by Ramona Finn
“I kept it because it reminded me of you, actually.”
“What?” He squinted at me in surprise. “What do you mean?”
“The marble you carry. It’s kind of your talisman. And when I saw this, I just thought, maybe it could be that for me.”
He smiled, reached into his pocket, and came out with that dark blue marble, distant and friendly all at once. “I never thought of it as a talisman, but now I always will.”
We traded talismans for a minute and I played with his. “Alright. I need answers, Kup. Good ones. And immediately.”
He took the horse and fake-galloped it up one of my legs. “Shoot.”
“How the hell did you know to rescue us from that pilot skip? Were you the person my mother notified?”
He sighed and leaned his head back. “No. Your mother notified a man named Kait. He’s… not my favorite person in the solar system.”
I stayed quiet—wanting him to give up the information, but also not wanting to press him. I desperately needed his story to match up with my mother’s.
“After my brother died, Kait thought that he should lead the Ferrymen. But Luce had left it all to me. I don’t think Luce had thought I’d be quite so young when I took it all over, but there we were.” He turned the horse over in his hands. “I was foolish and inexperienced, and I made some mistakes. But a lot of the decisions I made, I still stand by today. One of them, Kait took particular exception to. And he took a group of Ferrymen and defected. Started his own group.”
“What was the decision?”
Kupier sighed again, and this time it seemed to come from some place deep inside of him. “I decided to keep using the dampener on Datapoints. You see, about fifteen years ago, an inventor on Charon figured out how to use this implanted chip technology to prevent our brainwaves from being seen by Datapoints. It makes anyone who has one immune to the Culling. Invisible, even.”
“And you didn’t agree with it… why?”
“Well, it sounds great in theory. But the simple truth is that it works because it suppresses the brainwaves of the subject. The people who were having them implanted were almost instantly reporting feelings of emotional distance and loneliness. They were having trouble connecting with the world. Their personalities were changing. They were becoming angry and bitter, in some cases violent. Kait wanted to make it mandatory for anyone who was becoming a Ferryman to get one of these chips. He felt that it would make us braver and stronger to live without the fear of the Culling. I disagreed. I thought that the Authority would basically already have won if we were using defensive tech that changed who we were as people. That isolated us from one another.” He tossed the horse in the air and caught it. “Besides, no Datapoints were coming to Charon anyways. And it wasn’t like they could cull at great distances. Well, before you anyway, you freakazoid.”
He bumped his shoulder into mine and grinned down at me. That lined smile just filling up his face.
“So, my mother was in with this guy Kait?” I asked. Already, it made sense—all along, I’d thought something had been missing from my mom, and she hadn’t been willing to tell me the downside to the chip they wore. Here it was—my explanation for my mom and the chip issues, all in one.
“Yeah. He has a more… radical faction than we have. Kait highly praises his men who, ah, die for the cause.”
I closed my eyes, realizing this was what I’d expected all along, if only subconsciously. “Yeah. I figured as much. Seeing as how he sent my mother in to do a hacker’s job with not much more than a good luck and a kiss on the cheek.” I stood up and started pacing the room, having to step over Kupier’s extended legs every four steps. “Not only that, he sent her in to do an assassin’s job.”
“What do you mean?”
“She tried to assassinate Haven.”
“What?” He reached forward and grabbed my hand, and I remembered how much I had to tell him. “What happened?”
“She sent one of your Ferryman hovering darts at him and—” my voice broke and I cleared my throat. “My tech made me stop it. I snatched it out of the air eight inches from Haven’s face. If I hadn’t, this would be a very different conversation right now. And my mother would probably be having it with us.” I could live a hundred more years and never know how my voice didn’t shake through that. But my words sounded calm, flat.
“Oh, God.” He tugged on my hand and sent me tumbling into his lap. His arms came fully around me and his face buried itself in my hair. “God, Glade, this is all so screwed up.”
“How did you come to rescue us?” I needed a topic shift. I couldn’t think about my mother right now. Or the part I’d played in her death.
“After our conversation over comm last month, I suspected that Kait was the one who’d hacked our comms. I thought that, if your mother really was a Ferryman, she would be working with Kait. So, I had Aine hack into his computers. She’s good—really good. But it still took her a couple of weeks.”
I couldn’t help but scoff.
He leaned forward and tipped his nose against mine, in that bossy way of his, making me look into his eyes. “Don’t be rude, DP-1. We can’t all be geniuses.”
“You hacked in…” I prompted.
“And we found all these messages between him and an operative that he had planted on the Station. One who had benefitted from a fake death just a few weeks before. And one who had interacted with you and sought your help. It didn’t take much to figure out that it was your mother. I re-privatized our comms and messaged you about it, but you never responded.”
“Oh. Sullia took my comm. And then she smashed it when I accidentally electrocuted her with my tech. Long story,” I added when I saw the face he was making.
“Okaaaaay.” He shook his head, like he was attempting to clear it. “Anyway, I kept tabs on their communications and I saw that she’d made a plan to rendezvous with him from the garbage skip on the dark side of Mars at 10:00 a.m. yesterday. She also said that she was going to have an add-on. An ally who needed an escape route. I was pretty much positive that was you. So. That’s why we were there yesterday instead of them.”
“How did you keep Kait from coming?”
“We didn’t. He was there.” Kupier tossed the horse up in the air and caught it, grinning at me. “The Ray is just a hell of a lot faster.”
“Okay. Wow. Okay...” I rose up off Kupier’s lap and started pacing the room again. “Alright. Look. I’ve realized something over the past few months since we’ve seen each other.”
“You can’t live without me and you wanna get married.”
“I—what?”
“Don’t mind me. Carry on.” He fluttered eyelashes at me and had me laughing despite myself.
“I realized that I’m not confused anymore. About any of this. I’m never going back to the Station. I don’t care if my cover is blown. I don’t care about any of that. All I want is to be with the Ferrymen. To keep my sisters safe and to try to bring Haven down. All I want is to—”
Then Kupier was standing, towering over me. He slid one hand into my hair and the other around the hinge of my chin. “That’s pretty much the best news I’ve ever heard.”
I thought, for one vibrating second, that he was going to kiss me. And I really, really didn’t think I could handle that kind of system overload at the moment. But then his hands slid down to my shoulders and around my back. He held me in a hug that I could have sworn was magical. His arms were firm and tight around me, and I felt as if each second spent hugging this man was one more stitch on some inner wound that had been torn terribly wide open.
“Well,” I said as I pulled out of the hug, careful with my tender arm. “That means that we’ve got to get an effing move on.”
I was striding toward the door when he reached for my shoulder, stopping me and turning me around. “To where?”
“To Io.”
“Why?”
Disappointment donkey-kicked me in the stomach. Could he seriously not know? Lik
e, what the hell? Did he not know me at all? Could he have forgotten so quickly?
“To get my sisters,” I said slowly, as if it was merely an issue of jogging his memory.
“Oh.” He waved his hand through the air and leaned his shoulder on the wall, the picture of lazy self-assuredness. “I already did that a few weeks ago.”
“WHAT?” I was back in his space, almost nose to nose, up on my tiptoes and with my fingers gripping the collar of his shirt. “What are you talking about?”
He grinned and traced his hands over my ribcage easily, like he’d done it a hundred times in the past. “Glade. You asked me to get your sisters. I went and got your sisters.”
“But. But. But where the hell are they? How come no one told me?”
“They’re safe on Charon. With my family. I can only assume that Haven didn’t tell you your sisters were missing, because then it would be one less thing he could hold over your head to manipulate you with.”
Now it was my turn to bury my face in his neck. I breathed in the friendly, familiar, perfect scent of him. “They’re safe.”
“And happy. We can video-chat them if you want.”
My eyes filled with tears again, sore from all the crying. “I can video-chat with my sisters. Because they’re safe and happy and not being watched by the Authority. They’re not going to become Datapoints.”
“Hell, no. But they might make some fierce-ass Ferrymen. You should see the way Treb spars. She’s scary, like you.”
I laughed into his shirt. Then my head popped up. “Oh God! I almost forgot!” It was a sign of how much I’d been through over the last few days that I hadn’t unloaded this thing the first chance I’d gotten.
I reached behind my ear and pulled a piece of clear medical tape off. It held a chip the size of a fingernail, perfectly hidden by my hair. I handed it to Kupier, who studied it, his eyes squinting.
“I hacked Haven’s cloud. And downloaded everything that looked interesting. That’s how I first found out about the bomb. But there are things on there that I haven’t even looked at yet. I didn’t have the time, or the privacy, to really explore it. But I’m telling you, if the man has a weakness, it’s on this chip.”
Kupier’s eyes widened almost comically, and he cradled the chip like it was a baby bird in his overly wide palms. “Holy crap.” He caught me with those slices of blue eyes again. “I really think we should revisit the whole getting married thing again.”
I laughed, but only because I knew he was joking. “Maybe we should save civilization first?”
“Good plan.”
Later that night, I sat in the main room of the Ray, at a long table filled with Ferrymen. Kupier sat on one side of me and his little brother Oort sat on the other. Aine, who had grown much frostier toward me once she felt certain I was going to live, sat at the far end. The rest of the table was filled in with both Datapoints I knew and some I’d never met before.
I’d been to visit Cast and Wells, who wasn’t leaving his side. Their quarters were just like mine, and Cast’s health was already improving more on the Ray than it had on the Station. Maybe hope was like a super-drug or something. Our visit had been the first time in a long time that I’d felt as if I was talking to the old Cast. The wide-eyed kid who dreamed of racing skips.
I’d assumed that, as soon as we got to Charon, we’d be leaving the two of them behind. That they’d find some new life in the colony. But I was beginning to suspect that those two weren’t going to take kindly to being left out of the action.
The din of arguing Ferrymen brought me back to the here and now. There was frustration on the faces of some of the Ferrymen sitting at the long table with us, fear on the faces of others. But Kupier spoke with them, explaining my half of the story and showing them the chip of information. There were questions. There was some outrage, too. And there was definitely suspicion in regards to the two Datapoints and one Station mechanic who were suddenly residents of the Ray.
Kupier answered everything. He was calm. He was funny. He was a good leader. He cracked a joke and broke the tension.
I listened to their squabbles and negotiations. I listened while the group cobbled together a plan of what to do next. Their plans, their thoughts, their agendas… it was all as clear as the giant window behind us, one arm of the Milky Way glittering across the sky. They were transparent because they fought for the good of one another, of the citizens of our solar system, of civilization. They might never be as ruthlessly logical as Datapoints, but even so, all of this suddenly made brilliantly clear sense to me. This, this right here, this loud, laughing argument, this was how people were supposed to live alongside one another.
Not under the tight grip of a ruthless rule of law.
My eyes glanced off the glittery, light-catching tech on my arm. Never again, I promised myself.
Tomorrow, there might be an attack, or war, or more death. And sometime very, very soon I would meet with Haven again; that was another promise I’d made to myself. But right then, even all that disturbing knowledge was filtering to me only through the peaceful lens of my own thoughts. There was no more tech to infiltrate or calibrate my every thought, and it was almost dizzyingly blissful.
I laid one hand over my dampened tech. And enjoyed the silence.
Epilogue
Haven sat in silence in his office, his hands steepled against his face. An observer might have thought him to be calm and collected. He was seething on the inside, though. He was simply stunned that she was gone. Just… gone.
It wasn’t like it hadn’t occurred to him that she might try to leave. It was part of the reason he’d had the new tech installed in the first place. It was supposed to have been so much easier to keep tabs on her. To track her. To control her.
A lot of good that had done.
He hadn’t ever expected to have to use the tech as a weapon against her, but instead, he’d practically waged a war against her. After he’d been forced to put down that horrible woman in the simulation room, Haven had stumbled back to his office for a quiet moment. She’d been so determined to snuff him out. There’d been so much determination in her eyes. They were eyes that were floating in front of his face, even now. Strangely familiar ones, though he couldn’t quite place her. She’d reminded him of someone. The assassin wasn’t the first person he’d had to kill, of course. Though she was the first he’d ever killed in public. Or face to face.
He supposed he’d get over it in time. He’d gotten over it before.
He wasn’t sure, however, that he’d ever get over Glade’s betrayal. Haven was a bit surprised that it felt so very personal, too. He felt that he loved Glade the way a teacher might love a beloved pupil. But this betrayal felt like a daughter betraying her father. He wondered if it had even been a hard choice for her. To defect. She’d not only abandoned him, either—she’d apparently deceived him for months and months if she’d been in communication with Ferrymen.
He hadn’t yet allowed himself to think about what he was going to have to tell the rest of the Authority. He hadn’t yet thought about whether or not he was going to chase after her. He hadn’t thought about Sullia and whether or not he dared hand over the keys to the solar system to a girl with a half-tortured brain. He hadn’t thought about almost anything besides the file on the tablet in front of him.
It was a file that he kept in his own records. No one had ever seen it before, and nor would they. He’d once looked at this file with pride. He’d thought of it as his greatest accomplishment.
Tonight, however, he glanced down at the file and wondered where he’d messed this up. Had it been in the gene sequencing? Had it been in his calculations for what a Culling of this magnitude required?
This was thirty years of work, sitting in front of him. And now, Glade Io had rendered it useless.
Taking his hands away from his face, he finally dove into the file once again. He pieced through it, page by page. He looked at pictures of Glade’s father as a child. A brief history
of his life. And the same for her mother. He read their medical histories. He looked at images of their DNA. He read through his notes and plans that he’d devised to get them together once he’d found them—selected them.
These two applicants out of so many had caught his eye. And then all that had been left to do was for them to procreate. They’d done that, and actually seemed to enjoy one another. All the better because he hadn’t had to take the child and raise her himself the way he’d had to partially do with Dahn.
It had been a shame that he’d had to have the father culled, true, but he’d begun to ask too many questions about the future of his girl. He’d begun to get too loud. Too nosy.
None if it had mattered after he’d gotten Glade here, to the Station, training to be a Datapoint. The perfect Datapoint. The genetic miracle he’d grandfathered all on his own.
In some ways, that made her his own child.
He closed the file and turned away from it. That settled the matter. A father didn’t turn away from his child. He’d go after her. He’d make her see her destiny. If he had to destroy her to do it, she’d become as great as he knew she could be.
End of The Authority
THE CULLING BOOK TWO
Who gets Culled next?
Find out when The Ferrymen (book three of The Culling series) is released on March 4th 2018.
The Ferrymen is available for pre-order here.
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