by Ramona Finn
Some of the Authority skips, seeming to realize they had company, pivoted, attempting to face their intruder. But the Ray barreled on. A sphere of pure energy, purple with light, pulsed out of the Ray and super nova-ed fifteen Authority skips in every direction. They scattered to the winds, twisting, and their windows blackened as their power was apparently blown, as well.
Cast and Wells whooped in glee.
“I guess our ride is here!” Cast shouted out.
I, on the other hand, was fighting the chains again. My tech knew that there was a Ferryman ship coming for me. And it wasn’t happy about it.
My heart, though? My heart was leaping in my chest, skipping every other beat out of pure, ecstatic joy. Tears streamed down my face, half from pain and half from hope.
Hope.
There it was. Intoxicating and persistent. I’d shoved it down for so long that it pretty much knocked me to my feet in its insistence to burst forth into the world now.
Turn back! Fight! Evade capture by hostiles.
I remembered the last time my tech had warned me that someone was hostile. And now my mother was dead. Because Haven would put my heart in a steel cage if he could. He’d pick apart my brain piece by piece. No more. The horse figurine was still in my hand. I felt its mane cutting into my palm.
The Ray pulsed again and sent even more Authority skips flying. They were rearranging themselves now, attempting to make a shield around us. To keep our skip away from the Ray. But it was getting closer. Close enough for us to see the wild, bolted seams keeping the shark of a ship in one piece. Close enough for us to see the blinking windows of the great room I’d sat in so many times.
I was watching my home come jetting toward me.
“Kupier!” I screamed it, and hoped, hoped, hoped that somehow Haven could hear me. That he was putting all the pieces together as we spoke.
“Oh, God!” Wells yelled as the Authority skips closest to us opened fire on the Ray. Lasers and sharpened projectiles of all kinds tipped the Ray off her axis and made her shudder. One particularly large projectile exploded against her side as she dipped below us, out of view.
It had to have torn a hole in the side. But then she was circling back, already in the top of our vision again.
The Ray opened fire and three Authority skips were obliterated into absolutely nothing. They were suddenly and simply feathers of orange fire sucked away into the universe.
It ducked and was gone again.
My vision started to go black as I felt my skin at the gear chain beginning to tear irrevocably. I was destroying myself to get away. When all I wanted was to stay.
“Glade!” That was Cast’s voice, but I couldn’t hear it.
I slumped down the wall. Held up only by the chains at my wrist and chest.
There was a huge boom. The kind you feel in the cavity of your chest. And our skip started a roll through space—one that had the boys falling over each other, had Mars ping-ponging in our window. There was a crash then, and silence and no more oxygen.
This time, the darkness didn’t start at the outside of my vision. It started at the middle and spread outward until I was nothing but a black hole.
“Get it off of her!”
“So much blood.
“God.”
“Is she alive?”
“I said, help me get this damn suit off of her and tell Oort to get us the hell out of here already!”
I recognized at least two of those voices.
Kupier. I tried to say his name, but I couldn’t move.
My skin registered the cold first. And then the pain. I felt the oxygen suit get torn off of me and there was only the frigid cold. My skin was wet with something and I would have shivered if there were anything left within me to cause the reaction.
“Tourniquet!” That was Kupier’s voice again.
My eyes flashed open.
And there he was.
A face born to smile, though he was deadly serious right now. Two slices of thirst-quenching blue eyes, a shaved head, and that slightly big nose.
Almost instantly, though, my vision changed and I didn’t see Kupier anymore. I saw the leader of the Ferrymen. Infidel. Rebel. Traitor. Murderer.
I screamed in anger and fear and my arm ripped forward. I had to cull him. CULL.
“No!” My vision swam. It was Kupier. My friend.
“Her tech is controlling her!” Cast yelled.
“We have to get her in the dampener!” Kupier screamed, and I felt two strong arms hoist me up from the ground.
He tossed me over his shoulder and started sprinting. My fingers clawed at his back. My brain gathered itself to cull. I could do it on my own. I could see his brain pattern, even. There it was. Violent. Murderous.
No! I thought. That accusatory scream was the virus talking. He wasn’t dangerous. He was a free thinker. He wasn’t my enemy.
The hallways flashed past as he grunted in pain against the twist of my body, the scratch of my hands. He was sprinting me toward the one thing that could possibly silence my tech.
My heart rejoiced. Even if he’d been sprinting me toward an operating room to have half my brain removed, I would have rejoiced. I needed this abominable creation out of me. I needed Haven out of my brain. Forever.
But my tech didn’t want to go lightly. I watched the hallways blur as my body kicked and fought. I jolted with each sprinting footstep, feeling the band of his arm over my thighs. I could smell the sweat at his back. His familiar Kupier scent.
We slammed into a darkened room that I’d only been in once before. My tech, sensing what was about to happen, commanded me to snap his neck. Gouge out his eyes. Collapse his windpipe.
Eff that.
I gripped him around the waist and held on for the ride as he launched both of us into the air and headfirst into the dampener.
Chapter Eighteen
I floated weightlessly in a dark, wobbly sea of nothingness. I couldn’t breathe, but I didn’t care. Because everything was silent. There was no more voice in my head. No more noise. No more fighting. No more commands.
Peace.
There was peace.
My eyes fluttered open when something touched my hand. And there was Kupier, floating next to me, grinning like a fool. He tapped his throat and nose, reminding me that the dampener made you feel like you couldn’t breathe. As if you were underwater, but really, it was just an illusion.
I took a deep, overwhelming breath that made my head swim. The oxygen was too rich, too perfect.
Kupier signaled something to someone and twisted his body under mine. When the dampener was shut off, we tumbled to the ground and I landed in a heap on top of him.
“Is she alright?” a familiar voice asked, although I was pretty shocked at the concern in the tone.
Aine, Kupier’s right-hand woman, came rushing forward, the dim light glinting off her bald head. She usually looked at me with nothing but disdain, but here she was, wrapping a cloth over my wrist and shoving the hair out of my face.
“I don’t know. She needs medical attention right away. I’ll take her.” He rose with me in his arms like a baby. “Toss the kid into the dampener, too. And his friend, even though he says he’s not a Datapoint. Then give them rooms. Good ones.”
Kupier took me to a small room with a metal table in the middle. It was lined with shelves that were overflowing with medical supplies.
A Ferryman I’d never met before was sitting already, yanking on gloves and tying a mask around her face. Kupier laid me on the table. I felt him cut through the sleeve of my jumpsuit and hiss when he saw the extent of the damage to my wrist.
“I don’t have what I need to knock her out for this,” the Ferryman said.
“That’s alright,” I rasped. My teeth clacked together. I never wanted to be put under again in my life. “Last time I got put under, I woke up with this.”
I tried to hold up my tech, but my arm felt like it weighed a million pounds.
“Try not t
o move,” Kupier said, carefully moving my hair from my face and taking my free hand in his. He looked down and saw that I still held the horse figurine. He smiled when he saw it. “This fits you perfectly.”
“There’s a bomb.” After all this time, actually saying the words out loud to someone who could do something about it felt like setting down a hundred-pound sack of flour. My body ached with the relief of lightening my burden. “On a satellite orbiting Earth’s moon. It’s destined for Charon.”
My eyes were blurring with pain and fatigue, so I couldn’t have said exactly what facial expression he was making, but I felt his hand clamping onto my shoulder. “Is it initiated?”
I shook my head. “No. Not unless it happened since I left the Station. But it’s built and ready.”
“A bomb?” He struggled to process it. “But they must know that we’d be able to sense a bomb on our radar from half a solar system away; how could they think—”
“It’s inside the one-man ship I took from you.”
“Ah.” I could swear there was a smile on his face now. “Well, that certainly makes things more interesting. Hold on.”
And then he was gone. It was just me on that metal table and the Ferryman surgeon tinkering with tools and scrubbing her hands clean.
When Kupier came back, his hands went instantly to my hair. “Alright. Let’s do this,” he said to the surgeon.
“Did you— What did you—”
“Shhh,” he told me, those rough fingertips of his on my forehead. “We’ll go through it all later. But don’t worry. Charon isn’t getting surprise attacked anytime soon.”
I kept my eyes on the horse and on Kupier while the med Ferryman stitched up my flayed arm. The pain was bad, sure. But it was nothing compared to having your brain infiltrated and cleaved in half by the man you hated the most in the whole universe.
When it was all done, Kupier rose. “I’m going to let Laris clean you up. I’ll find clothes and be back.”
Laris was thorough and quick at removing the blood from my naked body. She even quickly washed my hair in the sink, braiding it while it was wet. Then she went to the door and accepted the dry clothes that turned out to be much too large for me.
She took off her mask and gloves before she helped me into the clothes and I saw that there was a large scar across the bottom of her pretty face.
“Thank you,” I whispered to her.
She nodded and rolled up the sleeve to see my tech, and then she inspected the tech on my face.
“If I had an actual operating facility, I could remove it for you. I’ve done it for other Datapoints.”
I reeled back from her in surprise. “You have?”
She nodded. “If you wanted me to.”
The silence of being alone in my own head rang in my ears like the clearest, sweetest note. A bell, forever rung and echoing.
Laris eyed me. “You need sleep.”
“Yes.”
She knocked on the door of the room and Kupier was back inside in a flash.
“Are we clear of them? The Authority skips?” I asked immediately.
He smirked at me. “Are you joking? Of course we are.” He snapped his fingers. “Easy as pie.”
“She needs sleep,” Laris repeated. She gestured to my bandaged arm. “She has a lot of healing to do.”
“Right.” Kupier scooped me up again, but this time I wiggled down from his arms. He settled for steadying me against his shoulders when I wobbled.
It had been quite the day, but I couldn’t think about any of it. I’d told Kupier about the bomb. He’d smiled, and known what to do. No one else was going to die today because of me.
I needed darkness.
He led me through the hallways and up a set of stairs that I remembered led to the Ferrymen’s quarters. They weren’t keeping me in the sublevel holding cells the way they had last time. I got my own room. A real room.
He led me in and laid me down on the bed. I glanced up and out the port window beside his head. An unfamiliar constellation of stars swirled past the bite of sky that I could see. It was beyond comforting. I had no idea where we were in the solar system, and neither did Haven.
My eyes slid closed and sleep took me.
I woke up to the sound of crunching. And slurping.
My eyes peeled open to see Kupier sitting on the floor on the other side of my small room. His legs were extended in front of him lazily as he munched on a bowl of soup and crackers.
“Hey!” he said brightly, the second my eyes came open and stayed open.
“Hey,” I tried, but my throat was so dry that the noise was like sand running over sand.
“Here.” He set the bowl aside and brought a cup of water with a straw to my lips. The room was so small he’d only had to lean forward to cross half of it at once.
I swallowed gratefully and winced when the cool water felt so good I could have cried.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Subhuman.”
“Well,” he said playfully, “being a Datapoint, there’s an actual argument for that theory.”
I rolled my eyes at him. “Yeah, yeah. My heart’s a computer. Ha ha.”
“I never said that,” he replied. “I never thought your heart was a computer. Your brain? Maybe, yeah. But even then, it was always more of a calculator than a computer.”
“You’re so tech illiterate that you don’t even realize how much of an insult that is.”
He chuckled, leaning back against the wall with his soup again. His eyes were so bright, so blue, so familiar that tears leaked out of my bottom eyelids, sliding sideways down my face onto my pillow.
“Tough day, huh?”
God, he was just the best. How could I have doubted him so easily before? I mean, I knew my mother had told me to, but still, sitting here, with his big crossed feet, that ridiculous smile on his face, clacking his soup spoon around, there was so much goodness reverberating from this man that it was undeniable.
“The worst.” I paused for a second. “My mom died.”
Kupier leaned forward again, crouching next to the bed another moment later. I thought for a second that he was going to embrace me and I tightened, already overwhelmed by it, but instead he just balanced on his toes and laid his chin on the mattress, less than a foot from my face. He held his eyes with mine and spoke softly.
“I’m so, so sorry, Glade. I thought that might be the case when she wasn’t on the pilot skip as planned.”
I turned my head into the pillow, trying hard not to jostle the stitches in my wrist, and I just cried. I cried hard and long, my body shaking the bed. Kupier did nothing but brush the hair back over my head, in long sweeps of his hand that nearly hypnotized me.
When the tears stopped, more sleep came. And when I woke again, he was there with more water. And this time, there was soup for me, too. We sat side by side on the bed, his shoulder pressed firmly into mine.
I cried until I slept again. And it almost didn’t feel like grief. It felt closer to letting the extra air out of an overinflated tire. There was too much world inside of me for me to keep going on. In order to live, I had to let some of that terrible day out, before it busted me at the seams.
He stayed and stayed.
It wasn’t until the next morning, two more bowls of soup and six more glasses of water later, that my inner Datapoint started to kick in again. Some of Kupier’s words began to make their way back toward my brain, and the insanity of what had happened really started to filter through me.
I hobbled to the bathroom and back, my face and hands and hairline wet with a quick sink bath, and I plunked down onto the floor next to him. I ignored the stinging ache in my stitched-up arm and glared at Kupier until his face cracked into a smile.
“You’re ready to have some of those holes filled in, aren’t you?” he asked.
“Yeah. You could say that.” I dropped my head into one hand to prop it up. “I have so many questions to ask, I’m scared they’re gonna
suffocate me.”
“Why don’t I start with a question, then?”
I balanced my elbow on my knee and my chin on the heel of my hand and didn’t even attempt to stifle my eye roll. His logic left something to be desired. “Fine.”
“When did your hair get curly?” He reached out and teased a section of my long hair through his fingers, holding it close to his face.
I lifted my eyebrows. “It didn’t. Laris braided it. This happens after you do that.”
“Ah. Okay. Another question.”
I sighed. “Sure.”
“What’s the story with this?” He held up the metal horse figurine in one hand and I reached out for it, tracing a finger over its mane.
“Dahn gave it to me.”
“Ah.”
Kupier’s smile quirked to one side and I could see that it made him a little bittersweet, to think of Dahn giving me a gift like this.
I held Kupier’s eyes. “But he didn’t come with me.”
Behind me, through the small port window, there were the pinpricks of stars in the distance, Jupiter looking like a tiny sun in the distance, and far beyond that, just a tiny ribbon of the asteroid belt.
Dahn was there.
I wondered if I’d ever see him again, and what they’d done with my mother’s body.
I’ll keep you safe, I promised him in my head, as if we were talking through our tech. But he wouldn’t hear me. I knew he wouldn’t. He was a million miles away. He was at the other end of the solar system. He was in another life.
Kupier shifted back until he was leaning against the wall, his legs stretched out in front of him, his hands tucked across his chest. “You gave him the option?”
I nodded, determined to be honest. “I let myself stick close to him, like you said I should. He was my only real ally on the Station. But I kept screwing up his life there. I asked him to trust me. But… he chose the Authority over me. It’s the only life he knows. It’s the only path to greatness that he can see.”
Kupier took the horse figurine from me and studied it again. “It’s a nice gift.” He handed it back. “And it really does remind me of you.”