Awakening (8 page)

Kayla pulled her legs out of the way as Risa squeezed through the hatch. The lowborn woman set Gemma’s prayer mirror on a shelf just above Kayla’s own.

“How’s she doing?” Risa asked. “Looks better.”

Gemma’s shallow breathing had deepened and some of the color had returned to her cheeks. As Kayla had hoped, Gemma seemed to be generating her own body heat now. Safe enough to leave her by herself under the blankets.

Kayla slipped from under the covers, then snugged them more tightly around the GEN girl’s neck. She dropped out of the sleeper area to the cab. Risa followed, pulling shut the curtains between the cab and the sleeper.

Risa slid into the driver’s seat. After starting the lorry’s lev-engine, she unstrapped the wristlink from her arm. “Contact Zul?”

Kayla accepted the wristlink and took her own seat. The lorry swayed as Risa got all six suspension drives onto the pavement. With practiced jabs of her thumbs, Kayla entered Zul’s contact number, then the security code that would put her call through.

Her stomach clenched as she waited for Zul to answer.

Sometimes Devak picked up for his great-grandfather. Could he have gotten all the way down to Two Rivers by now? All the unresolved questions between her and Devak tumbled inside her.

But it was Zul’s tired voice that drifted from the wristlink. Likely she’d woken the old man. Except when Zul was hyped up with crysophora, Devak’s great-grandfather spent far more hours sleeping than awake. Even in the wristlink’s small display, he looked twice his hundred-and-three years.

No use asking how he was. Zul’s body had been breaking down for years, his nervous system debilitated by an experimental precursor to the circuitry in Kayla’s own body. In a way, Zul had been the first GEN, never mind he was a high-status trueborn.

She quickly told him about the explosion at the warehouse across from the safe house. “The GEN workers all left before the bomb went off,” Kayla said. “They had to have been warned.”

Zul’s sharp gaze fixed on Kayla through the display. “Did you see anyone around the warehouse besides Teki and the two boys?”

“No.”

“No other clues to what happened?”

“No.” But then she remembered. FREEDOM, HUMANITY, EQUALITY, written on the warehouse door.

Of course she should tell Zul. He would want to know. But she held the words back.

Because telling Zul meant turning the problem over to him as she did every other troublesome Kinship issue. He’d tell her,
We’ll take care of it,
and she’d never hear how the problem turned out.

Zul kept her in the dark nowadays just as much as he did when she was first Assigned to him. Back then he kept more secrets than he revealed. It made sense at first—he didn’t know if she could be trusted with knowledge of the inner workings of the Kinship. But hadn’t she proved herself trustworthy a hundred times over? Especially when every day she put her very identity, her Self, on the line, risking a reset at the Brigade’s hands.

If she kept the information to herself, she could try to learn more on her own. Keep her eyes open, try to find out who was behind the Freedom, Humanity, Equality inscription. It might very well have nothing to do with the warehouse explosion.

“I really didn’t see anything,” she said finally.

Despite Zul’s sharp gaze that seemed to read her mind, she went on to the discovery of Gemma and the GEN girl’s twin identities. Zul must have been even more tired than he looked because he didn’t question the change of subject. In fact he waved her off when she said she’d send him the IDs.

His image disappeared as he handed off the wristlink. Kayla’s stomach tightened again in expectation of speaking to Devak, but then a different, familiar voice came from the wristlink—Jemali, a medic who’d been a friend of Zul’s for decades.

Jemali smiled kindly from the small wristlink display. “I’ll take the IDs and send them on.”

Kayla called out Gemma’s twin GEN IDs and her second name. Jemali repeated them back. He promised that someone in the Kinship would let them know when Gemma had been removed from the Grid so they could take her to a safe house.

She signed off and handed the wristlink back to Risa. The
lowborn woman must have seen the disappointment in Kayla’s eyes, despite the dimness of the lorry’s cab.

“Yer climbing up the wrong junk tree, GEN girl,” Risa said, although there was empathy in the lowborn woman’s voice.

“It doesn’t matter,” Kayla said.

Risa looked like she wanted to call Kayla out on her lie, but she held her tongue, turning her full attention to operating the lorry. Full dark had fallen, the downpour lit by the lorry’s front illuminators. Behind them in the sleeper, Gemma sighed, then her deep steady breathing resumed.

“Climb up there with her,” Risa said. “Take a rest.”

“I’ll just curl up here.” Kayla drew up her legs and sat sideways on the seat. She tapped into her circuitry to increase her body heat. Warm now despite her damp tunic and leggings, she fell into a half-doze.

Images flew in and out of her mind. Devak’s touch in the safe house tunnel. The Brigade Captain Harg, his datapod hovering over her cheek. The warehouse exploding, the dead enforcer. Gemma stumbling into the road.

The squeal of the lorry’s brakes snapped Kayla awake. “Is there another one?” she asked, half-expecting to see another GEN girl staggering from the sticker bushes. But then she saw the lights of Fen sector’s central ward, its warrens and warehouses lit in the dark.

“We’re in Fen,” Risa said. “Going to find a place to settle for the night.”

Kayla pushed herself upright and rubbed her eyes. Her left cheek, where the rubble had struck her, itched abominably. She rubbed it carefully, not wanting to disturb the scab.

Risa sucked in a breath as she stared across the cab at Kayla. “It’s gone.”

“What?” Kayla asked.

Risa splashed some water from her jug onto her sleeve. Without so much as a warning, she started scrubbing at Kayla’s wounded cheek.

“Hey!” Kayla protested. “That—”

That hurts,
was what she meant to say, an automatic response to Risa’s vigorous rubbing. But then Kayla realized it didn’t hurt.

“It’s gone,” Risa said again. “Your cheek is healed.”

Y
ou’ve seen me heal fast before,” Kayla said. “It’s just the GEN programming.”

“Seen you heal in a couple days what takes lowborn or trueborn a week,” Risa said. “Never saw it happen in hours. Without so much as a mark.”

“It’s just too dark to see.” Kayla twitched aside the privacy curtain and retrieved her prayer mirror from the washroom, taking care not to disturb the still-sleeping Gemma. As she settled back in the cab, Risa turned the cab illuminators on full.

Kayla aimed her palm-sized prayer mirror to her left cheek. And stared at the reflected image.

Other than a bit of blood by her ear that Risa had missed, no sign remained that Kayla had been injured. No scab. No puffy flesh indicating the wound was still healing. Just smooth, light brown skin.

“Am I broken?” Kayla asked. At Risa’s confused look, Kayla said, “My circuitry is supposed to work a certain way. Supposed to repair my body at a certain pace. Faster than you, but not like
this. If it’s hyper-healing me, something might be wrong inside.”

Now Risa looked concerned. “Should ask Zul.”

“Not tonight,” Kayla said. “Not as tired as he was.” Not to mention Devak would surely be there by now. She wasn’t sure what would be worse—talking to Devak, or having him refuse to speak to her. “I’ll run a self-check.”

The self-check was crude and limited since trueborns didn’t want GENs having too much control over themselves. But it could report a few error codes.

While Kayla initiated the self-check, Risa killed the cab illuminators and continued down Fen sector’s main street. As Risa nosed into a dark alley between a Doctrine school play yard and an adjacent rubble-filled lot, Kayla’s circuitry displayed the self-check results in her annexed brain.

Kayla read the codes, then told Risa, “Everything is operating correctly.”

“Need to talk to Zul,” Risa said. “Get you a Kinship medic.”

Kayla shook her head. “I need a tech for the circuitry. Medics only handle the meat.”

Risa flinched at Kayla’s use of the word meat. But she of all people knew that was what trueborns thought of a GEN’s body. Not to mention what the Brigade said when it came to handling “renegade” GENs—kill the jik, save the meat. Meaning, save the DNA for the creation of future GENs.

Kayla and Risa took turns in the minuscule washroom. Once they’d both finished their nightly routine, Risa regarded Gemma sprawled across the bed that Risa and Kayla usually shared.

“Wake her?” Risa asked. “Or maybe we draw for the cab seat. Other one can sleep in the bay.”

“I’ll take the bay,” Kayla said.

The rain had stopped, so Kayla slipped outside rather than use the hatch and risk disturbing Gemma. The clouds had cleared enough to reveal a swath of black night sky. The stars scattered across that patch of heaven burned bright with all three moons muted by the clouds. The biting autumn chill seeped through Kayla’s damp clothes.

Without thinking, Kayla activated her internal warming system. Tugging open the bay door, she stood aside as Nishi dashed to freedom and disappeared into the darkness of the alley. She’d have to leave the door open so Nishi could return with her night’s prey.

Just as she stepped up into the bay, Avish, the second of the trinity moons, peeked through the clouds and sent a beam of light to the rubble beside the alley. Her gaze caught a bit of GENscrib scrawled on a broken piece of plasscrete.

Hopping back down to the ground, Kayla picked her way through the plasscrete rubble. From the broken furniture, kitchen oddments, and scraps of clothing scattered throughout, this must have been a warren. Chaff heads, scrub flowers, and even a few sticker bush seedlings had taken root, which meant it had been demolished weeks or even months ago.

As usual, Social Benevolence was taking their own sweet time getting the warren built again. Meanwhile, GENs would be jammed into what housing remained here in Fen or uprooted to another sector.

Kayla reached the roughly meter-square chunk she’d spied, likely part of an exterior wall. Moving the fifty-plus kilogram piece to better read the GENscrib, she waited for Avish’s light to pierce the clouds again.

When it did, her heart nearly stopped in her chest.

FREEDOM. HUMANITY. EQUALITY. The same three words written in that nearly unreadable longhand GENscrib in Qaf.

She looked out at the ruined warren. The structure had to have been destroyed by Social Benevolence’s order. Yet . . . wasn’t that charring on some of the plasscrete pieces? Could the warren have burned first, then been razed?

Surely if this warren had been blown up like the warehouse had, Kayla or Risa would have heard of it. But the trueborns could so easily control information. If they wanted everyone to believe this had been a routine demolition, they had the means to do it. Any GEN witnesses could easily be reset. The Brigade that had to deal with the aftermath would know better than to talk.

Freedom. Humanity. Equality.

They were words nearly all GENs harbored unspoken in their hearts. Yet if the source were a GEN, why destroy a warren and make GEN lives more miserable?

Kayla returned to the lorry bay and nestled in a pile of scratchy plasscine blankets she and Risa used to protect fragile items. Her mind raced in a dozen different directions.

Who wrote the words? Were they a warning for the GENs in the warren to leave? Could they possibly be a vile joke of some Brigade members who’d learned a little GENscrib? Or did they mean nothing, written on a risky dare by some underfifteen GEN before a routine demolition?

Kayla fell into a restless doze. Sometime during the night, Nishi returned. After the seycat finished crunching the bones of whatever unlucky rat-snake or sewer toad had crossed her
path, she curled up next to Kayla. With Nishi’s purring warmth, Kayla finally dropped into dreamless sleep.

Considering how upside-down everything had been the day before, Kayla was barely surprised when a Kinship tech called in the morning to tell her and Risa that Gemma couldn’t be found in the GEN database. To double-check, the tech wanted Risa to download Gemma’s twenty-digit passkey that identified the GEN girl’s unique DNA sequence. Most GENs didn’t even know there was a passkey stored inside their annexed brains, nor did they realize that the passkey was also used to reset GENs.