The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  “You’re cute when you’re embarrassed,” Kupier said, stepping up to me and slicking a wide palm over my hair. “I’m just saying, Glade, that when you really love someone, sometimes you give up everything for them. It’s not insane that he crossed the solar system to get you back. You’re worth that.”

  “No,” Cast said as he rose up. “I think Glade’s right about this, though I get what you’re saying. Look, I know that Datapoints are dumb about love, or whatever.” He waved his hands in the air like this was a conversation he’d had a million times over at this point. I wondered who had clued him in on that little secret. Wells both grinned and rolled his eyes at the same time. I guessed that answered that question. “But you have to remember that Dahn’s a Datapoint, too. He wouldn’t act the same way that you, Kupier, would in this situation. He’d act the same way that Glade or I would in this situation.” Cast turned to me. “Glade, would you have crossed the solar system to get Dahn back?”

  “If I were Dahn, or, uh, Datapoint Glade? No. He’s way too logical. And besides, we… we said our goodbyes on the Station. If he came all this way, tried to get to me, it’s for a tactical reason, not an emotional one. He needs me for something. Something to do with the Authority. It’s the only thing he really serves. Even more than Haven. If he came here on Haven’s orders, then I truly don’t think he would have begged for death. I think this was a lone-man mission, and chances are that it wasn’t for Haven.”

  “You think that something happened between them?” Cast asked me.

  “Yeah. It’s the only thing that I can think. Something changed the circumstances since we left the Station. Something changed the rules of the game.”

  “Hold on,” Aine said, stepping forward. “You really think there’s no way that Dahn was sent? I mean, it has to be acknowledged that his attempt to kidnap you was almost successful. He was way closer to taking you than if the Authority had stormed in here with a hundred soldiers and tried to take you by force. We’d have sensed them a million miles away and blown them to hell. If they planned this, it was a good plan.”

  “No. I don’t think this was planned. I might have thought that if not for Dahn’s demeanor when he woke up. But he asked us to kill him. Like his life was over. If he’d just failed an assigned mission, he would have been ready to fight his way out, to get back home. But he was acting like his actions were going to be registered as betrayal. That means… yeah. That just means that he was acting without permission. Haven didn’t know he was coming for me. And once he finds out that Dahn was interacting with Ferrymen, he’s going to send him into interrogations.”

  “The fact is,” Cast said slowly, “Dahn is the only one who knows what happened to make him come here. We can stand here all day guessing, but we’re never really going to know unless he tells us.”

  “He’s not going to tell us until we release him from that room, and from his bonds,” I said. “Those were his terms.”

  Kupier’s brow furrowed and he needled his fist into his chin. “I don’t know. A hostile Datapoint, free in Charon? That’s insane.”

  “A hostile, unarmed Datapoint,” Cast corrected him. “He went through the dampener, remember?”

  “No,” I disagreed. “No Datapoint is ever really unarmed. Dahn’s incredible in combat. And he’s smart enough that the first thing he’ll try to do is find a way to reactivate his tech. Kupier’s right. We can’t just set him free.”

  “So, let’s keep him partially restrained,” Aine said. “Feel him out a little.”

  “You really think he’s just going to tell us what we want to know?” Wells asked skeptically.

  And with just a few words, he’d cut right to the heart of the matter.

  “Not without a bargain,” I said heavily. I turned to Kupier, my brain whirring and my eyes curious. “What if we give him what he wants?”

  “What?!” Aine demanded, stepping forward even as Kupier broke in.

  “Glade,” he started, “you can’t possibly mean that we let him take you back to the Station.”

  Even having the words said out loud sent goosebumps popping up all over me. “No,” I said quickly, shuddering. “No. But we could make him think we are. We make modifications to his ship, make him believe I’ve changed my mind, and I’ll try to get him to tell me what the hell is going on with Haven. Then, as soon as I have the information, you can rescue me.”

  Kupier stared at me blankly.

  “Or something,” I added, waving a hand through the air. “I haven’t figured out all the details yet.”

  “Glade, in case you can’t interpret the look on Kupier’s face right now,” Aine cut in, “it’s loosely translated as saying that you must be insane if you think we’re putting you back on a ship headed toward the Station.”

  “Bingo.” Kupier pointed at Aine.

  “Well, we can put a bunch of fail-safes into the programming of the ship so that it couldn’t actually get me to the Station. I’m not volunteering for a suicide mission here; I’m just suggesting that we need to do something to get this information!”

  “Never,” Kupier said. “Glade, I understand that you really want to follow the thread of why the hell Dahn showed up here, and I’m sure whatever information he has is probably pertinent. But over my dead body am I putting you on a ship with a Datapoint headed toward the Station. Please, think about what you’re asking here.”

  He was right, of course. There were a hundred fail-safes we could include in the software of Dahn’s ship, and there were a hundred more ways that it could all go wrong. Bottom line was that I was proposing a plan that could get me landed back on the Station. And I couldn’t risk that. But what was it that Dahn knew? The question was driving me insane.

  I held Kupier’s eyes for a hot, electric second, temper arcing from me and fizzling at his sincere, concerned gaze. I let out a puff of frustrated breath. “I just want more of the picture, Kupier. I want to understand what we’re up against. Don’t you feel desperate for more information?” I put my hands on his shoulders. “Any way that we can get it?”

  “Kupier?”

  We all turned to see Laris standing in the doorway of the room.

  “Yeah?”

  “Datapoint Enceladus wants to see you. He says he has something to talk to you about.”

  Kupier turned to me, his eyebrows raised, and with that smile on his face.

  Chapter Eleven

  Kupier had dealt with Datapoints before. Hell, he’d managed to crack Glade Io in two, revealing her gushy, emotional core. How different could this Dahn guy be?

  Kupier stepped into the medical room and winced at the bright red stripes of skin underneath Dahn’s bonds. He’d obviously been struggling. His eyes were eerily white and rolling in his head, and his dampened tech caught the light and momentarily blinded Kupier.

  Something with a hundred tiny legs skittered up Kupier’s spine.

  Okay. Maybe he’d been wrong. This was different than dealing with Glade.

  With Glade, Kupier had always been very certain that there was a beating human heart buried under her skin. That she had sweetness and kindness and love to give, if only he could figure out the best way to show her how.

  But there was nothing human behind this man’s silver eyes. And at the very second he realized that he wasn’t alone, Dahn’s eyes were lasers on Kupier. He stared at Kupier as if he could see his soul, his past, and his secrets. And for all Kupier knew, maybe he could.

  Man, this only added to the mystery that was Glade Io. How could she possibly have feelings for both Kupier and Dahn? Dahn looked like a cyborg masquerading as a human. One whose wiring was a little off. Hell, he looked like he’d bite the head off a bunny if Kupier set one within his teeth’s reach.

  A small smile quirked Kupier’s lips suddenly, watching the way Dahn glared, and he couldn’t help it. He didn’t bother restraining it. He knew it made him a weirdo, but realizing that Glade had, at one point, had feelings for this guy only made Kupier like her more.
She was such a mystery. So complicated. And, he couldn’t ignore it or deny it: she’d been trained as a Datapoint, same as Dahn. It was part of who she was. This guy, straining and glaring at him from the medical cot, was in some way a part of who Glade was.

  Kupier dragged a chair from one corner of the room and flipped it around to sit on it backwards. He rested his chin on the back of it.

  Dahn’s eyes narrowed as he took in every movement, and the deceptively lazy posture of the leader of the Ferrymen; he stopped struggling against his bonds and went unnaturally still.

  “You rang?” Kupier asked.

  Dahn was quiet for long enough that Kupier had to fight the urge to fidget. When he finally spoke, it wasn’t what he’d expected.

  “You don’t look like him,” Dahn said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Your brother.”

  Kupier cleared his tightening throat. He knew that Dahn was not talking about his younger brother, Oort. “You met Luce?”

  “If by ‘met’ you mean watched him slaughter my father, then yes.”

  Kupier couldn’t have held back his wince if he’d tried. He knew that his brother had had the capacity to be brutal when he’d been alive. Especially to Datapoints.

  “No,” Kupier said carefully. “I don’t look like my brother. We’re different in a lot of ways.”

  “You mean that you don’t murder Datapoints?” There was a cruel, disbelieving edge in Dahn’s voice as if he were sharing a joke with the devil.

  “I don’t murder anyone,” Kupier replied easily.

  Dahn scoffed and wriggled against his bonds, and Kupier noticed that his skin had gone shiny and raw underneath the ropes. It wouldn’t be long before he was bleeding.

  “Maybe if you weren’t quite so menacing, we’d let you off that table,” Kupier commented.

  Dahn glared at him. “I don’t want you to let me off this table.”

  “I find that hard to believe.”

  He expected Dahn to continue glaring at him, but instead, he turned those icy, silver eyes to the ceiling and they went strangely blank. “There’s nothing left for me if I get off this table anyway. There’s nowhere for me to go.”

  So, the Station wasn’t safe for him anymore. Interesting. Very interesting. “Well, you could always stay on Charon. If you promise not to kill anyone. Or do any other Datapoint stuff.”

  Dahn didn’t react as if he hadn’t even heard the other man speak.

  “Who do you serve, Ferryman?” Dahn asked in a low voice that Kupier had to strain to hear.

  Kupier leaned forward, lifting his chin off the back of the chair and squinting at Dahn. “What do you mean?”

  “Feed me whatever line you feed your followers. Explain it to me. The propaganda. Who does the leader of the Ferrymen serve?”

  “It’s not a line. There is no propaganda. It’s the truth. I serve the colonies. I serve the citizens. I fight for their freedom from an oppressive government that uses weapons of genocide as a way to keep them docile and compliant.”

  “You serve the citizens,” Dahn echoed, his voice strangely blank.

  “Yes.”

  “Would you kill one citizen to save five?”

  “What?”

  “Answer the question,” Dahn said evenly. “If, for some reason, you had to choose, would you kill one citizen to save five other citizens? Or would you let them all die in order to keep from being a murderer?”

  Kupier leaned back in his chair and let his easy smile resume. “Pretty great brainteaser, but not exactly applicable to real life. Or real choices.”

  Dahn shook his head. “God. You know nothing. All these misguided people following you. And you have the decision-making skills of a child.”

  “What would you do?”

  “Kill one,” Dahn answered immediately. “With no hesitation and no remorse. There’s no room for it in the battle for human life.”

  “Wow. You’re, like, a really intense dude, huh?”

  Dahn ignored him. “Do you understand how far the human race has come? From single-celled organisms in the primordial mud to the keepers of fire? To germ theory. To cloning sheep. To the inventors of the most powerful weapons in history. Jesus, we even control black holes. We’ve survived without a habitat. Fled to the corners of our solar system, and we still survive.”

  “Your point?”

  “My point is that all of that is about to come to an end. All because of—” Dahn cut himself off, slamming his eyes shut. “I don’t even know why I’m asking this. You’re obviously too weak to make anything even remotely resembling this decision. But there’s no other way.” He let out a long, tight breath that seemed painful. “Send her back.”

  “What?”

  “Send Glade back to the Station.”

  “Thanks, but no thanks.”

  “You’re weak,” Dahn sneered. “And short-sighted and foolish.”

  “And you’re a real charmer,” Kupier said with his eyebrows raised and a smile on his face.

  “If Glade doesn’t go back to the Station, we’re facing the end of human existence.”

  “Sounds like a real doozy.”

  Dahn closed his eyes. For a moment, he looked strangely calm, and it chilled Kupier all over again.

  “She’s the only one who can control the weapon that Haven is using,” Dahn said simply. “You should have seen it. You should have seen…”

  His eyes remained closed, and Kupier watched as Dahn’s expression went from neutral to being crumpled and pained.

  “Should have seen what?”

  “Enceladus.”

  This was the first thing that Dahn had said that Kupier actually took seriously. There was something in his expression that called out for understanding; it was desperate, and Kupier couldn’t ignore it. The other things Dahn had said had sounded as if he were reading out of a Datapoint manual or Haven’s personal handbook. But that, that single word, Enceladus, had had real emotion in it. Something other than fury and rage and frustration. It had had pain. Horror, and what had sounded like sadness.

  “What happened?” Kupier asked. He was standing now, though he didn’t remember standing up. He was regularly briefed on the goings on of the solar system. They had security sentinels placed around all of the colonies, and he hadn’t been warned of anything amiss in Enceladus. But, something had happened. He could see it on this Datapoint’s face.

  “A complete Culling. The new ‘chosen one’ destroyed it. Haven thought that she could control the tech, the way that Glade can. He thought she’d rise to the challenge. But she didn’t. She couldn’t. Everyone culled. All at once.”

  “Dead?” Kupier asked, his voice hushed and strained. He didn’t understand everything that Dahn was saying. But he understood enough.

  Dahn didn’t answer. His eyes rolled closed and Kupier wondered if he’d passed out. He stepped forward, his hand hovering over Dahn’s shoulder.

  “You have to send her back,” Dahn whispered again, one more time. Kupier jumped back. “Send her back and save the innocents. If you don’t, you’re condemning the entire solar system to mortal danger. Condemning them all to be culled, just like everyone on Enceladus. Send her back.”

  Kupier turned and strode out of the room.

  Chapter Twelve

  Jan Ernst Haven stepped off of his skip and onto Earth’s sole landing pad. He’d always relished this moment. This moment when he could step out into the free air of a real planet.

  To the left of the landing pad, off in the distance, there were white-capped mountains hiding their faces in a pitted, white cloud. Fields of gold and green rolled out the carpet toward Jericho, and just beyond the ugly gray cement of the landing pad, a deep, naturally-formed lake glinted silver in the afternoon sun. He knew that, were he to walk right to the edge of that lake, it would be so blue that it was almost black in the middle, where it was deepest. He also knew that the lake held silver fish which shined like rainbows in the sunlight and little red crabs that occas
ionally let themselves be caught by the children of Jericho.

  Earth. For such a complicated ecosystem, the simple beauty of it never ceased to amaze and delight him. On the colonies, the beauty was there, sure, but it was starker and inspired a kind of breathless awe. The black universe against the silvery sand of the moon colony. The navy, atmospheric sky against Io’s red, baked volcanoes. It was beautiful and brutal all at once. There was nothing relaxing about the beauty of the colonies.

  Not so, the case on Earth, where it seemed that every bit of beauty was accompanied by a deep, primal breath.

  There were no oxygen doors frantically sealing in behind him. There were no technicians rushing forward with oxygen masks. There was no grinding wail of a gravity pressurizer. No. On Earth, one simply stepped off their skip and into the world.

  Only, this time, Haven had stepped off-skip, into the world, and directly into the line of at least ten guns pointed in his direction.

  Ah, he sighed to himself. Guns. What a primitive weapon. They were practically extinct on the colonies, seeing that each colony’s gravitational pull and air pressure constant were so different from one another. What might be a dangerous weapon in one colony was simply a toy in another. People had found they had very little use. They’d instead resorted to weapons of a different kind when they’d felt they had to. And then, of course, those people had been culled. But that was neither here nor there.

  What was here and now was the line of soldiers in their dreadful uniforms, glaring at him with expressions so tight that they looked as if they were made of glass. Haven wondered, for a wild second, what would happen if he knocked one of them into the next. Would they all topple over like a child’s toy? Would they shatter into shards on the dirt ground and blow away in the next breeze that happened by?

  “Jan Ernst Haven, by order of the Authority, you are under arrest for crimes against humanity, attempt to incite a war, and for unsanctioned acts against the Authority,” one of the soldiers said as he stepped forward, something metal glinting in his hand.