The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  “Uh. Wow.” He dragged a palm over his head, sneaking a look at me.

  “Yeah.” I turned and faced him, too. I wasn’t surprised in the least to see a smile on his face. Though, this one was a little dopier than any I’d ever seen before.

  “So…” he started. “I was kicking myself for not doing that before you skipped town.”

  “Oh.” I gulped. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” With a flash of blue, I saw that he had the marble in his hands, and he was making it dance from one knuckle to the next. For the first time, I caught it up, held it between my fingers. The marble was warmer than I would have thought.

  “All those things you said that I feel,” I started slowly. “The missing you, the liking you, the trust?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You feel all that for me, don’t you?”

  He squinted at me. “I thought Datapoints weren’t good at reading emotions.”

  I shrugged and tossed the marble back at him. “I’m good at reading information. And that,” I pointed into the direct past with my thumb. “Was some pretty irrefutable evidence.”

  He grinned. “What can I say? I’ve got a thing for dark-haired girls who try to burn me alive using only the power of their scowls.”

  I rolled my eyes at him before looking out the windshield, absorbing the view for the first time. We were adrift and floating; Mars was coming into our view, filling up a quarter of the window. “Wow.”

  “Yeah,” he agreed, following my line of sight. “Have you ever been down there? To the colony down there?”

  I shook my head. “I’ve pretty much only been to Io and the Station. Well, and Charon.”

  He grinned at me. “You’ve never even been to Europa? That’s just a hop and a skip from Io.”

  My stomach tightened as I thought of boots on the street. The body of the woman with the scarf over her hair and her hand over her chest. Oh yeah. I had been to Europa. I was just blocking it out. Instead of answering Kupier, I just shrugged.

  I cleared my throat. “Have you been to all of the colonies?”

  “Yup. It was kind of a personal goal of mine when I was younger. Back before I became the leader of the Ferrymen. Before my brother died.”

  I glanced sideways at him. “Did you not want the job?”

  “At that cost? No. No, I didn’t.” He looked more serious than I’d ever seen him before, and both of us watched Mars float almost out of view. “I wouldn’t have wanted it anyway. Even if Luce had lived. I’m proud to be a Ferryman, but I never thought it would be ALL that I’d be.”

  “What did you want?”

  “To be a frontiersman.” He said it with a childlike grin on his face. It was the dream of almost every child in the solar system, at some point or another, to be one of the brave few who explored the limits of our territory, always looking for new resources, new places to live. Somehow, I didn’t think Kupier was joking.

  “An explorer.”

  “Yeah.” He seemed to relax just the tiniest bit when I didn’t laugh at him. “I was always curious about the cols; I wanted to know absolutely everything about any place that wasn’t Charon. And then when I was old enough to start traveling with Luce, with the Ferrymen, I fell in love with that, too. The traveling part. I love all of it. The piloting. The on-the-fly repairs that are always inevitable. Navigating by the stars when the computer goes down. A few years ago, I was on board a ship that spotted an entirely new grouping of Trojan Asteroids. Never before seen or documented.” He balled up a fist and banged it against his knee. “I’ll never forget that. The way that felt.”

  He faced the windshield and I faced him. The warrior who wanted to be an explorer and the Datapoint who just wanted to be free. We were more trapped in our own lives than we were in the tiny capsule ship.

  His face stayed forward, but his eyes slid to the side, and I caught just a flash of electric blue. “You keep looking at me like that, DP-1, and I’m gonna kiss you again.”

  I wasn’t sure who reached for who then, but it was an hour or so before I noticed our view had completely changed.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  “They’re gonna notice I’m gone. If I don’t notify them of my whereabouts soon, they’re gonna think I defected. And then it won’t matter what I tell them about the capsule ship. They won’t care. No story would cover it.”

  “Would that be so bad?”

  “Kupier.”

  “No, listen.” Kupier tugged at a length of her hair, letting it slip through his fingers like water. “You don’t have to go back. I hate thinking about you there. About you on that Station with people who would do that to you.”

  She’d told him about the interrogations and he’d gone white with fury. It had instantly topped his list of reasons to burn the Authority to the ground.

  She shrugged. “It’s the way life is there. And more importantly, that’s my life. It’s the only life I know, Kup. I’m not going to just abandon it.”

  She had other people there that she loved. Who she couldn’t abandon. That was the only reason he could think of that she would stick to this so hard. Continue to ally herself with the Station. He couldn’t make himself believe that the girl who’d just kissed his brains out could possibly have this much love for the Authority.

  “Besides.” She turned to him, her eyes flashing dark. “Do you have any idea what would happen if I threw my lot in with the Ferrymen right now?”

  “Everyone would live happily ever after,” he deadpanned.

  She deftly ignored him. “Haven would come after you with everything he’s got. I don’t think he’d stop at just bombing the surface of Charon. He’s resting all these dreams on my shoulders. At this point, the Ferrymen taking the ‘chosen one,’” she almost sneered the word, “would be tantamount to war. I don’t think there would be any line he wouldn’t cross.”

  “Well,” he started, figuring he should go for broke, “what if you came with me right now and we just threw the whole plan into motion? Got the Ray, headed straight for Earth, and destroyed the Database before anyone knew what hit ‘em?”

  “Yeah. I’m not doing that.”

  “Why?” He’d been joking before, but this question was deathly serious.

  “Kup, I don’t know what to believe. I… have questions about the Authority. Sure. Yes, I’ll admit that. And I’m deeply scared of what will happen to my sisters if and when they get brought to the Station. But I don’t believe enough in the Ferrymen ideology to put my life, and the lives of my sisters, on the line for your cause. You’re asking me to not only turn my back on something I was raised to believe in, but you’re asking me to destroy it. And I don’t think the Authority is as squeaky clean as they say they are. And I have no idea if I’m going to go through with this Culling. But what if we get down there, send it up in smoke, and then realize that we were all better off when it existed? I don’t know if I can handle that. I don’t know if I can handle any of this.”

  She took a deep, shaky breath. It was the first time he’d ever seen her look fragile. But it wasn’t because she was scared or tired. It was because too many people had asked way too much of her. Kupier bitterly regretted being one of them.

  Glade turned back to him. “Not to mention that, if I die, that’s just going to make things harder on Daw and Treb. Haven will just force them to be whatever it is that I am. And it almost killed me. The training. The testing. The simulations. My sisters are sweeter than I am. More tender. They wouldn’t survive the training – I know it. I’m not going to completely abandon everything I’ve known.”

  Even for you.

  It was unspoken. But somehow the words echoed on the air between them.

  He leaned in for a soft kiss while he stroked a hot palm over her hair. His eyes were sad. “So, you’re not ready to run away with me, huh?”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Yeah. No.”

  He shrugged and rolled to face the windshield. “Well. I guess that’s fair enough.” He turned back t
o her almost immediately, though. She’d never know how much rested on her answer to this next question. “But you’re really just fine with going back to the Station and doing everything the Authority asks of you? You’re fine, just ignoring all the parts that you have questions about?”

  She hesitated, and he could have sworn he watched her get older in that second.

  “No. I’m not fine with that.” One hand played lightly with her tech. Her words sounded like they were almost impossible for her to get out. “I’m suspicious of Haven. And of this new system of Culling. He’s given reasons for it. But even so… I don’t like it. I don’t want to just go back there and trust him, that what I’m doing isn’t mass murder.” She paused hard. “Genocide.”

  Kupier took a deep breath. Sometimes he wished that it wasn’t a Ferryman thing to keep your head shaved. Because he really would have liked to tug at his own hair right this second. He settled for flipping the marble over his fingers. “Alright. Then why don’t you go back to the Station. But this time, I’m the voice in your ear. Not Haven.”

  Sync or swim.

  “You mean to be a Ferryman?” Her dark eyebrows were almost all the way into her hairline, and Kupier couldn’t resist running one hand down the length of her soft hair.

  “No,” he laughed. “I think there’d be a mutiny if I unilaterally dubbed a Datapoint a Ferryman. But just think about it. The entire time that you were with us, on the Ray and on Charon, you had Haven whispering in your ear. Showing you the world from his perspective. Just let me do the same for you while you’re on the Station.”

  He could see her considering his words. If she said no, if she just wanted to go back and bury her head in the sand, he wasn’t sure what he would do next. The very thought of it exhausted him. The Ferrymen were quickly running out of ways to fight the Authority. And if what Glade said about Culling citizens every year was true? Well, then they were running out of time, as well.

  Her face was so serious. That frown that he’d come to have such a soft spot for just deepened and deepened.

  “Kup,” she sighed, half resigned. “I’m pretty sure that would have been the case whether you’d asked it of me or not.”

  “Ha!” Kupier smacked his hands together over his head, startling a laugh out of Glade and making her grin. “Yes. Hell yes. Okay, that feels good.”

  “That I’m not just writing you off as a crazy man?”

  “That I have part of your allegiance.”

  Her face grew immediately serious. “Yeah,” she said in a quiet voice. “You do.”

  “Great. Because now that I know that, I can give you two presents.”

  She started out rolling her eyes at him, but pretty soon her mouth fell flat open when he grabbed up the tech on her arm and started to yank something off.

  “Hey!” She tried to snatch her arm back from him. “You trying to get punched in the face again?”

  He ignored her, his tongue poking out of the side of his mouth as he worked. It didn’t take long for him to get one fingernail under the side of one of the crystals that lined her arm. He flipped off what looked like a two-inch-long piece of paper-thin glass. It had been completely invisible, pressed up against her tech.

  Kupier held it up between them and Glade blinked, reaching for it.

  “What is this?”

  Instead of answering, he lifted up his hips from the seat of the capsule and pulled something out of his back pocket. It was the same as the piece of glass that Glade held in her hand, but it was a little bigger and a little sturdier looking. “It’s a Ferryman’s com. We’ve been using them for years. It’s just messages, nothing by voice. And the messages can’t be intercepted. We had to modify yours a little bit so that it blended in with your tech.”

  She turned it over in her hands, snapped it back onto her tech, and watched it go utterly invisible. She pulled it back off. “When did you put this on my tech?”

  A look of chagrin came over his face. “Ah, right before we popped you in the dampener.”

  “Are you telling me that this has been here THE WHOLE TIME?”

  He nodded again. “It has a locator in it, as well. That’s how I knew where to find you in the Station.” He held up the matching one in his hand. “I used mine to find yours.”

  Glade just blinked at him for a second, turning the com over in her hands. “So why didn’t you use it to track us down when we left Charon?”

  “I did.”

  She blinked up at him. “But you let us go.”

  He nodded. “I told you before, Glade. I can’t force you to do this. To be on our side. I knew that if you wanted to go, then stopping you wasn’t going to put you any more on the Ferrymen’s team.” He held her eyes for a second. “Here. Let me show you how to send messages on it.”

  He was sure she could have figured it out on her own, but he needed somewhere else to look for a minute. He typed words into his own and, a second later, they scrolled over hers, iridescent and purplish.

  “Oh, that’s cool,” she noted. “Even though it’s clear, you can’t read the message from the other side.”

  “Right. So even if you get a message while it’s on your tech, no one will know. The words will face in.”

  She fiddled around with it for a few more seconds and he watched the ethereal light of the com light up her face. He took another deep breath.

  “You ready for your next present?”

  “Hmm?” she asked, and he could tell she wasn’t paying attention to him. Didn’t matter. She was about to give him her undivided attention. He was sure of it.

  “The Ray is on the way to get your sisters as we speak.”

  The com clattered out of her fingers and she stared at nothing in the air for far too long. “Excuse me?”

  Kupier couldn’t resist – he reached forward and tipped her chin up until she was looking at him. “I dispatched them yesterday.”

  “Before you knew where I stood? Before you knew that I was willing to be your ally?”

  He nodded. “I couldn’t just stand by and let them be taken. It’s a long way to Io. So, it’ll still be a week or so before they’re safe. But we’ll take them to Charon. Like you asked. We’ll keep them safe from the Authority.”

  He barely got the words all the way out of his mouth before she was tackling him back onto the seat, squeezing the breath out of him.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. He felt her tears against his neck and wondered if she knew she was crying. “Thank you.”

  She popped up from the hug. “Then I definitely have to get back to the Station. If they think something is up with me, or that I left or defected, then my sisters will be the first place they go. And all of this will be shot.”

  “Right.” He knew she was right. But there was a stabbing in his chest. Regret. Fear. He didn’t want to let her go. And he definitely didn’t want to send her back to a place that didn’t care if she lived or died. That tortured her.

  Sighing, he used his com to contact the nearby Ferryman’s ship. The Ceph wasn’t nearly as large or as fast as the Ray, but she’d do. “We’ll be docking in ten minutes and then you can take off from there. You want to go over what to tell them at the Station again?”

  She nodded, opening her mouth to recite her lines, but Kupier cut her off. He grabbed her hands tightly. “Tell me you’ve got at least one ally there, Glade. Someone who’s looking out for you even a little bit. I don’t think I can send you back in if there’s no one.”

  Her eyes went just the slightest bit guarded, but she nodded. “There’s someone. One person. My friend Dahn. I think I mentioned him a few times.”

  “You trust him?”

  Her eyes fell now. “Things have been changing. But yeah. If my life were on the line, I’d trust him.”

  Kupier sensed something there. Maybe even something that Glade herself couldn’t sense. And the words were like chalk in his mouth, but he said them. He had to say them. He hadn’t been born selfish, and he wasn’t about to teach himse
lf how to be that way now. “Then stick close to him, Glade. Promise me that you’ll stay as close as you can to him. Especially if,” he swallowed, “something goes wrong on my end.”

  Her eyes were fierce when he looked back at her. “Are you saying goodbye?” She let out a frustrated growl and banged a fist on her own leg. “God! I hate humans! I can never figure out what they’re really saying!”

  He couldn’t help but laugh. “I’m saying goodbye for now. And that I’ll let you know when we have your sisters safe. And that we’ll go from there.” He kissed her one more time. It was meant to be soft, but it ended fiercely. He wasn’t sure if he’d done that or she had. “And that I want you to take care of yourself. To actually take care of yourself.”

  She held his eyes and nodded. They sat shoulder to shoulder then, and watched in silence as the Ceph approached. They didn’t speak again.

  And he didn’t look back when he jumped out of the capsule and jogged across the landing deck of the Ceph. She didn’t look back when she launched off and into space.

  They didn’t look back. They looked forward.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  I knew that interrogations were a very strong possibility upon my return to the Station. There was a heck of a lot to be suspicious of. But in no way had I expected to get what I received.

  I was applauded. Cheered for. Absolutely celebrated. Apparently, being the chosen one had some perks.

  From the second I commed in to the Station to say that I’d recovered a one-man capsule ship that the Ferrymen had smuggled on to that supply skip. Well, it was like I’d announced that I’d single-handedly wiped the Ferrymen from the solar system.

  The engineers were thrilled to have yet another piece of Ferryman equipment to study and learn from. The tactical team was relieved to understand what the Ferrymen had done to the supply skip.

  And Haven? I think he was just glad I’d come back. I had no idea whether or not he believed my story, but both of us knew that throwing your ‘chosen one’ into interrogations was not exactly a good way to promote the new system of Culling.