Awakening (40 page)

Moonless night flew past the window in a blur. She could see the reflective safety rail of a skyway but nothing but darkness beyond. Her inner clock told her it was well past midnight. Which meant they’d had her locked up here and unconscious for a good long time before heading out. She guessed the allabain weren’t easy prey for the Brigade.

Had Risa seen the enforcers coming? She must have since they’d come from the direction of the lorry. Surely Risa knew Kayla had been captured and she’d send help.

Kayla straightened, and pain cut her wrists. She realized her hands were shackled together and locked to the seat in front of her, her ankles locked to the floor with about twenty centimeters of plassteel chain between them. Based on the ones across the aisle that she could see, the allabain were restrained as well.

She pulled against the shackles, but she was still weak, and they didn’t budge. She tried again with more force, but the exertion made the world spin and she had to shut her eyes. She thought she might vomit the long ago breakfast she’d eaten with Risa and Kiyomi.

Her brain felt muzzy and her tongue thick from the shockgun. She’d been hit once before with an enforcer weapon, but that had been a high-power, narrow-focus strike. The beam had just clipped her and left a nasty burn.

This had been low-power and wide-spread. It hadn’t burned her, but it had jittered all through her body, knocking her out. It had fogged her brain, both annexed and bare.

“Kayla.”

She thought at first it was that Infinite-blasted voice calling to her, but then she recognized Abran’s voice. She opened her eyes and looked up. He stood over her, a blue bali glittering in his ear, looking somber and sorry. She could see an empty space in the front row. So not every seat had been filled with allabain.

He glanced up toward the ruddy-faced enforcer, then back at her. “I had to do it, Kayla.”

“If I could get these shackles off—” She said each word clearly, and with as much menace as she could— “I would put you through a window.”

He set back on his heels as if she’d actually landed a blow. Then, moving cautiously, he sat on the corner of the seat, as far away from her as possible. “Baadkar had my family.”

Kayla eyed his unmarked left cheek. “Considering the blood when Raashida healed you, that tattoo was more than just decoration.”

He swiped at his cheek. “Baadkar had just enough circuitry installed so I could be downloaded. There wasn’t much data stored, but enough for a curious enforcer.”

And enough to convince her and Risa. Feeling stronger, Kayla tried to rise again, pulling at the bonds around her wrists and ankles. But the plassteel restraints just cut more deeply into her skin.

She sat back. “So Baadkar
had
your family. Not anymore? He let them go after you betrayed us?”

He turned away, his jaw flexing. “He still has my sister.”

“But not your mother. So you won something in the deal.”

Now his head swung back. “He killed her. When Risa sent me away.”

Denk it, she wouldn’t feel guilty. Not her fault. Or Risa’s.

“You’re not a GEN, so Baadkar wasn’t your patron. All that nonsense about him beating you—”

“That wasn’t nonsense,” Abran said. “It was true. He mostly beat his GENs, but when he was angry enough, he’d go after his minor-status workers too. If the numbers didn’t add up the way he wanted them, he hurt me. He punched me, broke my finger. And once he did use a shockgun on me.”

She desperately wanted out, away from Abran. She strained against her shackles, focusing her rage and sense of betrayal into breaking them. But her strength was no match for the pain of the restraints cutting into her wrists.

She relaxed as blood dripped down her arms. “All that time, I thought you were a devout worshipper with your prayer mirror, but you were mocking the Infinite.”

“That wasn’t my intention.”

“But it comes out the same, doesn’t it?” The blood on her arms itched so badly, it burned. Abran might wipe them clean if she asked, but she’d just as soon bite them off at the elbow. “So you told Baadkar where we were and he sent the Brigade?”

“No. Baadkar told me he was done with me. He’d found you and that other GEN girl himself.”

“Raashida.”

“Yes,” Abran said. “I knew your next stop was Amik sector. I stole the councilor’s lev-car.”

“Where’s Raashida?” Kayla made another quick scan of the Jahaja. No sign of the GEN girl.

“They sent her ahead.”

“To where?”

“Where you’re going,” he said, anguish settling in his face. “To Akhilesh’s lab.”

Another lurch in her stomach. “What are they going to do to Raashida? To me?”

“I don’t know.”

“Raashida has Scratch. Will they destroy her like they have all the other Scratch-infected GENs?”

“I don’t know!”

The enforcer on guard took a step toward the back, his shockgun raised. Abran shook his head and the enforcer retreated.

Abran fell silent. Out the window, Kayla could see the guardrails of the skyway blur past. Below, illumination dotted whatever sector they were passing over.

He was quiet so long, she assumed he was done talking. Finally, he said, “They had me make up some parts of my story, but what I told you about the bhimkay was true. Baadkar owns thousands of acres of adhikar, but between him and his sons, they go through dhans like water. Droms and kel-grain fields don’t earn enough so Baadkar brews drugs on the side. Mostly jaf buzz, but sometimes the punarjanma. He sent his youngest son, Ekavir, to a jaf buyer in Shafti, and Ekavir brought me along to carry the load.”

“So the bhimkay did kill him.”

“Killed him. Ate him. I barely got away.” Abran shuddered. “I ran back to Baadkar’s compound. He was angry, not because of his son, but because I’d left the jaf buzz behind. By the time another of his sons went to retrieve it, the buyer found it and stole it.”

“Then why didn’t he just throw you out? A minor-status like you couldn’t have been all that important to him.”

“Because he could use me,” Abran said. “Baadkar and Akhilesh cooked up this plan to track the lowborn woman’s lorry. A tech created the false tattoo and a medic bonded it to my face. They sent along enough punarjanma so I could heal like a GEN.”

The Jahaja swung off the skyway, the abrupt motion tugging on the restraints. Kayla sucked in a breath, blinking back tears at the pain.

They pulled up to a building, its exterior illuminators casting a yellow glow on four lev-cars docked out front, three Brigade Daggers and a luxury WindSpear. The letters GAMA were written in small script on the door of the building. A half-dozen enforcers who had been waiting there approached the Jahaja.

The ruddy-faced guard released the shackles from their attachments one row at a time. The guard and driver sent the still-restrained allabain off the Jahaja in pairs where the other enforcers waited.

“Why did they even bring the lowborns?” Kayla asked Abran.

“They were all healed by that GEN girl,” Abran said.

In time it was only her, Abran, and the ruddy-faced enforcer. The enforcer came back, his nametag glinting in the dim light. Kinship habit had Kayla storing away his name. Salot.

Salot cocked a thumb toward the GAMA lab. “Boy, you got someone waiting for you.”

A short, wide-girthed trueborn stood just outside the lab, younger men on either side of him. They all shared the same cruel faces, cut with shadow from the glare of the exterior illuminators.

“Is that Baadkar?” Kayla asked.

“And two of his sons.” His voice shook.

Abran got slowly to his feet and pushed past the enforcer. He glanced back at Kayla one more time before he stepped from the Jahaja. She tried to feel a little sympathy for him, but couldn’t summon so much as a gram.

Now Salot leaned close to Kayla, the stink of stale curry and devil leaf wafting off him. “I know your sket, jik. Even with the restraints, I don’t trust you not to break free and run. If it was up to me, I’d give you another blast with the shockgun, but Akhilesh says no. He doesn’t want your DNA juggled any more than it is. So a download will have to do the trick.”

Salot pulled out a datapod. Kayla’s whole body went numb as she realized this was how it would end. She’d never find out what Akhilesh had planned.

Salot only wanted her to black out from the download so he could get her safely inside. But once the download started, the Kinship failsafe would trigger. Her annexed brain would erase itself and her bare brain would fry. She would no longer be Kayla. She would be nothing but an empty shell.

As the ruddy-faced Salot placed the datapod against her tattoo, regret filled her, grief and terror on its heels. She wanted to cry out, to beg him to stop.

The extendibles bit her skin. Salot thumbed the datapod. Any moment the download would start and Kayla’s life would be over.

S
he could still feel the restraints cutting into her wrists. She could still smell the stale curry on Salot’s breath, could still see his pockmarked face.

I’m Kayla 6982, nurture daughter of Tala.
She waited for her identification to be wiped away.

Confusion darkened Salot’s ruddy face. He pressed the datapod harder on Kayla’s cheek as if that would make it work better. “Denking hell?” he muttered.

He thumbed the datapod to deactivate it, then yanked it out before the extendibles had retracted. Plugging the small device into his sekai, he tapped at the hand-held’s screen, then released the datapod again. The device’s ready light had switched from download to upload. He slapped the device back on her tattoo.

A stream of data should have fed into her annexed brain. But she detected nothing moving along her circuitry. She’d become so adept at tracing the data uploaded into her, she certainly would have been able to track even a few bytes of information.

The datapod deactivated, then dropped from her cheek. Salot snatched it as it fell. “What sector am I from?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s my father’s name?”

Kayla shook her head. “I don’t know.”

He swung at her in clear frustration. She tried to dodge, but her restraints made that impossible. She couldn’t get her head out of the way and his open gloved hand struck her already-sore tattooed cheek.

Her cheek throbbing, she glared at the enforcer. “You can’t knock the information out of me if it isn’t there.”

He lifted his hand to strike her again, then thought better of it. “Won’t download, won’t upload. What the denking hell is wrong with you, jik?”

Just then, the dark-skinned driver returned from escorting the allabain inside. Salot snarled at him, “Give me a hand, Nafti. I’ve got a chutting broken jik.”

Salot pressed the barrel of his shockgun against Kayla’s head as Nafti released the restraints. Then Salot yanked her to her feet, gripping her arm so hard his drom leather gloves pinched her skin. With the shackles still on her ankles, she barely kept her feet as he all but dragged her up the aisle. At the Jahaja’s door, Nafti took her other arm.

They hustled her into the GAMA building. What looked like a guard station in the foyer was unmanned. The long hallway they pulled her into seemed quiet, everything shut down for the day. There were no lights under the doors, except for the one on the left with Akhilesh’s name on it. The door farther down on the right, labeled GURU LIANG LING, hung open, but the room was dark inside.

Guru Ling made her think of Junjie, which brought Devak to mind. Was there any way either one of them knew she was here?

They’d muscled her to the end of the hall when she heard shouting from where they’d entered, a familiar rusty voice. Kayla twisted to look over her shoulder and her heart sank as enforcers dragged Risa and Kiyomi along the hall. The enforcers must have swept Risa and Kiyomi up during the raid of the allabain village.

Kayla had an instant to meet Risa’s gaze, to see the regret in the lowborn woman’s eyes. Then the enforcers pushed Kayla through a doorway and up a flight of stairs.

She heard Risa yelling, the lowborn woman’s bitter complaint at her detention. She shouted out that they would answer to Councilor Mohapatra.

Then Kayla heard the sound of a shockgun and her heart seemed to stop. Resisting the pull of the enforcers, she strained her ears, praying to the Infinite that she’d hear Risa’s voice again. But she only heard Kiyomi’s keening cry.

The impulse to escape spurted through her and she fought against Nafti and Salot, surprising them enough that their grip loosened. But bound as she was, she fell like a rock against the steps. She lay there dazed as Salot and Nafti yanked her to her knees. Her legs hit every hard edge as they toted her up the stairs.

Another long hallway on the second floor. They pulled her into the third door down, and slung her inside. It was large and brightly lit, maybe twenty meters by forty. To the left, banks of scientific equipment—microscopes, surgical lasers, computer arrays—lined the walls. Her tech-crazy nurture
brother, Jal, would be dancing with joy to get his hands on those sophisticated devices.

On her right were rows and rows of gen-tanks filled with thick green gen-fluid. A few tanks were unoccupied, but Scratch-marred GENs, stripped to their skivs, floated in the rest of them. Besides the breathing tube down their throats, skinnier tubes had been inserted in their bodies—at the upper arms, neck, and pelvis. The slender tubes joined to a single larger tube that led to a transparent box filled with pale yellow liquid.