The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  I pointed toward the blueprint I’d drawn up on the screen. Sure enough, the screen was magnifying and zooming in on the far left corner of the computer mainframe. That was the emergency override system that had gone berserk.

  “THIRTY SECONDS TO IMPACT.” A calm, cool voice came over the loudspeakers. It was the Ray. She was warning us to brace ourselves.

  I could hack my way into this or I could jump down and just bash the emergency protocol system to pieces and hope that that did the trick. Yeah. Hacking it was.

  “Warn Kupier that he’s about to get full manual control back!”

  Then Aine was gone, shouting into the cockpit, and I was alone in that small, hot room. Lights blinking in every direction, the ship’s voice was warning us of every bit of mayhem under the sun. Sweat slicked down my spine. But my fingers and my brain were in complete sync. I hacked into the emergency override system in seconds. I didn’t have time to run a diagnostics, so I swept it manually. With nothing but my eyes and the keyboard. I was looking for something out of the ordin—

  There it was. A pesky little jerk of a virus, clinging to the code of the emergency override system like a monkey to a branch. I moved in, plucking the virus off and decimating it with just a few strokes of my fingers. Then I disabled the emergency override and the overworked, buzzing mainframe went creepily quiet for just one tense second. Then the manual system kicked back in and the Ray gave an almighty lurch.

  “Hell, yeah!” That was Kupier’s voice.

  Suddenly, I was rolling backwards in a graceless backflip before I braced myself against the door jamb. The ship was veering upwards, everything tilted at a sharp incline. The screwdriver I’d used skittered across the angled floor, making an honest attempt to make me a cyclops before I smacked it to the side. Then the side access panel that I’d yanked off minutes before came next.

  It was plowing toward me when the ship suddenly leveled off. We’d stopped our rapid ascent and were now at a safe altitude to re-attempt a landing.

  I let out a breath and rose to my knees, still clutching the door jamb.

  “Everybody alright?” Kupier asked, looking around at his crew. His eyes lit with surprise when they landed on me in the door of the mainframe annex. He hadn’t realized I’d been back there.

  He got a nod from me and mumbled yeses from the rest of the crew, though Aine knelt on the floor and gripped a limp left wrist. Cast was bleeding from an eyebrow and Roon, I saw, had never made it out of the cockpit. He was busy untangling his pants leg from the screws on the wall that he’d apparently been thrown against.

  “Alright, people. Let’s try this again,” Kupier said as he turned back to the landing controls, that involuntary smile on his face.

  Chapter Three

  On the second try, we landed with little to no fanfare or drama. Soon, the Ray was parked on the dock with the jaws of the great gates closed up tight above us, and there we all were.

  Home sweet home.

  In our rebel colony. The one filled with outlaws and geniuses and rebels. The one that the Authority had created, and then tried to wipe right off the map. The one that had another Authority bomb pointed straight at its heart.

  Not exactly a vacation destination.

  And yet… I did feel a certain lung-deep unwinding when I stepped off the Ray and onto the packed soil floor of the landing dock. In the levels below me were markets and families and testing labs filled with people who were brave enough to fight the Authority.

  Not to mention the fact that my sisters were down there somewhere, tucked away with Kupier’s mother and sister. Safe and sound—

  “Glade!”

  “Glade!”

  Treb and Daw, my identical twin sisters, screamed my name in unison half a second before they came bolting across the platform and straight into my arms. They damn near laid me out. It was all I could do to grab them both and stay on my feet.

  “Thank goodness you’re here!”

  “It took forever for you to get home! What took you so long?”

  I couldn’t help but smile down at both of them.

  “Is Charon really that boring?” Kupier asked from over my shoulder.

  I had to roll my eyes when both of them went a brilliant red at the very second they spotted him. Well, he had, after all, rescued them both from Io about two months back. And delivered them safely to their new home. I supposed they were entitled to little crushes.

  “No! Not boring. Your mother and sister are so kind, and we’ve been learning all about how this colony is… so different from ours, and—”

  Daw cut herself off immediately when Treb caught her in the ribs with an elbow. She was rambling.

  “So, you guys came to pick me up?”

  “Yup. Owa and Misha came, too.”

  “Oh yeah?” Kupier asked, peering over all of our heads for a glimpse of his mother and sister. His face broke into the most epic sunrise of all grins in history just before he jogged off to swing his little sister into the air and envelop his mother in a hug.

  All three of the Io sisters had watched him go.

  “He is so cute,” Treb whispered as she turned back to me, her eyes hectic. “Is he your boyfriend?”

  I furrowed my brow and stared at her. “What?”

  “Is Kupier your boyfriend?” she asked again.

  I heard a noise behind me and turned to see Oort looking like he’d just swallowed his tongue. His eyes sparkled with what looked like contained laughter.

  I cleared my throat and shot him an annoyed look. “Have you two met Oort? Kupier’s younger brother?”

  I took Oort by the shoulder and stepped him forward. He wasn’t lanky or tall like Kupier. He was stocky and had a very substantial look about him, but he wasn’t ugly. And he was just a year or so older than my sisters.

  All three of them just sort of nodded at one another, their eyes bouncing around the landing pad in an attempt to see each other without getting caught looking.

  Right.

  I didn’t miss the Station. I’d never miss the Station after the way I’d been tortured there. And especially after what had happened to my mother there. But there was something to be said for living amongst a bunch of Datapoints. Certain things were a lot more straightforward. All these normal people feelings ricocheting every which way were confusing as hell.

  That night, Kupier lay awake on the floor of his little sister’s room. Oort lay in a nest of blankets beside him. On the other side of his mother’s small home, Glade and her sisters slept on mattresses on a packed dirt floor just off the kitchen.

  They couldn’t offer much in the way of amenities on Charon, but they could offer freedom.

  Kupier sighed and wondered why the hell he wasn’t sleeping. He was always sleeping.

  Tomorrow, it would really start. He was back on Charon, the Ray was getting maintenanced, his crew was resting up and seeing their families, and Glade was here. Glade was finally here. By choice, she was here.

  Kupier couldn’t help but smile as a whooshing, nervous breath exploded out of him. The rising feeling within him was layered over in a hundred iterations of itself, like sheets of overlaid petals from some ecstatically molting flower.

  Of course, Kupier was nervous, because having Glade here meant that the ball was going to start rolling. And soon. She was the entire key in the lock to their plan for knocking the legs out from under the Culling and the Authority. They couldn’t do it without her. And conversely, now that she was here, they could actually start. That meant the lives of every Ferryman who’d agreed to this plan were squarely resting on Kupier’s shoulders. That was enough to keep anyone up at night.

  But the feeling within him was bubbling up for other reasons, as well. It was simply having Glade there, in his mother’s house, at his side in so many ways. Having her on board the Ray for the last month had been confirmation – of the starkest, most undeniable kind – that she was special to him. She’d always been important. The only Datapoint that the Ferrymen could
use to implement this plan of theirs. And then she’d been interesting, because she was such a badass. And so smart. And not exactly pretty, but fiercely good-looking, with all that black hair and those dark eyes and her permanent scowl. And then, finally, she’d just gone ahead and lodged herself somewhere in between Kupier’s lungs, like an insistently growing pebble that he felt with every breath.

  If only he knew how she felt. Nah. Correction. If only she knew how she felt. Kupier knew that Glade had a soft spot for him. And he knew that she’d really enjoyed making out with him the one time. Because, come on, who wouldn’t have, the way it had happened? It had been romantic and desperate and they’d been orbiting Mars. Who wouldn’t have been caught up in the moment? Those few hours were easily in the top three best moments of his entire life.

  Kupier sighed and shifted, the coolness of the hard-packed dirt floor starting to seep up through the blankets and chill him. What he didn’t know about Glade was how she felt about this other guy. This Dahn guy. Who’d been tool enough to choose life as a law-abiding Datapoint over Glade Io. Who did that?! On one hand, you had a life of rules and order and a deranged psycho ordering you to kill whoever he wanted you to kill. And on the other hand, you had the bravest, most badass girl in the solar system asking you to come have an adventure with her. What kind of person chose the first option?

  But, of course, they’d grown up together on the Station. They’d bonded over their training as Datapoints, and Kupier was sure that Glade and Dahn had been through things that he couldn’t even imagine. Those kinds of things brought people together. Those were the circumstances where love grew. Deep love. Love that didn’t fade with time or distance.

  If she’d been anyone else, Kupier would simply have asked her how she felt. And then he’d have accepted her answer, whatever it was. But Glade Io was a Datapoint. She was horrible at figuring out her feelings. In fact, Kupier was fairly certain that she was still very much getting used to even allowing herself to have feelings. So, yeah, he could ask her, but he was almost positive she wouldn’t be able to offer anything resembling an answer.

  His only choice was to keep doing what he was doing, and waiting. She would get there. She would figure out how she felt about him. And then she would tell him. Because if there was one thing that he knew about her, it was that she was blunt as hell.

  And she was smart. Whip-cracking smart.

  And calm under pressure.

  And apparently, she knew how to maintenance a computer mainframe of a ship that was in complete free-fall, and could do so with calm and aplomb in less than sixty seconds.

  He silently chuckled into a palm he dragged over his face. He was gone. Just gone for her. There was no one else like her.

  His thoughts, warm and weightless as he considered Glade, started to wander away from her heroics of the day and toward the horrors of what could have been. The feeling in his chest went cold and sharp as he let his mind drift back to the events of their landing that day. His heart started pumping metallic blood as the panic and raw fury of those last few minutes replayed within him.

  If it hadn’t been for Glade, the Authority would have had a very important victory that day. Their solar system would have been down a Ferryman leader and one crucial rebel Datapoint. Not to mention all the men and women on the Ray who would have needlessly perished. All because of a glitch in the emergency override system? It didn’t ring innocent, and it bothered him.

  And then, yet again, his mind was back on Glade. To that look on her face as she’d emerged from the mainframe annex. Halfway between confident and cocky. She’d saved them. Aine had described how everything had gone down.

  Kupier sighed and scraped a palm over the short stubble of his haircut.

  She’d left everything behind to throw her weight behind the Ferrymen. Trusted him with her sisters. Hell, she’d become public enemy number one. All because she trusted him.

  It was time for him to return the favor.

  Kupier woke up even as he came springing to his feet, his body more awake than his brain was. There were shouting voices, and two loud bangs had just come from down the hall in his mother’s house. He was slamming out into the hall within moments, his shoulder ricocheting off the doorframe as he scrambled down to the mayhem before his eyes had fully opened.

  He got shoved unceremoniously to one side and then the other as Treb and Daw whipped past him and out of his mother’s front door.

  Kupier scrubbed his face on the inside of one arm and turned to the kitchen, where his mother stood, looking stunned as hell, and then he looked to where Glade scowled from the doorway of the small room she was sharing with her sisters.

  “What the hell just happened?” he asked them.

  “Nice underwear,” Glade replied, her face flat except for the one arched eyebrow.

  He glanced down at himself and, though his briefs were a little on the tight side, he deemed himself decent enough for the house he’d grown up in. Given the situation, at least. He shrugged and turned to his mother. “Seriously, what the hell happened?”

  Owa glanced between Glade and Kupier, her hand suddenly resumed forming the breakfast rolls she’d been working on. She didn’t seem to want to answer Kupier, which was a dead giveaway that she knew exactly what had happened. She cocked her dark head to one side and raised meaningful eyebrows at her son. Owa was always such a perfect mixture of delicate and tough. And now was no different.

  Glade, already dressed for the day in clothes that Owa had gathered for her, scowled from the doorway and crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I told them what happened. With our mom.”

  Kupier’s eyes grew wide as he lowered himself into one of his mother’s kitchen chairs, internally wincing against the chilly metal. “You told them… everything?”

  Glade’s arms unwrapped from one another and came straight down in frustrated defiance. “Yes! I told them everything. Just like you would want me to. And then they got all upset and stormed out—”

  “Just like I would want you to? I – Glade, sit down. Come on. Don’t go after them right now. Sit down and talk this through, okay? Can we have some tea?” He’d asked the last part to his mother as he yanked a chair out at the table, and then he practically had to sweep Glade’s feet to get her sitting down.

  Owa nodded and poured some already boiling water into two cups for tea. Kupier watched as she paused for only a moment before she poured a third cup for herself and sat at the table with them. Kupier’s mother was a private person, and she allowed others as much privacy as they required. If she was butting in on this conversation, it must mean that things had really gone off the rails with Glade and her sisters, and Owa had heard it happen.

  “Start from the beginning,” Kupier told Glade.

  Glade gripped her cup in both hands and spun the handle one way and then the other. “There’s barely anything to tell. We all woke up this morning and I decided that they should know what happened to Mama.” She glared into Kupier’s face, as if somehow this whole thing was his fault as if he was arguing with her. “They’re her daughters, too, you know. They deserve to know the truth about their mother.”

  “Of course, Glade. The why is obvious. The how is pretty important, though. How did you tell them?”

  She shrugged. “I just told them.”

  Sometimes communicating with a Datapoint was like speaking in a different language. “Tell me exactly what you told them,” Kupier said.

  “I said, ‘Look, there’s something you need to know about Mama. She faked her death on Io because she was a member of the Ferrymen. She came to the Station in secret, where I found her, kind of by accident. I helped her steal a bunch of information from Jan Ernst Haven and then she tried to assassinate him. Which didn’t work because my tech took me over and made me protect him. And then Haven killed her with the same poisoned dart that she’d tried to kill him with. And then I escaped to the Ray. I had to leave her there.”

  Kupier shared eye contact with his mother,
who, sadly, confirmed that that was indeed exactly what Glade had said to her sisters.

  Glade looked between them. “And then they started yelling and crying and stormed out of here.”

  “Yeah,” Kupier said, his head spinning. He wasn’t even sure where to start. “That was a lot to lay on them all at once, Glade. I wish you’d waited for me to help you. Or at least to plan it out with you.”

  She furrowed her brow, looking genuinely confused. “I wasn’t going to tell them at all, but I thought that you would want me to. That it was the right thing to do.” She looked back and forth between Kupier and Owa, at the look they shared. Glade’s face became instantly frustrated again. “Well, I tried to do what you would do, but apparently I can’t even get that right!”

  “You keep saying that. What do you mean you were trying to do what I would do?” Kupier asked.

  “I mean, that when I don’t want to act all… Datapoint-ish, and I want to be as human as possible, I try to think about what you would do, and then I do that thing.”

  Her words turned a key inside of him. She didn’t know it, and maybe even Kupier didn’t quite know how he knew it, but any chance that these feelings he had for her were going to dissolve away into thin air? Well, that was gone now. She’d locked it all up tight inside of him where it just might stay forever. He reached across the table and pried one of Glade’s hands loose from her cup of tea, lacing his fingers with hers. He didn’t know what to say, but he could hold her hand.

  “That’s smart,” Owa said softly. “Kupier is very human. And very kind. It’s a good strategy. But regardless, that was too much to lay on your sisters all at once.”

  “I thought, if I just got it all out there, then they could deal with it and move on. I mean, I’m not an idiot. I knew it wasn’t going to be an easy conversation. I knew that they were going to have to grieve her all over again.”