The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  “Well, you basically told them that their mother wasn’t who they thought she was, that she left them on purpose, for a rebel cause, that she was planning to become a murderer, and that you had a hand in her death. That’s more than just grief,” Kupier said gently. “That’s losing her in a lot of different ways. Even their memories of her have to change now. And the way they look at you, that’s going to be different, too.”

  Glade nodded, a shuttered look in her eyes. “That makes sense,” she said flatly.

  Kupier knelt beside her chair, took her by the shoulders, and made her face him. “I’ll talk to them, Glade. I’ll help as much as I can.”

  “You think you can fix it?” she asked in a voice he’d never heard her use before. She was utterly lost, he realized. But he wasn’t going to let her stay that way. He couldn’t.

  “We’ll figure it out, DP-1. Together. I promise.”

  Our first afternoon on Charon, I went to visit Cast and Wells, who had opted to stay together instead of bunking in different hosts’ homes. There had only been one place to set them up. With Aine.

  Aine’s small, earthen home, where she lived alone, was tidy and surprisingly welcoming. I’d been expecting someplace utilitarian, with, I don’t know, maps and schematics on the walls. But this was very much like a home. Right down to the colorful rug at the door and mismatched dishes drying on the rack.

  Aine’s wrist was wrapped from where she’d hurt it during the attempted landing yesterday, but both Cast and Wells looked healthy – content, even.

  All three of them were sitting at Aine’s kitchen table when I arrived, and for one moment, I really felt like they looked sort of like a family. A twang of regret had me pausing in the doorway even though Aine had already called out to invite me in.

  I’d really screwed things up with my sisters that morning – my family.

  For so long, I’d dreamed about getting them somewhere safe, even if I couldn’t be with them. My only dream had been to get them off of Io. But now they were here, on Charon, and I was able to be with them. And it wasn’t perfect. I’d hurt them, badly. The fact was, I had no idea how to be a family with them. How to laugh with them or take care of them.

  It was strange to see Cast, a fellow Datapoint, shoulder to shoulder with Wells, laughing across the table at something Aine had said. What was his trick? How was he fitting in with these normal people so well? I only stayed for a half an hour. Their boisterous excitement over the ‘next steps’ toward taking down the Authority was too much for me. They had the full-throttle energy of the naive. Making it worse, Kupier hadn’t shared the specifics of his plan with anyone but me, as far as I knew. And even Aine was dreaming and laughing and treating our impending battle with the Authority as if it were fortified with some sort of cosmic magic.

  I hadn’t even realized that Cast and Wells would truly want to fight the Authority. When they’d escaped off the Station with me, I’d simply been under the impression that I was bringing them to Charon to start a life that would be free from the strict rules that had bent them both so harshly. I hadn’t necessarily thought I was recruiting them into being Ferrymen. Watching them laugh and chat and dream around the table gave me the unsettled feeling that, if I’d been trying to keep them safer by kidnapping them from the Station, I really might have failed.

  I left Aine’s house with a sort of sick churning in my belly. It was almost like the three of them were under a sort of spell. They were still energized from everything that had happened yesterday, so that I could tell that the dregs of fear had dissolved into righteousness. To them, there was no way we were ever going to crash.

  But crashing that ship had been a very real possibility. If my brain had moved even a few seconds slower, we might not have made it.

  I wanted to go find my sisters, but Kupier had given me very strict instructions to keep clear of the house for the afternoon. He was going to talk with them, he and Owa. They were going to try and smooth over some of the damage that I had done earlier that day. I wasn’t supposed to come home until he commed me.

  I took the opportunity to head up to the landing pad and check on the Ray. Charon was an underground city that went at least ten levels deep, as far as I knew, and maybe there were even more levels than that. The first level was closest to the surface, and that’s where all the ships were parked and landed. The second was a bustling marketplace. The third was residential. The fourth was industrial, and that’s where all of Charon’s famed innovators and scientists and inventors had their workspaces. The fifth level on down to the tenth were naturally occurring caverns. The fifth was the largest cavern I’d ever seen, though I hadn’t been down there since the last time I’d been on Charon. It was large enough to hold the entire population of Moat, and it had, at one point, the last time the Authority had bombed Charon. It was far enough underground that the citizens had remained protected, too. From everything except the falling stalactites, at least.

  My ears popped as I walked up the packed dirt staircase to the landing pad. I was just stepping out onto the cement floor when someone grabbed my arm. I turned to see an older man with long white hair looking at me strangely. He let go of me quickly like he’d been burned, the second he saw the crystal tech at my cheek and on my arm. It was a dead giveaway that I was a Datapoint. I shrugged him off and flinched when he grabbed me by the arm again.

  “What?”

  He was obviously freaked out about speaking to a Datapoint, but he still cleared his throat. “You wanna go out on the pad, you gotta wear one of those.”

  He pointed to a pile of breathing masks.

  “I’ve never had to wear one before.” I’d been on the landing pad plenty of times without having to.

  “You want your lungs to collapse? Fine by me.” He threw his hands up and scowled, backing away from me.

  Seeing how serious he was, I understood. I’d only ever been on the landing pad at scheduled times when the doors were securely closed. But if I was out there and the doors opened to let a ship in or out, there’d be nothing between me and the very thin atmosphere of Charon. And then outer space, just a hop and a skip from that.

  I looked back at the man. He hadn’t been hassling me. He’d been warning me. It was actually kind of… nice.

  “Thank you,” I said to him. The words had felt a little clunky in my mouth, and the strange, popped eyebrow he gave me didn’t help.

  He nodded once and then turned back toward the staircase. I strapped one of the masks onto my face and headed toward the Ray.

  I stayed an hour, maybe two, inspecting her from the outside and the inside. Twice while I was on the landing pad, the great doors opened like a jaw to let a ship land or leave. Outer space was black as velvet through the gates, and though Charon’s thin atmosphere kept my feet on the ground, there was still the eerie, lifting weightlessness that came with the pull from the vacuum of space.

  Weirdly, I kind of enjoyed wearing the mask. It completely covered the tech on my face, and when I pulled down the sleeve of my long, chunky sweater – some hand-me-down of Owa’s – no one could see my tech. I was anonymous on the landing pad. The other techs were bustling past me and even bumping into me as they went from this ship to that. I couldn’t remember the last time my shoulder had casually bumped into someone else’s, except Kupier. This was what it felt like to not be the chosen one. It felt so good that tears stung my eyes in relief. Like stepping into a cool shower after a day of long, hot work.

  When I was halfway through a diagnostic inspection of the Ray’s engine room, the clunky comm on my wrist buzzed. Kupier had given it to me with a shrug and a smile. It wasn’t the sleek, secret comm that I’d used to have to hide on my tech. That one had been like a handheld pane of glass, beautiful in its simplicity and design. This one was more like a stopwatch lashed onto my wrist by an old and somewhat dirty strip of linen. It told the time and accepted and sent off typed-out messages.

  “It works,” Kupier had responded to my raised, skeptical
eyebrow. “But not well enough to keep a GPS on you. Oh, and it won’t take over your body and start controlling your thoughts and stuff.”

  It had touched me that he’d purposefully chosen a piece of crap comm for me. He’d known that I wouldn’t want to be tracked in any way, and that I wasn’t in the market for fancy technology. I’d had enough of that to last me a lifetime. I wanted simple. I wanted effective.

  And, I wanted my freedom.

  It meant that I had a strange fondness for the hunk of ugly metal and plastic that lay warm against my wrist. Something I’d never once felt for the gorgeous, forbidding tech implanted in my arm. I was glad my sleeves covered it.

  I opened the message that Kupier had sent through. It was time for me to come home and have dinner with everyone. It was as clear as it was ever going to be, he told me.

  When I got back to Owa’s adobe-style home, I kicked off my shoes by the front door, just the way she’d asked me to yesterday, and followed the sounds and smells toward the kitchen. I pulled up short at the scene in front of me. For the second time that day, I felt as if I were intruding on some patched-together family that I was so deeply not a part of. The weird thing was, half of the people in the scene actually were my family. And still, I had no way in. I guessed I was to thank for that. Me and my big, clumsy mouth.

  Kupier and his little sister Misha sat across the kitchen table from Daw and Treb. My sisters had red, puffy eyes and Daw was still sniffling a bit. Treb was trading what looked like a playing card with Misha and pretending to scowl at the girl who was a few years younger than her. Kupier laughed and refereed some aspect of the game in a way that made both girls bark with surprised laughter. Daw’s hands were working something under the table, but I couldn’t see what it was.

  Owa and Oort stood over the stove, and she was scooping some delicious-smelling concoction into a large bowl that he held with two hands. As he turned to carry it to the table, he froze upon spotting me in the doorway. One by one, the others looked up as well. Daw and Treb immediately looked away from my gaze, and any good cheer that might have been in their faces seemed to melt and harden all at once, like lava down the side of a cliff face.

  “Come sit,” Kupier held out one hand to me, a buoy in a rough ocean.

  “No!” Owa exclaimed, and I jumped as if she’d burned me. “For the love of God, child, go wash up. You look like you were washing your hands in motor oil!”

  The ease and matter-of-factness of her words had me blinking myself into a smile. It was just such a Mom thing to say. And she was right. I was all dirty from messing around on the landing pad all day. I nodded and headed to the washroom, feeling like at least some of the tension had been broken. At least Owa wasn’t treating me strangely.

  Footsteps followed me, and I wasn’t surprised when Kupier was there, right behind me all the way into the washroom. I was surprised when he crowded me toward the sink, his front to my back, and leaned around me to flick the water on. It was frigid enough to turn the skin on his fingers an immediate pink. He held my hands away until it was warm. Briskly, he yanked up the sleeves of my sweater and unbuckled the comm from my wrist. Then he grabbed the soap from a shelf next to the clay sink and handed it over.

  I just sort of held the bar of soap, a little flustered by his nearness and confused by his fussing over me. The small mirror over the sink was clean, but it had lost most of its silver over the years. I could just barely make out the two of us in its glass.

  I expected him to step back, but he didn’t. Instead, Kupier looped one arm around my shoulder blades and pulled me into him in a backwards hug. I sort of shrugged and started scrubbing the oil from my hands.

  “They’re kind of in shock,” he murmured, his chin resting on the top of my head. “And right now, that means that they’re mad at you. But I don’t think it’s lasting.”

  “How could it not last?” I asked, getting the grit from under my fingernails and trying to ignore the way his tight hug was making me sort of melt backwards into him. “They think I had a part in Mama’s death. That’s not something you easily forget.”

  “I explained that, Glade. How that’s Haven’s fault. Not yours. That you couldn’t control your tech. I explained what you were like when we rescued you from that trash skip. You were out of your mind, not yourself. You’d have murdered us all, or your own self; it was hard to tell. You’d nearly taken your hand off at the wrist with trying to fight your tech.”

  One of his rough palms slid over the bad scarring on my wrist where I’d cut myself all the way down to the bone, trying to fight my tech. The Ferryman surgeon, Laris, who’d sewn me up had given me two options. Either I use this funky smelling balm and heal fast as hell, with a big old scar as a souvenir, or I let it heal on its own time and not have such a bad scar. I’d chosen the scar. Not only did I not care at all what I looked like, but it was a reminder to me of what the Authority would do to me – given even half a chance. They’d destroy me. No, even worse. They’d make me destroy myself.

  “I think, more than anything,” he continued, “they’re mad at the way you told them. I think it felt like a slap in the face, or like you were re-opening a wound that had just started to close for them. They weren’t prepared.”

  I nodded as I rinsed the soap from my hands. “I just thought doing it fast was better than dragging it out.”

  “Maybe it was. But they’ve been through so much these last few months. Losing your mother, having you in and out of their lives, getting kidnapped by a dashing Ferryman.” He grinned at me through the mirror and tightened his arm across my collarbone when I leaned back into him just a touch. “And now they’re here, the farthest colony out in the solar system, trying to figure out how to make a life with a bunch of rebels. I think it’s best if we try to go as easy on them as we possibly can.”

  He plucked a course little hand towel the color of mud off the wall and handed it over. I saw that someone, probably Owa, had embroidered a crescent moon in each corner. Everything here was just so… family.

  Except for me.

  I sighed. “You’ll have to show me how.”

  “Of course.”

  He took me by the shoulders and turned me. He pulled me into a tight hug before we headed back to the kitchen, though, his chin at my temple, the wiry line of his body seeming to go on forever.

  I stood there stiffly until he reached down and lifted my arms to surround his back.

  “Step one,” he said, “is hugging back.”

  Chapter Four

  This time, Kupier was the one waking her up in the middle of the night to talk tactics. He hadn’t been sleeping well since they’d been back on Charon, and he didn’t particularly want to dwell on the why of it. Maybe it was the hard floor he slept on. Maybe it was that he’d gotten used to sleeping on the rickety, clanking Ray. Or maybe it was because he felt pinned in place by his home colony. A sitting duck. On the Ray, at least he was traveling somewhere. On Charon, all he was ever doing was waiting. For as active a person as he was, it was grating.

  Daw and Treb were sleeping in two muddled, fuzzy piles of blankets on either side of Glade when he peeked his head into their small room. They weren’t speaking to her and hadn’t for the last few days, but he considered it a good sign if they were sleeping next to her, still taking comfort from her presence in the night.

  Though it was the middle of the night, Glade’s eyes came open instantly at the very second he stood in the doorframe. It was as if she’d already been awake and expecting him. But that’s the way it had always been. Her training as a Datapoint had her as alert as a bird, even in the middle of her sleep cycle.

  He saw only two glitterings in the dark where her black eyes were, and then heard the rustle of the blankets as she rose. He tossed her an old sweater of his and she wordlessly followed him toward the living room of the small house, tugging the sweater over the tank top and loose sleep pants she wore. It fell straight to her knees, and for some reason that thrilled him. There was a worn-in
couch that looked exactly the same as it had since his childhood when he’d pretended it was the cockpit of a great, space-traveling ship. One he could use to explore the outer edges of the solar system.

  It creaked under his weight and then under hers when they sat down.

  He picked at the sleeve of her sweater. “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “The world must be ending,” she said dryly, but he thought he could detect just a touch of concern in her eyes.

  “I’ve been thinking about something.” He stretched out his long legs in front of him. “About whether or not I trust you.”

  She pulled back immediately, and Kupier cursed himself for wording it in that way. He knew that was a sore spot for her. Especially where that Dahn guy was concerned. The Datapoint, though she’d considered him a friend, hadn’t trusted her enough to leave the Station with her, which meant she’d had to leave him behind. As a Datapoint, she hadn’t had to value trustworthiness very highly because it had never been subjective before. Datapoints were trusted to do the most logical thing, always. Therefore, their individual trustworthiness was based on their intellect, their physical skills, their abilities to do the jobs they were trained for. It was measurable.

  But now? In this world where people were just people and everyone’s brains and emotions and choices were a mystery? Well, trustworthiness took on a sort of undefinable and mystical quality. Glade wanted to have it, but she had no idea how to get it. All she knew was that she’d failed with Dahn.

  “No, no, that’s not what I meant,” Kupier quickly corrected himself, tugging her sweater so that she was tumbling toward him. “I don’t mean whether or not I do. Of course, I do. I trust you because you’re honest and because you’ve shown up time after time. Because you could have told Haven about our Earth mission and you didn’t. Because you trusted me enough with the lives of your sisters. I trust you for all those reasons,” he insisted, his eyes on hers to make sure she got his point.