by Ramona Finn
“Then what did you mean?”
“I meant that, if I trust you, which I do, then why haven’t I agreed to your idea? The logic of that doesn’t follow.”
“Which idea? You mean with Cast’s tech?” Her eyes were suddenly even more alert. He had the sudden feeling that she’d switched down a microscopic lens through which to observe him.
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I couldn’t agree to it before because it just seemed foolish to activate a weapon that is so firmly in the hands of the Authority. But then, you hacked the ship and saved us all from a crash landing, and I just thought to myself, She’s the most talented person in the entire solar system. Why am I resisting this?”
“So, you’re agreeing to it now?” she asked, her tone the closest to excitement that he’d ever heard. “You’ll let me do it?” Her brow furrowed. “If Cast agrees, that is?”
“I think it makes sense. We have to be proactive about this. If Haven really is outfitting Sullia with one of those things,” he offered, frowning down at the dampened tech on Glade’s arm, “then we really might not have a chance. I imagine the Ferrymen will be the very first people he has her cull from a distance.”
“The chip will give us all a fighting chance.”
“Exactly. Do you really think you can make sure that Cast isn’t being controlled remotely? Through his tech?”
She nodded. “It might take me a minute or two, but I’m sure that I can. Besides, Cast is the person you want for this job. The whole reason he was so hurt last month was because he was attempting to resist culling people. He’s not a natural at this the way…” she trailed off. “The way some people are.” Something tickled at the edge of Kupier’s mind. “Whose name were you going to say right then?”
“Nobody.” She sighed, looking away. “Kup, I’m going to disable the GPS on his tech as fast as I can, but there’s always a chance that it’ll blip the Station and show our location.”
He shrugged. “There’s a pretty good chance they already guessed that we’d take you here.”
“I know. It’s just that… I think a confirmation is bound to spark some kind of action from the Station. From Haven. After a month of being completely blind, of not knowing where I’ve been, there’s bound to be something that gets stirred up if Cast’s tech sends the GPS signal.”
“What kind of something are you thinking of?”
“Well, there’s always the off-chance that Haven is well and truly done with me, and they decide to send the bomb and just finish off the whole kit and caboodle. But something tells me that they might send a rescue attempt.”
“He doesn’t want to lose you,” Kupier mused.
As they’d talked, they’d shifted closer to one another and he’d absently tossed an arm over the back of the couch. She looked so strangely small, tucked in under his arm. It surprised him. Her confidence and competence, her disdain and unwavering attention, all these things added up to a kind of larger-than-life presence for her. But really, she was kind of a peanut. Maybe five foot four on a good day, and slight. Her hand, if she were to lay it over one of his, would only come to his second knuckles. He knew that she was more than capable of protecting herself, taking care of herself. But in this moment, on the creaky couch in his mother’s dark living room, Kupier found himself feeling wildly protective of her. He wanted to wrap her in Teflon and find her some cozy rainforest on an unknown planet where she could climb trees and watch the moonrise and do nothing else. Nothing dangerous. “I can deeply relate to the feeling,” he said.
She tipped her head back, letting its weight rest on his shoulder. “Now that you mention it, you and Haven are pretty similar.”
Kupier felt his mouth drop open. “Take that back.”
“No.” She shook her head and he watched in fascination as the devil rose in her eyes. “Think about it. You both have an unhealthy obsession with me. You’ve both kidnapped me at some point or another. You both want me to ‘fulfill my destiny’ in one way or another, whatever the crap that means. And you both have tried to kidnap my sisters at some point.”
“Take it back!” he whisper-yelled, a teasing smile on his face. He twisted and slipped a hand down to dig a finger into her bottom rib where, during their many sparring match-ups, he’d discovered she was exceptionally ticklish.
“Never!” She squirmed away from his hand. “Tell the truth, you’re Haven in disguise, aren’t you?”
Amazed at this joking, flirting side of her he’d never really met before, Kupier decided not to look a gift horse in the mouth. He caught her behind the knee and half-dragged her across his lap while she attempted to scramble back towards the other end of the couch, a huge smile on her face. “Do I look like a crusty old psycho to you?” he asked.
“You really want me to answer that?”
The snark earned her another round of rib tickles, which made her yelp and kick out with one foot. She caught him off-balance and he tumbled down on top of her. “Admit it, Kup. Haven is your father. Insanity runs in your family. Any day, your hair is going to go moon-white and you’ll develop a penchant for civilization domination.”
“Rude!” He doubled down on the tickles and she quietly laughed and gasped and wiggled until he finally granted her mercy. He was half on top of her, her hands grasping his wrists, trying to hold his fingers away from her ribs. It was the fact that she could have kicked his head straight off his neck if she’d wanted to that really buoyed him. Her eyes were so big from this distance. He’d never been able to tell exactly what color they were. Except for the fact that they were dark, somehow hidden and vulnerable all at once. His face was just inches from hers, and closing in fast.
“I’ve never really thanked you for that, have I?”
Her words floated to him from a million miles away, even though there were less than two inches between their faces. Her voice didn’t have that giddy, stone-skipping quality it had had just moments before. She was suddenly serious and slightly husky. The usually chilly house felt hot and muzzy with whatever was zinging back and forth between them.
“For what?”
“For rescuing my sisters.”
He paused, and he saw genuine gratitude in her expression. There was amazement there as well, and a little bit of surprise.
“You don’t have to thank me for that, Glade.”
“Yeah,” she whispered, “I do.”
She leaned up, her hair whispering back over the arm of the couch, and closed the distance between them, her lips pressing to his.
Kupier’s blood went instantly hot, all kinds of yes zipping through him in every direction. He didn’t understand how something could feel so familiar and so foreign all at once.
Sometimes in a kiss, the simple math equation of two people and four lips never quite dissolved into the bliss of it. Kupier always found kissing enjoyable, but sometimes the mechanics were insistent enough that he couldn’t quite get lost in the magic of what could be between two people. That was not what happened with Glade. The second their mouths came together, a heart-banging fog seemed to descend over them. He was pretty sure he had one knee braced on the couch and one hand in her hair, but he lost track of everything else. He felt like someone had pulled a blanket of heat over both of them and tucked them in. Conscious of his considerable weight on her, he tried to rise up on his elbows but found that her arms at his back were steel bands holding him down.
It was minutes or hours or maybe several lava-slow weeks that passed by before Kupier lifted his head, hoping for a gasp of cool air to calm himself. But she threaded her hands through his hair and tried to pull him back down. He obliged, tipping his head and rolling them. With a surprised, arm-out yelp, they thunked off the couch and landed in a pile on the floor.
Glade laughed, propping herself up and shoving her hair out of her face. The sound was unfettered, and light as an arrow. A sweet, strong laugh that he’d never heard her make before.
“Well, that was smooth,” he muttered to himself, scooping an
arm around her shoulders and tucking her into his side.
She popped right back up, looking down at him where he lay and tucking her cold toes under him. “Were you trying to be smooth?”
“I definitely wasn’t trying to roll you off the couch.”
She grinned like the answer delighted her. “You’re such a mystery to me, Kupier.” She leaned forward and skimmed her hand over the short buzz of his haircut. “The good kind of puzzle. And I usually hate unsolvable puzzles.”
“I’m solvable,” he insisted. “I’m really not complicated, Glade.”
She looked between the two of them, their rumpled clothes and warmed cheeks. She looked back at the couch next, and one of her hands found its way up to press against her mouth with apparent nerves. “This is complicated to me.”
He tugged her hand down and swallowed it up in both of his, pressed flat together. “Because of that Dahn guy?” He made sure his eyes stayed on hers even when he wanted to flit them around the room. When she slid her hand out of his, Kupier reached into his pocket and pulled out his blue marble; he worked it in that familiar figure eight around his knuckles and it soothed his suddenly racing nerves.
She dropped her eyes from his and watched the path of the marble instead. “Um, I don’t know, I guess. But, no, not really. No. This,” she motioned between them, “doesn’t really have anything to do with him.”
“But it might’ve if he’d come with you when you left the Station,” Kupier guessed. He was attempting to be clinical, but he was certain his emotion was showing on his face. He just had one of those mugs. The kind that showed every thought. He was a terrible liar.
“I don’t know,” she said after a while. Her expression had gone from lit up and giddy to heavy, weighted. “I’m not good at figuring this stuff out, Kupier. Honesty? You want honesty?”
He genuinely considered the answer to that question. Was that what he wanted? What if she was about to tell him that he would always have second place in her heart. He was keenly aware that honesty, real honesty, at a moment like this, could puncture every good rising feeling he had like they were balloons. But he also knew that he’d never been one to bury his head in the sand; he could take the truth. He’d handle it, whatever it was.
“Yeah. Alright. Truth.”
She pulled her knees up to her chin where she sat. “I’ve known Dahn for so long. And, I guess, things were sort of changing between us when I left. But he didn’t come with me. So, I pretty much knew that it was goodbye.” Her eyes went sad and distant in a way that sliced something in Kupier’s gut. She looked a little heartbroken. “But I also know that, well, in that moment? When I was on the trash skip, and I thought I was either going to get dragged back to the Station or that my tech was going to kill me? Well, at that moment, I looked up and saw your ship breaking through the line of Authority skips. I saw the way you were driving it, so competent yet ridiculous. And I—” She tore off the words like they were the heel of a loaf of bread. She half-laughed into a hand that covered most of her face. “I’ve never felt a feeling like that before, Kupier.” She laid a palm over her heart. “You were coming for me. And I suddenly had a future. I suddenly knew I was going to live. And that you were going to fight for me and keep me safe. Make me laugh. I knew it all. All that made this thing in my chest start ticking. And so far, it hasn’t stopped.”
He let out a breath in a long, thin line. If that wasn’t honesty, he didn’t know what was. People always said that Datapoints didn’t have feelings. That they were basically machines. But that was not his experience with Glade at all. Sure, he’d seen her zip certain feelings into their own special compartments. But she was a bad-ass soldier who’d not only had to fight for her life, but for the future of their solar system. He didn’t, couldn’t, blame her for that. And then she went and told all of the truth like she just had. She’d told him everything. Even the parts that she didn’t know the answers to.
Kupier had had a few sweethearts before. Mostly before he’d become the leader of the Ferrymen and had had a bit more free time on his hands. He could never have predicted that the person in his life who would be the most open and transparent with her thoughts and feelings would be a Datapoint. Could have knocked him over with a feather over that one.
“That works for me,” he told her, and her expression eased a bit. He couldn’t help but pull her a little closer, pushing his nose against hers. “You said ‘ticking.’ That your feelings for me were ticking.”
She nodded, leaning over him now, one of her hands next to his ear, holding herself up.
“Like a clock?” he asked.
She smiled then, rolling her eyes at him. “I thought you of all people would understand. It’s more like a heartbeat.”
He laughed and tumbled her down onto his chest. “Guess that makes sense.”
Chapter Five
Are you sure? Like, positive? One hundred percent? Because if you’re not absolutely sure, then, morally, we really shouldn’t be risking this. Seriously, I think—”
“Wells!” I snapped, turning to him as I adjusted the tool belt at my waist and rolled up the sleeves of my jumpsuit. “This is literally the fiftieth time you’ve asked me this and there’s only so many times I can give you the exact same answer.”
I was using my scariest, steeliest expression on him, but he didn’t back down from me. Which both annoyed me and earned him points at the same time.
“I am pretty sure that Cast’s integrated tech isn’t advanced enough to be controlled remotely by Haven or anyone on the Station,” I told him yet again, keeping my voice low so that it wouldn’t echo around the cavernous, bunker-like room where twenty or so Ferrymen were convening to watch the experiment go down. My sisters were there, too, lingering with Oort against a far, dirt-packed wall. “Besides that, I am also pretty sure that I can disconnect it from all tracking and GPS in less than a minute, which would be too fast for them to hack into it anyways. And additionally, if you ask me one more time, I’m going to punch you in the throat so hard that you’re not gonna be able to ask anyone anything for a week.”
Wells’ eyes narrowed, his hands going to his hips, and he looked like he was about to say something else.
“Wells,” Cast called, a little laugh in his voice. “Quit bothering Glade. I’d rather she wasn’t distracted and annoyed when she starts hacking into my tech, alright?”
That had Wells’ mouth snapping closed at least, and he stalked over to where Cast was sitting on a metal table. We were in a lower level of Moat, in a small annex that had gone unused for a while. Kupier had told me that it had been used as a medical room in a pinch, but that it had also served a lot of different purposes. As did most things on Moat. It was a small place that housed a huge number of inventors and innovators and scientists per capita. Who knows what had been experimented on in this room?
The thought fortified me. We were just one of many groups of people who’d taken chances in this room. This was simply a risk we were taking. A huge risk. But, in my mind, there was no way around it. It helped that Cast had agreed almost immediately. He hadn’t looked happy about the idea of turning his tech on, though. In fact, he’d looked downright sick about it. But, he’d agreed immediately. He’d understood the stakes even before I’d gotten done explaining them. The Station’s goal was to cull from a great distance. That put everyone on Charon at serious risk, and probably at the very top of the list when it came to places Haven wanted to decimate. Plus, Sullia was most likely going to be the one in the driver’s seat. And she was a sadistic psychopath, so really, no one was going to be safe. We needed to find a way to shield ourselves from the Culling. Testing the chip I’d been working on was step one.
Getting Cast on board had been step number two. Step number three had been figuring out who was going to volunteer to give the chip a spin. I wanted to do it, myself. I was the one whose idea this was anyways. But Kupier had categorically refused to let me do it. In his eyes, I was too important, being the key to hi
s whole grand plan.
I refused to let him do it, either, seeing as how he was the leader of the entire resistance movement.
In the end, it was Aine who volunteered. And in the end, I only agreed to her doing it because I made some modifications that meant the chip didn’t necessarily have to be implanted in the skin of Aine’s head to work. She could wear it around her neck like a necklace. So, there wasn’t any real danger to her from my end.
From Cast’s end? Well, he was really gonna have to keep a tight leash on himself in order to keep Aine safe. His job was to read her brainwaves as a Datapoint. If they read as cullable, it was going to take a real effort for him to keep from culling her. His tech would be pushing him to cull, and he’d have to use some serious self-control to back down from that.
“Wells!” I called. “Will you go make sure that Kupier has everything he needs to keep this room secure?”
Seemingly extremely eager to have something concrete to do, Wells bounded off to the other end of our bunker-like room.
“Thanks,” Cast muttered as I sidled up to him, tools in one hand and my hacking keyboard in the other. “I know he’s just worried, but he’s driving me nuts.”
I paused. We were Datapoints, Cast and I, and we’d never quite had real conversations about our feelings. “Are you worried?” I asked anyway.
“I don’t know.” He shrugged. “I don’t want to do it. But no, I don’t think I’m gonna accidentally cull Aine, if that’s what you’re asking.”
I wasn’t totally sure if that’s what I had been asking or not. “Either way, I’m pretty sure I’ve rigged the chip to do what it’s supposed to. I think we’ll be in good shape.”
“What do you mean ‘either way’? You mean, if my tech is actually being controlled by the Authority and they make me cull her? Isn’t that worst-case scenario?”
“I guess that’s what I meant, but seriously, Cast, I don’t think that’s even possible, as basic as your tech is. Worst case that’s remotely likely, as far as I’m concerned, is that you feel pushed by your tech – not the Authority – to cull her, and have to use self-control not to. But, truly, I think this is going to work. Your tech isn’t likely to have any direct link to the Authority – it’s not important enough for them to have bothered.”
