Awakening (5 page)

Harg went straight for Kayla. “On your knees, jik.”

Seething inside, Kayla nevertheless dropped to the mud without argument. The thick yellow-brown muck immediately soaked into her already wet white leggings, ruining them. Harg wrenched the package out of her hands, glowering down at her as he ripped off the plasswrap. The bottles of sewer-toad venom scattered in the mud at his feet.

Harg picked one up and opened it, dabbing a bit on his tongue. He grimaced at the taste and spat, the spittle landing on Kayla’s shirt.

Bristling, Risa stepped in close to Harg. “What’ya want with my GEN? That’s good product you’re ruining.”

Harg narrowed his eyes at Risa. “Since I got here, only one jik has gone in or out of that warren. Yours. Hive of jiks like that ought to be busy. But I haven’t seen as much as a sow and her kit.”

Risa gave Kayla a sidelong glance, then focused back on Harg. “Not my problem GENs want to stay inside. You saw us go in, knew our business.”

Harg tipped his head toward the lorry. “Even so, you’d do well to get clear.”

“I don’t leave without the GEN,” Risa said.

“What do you care about a jik?” Harg asked.

“Don’t give a rat-snake’s ass for her.” Risa spat too, although it landed nowhere near Kayla. “Trueborn patron paid good money for her Assignment, even more for my permit to transport her to do his business. Not going to do the toting myself, am I?”

Harg pushed Kayla’s head backward with his black-gloved hand. “I don’t like that this jik is here today. I don’t like those kinds of coincidences.”

Did that mean they
were
here for the safe house?
Oh, dear Infinite, don’t let them have found it!

Then Harg was unclipping his datapod from his belt. Kayla’s gaze flew to Risa.

“Denking hell, don’t need to download her,” Risa said, wedging herself between Harg and Kayla. “Just ask me you want to know.”

Harg’s gaze slid over the lowborn woman. “Why shouldn’t I download? What are you hiding?”

“Nothing,” Risa said, a little too quickly.

But the true answer was
everything
. Kayla’s annexed brain contained any number of Kinship secrets—like the code phrases for every safe house in the northern territories and the exact formula for the GEN restoration process. Then there were Kinship member lists, only partial, but enough to endanger a lot of people.

In any case, Harg would never get any Kinship data. A failsafe in Kayla’s programming would detect the datapod and trigger her annexed brain to erase itself. At the same time parts of her bare brain would fry so that even under torture she couldn’t reveal what she knew.

First rule for Kinship GENs: Never get downloaded.

Harg tried to elbow Risa aside, but the lowborn woman stood her ground. “Got all the GEN’s specs right here.” She fumbled out her datapod from a pocket. “You can denking well read this as well as her. My employer won’t appreciate you digging around his private business and whatnot stored in her head.”

Harg considered the datapod Risa offered, almost looked ready to accept it. Then he shook his head. “I’ll see for myself.” He gave Risa a hard shove and the lowborn woman stumbled aside.

As the mud soaked her knees, rage burst white-hot inside Kayla, burning away her fear. Trueborns never ordered Risa to prostrate herself in the muck. The lowborn woman never risked oblivion at trueborn hands. Torture, yes, but even that would be short-lived since the Kinship’s machinations could rescue Risa fairly quickly. But by that time, Kayla’s mind, her
self,
would already be destroyed.

Kayla gave Harg a slanting look. One quick wrench with her powerful hands and Kayla could snap Harg’s neck. Probably take the other enforcers too when they returned. It would ruin her for Kinship work. She’d be the one living in a safe house—if the Kinship was still willing to protect her after she’d slaughtered trueborns.

Risa must have caught Kayla’s murderous look because she said hastily, “Denk it, she’s just back from being reset. Black market reprogramming. Gene-splicer said it takes time to settle in. Download now might wipe everything away. And putting my employer out like that would mean bad things for you,” Risa finished meaningfully.

Kayla held her breath, struggling to get her temper under control as Harg absorbed Risa’s lie. He asked, “What’s her sket?”

“Strength,” Risa said. “In her arms.”

Harg shoved up Kayla’s sleeves. “What’s wrong with her skin?”

Her anger warred with shame. While her flesh everywhere else was an even brown-beige, on her arms were blotches of dark brown, light brown, black, every shade of human skin, even pale as Risa’s.

“Skin disease,” Risa lied, and the captain snatched his hands back. If the situation weren’t so serious, Kayla would have laughed.

Harg swiped his gloved hands on his pants. “Not my fault your patron did his reset on the cheap. Jik’ll be just as strong when I’m done with her.” He reached for Kayla’s right cheek again.

Reflexively, Kayla shrank back, crying out in her mind for the Infinite. With the datapod millimeters from her tattoo, the warren door slammed open and Harg turned away from Kayla. The two enforcers who had gone inside were dragging out a GEN man between them. They dumped him in the mud beside Kayla.

The other enforcers who had gone around to the back were returning to watch the fun. Which meant they likely hadn’t found the safe house after all. This GEN was their only prey.

And now Kayla was as well.

The pale-skinned GEN man scrambled to his knees. “Please, no,” he begged Harg, “please, please, no.”

“You should be thanking me for resetting you, Axi,” Harg said. “Taking you out of your jik misery.”

The GEN man slapped his hands over his left cheek, covering his tattoo. “I needed the extra kel-grain for my nurture daughter. I would have put it back from the next ration.”

“Should have thought of that before you stole it,” Harg said, reaching out with his datapod. The other two enforcers grabbed Axi’s wrists and yanked his hands to either side.

“NO!” the man screamed as Harg bent, datapod pinched in his fingers.

As Harg pressed the datapod to Axi’s tattoo, Kayla had to swallow back a whimper. Axi jolted as Harg activated the datapod, then sagged. When the enforcers let him go, he flopped to the mud, as flaccid as a dead man.

He might as well be dead. He’d been reset, his personality wiped away. He’d be realigned now to become a different GEN, his Self replaced with another.

Harg retrieved his datapod from the GEN’s cheek, wiped a bit of mud and blood from it. Claws of anger and horror ripped at Kayla’s stomach as the captain fiddled with the datapod until the red light flashed green.

She glanced over at Risa, and her heart sank at the lowborn woman’s helpless expression. A flash of movement up Abur Street pulled Kayla’s gaze from Risa, but it was only workers filing from the foodstores warehouse—Teki, the two brawny GEN boys, and a couple of others.

“Don’t move,” Harg said to Kayla. “I might accidentally reset you instead of just download you.” He laughed, the other enforcers joining in.

She could swear Teki was looking her way. Dangerous, since the enforcers wouldn’t like the GEN woman’s sudden interest.

Then Kayla felt the coolness of the metal datapod against her cheek and the bite of the extendibles into her skin. She forgot about Teki as she waited for the moment the Kinship failsafe would wipe away her annexed brain and turn her bare brain into a hodgepodge of disconnected memories.

Then the datapod yanked free of her cheek. Harg collapsed at her feet, blood oozing from his head. She slowly processed the ringing in her ears, the rubble still raining down around her.

Someone had blown up the foodstores warehouse.

A
s Devak stepped from the access tunnel, the controlled panic of the safe house evacuation mirrored his own explosive emotions at having seen Kayla again. Two lowborn men who had been watching for him relayed Risa’s warning about the arrival of the Brigade, then pulled shut the heavy plassteel door to seal the access from the warren. The door’s purpose was to slow down the Brigade, but to Devak it seemed symbolic of the way he’d cut himself off from Kayla.

Lowborns and GENs ran every which way, some shouting orders to others, some stacking supplies by one of the four escape tunnels. The plasscine tables and benches used for meals had been shoved to one side, the cupboards in the kitchen alcove had been stripped of supplies. Shadows cast by the overhead illuminators crisscrossed the plasscine floor and voices echoed off the rock walls that the Kinship had carved out of the bedrock.

Devak checked the alcove used as a sick room and spotted his best friend, Junjie, taking a tissue sample from one of the Scratch victims. That had been his mission here, collecting samples. When he spied Devak, he packed away his gear and emerged from the sick room.

“Can we help?” Junjie called out to the lowborn safe house manager hurrying past. “Maybe get the Scratch patients out?”

The lowborn man turned toward them, walking backward. “We won’t move them until we’re sure the warren entrance has been breached. You can help best by getting out with what you came for.”

While the plassteel doors had been pulled shut on two of the escape tunnels, two were still accessible. The ambulatory residents were using one to pack out supplies, the other was the one Devak and Junjie had entered through two hours before. He and Junjie hurried into that one, Devak switching on his illuminator just in time as the closing of the heavy plassteel safety door obliterated all light.

From behind him, Junjie asked, “You got the packet?”

“Yes.”

Devak caught himself just in time before revealing to Junjie that it had been Kayla who’d brought it. Junjie knew how Devak used to feel about Kayla and for a while kept coming up with wild ideas about how the two of them could be together. Devak could pretend to be a GEN, and they could live up in isolated Daki sector. Or Kayla would be restored and Devak would become a lowborn like her, and they could travel with the nomadic allabain lowborns.

Devak finally told him to leave off, that he was over Kayla, had his eye on a trueborn girl instead. Lies, and Junjie knew it, but he was a good enough friend to stop sharing his schemes.

The tunnel climbed, which meant they were about at the
halfway point. As he stared into the ill-lit darkness, Devak remembered the surprise of seeing Kayla, the way his stomach had roiled with exhilaration and hopelessness. All his work at forgetting what he felt for Kayla had been torn away in those few minutes in the tunnel. He’d been transported back to four months ago in Sheysa, when he’d last spoken to her, when he’d thought there could be a future between them.

Even with her hair in that crazy tangle, her clothes baggy and damp from the weather, it had taken everything in him not to pull her into his arms. He was so grateful to see her untouched by Scratch despite the time she spent in GEN sectors, where Kinship medics suspected the infection originated. Something in the soil, maybe, or the water. Thank the Lord Creator it wasn’t infectious GEN-to-GEN. And thanks to Him that as dangerous as her and Risa’s work could be, Kayla had kept herself safe.

The tunnel ended at a ladder like the one Kayla had descended. Devak went first, carefully lifting the plasscrete trap door. He dodged the dirt sifting down into the hole.

“Clear,” Devak said, throwing the trap door aside.

He climbed out into a narrow passageway between two warrens. Junjie quickly followed and they replaced the trap door, tamping the dirt back on top of it.

Just beyond the back of the warrens, a narrow footbridge crossed the Plator River from Qaf to Falt, another GEN sector. They hurried across, then slipped through the screen of sticker bushes that hid his great-grandfather’s AirCloud lev-car.

Devak sighed with relief once he and Junjie were both inside the AirCloud. Beside him, Junjie squirmed in his seat.

“We should go before the Brigade notices us,” Junjie said.

“No enforcer’s going to question me.” It sounded arrogant, but even the tiny diamond bali he wore would make a minor-status enforcer hesitate to confront him.

“Even so,” Junjie said, peering through the sticker bushes at Qaf, “I have to get back to the lab. Guru Ling will want the samples I collected.”

Guru Ling, Junjie’s boss at the gen lab where he worked, wasn’t Kinship. But she was so obsessed with finding a cure for Scratch, she didn’t question where Junjie’s samples came from.

Devak started up the AirCloud’s engine and crept away from the river. He had to move slowly along the bumpy plasscrete berm that provided flood control here.

Junjie glanced at the chrono on his wristlink. “I lost track of time. I shouldn’t have stayed so long.”

“Guru Ling shouldn’t be that upset over an extra hour or two,” Devak said.

“I don’t have the freedom you have,” Junjie said. “Not anymore.”

Devak could have kicked himself for forgetting the obvious. Junjie was minor-status now, no longer even the demi he’d been a few months ago. His family had lost a rank when his mother died. Since the only adhikar his mother had owned had come to her through the death of Junjie’s father, that adhikar went to her cousin by marriage. Junjie had to live with his mother’s sister now in a mixed trueborn-lowborn sector.