by Ramona Finn
If she found the questions weird, she didn’t act like it. Maybe that’s the way she spoke to all Datapoints, or just to me—I couldn’t be sure. But either way, everyone on the Station was present and accounted for.
Which led me to believe that my mother was avoiding me.
She had to know that I’d been looking for her. It was probably obvious to anyone who was watching me that I was looking for someone. And she must know why I was looking for her, right? It had been what we’d decided on. That I wouldn’t try to make contact again until I had the info off of Haven’s computer. So why the hell was she avoiding me? This was mission accomplished and she was tripping at the finish line.
Over the next two days of fruitless searching, anxiety rose up within me with a choking ferocity. Dahn was back to barely acknowledging me. Physically, Cast was doing better, but he hadn’t spoken again since the first day I’d visited him.
And my mother was a complete ghost.
Meanwhile, Charon sat on the other end of the solar system like a fat rabbit during hunting season. And Haven had the shotgun.
I wondered, for the hundredth time, what the hell had happened to my comm after Sullia had attacked me. Because either it had gone unnoticed and into the trash bin, or she’d found it and currently had possession of it.
I was desperate enough that I would have reached out to Kupier, if I could have. Even though he was deceptive and couldn’t be trusted, and even though we didn’t know if that comm line was safe or not. But the information I had about the bomb was too important. Lives hung in the balance and I had to warn them.
It was the middle of the night, as I jolted out of a cold sleep, when the idea occurred to me. Would I even have to warn the Ferrymen about the imminent attack on Charon if I could stop the attack on Charon?
The last I’d seen the ship, it had been parked for diagnostic testing on the landing pad of the Station. Was there any chance at all that it was still on the Station? And if it was, could I possibly find a way to gain access to it?
My mind was whirring, and I didn’t make it back to sleep. By morning, I had a plan.
Dahn was grateful for any task that Sir Haven assigned him, but he couldn’t help but feel a prickle of irritation when he was sent out to fetch Glade. It wasn’t that the task was beneath him, though it was; it was that he’d been trying to avoid Glade as well as he could over the last few days.
Dahn found that if he thought about her, he got confused and frustrated, and something else he couldn’t name. But it was hot and tight in his chest, and he hated it. So, for the first time since she’d come to the Station four years before, Dahn was not spending his days thinking about her.
Nope. That part of him was closed for business. He’d checked in on her in the med unit, but only because she was the most valuable asset that the Authority currently had. But he’d dutifully ignored the tugs and stabs in his gut as she’d lain there, recovering from her attack and from her surgery. He’d watched over her, just as Haven had asked him to do. And the second she’d been well enough, he’d left.
He’d thrown himself into his work. His task of training the Datapoints to their new training protocol was tiring enough that it required all of his focus anyway, and he was thankful for it. He started lessons in the mornings and didn’t end until the evenings when he fell into bed after a few words with Haven.
There simply wasn’t time to try and solve the mystery of Glade Io. As far as Dahn was concerned, she was Haven’s problem.
It didn’t matter that she’d kissed him.
And it didn’t matter that he’d almost kissed her the other day in that empty classroom. It was ridiculous. Embarrassing even, that he’d been at the whim of his hormones. But that was the conclusion that he’d drawn in the few dark hours which had passed directly after that near debacle.
Datapoints were humans, he reminded himself. And he couldn’t successfully cut himself off from his own humanity. He was a man subject to a whirring upset of chemicals when he was close to a pretty woman like Glade. Not that ‘pretty’ was the right word to describe her, really. With her black eyes and hair like an ink spill, she was more overwhelming than pretty. And her new tech only exacerbated the intensity of her appearance. The motherboard on her cheek was a prism of crystals in a slicingly sharp pattern. It looked like perfect frost forming on her cheek. It gave her the appearance of being an ice queen.
But Dahn knew differently. She wasn’t cold. She was secretly very warm on the inside. And this, he’d realized, was the real secret. The one she’d been guarding like a pit bull for years. Her big secret? She cared. Not the way a normal human might, because she couldn’t control it or predict it or understand it the way a citizen might be able to. But the fact of the matter was that she had two or three times as many emotions as a normal Datapoint. She just kept them all wrapped up inside where no one could get to them.
Was it in spite of this characteristic that she had become the chosen one? Or was it because of it?
It was this thought that had wormed its way into Dahn’s gut. That had him lying awake at night.
Now, Dahn was late for a lesson with the Datapoints. But here he was, relegated to being a delivery boy. He’d been sent to find Glade yet again. And yet again, she wasn’t in her room or in the simulation room or in the dining hall. Of course.
Of course, she was out skulking around the Station somewhere. Doing whatever she was doing right under Haven’s nose. And, of course, Haven could barely be bothered with it. And, finally, of course Glade didn’t even care that Sullia was probably stalking her and would probably attack her again at the first chance she got.
Apparently, Dahn was the only one who cared about anything around here. So, for the first time ever, Dahn deliberately disobeyed Haven’s orders for something other than protecting Glade Io.
When he couldn’t find her in any of the usual places, Dahn decided he just didn’t even care anymore. He took the opportunity to slide into the main control room. This was where the Station was piloted from, and the computer mainframe was here, as well. At any given point, except for the dead middle of the night, it swarmed with techs of all kinds. The ones directing traffic in and out of the landing pad. The ones ordering new shipments from the colonies. The ones monitoring the temperature on the Station, and everything down to the toilet paper rations. This room was the brain of the Station.
It had the largest windows of anywhere on the Station, and it was to these that Dahn went first. In an uncharacteristically transparent move, Dahn walked around to the windows and looked out. The techs bustled behind him, but he didn’t think of anything but the asteroid belt rolling out in front of the Station like a red carpet.
The Station stayed ‘downwind’ of a few large asteroids that took the majority of the collisions for it. The asteroids that were close up were pitted and pocked, ranging from orange in color on to gray to even black. But the ones in the distance, lit from the side by the sun, looked almost like stars. And wasn’t that just the thing? That even this space debris could look as graceful as a star from a distance.
Maybe everything was meant to be seen from a distance. Anytime you looked closely enough at anything, you were bound to find the holes, the pockmarks. That was just the nature of the universe.
Dahn knew that he shouldn’t feel betrayed by Haven. The man was just a man, after all. It had been naive for Dahn to expect perfection from his mentor, simply because the man was a member of the Authority.
The real truth was that he’d been striving for perfection in order to be chosen as the next member of the Authority. But he had no idea if perfection was what they were looking for in their members. Haven was far from perfect. And the man’s agenda was showing more and more every day. It was almost as if, the closer he got to getting his way, the more excited and the less evasive he got.
Dahn followed the curving wall of windows around the room until he was at the very far edge. This was the one place where more than just the asteroid belt was vi
sible. He caught just one red slice of Mars in the distance, and a hint of Jupiter beyond that. From here, Enceladus, his home colony and one of Saturn’s moons, wasn’t more than a suggestion on the radar. Far from visible with the naked eye. But he had no trouble seeing it with his mind’s eye.
The surface was a silvery gray, and there were veins of bluish rock that ran through it, like the back of a sick person’s hand. The colony was cold, always. That was what he remembered the most about his childhood. That he’d always been cold. His grandparents had constantly been wrapping him up in layer after layer of their old clothing, rolling up sleeves and pant legs. He’d been so pleased when he’d finally come to live on the Station and it had been such a toasty seventy degrees in every room. And warm showers—gah! The pleasure had been excruciating.
But he’d forced himself to ignore the small pleasures of the Station and instead concentrate on the reason he was there. To be a Datapoint. The best Datapoint to come to the Station. His mother had left him behind like he was nothing. Like he’d never be anything. And he had to prove her wrong.
He turned his back on the view from the windows and strode over to one of the monitors without thinking too much on it. He spent an hour scrolling through the police database from Enceladus. And then from Europa. He scanned for her name until he slammed his eyes shut. He flipped off the monitor in front of him and cursed himself.
He was late for the training he was leading.
Why was he searching for his mother?
Why was he trying to prove anything to her?
He was going to do exactly what Haven had asked him to do. But for the first time, even that didn’t seem to matter.
Chapter Ten
I needed to get into the Station’s equipment database in order to track down the Ferryman ship. But it wasn’t like I could just walk into the main control room and start hacking. I had a lot of privileges, but I was pretty sure blatantly hacking Authority records was gonna get me a bit more attention than I was striving for. I figured there was one place where I might not be watched too carefully, though. And that was at the computers on the landing pad. If I could use their adjacent access to the Station mainframe, I might be able to get somewhere.
So, I tucked the hacking keyboard into the back of my pants, just like when I’d snuck into Haven’s office, said a little prayer, and headed to the landing pad.
I passed by relatively unnoticed and thankfully didn’t see anyone who might have stopped me. Sullia was MIA since her lovely little attack on my person, Haven barely left his office, I was pretty sure Dahn was avoiding me, and Cast was still laid up. And just like that, there was no one else who might be seeking me out.
As I made my way through the Station toward the landing pad, my hand kept wanting to trace along the newly formidable tech on my arm. It was a habit I’d developed when my comm had waited there. My connection to the outside world. To Kupier.
A sour feeling bloomed in my stomach as I thought of him now.
He’d started all of this. Without meeting him, I might have just remained a middle-of-the-road Datapoint. I would never have pushed myself, and I never would have discovered my hidden talents as the chosen one. I might have been able to toe the line just long enough to graduate the program. I might have been able to do just well enough to keep the heat off my sisters and still not bring this horrible fate down on my head.
But that way lay madness. Because ‘doing just well enough’ still meant culling innocent citizens. For as long as the Authority told me to. Haven still would have owned me.
Maybe he wouldn’t have done secret surgery on me while I lay unconscious in the medical unit, but that’s about it.
Who was I kidding? I was never destined to be free. None of us were, in this screwed up solar system. Even the citizens who never interacted with the Authority, who minded their own business and respected their local police departments—the Authority still had strings tied to their feet, dictating every step. The shadow of the Culling loomed over each and every citizen. Everyone, even the sweetest, most law-abiding citizen, feared the swift, unstoppable, and basically unpredictable ‘justice’ of the Authority.
I’d thought, for the briefest of years, when I became a Datapoint, that I was free. It meant that I’d never be culled. I’d had no idea that I was walking into a very different kind of prison. Of ownership. Because that’s what it really came down to. Haven owned every Datapoint he trained. He decided who came into the program. He, apparently, fudged our statistics to lead all of us to believe a different set of results. And, according to Kupier, he altered the programs that we used so that we weren’t even culling the people we thought we were.
There wasn’t a world where I didn’t end up here, walking through the entrance to the landing pad like I owned the place, attempting not to draw attention to myself. Every path led to here. And it didn’t serve me to believe anything else because I was about to hack, again, into prosecutably secret information yet again. For the second time in less than a month. And I couldn’t afford to have my mind thinking there was any other way. There was no other way.
It was with that thought in my mind that I skirted the wall, heading in the same direction as I had when I’d snuck into the ventilation system. This was a very different mission than that, however. This time, I didn’t have a blue-eyed, big-smiled man waiting for me on the other end. I wasn’t going to smile so hard it hurt as he sent me messages that made me feel like this whole thing might not end up with me being tortured and beheaded. That made me feel like he wouldn’t let that happen. Well, who even knew what he’d really been thinking when he’d sent me those messages, or what agenda he was serving?
The only person I could trust in all this was myself. I just wished I knew what the hell I was doing.
There was a cluster of computers on one end of the dock and it was partially hidden behind two landing skips that were being maintained by a few techs. As long as they didn’t question why the hell I was logging on to the landing deck computers, I should be fine.
The techs didn’t even look up as I walked past, though, and I was just letting out a breath of relief as I approached the computers.
“Datapoint Io!”
Damn it. Mother effer. Rage and frustration bubbled up inside of me like a pot boiling over. If this one single technician stood in the way of me figuring out where this bomb headed toward Charon was, I was going to gut punch him. I didn’t care at all if that brought down undue attention onto me. I just didn’t care.
I turned to the tech and saw that, though his voice had been deep, he was young. Probably not over fifteen.
“Yeah?” I’d tried to keep the fury out of my voice. But seriously, if he asked me what I was doing here, I was going to smack the hair off his head.
“I was just wondering, uh…” he said as two spots of color rose on his cheeks. Was he nervous to be talking to me? I tried to fix my face so that I wasn’t glaring poison at him. “I mean, I know you’re friends—roommates—with Cast. Datapoint Europa. And I wondered if you’d been to see him…”
He was curious about Cast’s health status? Confusion punctured the rage balloon blooming in my gut. “Of course I’ve been to see him.”
“Right. Okay. Well, how is he?”
My rage was dying, but my irritation was apparently alive and well. I felt like every second I spent chitchatting with this kid was another second in which this bomb was potentially barreling toward Charon.
“If you’re curious, why don’t you go visit him yourself?”
He gave me a surprised look, his neck cocking back and his brow furrowing. “Oh. Ah. Techs can’t, technically, fraternize with Datapoints. But Cast is down here with the skips so much, and he’s so interested in learning how to maintain them that…” He trailed off, obviously growing more and more uncomfortable as he spoke.
But he didn’t have to finish his thought. They’d become friends. And now this fifteen-year-old tech was shifting around, looking like he’d just se
ntenced Cast to a beheading.
“I mean,” he suddenly tumbled on, his hand messing around with his greasy jumpsuit. “We have a few projects we’ve been working on together, and I wanted to know when he might be back so I know if I should just keep working on them by myself.”
The kid was obviously panicked that he’d outed Cast as being friends with a tech.
“Kid,” I stopped him. “I don’t care if you and Cast are friends. Cast is cool. I get it.” I sighed, tossed my hair back, and gripped the little horse figurine in my pocket. “He’s not doing well. I don’t know what’s going to happen to him. You should visit him.”
The kid’s brow drew up even further. “Tech’s can’t fraternize with Datapoints,” he repeated.
“Technically,” I fed his own words back to him.
“Technically,” he said, almost turning the word into a question.
I shrugged. “Maybe his hospital bed is broken. Maybe it needs a mechanic.” I leaned in a little bit more. “Maybe the medical techs don’t check very hard about who comes to visit who.”
“Right.” The kid nodded, his eyes bouncing from one of mine to the other. The color in his cheeks rose even higher.
Datapoint Glade Io was basically telling a mechanic tech to sneak into the hospital wing and flout the Station rules that placed Datapoints above techs. And it was freaking him out.
“Right.”
He blinked fast and jammed his hands into his pockets. His copper-colored hair was trimmed in perfectly neat, short lines and there was grease on his neck. I thought about the life of a tech and envied the crap out of him. This kid was never going to be told to murder citizens by the government he served and upheld. The kid buzzed with energy in front of me, too, and I knew it was because he was contemplating the mildly scandalous task that lay before him.
“Is there anything I can help you with?” he asked, his voice sounding like he wanted to repay a favor to me.