by Ramona Finn
It had found the virus for me again, the one we’d tracked down together remotely, back at the Station. My tech made it easy for me, showing me the virus as if it were a plum on a vine. All I had to do was pluck it and the Datapoint program would continue to operate without it, unaltered by Haven. We could all go back to the way the program was meant to be operating, where it only culled those who deserved it.
I held the virus in my hand, mentally, testing its weight. I was so tempted. But no.
I cast it aside. I wasn’t here simply for the virus. I was here for the Database, the whole culling program. The long, horrible arm of the Authority, with its death grip over the colonies. I wrenched my tech away from the virus and toward the main memory of the Database. If we wiped it clean, then it would only be a shell program. It would be like a house left empty of its occupants.
It would have no hold over the Datapoints, and the Authority would have to start from scratch. That’s what I wanted. That’s what I’d come for.
And there! There it was. I forced my tech to see it like a switch that I could simply flick. Turn it off and off went the Database. But no, it wasn’t that simple. It wasn’t a plum on the vine. It didn’t want to be turned off. I’d have to write the code that could allow it to be turned off and enter it. My tech, though still warring with me, bent to my will, and the code began to write itself, across my brain, and then it was implanting directly into the Database. If I could finish writing it, this would all be over. I doubled-down. I felt my teeth groaning under the pressure of my jaw, my hands opening and closing.
Dimly, somewhere in my head, I heard a familiar, hated voice… shouting. And then I felt it. What I’d felt before.
Haven’s voice in my head. He was connecting to me. I heard his voice in my ears again. Was he here?
With a monumental effort, I wrenched open my eyes. My brain, still so completely entwined with my tech, only allowed me snapshots of what my eyes were seeing, of the basement room. But I saw it. Wells on his knees. A soldier with a gun to his temple. The other Ferrymen were face-down, pinned under the knees of other soldiers. There was a man standing with his back to the wall, no weapon in his hands, his silver eyes unreadable. Dahn. He must have hacked his way into the room. How he’d gotten off the Ray, I had no idea.
And in front of me was someone who was so close I could scent him. A strangely sterile scent. I could see the white flash of his person. That strangely blank look on his face. Haven. Haven was there right next to me. And inside my brain, all at once.
Datapoint! Stand down. Step back from that. That’s your lifeblood, Datapoint. That in your hands is your heart. Your soul. You cannot live without the Database. His words were toxic, but my tech trembled with the desire to follow his directions. I could feel a seam in my brain that I hadn’t known existed until now. I realized that this might actually tear me in two, to disobey Haven. The part of me that was me might just leave behind the part of me that was a Datapoint. Just like I’d tried to tear off my own hand when I’d fought my own tech before. But, yes, I would surgically separate myself from myself if I had to.
It was this thought that I clung to. If I had to tear myself in two, I would do it. Damn him, but I would. Prepared for the worst, I fortified myself.
I forced my tech to grip tighter to the codes that would unplug the brainstem of the Database, wiping it clean as if it had never existed.
A purple blur caught my eye. Behind Haven was a woman. Purple-haired and on her knees. She gripped her head and stared up at me.
Sullia.
Or, the remnants of her. I could barely see the beautiful girl she used to be. She looked half-dead. Gone was her aloof, neutral expression. In its place was only pain. I could see lacerations covering her skin, and her eyes were sunken and bloodshot. She looked barely human.
I inputted half the code that would destroy the Database.
Sullia gasped and fell flat-down. This was killing her, I realized. Behind her, Dahn was also gripping the tech at his temples. He was in pain, but he wasn’t dying.
“Do it!” Sullia screamed, rolling onto her back. “God. Just end it. Do it!”
As long as I lived, I’d never forget the ragged, pitted, gutted, sound of her words. It was as if she’d been scooped clean with a sharp spoon. As if there were nothing left.
Datapoint! Stand down! I could feel Haven’s words as if they were a hand on my wrist, yanking me back from the edge of a cliff.
I slammed my eyes closed, and I watched my tech input the remaining code. All I had to do was accept it now, enter it. And the entire Database would be gone. All of it. Haven’s power dissolved with the snap of fingers.
“Don’t!” I heard him scream in my ears and in my head.
His grip inside my brain tightened even further. I knew that he was holding part of me back. Part of me would never be able to escape him. Like he had me by the hair.
“Don’t!”
Too late.
I jumped off the edge of the cliff. I’d entered the codes, and I felt a part of me tear, terribly, away. I screamed in mortal pain even as my brain spun in confusion and my tech flickered along with the Database. The room was spinning. There was blackness, compression… nothing.
Chapter Eighteen
I came awake suddenly, feeling as if there was a lake slowly leaking from my skin. I couldn’t tell where I ended and where the air started. I tried to get my arms to move. One of them flung out fast and the other lay still like a leaden rock.
I heard shouting and could hear my tech banging in my ears, but I couldn’t understand it, could barely read it. I cleared my vision and realized I’d sat myself up. What was I looking at?
A river of purple four feet away from me. Sullia’s hair. Her eyes wide and unseeing. She was curled in on herself like a dead spider. And that’s what she was. She was dead. Her tech smoked at her forehead and on her arm. It was splintered and black.
I’d killed her. The end of the Database had killed her.
Instantly, I scanned across the room to find Dahn, who was rising up onto his knees, as if he’d been knocked down. He looked confused and furious. But his eyes were not on me. They were focusing ten feet to my side. Toward a point of silver and white that I slowly realized was Haven, crouched down on himself.
Haven rose up suddenly, and it was the most human I’d ever seen him look.
Rage lined his face. He lunged at me.
Someone knocked him to the side and I realized it was Wells, no longer at the whim of the soldiers who were confused at what had just happened, and who were looking to Haven for instruction he wasn’t giving. Haven stumbled back but managed to thrust a buzzing electric wand into Wells’ armpit. He fell to the ground then, shouting and twitching. Haven stepped over him, toward me. I braced myself.
The spiral stairs clattered and a white-haired woman pounded down to the room. I recognized her as Kalis Rome, a member of the Authority. There were cuts on her face and her white hair was an eerie blue in the early morning light.
Dahn stepped forward and held her back, away from Haven, who was now scrambling toward her instead of me. Haven’s eyes were blown out and wild looking. He looked like he might embrace Kalis Rome – or he might stab her dead.
“Haven!” she screamed. “What have you done?”
“Me?” He shouted back at her and then turned to me. I was still panting, my body feeling almost as if it belonged to someone else. “It was her. It was this abomination.”
I’d never seen so much hatred on one person’s face.
“The entire Database, gone!” He fell to his knees and screamed, “We were so close! So close!”
“We weren’t close to anything, you monster,” Kalis Rome shouted back at him. “You thought you could play God, designing Datapoints from before their births and implanting viruses into our systems. You did this so that we could all one day return to Earth? Lies! You did this so that you could control our population. Make it putty in your hands. Exactly the way you did wit
h these Datapoints.” She gestured at Sullia’s body. At Dahn. At me.
“What does she mean, designing us from before our births?” Dahn asked, striding forward, coming in front of Kalis Rome to look toward Haven.
Haven, on his knees now, stared back and forth between Dahn and me, a strange expression on his face. Like he was watching a beloved dog snarl and bite at him. But he said nothing.
“He selected for you. He selected your parents,” Rome said in a quiet voice. “We… we suspected he’d done it. But we didn’t have evidence until recently. He came here, with Sullia, to answer for Enceladus. But he’s been using her to keep us trapped. Turn over our power. He had everything he needed,” she admitted, dropping her head. “He had each of our families all in one place at one time. We came here because it was supposed to be paradise. And we ended up creating our own slaughter chamber.”
“You chose our parents.” Dahn’s voice was low and deadly, and apparently, he and I were caught up on the same detail.
Could that be possible? How?
“He arranged the match-ups based on their genetic information,” Rome said as if she’d heard my unspoken question. “Some of them worked out as pairs. Like Glade Io’s parents. And some of them didn’t.”
I watched Dahn’s face as he realized that Haven was the reason he’d been put into this world. That Haven had selected for him a mother who would leave him without turning back. That maybe his mother hadn’t loved him, or maybe she’d left him because she’d had to. Maybe Haven had made her. He’d never know.
“Get out of my head,” Dahn growled, his eyes on Haven’s. I realized that Haven was manipulating him. “Now.”
And that’s when I heard it, too – his voice. She’s lying, Datapoint. She needs to be put down. Cull her. Cull.
Dahn was going red in the face, struggling, fighting with Haven, and I realized why I wasn’t. Because I’d torn myself in two, shutting off the Database. I could hear my tech, and hear Haven, but it wasn’t controlling me. Hell, I was barely controlling me. I tried to lift my arms again and found that I couldn’t. I tried to speak, but only a whine came out of me.
“NO!” Dahn screamed and took a step toward Haven instead of Rome.
Haven fell backwards as if he’d been slapped, and came up sputtering. “You dare attempt to cull me?” he screamed, clambering away from Dahn. Apparently, the attempt had been unsuccessful.
Dahn was striding forward now. “Never again,” he said, “will you turn another child into a murderer. Never again will you steal us from our homes, torture us, use us as your personal weapons. Never.” With that, Dahn grabbed out at Haven, gripping him high on his shoulders, by his neck, and carefully, forcefully, he slammed a knife into Haven’s heart.
Chapter Nineteen
Guards!” Kalis Rome screamed, breaking us out of our collective stupor. We’d all been staring at the growing circle of blood surrounding Haven’s lifeless body. It took me a second to realize that the pounding of feet above us was probably not coming from Ferrymen.
I felt the tight band of two arms hauling me up by the armpits. “Can you walk?” Wells asked into my ear. I honestly wasn’t sure. Two attempts proved I couldn’t.
The spiral staircase trembled and guard after guard piled down into the basement. Royta held me up from one side while Oort and Nix stepped in front of us all.
“Leave the boy!” Rome shouted, pointing toward Dahn. “But take the others. They’re known members of the Ferrymen and I just witnessed them destroying the Authority Database.”
The guards surged ahead. “Don’t fight!” I commanded the Ferrymen around me. There were too many, and some of us were sure to get killed.
“Screw that!” a voice called from the top of the spiral staircase, and there, suddenly, was Kupier, grinning down into the dark basement and sizing up the fifteen or so guards that were surging toward us.
Kupier jumped over the side of the staircase, already swinging his weapon of choice – a metal-tipped bat – and clearing a path six feet wide through the soldiers. Kalis Rome lunged to the side and Dahn sprinted away from Haven’s body, flinging himself between Rome and the fray.
More Ferrymen poured down the staircase, catapulting themselves toward the guard, fighting like this was the last fight of their lives.
My consciousness was dimming as Royta and Wells dragged me through an opening in the fight.
“I’ve got her!” Kupier shouted, grabbing me around the waist and holding me like a baby.
He was taking the stairs two at a time, running with me in his arms; I could see over his shoulder that some of the Ferrymen were covering us from behind while others had to still be fighting in the Database room.
“You and me?” Kupier huffed as he exploded out of the mirrored building and onto the street. “We’re gonna have words about you doping me up.” He looked down at me. “Just as soon as I confirm that you’re not gonna die on me.”
I tried to speak, but I couldn’t. My brain wasn’t talking to my body. I felt as if some crucial wire within me had just been completely unplugged. I wanted to close my eyes and sleep forever.
I took a deep breath. I couldn’t die. I still had one more job to do. I had to hack into the defense bunker and take down the shield.
“Take me to the… defense bunker.” It had taken me about fifteen seconds to say that much, and all my breath was gone by the end of the sentence. “It’s the only way.”
Kupier looked down at me, pausing. “It’ll kill you. Look at you – you can barely speak.”
“It’s the only way.”
A resigned look passed over his face.
I was dimly aware of the other Ferrymen joining us as they caught up to us, but I had no idea how many were in the group. If we’d left any behind, if any had perished. All I knew was that we were sprinting toward the Ray.
“We won’t be able to get out if that shield is still up,” Oort said urgently to Kupier.
“I can do it,” I tried again. “Just get me to the bunker.”
“It’s too far,” Oort said, looking over his shoulder at what I could only assume were soldiers closing in on us. “Can you do it remotely? From the Ray?”
It would be harder, but I thought of the Ray. The home it had become. I thought of what it would feel like to die alone in a bunker. Or on the Ray, surrounded by all these people.
“Yes. I can do it.”
Kupier sprinted even faster toward the Ray and, moments later, I recognized the dingy, metallic scent of the loading dock, and then the morning light was blocked out as the door closed all of us in. “Tell Cast to get the ship ready for take-off. We’re going to need every second we can get.”
I could hear the tell-tale sign of bullets zinging off the exterior of our ship.
“Now, Glade. Now!” That was Oort. I could feel him holding my hand, and feel Kupier holding the other as I tried to corral my brain into paying attention, listening to me. I’d need my brain and my tech to work together right now, again, and I could barely get one or the other to work.
I tried, and my consciousness dimmed at the edges. I pulled back and breathed, commanding my tech to find the computer inside the defense bunker, to infiltrate the system. But I was broken. It was like trying to catch sand in my fingers.
Suddenly, a tremendous bang shook the Ray. I could hear debris bouncing off the sides of the ship as a cry rose up from the Ferrymen around me.
“She did it!”
“I didn’t think she was going to explode it!”
“Jesus!”
“She did it!”
“Glad she’s on our side!” I opened my eyes in confusion, searching for Kupier. I had done nothing. They all seemed to think I’d done something that I hadn’t. But he wasn’t looking down at me; he was calling instructions to someone, and sure enough, the Ray lifted off.
He picked me up like a baby and strapped both of us into one of the jump seats that lined one wall of the landing deck.
“Kupier, that w
asn’t me,” I whispered to him, slowly. “I didn’t make that explosion. Couldn’t have.”
“I know,” he whispered back, his arms tight around me and something hot against the back of my neck. He was crying, I realized. He was crying hard. “That was Haven’s bomb. That was my plan. Only, I wasn’t in the pilot’s seat of the one-man ship. Someone else was.”
My stomach tightened down to the size of a flower bud as I suddenly scanned the room around me. The ship was flying, so that meant that Cast was driving. It wasn’t him. There was Wells and Oort and…
I gasped against the pain that threatened to choke me. A memory of landing on Earth hit me. The attack systems on Earth were supposed to have been shut down as we landed. They should have been. We’d practiced it a hundred times together. She should have been able to do it. But we’d been getting fired on the entire time we moved toward landing. It was because she hadn’t been in the cockpit at all. She’d already jettisoned. She’d already been on her way to Haven’s bomb.
Aine had saved us all.
And now she was gone.
A few numb moments later, Kupier unbelted us from the jump seats and carried me through the Ray to the big room. He laid me out on the floor before jumping up to grab blankets. I rolled my head to one side and then to the other. There were wounded Ferrymen all around me. Cries of both pain and triumph filled the air. I watched as Laris bounded from person to person. But then my eye caught on something else.
The huge window filled up my entire vision. And through that window, there was Earth, growing smaller and smaller.
I knew exactly how many miles we were away from Earth. And, I realized with a jolt, I knew exactly how many miles we were away from the moon and the Station and Pluto. Because my tech was still activated. Humming quietly in the background, not demanding anything from me.