Awakening (25 page)

Now Kayla saw what the mural had hidden—a massive flat stone set in the ground. Mishalla and Aki sat with several other women around it, each of them using a palm-sized rock against the surface of the stone to grind something pinkish-gray into a pulp. Kayla recognized the thick branches that had once been the base of a sticker bush. Fragments of pinkish-gray root were still attached to some of the branches.

Aki spotted Risa and called out, “Sister!” She put aside her rock to come give Risa a hug.

From across the stone, Mishalla motioned Kayla over. She handed Kayla a rock and a piece of sticker bush root.

Kayla’s attention strayed to Devak on the far side of the gathering place. His fingers tapped the screen of the sekai, but his gaze was on the circle of women. For an instant, those dark eyes connected with hers, then she looked away.

Worried she might pulverize the rock along with the sticker bush root, she took care to moderate her strength as she rolled the rock against the stone. With little effort she crushed the chunk of fibrous root. The long fibers released their hold on the pulp, creating an unappetizing mess that stunk faintly of rat-snake dung.

“Do they eat this?” Kayla asked, smearing the fibrous blob across the stone.

Aki returned to her place, nudging Kayla aside to make room for herself. Risa settled next to Mishalla and stuffed a wad of devil leaf in her mouth. Aki picked up her rock and a chunk of root.

“We eat the pulp, and weave the fiber,” Aki said. “The bhaile fabric used to be made from sticker bush roots before plasscine sheets got cheap enough we could trade for them.”

Kayla poked a finger into the pink-gray paste and dabbed it on her tongue. It took everything in her not to spit out the bitter tasting stuff.

“It’s poisonous raw,” Aki said, a trace of laughter in her light tone. Risa, on the other side of Mishalla, guffawed, spewing bits of chewed devil leaf.

Now Kayla did try to get the nasty stuff out of her mouth. But the paste coated her tongue, numbing it.

“That little bit won’t bother a GEN,” Aki assured her, her eyes still bright with humor. “You’re here about Raashida?”

“That’s the girl on the mural?” Kayla asked, pretending Mishalla hadn’t just told them her name. “The one they were praying to?”

“They worship Iyenkas here, the dual sun gods become one,” Aki said. “They’re convinced that Raashida is Dhartri, the daughter Iyenkas promised to send to earth. Dhartri the healer.”

“Risa and I have been hearing stories,” Kayla said, “but I figured that was all they were. Made up stories.”

Aki leaned close to Kayla. “Do you remember two . . . no, three storms ago? A lowborn woman in Dika sector had a young son dying from an infection in his foot. She’d gone to sleep that night sure her son would be dead by morning. But
when she woke up, she found Raashida dead of Scratch, lying beside her son.”

So Raashida
had
had Scratch, and long enough ago, she would have had to have died of it. Kayla glanced over at Mishalla, and she could see from her friend’s face she was making the same calculation.

“Anyway,” Aki went on, “the boy not only wasn’t dead, he’d been healed completely. The village decided to bury Raashida to honor her. But when the lowborns went to collect the body after preparing a grave, they discovered Raashida had risen from the dead.”

Kayla stared at her, unbelieving. “She can’t have really been dead. They only thought she was.”

Mishalla said, “Maybe her circuits overloaded and put her heart and lungs on standby. I’ve heard of that happening to GENs.”

Aki tipped her head toward the others at the stone. “They’re all convinced. Because they’ve seen what she can do with their own eyes.”

“She’s here?” Mishalla asked eagerly.

“Not anymore,” Aki said. “They’re moving her to keep her safe. She stays in a village long enough to heal those that need it, then she travels to the next with a handful of trustworthy allabain.”

“Then she’s healed more people than that boy?” Kayla asked.

“Everyone she touches,” Aki said. “I saw her myself. I had a deep scratch from a sticker bush thorn here.” She held out her right arm. On her inner arm, a jagged line, faintly white against her golden skin, stretched nearly from wrist to elbow. “It was
bad enough, I’d planned to ask a Kinship medic for some antigerm. But one touch from Raashida and it had healed within an hour.”

Kayla’s stomach lurched as she remembered how quickly she had healed that night they found Gemma. But she’d never met Raashida, never had the GEN girl touch her. Still, the reminder of her possibly malfunctioning circuitry unsettled her. And what did it mean that other GENs’ healing systems— Abran’s, Gemma’s, now this Raashida’s—had also gone awry?

Aki hooked a thumb across the gathering place to where Devak stood. “Is that trueborn one of us?”

As much as a trueborn can be.
Kayla left the thought unspoken. “That’s Zul’s great-grandson.”

“That’s Devak?” Aki asked. “So Zul’s brought him into our fellowship at last.”

From under her voluminous dress, Aki produced a black DNA packet, although she kept it out of sight under the grinding rock. “Raashida wouldn’t let me download her passkey, but she allowed me to take a DNA sample. I thought Zul could see if it can be cross-matched with the Grid database. If Raashida’s been removed from the Grid, that’s one less worry for her and the lowborns protecting her.”

Kayla took the packet and passed it to Mishalla. “You and Devak will be able to get this to Zul quicker than me.”

He was too far away to have heard her speak his name over the noise of the crowd. Still, his attention sharpened on her and he seemed to lean in her direction as if to get nearer to her.

Or it was her imagination? Now he was moving through the crowd, nearly a head taller than the diminutive allabain, no more aware of her than the rock in her hand.

A rock she’d managed to break in two with the pressure of her fingers. “Sorry,” she muttered. “My sket.” Kayla tossed the pieces and brushed aside the dust.

Mishalla asked. “Where is Raashida now? Somewhere near enough that we could follow her?”

“I don’t know,” Aki said. “They kept their next destination a secret. For safety.”

Mishalla’s face fell. “No idea at all?”

Aki shrugged. “Could be anywhere. No way to know where any allabain might end up.”

The disappointment was sharp in Mishalla’s face. She got up, wiped sticker bush root from her hands and rounded the stone toward Devak.

Kayla got to her feet and followed. He and Mishalla had already untangled themselves from the crowd and had started back through the village, opposite the direction where Risa had parked the lorry.

“Devak!” Kayla called.

They both stopped, but when Kayla caught up, she said to Mishalla, “I need to talk to Devak.”

Mishalla smiled, surely with some kind of romantic notion on her mind. She moved out of earshot along the pathway.

“I know she asked you not to, but would you talk to Zul about this?” Kayla asked. “About this procedure Hala is promising?”

“I will.” Devak gazed down at her. “I wish . . .”

“What?”

“Sometimes I don’t know what the right thing is. I only know what other people have told me is right.” His fingers found the diamond bali in his ear. “I thought I knew four
months ago. Then I went back to my life.”

A life that didn’t include her. “You need to figure out what you want, instead of what other people think you should want.”

“Do I get that privilege?” he asked.

For a moment, anger spurted inside her at his talk of privilege. But then she remembered that in some ways he was as boxed into his world as she was in hers. She was the one who’d found ways to punch holes in her prison walls.

“You can have whatever you want,” she told him. “And not just because you’re a trueborn. But you’re the one who has to fight for it, not wait for someone else to tell you it’s okay.”

She wanted so much to take his hand, to feel it against her cheek again. But he’d told her in so many ways he didn’t want that anymore.

Abran’s familiar voice called out to her. “Kayla!”

She looked across the now near-empty gathering place. Abran had come from the lorry and stood beside Risa on the path. He waved, a broad smile lighting his face.

“Abran’s waiting,” she said.

Kayla turned her back on Devak and walked away. When she reached Abran, she stepped in close to him, hoping it would look to Devak that there was some intimacy between them.

Abran seemed startled, but he didn’t move away. With a rusty laugh, Risa started back toward the lorry, leaving Kayla alone with Abran.

He lowered his mouth to her ear. “I got you something in one of the shops on the square.”

Kayla couldn’t stop herself from looking back at Devak. He hadn’t moved from where she’d left him. His face might as well have been set in stone.

“Don’t you want to know what it is?” Abran asked.

She returned her attention to Abran, although she could still feel Devak’s gaze on her. “Yes. I do.”

Abran reached into the secret pocket inside the hem of his shirt. He kept his hand closed a moment before opening his fingers to reveal a necklace fashioned of dark red glass and polished brown wood beads. An intricately carved wood pendant of the same soft brown color as the beads hung from the center.

He reached around her neck to hook the necklace on. “The pendant is only carved sticker bush, but it looks perfect against your skin.”

Her fingertips idly tracing the pattern on the pendant, she glanced back again to see if Devak was still there. He was, but no longer looking her way. He was moving off to catch up with Mishalla. The two of them walked away.

“You don’t like it?” Abran asked. She could hear the tension in his voice.

She forced a smile, one finger running over and over an imperfection in the carving. “I do. It’s beautiful.”

“Good.” Relief relaxed his face.

They started off again, hurrying to catch up with Risa.

R
isa pulled into Skyloft late, traveling through the quiet, night-dark local streets to the mixed sector’s warehouse district. The kel-grain they would unload in the morning would be stored here to be doled out to the two closest GEN sectors, Daki and Ret. Then they’d backtrack into Daki sector to meet at the safe house with Junjie, who would hopefully erase the intrusion from Kayla’s bare brain.

The last several hours had been an awkward dance between her and Abran. He wanted her to sit up in the sleeper with him as they traveled, and when Kayla refused his request, she felt his fingers stroking her hair. She jerked away and glared at him, hard enough that he retreated into the bay with Nishi.

The next morning, while Abran took his turn in the washroom, Risa pulled Kayla from the lorry. They walked along the access road behind the warehouses and lowborn factories, a drizzle seeping through their cheap duraplass hats. Parallel to the road, sluggish muddy water meandered in a creek too small to have a name. On the other side of the creek, Nishi stalked
prey in a grove of junk trees, the seycat’s red-orange coat visible then concealed by the sticker bushes clustered around the taller trees.

Risa hooked an arm in Kayla’s, a familiarity the lowborn woman rarely risked. “That necklace mean you’re choosing the GEN boy? That you’re forgetting the trueborn?”

“I’m not choosing Abran. All of a sudden, he seems to want to choose me.” She fiddled with the beads on the necklace. “An alliance with a GEN like Abran makes a lot more sense than the foolish dream I was hoping for. Devak’s forgotten me, Risa. That dream died a long time ago.”

She shrugged. “If Nishi can’t find rat-snake, she doesn’t bring home scrap grass instead.”

Outrage bubbled up at the comparison. “So it’s always better to love a trueborn than a GEN?”

“Course not.” Risa flicked her free hand with impatience. “Better to admit the one you love, not pretend with the one you don’t.”

“Sometimes scrap grass is your only choice,” Kayla said.

“If you’re a drom,” Risa said. “That what you are? And willing to settle for what a drom settles for?”

Kayla sighed, her breath curling out from her mouth. “I thought you liked Abran.”

“And I thought you didn’t.”

Did she? Still not much. Him touching her hair had made her shudder, and not with any joy. “I don’t dislike him. I guess I’ve come to feel sorry for him.”

Risa snorted. “Almost love.”

Up ahead, a cluster of lowborn and GEN workers lingered around the rear door of a plass extrusion factory. They seemed
focused on getting out of the cold to start their work, but Risa dropped Kayla’s arm and took a step away from her.

“Not sure about that boy, still,” Risa said once they’d passed.

“Yesterday, you said he worked hard.”

Risa’s mouth compressed in a thin line. “Disappeared on me yesterday. Just a few minutes. Worried he’d got his hands on some more buzz.”

Kayla’s heart sank. “I wondered that too, yesterday. He went in to change his clothes, then came out kind of different.”

Risa shrugged. “Find him with it again, he’s gone. No more chances.”