Awakening (3 page)

The GEN boys hung back, eyes wide. “Are there any more in there?” one of them asked.

“Just the one,” Kayla told them. She laughed. “You’re not afraid of that little thing?”

Kayla wasn’t being fair. Seycats like Nishi might be barely knee-high to the tall GEN boys, but they could slash even a full grown man to ribbons with those claws and teeth.

To show it was safe, Kayla stepped into the bay. She piled two sacks of kel-grain on top of two stacked crates of synth-protein, and started toward the warehouse door. She cast a look over her shoulder and sure enough, the boys were trying to shift as much as she was, but couldn’t budge a load that size. Risa knew better than to try to compete with Kayla’s strength—she took only one crate. The boys finally gave in and settled for one bag and one crate each.

It started to drizzle with their first trip across the plasscrete dock, the force of the rain increasing with each load. Before long, the rain soaked right through Kayla’s cheap duraplass hat. Risa’s hat as well from the looks of it—the lowborn woman’s dark, gray-speckled hair hung lank, and water soaked the back of her sturdy drom-wool shirt. Kayla’s brown-beigey braid, which usually kept her long, tangle-prone hair under control, had unraveled in the dampness, curls and tendrils poking every
which way. Risa’s usually-pale skin looked even more pasty white in the cold. Even Kayla’s hands had taken on a blue tinge despite her GEN circuitry kicking in to warm her.

Working doggedly in the downpour, Kayla trudged from lorry to warehouse and back until only a dozen crates and a half-dozen sacks of kel-grain were left. Her arms and shoulders felt like mush from the wet work. The two GEN boys had run out of steam too, carrying only one sack or crate each per trip.

Kayla toted the last three crates, following Risa, who had the final kel-grain sack slung over her shoulder. Risa slung the sack on top of the pile, then nudged Kayla, gesturing toward the front of the warehouse where a GEN woman waited.

Risa tossed over her sekai, which Kayla caught onehanded. Kayla started down the line of stacked crates and kel-grain sacks toward the GEN woman. The woman led Kayla to an alcove carved out of the warehouse space and sat behind a battered desk.

“I have the invoice here, Teki,” Kayla said, setting the palmsized reader on the woman’s desk.

“Let me take a look.” Teki picked up the sekai. Her other hand cupped over something on the desk and slid it toward Kayla.

Teki lifted her hand just enough for Kayla to see the edge of a thumbnail-sized thinsteel packet underneath. Teki’s closed fingers concealed the packet from view of the netcam focused on her makeshift office.

“Twenty sacks of kel-grain?” Teki said. “I only saw nineteen.”

“You might have missed that last one Risa brought in,” Kayla said, leaning on the desk, her hand next to Teki’s.

A sweep of Teki’s hand toward Kayla’s and the packet was safely in Kayla’s grasp. “You’re right,” Teki said. “I didn’t see it.”

Her back to the netcam, Kayla tucked the black packet into a hidden pocket in her leggings. Teki held the sekai to her left cheek, and the device scanned the unique pattern of Teki’s tattoo. Kayla took the sekai and did the same, although her tattoo was on her right cheek. The kel-grain and synth-protein delivery acknowledged by them both, Kayla made her way back to the loading dock. With another DNA packet to deliver to the Kinship.

She found Risa on the plasscrete dock, rain dripping from the wide brim of the lowborn’s hat as she stared up the narrow alley to Qaf’s main street. “An enforcer on Abur Street. Might just be a scheduled patrol.”

“He didn’t go to the seventeenth warren, did he?” The neighboring warehouse blocked their view of Abur. They could only see the top three floors of the warren.

“Don’t know. Didn’t dare go down the alley to look.”

Kayla handed back Risa’s sekai. “Maybe he’s a GEN enforcer, not a trueborn.”

GEN enforcers handled minor issues in the sector— mediating disputes between GENs, delivering Assignment tack to fifteenth-years a day or two before they were Assigned. So if the enforcer was a GEN, they might be okay.

“Walked like a trueborn,” Risa said. “Like he owned the world.”

“We could skip the drop,” Kayla said.

“Long way to the next one,” Risa said.

“But it’s
my
jik skin that’s at risk.” Kayla faced down Risa. “Unless
you
want to be the one to take it in.”

Risa squirmed a little. “Not how it works.”

Kayla didn’t like it, but Risa was right. The enforcer would see Kayla in the lorry and wonder why the lowborn driver was making the delivery and not the GEN Assigned to her.

“Well?” Risa asked, leaving the choice to her.

Kayla weighed the risk of keeping the packet against the hazards of confronting the enforcer. “Let’s do it.”

Risa whistled for Nishi and the seycat trotted from the brush. Nishi’s irregular gait was unbalanced even more by the rat-snake dangling from her jaws. The seycat jogged up the stairs, across the dock and into the cargo bay.

Risa swung shut the doors and slammed home the latch. While the lowborn woman took the stairs to descend from the dock, Kayla jumped the meter and a half. Water from a puddle gushed up around her, soaking her synth-leather shoes. As she squished up to the cab, she patted her hip where she’d tucked away the packet.

Risa circled the lorry around the apron and back to the alley. They both stared right as they came even with Abur Street, peering through the rain at the seventeenth warren.

The enforcer was there, standing under the overhang that sheltered the front door. Risa eased back onto the street, turning right. Three warrens down, the lowborn woman stopped the lorry in front of the seventeenth.

The enforcer stared through the wet at them. He wasn’t a GEN. Even through the rain-blurred glass of the lorry window, Kayla could see no tattoo on his cheek. The enforcer’s light brown skin and the blue bali earring in his right ear confirmed he was a minor-status trueborn.

Even worse, the trueborn was a Brigade captain, not a grunt. Just seeing him, a knee-jerk fear gripped Kayla, closing off her throat. The moment the captain spotted her, he zeroed in on the tattoo on her right cheek. Kayla figured he was wondering why her tattoo was on the wrong side, wondering what that might mean about her. She started to tremble, the gut reaction threatening the hard-won courage she’d built these last four months as part of the Kinship.

Keeping the lorry between her and the captain, Kayla headed for the bay to retrieve the last crate. Thank the Infinite their delivery was nothing illegal, for either a GEN or a lowborn to transport.

Nishi growled as Kayla stepped into the bay, setting a protective paw on her half-eaten rat-snake. The seycat had already bitten off the venomous head and its eight spidery legs.

Before Kayla picked up the crate, she knelt to stroke Nishi’s damp head, to calm both the feline and herself. Nishi preened and purred a moment before sinking her teeth into the rat-snake’s long tail again.

Carrying the crate, Kayla followed Risa from the lorry to the warren. She kept her mouth shut and her gaze on the muddy ground as they reached the front door.

The captain blocked their way. “You can’t go in.”

“I have business here,” Risa said. She brought up the certification document on her sekai and held the device out to him.

He ignored it. “What’s in the crate?”

He pushed past Risa and ripped the seal, jostling the crate as he yanked open the flaps. He might have knocked it from Kayla’s hands if not for her extraordinary strength.

Knowing Risa’s temper, Kayla locked her gaze with the lowborn woman’s, narrowing her eyes in a silent warning. Risa glared back, but Kayla could see her swallow the sharp words she surely wanted to say.

“It’s just what it looks like,” Risa said. “Synth-protein. All spelled out in the cert doc. Trading it for sewer-toad venom.”

“Toad venom.” The captain snorted a laugh as he pawed through the half-kilo packets of protein. “Chutting worthless crap.”

“Distilled venom makes a good painkiller,” Risa said.

“For lowborns and tat-faces, maybe.” The captain plucked out two vac-seals of the synth-protein, stuffing them out of sight into the carrysak strapped to his back.

He gave Kayla an evil look. “How’d you get yourself a jik, anyway, lowborn? Did you find yourself a runaway and think nobody would notice?”

“She’s legal,” Risa said. “I’m not sanaki enough to let a GEN runaway hitch a ride in my employer’s lorry.”

That was honest truth. Scratch victims were one thing— their lives were short and they deserved dignity in death. But a runaway was just too dangerous for Risa to transport. The Grid Monitoring System tracked the location of every GEN at every moment. It could take anywhere from five to zero days to figure out if a GEN had strayed from his or her legal radius—a specified distance surrounding the GEN’s Assignment area.

Once the Grid knew a GEN had gone missing, it was no longer a question of
if
the GEN would be found, only
when.
So unless the GEN was established Kinship or could prove an imminent risk of reset, Risa had to turn the GEN away.

Risa held out the sekai again. “Cert doc verifies the GEN girl too.”

Finally the captain snatched the sekai from Risa and bent his head to read it. Kayla tucked the remaining synth-protein away and closed the crate flaps, keeping one surreptitious eye on the captain. She dared a quick glance at his nametag. Harg was written in red on a black background. She tucked it away in her bare brain.

Harg stared hard at the sekai display, flipping impatiently through the cert doc, no doubt looking for a reason to deny Risa and Kayla passage. But the Kinship was well practiced at forging documents. The captain could cross-check all he wanted, click through every link in the text of the cert doc. Even contact the Northwest Territory Judicial Council. He wouldn’t find a flaw.

In their four months of traveling, Kayla and Risa had successfully routed dozens of datapods and packets to the Kinship. They’d been lucky, but careful as well. Other lowborn-GEN teams, through mistakes like allowing runaway hitchhikers or letting slip incautious words, had met bad ends at the hands of the Brigade. Those lowborns had been imprisoned, some tortured and executed, and the GENs were reset, their souls wiped away.

Finally Harg thrust the device back at Risa and stepped aside. As Kayla passed him, she kept out of arm’s reach, as a precaution.

The warren door opened into a small lobby. A narrow hallway off the lobby stretched to the back of the first floor. The sweet-acrid stink of scorched kel-grain hung in the air, competing with the funk of too many bodies crammed into too small a space.

Risa leaned to peer out the dingy window that looked out on the street. “I’ll wait here. Keep an eye on him.”

Pushing off her hat and letting it hang around her neck by its string, Kayla headed down the hallway, counting doors on the left. Some of them were decorated, small murals praising the Infinite or carvings scraped out of the plasscine of the door. More than one had a prayer mirror inset into the jamb to cast a blessing on everyone reflected in it. She wondered what happened when trueborns passed a prayer mirror, if the Infinite just ignored their image when it was transmitted up to him.

The seventh door on the left was unmarked, with only a thumb-sized mirror affixed to the jamb. Kayla shifted the crate to her hip and knocked.

A GEN woman opened the door, the tattoo on her left cheek a glittering silver against her light-brown skin. She glanced at Kayla’s tattoo, her dark gaze narrowing like Harg’s had. Kayla could see the woman’s unease and suspicion, could almost hear her wondering if Kayla was genuine.

Kayla couldn’t blame her. Two months ago, the safe house in neighboring Fen sector had been discovered by the Brigade. Despite using the secret exits, a dozen GENs had been spotted escaping. They’d all either been reset or had their DNA redistributed.

The Kinship needed close to a year to excavate and equip a safe house. Until two weeks ago, when the Kinship finished this one under Qaf’s seventeenth warren, Kayla and Risa had had to cross over to the Northeast Territory to deliver packets.

Kayla accessed her annexed brain for the Qaf safe house code phrase. “Have you seen my prayer mirror?” she asked. “I lost it during the Festival of the Prophets.”

“I haven’t, but I have a spare I can lend you,” the woman answered. She gave Kayla a small, tense smile. “I’m Bala.”

“Kayla.”

After another moment’s hesitation, Bala stepped aside and let Kayla in. This was a single person’s flat, much smaller than the one her nurture mother, Tala, lived in. Just one room, with a bed in the corner and the kitchen stuffed into an alcove smaller than Teki’s office. No washroom, of course, since GENs had to make do with a communal setup.

Bala led the way to the kitchen alcove. “I leave for my warehouse shift in an hour. I can’t be late.”

“This won’t take long,” Kayla said. “Just a quick delivery.”

Worry still pinched Bala’s face, but she motioned to the counter where Kayla could set the crate. The synth-protein inside would be distributed in the warren.

Bala put her hand in the pocket of her full skirt, to grip her prayer mirror, Kayla guessed. Bala’s lips moved as she muttered a silent prayer.

Done with her entreaty, Bala pressed a section of floor beside the radiant stove. A square of plasscine popped up. Bala lifted it out of the way to reveal a dark hole barely a meter wide.

Kayla had contended with worse. She was slender and short in stature, so it wasn’t much trouble to lower herself into the hole and descend the ladder. Once she was low enough, she heard the thump of the piece of floor replaced, snuffing all light. She didn’t mind that either. She could make her way to the safe house just feeling her way along the tunnel below.

She reached the bottom and had just started to turn when a hand dropped on her shoulder.

She swallowed back a shriek, terror ripping through her
that this had been a trap, that she’d been directed here just to be arrested by the Brigade. She had nowhere to escape. The tunnel was blocked by whoever had touched her and certainly there would be more enforcers waiting at the top of the ladder.