The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  Dahn shrugged. “The only thing we can do is wait and see what the tactical team decides.”

  I wondered if this was what being culled felt like. Excruciating pain in my head, so bad that my eyes wouldn’t stop watering. Pain so tight, so pervasive, there was no way to yell, or breathe, or cry. Only, instead of lasting one second, the way a Culling did, this had been going on for at least three days.

  The pain released me and I fell flat on the floor, sweaty and weak. And now came the questions.

  “Tell me again, Glade Io.” The deep voice came from above me. I could smell the leather of his boots. “What is his name?”

  “Kupier,” I gasped. I’d already given that up hours ago. I was telling them every single thing I could. Besides the one thing I thought might get me executed.

  “Good.”

  I heard the click that often preceded the blinding pain in my head and I knew they were going to press the electrodes again. “His mother’s name is Owa. His brother is Oort. His little sister is Misha.”

  I repeated everything I’d told them before. I’d given up everything that I knew Sullia would have already given up. I desperately wanted my story to match hers exactly. If they found out that Kupier had given me preferential treatment, had spent time alone with me, I was sure I was going to be executed.

  There was no way that I could spin that to make it seem like I’d been spying on him. I hadn’t been. I also hadn’t been considering joining ranks with the Ferrymen, but would the tactical team see that? I wasn’t going to bet on it. Any minor allegiances were bound to get me killed. Right here and now. On the floor of the operating room that I hadn’t left in days.

  I’d already explained about every aspect of Moat that I could remember. The number of ships. The number of Ferrymen with weapons; the number of unarmed civilians. I’d named every member of the Ferrymen that I could. I’d explained about our housing situation on Charon. I’d told the team about helping Cast escape. About my first conversation with Kupier. I’d explained about Sullia. How I’d come to trust her less and less as time went on, and that I’d known she had some sort of plan in the works the whole time.

  I’d even explained that I had hesitated to go with her when she’d told me we were leaving that night. Though I hadn’t told them why – not the truth of it, anyway. I’d told them it had been because I was scared of getting caught and killed. I hadn’t explained that part of me hadn’t wanted to leave Kupier.

  They were looking for reasons to execute us. Of that much I was sure. They wanted to make a statement to the other Datapoints. That getting captured by Ferrymen was as good as getting killed. So, don’t… get… captured.

  But in the dim, exhausted back of my mind, I worried that they were choosing between me and Sullia. They didn’t need both of us to get the information they needed. And if we were both deemed damaged goods, then they wouldn’t want the headache and risk of keeping us both there in the Station. I knew that some people might never stop wondering if my loyalty had been compromised.

  I knew that, if that was the case, Sullia would throw me to the wolves with no hesitation. She would lie to get me executed before her. She’d do anything.

  And, I guessed, as I lay there on the cold floor in my own sweat, I knew that I couldn’t guess what her lies would be. So, I’d just try to stick my story as close to hers as I possibly could and hope for the best.

  “Good girl.”

  It was a new voice. One I hadn’t heard yet in the course of my interrogations. Haven was here. How long had he been in the room? I lifted my head to look at him, but found that my neck simply couldn’t lift my head more than a few inches.

  “She’s holding back, sir. There’s things she’s not telling us.” In that moment, if I could have culled the man with the deep voice, I would have. Clearly, he enjoyed violence.

  “I’m not,” I groaned, my lips dragging against the smooth floor. “I’m not holding anything back.”

  “Well,” Haven said quietly. “I suppose she can withstand more. If you still have doubts after a few more sessions… execute.”

  My blood felt solid and slow. Execute. They were going to execute me either way. If I told them that Kupier and I had become friends. Or if I didn’t tell them.

  I held my breath as the clicking sound came on. And then the electrodes attached to my head exploded into pain.

  I’d known about the interrogations. Both Sullia and I had known that they would be a possibility when we came back to the Station. But I’d never thought they’d go on for so many days. And I’d never thought they’d be this rigorous. There was nothing but the worst pain of my life, threatening to burn me alive from the inside out. There was no way to win. I was going to die. I was going to die. From this pain or from execution. Whether I spoke or not. I’d been kidnapped and I hadn’t fought my way out quickly enough. I hadn’t killed any Ferrymen. I’d spoken with them. Befriended some of them. And now my own people were going to kill me for it.

  I screamed and screamed. Even after the pain stopped. Because it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t asked to be abducted. I hadn’t asked to get along with Kupier. I hadn’t even asked to be a Datapoint. My father hadn’t asked to be culled.

  I didn’t want any of this. I just wanted to sleep and sleep. Forever. The longest, darkest night known to man. I never wanted to wake up. When I opened my eyes, I saw nothing but darkness.

  I didn’t wonder if it was because my eyes had stopped working or if I really was in a dark room. I didn’t care. All I cared about was sleep.

  I woke up in a dim room. Strapped to a chair yet again. Home sweet home.

  Something smelled terrible. And it took a moment before I realized that it was me. There was water on my lips and I realized that someone must have splashed some over my face to wake me up. I greedily sucked it down. It was the first water I’d tasted since the single glass they’d given me after my operation.

  My head lolled to one side and I saw that a port had been stuck into my wrist. On a table to my left was a set of syringes. All of them strangely small and filled with clear liquids. If I’d been a human still, my stomach might have dropped at the sight of the weapons that were going to kill me. But I wasn’t a human anymore. I was a ghost. A fossil. Gone was Glade. I was nothing. Just dead.

  My eyes fell to my hands and I was shocked by what I saw. I truly looked like a skeleton. The skin was pulled white over my bones and I was so stiff I couldn’t even bend my fingers.

  I didn’t know how long I stayed in that dim room. But the light never changed, so I knew that I wasn’t in an exterior room. I was deep within the Station somewhere.

  Sometime later, a long time later, while my eyes were half closed, a door behind me opened. A silver-haired man pulled up a stool next to me and leaned forward on his knees. “You’re going to die, Glade Io. And it’s such a shame.”

  Well. I guessed we weren’t wasting time on any pleasantries.

  “You always had such high potential. Your testing was through the roof. And even before that, when I saw you as a child – did I ever tell you that? That I observed you once, after the last Culling. I knew even then that you had massive potential in this program. And yet. Here we are. You’ve ceased improving. And now we’re questioning the most basic of all requirements? Your loyalty? How could this be?”

  “I’m loyal,” I heard myself say, and part of me was shocked. How could a ghost speak? How could the dead thing I was even have the strength to say two words? There was no air in my lungs. No space in my brain for thoughts.

  Haven studied me for a long time. “Well. You held back from the tactical team. So now we can’t trust you.”

  Calculating what I figured would be the last risk I’d ever get to take in my life, I just plunged in. “I liked the leader. Kupier. I liked him. He was charismatic and kind. But I wasn’t loyal to him. He tried to get me to help them, but I wouldn’t.” I dragged my head to one side. “And I figured telling you that I liked the leader of the Ferrymen would g
et me executed anyways. So, I took a risk and didn’t say anything.”

  Haven’s eyes darkened as he narrowed them. He leaned forward, slightly wrinkling his nose at my stench, but he stayed close. I could feel his soft breath on my face. “How shameful, child. To let yourself be taken in by a Ferryman. I thought I would have programmed you better.” He laughed softly. “But, like I said. Humans are not computers. Are they, Glade?”

  I didn’t acknowledge his words.

  “Well.” He rose and moved around to my wrist. I didn’t even have the energy to try and tug my hand away. “Either way, now you’ll get to rest.”

  I felt something get plugged in to the port at my wrist and I squeezed my eyes closed, willing sleep to come to me. Darkness. Quiet.

  I heard him walking out of the room. Heard the door close. It was ten minutes later when I gathered the energy to look around, and see the nutrition tube he’d plugged in to my arm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Two Months Later

  “Dahn, I swear. If you check on me one more time, I’m gonna sweep your legs.” He was like a mother hen. And he had been for the last two months.

  In the two months since Sullia and I had been deemed worthy of reentering life as Datapoints, there’d been a myriad of reactions amongst our peers. Some of them like Cast and Dahn had treated me like I might burst into a million pieces at any second. But most had kept a wide berth from either me or Sullia. I thought people were much more suspicious of me than of her. I’d been in interrogations for a full day longer than she had. I figured it had taken me that extra day to end up corroborating the story that Kupier and I had had a special relationship. They’d been able to tell that she’d given up all the truth. Just like they could tell that I’d been withholding. Sullia hadn’t initially tried to escape from the Ray. When it was unsafe to return, she didn’t. When it was safer, she did. Her loyalty was obviously to herself, not the Station. But she was predictable, reliable, understandable. And for that, she was a valuable Datapoint.

  In the end, we’d both returned, knowing that the interrogations were a possibility. They didn’t have to know that, if I’d known what they were gonna be like, I might have thought harder about coming back at all. I couldn’t speak for Sullia, though. We hadn’t so much as made eye contact since the day we’d gotten back to the Station.

  He rolled those soft gray eyes at me and had the audacity to look bored by my threat. “You could try.”

  So I did just that. Striking out of nowhere, I whipped one leg out to the side, catching him around the ankles and attempting to sweep his feet out from under him.

  He scoffed, remained standing, and merely cuffed me to the side with one hand to the forehead.

  “Pathetic.”

  I grinned, quick and fierce, and shifted to make another attempt to bring him down, but all good humor fell from his face now. He glanced around like someone might catch us messing around.

  “Datapoint,” his voice warned me to stand down.

  I sighed and fell back into place beside him. I didn’t bother to look around and see if anyone was watching me. I knew they were. They always were.

  I hadn’t hated the Ferrymen when I’d been their captive, not really. But I sure hated them now. Because of them, I was the outcast of the entire Station. My fellow Datapoints either glared at me distrustfully or they stared at me with wide eyes, waiting for me to burst into tears or something.

  I’d spent four days in the infirmary after Haven had plugged in my nutrition tube. On the last day, he’d come back and told me a few things. I was officially deemed trustworthy. And as soon as I was healthy enough to go back into training, I was going to have a mentor. The Culling was starting soon. And we needed every Datapoint out in the field.

  I hadn’t wanted to lay around sipping broth and eating crackers much after that.

  The only person who’d treated me semi-normally after I’d left the infirmary was Cast. He’d been almost excited to see me. Well, as excited as any Datapoint could get. He showed me his pilot’s training log. Apparently, his stint in the Ferrymen’s short-range skip had peaked his interest. We were allowed to pick specialties, and his was flying.

  “What was the specialty that you chose, Glade?” he’d asked me.

  I’d shrugged, feeling an odd sense of letting everyone down all at once. It must have been my recovery catching up to me. “I never chose one. I liked all the classes equally.” Or hated them all equally.

  The looks I was getting from all of the other Datapoints, surprisingly, weren’t the strangest part about being back at the Station.

  It was who had been chosen to be my mentor.

  Dahn.

  I’d always spent a fair amount of time with Dahn during our free time. And we’d often trained together; he’d always been pushing me to do more simulations. But now that he’d been assigned to me as a mentor? Well, let’s just say he was the first face I saw when I woke up in the morning and the last face I saw before bed.

  Dahn and I had spent basically the last month and a half joined at the hip, training like maniacs. I’d run hundreds of simulations. And every single time, I’d run scans on my tech for viruses. I’d connected to the Authority Database, like a good little Datapoint. I ran scans for viruses there, as well. Nothing showed up – not so much a blip on my radar. There were no viruses. The Ferrymen were wrong. Dead wrong.

  Having that matter put to rest allowed me to throw myself headlong into training. Most of it was simulations. But Dahn made sure to get me back into combat shape, as well. We began every day by beating the crap out of one another. That was the best part of the day as far as I was concerned.

  And from there the simulations started. The program uploading. The endless brain scan quizzes. No other Datapoints trained the way we did. Sometimes twenty hours a day. Part of that was Dahn’s obsessive personality. I knew he wanted to be the best mentor, who produced the most improvement in any pupil in history. But the other part of why we were training so hard was that we’d been assigned a Culling.

  Of all the Datapoints in the entire Station, I had no idea why they’d picked us. It was just a small one. A practice of sorts. On Europa. And I’d been told that a few other Datapoints were doing the same thing on other colonies. Test runs before the big show. The main Culling.

  So here we were, on a skip currently bypassing Jupiter and heading straight for Europa.

  “Datapoint.” A low voice behind me had me nearly jumping out of my skin. Ever since my torture stint with the tactical team, I’d been having trouble with low voices coming from behind me.

  But it was just the cook on our travel skip. We’d been traveling for the better part of three days to get to Europa, and we had a fairly large team with us. Pilots, health techs, and a cook.

  The cook shoved one bowl of soup into my hand and one into Dahn’s. “Something light that won’t weigh you down,” he murmured before heading back toward the galley.

  I looked down at the bowl of green mush in my hands. Apparently, this was Culling food.

  Dahn, taking his nutritional needs very seriously, sat down at the table under the small port window and started slowly eating. I followed suit in following him to the table, but didn’t eat. Instead, I held onto my bowl and looked out the tiny window.

  The skip lurched and I grabbed my soup in both hands. I’d been spoiled on the Ray. As crappy, haphazard, and rundown as that thing had looked, she’d flown like a dream. I knew it was because the Ray was a ship and this was a skip. But I had to admit, it had been a better ride.

  And a better view. The tiny port window on our skip was so scratched that I could barely see out of it. I had just the smallest edge of red Jupiter in our view. My mind landed on the big window in the Ray. My mind next tried to land on Kupier, but I skittered quickly away, sending my thoughts elsewhere.

  I wasn’t letting myself think about him. It was suicide. Becoming friends with him had gotten me tortured for days. It had almost gotten me killed. Thinking about
him always made me slower for some reason, too – less on point with my training as a Datapoint. And I couldn’t take that risk right now. Not when the entire Station’s eyes were on me and Sullia. It was better for me to ignore my time with the Ray and with the Ferrymen, even if my brain made them pop up at all the worst times.

  So, I was surprised when it was Dahn who brought them up this time.

  “I’ll bet this is better than the food you had with the Ferrymen.”

  I looked up, shocked that he’d bring the subject up. He hadn’t so much as acknowledged the fact that I’d been gone. Much less that I’d been abducted. The first time I’d seen him after my recovery, he’d literally shoved me into a simulator. We’d talked about nothing but training since then.

  I took an experimental bite of the soup and, yeah, it was pretty good. It didn’t hold a candle to Owa’s brown stew, but I didn’t bother bringing that up.

  I nodded to Dahn, avoiding that piercing gaze coming from his soft gray eyes. I’d never understood how his eyes could be both of those things at once, being both piercing and soft. But they were.

  He was quiet for a minute, and I got the impression that his brain was working very hard underneath that calm exterior. “What kinds of foods did you eat when you… were with them?”

  Now I was just confused. He wanted to small-talk about my time with the Ferrymen? When we were twenty minutes out from landing on Europa for our first Culling? I internally shrugged. Maybe this was normal and I was just being a freak. Nothing had felt the same since I’d returned to the Station. Either the Ferrymen had changed me irrevocably, or the interrogations had.

  “Mostly peanut butter sandwiches. Sometimes soup. Tinned meat. They made bread fresh on the ship. But mostly everything else was canned.”

  He nodded. I worked away at my soup and avoided his eyes.