by Ramona Finn
“Nothing,” I replied. “She’s a crazy woman.”
I picked up the pie and dumped it in the trash.
I woke up the next morning drowning in blonde hair. My sisters had snuggled up to me sometime during the night and I hadn’t had the heart to move them. We all still slept on Mama’s bed. With a small jolt, I lay there and realized that it was really Mama and Papa’s bed, but Papa had been gone for so long that I didn’t even think of it that way anymore.
And now Mama was gone, too. My sisters still slept as I looked at the pattern of cracks in the red dirt ceiling of Mama’s room. The cracks were as familiar to me as the pictures that hung on the wall. I’d always thought that they looked a bit like the waves in an ocean. Swooping up and back, meeting one another and breaking. I’d slept in this bed so many times after Papa had died. I’d wake up crying in the night to Mama gently lifting me up from my own bed. Carrying me in here. She used to let me play in here when I needed a break from the twins. She’d leave some sort of puzzle for me to solve. She had a million little wooden solvers. Once, at her wits’ end with how fast I was solving the puzzles she bought for me, she just took a hammer to an old calculator, handed the pieces over, and said, ‘Fix it.’
My throat gave a strange, tight ache and I tried to swallow the feelings down. It didn’t work. My eyes were hot and scratchy. I could smell the scent of my sisters’ soap. The same soap I’d used growing up. It was a mixture of clay and peppermint oil. My mother made it. Used to make it. I wondered how much we had left before we’d use it all up. Because she was never going to make anymore.
It was then that the tears slid hotly down my cheeks.
Haven had told me not to be alarmed if my body reacted this way. That no matter how much we excelled at our Datapoint training, things like this triggered our deepest human emotions. I’d never hated him more than I had at this moment, though. Tears coursing down my cheeks. Crying for my mother’s death, and thinking of Haven. Wondering if he’d had a part in it.
They’d told me it was Ferrymen who’d killed her. A Ferryman attack on the colony, and she was the only casualty.
I knew that, very soon, I’d have to sit down with Daw and Treb and ask them everything they knew about Mama’s death. They’d been there, after all. But right now, I couldn’t think about it. The details. Who did it. What it would mean for me and my sisters. What it would mean about how I fit into this whole horrible mess.
I only thought about my mother now. Long blonde hair and the prettiest hands. The vanilla corncakes she’d make on our birthdays. Her asking me to hide. To spend my life hiding. All so that none of this would happen.
“You okay, Glade?” Daw asked quietly. I hadn’t realized that she’d woken up.
“No.”
Maybe I was supposed to be the strong big sister who never let on that anything was bothering me. Or maybe I was supposed to just straight-up lie. But in that moment, with a sister tucked on each side of me, there was only the truth.
I felt Daw tremble against my shoulder and I knew she was crying, too. We held each other like that for a while. Quiet, our seams shredding, letting out everything we couldn’t keep inside. Each caving sob was in itself a relief, but there were always more of the feelings that were tearing me apart to get out of me. I felt as if something deep in my gut was chewing itself out a of a cage I hadn’t known I’d locked it into.
Finally, finally, when my chest gave out and the tears dried up, Daw fell still beside me and I knew she slept again. Treb had slept through all of it.
When I woke again, the light was clearer, more pink than red. I knew the volcano system was letting up. They usually belched and complained for a few days every month or so. Maybe Io would go easy on me and give us some respite from the ash. It would be a shame to leave here and never have seen the sky the way I remembered it.
It was that thought that pulled me from bed, away from my sisters who both rolled into the warmth I’d left behind. I pulled on one of my mother’s oversized sweaters, some sort of linen that used to be thick and stiff—I remembered hating getting hugs from her when she wore this sweater. But time had softened it. I almost didn’t recognize it.
I wondered if I would have recognized my mother, if I’d seen her, just before her death. Who she’d become. I hadn’t seen her in four years, since my recruitment.
And apparently, now I knew she’d been a Ferryman all along.
I carefully shut my sisters into the room and laughed to myself at the sheer ridiculousness of the whole situation.
The secret comm on the tech in my arm was silent, useless, as if it didn’t connect me to Kupier at all. If it hadn’t been for the messages we’d initially sent one another, I’d have wondered if it worked. I was alone here on Io. My mother was gone. And for the millionth time in the last year, I couldn’t tell who was lying.
I sagged against the door and laughed again. Because why the hell not?
“I’m not an expert on emotions, but I didn’t think you’d be laughing.”
“God!” I shrieked. Dahn had spoken up from three feet in front of me, and I’d nearly jumped out of my skin.
“Sorry.” He smirked and didn’t look sorry at all. Datapoints never were. He shoved a glass of water toward my hand. “You need to drink that or you’ll dehydrate.”
I stared at him, and he furrowed his brow.
“You’ve been crying,” he clarified. “You need to rehydrate.”
I resisted the urge to deny that I’d been crying. Who even cared if Dahn knew that I’d been crying? He’d been there by my side during the only true Culling I’d ever been through. He’d covered for me when my body rejected everything. When my heart, of all things, wouldn’t allow me to cull. To dust life out of citizens like ash from my hands. He’d done all the work. Every single one of them, he’d culled. And still, somehow when I’d been deemed the chosen one, he still hadn’t come forward to tell anyone, including Haven, that I’d balked. That he’d done all the work.
Even when my simulation scores had squashed his under their boot heel. Even when I’d unseated him as the best there ever was. Even then, he hadn’t annihilated me. He hadn’t gone to the Authority and told them that their precious chosen one had never actually culled.
So who cared if he knew I’d been crying? Datapoints didn’t cry, though. Or maybe they did, and never told one another.
But he was here, and his handsome face was tired and serious, but it wasn’t judgmental.
I took the glass of water from him and gulped half of it down in three huge swallows that stretched my cracked throat. I clutched the glass in both hands. “Why did you come, Dahn?”
He looked confused by my question.
“Seriously,” I tried again. “The last few days have been a total blur. I didn’t question it when you boarded the skip with me. But now I don’t understand. You’ve obviously slept in a chair in my tiny living room. I haven’t given you anything to eat. It’s volcano season on Io. Why did you come?”
Glade. He’d spoke in my head again, through my tech. It was his computer speaking to mine. Something that Datapoints usually only ever did during battle. But Dahn and I had taken to utilizing it much more often. I thought sometimes that both of us hated human communication so much that communicating through tech was just easier. I expected him to continue on, speaking to me silently, in my mind. But the next words were out of his mouth, not through his tech.
“Haven sent me.”
Of course. The words sent a strange jolt through me, like a light switch had been flicked on, and I understood. The light switch had been there all along, obviously; it was always there, and I’d ignored it. Haven’s orchestration of my life. It just hadn’t been flicked on until now.
I looked down at the glass of water in my hands, my eyes resting on Kupier’s comm. Of course Dahn had been ordered to accompany me here. I strode into the tiny galley kitchen with its black stone counter and inset icebox. Everything was so primitive here, and even so, I knew that Io was more advan
ced than many of the colonies.
“He sent you to babysit me?”
I could hear Dahn in the doorway. You’re the chosen one, Glade. And Haven had to meet with the Authority. He couldn’t come himself. He sent me to make sure—
“To make sure of what?” I turned and pinned him with my eyes. I knew that I could freeze a man at ten paces with my dark, mechanical gaze, and Dahn was no exception.
“People do crazy things when their parents die. Even Datapoints,” he said by way of an answer.
“He sent you with me to make sure I didn’t do something crazy.” My voice sounded dead.
“It’s a logical move, Glade. You were kidnapped by Ferrymen, tortured because of them, and now your mother has been murdered by them? It seems like a smart move on his part to send someone with you while you bury your mother and get your sisters settled into their new life.”
“He thinks I’m going to go after the men who did this to my mother?”
Dahn didn’t know that I wasn’t talking about Ferrymen. He shrugged.
“He’s right,” I told him. “I’m going to destroy the people who killed her.”
“Alright.” His nod was brisk. “The Ferrymen are outlaws and rebels, and they deserve to be put to death for what they’ve done to our government and what they did to your mother. But there’s a rule of law here, Glade. There’s an order of operations. The Culling is there for a reason. Our entire system of—”
“I’m not going to commandeer a skip and go on a revenge crusade, Dahn.”
Although, now that he mentioned it, that sounded pretty good.
That afternoon, I sat with my sisters in my mother’s bedroom. I didn’t want to do what I was about to do, but I took a deep breath anyways. I was a Datapoint for a reason. My emotions shut down one by one, like a computer going to sleep. In place of them, my logical brain stretched its hind legs, sniffing at the air.
“You have to tell me what happened to Mama.”
Daw and Treb looked up from the photo album before us, completely taken off guard.
“I thought the Authority told you already. It was a Ferryman attack,” Treb said.
“I know. But I want to know what you saw. You two were there.”
Daw looked like I’d just slapped her. “I—I don’t want to talk about it.”
I tightened my jaw. “Fine. Treb, you tell me.”
Treb looked between us and closed the photo album, clutching her hands around her skinny knees. “It was time for Mama to come home from the refinery.” Like most Ioans, our mother had been employed at the mineral refinery on the far edge of the colony. Io supplied most of our solar system with all forms of the trace minerals that could be found here. Our refinery was responsible for everything from batteries to vitamins. “Daw and I were already home from school.”
I nodded and forcibly ignored the way Daw had started rocking in place, like a baby trying to soothe itself. Letting them curl up against me at night was one thing, but reaching out and soothing her was another. I had no idea how to do that. So, I didn’t. “Go on.”
“That’s when the alarm started going off.”
“The attack alarm?”
“Yeah. The city-wide one. And we saw the skips landing in the distance. We knew it was a Ferryman attack.”
“How did you know?”
“The mayor came over that loudspeaker system. She was warning us that Ferrymen had landed and to go into our emergency shelters.”
“But you know that once ours seals, you can’t open it for hours,” Daw cut in, the words bursting out of her like overripe fruit from a tender skin. “So we weren’t going to go in until Mama got home. Or else—”
“Right.” Treb put her arm around her twin. “So, we ran out into the street to see if she was coming. And there was no one else around. It was just us—everybody was already hiding, I guess. But there was Mama. She was at the end of the street and running. Still in her uniform from work. She shouted something when she saw us. And then she jerked really hard and she fell.”
“She fell.”
“Yeah. Like she’d been pushed from behind.”
“Did you hear a bang?”
“No. It was just… silent.”
Ferrymen didn’t kill with far-range sniper rifles. And they sure didn’t have the ability to cull a citizen. But Datapoints did. The Authority did.
A strange haze obscured my vision for a moment. I knew it, suddenly, that they’d culled my mother. That someone, probably Haven, had ordered some Datapoint to cull my mother, and she hadn’t had a chance. I was sure they’d tried to cover it up as a Ferryman attack so that citizens wouldn’t get the horrifyingly accurate idea that apparently the Authority could cull whoever the hell they wanted, and at any moment. Whenever the hell they wanted.
It was then that I almost lost it.
They came for Papa and culled him. They came for me and recruited me. Then they came for Mama and culled her in the street. Not even during a Culling.
What would happen when they came for my sisters?
If Kupier would have answered my comm right then, or if I’d had any reason to think he would, I would have left. I would have left it all behind. I’d have said ‘fuck it’ to the Station, to the Culling.
I’d even have left Dahn behind.
I didn’t care about my strategic position within the Station. I didn’t care about gathering information for Kupier and the Ferrymen. I had hands on my sisters now, and I could have dragged them to the landing pad, shoved them inside a skip, and the three of us could have been gone like that.
They’ll track you, a voice in my head said.
I’ll rip out my tech if I have to.
Then you can’t use your tech to help Kupier gain access to the Authority Database and bring it down, the voice replied again.
Did I care about that? Well, staring down at my skinny, blue eyed sisters, I wasn’t sure if I cared. I might have been fine with disappearing into the solar system. To hell with our civilization. The three of us could disappear into some colony and never think about any of this again.
But Treb was still talking, and now she was gripping my hand. Imploring me to listen to her. “And she didn’t move. I tried to run toward her, but someone held me back. I—I can’t remember who.”
“It was Cyril,” Daw said quietly. “Cyril came out and held us both back.”
“And then these men came forward and knelt around her. And then they left. Just like that.”
“What did the men look like?”
“Um… They were wearing pilots’ clothing, I guess? And they had big guns at their sides. And they ran away really quickly.” She dropped her head into her hands. “And then Cyril dragged us inside.”
“And then, a few hours later,” Daw said, very quietly, “more men came for her. And they took her body away.”
“What?” Treb asked, her eyes wide. “What are you talking about?”
“I watched. I came back up a few hours later to see if she was still there. It was night. And they took her away.”
“Who took her away?”
“I don’t know. They wore city worker uniforms. But their heads were shiny.”
“Shiny?” There was a delicate glass thing in my stomach, and if I moved too quickly, it would shatter, cutting me from every angle. “Like, you mean their heads were shaved?” I asked.
She thought back, and then nodded. “Yeah. They put her into this little skip. Smaller than I’d ever seen before. They took off without even a landing pad. And when we woke up in the morning, the Ferrymen had gone and the Station had sent a message to tell us that you were on your way.”
I stood up and paced away. I paused at the small, inset window in Mama’s room. I could see just the edge of a volcano in the distance. Smoke billowed from it, but it was silent.
I played my sisters’ words in my head over and over again, as many times as I could stand it. I pulled the information apart letter by letter, rearranging it all and putting it back t
ogether.
I crouched, my eyes unseeing, and I only rose up again when my bad leg was screaming with the discomfort of the crouch. And when I did, the light had changed. My sisters were no longer on the bed. I could hear them in the kitchen, clinking around.
And I was fairly certain that I understood what they’d told me. I just had no idea why it would be true.
The Authority had sent assassins or a Datapoint to kill my mother. The Ferrymen didn’t snipe citizens from afar. Actually, from everything I knew about them, they didn’t kill citizens at all. And they certainly wouldn’t have killed my mother. Not when they’d been trying their asses off to win my trust, to recruit me to their side.
My mother had been shot down like a dog in the street, and then some organized group—Datapoints, maybe?—had made sure she was dead. Then they’d left her body on the street for city workers to come and collect.
And then, there was the really crazy part.
Was it Ferrymen who’d come to claim her body? It sounded like them, from the physical description. But why? Had it been Kupier? He’d come to claim her so that the Authority couldn’t defile her even further? But if he’d made it all the way here, then why wouldn’t he have taken my sisters, the way it had been planned all along?
Furthermore, did the Authority know that the body they’d cremated apparently hadn’t been my mother’s? Or were the shaved-headed people who Daw had seen Authority members dressed as Ferrymen? Had they just been trying to trick any bystanders into truly believing it had been a Ferryman attack?
None of it made sense, and I hated having to rely on other people’s eyewitness accounts. I wanted the facts. I wanted them so badly I almost screamed.
Unable to stand it a second longer, I ripped the comm from my tech, making sure my mother’s door was closed.
Kupier had given me the comm as a way to get in touch with him. A slim piece of glass, it fit perfectly into my tech and was completely invisible on my arm. When I took it off, I could send and receive written messages from him.
Since I’d learned that my mother had died, I’d sent ten messages to him. Not a single one had been answered.