Awakening (38 page)

Devak was going to say no. But somehow Kayla’s face intruded again. He could see her disapproval, imagine what she’d think of him if he backed down from Junjie’s challenge.

“Okay. I’ll see what I can do.”

Junjie whooped. “I’ll clean up. You go get started.”

So Devak returned to the computer. He guessed that if there had been a note and Akhilesh had turned it over to the Brigade, it would have most likely been the Plator-based division. The trick would be to find some sort of weakness or back door to the Brigade computers. His spider needed a vulnerable path to infiltrate.

Three hours later, his eyes burning with exhaustion, Devak thought he’d explode from frustration. He kicked the wall in irritation, the noise startling Junjie, who was dozing on Devak’s bed.

Junjie sat up, rubbing his eyes. “What’s the matter?”

“There’s no way to break through,” Devak said. “They’re too well-protected. Not the slightest crack for my spider to crawl through.”

Devak shoved back from the holographic display. He could see that Junjie was trying to hide his disappointment, which made Devak’s failure sting that much more sharply.

To make things even worse, there was Kayla in his mind’s eye again. He was remembering how impressed she’d been that night he’d hacked into his father’s computers. He’d been such a hero to her when he’d updated the programs and data to keep her and her friend Mishalla safe from the monitoring Grid.

Now it was a routine job for him to access the monitoring computers. It took him seconds to ghost in GEN locations to fool the Grid into thinking the tankborns were where they should be instead of off on Kinship business. Sometimes he went a step further to keep safe even non-Kinship GENs by deleting Brigade alerts that notified the enforcers a GEN had strayed outside his or her allowed radius.

Brigade alerts.
He felt like a ton of plasscrete had just fallen on his head.

“I am a chutting idiot,” he muttered as he pushed back toward the computer.

“You have an idea?” Junjie scrambled off the bed and into the chair beside Devak.

“Of course I know a back door to the Brigade system.” Devak’s fingers flew over the holographic keyboard, sending his spider back in. “The path I use to overwrite the alerts.”

“So you can find the letter?”

“If it’s not behind a different firewall.”

He shut off his awareness of the ache in his shoulders, of
the burning in his eyes, of the fresh hope in Junjie’s face. This time when he sent in the infiltration spider, it was as if his own mind followed it, crawled into his computer, crept along the electronic pathways. The system’s circuitry became his own, like the annexed brain of a GEN.

Was this what it was like for Kayla? he wondered. Being so hyper-focused, as if he was following the synapses of his own brain? As if it was no longer an algorithm that brought the infiltration spider into existence, but his own thoughts? And now he reached into the Brigade system with mental spider feet that would pluck out exactly what he was looking for?

And there it was. The search terms seemed to glow brilliant white
—Guru Ling, suicide, death report, final note.
Embedded in the note, a Brigade system tracking spider crouched, ready to report an intrusion. Devak’s infiltration spider sent the Brigade’s tracker a red herring, sending it scurrying off to defend some other part of the system. Then with a sweep of his physical fingers on his keyboard, Devak had the note downloading to his own computer.

“Do you have it?”

Junjie’s question nearly startled Devak off his chair. He looked at the computer clock in stunned disbelief—nearly another hour had passed. He’d been so focused on the single task of finding Guru Ling’s letter, it had seemed like only minutes since he’d started.

His legs felt as wobbly as a rat-snake belly. His experience following his spider’s crawl into the Brigade computer might have been similar to how Kayla felt when she used her GEN circuitry, but it took far more effort for him than it ever seemed to for her. He was only human, and she was—GEN.

For the first time he realized that in some ways she was more than human. Better than human.

Except she wouldn’t want him thinking she was anything but human. Even though some of her GEN abilities were so far beyond anything he could do.

He realized something else. All evening he kept thinking of her. That wasn’t unusual, since he had a hard time keeping her from his thoughts. But by remembering the two of them together that night he first reprogrammed the Grid computers, he’d found the key to hacking into the Brigade system.

Beside him, Junjie was reading the letter displayed on the holo-screen. His face was screwed up with confusion.

“I can’t believe she wrote this.” Junjie read aloud, “I
wanted you to know, Junjie Tsai, if I don’t see you again, I hope you think of me as you think of your mother. That seeing your mother’s face will remind you of me, no matter what the flaws.
That’s crazy. First, she didn’t look a thing like my mother. Second, I didn’t know if she even liked me, let alone thought of me like some kind of son.”

“Except she’s not exactly saying she wants you to think of her as if she was your mother.” Devak read the letter again.
Your mother’s face . . . no matter what the flaws . . .
“Sweet Lord Creator! Where’s the holo of your mother?”

“The kitchen table.” Junjie ran to retrieve it and handed it over to Devak.

Devak closed his fingers over the black holo case. “It doesn’t have an interface jack.”

“Of course not. You send the image to the holo tech company and they load it and seal the case.”

“Do you suppose it’s just a mag-connector holding it
together?” Devak studied the case. “Because you’d have to open it to upload anything else onto it.”

“Why would you . . .” Junjie’s eyes grew wide. He snatched the holo projector from Devak and switched it on.

Junjie’s gaze softened as he watched his mother’s smiling image. At the moment it briefly dissolved into static, the light went on in Junjie’s eyes.

He gave it back to Devak. “Break it open if you have to.”

“I should be able to save your mother’s image, but if I can’t—”

“I don’t need a holo of her to remember her,” Junjie said.

Devak found a demagnetizer in his desk and passed it over the seam in the holo case. It fell open and the holo image vanished. “I’ll try to fix it if I can,” Devak said.

He’d never worked much with holo units, and never with one as small as this. He was looking for the data chip where the image and the instructions for its display were stored. Devak nearly missed it, the chip was so tiny, nothing more than a glimmer of metal inside the case.

It was too small to connect to the computer, but there was a miniscule port in one of his datapods that the data chip fit into. Then he snapped the datapod into one of the computer interfaces and copied the chip contents onto the computer.

The image of Mrs. Tsai was even more degraded on the computer display. And when Devak imported the holo code into a data translator, it stopped looking like a picture at all.

“Oh,” was all Junjie could muster. Devak himself couldn’t say a word.

There, neatly listed on the screen, was file after file of Guru Ling’s research. Including, if the last file could be believed, a cure for Scratch.

A
bran had been long gone when Kayla woke the next morning, leaving her and Risa to unload the drom wool on their own. Kayla hadn’t realized how much Abran’s labor lightened hers until he wasn’t there to lend a hand. She missed his strong back even more when their next load was plasscrete rubble from a bombed out Mendin warren. A GEN crew helped Kayla and Risa pile the chunks in the rear half of the bay. It would go to their next stop in Amik where it would be crushed to make road base.

Risa must have called her wife during the night, because Kiyomi arrived via pub-trans from their Cayit sector home to join them. Yomi would travel with them up to Amik sector, help unload the plasscrete, then go stay with her still-ailing auntie in Amik.

When they stopped in Qaf sector for the night, Risa offered that she and Kiyomi could bed down in the bay. But Kayla insisted she’d sleep there, despite the oddness of lying in what had so recently been Abran’s bed.

Nishi, who sometimes would share the sleeper bed with Risa if Kayla wasn’t there, was jealous of Kiyomi and would bite Risa’s wife while she was sleeping. So the seycat had been banished to the bay where she grudgingly curled up in Kayla’s blankets.

The seycat was too smart to sleep on the pile of plasscrete mounded in the rear of the bay, wary as she was of the plassfiber splinters that flaked out of the rubble. Kayla herself made sure to clear away the chunks that had tumbled from the pile while they drove to give her a safe spot to bed down.

They got an early start the next day leaving Qaf. With Risa driving and Kiyomi in the passenger seat, Kayla sat up in the sleeper, watching the night-dark sky lighten as Iyenku pushed above the horizon. Kas made its appearance as they pulled into the Amik sector warehouse district.

The sky was a cloudless blue-green, a rarity for early winter in the northern territories. But puddles in the packed-gravel roadway spoke of recent rain.

Her gaze fixed on the rear view vid display, Risa backed the lorry along the alley between the plasscrete processing plant and a foodstores warehouse. Their slow pace gave Kayla plenty of time to search for the FHE inscription, a habit now for her. Thankfully, the beige walls on either side were bare.

“Mohapatra hired helpers here,” Risa said around a mouthful of devil leaf. “A few factory GENs, mostly allabain lowborns. Same ones might be protecting that GEN girl, Raashida. After unload is done, you go with them to their village.”

“If I find Raashida?”

“Bring her here,” Risa said. “Allabain won’t like us taking
her, but she’s likely took sick again by now anyway, like Gemma. Sick more than once, I’ll wager. Needs help they can’t give.”

The rear of the truck cleared the back of the processing plant. Creeping even more slowly, Risa turned the wheel of the lorry to navigate behind the building. The lorry suddenly lurched and tilted as the rear right lifter sank.

“Denking hell?” Risa muttered, as she jammed on the brakes.

In the console vid, Kayla could see a slice of the wide space that stretched behind the processing plant and the warehouses beside it. Her view included a dozen or so allabain standing in yellow muck.

“Best I get back on the roadway,” Risa said, gunning the suspension engine. Since only one of the six lifters had tilted into the mud, the lorry righted itself pretty easily.

Risa killed the engine and they all climbed out, Kayla following Kiyomi through the passenger door. They had to squeeze between the lorry and the wall of the processing plant, keeping close to the lorry so they could stay on the relatively firm roadway.

As they got clear of the blocky building, they could see the mess first hand. The factories and warehouses all had the usual plasscrete loading docks jutting out from the backs. But where there should have been a plasscrete apron to drive the lorry on, there was nothing but yellow mud. The allabain and GENs stood shin deep in the stuff.

They’d made the best of the nasty conditions. The GENs and the allabain men had rolled their loose pants up to the knees and the allabain women had brought the backs of their skirt hems between their legs to tuck up into their waistbands. Kayla guessed none of them had bothered to wear shoes.

A lowborn man, dressed more plainly than the allabain in brown shirt and pants, slogged through the mud toward them. “I’m Keita,” he said, dipping his head at Risa. “Plant supervisor.”

Risa spat a stream of devil leafjuice into the mud. “Denking hell. What happened here?”

Keita grimaced. “We had a few cracks in the plasscrete apron. Lowborn sector board decided to replace rather than repair. Tore out the apron last spring, but then couldn’t get funding from the trueborn board.”

Kayla spied the hopper that fed the crushing machine on the opposite side of the processing plant. She visually measured the distance between the lorry bay and the hopper with dismay. “We can’t get any closer?”

“Not and get out again,” Risa said. “Saw how we sank in it.”

Resigned, Kayla helped Kiyomi unlatch the doors. Nishi made a mad dash for freedom, then skidded to a stop at the end of the bay when she saw the mud. The seycat seemed to judge the driest spot, then leapt to the relatively solid roadway. She ducked under the lorry, seeking firmer ground.

With a sigh, Kayla shed her shoes and traded them for the work gloves she’d tucked into an empty corner by the back door. Following the allabain example, she rolled her leggings up above her knees. Then she adjusted the hinges on the right hand bay door so it swung flat against the lorry and out of the way.

Spitting out her devil leaf, Risa shouted at the work crew, organizing them in two lines stretching from the bay to the hopper. Kayla headed one line and Keita, the supervisor, headed the other.

Risa and Kiyomi climbed into the bay and tossed out
plasscrete chunks, Risa to Kayla and Kiyomi to Keita. Kayla passed her load to a dark-haired, blue-eyed allabain girl named Lak, who passed it to the next in line.