by Ramona Finn
For the first time since it’d been dampened, I missed my tech. If I’d been able to activate it and sync, I’d have had access to all sorts of blueprints and schematics and secret files that involved Earth’s security system. I was sure I could find a way to circumvent this horrible roadblock if I did. But I was also sure that, if I activated my tech, I’d be turned into a murder machine completely controlled by Haven. Way too risky while I was on board a ship with a bunch of Ferrymen who I happened to care about.
Which was why I was headed down to the cell level of the Ray. Because there was one person who wouldn’t start a riot if he knew that Kupier was going to sacrifice himself. I wasn’t optimistic about the odds of him talking to me about pretty much anything right now, but I needed some answers. About a variety of things. Plus, what else was I supposed to do at this point?
“Don’t waste your time,” was the first thing that Dahn said to me when I stepped off the metal staircase and through the dim hallway leading toward his barred cell. He looked pale and emaciated and bored. Somehow, that made him even more handsome than usual. His hair was once again clean and pulled back. There were dark purple smudges under his eyes. If you discounted the bars surrounding him, I could see that the Ferrymen were actually treating him quite well. There were a pile of pillows and blankets in one corner of his cell and they were more than enough to keep him quite warm. I saw a half-eaten sandwich on a tray, too, which implied to me that he was at least being fed enough to not have to scarf down the entire thing in one go. When I got closer, I also saw that his wrist was hooked up to an IV. The Ray lurched a bit as I watched him, sending his head lolling back on his shoulders. The noises of the engine room were louder down here, but it was an almost sonorous rising and falling of noise. Soothing in a way.
“Hello to you, too.” I crouched down on the other side of the bars and really studied him. He looked different, and not just because he was so much thinner than the last time I’d seen him on the Station. No, there was something missing from his expression, and it didn’t take me long to realize what it was. Ambition. He was, for the first time since I’d ever met him, completely devoid of ambition. It made his handsome face look wildly blank.
“What happened to you, Dahn?” I hadn’t planned on asking the question, but there it was, popping up like a daisy out of the snow. There was something in my voice that I knew neither of us Datapoints was going to be able to interpret, and my words shook just the slightest bit.
“I’m not telling you anything, Glade.”
“Why?” The question was genuine, if not a little sharp.
He laughed and threw his forehead into his hand, covering those silver-green eyes of his. “There’s so many reasons, but let’s see, where shall I start? How about the fact that you’re a traitor to your government?”
“That didn’t seem to bother you much when you were hugging me goodbye in the Station.”
I love you. His words, his voice, seemed to float up out of the ether and land between us. I was sure he was hearing them, too. He dropped his hand and there were those eyes of his, boring into mine. They burned with an intensity that gave me hope. So, he wasn’t just rolling over and dying. There was still something of the Dahn Enceladus I knew in there.
“Ah, yes.” I could hear the venomous sting in his tone. “The moment you put yourself before the rest of the solar system and just disappeared.”
I bit back the fury that instantly rose up within me. It wasn’t Dahn’s fault that he sounded just like Haven. He’d practically been raised by Haven. There was every reason in the world that he would have accepted Haven’s views as righteously truthful. He hadn’t even been given the chance to hear the alternate information that I’d been privy to.
“Dahn,” I tried, “you’re such a smart person. The most logical person I’ve ever met in my life. If only you’d give me the chance to share the information the Ferrymen have shared with me. If only you could see—”
He laughed then, a sound that was half vicious and half broken. “Spare me. Spare me whatever propaganda you think will part the clouds for me. God, thank you. Thank you, Glade. For making everything so very clear for me.”
“Clear? What are you talking about?” I was suspicious of this bitter, thin, broken version of the man who’d meant so much to me for so long. I didn’t understand this version of him, strange and toxic, looking for all the world like he might slit my throat if I got close enough to the bars.
He was silent for a moment before he closed his eyes and let his head fall backward onto the wall behind him. “I was so guilty. The entire trip across the solar system, I tried to talk myself out of it. I tried to find any solution that didn’t end up hurting you. You.” His eyes came open again and found mine. “The woman who loved me. Touched me. Asked for my allegiance. I knew what I was doing was unforgivable, that it made me inhuman. To take your life from you the way I was about to. But it didn’t matter in the end. Your boyfriend caught us and it didn’t work, and there you are, on the other side of the bars. But that didn’t stop the guilt I felt. At having valued something else higher than you. At having betrayed my own…” he thumped a hand over his chest, his voice failing him for a second.
Who was this man before me? The Dahn I knew would never speak this way. He was logical and calm and reserved. This man in this cell was talking like these were the last words he’d speak before he bled out on a battlefield. Something in his tone put me in mind of a fish, half-filleted but still desperately alive for just a few more moments.
“But thank you, for trying to talk me into this Ferryman mess all over again and reminding me that you never really loved me in the first place.” He did that horrible laugh again. “Now I can let go of my guilt.”
I could feel myself going full Datapoint. My face was pulling into a mask, my body freezing. There was something racing through my veins, making my fisted hands shake, but I couldn’t be bothered to pause and find out what it was. “You don’t know how I feel about you. No one can really know how someone else feels.”
It was a logical answer to an extremely emotional quandary. Dahn’s response was to roll his eyes. “I know exactly how you feel, and felt. I have all the evidence I could ever need to know it was all fake.”
“What are you talking about?” I demanded. I was standing now, leaning against the bars of his cell.
“You didn’t love me, Glade. You might have thought you did. But you didn’t. You can’t love someone while simultaneously wishing that they were fundamentally different.” His eyes were blazing into mine as he rose, grabbing the bars of the cell just above my own hands. “You always held yourself back from me. And now I know why. Because you always wanted me to turn away from my beliefs. You wouldn’t trust me until I did. You held my love for the Authority against me until the end. Held your love away until I gave you everything. Even the foundation on which I was built. That’s not love, Glade. That’s control. And that’s all you could ever offer me.”
“No!” I took an involuntary step away from him. “That’s not how it was!”
“That’s exactly how it was.” His hands tightened on the bars, whitening his knuckles. “You think I betrayed you by choosing the Authority? You betrayed me by choosing the Ferrymen!”
“There are no rules, Dahn!” I threw my hands up helplessly to the sides. “I know you desperately want there to be, need there to be rules to all this, just so you can know how to feel. But there’s no telling yourself how to feel. You just have to feel it. That’s why they’re called feelings!” I paced away from him and back. “You can’t hold my choices in one hand and yours in the other and try to make a line graph of what it means to love somebody! Ferrymen or Authority? Dahn, if there’d been a third option, don’t you know I would have chosen it? Maybe that makes me a traitor to everybody, but I don’t care! All I want is to not have non-consensual brain surgery while I’m unconscious. All I want is to not have someone else control my brain and thoughts and actions.” I held up my dampen
ed tech. “All I want is to not have to kill anybody. All I want is to be free!”
I strode away from him then, almost all the way back to those rusty metal stairs, but I couldn’t help myself; I couldn’t leave it at that. I turned on my heel and paced right back to him. “You wanna crucify me, write me off, stop loving me because you think I chose the Ferrymen over you? Kupier over you? Well, you’re wrong. Dead wrong. I didn’t choose the Ferrymen or Kupier. I chose myself.”
He recoiled from me as if I’d said something vile, reprehensible, wildly inappropriate.
“You’re a Datapoint, Glade Io. You have a fundamental responsibility to uphold your government. You think you’re fighting for freedom with the Ferrymen? You’re fighting for anarchy! There is no freedom in chaos. Freedom requires structure. Structure that only a government can provide. You topple the Authority, you’re condemning colony after colony to exile and death! You’ll be no better than…” he trailed off there, and I could have sworn his voice cracked. He leaned his forehead on one forearm, his fists still gripping the bars of his cell. “No better than Haven.”
I froze still, my brow furrowing in confusion so deep that it made my head hurt. I found myself turning my head, my eyes still trained on the air. I felt the primal urge to sniff the air, like a wolf scenting enemies on the wind. Dahn Enceladus was speaking poorly of Jan Ernst Haven? It didn’t compute. I watched the fatigued, almost dead, way that he melted down to the floor of the cell a moment later, without saying anything. The line of his IV tugged at him, and Dahn yanked it out of his vein in frustration and tossed it to the floor. His breaths were ragged and loud. I couldn’t tell if it was from emotion or his recovering lungs. I took a step back from him, and another, until my back was against the wall. Neither of us spoke for a long, long time.
“What are you saying, Dahn? Tell me. No more secrets.”
He said nothing for a long while. Then, “Your Ferryman didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
“What I told him before we left Charon?”
I eyed him long enough for him to know the answer. He laughed again, but this time he was more confused than anything.
“I don’t understand him, Glade.”
“That doesn’t surprise me. You’re practically two different species.”
Dahn raised his eyebrows and I finally sank down to the floor so that we were at eye level again, looking at each other between the bars.
“Tell me what happened with Haven,” I said quietly. “Tell me.”
His eyes went back to that dead look from before. All the light was gone from them. It was just when I didn’t think he was going to say another word that he finally spoke up. “He implanted the tech in Sullia.”
I groaned, a full, deep pain rolling up through me. “That’s not a surprise. But still. God, how could he do that? Why wouldn’t he have implanted it in you instead?” I was asking the question, but I already knew the answer. So did Dahn.
“Because it would have destroyed me. Only you and Sullia were capable of wielding it. Only, it turned out that Sullia wasn’t really capable, either.”
“It killed her? Destroyed her?” A strange mixture of regret and relief twisted up through me. Maybe it made me a monster to not feel any sort of grief at the thought, but the girl had tried to kill me one too many times.
“No,” Dahn shook his head. “It just completely controls her. She doesn’t have a hold over it at all.”
I wasn’t sure what had made Dahn start talking to me about all this, but I didn’t want him to stop. “I take it the simulations haven’t been going well?”
“There were no simulations.”
“What?” I couldn’t possibly have heard him right. There were hundreds of simulations for a Datapoint before they were put into the field.
That was when Dahn looked up, directly into my eyes, his silver eyes like two crystal balls, so that I could practically see the images he described reflected in them. “Haven gave her Enceladus. She tried. And failed.”
I couldn’t help the gasp I let out, and couldn’t tell if my heart was beating or not. “How many perished?”
He looked at me as if I were dumb. “All of them, Glade. Cullables. Innocents. Every one. Enceladus is no longer a colony.”
Dahn watched as the blacks of Glade’s eyes reduced to the head of a pin. She looked like she was going to be sick. No, she looked like she was going to pass out. When she finally took a breath, a good long one, Dahn couldn’t help but be relieved. He felt as if time had frozen while she’d processed the information.
“You weren’t trying to kidnap me back to the Station on Haven’s orders, were you?” she asked quietly, in that voice of hers which still, even after everything, made his heart race a little bit.
It didn’t surprise him that she was putting the pieces together this fast. That she’d realized that Sullia was a menace to every single citizen who breathed air in the colonies.
“I didn’t even tell him I was going.”
“You left without his permission.”
“Yes.” “You’d be a hero if you returned with me, but you risked execution for desertion if you returned without me.”
“Yes.”
“Because you think Haven’s going to set Sullia loose on another colony?”
Dahn cleared his throat, which had gotten strangely tight again. “I know he’s going to. This new way of Culling, he’s obsessed with it. He feels it’s his life’s work. Its success is more important to him than everything. Than the Authority, than the lives of citizens. He’s going to keep going.” “And in your eyes, it’s better to give him a sniper rifle,” Glade said as she pointed at her own chest. “Rather than the nuclear bomb he currently has.”
Dahn nodded. There wasn’t a ton more to say after that. Obviously, Glade understood perfectly.
She let out a long breath. “You figured that it was either my life or the life of every other citizen. You did the math and made your decision.”
“Don’t pretend as if you wouldn’t have made that same decision had you known. I know how your mind works, Glade. You’re as logical as I am. More so, in some ways.”
She was quiet for a while. “You told all this to Kupier. And he said what?”
Dahn sneered. “Nothing, really. Next thing I knew, I was getting loaded onto this tin can.” He intentionally lowered his eyelids so that he looked as bored as possible. “But I can only imagine we’re not chauffeuring you to the Station right now.”
“No.” She rose, her fingers tenting on the floor for just a moment. She tossed her hair back behind her shoulder in that way of hers that Dahn now knew would always wreck him, probably until he died. “We’re not bringing me to the Station. Because Kupier did his own math equation. And he chose differently.”
She turned her back then and walked with purpose toward those metal stairs that she’d clanked down on. She paused and turned back to him when she was halfway back.
“Dahn, your love for the Authority, it’s based on what? Power? Order? What?”
He squinted down the dark hallway toward her and gave her an answer that he barely knew was true himself. In fact, he might never have been able to say it if she hadn’t been walking away from him for what felt like the last time. “It’s about the people, Glade. Protecting the citizens in the only way I know how. By creating a structure that they can lean on, depend on. It’s about human life.”
She didn’t turn around to face him fully, but she stayed still for a long moment. He couldn’t tell if she was shocked by his answer or not. He could never tell with her.
I’d have been lying if I said that we entered the asteroid belt without me thinking of a thousand ways that I could return to the Station, just like Dahn had wanted. In a way, I thought that he was probably right. The only way to stop Sullia from culling the entire solar system was for me to return, take her place, and do a much better job than she could. That was also the only way that I could save Kupier’s life. He’d have no
choice but to abort this insane mission without me.
But that also meant returning to the Station. To a life of culling. Of subservience. Of Haven. I was also one hundred percent certain that any of the simulated freedoms I’d enjoyed on the Station would be completely evaporated from any existence I could lead. Haven would never again give me even a chance of escape. He’d be in my head at every turn. My tech would control me, body and mind. Maybe even soul. I wouldn’t have put it past him.
I was standing on the landing deck of the Ray, which was infinitesimal in comparison to the one on the Station or on Charon. I looked out on the silent landing ships all scattered about and darkened, like sleeping cows dotting a field. I remembered the first time I’d been there. When Cast and I had been prisoners of the Ferrymen and we’d done everything we could to get the hell off the Ray. Only Cast had escaped that night. Sullia and I had remained. I’d met Kupier the next day.
Tense in the doorway, I shook my head. It felt like that had all happened a hundred years ago. Or maybe even in someone else’s life. My mother had still been alive then. I’d been convinced that being a Datapoint was honorable and worthwhile. I’d thought Haven had all the answers then.
My hands tightened at my sides. I was wearing a jumpsuit. Underneath, there were knives strapped to each of my legs, throwing stars in my sleeves, and four sets of poison darts hidden strategically on my person. It was exactly what I would wear when we landed on Earth in a few days.
But I’d risen this early that morning knowing exactly where we were passing that day, and somehow, the outfit had just kind of found its way onto my body.
“What are you doing down here?”
I almost jumped out of my skin, whirling and whipping one of the knives out and to the throat of the speaker. Wells held himself perfectly still, his head cocked to the side and his hands in the air; he let a wrench fall with a heavy, ringing clank.
“Oh. You scared me,” I said lamely.
“Yeah,” he choked as I released him from the hold. “Got that.” He rubbed at his throat and coughed. “Little high-strung this morning, are we?”
