Awakening (7 page)

Risa shifted, planting her foot in the mud right up next to Harg’s hand. “I got pick-ups to do,” she said to the frantic enforcer tending Harg. “Can’t stay here all day.”

Pena glared up at her, fear, desperation, and arrogance in his eyes. “You don’t go anywhere, lowborn. Or your jik sow.”

Kayla realized with the other two across the street, Pena was the only able-bodied enforcer left. A quick punch of her fist and Pena would be lying there in the mud beside Harg. She’d need only a half-strength blow to kill him, to dent in his skull like the dead enforcer. So easy. Kayla gripped the folds of her shirt, keeping her hands anchored.

“Look,” Risa said. “We got nothing to do with that.” She gestured toward the wreckage of the warehouse.

“Harg told me you were over there before you came here,” Pena said. “You could have set the bomb while you were there.”

“Then why’d we come over here?” Risa asked. “Why not jet our way to the next sector over? Look at the way that chutting crap dented my lorry. Employer won’t be happy.”

Pena stared at Risa. Right up front, no trueborn ever
trusted a lowborn, not after the riots. But he was rattled by the explosion and Harg couldn’t tell him what to do.

He fussed with his bali, smearing the small blue stone in his right earlobe with a little mud. His mind seem to grind as slowly as the Chadi River at the end of summer.

“Give me your employer’s name,” he said finally. “He checks out, you can go.”

“Vagish Mohapatra,” Risa said, and Pena’s eyes went wide at the high-status family name. “Of Leisa sector,” she added unnecessarily. The enforcer would know what sector the Mohapatras hailed from.

“Looks like this one has more sense than the other one,” Risa quipped as Pena called the Northwest Territory Brigade headquarters and passed on the information. Kayla knew what would happen next—someone within the Brigade would call the office of Judicial Councilor Mohapatra, and the councilor would acknowledge that he employed Risa, that Kayla was Assigned to him. What the councilor wouldn’t mention was that he was part of the Kinship.

“Go,” Pena finally said as the medic’s lev-car pulled up.

Risa couldn’t help Kayla to her feet, not with the enforcer watching. So Kayla levered herself out of the mud on her own. The gash on her cheek beat with pain in rhythm to the throb of her other bruises. As she was swiping mud off her hands onto her blouse, Risa fumbled her tin of devil leaf and dropped it.

“Pick it up, jik,” Risa said.

Kayla reached for the tin, searching the mud for whatever Risa intended for her to find. She spied what the lowborn woman had dropped the tin next to, just out of reach of Harg’s
fingers. The captain’s datapod, pressed into the mud by Risa’s boot print.

Kayla palmed it the way she had the packet from Teki, then straightened, both tin and datapod in one hand. She gave the tin to Risa, datapod hidden underneath. They’d turn it over to Zul, see if they could glean anything valuable from it. If nothing else, it was one more datapod to ferry information.

As they walked to the lorry, four more enforcers arrived in a Dagger lev-car. Flying plasscrete had shattered the windshield of the Jahaja parked in front of the warren. The lorry was battered and the passenger side-mirror sheared off, but otherwise undamaged.

Kayla didn’t breathe easy until they’d backed away from the warren—after a tense negotiation to persuade the newly arrived Brigade Dagger to give them room—and into a nearby alley to turn around. They had to wait for the passage of yet another Brigade Dagger, then Risa pulled onto Abur Street, traveling back the way they’d come.

There was no racing away from the scene, not on the pockmarked local road. It would draw attention to them anyway. They could hear the sirens of more Brigade lev-cars arriving.

Kayla checked the console vid screen for a rear view, saw two more Daggers blocking Abur Street. “All those enforcers here can’t be good for the safe house.”

“Nothing we can do about it,” Risa said. “Sent off another message. They’ll hunker down.”

“Who would have blown up the foodstores warehouse?” Kayla asked. “Not the Kinship, surely.”

“Not their style. And wouldn’t have done, that close to a safe house, for denking sure.”

Kayla remembered what had been scrawled on the warehouse door. FREEDOM. HUMANITY. EQUALITY. Could that have anything to do with the bomb?

“Could it be lowborns?” Kayla asked.

Risa tossed her a narrow-eyed glare. “T’isn’t the GENs lowborns hold grudge against.” Then she shrugged. “Wouldn’t gain the lowborns nothing blowing up a GEN warehouse.”

“Wouldn’t gain anybody,” Kayla said.

A few moments of silence, then Risa slanted her a look. “You okay?”

A beat, then Kayla said, “Why wouldn’t I be?”

“Enforcer almost wiped you away,” Risa said.

White-hot anger spurted up at the reminder of the close call. She shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “Can’t let them get the safe house codes, membership lists.”

Risa stared across the cab at Kayla. “Wouldn’t have really killed that enforcer, yeah?”

Of their own accord, Kayla’s hands tightened into fists. She imagined the thud of contact against Pena’s skull.

“Should get that cut on your face cleaned up,” Risa said, pulling Kayla from her thoughts of revenge.

She’d almost forgotten it, but now it throbbed. “I’m a mess. I’ll get mud on the sleeper bed.”

“Strip here,” Risa said with a smirk. “I won’t look.”

Even if she weren’t an old woman—nearly thirty years past Kayla’s fifteen—Risa only had eyes for her wife, Kiyomi. Risa wasn’t quite nurture mother to Kayla—no one could replace Tala in that role. But maybe an auntie, if GENs had such a thing.

Kayla shimmied out of her muddy leggings and shirt,
wadding them up before pushing aside the curtain that concealed the sleeper behind the cab. Kayla washed the yellow muck from her hands and face and knees, then used sani-wipes from the washroom cupboard to cleanse the gash in her left cheek. The moist cloth stung the wound.

She propped up her prayer mirror on an eye-level shelf to check the damage. The cut was a good four centimeters long, but not deep, thank the Infinite. And it was in her left cheek, not her right where her tattoo was.

GENs healed rapidly, maybe twice the rate of a trueborn or lowborn. But it always took a little extra time for a GEN’s programmed nervous system to re-wire the tattoo after an injury there. Since it was her bare left cheek, nothing would be left in a week’s time but a bit of redness.

After pulling on a clean shirt and set of leggings, she took the muddy clothes into the washroom next to the sleeper.

The shirt and leggings got a half-hearted rinse in the tiny sink. They had a good-sized water tank on board the lorry, but not enough for the luxury of daily laundry. That had to wait until they reached their next destination.

Her hair needed a re-braid, but she just didn’t have the patience for it. She did what she could to smooth it and tuck some of the escaped curls back in the braid.

By the time she’d settled back in her seat, Iyenku and his brother sun, Kas, had surrendered to the rain again, both sulking behind the thickening clouds. Only late afternoon, but with the drenching rain, it was dark as dusk.

They pulled clear of Qaf’s main street and continued along a canyon of warrens that gave way to thickets of sticker bushes and yellow scrub flowers. The packed-gravel track was narrow and
where it meandered too close to the Plator River, the shoulder was muddy and treacherous. But Risa continued grimly on.

They reached the north-south cross-sector road that was blessedly well paved and properly maintained. Risa slowed to make the turn to head north, then gunned the suspension engine to pick up speed.

All at once, a girl staggered from the sticker bushes and into the roadway. Kayla shouted, “Stop!”

Risa didn’t react. With only meters before impact, Kayla grabbed the wheel to yank the big lorry clear. The ponderous vehicle fishtailed, while Risa fought to get control. The lorry threatened to tip, screaming as the suspension engine sputtered and the undercarriage sank to scrape the pavement.

Finally the lorry came to a stop, half on, half off the pavement, pointing nearly south. Risa turned to her, blazing with anger. “What the chutting hell was that all about?”

“I couldn’t let you hit the girl!” Kayla said.

“What girl?” Risa snarled back.

Kayla pointed back down the roadway. The girl still stood there, swaying in the downpour.

“Oh, sweet brother suns.” Risa clutched her throat. “Didn’t even see her.”

“Better get the lorry clear. I’ll go get her.”

Kayla jumped from the cab, running back down the road into the storm. The girl—a GEN—didn’t move, her short dark hair pasted to her head, her skin an unhealthy white.

But when Kayla got nearer, she realized that what she’d taken as strands of dark hair stuck to the girl’s face were actually dark welts. Two on her right cheek, one on her left, cutting through her GEN tattoo.

The marks of Scratch. No wonder the girl seemed so disoriented.

Kayla took the girl’s hand. “How about we get out of the rain?”

The girl didn’t move. As Kayla tugged at the girl’s hand, heat seemed to sizzle up Kayla’s left arm and briefly throb in the gash on her cheek.

Kayla led the girl to the lorry that Risa had managed to get back onto the roadway and facing north again. Kayla motioned for the lowborn woman to come around back to the bay.

Kayla opened the bay doors carefully, worried that Nishi might bolt out. In the light of the bay illuminators that Risa had switched on, Kayla spotted the seycat curled up in the corner on a pile of empty kel-grain sacks. With her stomach full of rat-snake, Nishi apparently had enough sense to stay put in the storm.

After the three of them had climbed inside, Risa closed the door. In the half-light of the bay’s illuminators, Kayla got a better look at the girl. Where her tunic and leggings were ripped, no doubt by sticker bushes, more lines of Scratch were visible—on her arms, her belly, her thighs.

“How long have you been sick?” Kayla asked.

“I’m not sick,” the girl said.

Kayla pushed up the unresisting girl’s sleeve. And saw what she’d never seen before. “Risa, they’re healing.”

“What do you mean?” Risa said, coming in for a closer look.

“The scratches are all scabbed over.” Kayla struggled to wrap her mind around the impossible. “And here—those marks are pale, not even red. And the skin there is smooth. No welts.”

“No one recovers from Scratch,” Risa said.

“Maybe some do.” Hope blossomed faintly inside Kayla.

“Get her to a safe house?” Risa suggested.

“Call Zul at the least and get her off the Grid. What’s your name and ID?” Kayla asked.

“I . . .” The girl’s brow furrowed. “It’s . . .”

“You don’t remember?” Kayla turned to Risa. “Could the Scratch have damaged her bare brain?”

The girl shook her head. “Do remember. Except . . . my name is Gemma 4727. And my name is Gabrielle 6181.”

Kayla glanced over at Risa. “There were a few GENs in Chadi sector that went by two names. But not two IDs. Even if she were reset, that should have wiped out the original ID.”

“You remember anything else, GEN?” Risa asked.

The girl didn’t answer. Her pale skin grew even paler and she started shivering so violently, Kayla feared the girl would hurt herself.

“Gemma!” Kayla shouted, but the girl didn’t respond. “Gabrielle, use your circuitry to warm yourself.”

The glassy-eyed GEN girl just kept shivering. The clamminess of her skin told Kayla she wasn’t in any state to use her circuitry.

“Shock, I think,” Kayla said. “We’d better get her into the sleeper.”

There was no way they could take her back out into the downpour, which meant they’d have to use the access hatch between the lorry’s bay and the sleeper compartment. But getting her up to the hatch required the GEN girl to climb a ladder from the lower bay to the higher level of the sleeper and cab. The girl looked ready to collapse, not at all fit to use a ladder.

“I’ll pull her up,” Kayla said.

She hurried up the ladder, slid aside the hatch cover. Easy enough for Kayla to squirm through the half-meter square opening, small as she was. The tall, slender girl would be more of a challenge, especially since she would be near dead weight.

Not just near, but total, Kayla realized as the GEN girl passed out and slumped in Risa’s arms. “Hey!” Risa shook her, tapping her cheek with an open hand. “Wake up, you!”

“Gabrielle!” Kayla shouted through the hatch. No reaction. “Gemma!”

The girl’s eyes fluttered open. She tried to focus on Kayla.

Kayla reached down through the hatch. “More Gemma than Gabrielle. Let’s assume that’s her name.”

Risa propped Gemma against the ladder, stretching first one limp arm then the other in reach of Kayla’s grip. Kayla lifted the GEN girl slowly, taking care not to bump her head as she angled her through the hatch.

Once Kayla got Gemma settled on the sleeper bed, she stripped the girl, dropping the soaked tunic, leggings, and underthings back through the hatch to Risa. She quickly dressed Gemma in one of Risa’s shirts and a pair of the lowborn’s leggings. The girl was too tall to wear Kayla’s things.

Kayla piled blankets on top of the ice-cold girl and slipped under the covers with her. Holding the girl close, Kayla used her circuitry to crank up her own body heat. As her warmth soaked into Gemma, the girl’s shivering eased.

Kayla called out to Risa, “The clothes help identify her at all? House GEN? Factory GEN?”

Risa’s voice drifted up through the hatch. “Drom-wool tunic fit for a demi-status trueborn’s house, but the skivs and
leggings are factory-issue. A plain metal prayer mirror.”

“I don’t suppose she has any secret pockets.” Not likely Gemma was Kinship, but worth asking.

“Naw. Nothing.”

A moment later, Kayla heard the
whomp
of the small incinerator in the bay as the energy core destroyed Gemma’s ruined clothes. Even though the garb revealed no clues to Risa and Kayla, they might to someone else. The enforcers searched the lorry on a regular basis. Always better to avoid questions.