The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  She froze and looked back at the room. “But you don’t want Sullia to come.”

  Kupier raised an eyebrow halfway up his forehead. “Do you want Sullia to come?”

  To his utter delight, Glade burst out laughing. It was muffled by the hand that she’d clapped over her mouth, but it bubbled right out of her. It was the first time he’d made her laugh, and in that second, he resolved that it definitely wasn’t going to be the last.

  He tossed his head in the direction of the front door and led Glade through the house. He stepped out into the narrow, dim alleyway in front of his house immediately, but paused when he saw that Glade hadn’t followed him. She stood in the doorway, shadows throwing a pattern over that serious face of hers.

  “Come on.” He gestured for her to follow him.

  “You want me to follow you out there. Alone.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “You won’t be alone. You’ll be with me.”

  “Right.” She didn’t move at all.

  Kupier let out a rough breath as he took a quick step forward. He wasn’t frustrated. He was sad. She didn’t flinch away from him, but she did stiffen when his hands landed on her shoulders.

  “In case my actions haven’t made this clear, I’m just gonna come out and say it.” His eyes searched hers and she held perfectly still, looking up at him. “I’m never going to hurt you.” He squeezed her shoulders and his fingers slid just a little bit down her arms. “And I’m never going to let someone else hurt you, either.”

  She frowned at him. He frowned right back.

  “What?” she asked dryly. “You want a hug or something?”

  Kupier let out a huffing laugh. “I’d try, but I don’t feel like getting chopped in the throat right now.”

  He could have sworn that her frown softened at the corners of her mouth, but other than that, she said nothing.

  Kupier dropped his hands and stepped back from her. If she didn’t trust him, she didn’t trust him. He wasn’t going to punish her for it.

  “Alright,” she sighed, tipping her head to one side. “Where are we going, then?”

  He tried to fight back his grin, and didn’t wholly succeed.

  Chapter Ten

  I would never get used to living in an underground colony. Every windy corner we turned, I kept looking up, expecting to see the sky. And all I ever saw was a packed dirt roof. Sometimes it was a good fifty feet up and sometimes the ceiling was low enough that Kupier stooped as he led me through the back alleys of Moat.

  There was the scent of rich soil, not unpleasant, and after a while I realized that it was getting stronger.

  “Are we going down?” I asked.

  He nodded. “The city has a bunch of levels. We’re on the fourth one right now, mostly residential. We’ll cut through the fifth level and head to the sixth.”

  Sure enough, a few minutes later, after we’d skirted past more darkened, sleeping windows, it became clear that we were descending even further. The ground under my feet slanted and the walls of the alley had started sweating.

  “Is there water under the surface here?”

  “Yeah. An underwater ocean. We have cryovolcanism here. It’s like your volcanoes on Io, except they’re ice instead of lava.”

  “Hmmm.” Being someone who’d grown up on a highly volcanic planet, that didn’t sound like a volcano at all to me.

  We got to the bottom of the dirt ramp and Kupier paused, his ear cocked like he was listening for something.

  He took a few steps and I followed, though I noticed that he was shielding me from view, pressing me closer to the wall than he had before.

  I started to hear more noises, the farther down we wound. Voices in the distance, metal clinking. I smelled soot and smoke, and heard a shout of laughter. “Is this the fifth level?”

  He nodded.

  “What happens here?”

  “Ah. Manufacturing. Sort of?”

  I raised my eyebrow, about to ask him exactly what ‘sort of manufacturing’ could possibly be when a group of men came into view in front of us.

  They were mostly shadowed, lit only by the orangey glow of the service lights lining the exterior wall. I saw tools slung over their shoulders, and a few of them were laughing and jostling one another.

  Kupier grabbed my elbow and pushed my back against the wall, tossing the hood of my sweatshirt over my hair. I stiffened, pushing back at him, but one of his elbows went onto the wall over my head as he leaned into me.

  “Be still,” he hissed, dropping his head down to my ear.

  I realized then that he was hiding me, his back to the men. Apparently, he wasn’t wanting to draw attention to us.

  I held perfectly still, my eyes glued to his chest as he leaned over me. The men passed by, and if they noticed the couple wrapped up in shadow, none of them said anything. The second they were past us, Kupier grabbed my hand and tugged me along.

  “I take it we’re not supposed to be here?” I asked.

  He smirked at me. “It’s better if I don’t get caught bringing a Datapoint down to the sixth level. I happen to like my head attached to my shoulders.”

  “You could get executed for this? What the hell is the sixth level?”

  He tugged me into a jog as we made our way along the exterior wall of the alley. He veered down a small entrance on our right and we took the darkened stairs two by two. I guessed we were skipping the rest of the fifth floor entirely.

  “What exactly do you know about people from Charon, Glade?” he asked instead of answering my question.

  “Ah,” I wracked my brain. “That they’re rebels. And that they – you – were making dangerous weapons and had to be separated from the rest of the cols. Cut off, I guess, is a better way of putting it. And that’s how the Ferrymen came to be. A terrorist organization that started when the Authority cut you off.”

  Kupier laughed humorlessly. “Wow. Once again, what a convenient bit of information for the Authority to have given you.”

  “Well,” I snapped. “What do you say happened, then?”

  Kupier looked back at me for a second, pausing, with shadows like crow feathers over his face. His eyes were somehow still light, even in the suffocating underground dark of Moat. When he started walking again, this time his warm palm was pressing against mine, his fingers closing around my hand.

  I opened my mouth to say something about it, but he spoke first. And when I tugged at my hand, he just firmly held on.

  “We weren’t cut off. We separated.”

  I raised a skeptical eyebrow. No colony would ever willingly separate. Each col had its own specialty, something that it made or produced that the rest of the solar system needed. And likewise, each colony needed something from all the other cols. To separate would be to live without essentials. It would be to cut yourself off from products and supplies that were necessary for survival.

  Kupier read my facial expression. “It’s true. Charon separated because we became self-sufficient. We didn’t need the other cols and we certainly didn’t need the Authority, stealing our tech and trying to impose a brutal rule of law.”

  “You became self-sufficient,” I repeated blankly.

  Kupier nodded. “About 30 years ago. You see, Charon is made of all the outlaws, or it was originally, at least. A long time ago, before the Culling even began, the Authority used to send ‘troublemakers’ out here to live on this col.”

  “Why the air quotes?”

  “Because who they called troublemakers were really just free thinkers. Innovators. Inventors. Artists. All people with ideas that scared the Authority.”

  I frowned. “The Authority isn’t scared of innovators or inventors. They’re always on the lookout for new tech that we can use. They foster people with good ideas and good minds.”

  Kupier shook his head. “No. They foster people with good ideas and good minds who are also willing to do what they’re told. The Authority has no use for people who aren’t… malleable. Thus, the exile to Charon.”


  I could see from the look on Kupier’s face that he not only believed what he was saying, he knew it. But honestly, this didn’t make sense to me at all. The Authority wanted people who listened, of course, but they weren’t in the business of exiling brilliant minds. I had never heard anything like that before.

  “That was about a generation ago. Most of our grandparents were from the original exiling. The good part about it is that almost all of the children who have been born here on Charon have been incredibly brilliant. Free thinkers.”

  I could see where he was going with this. “You’re telling me that, in just two generations, people on Charon invented ways to be completely self-sufficient, on their own in the solar system?”

  He nodded, his eyes solemn. I tilted my head to one side and the tech on my cheek must have caught the light because his eyes fell there instantly. His hand flexed in mine.

  “That’s what I’m telling you.”

  “So why would the Authority tell us that you’d been cut out?”

  “Because they didn’t want other cols to get any ideas.” He shrugged. “Because being self-sufficient means that we don’t need the Authority. And the big secret is that the Authority needs the cols more than the cols need the Authority.”

  I blinked my eyes for a second before tipping my head back and groaning. “Good Lord. You sound exactly the way I thought a Ferryman would. All this conspiracy and revolution crap.” When we’d been cautioned about Ferrymen, we’d always been warned about the kinds of things they believed. The kinds of things they would try to get us to believe.

  Kupier nodded, though there was a flare of something in his eyes. “Of course I sound like a Ferryman. I am one. And proud of it. I’m proud to see things clearly.”

  I scoffed.

  “You want to know the truth?” he asked me.

  I shrugged. This would be the truth according to Kupier.

  Instead of speaking, though, he tugged me down the ramp even further. The level that he led me through next was definitely different than the residential area. Where the fourth level had been, there’d been hut after hut, one sandwiched in after the next. There’d been narrow alleyways, some of them only big enough for a child to sneak through. There’d been people leaning out of their windows to talk to one another, laundry hanging on lines between houses. The residential quarter had been filled with noise, bustling with people.

  The sixth level was deserted. And as my eyes adjusted, I realized that it wasn’t made up of many rooms or huts jammed together. No. It was a humongous cavern. Natural, from the looks of the irregular and vaulted ceiling, the geodes sparkling in the walls. The sixth level stretched on, as far as the eye could see. I knew without asking that it spanned the entire city.

  “What is this place?” My voice was hushed, and still I felt I could hear it echo.

  “This is the real Moat.” Again, with that humorless laugh. “This is where we came when the bombs dropped.”

  “Bombs?”

  We scuttled through the sixth level, and I was immensely relieved when he didn’t cut across the middle of the huge cavern, but rather continued around the exterior wall. I was still craning my head, trying to see all the way to the glittering stalactites on the ceiling, when he tugged me sideways and through a door I never would have seen on my own.

  Kupier flipped on a small service light to our left and I blinked my eyes in pain even though the light was dim. But even when my eyes had begun to adjust, I kept blinking. Because what I saw didn’t make sense in the least.

  It was the last thing I’d ever expected to see juxtaposed against the great, geological cavern. This small room with dirt-packed floors was filled to the brim with… computers.

  “An archive?” I asked him. It was the only place I’d ever seen so many computers in one place. The most interesting part was that all of them were from different eras. They were of all shapes and sizes, denoting different generations of use. Most of them, I’d only ever seen in photos. My tongue went dry at the exact same second that my fingers started to itch. What I wouldn’t give to mess around on some of these. I hadn’t been allowed to touch a single piece of tech the entire time I’d been with the Ferrymen, and I was parched for it. There hadn’t been a longer stretch in my waking life that I’d gone without solving some computer puzzle. Without coding or fixing something in the Station. Even at home on Io, there’d always been some old desktop to screw around on.

  Kupier nodded. “A complete historical archive of our solar system.”

  I took a step into the room and froze at his next words.

  “It’s the other half of the reason that the Authority bombed Charon.”

  “What?” She only turned her chin, keeping her back to Kupier.

  “Twenty years ago.” His voice was so quiet and clear that it almost, almost, sounded like his older brother’s. The real leader of the Ferrymen. The man who really should have been the one here and explaining all this to Glade. But he wasn’t. Luce was just one more thing that the Authority had taken from Charon. From its people. From Kupier. “We weren’t always an underground colony. We had a great city above ground. Didn’t you see the wreckage when you flew in? That sure isn’t naturally occurring. After we separated from the solar system, proclaimed our sovereignty, they knew that they couldn’t have word getting out that separation was possible. So, they announced that they’d cut us off for being rebels. And then they bombed the hell out of us. They wanted it to seem like no colony could possibly survive without them. They wanted us to be a broken shell of a colony. That anyone who survived, which they deemed unlikely, would suffer until they eventually met their death.”

  He was sure that she wasn’t believing him. He could see it in the stiff set of her shoulders, the stubborn rise of her chin. So, he stepped around her, shifting her to one side with his palms on her shoulders. He strode to one of the computers, powering it on and navigating to the files he wanted to show her.

  Images.

  First there were shots of the radar that had sensed the bombs coming. Had tracked them. Then there were the Charon-wide alerts to all citizens to evacuate their housing and make their way toward level six. There were photos then, of the bombs as they entered the atmosphere.

  His eyes on the side of Glade’s stubborn expression, he clicked on a video. Dark, glittery images of the cavern right outside their door. In the video, it was packed with people. Thousands of people. Families were huddled together, babies crying, blankets over shoulders. And then the entire thing shook with a tremendous, eardrum-shattering bang. Everyone screamed, stalactites falling from the ceiling of the cavern. The camera fell and the video went black.

  He knew it was brutal, but he clicked into another video, and this one showed the same thing from a different angle. And then there was another. Her frown deepened, but her face showed no sympathy for the people in the video. She merely watched.

  And then he showed her the pictures. First there were the before pictures of Moat. Parts of it had been above ground. The atmosphere had been modified by great machines. People had walked freely. Seen the stars at almost all hours of the day. Made wishes on Pluto. Squinted one eye at the sky and pinched the sun between two fingers.

  And then, after the bomb. The landscape was a wasteland. There weren’t even remnants of the structures that had existed. The atmosphere was forever altered. The people of Charon were condemned to the underground.

  Kupier watched Glade so carefully that he could see the images reflected in the glitter of her eyes. She barely blinked.

  But when she did blink, she shook her head at the same time, as if she could shake this new information right back out of her mind.

  “You really think they bombed you because you tried for sovereignty? Because you have a room filled with old desktops? Kupier. This is insane. This is propaganda that someone has fed you.”

  He laughed then, a hearty one, because the irony was too real. “No, Glade! You’re the one who’s been fed the propaganda
. Don’t you understand what you’re looking at here?” He swept his hand over the entire room, thirty feet by thirty feet, filled with computers. “This bunker is filled with actual historical records! Compiled by hackers and computer geniuses so good that the Authority quarantined them on Charon!”

  Glade shook her head. “Yeah. Kupier, I just really don’t believe you.”

  It was then that he knew he was going to have to go in for the kill shot. He really didn’t want to do it. If there had been any other way to convince her of the truth, he would have gone for it. But he could see the skepticism on her face. And worse? He was starting to sense her loyalty to the Authority. It had been hypothetical before. But now, faced with this incendiary information, she was doing exactly what he’d feared she would. She was siding with what she’d always thought she’d known.

  “I’m not saying this is some alternative history book, Glade. This isn’t a room that’s filled with opinions and perspectives on moments of history in our solar system. This a room filled with evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” she asked, throwing her hands up in the air in frustration.

  “Just sit.” Hands on her shoulders, he guided her to a chair.

  He flicked on one of the bigger monitors next, and navigated his way toward the program he wanted to run for her. She clucked at his clumsy attempts through the network. Computers weren’t really his thing.

  When he turned back to face her, she had her arms crossed over her chest and her hair spilled to one side. “A forty-five minute video? You’re really going to make me sit through the entire thing? You know, this would really be a lot simpler if you’d just let me plug in my tech.”

  She gave him a toothy smile that she’d never showed him before and Kupier stared at her for a second, his heart strangely noisy in his chest. And then he shook his head. “Yeah, right. I’d rather we kept your tech off for the time being. I kind of like having a functioning brain, thank you very much.”

  Her frown returned instantly. “Are you saying that, if my tech could read you, I’d cull you?”