Awakening (41 page)

The color, the translucence of the fluid filling the box, it reminded her of something . . . was it punarjanma? Were those GENs here to be treated for their Scratch? Would it heal them the way she’d seen Abran healed, do what their circuitry seemingly couldn’t do, cure the Scratch infection?

Nafti and Salot pulled her past the gen-tanks toward four metal float tables, three of them occupied by allabain, two men and a girl. Kayla’s heart fell when she saw the girl was Lak. Each of the allabains’ restraints had been locked to the float table, their arms separated and secured on either side of their hips. A band of plassteel circled their necks, tight enough that they could turn their heads left and right, but not lift them from the table.

Lak and one of the men watched as the enforcers dragged her to the empty float table. The third allabain stared glassyeyed at the ceiling.

No, he wasn’t staring. His chest no longer rose and fell. He was in the hands of his god Iyenkas.

The enforcers heaved her up, then dropped her none too gently on the empty float table. While the dark-skinned
enforcer, Nafti, activated the connection between the float table and the ankle restraints, Salot used his datapod to signal the wrist shackles to separate. He attached them on either side of the float table, then shoved her flat and clicked the throat restraint around her neck. She tried to raise her head, but the pressure cut off her breathing.

Salot made one last check of the restraints, then he and Nafti walked off between the rows of gen-tanks and out of the room. Kayla could turn her head just enough to see Lak’s blue gaze fixed on her.

The allabain girl asked, “What do you think they’re going to do to us?”

“I don’t know. Were you able to get a warning out to our friends?” The Kinship, she meant.

Lak just shook her head. Then the Kinship had no idea they were here. Despair washed over Kayla.

She slid her gaze to the left toward the row of four bubbling gen-tanks closest to her. Horror dug its claws in her as she stared at the thick green gen-fluid that filled each tank.

The three nearest tanks were unoccupied, but someone floated in the fourth one. At the angle she lay, she couldn’t quite see the occupant. Then the body within rolled, the face pressing closer to the tank wall.

It was Raashida.

Kayla tried to kick, to pull her arms free. The restraints held her down even as her heart raced with a flood of adrenaline. Finally, she surrendered to the pain of the bonds cutting into her and lay still.

She wanted to believe that Raashida was in the tank to be cured, but it didn’t make sense. Abran had infused the
punarjanma via a vac-seal. Why not do the same with Raashida and the other GENs? Why put them in gen-tanks?

Her wrists and ankles throbbing, despair lapped at her. Risa was at the least injured, possibly even killed. In any case, both Risa and Kiyomi were captives. All because of Abran? Or some other treachery? Certainly Baadkar had played a part.

The door latch clattered. As the high-status trueborn came into her field of view, his face triggered a hopelessness in the pit of her stomach. She didn’t know him—why the instant fear? The friendly smile he sent her way did nothing to reassure her.

Then he spoke and her unnamed terror amplified. “I’m Akhilesh. Kayla, isn’t it?”

He was close enough she could see the bali in his right ear now. Why was Akhilesh wearing a demi-status emerald bali when he should have been high-status? His perfect skin color and elegant facial structure marked his elevated rank. Something buried deep in her bare brain told her she’d seen this man before and when she had, he’d worn a diamond bali.

He touched her hand, gently and without the least revulsion despite being unprotected by gloves. It should have put her at ease that this trueborn had no qualms about skin-to-skin contact with a GEN. But her fear grew so large, she had to swallow back a whimper.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of, Kayla,” Akhilesh chided. “I’m not hurting you, am I?”

Unwanted tears burned her eyes. He pulled a float tray closer to the table, then took a lase-knife from it. She followed the path of his hand as he brought the surgical tool closer.

But he only used the lase-knife to carefully cut the length of her sleeve, from wrist to shoulder. He pulled aside
the fabric, exposing the mottled skin of her arm that she so despised.

“Hard to run away from this,” Akhilesh said softly. “Isn’t it, Kayla? Or perhaps . . .” He stroked the tattoo on her right cheek. “ . . . I should call you Elana.”

Kayla heart stuttered in her chest. Before she’d become a GEN, when she’d been a minor-status trueborn, her name had been Elana Kalu. That Akhilesh knew her trueborn name filled her with dread.

Beside her, Lak struggled against her bonds. “You have no right to take me into custody like this,” the girl cried out. “I’m a freeborn allabain. You’re violating the Lowborn Welfare Laws.”

Akhilesh glanced over at the girl. “You’re right,” he said pleasantly.

Setting aside the lase-knife, he plucked a square vac-seal from the tray and rounded Kayla’s table to Lak’s. With one hand, he yanked up the girl’s sleeve, with the other he thumbed the activator tab and slapped the vac-seal to the crook of Lak’s arm.

Lak gasped and jolted, spasming against her shackles. Her body shook, ugly, guttural sounds forced from her throat. Then she fell back, her body still, her eyes half-lidded like the dead allabain man’s.

Kayla stared at Lak’s chest, prayed she would see it rise and fall. Sweet Infinite, was she gone? Pain lanced Kayla at the loss.

The second allabain man moaned and fought against his restraints until his wrists bled and he coughed from the pressure of the band around his neck. Akhilesh moved to the man’s side to pat his shoulder. “There’s nothing to fear. Be at peace, friend.”

Then Akhilesh tugged over the float tray and retrieved another square vac-seal. The allabain man shrieked as Akhilesh pulled up his sleeve.

Kayla wanted to look away, shut her eyes and ears, anything but watch a second execution. But someone had to bear witness to the man’s death, so she forced herself to look. As the allabain grunted and spasmed toward death, Kayla sent a silent prayer to the Infinite that He would guide the man toward Iyenkas.

When it was quiet again, Akhilesh turned to Kayla. Rage wiped away her terror of him.

“I need to place these three in cold storage to wait for experimentation.” He gave her shoulder a gentle pat and her skin crawled. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

He pushed Lak’s float table from beside Kayla and headed for the door. Kayla waited for the door to click shut and his footsteps to start down the hall, then she fought her bonds with new energy. No telling how far he had to go with Lak’s body or how long he’d be.

A quick scan of the float tray told her it contained the lase-knife, the much larger lase-cutter, what looked like a sekai and several other vac-seals of varying shapes, their contents of various colors. There were more of the square vac-seals that had killed the allabain. She’d use it against Akhilesh if she had to.

She turned her attention back to her struggle as she felt the slightest give at her right wrist. It wasn’t the restraint loosening, but its attachment to the float table. If she ignored the pain of the plassteel bands around her wrists, she could break the attachment.

She allowed a little bit of hope to rise in her chest. She pulled and twisted and fought against the bond on her right
wrist. She could feel it breaking away, even as she felt blood dripping from her wrist again. Her eyes kept returning to the door where Akhilesh had exited.

Just as the door latch clicked, the restraint snapped from its mooring. Triumph flared inside her even as Akhilesh ran toward her, grabbed something from his float tray. Just as she reached up to twist away the neck band, she felt a chill on the crook of her left arm.

Akhilesh pressed a vac-seal against her arm. Kayla whispered, “No,” a sob rising in her throat.

He took his hand away, and she saw the triangular shape of the vac-seal. Not square like the one that killed the allabain.

Akhilesh turned his back on her and tugged over the float tray to drop the emptied vac-seal on it. Kayla reached for him.

But her arm wouldn’t move. It lay across her chest, her fingers still curled around the neck band. But no amount of will could force it to lift, to close the space between her and Akhilesh.

He smiled down at her. “Just a temporary paralytic. You can still breathe. I’m afraid you can’t speak, but you can still hear. Which is good, because I’ve waited so long to meet you again.”

She tried to speak, but her tongue wouldn’t work, her lips wouldn’t move. She could moan, the formless sound breathy and useless. A fog dulled her mind as if even her thoughts were paralyzed.

“I’m sure you want to know everything,” Akhilesh said. “But first I have a few questions. The enforcer tells me he couldn’t download or upload you. Why is that?”

Because I’ve been made immune to you. To all trueborn intrusion.
Her anger at the unasked for FHE programming gave way to gratitude.

Akhilesh picked up what had looked like a sekai reader from the float tray. But when he held it to her tattoo, it formed itself to her cheek. She felt the bite of extendibles, except they pierced deeper than a datapod. The paralytic did nothing to ease the pain.

Akhilesh studied the device’s screen. “The sekai recognizes the tattoo pattern. Knows you’re Kayla 6892. But there’s no longer any external access to your internal electronics.” He peered into her face. “Who did that to you? Who ruined all that lovely circuitry I took so much trouble to install eleven years ago?”

Terror crept through her again. Familiar images flashed in her mind, not exactly memories, more like she was watching them on a sekai screen. She had no arms, and she was being torn away from her mother. Enforcers carried her off and gave her over to a trueborn.

Gave her to Akhilesh.

Now she could see his face, a decade younger, a diamond bali in his ear instead of an emerald. His hands had been so large against her small body. They spanned her waist as he plunged her into the gen-tank.

She remembered the scrape of the breathing tube down her throat, the chill of the gen-fluid, the weight of it. Even with the tube feeding her air, she felt smothered by the fluid for endless moments before she blacked out.

“The memories are still there, aren’t they?” Akhilesh said. “Have you figured that out yet?”

They were the same nightmares she’d always had. She’d
been born without arms and had been put into the tank to grow new ones, transformed at the same time into a GEN. Except . . . With her greater ability to track her own circuitry, to see what moved where, revelation hit her like a bhimkay strike. The memories weren’t stored in her bare brain. They were in her annexed brain, and were being fed to her bare brain.

He must have seen the realization in her eyes. “It did all happen. But you were wiped afterward, just as all conversions are. We don’t want you remembering your trueborn life.

“But I like the converted to know that I made them. Like a signature. So I plant true memories in your annexed brains and use a program to send them to your bare brain.”

Now she understood the fear. She might not remember the details without Akhilesh’s planted memories, but she knew him at a cell level—his eyes, his smell, the sound of his voice. He was the one who had torn her from her mother and thrust her into slavery.

Except—hadn’t her mother given her up? Abandoned the fourth-year child Kayla had once been when she couldn’t be made perfect? Akhilesh had changed her, but hadn’t it been at her parents’ request?

The gen-tank holding Raashida beeped and Akhilesh turned away to attend to it. Pulling on a pair of protective gloves, he picked up a tong-like tool to avoid touching the gen-fluid filling the tank. Kayla had learned in Doctrine School that gen-fluid had to be programmed for the occupant of the tank. The gooey green liquid was set for Raashida’s genetic profile, not Akhilesh’s. So while it was safe for the GEN girl, it would mutate and deform Akhilesh if it touched his skin.

Using the tongs, he pulled out Raashida’s arm. As he bent to examine it, Kayla caught a glimpse and nausea gripped her again.

The GEN girl’s beautiful dark skin was gray, her arm sunken around the bones as if part of her had been sucked away. That yellow fluid, what Kayla had guessed was punarjanma, had been pumped
out
of Raashida. Out of the other GENs.

Kayla!

She jolted at the sound of that inner voice.
She could move!
Not much—her fingertips. Her skin. And the paralysis had faded from her mouth and tongue.

But she stayed silent, not wanting to let Akhilesh know the paralytic was wearing off. She let her thoughts run, let the realizations tumble out. Akhilesh wasn’t using punarjanma to heal these GENs. He was pumping it out of them. Was it a side-effect of the Scratch? How did Akhilesh know?

The answer came to her an instant before he spoke. Because Akhilesh had created Scratch.

He glanced over his shoulder at her with a smile, clearly proud of his cleverness. “It was a beautiful piece of genetic engineering. Use GENs as factories. Once infected, their own healing system manufactures the punarjanma.” He carefully eased Raashida’s arm into the tank fluid, then lifted the other. “What better way for GENs to serve trueborns? It not only heals, as it did our friend Abran, it restores youth. Corrects illness, neural damage, no matter how serious, how chronic.”

Neural damage. Like Zul’s. Devak’s great-grandfather been so improved when she’d seen him in the Beqal sector safe house.
A treatment personally derived for me,
he’d said.
By Akhilesh Garud. The head of GAMA.

Did Zul know his good health came at the expense of Scratch-infected GENs?

Kayla!

Her left arm still remained inert, but strength was returning to her right arm. Akhilesh had left her right wrist unbound, no doubt certain that the paralytic was restraint enough.