Awakening (9 page)

But when Gemma woke, Kayla and Risa discovered the girl
did
know the hidden purpose of the passkey. It therefore took some persuasion for the GEN girl to allow Risa to download the passkey using her datapod. But when Risa then uploaded the twenty-digit string to the wristlink and the tech checked it, there was no record of the passkey in the GEN creation database either.

After signing off, Kayla unearthed a last few redfruit and their store of nutras and handed them out to Gemma, Risa, and herself. The compressed, vac-sealed kel-grain bars were barely palatable, but they would keep stomachs from growling until they could restock the lorry’s pantry.

Leaving Gemma with a nutra, a juicy redfruit, and a jug of cold kelfa drink, she and Risa went around to the back of the lorry. “What now?” Kayla asked.

“Girl’s not on the Grid, can go to a safe house,” Risa said. “Maybe over in Nafi sector. Out of Northwest Territory.”

“You’ll have to call Councilor Mohapatra again and have him change your delivery schedule,” Kayla said around a mouthful of redfruit.

“Don’t like bothering the councilor twice in two days,” Risa said.

“We can’t just jet up there on our own judgment,” Kayla said, pointing out the obvious. Irritation pricked at her. “Although I don’t see why not. If we think it’s the right thing to do, why are we always having to ask permission?”

Risa shrugged. “Kinship rules. No way we can drop her at Qaf safe house, never mind it’s closest.”

“I’ll go on ahead to the warehouse,” Kayla suggested. “Let them know we’re on our way.”

GENs weren’t allowed wristlinks, so the only way to communicate with them was to hike over there through the central ward. But Kayla didn’t mind the trip, since it would give her a chance to search for any other cryptic graffiti that might be scrawled on Fen walls. She unearthed a last hidden redfruit and her prayer mirror, tucking the mirror into the pocket in the waist of her leggings.

Nibbling around the bruises on the redfruit, Kayla wound her way through Fen’s alleys and rutted roadways toward the warehouse district. The recent rain had soaked the hard-packed gray-brown dirt and the resulting mud sucked at her feet. Her synth-leather shoes were sturdy enough, but moisture seeped through their seams and her socks grew damper with each step.

GENs crowded the local streets that intersected the alleys. Under-tens and under-fifteens flooded past her on their way to the Doctrine school where Risa had parked the lorry. Nurture
parents, many with a baby or toddler in tow, accompanied the youngest ones. Non-nurturer adults, those GENs lucky enough to be Assigned right there in Fen, threaded through the crowd as well, headed for their Assignments on warehouse loading docks or in Doctrine school classrooms.

Some of the adult GENs, recognizing her as a newcomer to Fen, stopped to say hello, and lingered a little while in hope of news from other sectors. One woman, after discovering Kayla was widely traveled, motioned her to the entry of her flat where three second- and third-years clung to her skirt.

“Do you travel to Chadi sector?” the woman asked. “My nurture daughter, Lis, was Assigned there.”

“I’m from Chadi.” Kayla suppressed a twinge of longing for her own nurture mother, Tala, and nurture brother, Jal. “I’ll look for Lis next time I visit. Send your good wishes.”

The grateful nurture mother escorted her charges back inside and Kayla continued on. Who knew how long it would be before she could keep her promise to the woman, or for Kayla to see her own family?

She forged through the swarm of bodies, pausing to exchange friendly greetings, keeping a sharp eye out for any GENscrib scrawls, in that peculiar longhand or otherwise. She didn’t see any scribbles, but she saw fresh swaths of paint on walls here and there. A crew must have been through Fen recently, wiping away any GEN graffiti.

For the most part the crew had left the artwork—she spotted abstract depictions of the Infinite’s face, or ornate inscriptions from the liturgy on warren walls. But in the still-glum overcast, she couldn’t make out anything that might have once been GENscrib under the dull beige paint.

She dove into a less-crowded alley between two warrens. Murals lined both sides of the alley—on the left, the Infinite placing the twin suns in Loka’s sky; on the right, representations of the prophets, Pouli, Cohn, and Gupta. In spite of herself, Kayla’s hand went to her waist, reaching for her prayer mirror.

She dropped her hand again without pulling it out, but could barely resist the urge to send a mental prayer to the prophets. Even though she now knew the truth about the three—that Pouli and Cohn were complete frauds and Gupta killed himself as repentance for his part in creating the GENs. Even worse, the liturgy of the Infinite was Pouli and Cohn’s creation to keep GENs oppressed.

Still, her heart couldn’t deny the existence of the Infinite. She’d come to realize that the deep knowing within her of that great Divinity hadn’t really come from the false liturgy. What Pouli and Cohn had created had nothing to do with the way the Infinite had placed His hand on her heart throughout her life, when she’d most needed His love.

Morning sunlight punched through the surly clouds, illuminating the lower left corner of the mural of the prophets. The angle of the sunlight revealed the edges of what had been painted over just below the mural. She crouched to see if she could make it out.

Yes, there was GENscrib there, but what had been scrawled was another insult, this one comparing the hairiness of a certain member of the Judicial Council to a bhimkay’s ass. No secret, mysterious messages.

She’d taken so long meandering through Fen’s streets and alleys that by the time she reached the warehouse, Risa had already arrived. When Kayla would have climbed up on the
loading dock to help ferry crates of processed plass-fiber to the lorry, Risa pulled her aside.

“Where you been?” she asked.

“The crowds were thick,” Kayla said. “Everyone was hungry for gossip.” Not strictly true, but close enough. “Did the councilor agree to change your routing?”

Risa shook her head. “Too risky, he says. Going to send a trueborn to pick up the GEN girl, like she was a reset to be realigned.”

The weight of apprehension settled in Kayla’s stomach. “They wouldn’t actually reset her, though, right?”

Risa looked shocked. “Course not. Taking her to Nafi safe house, not a gene-splicer lab.”

Of course. Kayla was just so edgy about the GENscrib messages, her imagination created peril where there was none.

“When?” Kayla asked.

“Evening. After dark,” Risa said. “Less notice that way.”

“So we can’t head for Beqal sector until they’ve taken her.”

Risa’s mouth pinched with displeasure. “Leaves us idle after we unload.”

They set to work, carrying out the crates and loading them in the lorry. They could have stretched the job out since they had nowhere to go after. But it wasn’t in either one of them to shirk. They worked as quickly, carried as heavy a load with each trip as if they were late for their next delivery. At least it was dry work, the skies clear and sunny.

Partway through the job, Gat, the GEN warehouse manager, pulled Kayla aside. He gave her another DNA packet and uploaded new programming for the Grid into her annexed brain.

What he stored inside Kayla was only a fragment of the newest changes to the Grid programming. Not all the pieces were stored inside GENs, either. Lowborns would carry parts of the puzzle on datapods, and trueborn techs would hack into the Grid, steal fragments, and store them on their computers. Eventually all the pieces would be put together so the Kinship could continue to mask the true locations of hundreds of Kinship GENs.

The morning was gone by the time they finished loading. Both of them were ravenous after nothing but nutras, so they visited a food stand on Karpa Street for watered-down fruit melds and stuffed bread rolls. Risa pretended she didn’t know it was ground rat-snake meat filling the bread rolls. They went back to the lorry to eat, bringing extra to share with Gemma.

As they were just finishing their meal, a lowborn woman a few shades browner and about a decade younger than Risa’s forty-seven years approached the lorry with a smile and a wave. Risa caught sight of the woman—her wife, Kiyomi—and tossed aside the last bite of her bread roll as she scrambled from the cab. She took off running toward the woman and they jumped into one another’s arms.

Their kisses were passionate enough that Kayla looked away. When she glanced up again, Risa and her wife were walking toward the lorry, arm in arm. Kayla slipped from the cab to meet them.

Risa grinned in uncharacteristic joy. “Didn’t know Yomi would be visiting her sick auntie over in Amik.”

Tall Kiyomi smiled down at Risa. “I wanted to surprise you,” she said, her voice low and musical. “And I couldn’t wait another week for you to return to Cayit.”

Risa turned to Kayla. “Don’t mind if I go back to Amik with Yomi? Spend the afternoon there?”

“I can go down to the warehouses,” Kayla said. “Look for some work to keep me busy, maybe earn a half-dhan or two. You enjoy your time together.”

The two of them walked off, their love for each other surrounding them like an aura. Watching them, Kayla’s heart ached with hopeless longing. She would never be able to walk openly with Devak like that, even if she was restored. She and Devak could never be together the way Risa and Kiyomi were, the way Mishalla and Eoghan were, unless the Infinite cast aside the natural order and magically turned Kayla back into the trueborn she’d once been.

She shrugged off the pain and focused instead on finding work. There were plenty of GEN warehouse managers glad for an extra pair of hands, who were more than willing to pay a little cash for her labor. With the arrival of fall, lightweight summer tunics and leggings had to be toted to the cache warehouses, and replaced by warmer winter clothes. Even though a GEN could use her circuitry to regulate her body temperature, that effort still took energy, additional calories the trueborns didn’t want to supply. Better and cheaper to give the tankborns warmer clothes.

Toting crates full of summer wear to the cache warehouse and returning with crates packed with heavier weight winter gear should have been a mindless exercise. But with each trip, Kayla wrestled with the ever-present ache in her heart that had been triggered by seeing Risa and Kiyomi’s happiness.
Devak, Devak, Devak
rang in Kayla’s ears with each footstep.

Even worse, it seemed around every corner she’d glimpse
some dark-headed GEN boy—a warehouse worker or a tech or even a nurture father. The boys were like shadows of Devak, never quite as tall as him, their skin never the right kelfa color. But they were close enough that her imagination filled in those details.

She forced mental blinkers on to close out those passersby and doubled her attention on the drudgery of her work. After all, this was what she’d been made for, a beast of burden built to carry and tote for trueborns.

B
y the time Kayla returned to the lorry, four half-dhan coins safely tucked away in her hidden pocket, Kas, the lesser brother sun, had nearly sunk below the horizon. Risa must have been keeping a lookout for Kayla because the lowborn woman made a beeline for her the moment she spotted her. Risa’s cheeks were fat with devil leaf, and she chewed at a frantic pace.

“Brigade’s been by here twice just since I got back from Amik,” Risa said as they walked toward the lorry. “Want to know what we’re doing, parked here all afternoon.”

“What’d you tell them?” Kayla asked.

“The truth,” Risa said. “Waiting on a GEN pickup.”

“That’s okay, then,” Kayla said.

They reached the lorry and climbed into the cab. The curtain that concealed the sleeper had been pulled open and tied back. Gemma sat on the bed, her short dark hair neatly combed, her gaze solemn. The Scratch marks had faded completely from her face, leaving only smooth, pale skin and an unmarred tattoo on her left cheek.

“Lock the door,” Risa mumbled, then spit out the devil leaf into a nearly full bucket.

Risa swiped at her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing a little devil leaf juice across her face. “First enforcer was satisfied, second ordered me to off-load entire cargo so he could inspect it.”

Kayla’s jaw dropped. “But you didn’t.”

Risa’s gaze narrowed on her. “How could I, you gone and all? Had to call the councilor. Again.”

“At the Council house?” Kayla asked. Someone would surely notice that Councilor Mohapatra received three calls from his lowborn employee.

“He was home. Had me put the enforcer on the wristlink. Threatened to send him to Belk sector.” Risa sniggered at that.

“Did you ask when the trueborn would be here to fetch Gemma?”

Risa gave her another sharp look. “Me, chut away at a judicial councilor for taking too long?” She shook her head. “Some kind of sanaki GEN you are.”

Kayla brushed off the insult. She’d heard Risa call plenty of people crazy. For Risa, it was almost a term of endearment.

So they waited while Kas withdrew all of his indolent light. The now-deserted warehouse district plunged into darkness.