Authors: Karen Sandler
Awakening
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2013 by Karen Sandler
Jacket photographs copyright © L.Watcharapol (model),
© Vasilchenko Nikita (wall)
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in an information retrieval system in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
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To Gary, always at my side through meltdowns and happy dances.
And to my dad, Sam.
Contents
PROLOGUE
E
verything hurt. The long red-black welts on her arms. The needle-like feel of the cold rain on her feverish skin. The way her head pounded as if it would literally explode.
Wrong, so wrong.
The words spun in Raashida’s muddled mind. She was a GEN and GENs weren’t supposed to ever get sick. Yet she swayed on unsteady feet, her strength all but sapped. Her body boiled with such heat, she was surprised the rain didn’t sizzle into steam.
The autumn deluge had swept in like a demon and soaked through her inadequate GEN-issue shift in an instant, filled her sturdy synth-leather shoes. She’d slipped in the thick yellow Lokan mud so often, her legs were covered to the knees with the nasty ochre stuff.
She should be home by now. Her nurture father, Qang, would be worried. But no matter how hard she squinted into the wet darkness, she couldn’t see the street that led to Qang’s flat.
She stopped, struggling to clear her thoughts. Why would
she be going to Qang’s? She wasn’t an under-fifteen anymore, still living with her nurture father in Mut sector. She’d been Assigned already, hadn’t she? Sent off by the trueborns how long ago? She couldn’t remember, couldn’t remember Qang’s face. Wasn’t even sure what her own face looked like.
Raashida skidded again in the slick mud and groped frantically in the darkness for something solid to break her fall. Instead she slammed to all fours, pain shooting up her left leg as her knee hit a rock. She managed to struggle to her feet again, but she couldn’t put more than a gram of weight on her leg without gasping with the pain.
What if her knee was broken? Trueborns expected GENs’ self-healing to properly knit their wounds. If an injury were bad enough to cripple her, gene-splicers would drop her in a gen-tank, reset her, and maybe even re-jigger her DNA to make a new GEN.
“Infinite, save me,” she whispered, the prayer drowned by the roar of the rain. Would He even acknowledge her plea? After her third beating by her trueborn patron, she’d turned her heart against Him. She wasn’t even sure where her prayer mirror was.
What was that glow? Was it real? Or just a fever dream? Or could it be the Infinite was coming for her, his brilliant light cutting through the darkness?
As she stumbled toward that faint gleam, biting back a scream of agony with every other step, the light grew brighter. She could make out the lines of a shack. The deafening fall of rain grew even louder as it hit the plasscine roofs of the shack and the near-invisible neighbor to it just beyond.
Lowborn shacks, no doubt, and a GEN like her unwelcome,
storm or no storm. She would have walked on, but her good leg gave way, her body too weak to keep her on her feet. As she lay there, rain pelting her, she despaired that the Infinite would let her die in the dark.
Then she heard a faint cry from within the shack. Her heart clutched inside her. She knew that voice. It was her nurture brother, Fabi. She’d left him behind on Assignment day, hadn’t seen him since.
No way to stand and walk. She dragged herself to the door, nudged it open wide enough to pull herself inside. In the yellow light of a flame—she could smell the acrid tang of drom dung— she made out the pallets on the floor. There lay fourth-year Fabi bundled in rough blankets, a woman stretched out close beside him. Fabi’s hair had changed from curly brown to wispy blond, and she couldn’t see his GEN tattoo on his cheek, but she knew him anyway. The changes she saw were just a fever dream.
Her teeth chattering from the rain, Raashida dragged herself across the shack to the pallet. With the last of her energy spent, she fit herself alongside Fabi, opposite the strange woman. The woman’s eyes fluttered half-open, then closed as she dropped into sleep again.
Fabi whined and shifted under his blankets, his sleep no doubt disturbed by the wet chill Raashida had brought in with her. She started shuddering, her teeth chattering, and she feared she’d disturb Fabi even more. With the last of her energy, she tapped into her GEN circuitry to warm herself, then wiped the mud and wet from her hand. She set her palm on his cheek, and reveled in the look of his face.
A new heat seemed to explode from the center of her, different than the warmth her circuitry generated. It moved
across her chest, along her arm, out her hand, into Fabi’s cheek. Her nurture brother squawked in complaint, briefly rousing the woman again, but to Raashida’s relief, neither woke.
That flood of heat from her to Fabi seemed to have stolen the breath from Raashida’s chest. She had to fight to fill her lungs again. Her heart, a rasping beat in her ears, slowed and stuttered, slowed and stuttered. Her circuitry jolted her heart again and again, but her heart continued to fail. She couldn’t keep her eyes open, couldn’t move even to take her hand away from Fabi.
The flicker of light through her eyelids dimmed, the stench of drom dung faded. The cold and wet became meaningless. The drum of the rain softened to silence.
One moment there was a last breath and a heartbeat. The next there was nothingness.
Shona woke with a start, the glare of sunlight in her eyes, the brightness bleeding in through the partly open door of her roughly built bhaile. What did it matter if she hadn’t shut the door properly, or if rain now soaked the edges of her one good rug? She couldn’t bring herself to care when her dying son lay beside her.
Or maybe he was dead already. She couldn’t tell if the weight against her back was warm or cold in the chill air. She’d wrapped him as tight as she could after lancing the pus from his infected foot last night until poor Wen screamed with the pain. Then she’d squeezed the last of the vac-seal of medicine into the slender crook of Wen’s arm.
The anti-germ in the vac-seal had been a single adult dose, all Shona could afford to buy with her few dhans. The minor-status trueborn who sold it to her said to give Wen a light squeeze each day for ten days. But it had been hard to do it right, and surely some days she’d dosed too much and some days too little.
Then last night she’d been so exhausted by days of grief and worry, she’d been all but dead to the world as she slept. She remembered Wen crying out once, and had tried to struggle awake. But then he’d quieted. She’d been so fearful that cry had been his last, and she was too much a coward to face that truth in the middle of the dark night, so she let sleep take her again until morning.
Her heart ached, heavy as a stone in her chest. Wen had been her last chance to send a part of herself into the next generation. With the boy’s father dead and she a year into the change that stopped her monthly bleeding, she would never bear another child. She was an old woman now. Her wrists and hips already throbbed with the joint-ache.
Time to turn and look at Wen, Shona told herself. See if her son had been taken up by Iyenkas, the twin brother gods become one. Truly, death and eternal life with Iyenkas would be better than the agonizing pain poor Wen had suffered through.
Shona tossed aside her blanket and creakily elbowed herself up. Tugging down her night shirt against the chill, she took a breath to fight her tears.
“Mama?”
She froze. She forced herself to turn, sure she’d gone mad and had imagined Wen’s sweet voice.
He was sitting up in his blankets. Grinning at her with his bright mischief.
And a woman lay beside him. Not a woman, a GEN female. Even if her skin hadn’t been too black to be anything but a non-human, the tattoo on her left cheek would have given it away. Her myriad long braids lay scattered around her shoulders.
“I’m hungry, Mama,” Wen said.
Shona snatched Wen up into her lap. She had nothing against GENs, but she wasn’t sure she wanted one touching her son. Although it looked as if the female had done exactly that. Her hand still rested on the dent in the pillow where Wen’s head certainly had been.
Wen patted Shona’s hand with a certain urgency. “Hungry, Mama.”
Shona felt the coolness of her boy’s touch, the strength in his wiry body. With shaking hands, she unknotted the dressing around his foot. It had been clean when she’d wrapped it on last night, now it was soaked through with blood and pus.
But when she pulled the last of it free, the oozing wound was gone. She laid the complaining Wen on her pallet to bring the foot closer to her view. Even opened the door wider for more light, despite the autumn chill.
No more festering gore in the arch of Wen’s foot. Not even a scab. Only some dried blood that gave way when she spit on her thumb and scrubbed while Wen giggled and writhed in ticklishness.
Her gaze slid to the GEN lying motionless beside Wen’s pallet. In that moment, she realized just how still the female lay.
“Want a sugarfruit, Wen?” Shona said, her voice trembling.
“Yes, yes, yes, yes,” he shouted, jumping up and down with each word.
