The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  “It’s sick, really, that they take such good care of you, just to send you to do what you have to do. Like fattening pigs for slaughter,” the med tech added sadly, glancing back to Dahn’s door.

  “Yeah, except we’re the ones who are doing the slaughtering.”

  She looked at me then, apparently trying to figure out if I was joking or not. I quirked my face into my best impression of Kupier and shrugged.

  She gave a nervous chuckle.

  I nodded, but turned to the door; I wanted to go in and see him.

  “You can go in. Just don’t disturb any of the wires or the machines.”

  I rolled my eyes at that. I wasn’t an idiot.

  I waited for her footsteps to fade away before I stepped through the doorway. And I just held myself there for a minute. The room was darker than mine had been. The walls were close and dark, and the ceiling low. There were machines embedded into every wall, and most of them buzzed or beeped as I stood taking in the space. I supposed they were tracking every component of Dahn’s body. Finishing the space, there was a single light in the center of the ceiling, lighting up the medical bed in the middle of the room. And there he was.

  I didn’t step forward for a long time. I just looked at him.

  He looked big in the bed. A mountain of a man covered over in blankets. He wasn’t as tall as Kupier, but he was stocky and muscular. His dark hair was spread over his pillow. As I stepped closer, I saw that the backs of his eyelids were a light lavender. I couldn’t tell if that was from his condition or if they’d always been like that. I wouldn’t know. I’d never seen him with his eyes closed before. Dahn Enceladus wasn’t the kind of person you could catch sleeping. Or resting. Or relaxing. He was a soldier to the core. Trained and dedicated and always working.

  I watched as his eyes moved underneath his eyelids. He looked active, even in his sleep. I hoped that that was a good thing. I couldn’t do more than stare down at him, lying there so still, it was so strange to see him like this. I felt like I was in a dream.

  Looking down, I waited for my rage to rise. But I just didn’t have it right now. All I felt was sadness.

  They can’t tell me who my enemies are.

  Aine had said that to me, and I clung to it now. Dahn had tried to take me away. To take me back there. But Haven couldn’t make me hate him for it. Dahn didn’t know what I had here. And honestly, he didn’t know the truth about was happening there, either.

  “You need to wake up.” I cleared the cobwebs out of my throat and tried again. “You need to wake up so that I can tell you the truth about everything. I really need you to understand.”

  He didn’t move. Only the sound of the respirators and the beeping of the machines kept me company.

  He was floating out in space. This was surely what being sucked out into a black hole felt like. There was no air. There was no heartbeat. There was only endless suffocation. He heard his own groan of pain, and that’s how he knew he was alive.

  “Come on,” said a painfully familiar voice. Her tone was harsh and tight. Her volume was too loud or too close. “Wake up, you asshole.”

  Dahn knew that he was awake now, but he could barely get his eyelids to open. There was just a crescent moon of light to be seen, and then more darkness.

  He heard arguing and tried to shrink away from it. Like it was a dark, confusing cloud. He couldn’t make out the words, but he heard the volume rise again. Then there was a sharp, clear pain in his neck that started as a point and spread into his veins. There was fire pulsing through him, burning through him, and that’s how Dahn knew his heart was beating.

  “Come on, Dahn. Open your eyes.”

  He slammed them shut harder against the venomous burn that was in his veins, but soon his body wouldn’t let him pull them any tighter closed or block out his surroundings. He had to breathe, he had to break free, he had to…

  A dark yell burst out of his chest as he tried to sit up. There were hands on his chest, holding him down, and restraints at his wrists. Stripes of light and dark slashed across his vision.

  He yelled again, but this time he was too weak to push against the hands again. The venom in his veins made him want to get up and sprint, to scream as loud as he could and rip his hair out of his head. He settled for gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw trembled. Tears leaked out the corners of his eyes, they were pressed together so hard.

  “Check his vitals!”

  “Get that off his chest – it’s constricting his breathing.” Dahn dimly recognized that voice as Cast’s.

  “Hell, no. You get that off his chest, he’s exploding out of here. Hold him down!” shouted Glade.

  Of course, she’d be the one advocating for keeping this band of tightening pressure over his ribs.

  “Stop fighting it, Dahn,” she growled into his ear. “It’s only suffocating you because you’re fighting it.”

  He slammed his head back and tried to wrench his eyes open again. He put his shoulder blades against the mat beneath him and tried to breathe. That was the best he could do. His breath through his clenched teeth felt like it was a thousand degrees, and he wouldn’t have been surprised to open his eyes and see he was breathing fire.

  Something cool touched his forehead and Dahn flinched away from it for a second. Then he stilled, and it touched him again. It doused some of the tight pain in his eyes and his eyelids stopped straining.

  He felt hands leave his arms and legs then, and he realized that people had stopped attempting to restrain him.

  “Dahn,” Glade’s voice said again.

  “Give him a minute,” a man’s voice cut in.

  She, apparently, didn’t agree with the sentiment. “Dahn,” she said insistently, “it’s time for you to wake up. The more you fight, the more you’re going to hurt yourself.”

  He rolled his head to one side and felt the cool cloth slide from his face. He tried cracking his eyes again. This time, when the light striped itself across his vision, he made out the shapes of the room around him. There were dark walls, a subterranean scent, and the air felt close and humid. There was a familiar silhouette in front of him. Cast. It was definitely Cast.

  His brain stuttered and started. He felt his engine running, but he couldn’t quite put anything in gear. That venom was still in his veins and he could feel it making his heart bang against his ribs. He felt like a wild animal who’d been sedated and caged, just waking up to its bars.

  “Where…” he tried through a throat that felt like it had been scored raw with a sharpening file.

  “You’re on Charon,” Cast answered. Somehow, dimly, Dahn registered that Cast was answering in his normal, healthy voice, and not his wrecked, injured voice from all those weeks ago. He’d healed in the time since Dahn had last seen him.

  Then the meaning of Cast’s words filtered down to Dahn and he almost choked. “Kill me,” he managed.

  That unfamiliar man’s voice sputtered out a surprised laugh. “He’s funny.”

  “That wasn’t a joke,” Glade replied. “He’d literally rather be dead than in the rebel colony.”

  Dahn forced his eyes to focus, but with little success. He swung his head to one side until he found Glade’s silhouette in the room. He wanted to say more, but his throat burned, his head ached, and his spirit had never been more crumbled than it was at this moment. He shouldn’t have to explain that he already was dead. A failed, unauthorized mission that had landed him squarely into the hands of the Ferrymen? His life was over one way or another.

  He’d be lucky if Haven didn’t execute him for the treason involved in what he’d done. And that was only if he survived the interrogations he’d have to endure once he was back on the Station.

  “He needs rest,” repeated that unfamiliar female voice he’d heard earlier. “Leave him be.”

  “We’re not leaving you alone in here with him,” Glade responded.

  “I don’t think this pained, weakened man is much threat to me right now. Besides, you’ve tie
d him to the table in every imaginable way.”

  “I’m staying,” Glade answered.

  Dahn heard the chill in her voice. The anger. The suspicion.

  But he couldn’t hang onto it. He couldn’t grip any part of the reality around him for long. The world started to slip past him like water in a river. And he welcomed the oblivion.

  I stayed until Dahn woke up for the second time, this time without the shot of pure adrenaline I’d jammed into his neck. It was just me and Laris in the room when he came to, as Cast was dozing out in the hallway and Kupier had simply asked me to comm him the second that Dahn was awake again.

  I was pacing his medical room while Laris plucked away at a tablet, analyzing Dahn’s brainwaves and muttering to herself. She seemed to think that he was still teetering on the edge of death. Me? I wasn’t convinced. This was Dahn Enceladus that we were talking about here. He wasn’t going to go softly over that waterfall.

  When I turned back to pace to the other side of the room, I noticed that his silver eyes were open. And they were trained on me. I met his gaze, taking in his form all over again. He wore pants and no shirt. He was belted down to the table. His skin was puckered and reddened.

  “Kill me,” he said again.

  I rolled my eyes and strode over to him. “I’m not going to kill you, Dahn.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” he replied after a minute. “I’m already dead when you think about it.”

  I stood over him. “You’re only dead if you’re planning on going back to the Station.”

  He looked at me as if I were an idiot. I mirrored the expression right back to him.

  “He needs water.” Laris gently moved me aside and leaned over him. I was amazed at how she didn’t flinch away from the angry, threatening Datapoint. She merely tended to him so gently that I got uncomfortable and turned away. I wasn’t used to anyone being tender with Dahn. I wasn’t used to seeing him sick. And yet, he was taking water like a baby bird, his eyelashes fanned across his pale cheeks as he winced his way through a simple swallow.

  I knew what it was to fight for your life while unconscious, wake up, and then continue fighting for your life. It sucked. Royally. “This whole thing is your fault, you know,” I told him.

  Laris turned and glared at me, but I ignored it. I stepped back up to Dahn’s table and leaned over him, though I waited to speak until she’d given him another sip of water and then taken a step back so I could better meet his eyes.

  His eyes looked flat and gray. There was none of their usual silver sparkle. He said nothing, and I probably should have buttoned up my mouth, but the words were tumbling out of me faster than I could stop them.

  “If you’d just shared my damn oxygen, you wouldn’t have been fighting for your life for the last week. You’d have had a hell of a headache, but you wouldn’t have almost died. That was dumb, Dahn. Incredibly dumb.”

  He looked confused for half a second and then raised one eyebrow. I raised one right back. “Interesting,” he said roughly. “I figured you’d have been angrier about the kidnapping attempt and the fact that I sedated you with enough tranquilizers to put down half a colony.”

  I glared at him. “Why do you think I stabbed you in the neck with a syringe the size of my forearm?”

  He winced. “Ah. That’s what that burning sensation was.”

  “They didn’t think I should do it, but I knew it was the only way to wake you up. Sometimes a rat will hide in its hole until you set it on fire.”

  “In your twisted reality, I’m the rat, I guess.”

  “You’re definitely the rat.”

  He laughed humorlessly and twisted a little against the bonds that still held him to the medical cot. Laris laid a blanket over top of him to keep off the chill, but we both ignored her. “The sick part,” Dahn gritted out through clenched teeth, “is that you don’t even have any clue how brainwashed you are. You actually think you want to stay here.”

  “No, Dahn, the sick part is that you don’t know how brainwashed you are. You asked me to kill you. Which means you have no intention of fighting your way out of here. Are you or are you not the Dahn Enceladus who would fight until his last breath for the Authority? The Dahn I know would never allow himself to be put down at the hands of his enemies.” I thought of that moment when I entered his ship and felt as if I were in the presence of a different person. A new, broken person. “You’re here, and you’re not supposed to be, are you? Everything got messed up when Kupier rescued me, and now you want to die?”

  Dahn stared at me but didn’t confirm or deny what I’d said. Meanwhile, I watched him, suddenly captivated as a fire seemed to ignite inside of him. Color rose in his cheeks and a muscle clenched and released in his jaw. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he finally spit out.

  I stepped back in surprise, my eyes narrowed. I had the feeling that I knew exactly what I was talking about.

  “What happened?” I asked suddenly. “What’s going on, exactly? Even if your mission failed, Haven would still want you back alive. He wouldn’t want someone as valuable as you dead.” I was thinking out loud really. But I knew I was right. Dahn would never ask for death if Haven wanted him alive. It could only mean that Haven wanted him dead. “Unless you betrayed him…”

  It was nearly unthinkable that Dahn Enceladus could betray Jan Ernst Haven. But there was no denying that the man on the table was a different version of Dahn Enceladus than I’d ever met before. I couldn’t imagine what could have brought Dahn to betray Haven, but what else made sense? His reactions here, his begging for death, this already-dead look in his eyes… all of it suggested the actions of a man with nothing to lose. Nothing to return to.

  Dahn’s mouth clapped shut. “Untie me from this table and maybe I’ll talk to you.”

  I snorted. “Yeah. Last time you had control of your limbs, you kidnapped me and jammed a syringe into my neck. I’ll pass, thanks.”

  Dahn looked pointedly at his bonds before lifting his chin and exposing the bruised place where I’d jammed the medicine into him. “Pretty sure we’re even now, Glade.”

  I stepped closer to him, my eyes not leaving his. It was completely possible that he didn’t have information and that he was just trying to get me to untie him. Or it was completely possible that he really did have info.

  “What happened, Dahn?” I stared at him. “What could have possibly made you fly across the solar system, with no back-up, and risk getting taken captive by the Ferrymen? If you did this without sanctions, you had to have known the risk you were taking. You had to have known that, if you failed, you’d be considered to be in line with the Ferrymen.”

  “I wasn’t planning on failing.” He glared at me. It was practically confirmation that he’d done this without Haven’s permission. So, either there’d been some sort of severing event between the two of them and he hadn’t sought the permission at all, or this was a last-ditch effort he’d made in order to be the hero. The bearer of the chosen one.

  “So, what? You were just trying to get me back to the Station to elevate your own status? Be the hero? I don’t buy it.” I slammed a hand onto the cot beside his head. “Tell me! Why did you come for me?”

  Dahn said nothing.

  And, after a moment, I didn’t bother staying to find out if he would.

  “You don’t understand,” I said to Kupier for probably the fiftieth time as I paced back and forth in one of the classrooms on the Ferrymen’s level. “Dahn doesn’t do things on instinct or at the spur of the moment. He’s not a willy-nilly type of guy. He had to have had a reason for this. One he’s not telling us.”

  Cast wordlessly nodded his agreement from where he sat cross-legged on the floor. Wells and Aine both leaned against the wall, their own arms crossed against their chests. Kupier stood by calmly, his hands in his pockets, rotating to face me wherever I paced.

  “Well, on one hand, I think his motives were pretty obvious,” Kupier said, lazily stepping to one side to keep my fac
e in his line of sight.

  I lifted my arms to the sides, my eyes wide, like, Freaking tell me, already!

  “He came here for you.”

  I dropped my arms in exasperation. “Yeah, we established that. Not a shocker.”

  Aine groaned and dropped her head back against the wall. I could tell she was in the throes of thinking I was a complete idiot. What else was new?

  “No,” Kupier said, and shook his head and strode over to me. He took me firmly by the shoulders. “I don’t mean he came here for you as a Datapoint. I mean that he came here for you as a person. You, Glade Io. He wants you back.”

  I stared at him.

  Kupier groaned just a little when I still didn’t bother responding after another minute. “What a sick joke this is, that I have to be the one who explains this to you. Glade, he loves you. He obviously really loves you.”

  I was aware that my cheeks had gone bright red. Suddenly, the room felt as if it had shrunk a few sizes. I watched Cast shift uncomfortably against the wall where his back was leaning. “The kind of love you show someone by drugging and kidnapping them?”

  I’d known that mine and Dahn’s relationship hadn’t been strictly colleague-ish on the Station. I’d known he was a friend. And then I’d known that he was a bit more than a friend. But I also knew what it felt like to be around Kupier. To be within the circle of Kup’s light. It was almost inconceivable to me to apply the same word to both of those things, those relationships. I wasn’t even sure that Dahn could love at all.

  “It’s true,” Kupier insisted. “Whether you can see it or not. It’s pretty clear to the rest of us.” I could see Wells and Aine nodding in my peripheral vision, and I ferociously ignored them.

  “Regardless,” I said, striking the thoughts from my head. “I don’t think that’s the reason he came across the solar system, or risked his life. His status as a Datapoint, on top of it. It’s not enough motive.”

  “It would be enough for me,” Kupier said quietly, his eyes on mine.

  The room did that shrinking thing again as Kupier’s low voice made its way to me. I tugged at the collar of my jumpsuit. Cast looked even more uncomfortable, but Wells was grinning, and Aine’s face was perfectly impassive.