by Ramona Finn
It was a memory from the interrogations I’d withstood a few months earlier, after I’d returned to the Station after being kidnapped by the Ferrymen. The Authority had needed to know I was still loyal to them. Loyal to the Station. To my training as a Datapoint. They’d tortured me into giving up every piece of information I’d had on the Ferrymen. I’d almost lost my mind. And afterward, when I’d told them everything I could, I’d stood alongside them, in the brotherhood once again.
“It’s a … very complicated honor,” I finally answered.
Daw looked up at me, one knuckle in her mouth the way she used to do as a kid, and the familiarity of it suddenly made my heart clamp down for my mother. I wanted to lean forward and tug that knuckle free, like my mother would have, but I was worried that the gesture would destroy the three of us. “But aren’t you trained to fight?” she asked. “Even if somebody here tried to hurt you, you could just fight them off, right?”
“Meh, yeah. I mean, I’m really good at fighting. I could certainly take you puppies down.” That made them smile at one another. “But if a whole colony came for me? I’d be toast.” I read their expressions and tried to explain more. “Datapoints are feared more than they’re respected—you two know that, right?” I couldn’t quite pin down their anxiety. Were they confused about Datapoints in general, or just me? Were they worried for me? “No one is going to storm in here and hurt me. I’m just saying that I’m not invincible.”
“So, he has to stay?” Daw asked, and I realized that she was still glancing nervously out toward the main room where Dahn was.
“What don’t you like about him?” I asked, mystified. Dahn wasn’t the biggest teddy bear around, but he was a source of comfort for me back at the Station. Dahn had his ambitions, sure, but he wasn’t going to kick me down a stairwell to take my spot as the chosen one. And there were a few Datapoints who probably would.
Daw and Treb were eyeing one another now, apparently trying to figure out how to describe what they didn’t like about Dahn.
Finally, Treb faced me. “He looks… dead.”
“What?”
“There’s nothing behind his eyes. Like, have you ever seen a picture of a snake before?”
Most of Earth’s animals were extinct now, though some, like cats and dogs and farm animals, had been evacuated alongside us all those hundreds of years ago. Snakes, however, existed only in photos and videos in our historical archives.
“Dahn doesn’t look like a snake.” What they were saying had surprised me. I thought Dahn was handsome, and so did most of the male-inclined Datapoints on the Station. But my sisters were freaked out just from that momentary glimpse of him. What were they seeing that I didn’t?
As a Datapoint, my first analysis of any situation was logical, analytical. Unlike most humans who engaged with the world in an emotional way. Usually, it made Datapoints superior. We were strategic, tactical, calm. But occasionally, I wished for the emotional input that came so naturally to my sisters. Was I blind to something that they could see clearly?
“I don’t want him here,” Daw whispered. And then her face screwed up in awful pain. Her hands, stronger than I’d thought they’d be, gripped at the shoulders of my shirt. I winced when her fingers bit into me. I wasn’t even sure if she was trying to shove me away or hug me closer. I didn’t think she knew, either. “I don’t want you here, either.”
“Daw!” Treb looked horrified. She tried to yank Daw’s hands from my shoulders. “Don’t say that! We’ve been waiting for years for Glade to come home.”
That heavy, saturated sack of emotions was starting to settle over top of me again. I felt like I had to keep moving. I needed to walk or run. If I stayed still, it would crush me down forever. I just knew it.
“I don’t want you, Glade,” Daw repeated, and her fingers were trembling. I would have pulled her off, but I could feel she was losing strength. Losing steam. Her eyes were glazed and bright, her voice pulling at the edges, stretching with grief. “I want Mama. I don’t want you. I want Mama.”
And then, like the volcanoes in the distance, spitting smoke and flame into the sky, Daw’s emotions roiled to the surface. She went from stretching halfway across the bed to grab me into being a contracted little snail. I couldn’t believe how small she looked, her face jammed into her knees and her blonde hair a messy net over Mama’s pillow.
The light was failing. It would be night soon, though when the volcanoes were awake, there wasn’t much difference between night and day. The smoke made the sky opaque and the glow from the magma dyed everything a sickening red. And that’s the color that we were. The three of us.
We’ve been waiting years for Glade to come home.
Treb laid herself over Daw, whispering words of comfort that I couldn’t hear. Even if I could have heard them, though, I guessed they’d probably mean absolutely nothing to me. If Dahn was a snake, then so was I. There was nothing inside me but the machinery implanted into my arm and alongside my cheekbone. They’d implanted my integrated tech and extracted my soul. I was sure of it. And I’d never been more sure of it than I was at that moment. My two sisters wept on one side of the bed, needing a mother. Needing comfort. Needing safety. All I had to do was reach out my hand to them, but I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I shut my eyes and pretended I wasn’t there. In my head, I was on a gigantic, rickety ship, cobbled together by a bunch of rebels. There were enemies on this ship, sure. But there was a friend, too. A friend who would have known how to comfort my sisters. I wanted my friend. I wanted Kupier.
Instead, I was alone. Being smothered under this unfightable weight. Alone.
Chapter Two
Glade.
The word was spoken through my tech. I sat up, blinking into the red-dark of my mother’s room, instantly awake. My sisters, tangled up together on one side of my mother’s bed, were breathing deeply, asleep. I knew exactly what had woken me up. There was only one person in the universe who spoke to me through my integrated tech. Who I could hear in my head.
I rose from the bed and tiptoed out of the room, not wanting to wake my sisters. Dahn waited for me in the living room, rising up from an old, rickety chair when I closed my mother’s door at my back. I scanned my tech and saw that it was 9:30 at night. My sisters and I had been asleep for an hour.
“What is it?” I asked him in a low voice as I crossed the room. A scent caught my attention, coming from the kitchen.
“Your neighbor came by. She brought food. And information. Or so she says.”
I stopped on my heel and turned to him, seeing his silver eyes lit with the same eerie red that lit everything on Io right now. I couldn’t read his face.
“She wouldn’t tell me what she wanted to talk to you about. She said to send you over when you woke up. It didn’t matter what time it was,” he added when I remained frozen.
Finally, I nodded. “Did she say her name? I have a few neighbors here.”
“Cyril Io, she said. But, Glade…” He was suddenly in front of me, blocking my way without touching me. Dahn and I had come through our training together; we’d sparred a hundred times, a thousand. I knew I had as equal a chance of getting past him as I did getting my ass pinned to the ground. “I want to go with you.”
“No,” I said simply, and his eyes burned with something I couldn’t name.
“I want to go with you,” he repeated.
“No,” I repeated right back to him. “Someone needs to stay with my sisters.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Your sisters do not want to wake up and find themselves alone with a snake.” He eyed me for a second. “Thin walls.”
“They’ll get over it, Dahn. I’m going alone. I’ll be back in a minute.”
“Glade.” Frustrated, he tried one more time, but words seemed to fail him. “Fine. Reach out on your tech if you need me.”
I nodded, and then I was around his bulky frame and out the front door. I hopped our side fence and jogged up Cyril’s front walkway. She was
a strange older woman, and she’d lived there alone since I was a baby. My mother had never liked her, exactly, but they’d been neighborly. Once, when the main volcano had threatened its biggest eruption in a century, we’d had Cyril come stay with us in our emergency cellar.
But that didn’t mean I had any clue of what to expect from her as she yanked open the door. She stood there, cloth tied over the lower half of her face and her fly-away steel gray hair yanked into a messy knot on the top of her head. She wore an apron over thick canvas pants and a tunic.
“Come in quick.” She hurried me indoors, and the smell of her house was strangely familiar. Musty and bready. I must have been inside as a child, though I had no memory of it.
All the electric was off in her dark house. “Who is that man at your house?” she asked.
“Dahn is a Datapoint.” I cleared my throat. “A friend.”
She turned to face me then, and I saw her eyes linger on my cheek. She shuffled backwards a few steps and put a chair in between us, under the guise of straightening it up.
“Dahn said you had information for me?” I prodded her.
She paused, and her eyes went small and beady. She was seriously rethinking having me in her kitchen.
I was freaking her out, I realized. Maybe I looked as snake-like as Dahn did. I sat down at one of the ashy wooden chairs at her kitchen table and tried to channel Kupier, the most human person I knew. What would he be doing with his hands? His face? I put my lips into a half-smile and set my hands casually on the table, hoping my forced friendliness didn’t look too creepy.
Cyril sat down, hiding her hands in her apron. “I’m no traitor to the Authority.”
I raised an eyebrow. Interesting way to start out this conversation…
She cleared her throat. “But your mama was.”
I pulled up short, the words making almost no sense to me at all. “What?”
“Look,” Cyril said in a harsh whisper before she stood up and started rifling through a kitchen drawer. “I’ve been your mama’s neighbor going on twenty years now, and I don’t know what the Authority knows about her and what they don’t, and I thought it might make sense to tell somebody what I know. And considering you’re the closest thing to the Authority that I ever met… well. Might as well tell you.” She fished out a single homemade cigarette and set it between her lips with fingers that trembled. A loose piece of tobacco dangled from the end of the cigarette as she fumbled for matches.
“This is crazy, Cyril,” she mumbled to herself. “Too late now. Already invited her over.”
“Cyril, what’s going on?”
“I changed my mind. I shouldn’t tell you. You were her daughter. Go get the other one. The boy Datapoint. That makes more sense.”
“Cyril.” I rose up from the chair, my fingers making pyramids on the table top. Any humanity I may have been channeling was long gone. I knew she was looking into the eyes of a machine. Her cigarette trembled hard enough that the loose piece of tobacco fluttered down to the ground like the ashes from the volcano. “You need to tell me what the hell is going on right now. Is this about her murder? You saw it?”
She shook her head and scratched a match against the wall to light it. I waited, trembling on the edge of patience while she took a drag on the cigarette that nearly halved the damn thing in one go. “I wasn’t here. I didn’t see it. I got home from work and the block was buzzing with the news. They’d already taken her body away and everything. No, I don’t know nothing about her murder, I’m sorry.” Cyril covered her eyes with the hand that held the cigarette. When she spoke again, her voice was cracked. “But I know a little bit about the way she was living her life.”
“What are you talking about?”
Cyril turned away and she moved toward her potted sink. I watched her knuckles go white where she gripped on for dear life. “They’re gonna kill me for not telling sooner. I’ve known for a decade and I never told nobody. Didn’t think it was my business. Besides, she had three girls that would turn into orphans if I told. I—God. They’re gonna kill me, aren’t they?”
“Who?” I was standing now, too, my hands in my hair in frustration. If she didn’t start making sense in about T-minus-three seconds, I was gonna have to start beating the words out of her.
“I didn’t tell anyone, and that makes me as big a traitor as she was. I should have told.”
“A traitor? My mother? Are you saying that she was a traitor to the Authority?”
Cyril said nothing, but her hands gripped the sink even harder, the end of her cigarette matching the glowing red eyelashes spearing down the side of the volcano that lay miles outside her window.
I wracked my brains for all the ways a mother of three, living peacefully on Io, could be a traitor to her government. “You mean she was outspoken? Dissenting…?”
Cyril shook her head. “No. She was a good citizen in all outward appearances. She... She hid in plain sight. Don’t make me say it out loud, child.”
The word was there, then. In my mind. What Cyril was really saying. I understood what she was insinuating, but it sure as hell didn’t make any sense to me. “The Ferrymen?” I asked.
Cyril’s back went as tight as a bow string. “Hush,” she growled, her eyes bouncing in about ten different directions. She was terrified of someone hearing us. Paranoid.
“Cyril.” I strode over to her and spun her around. She gasped like I’d hit her, and maybe I was being too rough, but I didn’t have it in me to care. “Are you telling me that my mother was in league with the Ferrymen?”
Cyril took a drag on the cigarette. “Yeah.”
“What’s your proof?” I demanded.
“Ten years’ worth of suspicious behavior. Leaving in the middle of the night. Hosting people in that house who wasn’t no relation. People not from around here. She had a comm that she used at all hours of the day and night. An interplanetary comm. Three times over the last four years, she disappeared for more than a week. Left the girls here with me. And when she came back, she’d be shot to hell. Bruises, cuts, wounds of all kinds.”
I was speechless as I studied the woman before me. Was there any way this could be true? Regardless, the only evidence I had was inside the ratty-haired head of the woman in front of me, smoking a cigarette down to her fingernails. My Datapoint training screamed in my head, Do not believe this wacko! A single person’s testimony meant nothing. Especially when she was halfway cracked in the first place.
But another voice spoke, too. And this time, it wasn’t my own. It was Kupier’s voice. Could it be true? He asked me. Is there any world where this is true?
God’s honest truth? I had no idea. This didn’t sound anything like the mother that I’d known. She’d told me a thousand times in my life to never do anything that would get me noticed. Her life’s ambition for me had been that I fly under the radar. I couldn’t imagine her doing something like this. Flying in the face of our system of government. And I certainly couldn’t imagine her doing something that could get her torn away from her children. Or murdered.
Again, I considered the woman in front of me. She was still trembling. She thought she’d be executed for keeping this information from the Authority. Why would she tell me this if she didn’t believe it, though, when she was this scared?
“Why are you telling me this? Why not keep this secret to the grave if you think it’ll get you killed?”
“Be-because he’ll come for those sisters of yours. I know he will. He’ll recruit them exactly the same way he recruited your mother. He waited until she was desperate. Right after your father was culled. She was grieving and angry. That’s when he came for her. Sucked her right into all that mess.”
“What? Who are you talking about?”
“Their leader. The Ferryman leader.”
At first, my mind went directly to Kupier. That shaved head, his ever-present smile, those eyes so blue they made me thirsty. “When? Ten years ago?”
She nodded. “That’s when I
saw him over there. Ten years ago. When she first got involved in all this.”
So, not Kupier then. He wasn’t the leader ten years ago. His brother was. Luce. “How did you recognize him?”
“Please, child. You know their faces are plastered all over our screens. The Authority want to make sure every single citizen knows exactly what the Ferrymen look like.”
“Luce, the leader of the Ferrymen, came to Io ten years ago and recruited my mother,” I summed up flatly.
“And now I think he’ll come for your sisters. Just the way he came for your mother. I’m telling you, child. Get them the hell off of Io unless you want them turning into Ferrymen just like your mother.”
“Luce is dead,” I said.
Surely, she must have known that. I eyed her, and the longer I looked, the beadier her eyes became, the rattier her hair. The smell of her cigarette started to burn at my nostrils. There was too much smoke. Not enough clean air. She was a crazy old woman who was half out of her mind.
“I’m telling you. They’re going to come for your sisters,” she insisted.
“I have to go.” This was so screwed up. I hated humans. I had no way of knowing if she was telling the truth. And if she was lying, then why? Here she was, warning me against the Ferrymen when, over the last few weeks, the only thing I had wanted was for the Ferrymen to come for my sisters. Daw and Treb would be safer with the Ferrymen than in the hands of the Authority.
“Fine. I did my piece. I told you. Nothing more I can do.”
“Goodbye, Cyril.”
She said nothing as I walked out of her house and back to mine.
Dahn was waiting for me in the kitchen, staring down at the kale pie that Cyril had dropped off when she’d come to speak to me.
“What happened? What did she want?”