
did
work on trueborns, but in a different way. Jaf buzz and crysophora acted as stimulants for trueborns, but made GENs sick and crazy, revving up their circuitry until they collapsed. Maybe for trueborns, punarjanma was another stimulant like jaf or crysophora.

But punarjanma’s stimulus would supplement a GENs healing process when it failed. Instead of electrical impulses from a GEN’s circuitry stimulating the cells to heal, the drug
would do it directly. Punarjanma’s greatest value would be as a trueborn stimulant, but if it was cheaper and less timeconsuming a treatment for GENs than the tank, that gave it a little extra worth.

Abran had shut his eyes and looked to be sleeping sitting up. Kayla muscled him to his feet, and walked him to the bed he’d made for himself near the hatch ladder. He was out before she even got him prone.

Risa fingered her wristlink. “GEN boy has to go. Too dangerous to keep him anymore, nosing into our business.”

Kayla stared down at the sleeping Abran. He’d spied on them, betrayed them. Lied so many times, it was hard to be sure if they knew the full truth even now.

Yet his scars were real. His despair over his family was utterly convincing, as was his terror of Baadkar.

“I’ve never quite trusted him,” Kayla said. “I tried, but I couldn’t.”

“Nor me,” Risa agreed.

Kayla’s fingers sought out her prayer mirror tucked at her waist. “I’d like to think he hasn’t lost his place in the Infinite’s hands. That it would take more evil than what he’s done.” The kind of evil Baadkar had committed.

“Only a few days more until the judgment,” Risa said. “Boy can stay with the councilor until then.”

And what about after? Would he go back to Baadkar? Once, she would have thought,
Of course not
, but did she really know the Kinship anymore?

“When you call,” Kayla said, “see if anything can be done for his nurture family.”

Risa called Zul, loathe to contact Councilor Mohapatra
directly. Zul, thank the Infinite, agreed with Risa and promised to send someone to pick Abran up.