Awakening (10 page)

Risa didn’t turn on the interior illuminators. She probably didn’t want to draw any more notice than they already had.

“Strange thing I heard in the lowborn village,” Risa said softly after a long stretch of silence. “GEN girl came through there two days ago.”

“Came through, like passed the village on her way to her Assignment?” Kayla recalled passing a lowborn village in Foresthill as she’d headed for her first Assignment. “Plenty of GENs do that.”

“Came through, like brought there by an allabain lowborn woman,” Risa said.

The allabain were a lowborn sect that traveled from place to place, settling for a few weeks or months on the outskirts of mixed or even GEN sectors. They’d pick up a few dhans doing day labor, then move on.

“GEN girl stayed two days in the headwoman’s house. Villagers spoke about her like she was Lord Creator Himself, or his only daughter, anyways.”

“A GEN girl, the Lord Creator’s daughter?” Kayla asked in disbelief.

Risa nodded. “In some other village, she brought a dead lowborn boy back to life. So they said.”

Kayla vaguely remembered a myth she and Mishalla had read about a man who could raise the dead. But since they knew only the Infinite could control who lived or died, Kayla and Mishalla hadn’t given much credence to the fairy story.

“The boy probably wasn’t really dead,” Kayla said. “He just got better on his own from whatever sickness he had.”

“Likely,” Risa said. “Ought to tell Zul, nevertheless.”

Finally, Kayla spotted the lights of a lev-car bumping its way along Karpa Street toward them. Risa briefly turned on the lorry’s front illuminators and Kayla was relieved to see the lev-car was an ancient WindSpear and not a Brigade Dagger.

Kayla allowed herself an instant of longing that it would somehow be Devak here for Gemma. Then the lev-car’s door opened, and the interior light shone on the trueborn woman inside.

The woman, who said her name was Coria, climbed up into the lorry’s cab, seeming not the least uneasy about sitting beside Kayla. Soft-voiced and kind-faced, Coria’s light-brown skin and hair, along with the emerald bali in her left ear, identified her as a demi-status.

Most demis that Kayla met were mean and quick to offend, squeezed between wounded pride that they weren’t good enough to be high-status and fear that they might someday slide into minor-status. But Coria seemed comfortable and confident in her rank, friendly both to lowborn Risa and the fragile GEN girl, Gemma.

The trueborn woman slipped a datapod from her pocket and put it up to Gemma’s cheek. Gemma jolted a little at the prick of the extendibles, then her eyes went blank as Coria’s datapod downloaded Gemma’s annexed brain. Gemma’s eyes came to life again as the datapod dropped from her cheek.

Coria fitted the datapod into her wristlink, then after a few moments, studied the display. Her brow furrowed.

Gemma leaned forward, trying to see the wristlink. “Does it tell you anything about me?”

“Only what we already knew,” Coria said. “That parts of two identities have been programmed into your annexed brain, and neither match the GEN or Grid databases. But I’ve sent the full download to a Kinship personality engineer.”

Now Coria turned to Kayla, holding out the datapod. “I have an upload for you. May I?” the trueborn woman asked.

“Why didn’t you ask Gemma before you downloaded her?” Kayla asked.

Coria seemed flustered. “Because . . . I didn’t . . . I don’t . . .”

“Never mind,” Kayla said. She knew why. A lot of Kinship
trueborns saw Kinship GENs as special, different than ordinary GENs. They would treat Kayla with unfailing respect, then turn and order a house GEN to clean the kitchen or weed the garden.

Kayla held out her hand for the datapod. “I’ll do it myself.” Coria hesitated only a moment before dropping the datapod into Kayla’s palm.

“What’s the upload?” Kayla asked, and she saw surprise flicker in Coria’s eyes that Kayla would have the impudence to question her. So even a Kinship GEN like her hadn’t yet risen to full respect in the trueborn woman’s eyes.

But Coria recovered quickly, smiling at Kayla. “It’s new code phrases for the safe houses. And membership changes.”

Risa exchanged a glance with Kayla.
Changes
often meant they’d lost members. Lowborns killed, trueborns arrested, GENs reset.

Neither Kayla nor Risa knew the full Kinship roster. They were made aware of only those they might have need of, whose paths they might cross. Coria, for instance, had been stored in Kayla’s annexed brain sometime back, in expectation for the demi-status woman’s use as a courier. Occasionally they would be notified of alterations to the roster.

Best to get any bad news over with. Kayla applied the thumb-sized device to her cheek and felt the bite of the extendibles. She braced herself.

It wasn’t good—three GENs reset, their personalities wiped away, a fourth GEN destroyed by a shockgun blast when she tried to escape. The names matched entries in Kayla’s annexed brain, but there was no match in her bare brain, which meant she didn’t know these GENs personally.

At the mention of one new member, Kayla’s breath caught—Mishalla. How could she have joined the Kinship? Mishalla and Eoghan were supposed to be raising a growing brood of fostered children in Plator.

Kayla had begged Mishalla to stay out of the Kinship. Her friend was safe as a lowborn only as long as she stayed hidden.

But if she moved more into public view working for the Kinship, someone could recognize her, remember she’d been a GEN. She would be arrested. Gene-splicers would try to reinstall Mishalla’s neural circuitry in a gen-tank. Except as old as Mishalla was, her body would reject the circuitry and the installation attempt would kill her.

While Kayla mulled over Mishalla joining the Kinship, a last bit of programming shivered along her circuitry into her annexed brain. Distracted by that late bit of code, she followed its path to where it had stored itself and was surprised when she reached a mental dead end. There was no new programming in that location.

She’d sensed little internal hiccups along her neural system before, echoes of the upload. Generally it was junk data that her annexed brain rejected, which must be what this was since she couldn’t find a trace of it.

The datapod finished and dropped from Kayla’s cheek. She handed it back to Coria.

Coria smiled. “Everything upload okay?”

Kayla took a breath, about to mention that hiccup, the phantom code that apparently didn’t exist. But instead she forced a smile back at the trueborn woman. “Sure. All okay.”

Coria left with Gemma, tucking the girl into the back of
her ancient WindSpear. After they sputtered off, Risa turned to Kayla.

“Could stay here for the night, but it’d be risky, with the enforcers prowling.”

“Let’s just go,” Kayla said. “We’ve lost a day anyway, when we should have been on our way to drop this load.”

“Trade driving?” Risa asked. “Me first, then you?”

“As long as we’re outside town when I take the wheel,” Kayla said. “On the empty roads.”

Which went without saying, since GENs were forbidden to pilot lev-cars. But few enforcers stirred from the central ward of the sector they patrolled.

But even if they could avoid enforcer attention, the thought of driving in the denser central wards terrified Kayla. She’d never operated a lev-car before meeting Risa, let alone something as big and awkward as the lorry. She’d just as soon drive the massive rig on wide, untrafficked highways.

So Risa took the first shift while Kayla crawled into the sleeper. As Kayla settled in, she heard Nishi’s yowl, the high-pitched sound the seycat made when she went after prey. Rat-snakes sometimes squirmed their way into the lorry in search of spilled kel-grain. This rat-snake would be doubly disappointed—nothing but plassfiber and a seycat ready to hunt it down and eat it.

Kayla opened the hatch to see if Nishi would leave off her pursuit and curl up in bed beside her. But Nishi, nearly at eye level through the hatch where she perched on a tall column of crates, just glared at Kayla. The feline refused to budge, no matter how sweetly Kayla called.

One of those nights when Nishi was rethinking her close
association with humans and GENs, Kayla supposed. She shut the hatch to close off the chill from the bay, then curled up in the covers. She fell asleep almost instantly.

Kayla woke refreshed and swapped with Risa behind the lorry’s wheel. Nishi climbed from the bay for Risa, her purring interspersed with growls as she curled up in the bed beside the lowborn woman.

Twenty kilometers into her stint, Kayla spotted a roadside sign. The marker was the only indication they’d crossed from Northwest Territory into Northeast and had left Fen sector and entered Beqal.

You wouldn’t know it from the landscape. The same boulders littered the rolling plain, the same scrap grass lay flat by the recent storm’s rage. Here and there a junk tree thrust up from the unforgiving dirt, sharp skeletal branches dull gray, the red fractals of the symbiotic host that lived along its bark invisible in the dark.

The lorry’s front illuminators picked out a pair of giant bhimkay skittering through the mashed-down scrap grass. A shiver zipped up and down Kayla’s spine as the spiders merged into the darkness. As big as they were, those two were young ones, barely hip-height on her, Kayla guessed. It was alarming to see them here in a populated GEN sector like Beqal. The bhimkay usually stuck to the more remote adhikar land in the center of each territory.

But trueborns didn’t like the bhimkay on their adhikar tracts, never mind that was the safer place for the big spiders since so few people lived there. For the trueborns, it was all a matter of profit. The bhimkay sometimes foiled the electrified fences that protected the trueborn drom herds roaming their
adhikar. A big enough colony of bhimkay could put a dent in a trueborn’s wealth by killing their more vulnerable juvenile droms.

Even worse, she’d heard of a trueborn killed recently on his own family’s adhikar. The youngest son of a powerful high-status Nitha sector family had been attacked by a bhimkay while surveying drom herds or kel-grain fields or a plassfiber mine. She couldn’t remember the details. But the spider caught him and sucked him dry.

So the trueborns ordered their lowborn managers to drive off the bhimkay from their adhikar. The giant spiders had to go somewhere. It looked like at least a few had made it all the way from the adhikar reserve in the center of Northeast Territory to Beqal. If the bhimkay got brave enough to make their way into the central ward, it would be GENs and not droms killed. Which was shortsighted of the trueborns since a GEN was worth at least what a drom was—more if the GEN had a tech sket.

As she continued on through the night, she didn’t spot any more bhimkay, thank the Infinite. She drove until Iyenku crept enough above the distant horizon that she could make out the silhouettes of Beqal sector’s warehouses and warrens. Then she pulled over and nudged Risa awake. Risa took the wheel.

As early as it was, their destination, the plasscine extrusion factory, was still dark. Risa drove around to the loading dock in back and killed the engine.

“Go over to the safe house,” Risa suggested. “Drop off the packet, get yourself some grub. I’ll wait here, catch a few more winks.”

Kayla left as Risa crawled back up into the sleeper. As
she threaded her way through Beqal’s rows of warehouses and factories, the damp chill bit her skin. Her internal warming system couldn’t quite keep up, so she alternated between cold and warm as she walked, her internal map guiding her steps.

This early in the morning, few GENs were abroad yet. She passed a nurture mother with an infant cradled in each arm, a couple fifth-years trailing behind. On their way to Doctrine School, no doubt. A few fifteenth-year boys, newly Assigned from the look of their wide-eyed uncertainty, crossed her path as they emerged from an alley. An older boy, maybe a seventeenth-year, smiled back at her as he came up behind and passed her, his teeth white in his red-brown face.

Most of the Kinship safe houses were excavated under warrens, but in some sectors like Beqal, the warehouse district was a safer location. In Beqal, the soil beside the Plator River was barely stable enough to construct the warrens on, let alone to dig beneath for a safe house. Under the warehouses, a natural cavern gave the Kinship a starting point.

The enforcer patrolling the warehouse district, too busy trying to stay warm in the morning chill, barely gave Kayla a second look. She walked briskly to make it clear she had a legitimate destination.

She turned into the alley between the foodstores and household goods warehouses. A GEN boy, as dark-skinned as Kayla’s nurture brother, Jal, loitered near the warehouse door. He clutched something in his hand and inhaled from it. Some homebrewed rawseed zing, maybe, to get him through his upcoming shift.

Except the moment he spotted Kayla, he tossed aside whatever had been in his hand and approached her. His eyes
were clear, his cheeks unmarked except for his silvery tattoo. Zing use mottled even the darkest skin with an ugly purple.

He made a swift scan up and down the alley, then said, “I’ve just been Assigned to Tellik sector.”

This was one of the new code phrases Coria had uploaded. “The Infinite shines his face in every sector.”

He’d started to turn toward the door as Kayla began speaking, then he froze at her final words. He stared at her, uncertainty clear in his dark eyes.

Kayla’s cheeks flushed with heat as she realized her mistake. “The Infinite shines his face in
all
sectors.”

Now the boy smiled. “This way.” He opened the warehouse door for her and let her enter first.

As they zigzagged through the tall stacks of crates and full-to-capacity plasscine sacks of kel-grain, worry nagged Kayla. How could she have gotten the code phrase wrong? If it had been in her bare brain, she could have easily mixed up the wording; that part of her brain wasn’t wired for exact retrieval.

But her annexed brain—the circuitry there was designed and installed to work with machine-like precision. Yet altered wording had spilled from her mouth. And what about that upload hiccup, when she’d been sure some new programming had been stored, then there had been nothing there?