Awakening by Karen Sandler Read Free Book Online

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.
    The Tsais had always been on the lower edge of demi-status. Their skin color was a shade or two too pale and tinged with gold. Their eyelids didn’t have a fold, and their faces were too round.
    Devak felt a little ashamed that he’d taken such note of the Tsai family’s facial features and how it affected their status. “Rank doesn’t matter in the Kinship,” Devak said, to soothe his own guilt.
    Junjie laughed. “Then why do trueborns all stick to their own at Kinship meetings? The lowborns and GEN teams sit with each other, but it’s like there are big fat lines separating the trueborn ranks that they never step over.”
    Devak didn’t like it, but what Junjie said was true. He’d seen even Pitamah sit only with his old cronies at the few Kinship meetings Devak had attended with his great-grandfather.
    Turning away from the river, he reached Falt sector’s pothole-pocked main street and upped his speed a fraction. Junjie sat silent beside him, maybe thinking about the samples he would deliver to Guru Ling, or wrestling with some knotty gene-bending problem he’d been given.
    Junjie adored the technical puzzles of chemistry and genetics. He would have wished for exactly that kind of work if he’d had the choice. But it didn’t seem fair that being a minor-status, Junjie could never hope for anything higher than a tech position.
    As a high-status trueborn, Devak could some day take a position as a director in an office, or possibly even make his way up the ranks in government to become a member of Congress. But Junjie was boxed into the tech fields, for no reason other than his family now owned less adhikar land than they once had.
    Wasn’t that exactly what the Kinship was trying to change? And if Devak could be friends with a minor-status like Junjie, why not be friends with a GEN like Kayla?
    Because it’s different. The thought fell like bitter poison in his stomach.
    It had all seemed so clear in Sheysa when he and Kayla had held each other one last time. His feelings for her had been good and bright and powerful. They would have to be patient. It would be difficult navigating even the trueborn-lowborn divide when the treatment removed her GEN circuitry. But someday she would be restored and they would find a way.
    But then his life got torn apart when his father went to prison. His mother left him and Pitamah to fend for themselves. She’d taken with her the adhikar she’d brought into her marriage and managed to claim most of Pitamah’s since he’d given it over to Devak’s father, Ved, some years ago.
    She’d even appropriated three-quarters of Devak’s adhikar, declaring she’d be acting as his regent since he was two years away from his majority. Never mind she’d never sent so much as a dhan Devak’s way since then. If not for the strings pulled by Pitamah’s friends, Zul and Devak might have ended up minor-status like the Tsais.
    The hope he and Kayla had shared in Sheysa had vanished with his adhikar. He came to understand that each step down in status degraded others’ opinions. It did not pass the notice of other trueborns that he and Pitamah clung to their high status by their fingernails. Bring Kayla into the picture and trueborn scorn would bury them all, with Kayla getting the worst of it. How could they change anything for the better then, when no one would listen to them anymore?
    They would be safe only within the