by Ramona Finn
I started to rise to my feet, but she held me down. Her eyes found mine even in the half dark simulator. “No. Let me take you to medical,” she whispered urgently.
I stayed on my knees and leaned on her. Two more technicians came in and reached for me tentatively, as if they were nervous about even touching me.
“Oh, for God’s sakes, it was just a simulation!” Mama scolded them. “She’s not going to cull you where you stand. Help me get her to medical.”
When the three technicians dragged me from the simulator, I blinked against the light of the room. I saw that there were a lot more Datapoint trainees than when I’d started.
I caught snippets of their whispers. “She culled everyone!”
“The entire solar system at once!”
“And look what she did to the simulator.”
“Oh my God.”
“Freak.”
I turned back and glanced at the simulator, doing a double-take in surprise. The normally igloo-shaped machine now had a huge, obtusely-angled lump in one side, like an explosion had warped it out of shape. I remembered the pulse of energy that had nearly wrecked me as my tech had culled everyone. Had I really done that?
God, what the hell was this horrible tech that Haven had stitched into me? This tech that had a mind of its own, its own agenda, that could sync with my brain without me noticing, that could sync my brain with the Database without me knowing it.
I felt revulsion climbing my throat like a spider up a web. I wanted this horrible thing off of me. Gone. I hated it.
The technicians had me most of the way out of the room when I scanned it once more. It was then that it hit me. Dahn and Haven were gone.
They hadn’t even waited to see if I was alright.
I lay on the cot in the medical unit and wondered how much longer I was supposed to stay here for. They’d hooked me up to an IV, but beyond that, there hadn’t been much to do. The experience in the simulator had done a number on my mind, but my body was actually alright.
It wasn’t until an hour later when I realized why my mother had been so insistent that I be brought there. Because it was then that she showed up in a medical technician’s clothing, leaning over me to take my temperature and fussing with the pillow behind my head.
“All this just to play nurse?” I asked quietly, almost coldly. I was glad she wasn’t dead. But I was pissed that she’d been avoiding me.
“All this so that I finally have a second to talk with you,” she muttered back, leaning down to check out a machine that beeped away beside me. I was certain she had no idea what she was doing. Her eyes looked pointedly to the side and I didn’t need to follow her gaze to know what she was looking at. My beloved tech had already notified me that there was a camera on me.
She was playing the part of the nurse so that anyone watching wouldn’t see a housekeeping technician talking to the chosen one.
“You’ve been avoiding me this whole time,” I accused her softly, and I couldn’t help the petulance that creeped into my voice. In the end, I was her child. And she’d left me completely high and dry.
“I had to,” she hissed back.
“Well, it’s on your head if Charon gets completely obliterated, then.”
She froze, her hand resting on my IV bag. “What?”
“I completed my part of your mission. I got the information you all were looking for. And now I know that Haven’s got a bomb on a satellite orbiting Earth’s moon and its destination is Charon. I’ve been trying to find you and tell you for weeks.”
She sagged. “I—I didn’t think…”
I ripped my wrist out from under the fingers she’d lightly set there. “Why did you do it? Avoid me this whole time?”
“Because, getting the information you found wasn’t the only reason they sent me here. There’s something else I have to do.”
“So why avoid me?”
“Because I knew that the second you found that information, you’d want to get out of here as quickly as possible. You’d want to go get Daw and Treb and disappear. And I wouldn’t be able to complete the whole second half of why I’m even on the Station.”
Frustration boiled through me. “Well, maybe I would have accepted a different outcome if you had told me what the hell is going on!”
My words were whispered, but my mother jumped at the intensity in my voice.
“Glade, there are things that I am not willing to drag you into, okay?”
My eyes searched hers. So familiar and yet so aged since my childhood. The Datapoint in me wanted answers, and wanted them now. But some long buried, softened part of my heart had me asking a different question. “Why do this? Why do any of this?”
Her expression fell. As if I’d asked the one question she’d hoped I wouldn’t. She glanced around her.
“There’s no microphones in here,” I told her. She eyed me strangely. “My tech can tell.”
She reached across the bed and picked up my arm. She didn’t touch the tech, but she did rotate my wrist to make it catch the light, inspecting it. When she set my arm down, there was a strange look in her eyes.
“I did all this. Joined up with the Ferrymen,” she whispered, even though I was confident we weren’t being overheard. “Because of you.”
I narrowed my eyes. “Me? What do you mean?”
“You’re so much like your father in so many ways…” she trailed off. “After he was culled…”
I tried not to be impatient. I really did. But she must have seen it in my face because she chuckled to herself. “Glade. I don’t know how much you remember. You were so young when your father was culled. But it was a shock. To everyone who knew him. Because only the murderous and dangerous and violent were culled. And your father… well, he was the gentlest man.” She cleared her throat. “He wasn’t perfect. But he was gentle.”
“I remember that.”
She held my eyes for a second before dropping them back to the hospital bed cover. “I knew something was wrong with the system after he was culled. That they weren’t culling people for the reasons they said they were. Not if they could cull him. But other things started to make sense to me, too. He used to go to town hall meetings. He was deeply opposed to the pipeline they wanted to install linking that distant volcano system. It would have made our colony richer if it had worked, but it would also have made the living conditions much more volatile. He was strictly opposed to it, and outspoken. And when he talked, people listened…
“I don’t know. He never liked the Culling. He was against it. Outspoken about that, too. Just to our friends and neighbors, of course, but still. You never know who talks. And I just knew. I knew that that was the reason he’d been culled.” She paused for a second, and she looked so sad. “And there you were, looking more and more like him every day, and acting more and more like him.”
I shook my head, trying to understand what she was getting to. “You mean with the puzzles and stuff?” Both my father and I had always liked solving puzzles of all kinds.
“Sure. But also in the way you were with me, and with Daw and Treb. You were always so patient with them. And with me, you were always looking for a way to help me. To take on more responsibility. It was always very important to you that things were fair. But you were competitive, too. If something wasn’t fair by nature, then you tipped the scales by making sure you were the best at it. All of those things were just like your father. I lived in complete fear that you’d be culled come the next Culling. They’d obviously been willing to cull him. So why wouldn’t they cull someone who was practically his double? The only thing I could think to do, to save you, was to try to contact them.” The Ferrymen. “They were the only people who I thought might be able to escape the purview of the Authority. Because if they couldn’t, and they really were as dangerous as the Authority said they were, then why did they still exist? Why wouldn’t they all have been culled? So, I figured that either they weren’t dangerous, or they’d figured out how to avoid getting cu
lled. And honestly, either option was okay with me. I just needed help. A single mom. Three daughters. Zero answers. I just wanted our family to remain a family.”
“What did you mean, that Dad wasn’t perfect?”
Her eyes snapped up to mine, and they were the eyes of an animal, for just a second. The eyes of a woman who’d had to defend someone many times before, and viciously. “He was a human, Glade.”
“Obviously.”
“He did things… things that could have landed him in jail. And could have split our family up if anyone had found out about them. But he was culled before anyone found out. So, there. Let sleeping dogs lie. There wasn’t any reason to bring it up after he was culled, and there’s no reason to bring it up now.”
I opened my mouth, but she whipped around to the door when a medical tech passed by, leafing through a chart.
She was shaking when she turned back to me. “In what format do you have the information you stole?”
“I have it on a tablet and on a memory chip. Both are hidden.”
“Fine. I’ll come by tonight for them.” She dropped her face into her hands for a second. “I don’t know what I was thinking. It was too dangerous to stick you with all that.”
“When will we leave?” I asked, realizing that she had no intention of telling me about the rest of her mission.
She adjusted the sheets and answered in such a crisp, unworried tone that I knew she was terrified of whatever the second thing was that she had to do. “As soon as I finish up the last thing on my list.” Like it was a shopping errand.
“And what’s that, exactly?” I asked, unable to help myself.
“I’m not going to tell you, Glade. I’ve already told you too much and put you in too much danger. I only accepted your help on the first task because I truly didn’t think I could pull it off.”
“You couldn’t have,” I said with a wry smile. “But, Mom, listen. Who sent you here? I know some of them—tell me the names of the ones who sent you here.”
She frowned down at me. “Why?”
“Because whoever sent you did not equip you properly. Mama,” I fiercely whispered her name. “You would not have been able to break that firewall with the instructions you were given. They should have sent a hacker. Not you. And knowing that, I don’t have supreme confidence in whatever task you have next on the list.”
She looked down at her hands. “They weren’t going to send anyone in. I volunteered for this. They prepared me the best they could.”
“Because of Papa getting culled?”
She reached out and brushed my dark hair back from my shoulder, a small smile on her face. “How many times do I have to say it’s for you? And Treb and Daw. The Authority is after my children. And I’d do anything, anything at all, to get you out of their grasp.”
Finally, the question that I’d been trying to get answered just popped out of me. There was no avoiding it. No dancing around it. It didn’t matter if it was like swallowing a blade to hear the answer. I was prepared. “Was it Kupier?”
“What?”
“Was it Kupier who sent you here?”
She pinched her face down. “Of course not. I’ve never even met Kupier.”
“What?”
“And he certainly doesn’t give me or any of my comrades orders.”
“What?!” It took my mother wincing for me to realize that I had yanked her forward by the collar of her shirt. I forced my fingers to release her. “But you said that you worked with the Ferrymen.”
“I do.”
“But how could that be possible if you don’t take orders from Kupier?”
“Because he’s only the leader of one faction of the Ferrymen.” She looked at me as if this were elementary information.
My eyebrows must have damn near been off of my head. There was more than one faction? There were other leaders? This… was news. “Cyril said she saw you with Luce once.”
Now it was my mother’s turn to drop her jaw. “I knew that old bat was spying on me.”
“So, it’s true?”
She nodded. “Luce recruited me. And I worked with him closely until he died.”
“But you don’t work with Kupier even though he took over his brother’s position.”
“Everything changed after Luce died. There were so many Ferrymen, and most of them didn’t want to be led by a teenager. Especially one like Kupier. Who most people thought was weak and idealistic. A few groups branched off. One of them was mine.”
“Weak?” Idealistic, sure. I could definitely see that in Kupier. But weak? Never.
My lungs slowly inflated more and more. I realized that it wasn’t my actual lungs, though—it was some part of my inner self that was finally breathing again. The untouchable me-ness deep inside me that hadn’t breathed since my mother had told me not to trust Kupier. My soul had instantly believed her, trusted her. And then I’d just stopped breathing. Was she really telling me that she didn’t trust him because he was believed to be weak and idealistic? She’d made it seem like it was because he was after a hidden agenda. She’d said he could always get his way with words. That he was a snake. I’d assumed that meant that there was some hidden side to him that I hadn’t yet been allowed to meet. Was it possible that she was just talking about the talky, charismatic person that I knew so well? Sure, he often got his way. If you let him talk long enough, he could talk you right in a circle. But it wasn’t because he was a snake. It was because he was Kupier. Had she not even met him, and just been going off of other people not understanding him, or feeling differently?
I tested out that inner self deep breath again. Relief fled to every part of my achy body. Straight to my fingertips.
She nodded again. “He couldn’t make the tough calls that Luce did. Especially about the shielding chip.”
She gestured behind her ear and I knew she was talking about the tech they used to prevent them from being culled. She’d shown me before, but I still couldn’t remember seeing Kup wearing one of those chips. Maybe that was what she was talking about.
“What do you mean ‘tough calls’? It seems like a pretty obvious choice to use the technology that keeps you from being culled.”
“You’d think. But the chip we wear has some… downsides. And Kupier ultimately didn’t allow his men to use them. It was divisive, and a few different offshoots defected from his leadership. I was on Io the entire time. But it was very clear to my group that he was not the kind of leader we wanted. And he didn’t make it easy for them to defect. He tried to hold onto his power. He tried to keep all the groups from getting out from under him. Like a tyrant.”
Or, like the caring worrier that he was. If he’d truly believed that defecting was going to put them in danger, he definitely would have fought them on it. This was suddenly sounding more and more like the Kupier that I’d thought I knew. That maybe I really had known. “You said he was a snake. A liar.”
She nodded, solemn and resolute. “When he first came into power, he made a deal with the man who became the leader of my faction. Kupier went back on it within days.”
“When he first came into power? You mean when he was fifteen? And mourning the death of his brother?” Yeah. Pretty sure he got a free pass on that one. In my head, at least.
My mother was beginning to sense that I wasn’t buying what she was selling. Two bright spots bloomed on her cheeks and her spine straightened. “He left my group unarmed and unprotected while they were executing an extremely dangerous mission gathering information from Earth,” she told me. “Maybe you know this or maybe not, but Earth isn’t exactly the wasteland we’re led to believe it is. It is highly protected and highly guarded. Without serious weaponry on our side, all the Ferrymen in my group could have been killed. But did Kupier care? Apparently not. He pulled back all the other ships and ordered them to stay away.”
Ordered them to stay out of harm’s way—that’s what it sounded like to me. But I could see from the flint in her eyes that there wasn’t
even a point in saying that out loud. She’d made up her mind about Kupier.
We both heard the rumbling rise and fall of a group of medical techs conversing down the hall. My mother’s breath came more quickly.
“Look,” she said. “I’m not even sure what we’re arguing about here. But we can’t do it. Not right now. I’ll come to you tonight and get the memory card from you.”
She was already skirting around the edge of the bed, about to leave the room. I lunged up and grabbed my mother’s hand. “And do what with it?” I hissed.
“Glade…”
She was going to give it to her faction of the Ferrymen, I was sure of it. For a long time, that had seemed like the best option. To pass this information on to anyone who cared about Charon. Especially when Kupier had suddenly seemed like a stranger who couldn’t be trusted. But now?
Suddenly, I didn’t really want to pass this information on to my mother.
Another noise from the hallway had her jolting.
“Tonight!” she hissed. And then she was through the doorway and gone.
I fell back on the bed and ripped cords from my arm. I almost immediately reared back up when the beeping of the machine next to me threatened to drive me utterly insane, though. I didn’t care about the little alarms that were going off all around my hospital room. I was getting up and out of here.
If I’d been a normal person, my head would probably have been spinning right about now. But instead, my brain just chug-chug-chugged along, processing this information.
There was one thing that really bothered me about this.
The woman who’d just been in my room really didn’t seem like my mother. Of course, her appearance was different, so that didn’t help. But truly, she’d seemed jumpy and juvenile as we’d spoken. I felt love for her, though. And I could feel her love in return. Which made me fairly confident she wasn’t a complete imposter. But there was something off about her.
So, the question was, did I trust her with the information I’d stolen from Haven?
Did I trust the people she was working with? These Ferrymen whose names she wouldn’t even tell me?