by Ramona Finn
Hostile! Hostile! Hostile! my tech screamed at my brain. But my brain was too busy looking at my mother and knowing, logically and also in my heart, that she wasn’t a hostile or a dangerous presence to me. So, what was my tech warning me of? What was—
I saw her pull sideways one side of her jumpsuit and reach inside. She came out with a small black dart that, when activated, hovered in the air like a tiny hovercraft.
Hostile! Hostile! Hostile!
I knew that weapon. I’d seen it before. I’d studied it in one of my tactical classes. It was a Ferryman favorite. A weaponized, poisoned dart that could weave through a room, seeking only its target.
Hostile! But she wouldn’t have come for me. I knew she would never assassinate me. This was my mother, for God’s sakes!
I watched in slow motion, suspended animation, through thick, solid air as she narrowed her eyes on the man next to me and set the dart in motion.
I knew the dart was moving faster than an eye could see. I knew that. But still, I was watching it part the air like a finger through Jell-O. I could practically see the spiraling, elegant slipstream it left behind as it wove through the room and came straight for Haven’s heart.
Hostile! Hostile! Hostile!
She was here to eliminate Haven. This was her final task. The task that she wouldn’t drag me into. This was the task that she was so adamant about keeping separate from me. The killing of a man. I knew then, without a doubt, that no matter what we were all told about Datapoints, my mother had always believed in my soul, my heart. She saw my humanity. Always had. She wouldn’t let me assassinate someone. Even when she knew what I’d been trained to do. What the Culling really was.
It was with my eyes on my mother’s that my tech took control of my body again. Much the way that it had the last time I’d been in the simulator. My arm was simply not my own anymore. I could barely feel it anymore as it raised. As it flashed out, catching the broad side of the dart. My hand closed around the cool metal of the poisoned dart. It was strangely innocuous in my hand, as if I were holding a pen or a stylus.
I couldn’t hear anything, but the world was a smudged painting of action all around me. Dahn’s face was drawn and serious as he dragged Haven to the ground. Haven himself was shocked and staring. Dahn was shouting something into Haven’s wrist. Into a comm he wore there.
I stared at the dart in my hand. I’d caught it. My tech had made me protect Haven. I hadn’t had a choice. He’d implanted tech within me that had made me identify a hostile force for him. To protect him.
I opened my hand, reclaiming it as my own. The dart rolled off the flat of my palm and clattered to the floor. I watched Haven snatch it up.
It was then that I looked up and realized that the room was in chaos. Datapoints were scattering and running in every direction. I caught sight of my mother on the far side of the room, scrambling for the exit. She paused, for just one second, to look behind her. Her eyes found mine.
Run! Now! Her mouth had formed just those words exactly, and her eyes were scared and sad. She understood. She understood that it wasn’t me that had stopped the dart. It was my tech.
I glanced down at the horrible, offending technology in my arm. In my brain. When I looked up, my mother wasn’t in the doorway anymore. She was on the ground. And men in gray were pinning her down. I took two steps toward her. And then another.
But Haven was up, and he was running. Dahn was just behind him. I was running, too. Why was Haven running toward my mother? I tried to get my legs to move faster, but my legs were leaden. I was stumbling, falling. I landed on my hands and looked up to see the men holding my mother flat on the ground. Haven was bent over her. Saying something in her ear. Dahn was pulling at him, yanking at the back of Haven’s white coat.
Then there were men in gray on Dahn, too. He was slammed against the wall, the flat of his chest hitting against that cool chrome. The screens, Io red, flashed all around us. My home colony. And my mother pinned to the ground with my enemy looming over her.
My feet slipped on the slick ground as I sprang upwards, toward them.
I was half a step away when Haven pressed the poison dart into my mother’s neck. It was almost sickeningly gentle. Like he’d never pierced the skin of another human before. He didn’t jam it or slice it in. He merely, sweetly, pushed the dart into her.
I finally stood beside him as her eyes went glassy, focusing on the red volcanoes reflected all around us. Focused on home.
Chapter Sixteen
My mother hadn’t been dead for more than three seconds when I started running.
It felt like a week passed with each footstep.
Sound came back all at once and everything was blessedly noisy. There were the screams of terrified people. The noise and bedlam of hundreds of people running through metal hallways. There were everyone’s breaths and heartbeats. I could hear it all. I swore I could have heard their hair growing if I really tried.
I praised the Datapoint within me. Thanked God. I’d cursed my training more than I’d ever been thankful for it. But it was the Datapoint within me that had known, immediately, there was nothing to be done for my mother. Fresh dead was still dead. Poison was poison. Murder was murder.
And, running was running. A plan was a plan. And if I didn’t leave now, there was no leaving. If I didn’t leave now, there was only a lifetime of the Culling to look forward to. A lifetime of finding out exactly what else Haven had programmed my tech to do for him. A lifetime of serving him, protecting him, and murdering for him.
So, the plan. My mother’s plan.
I sprinted through the crowd, weaving, toward the service stairwell that she’d told me about. I opened the door just a crack. If I flung it open, I risked someone coming after me.
I was through the crack in the door and two steps down the narrow stairs when someone’s strong hand closed over my shoulder.
I’d wheeled, ready to fight, when I saw who it was. Dahn.
I watched his pained, serious eyes go from silver to green as he leaned down toward me. A fierce kiss, a forehead against mine.
“I love you, too,” he said.
His strong hands squeezed my arms, his breath washed over my face, and then he was gone, back through the service door and out into the crowd. Back to Haven.
I turned and ran again, on complete autopilot.
My mother. Dead. Mama.
Dahn loved me. He was letting me go.
My mother was dead.
I was escaping.
Dead.
Dahn wasn’t coming. He loved me. He was letting me go. Mama. Dead.
Every footstep was one syllable in the mantra from hell. My head spun and finally just sort of whited out. The only thing that existed, that could exist, was the plan. I had to concentrate on that and only that.
My mother had arranged everything, putting it all into place. All I had to do was get to the service loading dock.
I was just adding in one variation.
When I was two levels down, I jumped off the service staircase and into a narrow hallway. My tech showed me a blueprint of the Station, almost before I asked for it. I hated this tech so much that I almost just smashed my arm against a wall and destroyed it. But I couldn’t waste time on dramatics. I had to stick to the plan.
I jumped, digging my fingers into the edge of the chrome paneling on one wall of the hallway, and ripped an air vent right out, tossing it behind me.
I hoisted myself up and into the vent then, scrambling on my knees and not giving a crap about the noise I was making. I asked my tech for a live feed of the simulation room security cams and I saw Datapoints still scrambling, screaming. I saw a huge group of medical technicians all crowded around Haven. My mother still lay on the floor, her arms spread, palms up.
I exited out of the feed. I couldn't stand to see more. The medical technicians looked to be occupying Haven, but I knew I didn’t have much time before his attention focused back onto me and they started their search for
me. A search that probably wouldn’t take long at all, considering all the ways I was sure they could track me with this effing tech.
Here. I veered into one of the ventilation offshoots and saw that I’d aimed perfectly. I was in the ceiling above the medical wing and peering down at Cast’s room. He was sitting up in bed. Good. That was a good sign.
I was about to call down to him when I realized that he wasn’t alone. Right at the edge of my range of vision, there was another person sitting. He was whispering to Cast, his feet up on the foot of Cast’s bed. It was the mechanic technician who hadn’t ratted me out on the landing dock. The one who was Cast’s friend.
Feeling like I had nothing left to lose—and that even if they raised the alarm on me, I would probably still have time to execute the plan—I banged the air vent grate out of the ceiling. The grate clattered noisily down to the floor and made both of them jump out of their skins. I stuck my head out of the vent, my hair falling through first.
“Glade!”
“I’m leaving. Right now. Forever. If you wanna come, let’s go.”
“What?” Cast spluttered, and I noticed that one of his eyes wasn’t opening as far as the other. His words were slow and the sounds were stringing together. He wasn’t recovered. Not all the way.
“Look,” I glanced between them. “I’m not wasting time convincing you. Now or never.”
I knew that it wasn’t the sweetest of offers; they had no idea what they were getting into. And I didn’t have time to explain more. But I also knew I couldn’t live with myself if I left without at least trying to spring Cast. Being a Datapoint was killing him.
“I—” Cast looked at his friend, finding panic and confusion reflecting back at him.
“Five, four, three—” I started counting, like a real jerk. Whatever. We were kind of on a schedule here.
“Okay!” the mechanic shouted. “Yeah. Okay.”
He and Cast were still staring at each other. Trying to figure out what to do next.
“Okay,” Cast echoed him. It almost seemed like they were having two conversations at once.
“Through there?” the mechanic asked.
“Yup.” I reached one hand down.
The kid glanced behind him and climbed up onto Cast’s bed, dragging Cast up to stand beside him. “Hurry,” he said. “There should be someone coming to check him in less than ten minutes.”
“In ten minutes, we’re gonna be on the other side of Mars, kid.”
The kid looked a little shocked, but he didn’t hesitate in hoisting up Cast as high as he could. Cast’s grip wasn’t very strong and it took both of us able-bodied people to get him up into the vent beside me.
The mechanic came next, and I was halfway through hoisting him inside when his face broke out into a grin. He had one of those smiles that cracks a person’s face in half. He was all ears and smile lines, and there was coppery hair I hadn’t noticed before in a lengthy stubble covering his round head. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said as I got him the rest of the way into the vent.
“Yeah. Join the club,” Cast said.
“What’s your name?” I asked the mechanic as we all belly crawled through the vent and back toward the service stairwell. I wanted to stay out of the line of security cameras as long as we could, and there was no other way to have gotten Cast out besides the vents, but I knew we needed to get back to the stairwells in order to access the back loading dock.
“Wells,” he called. “Wells Enceladus.”
Wells and I shimmied out of the vent and dragged Cast out with us. It looked like Cast was having trouble with his feet and hands mostly. And the weeks in the hospital bed had atrophied his muscles.
It was slower going than it would have been if it had just been the two of us, but I didn’t dwell on it. Once we were back in the stairwell, I had us practically skipping steps as we tumbled down toward the sublevel.
“Are we headed to the service dock?” Wells asked.
“Yeah.” I glanced at him.
He nodded, grunting against Cast’s weight on his shoulder. “I assume we don’t want any company?”
“Yeah. Don’t worry.” I knew what I was doing. Or, my mother had known. This had been part of the plan.
When we passed the first sublevel, I ducked out of the stairwell and slid along the wall. There were technicians and mechanics there in the dingy repair room, but they were mostly huddled around a screen, whispering in horror and excitement. I assumed they were watching security feeds of the rest of the Station. For a moment, I was tempted to check the feeds, but I resisted.
I followed the plan. I slipped behind a hulking piece of grinding machinery that was positioned exactly as my mother had said it would be. I woke up a sleeping screen, and I hacked in immediately. I opened three hatches and disabled four security walls. I purposefully tripped the last one and, almost immediately, a red light over top of the far doors started blinking, a horrible screeching noise accompanying it.
I sprinted, under cover of the machine, back to the stairwell, and slipped my shoulder under Cast’s arm again, dragging our group further down the stairs.
“You tripped the alarm on purpose? To draw the employees from the service dock up here?”
“Emergency protocol.” I shrugged. “Plus, I opened one of the service doors and jammed it.”
“You just opened a door into space. Just like that.” Wells sounded stunned.
“Just one of the small ones, up near the ceiling. No one will get sucked through. It’ll just keep them all busy for the next half hour or so.”
“Wow,” Cast whispered, his feet scrambling to keep up with us. The stairs into the sublevel were narrow and dark and seemingly endless with Cast’s dead weight on our shoulders. My mother had told me that it would take longer than I thought, that the flights of stairs corresponded to floors that were warehouse-sized. This wasn’t a discreet twelve stairs to a floor. We were catapulting ourselves down forty or fifty stairs per level. All while trying to go as fast as we could and not tumble forward.
I knew what Cast and Wells were thinking—what the hell had they gotten themselves into? Honestly, they hadn’t seen anything yet.
I was sweaty under my jumpsuit and Wells had some of my hair accidentally in his grip as he held on to Cast. It yanked and tugged, bringing tears to my eyes. My fingertips were freezing and stiff where I gripped Cast for dear life.
“Here we go.” We’d made it to the bottom. It had been maybe seven minutes since I’d gotten them from the med unit. We didn’t have much more time before they noticed I was gone. If Haven was truly scared for me, or started tracking me, I had no doubt they would close down the entire Station. Nothing in or out. And then we’d be screwed.
I slipped open the service stairwell door just a crack and peered into a blessedly silent bottom level. Just as I’d hoped, it was empty, all the technicians down here having followed the emergency protocol my mother had researched. Which was to take the main stairs to the point of need. We were alone in the sublevel.
It was smaller down here than I’d thought it would be, and it reeked of garbage. This was where all the trash chutes led. I thought, for just a moment, of the dishes I’d tossed down that morning and bit back the urge to laugh. I knew I was a breath away from hysterical, but I was about ten moves away from being safe enough to crack in half and let my grief take me away.
“There,” I murmured to my companions, pointing toward the trash pod that was about to be jettisoned out past the asteroid belt. Apparently, this happened every morning at 10:00 a.m., my mother had informed me. It was a huge, compacted amalgam of trash that had been smashed together into the shape of a fifty-foot pill. An automated pilot skip was clamped on to the front of it. The skip was ancient, and didn’t even require a pilot. It could be piloted, but its job was so simple—drag trash to open area, jettison trash, return to Station—that it didn’t need a pilot. It was slow and clumsy, and didn’t even have the technology of jumping from one ar
tificial black hole to the next. As an escape skip, it sucked. But it was the best we had. And apparently, my mother’s Ferrymen were going to be meeting us as soon as possible. Hopefully, that would be before the Station realized what had happened and came after us.
Wells and I dragged Cast across the dim service dock and Wells slammed open the door of the trash skip. God. The door wasn’t even hydraulic. I scanned it with my tech. It was oxygen-equipped. But just barely. If anything went wrong, we were toast.
I turned and scanned the dock, looking for something I really, really hoped would be there. Yup. There they were.
“Get him in. I’m getting those.”
Wells’ eyes followed where I was pointing and nodded. “Good idea.”
I heard his grunt as he hoisted Cast into the tiny cockpit as I sprinted toward the messy equipment area of the service dock. There were ten or so emergency oxygen suits just in case some outer part of the Station had to be serviced. If we wore these, we vastly increased our chances of not having our lungs sucked out through our noses by the vacuum of deep space.
I was just hauling three of the heavy, clumsy suits behind me when my tech raised an alarm and something smacked me in the side of the head hard enough to blacken my vision.
I fell to all fours and sprang back up, dropping the suits but ready for what came next. I saw rather than felt the electricity from the taser. It was white hot and arcing toward me in a jagged line.
The energy from my tech stopped it before I could even ask my tech to do so. Orange met white in a clash and the lines of energy stymied one another. My vision cleared as I came to my feet and turned toward my attacker.
“SULLIA!” I roared, not caring if my voice echoed around the empty chamber.
The taser turned up to a higher force and the sparking electricity washed the red of her hair into a strange, rosy metallic color. She was twenty feet away from me, emerging from the main stairwell.
She had welts and burns from her most recent time in interrogations. Either they’d let her go or she’d escaped, but either way, she looked like she was just hours out from her torture. Her eyes were purpled and bloodshot, and her lips were cracked and bloody. I could see, even from here, that her fingernails were broken off in many places, like she’d been gripping the floor in pain. I remembered the feeling well. When gravity was the only friend you had in the entire world.