by Ramona Finn
“All the way back to Charon?” That was a long way to go without oxygen. There wouldn’t have been enough in the one-man ship for two people. There would barely have been enough for one person, let alone two.
“Yeah. It was a calculated risk,” he said before he flopped his forehead down into the palm of his hand. “The worst one I’ve ever had to take. But we knew that if we opened up his craft to the Ray, brought him onboard, there was a chance he’d be able to commandeer the ship. Take us all wherever the hell he was trying to take you.”
“Plus,” I reasoned, “you didn’t know whether or not he’d activated my tech. So, I very well could have been a liability as well. And you, Aine, and Wells would never have been able to take Dahn and me.”
Kupier stared at me for a long time again, his expression inscrutable. “That’s exactly the logic I used.”
I shrugged. “It makes sense.”
“Why the hell doesn’t that make me feel any better?”
Now it was my turn to study him. What was that look on his face? What was it that lined his eyes? Turning his mouth down. “You’re feeling guilty,” I realized. I felt as if little ice cubes were suddenly all joining together in the pit of my stomach. “Why are you feeling so guilty? Kupier, what happened?”
I couldn’t even bring myself to vocalize the question of whether he was, though.
“You made it back just fine because you still had the oxygen mask from the landing deck on. But Dahn… he wasn’t in good shape when we got back to Charon. We had to do all kinds of things to revive him. We lost him for a few minutes. He’s in medical on a different, more secure level. But, I’m not gonna lie, Glade. It doesn’t look good. He was pretty close to suffocation. He hadn’t had oxygen in a long time by the time we finally got him here.”
“But…” I started after a moment.
Kupier looked at me expectantly, waiting for me to finish whatever it was I was going to say. But there was nothing for me to say. I couldn’t think of a single word to follow it.
“But,” I tried again, and again drifted off. Dahn was the strongest, most resilient Datapoint I’d ever met. There was no way that he could be dying.
Kupier waited patiently, and that alone fortified me to gather my thoughts. “He – he was trying to kidnap me.” Tears as hot as blood were suddenly rolling down my cheeks. My head ached with it. I was too dehydrated to be crying this hard, but I was.
Kupier shoved a cup of water into my hands and I took a long, grateful draught of it. The water was metallic in flavor and almost warm.
“This tastes terrible!” I told him and shoved the water back toward him. “It tastes terrible because we are stuck out on the farthest colony from the sun, synthesizing our own water because our government threatens us with death.” I shook the cup at him. “The same government that recruits children to do their dirty work. The same government that made Dahn and I compete for years over who could be the baddest weapon around. And he’s still on their side. He’s still fighting for them. He came all the way here just to jam a syringe in my neck and trick me, and try to haul me back, and to almost get himself killed?” I pushed the cup at Kupier and he took it from my hands. “How is that fair, Kup? How is any of that fair? I thought he was my ally. I never quite knew if we were friends, if we were even capable of being friends. But, at the very least, I knew he’d never put me in danger. And then, when I knew that he loved me, I thought he’d let me go. I thought, ‘That’s what that means, Glade. He loves you enough to not stop you from leaving the goddamn Station.’ But then he tries to drag me back, and…”
I trailed off as more tears rolled down my cheeks. Kupier’s hand was firm at the back of my neck, tipping my head back for more of the water. It wasn’t so bad on the second attempt, and I gulped it down, my rattled breaths splashing it down my chin and over the sides of the cup.
Kupier set it aside and used the sleeve of his worn shirt to wipe my face. “None of it is fair, DP-1. The Authority makes monsters out of people and then punishes them for being monsters. They’re controlling, and they won’t stop. Not until we put them down. Not until we take away their means. They won’t stop until we make them stop.”
I nodded. Fury and pain warred in my gut. It was a freezing hot tangle that danced with my residual nausea. If Haven had been in the room at that second, I would have killed him with my bare hands. There was no question in my mind.
Kupier reached out for my hand. I numbly let him take it. “He didn’t take the oxygen from you.”
“What?”
There was a little bit of that smile returning to Kupier’s face. A sad, complicated smile that looked almost like it pained him. “Dahn. He could have shared your oxygen mask with you. You would have ended up in a little worse shape and he would have ended up in a lot worse shape, but much better shape than he’s in now. But even when he must have been suffocating, he didn’t take your oxygen mask from you.”
My eyes darted back and forth between Kupier’s. “What are you saying?”
He flattened my palm between two of his, his voice quiet and his face close to mine. “I’m saying that your life is obviously important to him.”
“It’s not my life he cares about! It’s the life of the chosen one,” I hissed. Next time I saw Haven, I was seriously going to brass-knuckle him in the temple. Fury seemed to put my pain on steroids, expanding it like a storm cloud.
“No, I don’t think that’s right.” Kupier’s voice was even quieter now, and he adjusted the sheet over my knees. “I think, if he just cared that you made it through to the other side, your body and your brain, so that you could still use your tech and be the chosen one, I think he would have shared the oxygen with you so that you both made it. But he didn’t. He didn’t take any for himself. He didn’t want to pose any risk to you at all. He couldn’t bring himself to put you in danger any more than he already had. I think that means he cares about you. About you, Glade Io, not just what you can do.”
“He wanted to drag me back to the Station, Kupier. I think that makes it pretty clear that he doesn’t give a crap about endangering me.”
“Well,” Kupier considered, “okay, he drugged you, and that meant some danger, yeah. But from the sounds of things, Dahn doesn’t see the Authority or the Station the way you do. He might not have thought he was putting you in danger. He probably thinks of Charon as wildly dangerous, though. He might have even thought he was rescuing you, not kidnapping you.”
I searched Kupier’s face. Surprise, surprise, I couldn’t read his complicated expression. “Why are you defending him?” I asked suddenly. I could think of no logical reason for Kupier saying all this. Dahn was a Datapoint, a right-hand man to Haven, and my only real tie back to the Station. It would make a hell of lot more sense for Kupier to encourage me to hate Dahn. “And why the hell did you save his life? Why not just let him die?”
Kupier sighed deeply. And he was quiet for a long time before he answered. “Because I saw that he hadn’t let you die. Because I don’t want you to lose another person in your life. Because I don’t want to be responsible for the death of another living soul, even if that living soul is a Datapoint who would cull me before he even shook my hand. Because killing Haven’s minions is not the same thing as cutting the legs out from under Haven. Because, contrary to popular belief, Ferrymen are not murderers.”
I felt my eyebrows work their way all the way up to the top of my pounding forehead. “That’s a lot of reasons.”
He shrugged. “Plus, you’re smarter than me, and I figured, when you woke up, you’d be able to think of about fifty more tactical reasons why he was more useful alive than dead.”
I laughed at that, in just one bright gasp of humor, but my skull seemed to shrink around my brain and I abruptly cut it off. I was spinning again, the room doing a slow-speed turn with me at the center. Kupier pushed on my shoulders and sent me back into the pillow behind me.
“I can’t think of anything right now,” I said shakily.
“That rat bastard,” I scowled all over again, thinking of Dahn. My anger at him only burned for a moment before it twisted into pain. “I can’t believe he shot me up with sedatives.”
“Yeah, well, if I were trying to kidnap you, I probably wouldn’t want you conscious either.”
“Kupier, you did try to kidnap me, and you kept me conscious the entire time.”
“Yeah, but I did rope you to a chair and intimidate the crap out of you until you acquiesced to the Ferrymen’s agenda.”
I had to choke down a laugh again. “Right. You basically flirted with me until I got too annoyed to turn you away.”
“To each his own.” Kupier’s eyes were softer now, and his perma-smile was back. I realized, when he shoved me over to one side of the medical bed, that he wasn’t leaving; in fact, he was making himself comfortable. “Glade, I’m not saying you have to forgive him. Honestly, I don’t care if you do. But I’m just saying that I don’t want you to lose someone else in your life. And you might still lose him anyway. He might not make it.”
“I can’t think about that right now,” I said. My voice sounded strong enough, too, but I could feel myself flagging, getting heavier under the weight of fatigue.
“Fair enough,” he murmured.
We lay there side by side, him sitting up tall and me leaning back against the pillows. I must have slept after that, because when my eyes came open again, I was chilly under the thin sheet, and alone. I didn’t intend to stay that way very long.
Chapter Ten
I had to see it with my own eyes.
Dahn Enceladus on Charon.
Dahn Enceladus unconscious in a medical unit, fighting for his life.
Both thoughts, both supposed truths, seemed equally unbelievable to me. Dahn wasn’t someone who I’d ever seen injured before. He was a cat on his feet. I’d seen him spar with five other Datapoints and emerge without a scratch. I’d seen him balance a katana on his forehead. He had more control over his tech than anyone I’d ever met. He had the kind of concentration that meant you could shout his name at point-blank range while he was cracking a puzzle and he honestly wouldn’t hear you.
He was the most competent person I’d ever met in my entire life. To see him injured in a medical unit was something I could only dimly picture.
Luckily, I didn’t have to sneak out of the medical unit where they were keeping me. On the second day after I woke up, Laris brought me a fresh jumpsuit and basically told me to take a hike. “I can’t take your scowls anymore,” she said.
I couldn’t help but think about how different that comment was than anything I might have received while on the Station. Where they basically kept me behind bars every time I got so much as a papercut. I’d used to have to talk or sneak or trick my way back into my regular quarters any way I could. Here, Laris simply sent me packing and let me take care of my own self. Or, perhaps, she trusted that I’d be around folks who would do it for me, which was just as foreign a concept as the first.
I tugged on the clean jumpsuit and headed immediately to the next level up, where I knew they were keeping Dahn.
“DP-1!” an unfamiliar voice called from behind me as I slowly made my way up the staircase to the next level.
I turned and saw a Ferryman who I vaguely recognized. I squinted through the dim lighting, expecting him to say something more, this young kid with a young face who was calling me the nickname only Kupier called me. “You need a hand with anything?” he asked me.
“No.” I shook my head at the kid, confused as hell as to what was going on.
“Alright,” he said and shrugged and kept heading on in his own direction. I stared after him for a moment before I ducked onto Dahn’s level.
Luckily, I didn’t run into anyone else who stopped me along the way. I knew vaguely where they were keeping Dahn from talking to Kupier, and so I strode fairly confidently through one of the levels that I hadn’t spent much time on. It was the opposite of the cavernous Ferrymen level. This level had low ceilings and narrow hallways. It would have been so easy to get lost here, and I wondered if that was why they’d intentionally put him here. Even if he were awake, he mostly likely wouldn’t have been able to find his way off this level with his tech dampened. Still, I managed to find my way from one end of the level to the other just fine by following the line of Ferrymen who were busy keeping an area cordoned off from the general population of Moat. As if Dahn could suddenly spring up from his coma and start kicking ass.
Sometimes it amused me how little regular people understood Datapoints. And sometimes it irritated me. Right now, it irritated me.
“Glade!” someone called from behind me. Another voice I didn’t recognize. I also didn’t stop. I skirted along the line of people and stopped cold at a huge steel door. It was one of the only ones I’d ever seen on Moat. Generally, there were just dirt-packed thresholds and maybe a curtain in place for a door. The houses on the third level had small wooden doors, but I’d never seen one like this. This was a military-grade door. The kind that offered the type of security they had on the Station.
The sight of it sent an involuntary chill down my back, but I didn’t hesitate for long.
“Datapoint!”
“Glade!”
I heard more voices of Ferrymen behind me, some I recognized and some I didn’t. Too late. I was already rearing back and kicking the hell out of the door. It didn’t budge, though, and the impact of my kicks reverberated all the way up my weakened leg and to my hip. I still had the technique and the determination of a Datapoint, though. I kicked at it again. This time, the door shook on its hinges.
“Oh, Christ,” Aine said as she cuffed me backwards by the shoulder.
She really was a tall girl. And I really was in a weakened state from my time in the medical unit, because she’d basically just pinned me to the wall and was holding me there.
“If you want to get through this door, why don’t you just ask somebody?” she demanded, holding up a set of keys.
I held her gaze, momentarily a little stymied. That had just… not occurred to me. Everything on the Station was locked down so tight. And everything was such a secret. Layers and layers of subterfuge over every single operation. I knew Charon wasn’t the Station, but considering that Dahn was probably considered something of a prisoner, I’d guessed the situation would be the same here.
Aine, on the other hand, had let me go and was already jamming a key in the lock of the steel door and swinging it open.
“I didn’t realize that was an option,” I told her as I followed her through the doorway and she locked it again behind us.
“Glade,” she said, grabbing my shoulder again as she turned me around. My hands automatically came up in a defensive stance, but she ignored it. “When are you gonna learn that you’re not a prisoner here?”
I opened my mouth and slammed it shut. “I don’t feel like a prisoner.”
“Then quit acting like it.”
“Why does it even matter?” I demanded.
“It matters because this is a group of free people fighting for freedom. You’re kind of like our secret weapon, you know? Or maybe not-so-secret. I don’t know. The point is, you’re a symbol that we can all gather behind. But we can’t really gather behind you when you’re acting like we’re holding you against your will. Which we’re not.”
I clapped my mouth closed and crossed my arms over my chest. Aine mirrored my position. I raised my dark, commanding eyebrows. She did the exact same thing.
“Well,” I started, “fair enough.”
Her eyebrows went up even higher. I’d managed to surprise her.
I decided to double-down on it, and continued, “This is new to me, Aine. I’ve basically been living in a prison for the last four years. Nothing was shared with me. And asking questions meant that I might become a suspicious person. Being a suspicious pe
rson meant I might be thrown into interrogations. Which is essentially torture. But without all the pleasantries you might expect from torture. Some of those expectations I learned to live by are hard habits to break.”
She dropped her hands from her chest and pressed fingers to her forehead in an uncharacteristically unsure gesture, shaking her head at either herself or me. “I guess that makes sense.”
I looked around me, at the next dark, twisty hallway that led to a dimly lit room where I assumed Dahn was. “I’m going down there,” I told her.
“Free colony.”
I stared at her a moment longer, checking to see if she was joking or not. When I couldn’t tell, I just shrugged and headed down the hall.
I paused at the doorway, stepping aside when a med tech came through, frowning and staring down at the tablet glowing in her hand.
“Is he alright?” I asked, stepping away from the shadowed wall.
She’d jumped like she hadn’t noticed me there.
“Sorry.”
“Yeah. Uh, his status is extremely questionable. To be honest, we don’t treat many patients like him.”
“What do you mean? Like, a Datapoint?”
“I mean, a citizen who’s been so well taken care of in his life.”
I squinted at her. That was definitely not how I’d describe the life of a Datapoint. “What do you mean?” I repeated.
“His bone density, blood pressure, nutrient saturation, all of it is at levels that have only been matched by you and Datapoint Cast, to be honest. If it were a citizen of Moat in his position, with this level of trauma, I would say that there was no possible way for him to survive it. But he’s strong. And it looks as though he’s always been strong. He might be able to pull through. We just won’t know until we know.”
It had never occurred to me before that being a Datapoint had perks that went beyond all the training for battle.
