Awakening (37 page)

After Risa signed off, she jerked her chin toward the hatch ladder. “I’ll wait here. You get some sleep.”

Kayla felt the slightest twinge of regret at not saying goodbye to Abran. But she turned her back on him and returned to the sleeper.

Despite her exhaustion, she was restless at first. She kept thinking of Abran’s dilemma, his broken circuitry, and imagining it happening to her. Some might think that would be a good thing. If
she
couldn’t access her annexed brain like Abran, then neither could an enforcer with a datapod.

But Kayla had come to appreciate what her circuitry could do, in spite of—or maybe even because of, she admitted grudgingly—FHE’s improvements. From the simple convenience of her internal clock and the Svarga continent maps programmed in her annexed brain to the way she could warm herself and access far more data than a non-wired trueborn or lowborn. Not to mention her quicker healing from injury or disease.

Abran had none of that anymore. It could be that if Councilor Mohapatra sent Abran back to Baadkar, the trueborn would realize the GEN boy was so broken, he’d be sent off to the gene-splicers to be broken down for his DNA. Abran wouldn’t be worth as much as a live, functioning GEN would be, but Baadkar would pocket a small fee in exchange for the boy’s genetics.

Despite Abran’s treachery, Kayla felt a little sick inside that the boy might end up sold to gene-splicers. Her hands tightened into fists as she considered the myriad ways trueborns
controlled GENs—mentally, physically. They’d turned Abran against his own, and Risa had had no choice but to cast him out.

Kayla relaxed her hands with an effort. She’d figured out the first time they’d had to turn over a Scratch-infected GEN to the Brigade, they couldn’t save everyone. If they lost this GEN boy, she’d have to learn to live with that.

She retrieved her prayer mirror from the cubby she’d placed it in for safety. With the reflective surface pressed against her lips, she prayed for all those GENs whose lives were cut short by trueborn cruelty. And when she couldn’t quite bring herself to pray for Abran, she prayed instead for his soul.

H
is back aching from hours in his chair, Devak stared at the flood of data scrolling past on the holographic display of his computer. Tapping the keyboard, he sent the infiltration spider he’d programmed a little deeper into a data storage unit tucked away somewhere in Dika sector. He’d lost count of how many databanks he’d hacked into over the last eleven days, first in Guru Ling’s home sector, Plator, then when that search came up dry, in the surrounding trueborn and mixed sectors. So far, not a clue as to where Guru Ling might have hidden her research off-site, or if she even had.

Junjie sat on a chair beside Devak, feet up on Devak’s bed, using a sekai Pitamah had loaned him to sort through the data Devak collected. Pitamah had kept himself as scarce as possible the last week and a half, remaining intentionally ignorant of what Devak and Junjie were up to.

Gemma had survived after a rough few days, and had been moved to Foresthill sector to stay with the old medic, Jemali. If she could still heal others as she had at the Daki
sector safe house, no one knew. Although she’d allowed Jemali to take tissue samples for research, she stayed alone in a room at his small house, refusing to see anyone but him, touching no one. She’d died again two days ago. When she revived, she was weaker than before, and had yet to gain her strength or fully fight off the Scratch. Jemali said it was only a matter of time until she had another relapse that she couldn’t battle back from.

Junjie was sure that Guru Ling had left something behind that could cure Gemma and all the other sick GENs. But after eleven days of failures, Devak knew it was a hopeless quest. He hadn’t yet scraped
every
likely database of contents that might connect to Guru Ling’s research, but he was nearly out of options.

“Nothing,” Junjie said, his thumb moving quickly across the sekai screen as he scrolled through Devak’s last data dump. “What’s next?”

“Not much.” Devak retracted the infiltrator spider with the data it had collected, and routed the data to Junjie’s ID.

“Then we’ll go farther out.” Junjie tapped and scrolled, peering at the sekai screen.

Devak was pretty sure that wouldn’t help. If Guru Ling had tried to leave anything behind, Akhilesh had probably purged it.

The GAMA director never did let Junjie get any closer to Guru Ling’s body that day at the riverside. Akhilesh had suggested kindly enough that Junjie go home, that he should take a few days off. But he had enforcers escort Devak and Junjie back to the AirCloud—for their safety, he said. And when Devak took Junjie home, he found his aunt gone. When he called her, she’d told him she’d moved to Sheysa sector. Since he’d turned out to be such a troublesome boy, she had no room for him anymore in her home.

Another half-dozen enforcers crawled all over the small Plator sector house. Everything inside was turned upside down and torn apart. Junjie had told the Brigade that Guru Ling had never been to his house, and that he never took home any of the studies he did in the lab. But still they followed him while he packed some clothes and personal items and escorted him from his own house.

It was the same at Akhilesh’s lab. Enforcers blocked Junjie’s way while one Brigade officer after another carried crates and equipment out. All of it went into the back of a lorry they’d brought in.

Junjie hadn’t had much at the lab—a couple sekais, a beaker full of broken datapods, a few tricky mind teasers he’d kept on his desk to fidget with. But the one thing that really mattered to him—a holo of his mother, the only image he had of her— nearly went into a crate along with a bunch of other odds and ends from Guru Ling’s lab.

An enforcer had found the little thumb-sized self-powered projector in the back of Junjie’s desk drawer where he’d hidden it. Junjie had had to beg the enforcer to give it back. The enforcer must have had at least a tiny grain of a heart. After checking to be sure the device only displayed a holo, she’d tossed it to Junjie instead of into the lorry.

“Nothing in that batch either,” Junjie said, dropping the sekai on the bed. “It isn’t even tech data. Just a bunch of IDs for dead GENs.”

“The Scratch victims the enforcers bring in?”

“Can’t be. The IDs are from GENs who died ten years ago
and more. There must be some other storage areas we could search.”

“There are plenty I could hack into if I went continent wide,” Devak said. “But if Guru Ling was putting her data off-site in a sector besides the ones surrounding Plator, how would we ever guess which one?”

“Why didn’t she leave me a clue?”

“Because she killed herself.”

“She didn’t,” Junjie said emphatically. “That’s a lie Akhilesh made up.”

“She left a note,” Devak pointed out.

“Which
I’ve
never seen. We only have Akhilesh’s word on that.”

Devak pushed away from the computer. “We’re getting nowhere. We might have to give up.”

“But there might be a cure for Scratch out there.” Junjie scrubbed at his face. “I can’t believe all of Guru Ling’s work is lost.”

“Didn’t she tell you anything about what she was researching?”

“Not all the details. She didn’t like sharing until she was confident her methodology was correct.” Junjie turned and propped his feet up on Devak’s desk. “I knew about the duwu in the lymph system and the way Scratch kills. She was trying a bunch of methods to counteract the process and ways to inoculate. But she never told me she found a way that worked.”

“You were doing work for her,” Devak said. “How could you not know more?”

“Because what she had me doing for her was just little pieces.” Junjie huffed with exasperation. “Little side studies to
prove her theories. I never really knew what the theories were.”

“Maybe just as well,” Devak said. “Considering what the enforcers put you through. You could be dead if you knew more.”

They’d taken Junjie into custody for several hours the day after Guru Ling died. “That’s true. I couldn’t answer what I didn’t know.”

“Maybe that’s what she wanted.”

Junjie just shook his head. Devak’s stomach rumbled and he realized it was nearly time for evening meal and they’d never even stopped to eat at midday. With Pitamah at some Kinship meeting with Jemali and Hala, Devak and Junjie were on their own.

Devak rummaged through the kitchen cupboard, then the coldstore. “Can you stand more kel-grain?” he called to Junjie. “There’s a little ground drom meat and some patagobi to mix in.”

Junjie came to the kitchen doorway. “Kel-grain is fine. Auntie and I have certainly eaten plenty of it.”

Devak was eating quite a lot of kel-grain too. The rice his mother used to buy was a luxury far beyond his and Pitamah’s means, now that they barely had the adhikar to maintain their high status. But he’d also eaten a fair amount of it back in the days when Kayla was Assigned as Pitamah’s caregiver, when he shared meals with her in his great-grandfather’s room or in her small shack.

Denk it. He never should have let her into his mind. He’d struggled to avoid thinking about her these past several days. That was one good thing about the mind-numbing data search he and Junjie were doing. It distracted him from dwelling on Kayla and the terrible ache in his heart that came with thoughts of her.

Devak set the bag of kel-grain on the counter beside the radiant stove and filled a pot with water. He scooped out the proper measure of the gray oblong grains. They were half the length of the kernels of rice he and Pitamah could no longer afford, with less than half the flavor if they weren’t spiced up.

Junjie sat at the table, the holo of his mother in his hands. He thumbed it on and stared at the brief animation of his mother smiling at him. The image flickered partway through its display, Mrs. Tsai dissolving momentarily into static each time through the animation.

Devak gave the pot a stir, then covered it and lowered the heat. “Did you figure out how to fix the corrupted image data?”

Junjie shook his head. “I wouldn’t have thought a mini-holo would get damaged so easily. The case is intact.” He held it out for Devak to see.

“Maybe it was defective to start with.”

“Maybe. But it’s only been doing this since I got it back from that enforcer. Maybe she dropped it bringing it out.”

Junjie lent a hand with dinner, slicing the patagobi leaves into narrow strips while Devak browned the drom meat. He was pretty sick of drom, particularly since the only ones he and Pitamah could afford were the beasts from their adhikar that were past breeding age. They couldn’t butcher the droms reserved for their premium wool, or eat the young ones sold for their tender meat to the high-status trueborn market. That left the stringy elderly beasts. They split the gamey meat with the lowborn family that cared for the herd.

Junjie picked at his dinner portion, punctuating each bite
with heavy sighs. Kayla kept intruding in Devak’s mind, the look on her face just before she’d climbed from the AirCloud that night, what she said about mistakes.
Sometimes it’s not a mistake at all. It’s just making the best of things.

But he could never figure out whether his decision to stay away from Kayla was the right thing for both of them or a big mistake on his part. If pain were a gauge, the way he felt inside meant he’d made a huge error in judgment.

To his surprise, his bowl was empty. Between his hunger and his preoccupation with Kayla, he’d eaten his way through his portion of kel-grain and couldn’t remember even tasting it.

Junjie had barely touched his. “Do you think there was a note? I’d really like to read it. Maybe I could make sense of this.”

“I’ve been all through Akhilesh’s public files. I suppose Guru Ling’s letter could have been in Akhilesh’s private database, but not even my hacking could get through his firewall.”

“If a letter exists,” Junjie said, “why hide it? Even if he wrote it himself, he would want the Brigade to know about it.” Junjie’s expression brightened. “What if it’s in the Brigade database?”

“It could be,” Devak conceded.

“You could find it there.”

“Hack Brigade files? That wouldn’t be easy,” Devak said. “They’ve probably got even stronger firewalls than the Grid does.”

“But you know how to hack into the Grid,” Junjie said. “How much harder could it be?”

“Plenty harder. And if their sentries detected me, we could have the enforcers on our doorstep pretty denking quick. And I doubt the Kinship would want to step in to save us and risk that much exposure.”

Junjie poked at his kel-grain with his spoon. “What about someone else in the Kinship? Could one of the other data techs do it?”

“The question is, would I want to ask for help?” Devak nudged his empty bowl from side to side. “I personally know five techs at least as good as me or better at system infiltration. A few weeks ago, I wouldn’t have hesitated contacting them. But this power shift in the Kinship . . . I’m not sure who we can trust.”

Junjie scooped up a bite, then set it down again. He looked up at Devak. “I think this is important. Even though it’s risky. Will you try?”