The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  I knew that expression. I’d just never noticed how starkly different it was from the way he’d looked on the Ray, or on Charon.

  Cast, with his tech activated, had a dead look in his eyes. But not inactive. No, this look spoke of duties, missions, obligations. This was the look of a Datapoint. There was no warmth or humor in it.

  Something clicked into place for me.

  Later, though… that was for later. Now it was time to concentrate on Cast. He needed me in his corner.

  “Cast,” I said quietly.

  His eyes flicked toward me and I saw something human cross his expression, but it was almost undetectable. He was in full-on Datapoint mode.

  “Did it work?” His voice was rough with the ordeal he’d just gone through.

  “Yeah. Glade did it. And so did you.” Wells stepped forward and squeezed Cast’s elbow. “You look like you did on the Station. Robot Cast.”

  Apparently, Wells had noticed the same thing I had.

  “Uh oh,” Cast said. “We better get this over with then, so I can go back to being Human Cast.”

  “Ferryman Cast,” I corrected. “Datapoint Cast is creepy.”

  “All Datapoints are creepy,” Wells said.

  “Let’s do it,” I told Cast, stepping back as he jumped down off the table on unsteady legs. I wished that we had time for him to rest and eat and relax. Syncing came with a bone-deep exhaustion, and now we were asking him to do even more, something that he would need strength for. But there was just absolutely no way that we could have a live Datapoint wandering around Charon; whether he was controlled by the Station or not didn’t matter. He would be a sitting duck. There was no question that someone would attempt to assassinate him. There was no love for Datapoints here. Getting this over with, as much as it would further exhaust him, was for Cast’s safety as much as for any other reason.

  Cast, Wells, and I all walked over to the spot on the floor we’d designated just for this moment. Fifty feet from Aine and Kupier. She was standing in her own spot now, her shoulders back and her face resolute. I could see the chip glinting against her chest.

  It was going to work. It was going to work, no matter what. I’d made a good piece of tech.

  I lined up at Cast’s side, shoulder to shoulder with him, and when I finally drew my gaze up, away from Aine, I saw that Kupier stood exactly the same way. Alongside his person, just like me.

  “Ready?” Cast called across the room to Aine.

  “Fire away,” she called back, and Cast and I were the only two people in the room to laugh. Right. Apparently, that wasn’t a joke to anyone else, but for us; we quieted quickly.

  There wasn’t anything for me to say to Cast. Not really. We Datapoints weren’t exactly motivational speakers. “Don’t kill her,” I said instead.

  It was all I could really think of.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “That’d be bad.”

  Then he closed his eyes and I squared myself at his side, facing Aine. I could practically follow along with what was happening in Cast’s head. I knew what was going on because I’d done it so many times myself. He was getting in touch with his tech. In his head, it would just feel like getting centered, but really, he was subconsciously activating all the parts of his internal culling program. The first and only part that he’d be using today was the vision program. He’d be locating and identifying Aine’s brainwaves.

  I pictured Cast’s inner mind as a dark room. There would be a blur of red brainwaves coming from each person in the room. He would only focus on Aine’s, and he’d slowly bring her into focus.

  I let myself look at the Ferrymen for just one brief second, and was brought up short by what I saw there, on all their faces. I’d expected tension, trepidation, nerves. What I saw, though, on almost every face, was shock. Raw fear.

  I tilted my back to them and turned to look at Cast, at what they were all looking at. And for the very first time, I saw a Datapoint through the eyes of a citizen.

  He was terrifying.

  Cast’s face was tight and lined, concentration in every line. His arms were tight at his sides, his shoulders high, his feet spread apart and planted. His eyes were both blank and horrifyingly focused at the same time. There was no humor, no softness, nothing to mark him as a human. He looked vicious and dangerous. Like a weapon.

  He took a step forward and I watched through narrowed eyes. I could feel the collective inhaled breath of the Ferrymen around us. I never moved when I culled, but I knew that every Datapoint was different. Cast took another step, and Aine’s eyes fluttered, her face twisting in pain. Which was strange. If she were being culled, there’d be no warning. There would be no pain. So that’s not what this was.

  Cast looked like a soldier at the ready before his head tilted to one side and then the other as if he were following the track of a renegade skip through the sky. His arms came up suddenly and he swiped at the air as if he were flicking a troublesome fly to the side. The muscles in his arms bunched and he made a sound – a strained, frustrated sound.

  He was fighting. That much was clear. He was fighting either with his own tech or… No. There was no ‘or.’ I’d closed off all pathways for the Station or the Authority to hack in. He was fighting with himself.

  Cast’s arms flew out to either side and that noise came out of him again. He went straight down to his knees, and then his palms were on the floor. He looked back at me, showing something so young in his eyes, and I saw there was a thin line of blood tracking down from the tech implanted in his forehead.

  “It works,” he rasped before he fell flat-down, unconscious.

  Across the solar system, a lowly technician held a back-up drive in her trembling hand. She straightened the collar of her jumpsuit. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other outside of the door she’d never thought she’d knock on.

  She wasn’t scared of Haven, exactly.

  But she’d been there weeks before when he’d injected that woman with poison. It had haunted the technician. The way that Haven had killed her. So gently.

  Granted, the woman had been an assassin. But still, the technician had been having trouble sleeping ever since. Which was why she’d volunteered for the night shift in the control room of the Station; if she wasn’t sleeping anyway, she figured she might as well be of some use.

  Besides, nothing ever happened on the night shift. It was an easy job. And the technician liked drawing. She usually got a lot of work done on her own.

  Tonight, though, something had happened. One radar, a very special one, had come alive. Just for a moment, maybe five seconds at the most… but it had been enough to activate about twelve other screens that she was in charge of keeping an eye on. Read-outs of all kinds had flashed across the screens. And almost as quickly as the special radar had gone black, a comm that she’d never seen used before had started glowing to her left. She’d answered it, knowing, but not quite believing, who’d be on the other end.

  The reedy voice had instructed her in exactly what to do.

  And she’d done it.

  So, here she was, standing outside of Haven’s door with a back-up drive of all the information that had been on those screens. Technicians weren’t even allowed to fraternize with Datapoints, and she was about to directly interface with a member of the Authority. The scariest member of the Authority by far.

  She screwed up her courage, took a deep breath, and knocked on the door.

  To her surprise, instead of a voice summoning her inside, the door swung instantly open, as if he’d been waiting for her on the other side. His silver hair was as bright as ever, but the slightest bit disheveled. The technician could see his usually scrupulously neat clothing was wrinkled and his collar turned in at one side. She’d never seen Haven from this close before, but she hadn’t been expecting this. She got a strange tickle down her spine and the strangest feeling that Haven was wearing some sort of mask. Not a real one, of course. But she felt like she could reach forward and slip his face right
off. Underneath would be some sort of animal, raw and vibrating with hunger. She fought back a shiver and told herself she’d spent too many hours drawing that night, and not enough time sleeping. Her imagination was getting the best of her.

  “Good evening, Sir Haven,” the technician said, proud that her voice didn’t quaver.

  “Yes,” he replied, already holding out his hand for the back-up drive. He practically snatched it from her hand, the door of his office already being shoved closed.

  “Ah—” the technician had started to say when a hand came over her shoulder and kept the door from closing. Both Haven and the technician turned to see Datapoint Dahn Enceladus standing there. He also looked ruffled, but he didn’t have the same rabid glint in his eye that Haven did.

  “Come in,” Haven said almost feverishly, and for one, stomach-lurching second, the technician thought he was talking to her. But no, it was Dahn Enceladus who brushed past her and stepped into the office.

  “Ah,” she tried again. This time, Dahn turned to her, though Haven had already disappeared beyond the door to where she couldn’t see him. “There’s really not much there. It only appeared on the radar for maybe five or six seconds. It might not even be enough to have gotten the coordinates of his location.”

  “That’s fine,” Dahn said in that flat way Datapoints had of speaking.

  “Right.” She wasn’t sure why she continued. “I just want you to know that it wasn’t her.”

  It would have taken someone much less intelligent than this technician to miss the fact that the radars that she watched every night were tracking radars on the integrated tech of two Datapoints. The two missing Datapoints. But as no one had expressly explained to her that that’s what she was doing, she’d surmised that she wasn’t supposed to overtly speak about her job, either. But she needed to have said it. The homing beacon that had appeared on the radar tonight wasn’t from the high-grade technology that was surgically implanted in Glade Io. And the technician worried that if she didn’t say it aloud now, then she might somehow end up being punished for the fact that she’d inadvertently gotten Haven’s hopes up, simply by being the technician who’d happened to be there when the read came in.

  “That’s fine,” Dahn said again. “You’re dismissed.”

  The door closed in the technician’s face and she stood there in the dim hallway in the middle of the night. It took her about fifteen seconds to start heading back toward the control room, back to her job.

  The whole way there, her eyes were unfocused and thoughtful. She couldn’t stop replaying Dahn’s face, from right before he’d closed the door.

  She’d lived on the Station for almost a decade now, and she could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen a Datapoint emote. Well, emote some emotion other than frustration or rage, anyway. But she could have sworn she’d seen something on Dahn’s face. Something that had looked a heck of a lot like longing.

  Chapter Six

  I can’t tell if I’m the most popular guy on Charon these days or the least popular,” Cast said as we walked side by side through the marketplace on the second level of Moat.

  It had been four days since the chip experiment. Cast had been down for the count for two of them. The experiment had completely exhausted him and given both him and Aine a banger of a headache. But in the end, he hadn’t been able to recognize her brainwaves as cullable, no matter how hard he’d tried. The chip wasn’t perfect, though. Aine had said that while Cast’s tech was focused on her, her vision had become obscured and she’d gotten all dizzy and off-balance. But the bottom line was that he hadn’t been able to recognize her as a cullable. The chip represented at least a preliminary level of safety from Datapoints.

  Since the experiment, however, things had changed for Cast and me on Charon. And I was just as confused about it as he was. “Tell me about it,” I said in response.

  Even now, as we walked through the marketplace, there were whispers following us in every direction. There were hundreds of pairs of eyes on us as we wound through the booths. As we kept going, I noticed a small group of kids were playing some kind of make-believe game in a crowd in front of us. Something about it seemed strangely familiar.

  “Look,” I whispered to Cast. We stood to one side and watched as the kids waged war against one another, making laser blaster noises and using their forearms like guns and shields.

  “Oh my God,” Cast whispered back to me, something like confused glee on his face. “I think they’re pretending to be Datapoints.”

  “They are,” said a familiar voice behind us. We both turned to Kupier. “Rumors of your bravery and effort abound,” he told Cast. “You’re the talk of Charon.”

  “In a good way?”

  Kupier shrugged and leaned casually over the counter of the booth directly behind him. He leaned back and gave a huge, smarmy grin at the woman behind the counter until she rolled her eyes, a small smile on her face. She scooped some roasted nuts into a small paper cup and handed it over to him. He offered some to us. “It depends, I guess. I think there will always be people with extreme prejudices against Datapoints, no question. It’s a pretty natural suspicion, you have to admit. But what you two did, it went a long way. You didn’t have to help us, but you did. And now we have this awesome new tool to protect ourselves against Datapoints and the Authority. One that doesn’t fry our brains in the process. I think the two of you may have gained a few fans with that feat.” He crunched a few nuts and talked through the mouthful. “Especially you, Cast.”

  Cast went a very surprising shade of pink as he tried to shrug off the news, but I slapped him on the back, a big grin on my own face. It had been a long time since the spotlight had been off of me at all, and I was thrilled with the break.

  “But listen, Glade, I was hoping I could talk to you for a minute.”

  “Oh. Sure.” I turned to Cast and saw he was nodding at me.

  “I’ll go see if Wells needs a hand up on the landing pad,” he said.

  The kid had melded seamlessly into the group of mechanics up on the first level of Moat and had been spending a lot of time up there since we’d landed.

  “Alright.”

  We watched Cast go before Kupier grabbed me by the hand, ducking and weaving through the booths. People stopped to stare at us as we rushed past, some of them calling things out to Kupier, the beloved leader of the Ferrymen. He joked back with them and even stopped just long enough to shake a hand or two, but barely a minute went by before we were skirting the edge of level two, the dirt-packed wall on one side of us and the bustling marketplace on the other side.

  “What’s the rush?” I asked as Kupier hustled me through an opening in the wall that led to a darkened stairwell of sorts. I knew that this particular stairwell led straight down to the cavernous floor which was mostly used exclusively by Ferrymen. There were rooms upon rooms that they used for sparring or planning, and there were stores of weapons and maps of the solar system. There was even some sort of medical-looking room that I hadn’t asked about yet.

  “You look pretty,” Kupier said, ignoring my question.

  He gave my hand one more yank to keep me from going down the stairs like I’d assumed the plan was. We stood at the top, in the dim light, the organic scent of Charon closing in around us. The noise from the marketplace was loud but blunted behind the wall, no particular sound making its way through.

  I raised an eyebrow at him, tossing my dark hair over my shoulder. “You’re in a rush because I look pretty?”

  “No,” he said and stepped closer. “I’m in a rush because I’m excited and wanted to show you something, and I wanted to have time to do this, as well.” He took my chin in one of his large hands and squared my face to his, dropping his lips to mine and kissing me thoroughly.

  I blinked my eyes open when I felt him move away and I stumbled after him as he jogged down the stairs.

  “No sarcastic remark?” he asked as we made it to the next landing of the stairs.

/>   I cleared my throat, but the stairway was dark and he was moving fast – and he’d just made me a little dizzy with that kiss – so I didn’t even bother responding. It was all I could do to pull up short when he stopped suddenly, turning to face me. Even in the dark, I could see the flash of his smile.

  “DP-1, did I just bamboozle you?”

  “Well…” I screwed my face up into a scowl and put my hands on my hips. “I’m a Datapoint. I’m not exactly used to, you know…” I wiggled my fingers through the air. “Feelings.”

  He laughed. “You’re acting like feelings are some kind of bacteria in the air.”

  I shrugged. “If the shoe fits.”

  He opened his mouth to say more, but I shoved at his shoulder. “What was it that you wanted to show me?”

  “Oh. Right!” And then we were jogging down the stairs again, a mile a minute. That’s just how it was with Kupier. I was never more relaxed or more rushed with anyone than I was with him. Everything was at his own pace. Perhaps he had some internal metronome that only he could sense. There was no telling when he was going to flop down for a nap or rush you down five flights of stairs and just keep running.

  I followed him through the cavern of the fifth level and into a room I’d never been in before. There were screens on every wall and a large work table that had papers strewn all over it. Most of the papers I could see were filled with drawings and notes that were covered from top to bottom in what I now knew to be Kupier’s handwriting.

  “Your diary?” I asked him, nodding toward the papers.

  “Pretty much.” He grinned and tugged my hand as he drew me over. “This is my wildest dream right here.”

  I tried to read the complicated expression on his face and decided it was somewhere between hope and fear before I just gave up and looked down at the papers.

  It didn’t take me long to realize what I was looking at. There were complicated analyses of Earth’s atmosphere laid out in front of me. Maps of the paths of the ancient satellites that still orbited. There was the moon in all of its phases. There were calculations of the Earth’s tilt on its axis. And then there were pictures. So many pictures. Blurry with distance and atmosphere and the volatile weather that still rolled over Earth’s surface even hundreds of years after we’d been forced to evacuate our home planet.