The Authority (The Culling Trilogy Book 2)

by Ramona Finn

  I sent it before I lost my nerve. Three quick messages came in rapid succession.

  You.

  Have.

  Me.

  And then there was another.

  DP-1, listen to me. You’re not there just waiting for your demise. Get off your ass and observe. Gather information. Use your position for leverage. I’m not going to let you die on that Station. I’m not going to let them use your beautiful brain as a weapon for genocide. And remember that thing you asked me to do right after we kissed? I know it got screwed up. But I’m going to do it. I swear to you I’m going to do it. You hear me?

  I stared at his messages to me. I pressed my hand over top of the comm then; if the words had been white hot, I would have willingly branded them onto my skin.

  He was still going to try to rescue my sisters from Io. I clutched the comm. Even if we were silent, I still had him. I couldn’t let myself forget that. It was imperative, to my life, that I never forget that.

  I said, you hear me, DP-1?

  I hear you.

  I wish I could see you and figure out if you’re actually believing me or not.

  I believe you.

  I also wish I could kiss the crap out of you.

  I frowned at the comm, but it was only because my smiling was getting out of control. The emotions in my body were so used to running downhill that this strangely effervescent ascension into happiness and relief felt foreign and achy. Like I was stretching my muscles for the first time in weeks. Good and bad.

  Yeah. Yeah.

  I’m going to pretend you said that all romantic and heart-eyed.

  You do that.

  Come on… flirt with me. You know you want to.

  Aren’t you the one who claims our comms are hacked?

  Let ‘em watch.

  Perv.

  I could imagine Kupier laughing in that easy, delighted way of his. That was his body’s natural response to everything. A good, hard laugh. I was almost laughing again myself when a noise down below, from the grate that led into my room, caught my attention. I frowned down at the familiar silhouette standing in my room.

  It was Dahn. He was looking around for me and frowning. And there. He looked terrible. So angry he could barely breathe. At me? Had he known that I’d been less than enthused about Haven’s plan for the new Datapoint protocol? Was he suspicious of me? Or was there another reason for the expression on his face?

  I watched as he scraped a hand over his long, dark hair and clenched his fists at his sides. He strode over to my bed and pulled the curtains back roughly. It was then that the expression on his face went from rigid and furious to that softened look he often got when talking to me. Okay. So, maybe he wasn’t mad at me? I couldn’t tell.

  He took one thing from each pocket and placed the items on my bed before zinging the curtain closed and striding out of my room. What the hell was that all about?

  I looked back at the comm and saw a message from Kupier.

  I miss you, DP-1. But I have to go. Look. Message me if you need me. Even if this line is bugged. I’ll try to figure out who messaged you from my end. Stay safe.

  You stay safe too, okay?

  Don’t worry, I’m the master at what I do.

  Sure. Right. Totally reassuring.

  I’ll stay safe if it means getting to see you again, Glade. I promise.

  I promise, too.

  I clipped my comm back onto my tech. That was that. The last time I’d speak to Kupier for God only knew how long.

  I allowed myself a few minutes of complete silence. Just my head in my hands and deep breaths. I was going back down into the shit show of my life in a second. Cast, my roommate, would be back from his afternoon sessions any minute, and I didn’t want him to catch me jumping down from the vent. I didn’t think he would turn me in, but still, I didn’t need to sow anymore suspicion into my life.

  Checking with my eyes and with my tech, I knew I was alone, so I wiggled the grate from its edges, hopped down onto the top rung of my bed, and slipped the grate back into place. I had just jumped down and straightened my cargo pants when Cast strolled in.

  “Hey, you wanna head to the dining hall for an early dinner?” he asked, tossing a bag onto his bed and then sitting down to switch his shoes from one pair to another.

  In a way, it was good to see him and be back in the present moment. I’d been in my own room for a little bit after the Ferrymen had abducted me. But then I’d opted to go back into my old bunk room. It was just me and Cast now, Sullia’s bed lying empty. She could sleep in a black hole for all I cared.

  “I was gonna go to the simulation room and get some practice in.” I thought about Kupier’s command. Act normal. Use my position to gain access and intelligence. I considered our eventual endgame. Kupier wanted me to plug into the Authority Database, which he claimed was on the burned-out hull of Earth, and destroy the whole thing from the inside out. No more Culling. Just like that. I still hadn’t decided if I was willing to take such a drastic step. But if I was going to, it wouldn’t hurt to understand the Database as well as I could. And since they didn’t let Datapoints hack into the system as coders, the only way to learn the Database was as a user. A.k.a., Culling simulations.

  “Come have dinner first and then we’ll both go to the simulation room.”

  “Alright. I’ll meet you there in a minute.”

  Cast nodded and headed out. I waited until his footsteps had faded before I whipped back the curtain on my bed and leaned forward to see what Dahn had left for me.

  The first thing was the old gaming device that he and I had hotwired so many times in our past. We would code a puzzle into it and hand it off to the other to solve. He’d left a puzzle for me—and he knew that was pretty much my favorite thing in the universe.

  He couldn’t be mad at me, then, right?

  The second thing that he’d left was a small metal figurine. It must have, at one point, been fully painted, because flecks of shiny black paint speckled the gray metal figure.

  I placed it on my hand and stared and stared. It was a horse, tossing its mane and front feet into the air. The figurine balanced on its back two legs, and it was small enough to fit in my pocket without a bulge. I immediately shoved it there. It hurt to look at it.

  A long time ago, during a training session, Dahn and I had seen a movie of Earth. The way it used to be. There’d been a horse in the movie that had tossed its hair and Dahn had teased me that it looked exactly the same as me when I tossed my own hair. I’d thought of that horse countless times since then. Its freedom, even when a rider lashed himself to the horse’s back. I’d thought of galloping at full speed. Defiance in the face of captivity.

  Was that the way that Dahn saw me?

  Was that the way I saw myself?

  Chapter Five

  Two weeks after my conversation with Kupier, I was still wading through the rubble of my mother’s supposed death. I had no idea if I was in mourning for her or not. Part of me simply didn’t believe she was dead. The other part of me knew exactly how efficient the Authority was when it came to that kind of thing. If they’d wanted her dead, she was most likely dead.

  Haven hadn’t spoken to me again about implementing his new training protocol, and if he’d talked to Dahn, neither of them had brought it up with me. I knew that we were only three months away from the Culling, though, and I was spending almost all of my time in the simulation room. I was trying my hardest to learn every aspect of the Database. The side effect was that I was getting better and better at culling.

  I never culled as many citizens as Haven had made me cull months ago when he’d wanted me to prove I was the chosen one. But I was certainly regularly culling thousands more than any other Datapoint.

  If the data could be trusted.

  That was one part of my meeting with Haven that was really sticking with me. Was the computer telling me whatever he wanted it to tell me? How did I know I was really culling this many people at once? Were the sta
tistics fudged?

  I stepped out of the simulator one afternoon with these same old questions running through my head, picking up my hair off the back of my neck. I was hot as hell, but culling would do that to you. The simulation room was empty, which probably meant that dinner had just started.

  Something skittered up my spine and I turned.

  There she was.

  Sullia.

  She leaned in the doorway of the simulation room, one foot in and one foot out. Her hair was dyed a deep emerald and she looked as horribly beautiful as she always did. Perfect and deadly and cold as a fish. I hadn’t seen her in months, and I hadn’t expected my stomach to drop right out of me at the sight of her. My fingertips were cold and clenched together. The last time I’d seen her, she’d threatened my life and my position. The time before that, she’d tried to kill me. To cull me right there on the floor.

  She might have done it, too, if Dahn hadn’t jumped in and saved me.

  And now here she was, eyeing me from twenty feet away. Her eyes narrowed in on my simulation stats, reflected on the screen beside me. She smirked and disappeared from the doorway.

  I didn’t like her skulking around. I didn’t like her watching me. I didn’t like her acting like it was totally fine for her to be around me. She’d tried to kill me, for shit’s sake. My feet took me forward three paces. I could end this right now. I could remind her exactly why she needed to stay on her side of the Station.

  The Datapoint in me could see the logic in it, too. Fighting hurt, sure, but it would also remind her of who exactly I was. And that I was not to be screwed around with. Sullia considered herself to be better than me, more skilled than I was. But if I beat the hell out of her enough times, she was bound to change her mind, right?

  It was Kupier’s voice in my head that stopped me from following her out into the hallway. He’d asked me to stay safe. To keep myself safe.

  And I’d promised him that I would. For him.

  He was somewhere out there, trying to figure out how to rescue my sisters from Io, and the least I could do was not get dead at the hands of some psychopath who even the Authority treated with caution.

  Besides. All she’d done was look at me.

  But her stare had been like cold glue down my back, and it was a feeling I wasn’t able to shake for the rest of the day. And for the next day, and the next after that. I refused to turn around, to case every corner of the Station, but somehow, I knew. I knew that she was watching me.

  And that’s exactly what I’d told Dahn when I found him leaving the simulation room. “Sullia is following me. Watching me.”

  “What?”

  He'd looked around, startled, like he’d find her peeking around a corner with a pair of spyglasses trained on us.

  “I can’t prove it. Or explain it, exactly. But I just know it. Can you check the security cameras for me?”

  He’d frowned. “I can talk to Haven about it for you. He’ll have to give me approval for the security cams.”

  I’d chewed my lip. “Fine.”

  But a few days later, Dahn found me, and told me that Haven had checked the security footage himself and seen that there was no definitive proof she was following me.

  “Definitive?”

  He shrugged. “Look, Glade, you’re Haven’s number one priority. If you’re worried about Sullia still, then stick close to larger groups of people. Don’t go anywhere alone. And I can make sure to spend more time with you.”

  Maybe if he’d offered in a different way, I would have taken him up on it. But the flat tone of his voice had my back straightening. “I’m not scared of her, Dahn. And I’m not gonna hide in groups of trainees because she’s spying on me.”

  He glared at me. “There is no proof that she’s spying on you. And if she is, your job is to stay safe. You’re already the chosen one. What more could you have to prove?” His words had some real heat to them, and I wondered if he was talking about more than one thing at once.

  In any case, I didn’t follow his advice. I wasn’t scared of meeting Sullia one on one. More than anything, I wanted to shake her off.

  I started taking different routes through the Station than I normally would. Ducking and weaving through groups of trainees and techs. Instead of any of the main hallways, I found myself in the back hallways. I wasn’t required to be in any classes, as Haven hadn’t summoned me to him for two weeks; besides being committed to sparring with Dahn in the evenings, I made my own schedule. It didn’t matter if I took twice as long to get someplace as I normally would.

  And still, I often felt the sticky freeze of Sullia’s gaze.

  One afternoon, I slipped through the auxiliary kitchen and then down a set of service stairs. I knew that there was a back exit here that could lead me to the machinist’s workshop. I had a question about how the simulator was made that I hoped he could answer for me. If I could figure that out, I thought it might answer a few more questions I had about the Database.

  It was right as I was stepping off the bottom stair that a door beside me was flung open and a woman quickly backed out of a linen storage room, balancing a humongous pile of towels in her arms.

  She didn’t see me, and before I could even say anything, she’d bowled right into me. She yelped and we both went down in a heap.

  The towels tumbled everywhere as I attempted to untangle myself from her. But halfway through sitting up, I froze. I recognized the calf that was pinning my bad leg to the ground. I recognized the knobby knuckles of that hand on the tile floor. And I certainly recognized that scent. Like bread and cotton all at once.

  She rolled off of me. “I’m so sorry,” she said in that voice that I knew so well. The voice that I heard in my head every single day. “I couldn’t see where I was going.”

  The woman righted herself up from her hands and knees and turned to look at me. It wasn’t my mother’s face that stared back at me. But it sure as hell was her eyes. Eyes as blue as Daw and Treb’s. Eyes that froze into a solid block of ice the second they landed on my face.

  I studied this person who had my mother’s hands and scent and shoulders and eyes and who did not have my mother’s face and hair. My mother’s hair had been long and blonde, and this woman’s hair was stubby and red. Her face looked like my mother’s, in a way, but off. Like it was that of a distant relative. Her nose was bigger and crooked, her brow heavier, and her lips thinner, and there were deep lines on either side of her mouth.

  There are times to equivocate and hand wring. To cry or double- and triple-check what you suspect to be right. Sure. This was not one of those effing times.

  I knew, bone deep, that I was right about what I was looking at.

  I sprang up. Fast. I stomped across the towels, grabbed my mother by the shoulders, and hauled her backward into the storage room she’d just come out of. I slammed the door behind us and wedged a broomstick into the hinge so that it couldn’t be opened from the outside.

  Then I snapped on the light, making her flinch.

  She stared at me like she had absolutely no idea of what to say.

  That made one of us. “What the hell is going on,” I gritted out. It wasn’t a question that I’d asked. It was a demand through clenched teeth. Brutal and aggressive. I loved this woman in front of me, but there was nothing but a bubbling rage in my chest right now.

  A small part of me wanted to hug her. Hold her. Cry into her hair.

  But the rest of me remembered holding Daw and Treb while their lives crumbled all around them. I thought of Treb’s trembling face as she told me about watching our mother fall on the street. Her body being taken away. I needed answers. And I needed them yesterday.

  “Calm down, Glade.”

  Hearing her gentle voice was like choking to death on a feather. She was both innocuous and deadly. I felt sick and overjoyed all at once. My hands clenched into fists at my sides. “Tell me what is going on.”

  She stared at me, her eyes whisking back and forth between mine. She took a de
ep breath and came forward, as close to me as she could. She was taller than I was and her arms folded me up exactly the way they used to, when I was a kid.

  I resisted the hug for as long as I could, but on the fifth or sixth second of being rigid in the circle of my mother’s arms, I crumbled. Just a little bit. My arms came to her back, hard and unforgiving, and my forehead found its way to her shoulder.

  “I’m so sorry that it had to be this way,” she whispered, her voice trembling the way it did right after my father was culled.

  “What way? Tell me.”

  She stepped back and took me with her, her familiar, long fingers clenched around my hand as she led us back to a stack of blankets and sat us down. The second we sat, she was brushing my hair back over my shoulder, straightening a button at the top of my blouse. There was no one in the solar system more comfortable with touching me than this woman here in front of me, and it was throwing me off. I hadn’t been intentionally fussed over since… well, not since Kupier had smuggled me off the Station and kissed the daylights out of me.

  Her light, firm touch was wrecking me. And not in a good way. I pulled away from her, my patience running out.

  “I knew they were coming for me,” she finally said.

  “Who?”

  Her eyes searched mine and she pursed her lips. “Assassins.”

  “Do you know who they were?”

  Again, she searched my face like she was trying to figure out what exactly I knew. “Yes.”

  “But you’re not going to tell me.” I could see it all over her face.

  “No.”

  It hit me like a bag of volcanic rock to the temple. She didn’t trust me. She loved me. But she had her own agenda. And she certainly didn’t know mine.

  “I’ll guess then.” I plunged in. “I think it was the Authority that sent assassins for you.”

  She pulled up tight. Her eyes wide and her hands suddenly a tight nest on her lap. She stared at me, her Datapoint daughter, and I knew what she saw. A fully trained weapon of the Authority, a brainwashed minion. She had no idea what my allegiances were.