Tankborn

Kayla hunched on the bank of the Chadi River while below her, Jal, her
slender, black-skinned nurture brother, skipped from one deep pool of the
river to another, searching for sewer toads. Watching over Jal had not been
in Kayla’s plans. She’d intended to spend the rare Thirdday holiday with
her friends. But when her nurture mother, Tala, got wind of Jal’s plans,
she’d insisted a tenth-year like Jal wouldn’t be safe at the river by himself.
Never mind that Tala had let Kayla go off by herself without a second
thought from the time she was an eighth-year. So Kayla had to tromp down
to the river with Jal for his toad hunt instead of spending the afternoon with
Miva and Beela.
Not that the two girls were heart-deep, blood-to-blood, tank-sister
friends the way Mishalla had been. But among the fourteenth-year GEN
girls in Chadi sector, they were about the only ones who didn’t think Kayla
was a freak.
Jal grinned up at her as he showed off a particularly fat sewer toad, its
arachnid eyes beady and staring. The sewer toad’s eight segmented legs
squirmed, river sludge dripping off its slimy skin. She’d seen images of
bumpy brown Earth toads on the sekai readers in Doctrine classes. Those
had been cuddly pets compared to the nightmare spider-like creatures Loka
had to offer. But then, nearly everything on Loka was uglier than what
humans had left behind on Earth.
The few mammals on Loka weren’t as hideous as the spider-creatures.
The wary seycats that kept the vermin down in the warehouses sported
intriguing striped pelts and tall tufted ears. The six-legged droms that
roamed the plains had thick mottled wool and droopy noses and only one
pair of large black eyes set in their camel-like heads.
But the seycats rarely showed their faces when people were around.
And there weren’t too many of the native droms left. The ones that didn’t
get eaten by the bhimkay had been crowded out of the grassy plains by the
gene-splicers’ version of the drom— twice as tall, three times as heavy. The
gene-splicers had used DNA from Earth cows to get bigger meat animals.
Kind of like the way they used bits of animal DNA to give GENs like Kayla
their skill sets.
Jal stuffed the toad into his carrysak, then waded along the far bank,
gaze fixed to the water’s surface. The GEN healer in thirty-third warren
paid one dhan for twenty toads, although what the woman did with the
disgusting things, Kayla didn’t want to think about.
She’d been a pretty rough-and-tumble girl when she was Jal’s age,
especially considering her sket. She’d climbed the scraggly junk trees in
Chadi Square, scoured condemned housing warrens for trash she could
exchange for quarter-dhans. She’d even trapped the eight-legged rat-snakes
for the healer, toting them in a carrysak like Jal did the toads. Rat-snakes
weren’t rats or snakes, just another spider-like creature with a long, squirmy
thorax and a rat-like head. She shuddered now at the thought of touching
those nasty, hairy monsters.
The rumble of an engine snagged her attention. On the trueborn side of
the river, a micro-lev-car, a shiny pearl gray Bullet, slid into view from
between the Foresthill sector warehouses. The sleek, snub-nosed Bullet
rocked a little as the engine’s air cushion traversed the uneven rubble of
permacrete littering the far side, then settled its belly to the ground beside a
skyway support pillar. The primary sun, Iyenku, cast its coppery glare on
the windshield and hid the occupants from view.
Kayla’s heart skittered with alarm as the wing-doors popped up and two
trueborns climbed from the Bullet. They minced along on the permacrete
rocks toward the river. She saw plenty of lowborns walking along the bank
on the Foresthill side, taking a shortcut from one riverside shantytown to
another. But other than the occasional glimpse of a warehouse supervisor,
trueborns never got this close to the GEN sector.
If she only considered the high-priced Bullet and the two boys’
extravagant clothes, she would have pegged them as high-status trueborns.
But their pale skin and the green glint of their emerald bali in their right
earlobes meant they were demi-status, not high.
Despite their showy, jewel-stitched capes and kortas, Kayla knew the
demi boys possessed nothing even close to high-status trueborn wealth. The
high-status started their lives rich, awarded massive tracts of adhikar land as
babies, twice the acres demi babies received. Of course, the demis’ adhikar
grants were double what the minor-status trueborns got, and lowborns got
nothing. So demis liked to rub what wealth they had into minor-status and
lowborn noses.
But usually demis steered clear of GENs like Kayla and Jal. Tankborns
like her and her nurture brother were beneath trueborn notice. If they’d
stopped to relieve themselves, they’d have found a more private spot
between the warehouses. But they were headed straight for the bank
overlooking where Jal waded in the river.
Head bent down as if Jal still had her full attention, she angled her gaze
up to keep one eye on the trueborns. “Jal,” Kayla called out to her nurture
brother. “Come out of the water.”
Slogging through the sludge, Jal waved her off, too focused on finding
one more toad to listen to his older nurture sister’s request. And he had a
point. With the river’s far edge marking the transition from Chadi sector to
Foresthill, she and Jal were both legitimately on the GEN side of the border.
Those trueborns had nothing to report on their wristlinks.
Nevertheless, Kayla eyed them uneasily. She guessed they were maybe
a little older than her nearly fifteen years. The stout one didn’t wear his
gem-encrusted korta well. He looked stuffed into it like a sausage, his
leggings so tight she feared they might burst.
The other trueborn, blond and tall and good-looking, with a mouthful of
too-white teeth, had a meanness to his pale face. He was proud enough of
his broad shoulders to keep his cape thrown clear of them. Pela fur trimmed
the cape, dyed a nasty shade of purple. She supposed she should be grateful
the gene-splicers didn’t create GENs that awful color.
The good-looking trueborn spoke to his friend, pitching his voice loud
enough for Kayla to hear across the river. “What kind of DNA made that
one?” He pointed at Kayla. “Looks like sow to me.”
“Pig for sure,” his fat friend agreed.
Kayla’s cheeks burned. Even knowing the consequences, she wanted
nothing more than to ford the river and grab the tall blond boy by his ugly
purple cape. She’d shake him, hard, and give him a dunking in the river.
The good-looking one whispered to his friend, then they both bent to
gather up a handful of the smaller perma rocks under their feet. The fat one
lobbed a rock toward Jal, but he had such lousy aim, Kayla doubted he
could have hit a stationary pub-trans with a boulder. Jal dodged the rocks,
leaping side to side as if it were a game.
But the taller trueborn had a better arm. The chunks of permacrete he
cast fell precisely to either side and just short of Jal, closer and closer.
When her brother tried to back away in the dank water, a jagged piece
grazed his left cheek, scratching across his GEN tattoo before it plunked
into the river.
That was enough to send Kayla scrambling down the trash-strewn bank,
a prayer to the Infinite and all three prophets flung off in her mind. But
before she even reached the water, the good-looking trueborn raised a
massive piece of perma and shouted, “Hey, jik! Catch this one with your
teeth!”
Kayla screamed, “Jal, run!” as she slithered to the river’s edge and
struggled for footing in the slippery riverbed. His carrysak heavy with
toads, Jal took a bad step, losing his balance. He fell to his knees in the
shallow, slow-moving water. The trueborn stretched his arms back, ready to
heave the permacrete at Jal.
A pair of hands wrenched the rock from the good-looking trueborn
boy’s grip. The slope of the riverbank and the broad-shouldered trueborn
blocked Kayla’s view of Jal’s rescuer. She heard him shout, “Leave off,
Livot, or I’ll take some perma to that Bullet of yours.”
A few more shouted words, then Livot and his fat friend retreated to
their micro-lev-car, their footsteps crunching in the rubble. Kayla grabbed a
handful of Jal’s shirt, lifting him off his feet, the heavy carrysak and his
wiry thirty-five kilos a featherweight to her strength. He squawked at the
indignity of dangling from her hands, but she didn’t let him go until she’d
carried him to the water’s edge.
The bank was steep enough she had to pull herself up on all fours, but
as usual the hyper-genned strength of her upper body got the better of her
lower. She fumbled more than once, muddying her knees, adding to the
ugly ankle-high sludge staining her best leggings.
It wasn’t until she and Jal had reached safety on the top of the bank that
she realized the third trueborn was following them across the river. He’d
found a path of rocks, barely wetting his boots with his careful steps, let
alone the cuffs of his pants.
Kayla bent to whisper in Jal’s ear. “Run to the flat. If I’m not back in an
hour, tell Tala what happened.”
Jal’s eyes widened. “I can’t leave you.”
“I’ll be fine.” The trueborn’s head had appeared above the riverbank.
“Do as I say! Go!”
Carrysak clutched to his chest, Jal took off down the narrow weedchoked path. He disappeared around the corner of the kel-grain warehouse
before the trueborn topped the riverbank and started toward Kayla.
Even without the white diamond glitter from the bali in his right ear,
Kayla would have known this one was high-status. His dark hair was
straight and glossy, not wild and kinked like Kayla’s or tight curls like Jal’s.
His skin was the perfect color, a rich medium brown. Not near black like
Jal’s, nor the pale mud color of her own skin, but a warm shade in between.
The color of status.
He smiled, the slash of white in his beautiful face stealing Kayla’s
breath. When he stopped a half-meter from her, she edged away. He wasn’t
as tall as the blond trueborn, but Kayla had been genned small, so she had
to crane her neck to look up at him.
“Is he okay?” he asked. “The young male?”
She stood there, torn, wanting to run and wanting to stay all at once. She
didn’t like the way he made her feel, the way his smile, his seeming
kindness, kept her feet rooted to the damp riverside dirt.
“He’s fine,” Kayla said, eyeing the boy warily. He wore a plain navy
blue korta, not a synth-gem in sight on its collar, no fur or fluff on the
brown chera pants. But he wore the clothes as if he owned the world and
everything in it. Which he did, like all the other trueborns, especially a
high-status like him.
His straight black hair was neatly cut short, not a waist-length sandycolored mess like hers. She brushed and braided her hair every morning, but
by mid-afternoon, like now, more of it had escaped the braid than remained
in it.
By the prophets, he was beautiful. His face out-dazzled the images
she’d seen of the mythic gods Iyenku and his brother, Kas. On Earth, the
twins had driven their fiery chariot together across the sky. Here on Loka
they chased each other, the primary sun Iyenku rising first, then sleepy Kas
peeping above the horizon later. In her mind, neither god could compare
with the flesh and blood trueborn standing before her.
His gaze fixed on her, his stare bordering on rude. She wanted to back
away, but she made herself stand there. “What? Have you never seen a
GEN before?”
“Plenty of them. Working at the warehouses. Sometimes in towncenter.
Except they’re not . . .”
“Not what?” she asked.
She didn’t like the way he stared at her. Usually trueborns sneered at
GENs or narrowed their gazes with contempt. They’d make rude comments
about what kind of animal DNA had been used for a GEN’s sket, like Livot
had.