The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  “No!” Glade hissed again, so incensed that her mouth was just opening and closing, no clear sounds coming out.

  Kupier turned away from her. “We’ll need fifteen men aboard the Ray,” he called to the group. “And at least twenty more here on Charon to monitor the proceedings and to send us intel. It’s dangerous, yes, but I have every reason to believe that all of you should return to Charon safe and sound.”

  Glade glared at his choice of words, and the deliberate omission of himself from that qualification of ‘safe and sound.’

  Kupier looked around at the forest of raised hands all around him. “I haven’t called for a vote yet!” he laughed, surprised.

  “We’re not voting,” Aine clarified, a smirk on her face. “We’re volunteering.”

  Kupier looked back around at the group again and realized that every single person in the room had their hands raised, including Cast and Wells. Only Glade had her hands at her sides, her fists opening and closing, her eyes looking like they could melt glass if given the slightest chance.

  “Ah,” Kupier said, a smile blooming over his face as he turned in one last circle. “I’m going to take that as a ‘yes’ vote, then.”

  Glade took one last look at him before she turned on her heel and stormed from the room.

  Kupier looked after her for only one second before he turned back to his men. There was a lot more to say and a lot more to prepare.

  I kicked the packed dirt wall of the hallway I was storming down, tears pricking at my eyes as viciously as needles. I couldn’t believe it. I’d been so sure that Kupier would never make me do this against my will. He knew that now he’d gotten all these Ferrymen to agree, I’d never compromise their lives by sabotaging the mission. He knew that I’d play my part faithfully. I’d do everything he’d needed me to do from the beginning.

  It was his plan all along, a cruel voice deep in my gut started whispering to me. He knew exactly how to get you onto his side. He knew exactly how to get you to care for him. For the Ferrymen. He knew exactly how to get what he wanted from you.

  He’d destroyed my alliance with the Authority. He’d dragged me across the solar system. And all for what? Just so that he could manipulate me just like Haven had? Playing my emotions against each other, threatening the lives and well-being of people I cared about just to get me to use my talents?

  I kicked the wall again and screamed through my teeth. What I wouldn’t have given to have been untalented and hidden and no one. Just some girl on Io. At my age, almost seventeen, I would have had a full-time job in the refinery by now. Maybe my mother would still have been alive. Maybe she would have been pestering me to start looking for a husband, hinting about me starting a family of my own. I grimaced through my tears. I would have hated it, resented it, I was sure, but oh, what I wouldn’t have given in this moment for problems as mundane as those.

  “He rescued your sisters,” I reminded myself, out loud this time, as if I could override the sniveling voice inside me that was whispering about his betrayal. “You know who this man is. There has to be a reason he’s doing this.”

  I turned on my heel, going back the way I’d come. There was one person who could answer my questions, and I didn’t have any idea how long I’d have available to be able to beat the truth out of him. Now that the Ferrymen had voted yes on this plan of Kupier’s, I had no doubt that they’d all be scurrying about Moat, preparing to leave. And, of course, I’d be going with them.

  Against your will! Just like always.

  I swallowed the bitter taste in my mouth. “It was my choice to leave the Station,” I reminded myself out loud. “No one manipulated me into that. Don’t play the victim, Glade.”

  I turned down one hallway and then the next until I found myself in the sequestered area on Dahn’s level. He must really have weakened since I’d last seen him because there was only one Ferryman posted outside his door, and it was Laris. Barely a warrior. She watched a computer monitor, frowning, a clipboard in her hand.

  “Glade!” she seemed surprised to see me there. “Are you here to visit Dahn Enceladus? I was told that no visitors—”

  “We can do this the hard way or the easy way, Laris. Your choice.”

  She glared at me. She wasn’t much of a fighter, but she wasn’t a push-over either. “I’m not going to stand in your way, Glade. I happen to like my nose unbroken. But—” she grabbed my arm as I went to move past her. Her grip was stronger than I’d expected. “You should know that his health is not good, at all. He’s refusing antibiotics for his cuts and they’re becoming infected. Try to talk him into receiving treatment. Or at the very least, don’t upset him too much.”

  I turned back to Laris, a confused frown creasing my face. “What do you care for the life of a Datapoint?”

  She frowned right back at me. “I brought you back from the dead, didn’t I? Stitched up that arm of yours? I care about human life, Glade. That’s my agenda.”

  I looked at her again, this time really studying her. I was surprised by what I saw, or rather, what I’d never noticed before. She had a sweet face. But intelligent. With her brown hair piled up high off of her head, I realized that she usually wore a cap over it. I hadn’t really realized before that her head wasn’t shaved like the other Ferrymen’s.

  “Are you a Ferryman?” I asked her.

  She looked momentarily surprised by my conversational turn but quickly recovered. “No. Not really. But I was born on Charon. And I do everything I can to support the Ferrymen.”

  I spoke my next question carefully, slowly. “If we were to strike down the Authority’s hand and you were free to leave Charon, would you stay here?”

  Laris paused, considering me as if she were trying to figure out why I was asking this particular question. She shrugged. “No. I suppose I’d go wherever I was needed the most. All the colonies have health crises of one kind or another.”

  I nodded, taking a step away from her toward Dahn’s bleak medical room. What a shame it was, a horrible waste, that the Authority kept someone like Laris trapped on Charon. Just because of where she’d been born, who her ancestors were. The Authority feared losing their control of the citizens so much that they’d rather lose out on someone like Laris than figure out how to live with Charon.

  I was shaking my head as I stepped into Dahn’s room, but I froze when I saw what awaited me. Someone had removed the bonds that had kept him strapped to the table, but I could see where they had been. Welts, red in the center and white at the edges, striped his body. Lightning bolts of infection spidered in all directions from them. His lips were cracked and almost lavender, his eyelids bruised and fluttering over eyes that looked frantic in their pattern. His hair was lank and splayed out over the small pillow under his head. I could see that his muscles had atrophied from all the time he’d been tied down and unconscious. If he hadn’t been wheezing with breath, I would have thought him dead.

  “Why the hell are you refusing medicine?” I demanded, my voice loud and abrupt in the cold room.

  His eyes came all the way open for just a moment. I saw a flash of recognition, but then exhaustion seemed to take over again. He made a sound, something like a grunt, and I got the distinct impression that that was the only thing that he could do.

  “He’s gotten much worse in the last few hours,” Laris said from behind me. “His body isn’t used to the kinds of bacteria we have here on Charon.”

  “Dahn,” I tried again, taking another step forward. “You’re dying.”

  His eyes fluttered open again and I watched as he attempted to move his lips. The skin on his bottom lip cracked anew and I watched as blood rose to the surface, trickling through the tracks of his chapped skin.

  I turned back to Laris. “I’m right? He’s dying?”

  She shrugged. “It’s hard to say, but he’s deteriorated very fast. I explained it to him a few hours ago, about the kinds of bacteria we have here. But he refused the antibiotics.” She nodded toward a tray of syringes
on a rolling table next to his head. “He said he didn’t want them. He said that he didn’t have any place to go back to. That they wouldn’t take him back.”

  I turned back to Dahn, squinting at him. His eyes were blurry and only half open as his chest wheezed. There was no way to know if he was fully conscious or not. “Nothing to go back to?”

  Had he betrayed Haven? Had him coming to get me been on Haven’s orders? Or of Dahn’s own volition?

  “He wanted to die,” I said to the room. Not sure who I was really talking to.

  Laris answered. “Well, he certainly knew that dying was a distinct possibility in refusing the antibiotics.”

  “Oh, Jesus, Dahn.” I paced beside his bed, unsure if he could even hear me or not. “You’d rather die than find yourself aligned with the Ferrymen? This is just so ridiculous. Look, I know I’m being all insensitive here because Luce killed your father.”

  Behind me, Laris gasped, but I ignored her.

  “I get it,” I continued. “I’m an asshole for bringing it up. And you don’t want to be aligned with the group of people responsible for your father’s death. Fair enough. But if you die right now, you’re going to go down in the record books as having fled to Charon and then died. Dahn, you’re already aligned with the Ferrymen in the eyes of anyone in the Authority who finds out you came here. So, what’s the point of dying? Why not live and try to set the record straight?”

  His eyes were on me, tracking my frantic pacing, but they were dull and his pupils were blown out. He made no more grunts or noises to indicate whether he could hear me or not.

  “This is ridiculous. Laris, you’re just going to let him die?”

  “I’m not going to go against his wishes, Glade. He was of a clear mind when he told me what he wanted. I won’t take away his choices.”

  That point struck a little too close to home, I had to admit. Wasn’t I the one who’d just been griping about having my choices taken away yet again? “Yeah, well, I’m pretty sure that’s the life of a Datapoint,” I said to all three of us, willing myself to hear the words. To absorb them. “Maybe that’s just life. Sometimes your choices get taken away and you do the best you can with what you have. I’m not letting Dahn Enceladus die on a metal table in the bowels of Charon, though. If you’re gonna die, then you’ll die defending yourself,” I told him.

  I strode over to the table and picked up one of the syringes. “This one?”

  “No!” Laris strode over. For a minute, I thought she might attempt to stop me, but she paused, her hand over the tray. “This one. If you’re so determined, then I’ll do it. I wouldn’t want you pumping air into his system and killing him faster.”

  “Maybe this makes me selfish,” I told Dahn, whose eyes had fallen to Laris. “But you’re going to live. I refuse to stand by and watch while the Authority takes another life.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  I strapped myself into one of the take-off chairs in the big room of the Ray, sitting between Cast and Wells as all of us stared forward in silence at the sheer number of citizens standing on the landing pad, watching us get ready to go.

  My sisters were among them, though I couldn’t pick them out of the huge crowd right now. I was grateful for that. Our goodbyes had been hard enough. To my surprise, Daw had been the one who’d tried to insist on joining the mission. I’d realized later – with no help from anyone else, thank you very much – that she’d been terrified of being separated from me again. As mad as they’d been at me over the last few weeks, they were determined to make a family with me again. To stay with me. It was Treb who’d talked Daw down. Convinced her that they would only distract me from my mission if they were aboard the Ray. That they would make all this even more dangerous for me if they were there. She was right.

  So Daw and Treb had agreed to stay behind on Charon with Owa and Misha. Though, I had my suspicions that they were going to talk their way into aiding the Ferrymen who were staying behind on Charon.

  That was fine by me. We needed all the help we could get.

  Considering that we had to make our way across the solar system undetected – which was pretty easy until we got to Mars, where things got sticky – we were going to have to disable the Authority’s tracking systems in order to make it through the asteroid belt. Once we were close enough to Earth, there would be no disabling anything, though, and there would only be dodging their artillery from the moon colony. Then, there was just the super-simple task of breaking through Earth’s security shield and landing without crashing. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

  Yeah. No. We were going to need all the intel and hacking that the best and brightest on Charon had to offer.

  Aine popped her head into the big room. “T-minus one minute.” She jogged back toward the cockpit, where I knew she’d be sliding into the co-pilot seat next to Kupier.

  “Here we go,” Wells whispered under his breath.

  “Are you sure he’s going to be alright down there?” Cast asked me for the fiftieth time.

  He was referring to Dahn. Who, by way of a last-minute stipulation from me, had been brought along. He’d rebounded a bit in the day since he’d received his antibiotics, but Laris had still insisted on coming along to ensure his health. Kupier hadn’t wanted to bring him along, but I’d flat-out refused to get on board unless Dahn did.

  The way I saw it, leaving this unwilling Datapoint captive on Charon was going to be a problem no matter how we sliced it. Either Dahn was going to get testy and start killing the people who were trying to restrain him, or the citizens and Ferrymen left behind were going to start fearing him as his health returned and, as a result, just flat-out merc him.

  Neither were my first choices of what came next for him. I’d gone to talk to Kupier, and that had been the first and only time we’d spoken since the war room. I was too betrayed by him to even be in the same room as him more than was necessary. My plan was to avoid him until we got to Earth.

  “Look,” I’d told Kupier, venom in my voice and my eyes staunchly avoiding his. “He comes along or I don’t. What’s the issue? He’s weak, and we’ll keep him strapped down and his tech off. We can even lock him in one of the cells on the lower level of the Ray. And then, when we get to Earth? We’ll kick him off and leave him to his own devices.”

  “His own devices as a fully trained Datapoint who happens to hate the Ferrymen? I’d rather not empower him down that road, Glade.”

  “Kupier, he’s way more of a threat to us on our own territory. He’s not like me. He’s not going to eventually flip to the Ferrymen’s side. Trust me. He will die in the name of the Authority. And take us down with him. So, okay? Keeping him on Charon is dangerous for everyone involved.”

  “Fine, we’ll drop him on Io as we pass by.”

  “You know our path doesn’t take us anywhere near Io. And aren’t you the one who says that we don’t have any more time to waste? Where are those extra two weeks gonna come from, Kupier?”

  “Fine,” he’d said, and sighed deeply and dragged a hand over his face. I’d finally looked at him then. It had been one of those rare times when there were no signs of a smile anywhere to be found on his face. He’d looked so different without that defining feature. So plain. It had plucked at my heart.

  He’s implementing a plan that means his own death and you’re ignoring him, punishing him, that little voice had said in my gut. That same little voice that had accused him of betraying me just a day earlier. Make up your mind! I’d wanted to scream at myself. Why couldn’t I ever just feel one way about something?

  I’d just been opening my mouth to say something, anything, though I wasn’t sure what, when he’d spoken again and cut me off.

  “We’ll take him and leave him on Earth.” He’d stared at me, looking as somber as he had just a few moments before.

  And I hadn’t been able to bear it any longer. I’d turned and strode away. Half of me had wanted to run back to him and take him in my arms, begging him not to do what I knew he was
going to do. The other part of me had wanted to scream at him to just go to hell already if he was so determined to do it.

  I’d done neither. And, ten hours later, I found myself here. Strapped into the Ray, skittering from its thrusters and chomping at the bit to take off.

  I closed my eyes as we started to levitate over the landing pad. The grind of the doors indicated that it would only be seconds before we took off. I didn’t want to see the faces of all of the people we were leaving behind. The faces of all of the people who were depending on this mission to be successful.

  I felt something brush against my stomach and looked down; Cast and Wells were holding hands across my lap.

  “Glade,” Cast said, holding up their joined hands.

  I looked down at their joined hands. Just as the thrusters of the Ray kicked on and we were catapulted out into the atmosphere, I laid my hand over theirs.

  “Aine,” I groaned, dropping my forehead into my hand. “Not again.”

  “Yes, again!” she insisted, her face pinched in concentration as she looked down at all the words and diagrams and figures she’d drawn on the paper in front of her. It had been a week since we’d left Charon, it was another week before we’d hit the asteroid belt, and this was roughly the hundredth time she and I had gone over the plan to infiltrate Earth. We were sitting on the counters of the tiny galley kitchen, eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Her feet swung free and mine curled under me. “I’m sorry that I don’t have the battle-ready mind of a Datapoint, but some of us feel the need to really strike this thing down to memory!”