The Authority (The Culling Trilogy Book 2)

by Ramona Finn

  I glanced up at the doorway as three medical techs charged through the door, slipping and sliding against one another.

  “Datapoint Io!” one yelped, rushing toward me.

  The other two ran to the machine I’d flicked off. “Oh, thank God. She just turned off the machine.”

  I looked around, one eyebrow raised at their three heaving chests, and the looks of utter and complete relief on their faces. They really, really didn’t want the chosen one to die on their shift. I almost laughed.

  It was the first time I’d even had the slightest urge to laugh since…

  I shook my head to clear that thought. It wasn’t the time. I needed privacy and quiet to piece together that thought.

  “I’m ready to go back to my quarters now,” I told them.

  They looked at one another.

  “Datapoint Io,” said the first one, “we have orders to keep you here until you’re completely well.”

  “I’m completely well,” I answered.

  I tossed the blankets off my legs and slid down the bed. Exactly as I’d assumed they would, the med technicians parted for me. Whether it was out of respect or fear, I found I didn’t really care. They didn’t even call after me as I strode down the hall and through the Station, all the way to my bunk room.

  I closed the door and pulled the curtain around my bed so that I could lay down in privacy and stare blankly upward.

  My thoughts were like a sack full of marbles that I kept attempting to make stand one on top of another. Somewhere in there was the truth. The way everything fit together. But I just couldn’t make the puzzle work.

  The evening lights had buzzed on by the time I’d come to one conclusion and one conclusion only.

  What I did next all boiled down to who I trusted the most.

  My mother or Kupier.

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was trust that I thought about as the Station tumbled its way through the asteroid belt, orbiting the sun. What was trust really? Just a chemical response in my brain? An ancient instinctual response? Could it really be explained or quantified? Should I question it? Or was it just better to accept it as it came?

  I knew that night had come, that the Station’s occupants had tucked themselves in, when the door to my bedroom cracked just so. There was a sliver of light across my bedroom floor. I couldn’t see it, closed off by the bed curtain as I was. But I could feel that sliver of light. Visualize it. Like a blade. Perfect in its unwavering interruption.

  I heard a footstep, and then another, and knew that the sliver of light had been disturbed, shadows thrown across it. I heard the door close.

  “Glade!” There was my mother’s urgent whisper.

  “Stay to the wall,” I whispered back. “There are cameras that will see you if you cross the middle of the room.”

  I waited until I heard her at the edge of my bed before I pulled open the curtain and gestured her inside.

  My mother knelt beside me, her legs crossed like a little girl’s. But there was something missing from her. She loved me. That was palpable even at a distance. But there was something motherly that had been extinguished. Or extracted. Even as she reached out to tuck my hair back over my shoulder, the way she’d done a thousand times when I was a child, there was something strangely hollow in the gesture, as if she were rehearsing the movement.

  “Do you have it?” she whispered.

  “Yes.”

  She waited.

  “I’ll give it to you when we’re on the skip leaving the Station.”

  There. That hadn’t been so hard. In the end, the choice of who I trusted more had been confusing. But it hadn’t been hard.

  I could see the shock and betrayal on my mother’s face, though, and it made my stomach twist in a primal, childlike way. But I didn’t feel guilty. Kupier was the only person I trusted with this information. I didn’t know who my mother was mixed up with, and I wasn’t about to hand over an entire cloud’s worth of sensitive information just because my mother happened to be their foot soldier. Besides, I wasn’t an idiot. I knew that this information was my only currency when it came to the people waging war on the Culling. They didn’t have much incentive to free a Datapoint from the Station. Much less keep me alive after they got what they wanted.

  And I really didn’t think my mother had much sway with them. They’d sent her alone to the Station to hack Haven’s cloud with a set of shoddy, outdated instruction. She clearly wasn’t exactly their most valued member. Could she protect me if I handed over the information and her higher-ups decided I was no longer valuable? Or worse, that I was a threat? Yeah. Not betting on that.

  She pulled back from me. “What?”

  “I erased the information from the tablet. So now it’s only on a memory stick. But I’m not going to give it to you until the Station is safely behind us.”

  “Glade, you were the one who claimed that lives are in the balance the longer we wait to give this information to the Ferrymen.”

  “There are lives in the balance. Every life on Charon.” I said the words, but forced my thoughts away from that reality. I knew it made me horrible to be leveraging this. But part of me just knew that the only person who could be trusted with this was Kupier.

  “Then why would you keep it from me?”

  “Because you’re my ticket off the Station.” I made my face as blank and neutral and Datapoint-ish as I knew how to. She was going to understand how serious I was if it was the last thing I did.

  “You’re forcing my hand to perform my second task so that we can leave?” She looked flabbergasted.

  “Unless you can somehow get me a direct line to Kupier.”

  She blinked at me as if I were a complete stranger. “What?”

  “I know you’ve been communicating with your faction. They must be able to patch me through to the Ray. I’m sure they have the technology. They are Ferrymen, after all.”

  “You’d give the information to Kupier, but you won’t give it to me?”

  “I understand Kupier’s agenda.”

  “I told you mine. That I’m here to keep my girls safe, that—”

  “I know your agenda, Mama. But I don’t know anything about your faction. And there is no logical reason for me to hand over the keys to our entire government—the structure of our civilization—to people who sent you into this mission with minimal support or preparation.”

  Her mouth dropped open. “My God. You’re well and truly Kupier’s man, aren’t you? I had no idea that he was so good. That he could even talk a Datapoint into believing his crap.”

  “I don’t care what you think about it. I’ve told you my terms.”

  “And that’s it? There’s nothing I can say to convince you otherwise?”

  “You know me. You know the way I make decisions. And you have to know that the last four and a half years on the Station will only have intensified that part of me.”

  Her face crumpled, and she looked so much like Daw for a moment that I almost took every hard thing I’d just said and threw it out the window.

  “I can’t get you a line to Kupier,” she said simply. “I’d have to request it from my faction, and that would be like treason to them. They’d assume I’d been compromised. They’d cut us off here. They might even set up a trap for me to get caught by Haven so that I’d be well and truly neutralized. Our only option to get out of here is through them.”

  “Fine. And you won’t go without completing your second task?”

  She slowly nodded. “I have to.”

  “Fine. But just know that every second we’re on the Station, we get closer to the Culling. I have no idea what is going on with Daw and Treb, either. I got knocked unconscious and woke up with this.” I held up my abominable tech. “But I’ve made up my mind. I know whose side I’m on. And I’m not staying here a second longer than I have to. So, it’s up to you now, Mama. Do whatever the hell you have to do and get us the hell off the Station.”

  She nodded, but her voice
shook when she spoke. “You don’t know what you’re asking me.”

  “Fine, then skip the damn thing and just get us the hell out of here.”

  “I can’t just leave, Glade. I can’t fail. You have no idea what rests in the balance.”

  I pinched the bridge of my nose. “If you need help, tell me. I’ll help. Hell, I’ll even do it for you if you need me to. I don’t care. All I care about is getting out of here, getting Daw and Treb and hiding out somewhere forever.”

  “No.” She dropped her head into her hands, obscuring her slightly distorted features. “It’s my task. Mine. I volunteered to take it up. It’s… not complicated. It’s just hard.”

  “You won’t tell me what it is?”

  She raised her head and shook it.

  “Is there any way I can help?”

  “You could give me that memory stick with the information on it.”

  I laughed, it coming from me as a dry, husky, foreign thing that almost stuck in my throat. “Good one.”

  “Fine. Then you could do what you did today. Do it again.”

  “A simulation?” I squinted at her through the dark.

  She nodded. “I need you to have observers. The way you did today.”

  I almost asked her why. But I recognized that certain set of her jaw. That look in her eye. It was the exact same look I often had on my own face. There was no way she was telling me more than I had to know.

  “Fine. I’ll arrange it with Haven as soon as I can. I’m sure he’ll be thrilled I’m showing so much initiative.” I heartily rolled my eyes and my mother laughed, her hand coming up to cup my cheek in a gesture I remembered so well. This time, I knew that it was genuine, and I suddenly felt like a very little kid.

  “Glade? Do you remember when you were little, after Papa died? You would wander around the house looking for something, but you wouldn’t know what you were looking for?”

  Her eyes softened and she looked even more like the mother I remembered. The soft, corncake-making mother who used to braid my hair and test the bathwater with the back of her hand.

  I did remember that. It had happened a lot after my father had been culled. “I remember.”

  “Do you remember what it was that you were looking for?”

  That was a trick question. “I remember how it would always end. If that’s what you mean.”

  “It would end with you on my lap and us hugging each other for a long time.”

  I shifted on the bed, tossing my hair back over my shoulder. The memories of my childhood washed over me and overlapped with my more recent memories of that house. The darkened, washed-out feeling of mourning my mother’s death alongside my sisters. And now, here she was, sitting in front of me and reminiscing. “Right.”

  She looked up at me and her eyes were intense now. They weren’t softened by memory or nostalgia. There was an unexpected urgency there. “You know that that’s what you were looking for, right?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean that you’d wander around, not sure what you were looking for, but it was affection you were looking for. A moment where you could be nothing but loved. And safe.”

  I squinted one eye and cocked my head as I tried to make that information fall into the right place in my head. It clanked around like an empty can. Instinctually, I knew I had to be careful with it. It couldn’t just be jammed someplace or it would crumple down and be lost. Lose all its original shape.

  “Even then, you had no idea how to ask for what you wanted. Needed. You had no idea that you even wanted it. Well, your brain didn’t know. But something within you knew. Something within you would stop your playing and send you inside. Into the house to turn it upside down, looking and looking. And that’s when I’d know that you were lonely or sad or just needed some love for a moment.”

  I stared at her, unmoving, as she finished.

  “It broke my heart because your father always knew how to give you those things without asking. You and he had sort of a secret language. Well, not intentionally secret. But there were things that only made sense to the two of you. And I guess he just always knew the right way to love you,” she said quietly.

  I wondered if that was true. It sounded true. But I had no way of knowing. My father was dead. Culled. I could never ask him. Only my mother could tell me now.

  “Why are you telling me this?” I gripped the horse figurine in my pocket.

  “I’m telling you this because—” she paused there, and started to reach out for my hand. We both hesitated. Just a few inches apart. Then she fought her way through the distance and tightly took my hand in hers. “Because I want to know if you have anyone who figured out that part of you. Do you have anyone, a friend, who knows that you don’t ask for love, that they just have to give it to you?”

  I blinked at her. It was an unexpected topic of conversation, and in a way, it strangely validated my decision to keep the information out of her hands until I could get it to Kupier. The only one in this equation who I trusted with it.

  “Yes,” I answered. “I do.”

  “Alright,” she said, and nodded and leaned back. “Good.”

  “Good,” I repeated, unsure if I was saying it to myself or to her. We sat like that for a moment. In the dark, like we used to when I’d have a dream about Papa and I’d come into her bedroom in our small clay home on the red colony. “Now, tell me. What’s the plan for getting us the hell out of here?”

  She sighed, leaning forward and tracing a hand through her stubby red hair. “Well. Listen closely. Because timing is everything.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  The next morning, I stood in front of Haven’s desk and said words I’d never thought I’d say willingly.

  “I want to do it again.”

  Haven, silver and strange, leaned across the desk toward me. It registered that he hadn’t invited me into the red armchairs the way he usually did. He eyed me differently than normal. There was less softness, less coercion. No, now there was a smug sort of satisfaction in his eyes. And it had been there from even before I’d spoken. It wasn’t because I was agreeing to more practice, either.

  A cold, light-footed feeling danced up my spine, raising the hairs on my arms with it.

  “A simulation?” he asked in that reedy voice of his. His eyes stayed firmly on mine, but I had a feeling he was communicating with the person behind me. Dahn. He stood at the back of the room and had barely even looked at me when I’d come in. I’d had the strange feeling that they’d been expecting me to come.

  Well, there was no way out but through at this point.

  “Yes.”

  Haven cocked his head to the side and hair tumbled across his forehead in a repulsively boyish way. It made him seem almost as if he were wearing someone else’s body. “You’d like to do another simulation.” He paused. “But in what simulator?”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You destroyed the simulator yesterday,” Dahn reminded me.

  I didn’t turn, but Haven’s eyes finally flicked to Dahn.

  “Destroyed? You mean the technicians can’t fix it?” My brain jolted into motion. “I could try to do some maintenance on it. Actually, I’ve always been interested in learning more about how the simulator actually wor—”

  “That won’t be necessary.” Haven held up a soft-palmed hand. “To use an old Earthly expression, we’ve decided to put it out to pasture. We’ll build a new one from scratch when the time comes.”

  “You’re saying that you’re willing for the Station to be without a working simulator for a month and a half before the Culling?”

  Haven nodded and that sharp smugness was back, all over his silvery face. “We have found that we don’t have a need for it anymore.”

  His use of the word ‘we’ was starting to alarm me. His eyes flicked back over my shoulder to Dahn again and I got the rising, sickening feeling that he was referring to the two of them. Finally, I turned and looked at Dahn. He didn’t look back at me
. His eyes stayed trained on Haven. I resisted the urge to wave my hand in his line of vision as if I were testing for hypnosis.

  I turned back to Haven. “It doesn’t make sense to me to sacrifice our greatest tool right before we cull the entire solar system. I’ve barely practiced with my new technology. How can I be expected to—”

  “Your simulation yesterday was more than satisfactory to me. You performed incredibly well.”

  I blinked at him, unable to keep from raising the one eyebrow. “I accidentally culled every single living person in the solar system and I blew a hole in the simulator.”

  Haven waved a hand through the air as if what I’d said was merely a matter of semantics. “You showed incredible power. And you’ve shown your precision time and again. Your new tech is strong. We can’t expect you to have complete and total control over it.”

  My heart froze. It simply turned to a block of ice in my chest. My blood was icy, too. All the way to my lips. To the tips of my ears. I wasn’t supposed to have ultimate control over my tech? This was news to me. And completely the opposite of absolutely everything we’d ever been taught about our tech as Datapoints. The whole point of this was that we had control over our tech. As Datapoints, we had the abilities of the computers implanted into us. But we had ultimate control over it. Something only ever achievable through the syncing of our brains with our tech. But, no matter what, we were meant to retain control—that was the reason at the heart of why Datapoints did the Culling to begin with, instead of it being left only in the hands of computers.

  But I hadn’t ever really gone through the syncing process with this tech, had I? With my original tech, the syncing process had lasted days and days. It had been torturous, literally. My eyes had been peeled open, raised to bright lights to keep my pupils tight. I’d fought it. My brain had struggled and resisted the intrusion of the tech for days. Until there’d been no real choice. I could die from exhaustion or sync. I’d synced.

  None of that had happened with my new tech. I’d just woken up and it had been there. In my head.