The Ferrymen (The Culling Book 3)

by Ramona Finn

  I shoved those thoughts from my brain with a ruthless efficiency. Because none of that mattered now. All that mattered in this particular moment was the darkened street I sprinted down in the early dawn of Jericho. An Earthen morning.

  The streets were cobbled with red brick and there were townhouses rising on either side of me. I took a sharp left, Kupier’s voice practically whispering the directions in my ear. The group of Ferrymen running with me were juking and ducking as they worked to keep up.

  “Jeez, warn us next time before I twist an ankle,” said a familiar voice in my ear. I jolted as I realized that Wells was next to me. He wasn’t an anonymous Ferryman. No, this was my friend, sprinting down the street with a machete in one hand and some kind of shield in the other. The Ferryman on the other side of me had one, as well, and I knew what they were for. Protecting me. Protecting me at all costs as I attempted to destroy the Database. And Wells had volunteered. I would have thought that nothing could have torn Wells and Cast apart on a battlefield, but here he was, sprinting with me into the abyss.

  Lights lined the opulent street and, as we passed under one, I caught a look of Wells’ face, just a single-framed picture. There was ferocity on that face. And determination. It wasn’t the face of a warrior, per se. No. This was the face of a finisher. A person who’d come here to get something done – and he was going to do it.

  I turned back to face where we were going. “Right!” I whisper-yelled to the runners around me, and as a pack, we veered down an alley that Kupier had mapped out for me. We were lined on every side by red brick now. There was no trash or debris or even dust in this alley. Even here, though, the night air was rich and scented with what smelled like herbs of some kind. Maybe even summer fruit. Above us, there was only a thin strip of early morning sky between the two buildings surrounding us, but it was dazzling. Earth’s atmosphere didn’t disguise any of the richness of outer space, or the sparkle of stars. I wondered at the perfection that was planet Earth. The single grain of sand on a beach that it was. It was truly the only place that was fit for a human to live.

  That thought spurred me on. I ducked my head and looked around no more. At the end of the alleyway, we jogged sharply to the left and I saw the Database building up ahead, just like Kupier had shown me in pictures. It was a strange-looking building, sandwiched between what appeared to be homes. The building itself was covered in reflective glass. Throwing reflections everywhere, it looked almost like a black hole in the middle of the block. Like there was nothing inside it – only a gravity that was strong enough to stop time.

  There was a shout from our backs and a thud. Something whizzed past my ear. I heard a Ferryman shout and felt Wells move from running at my side to running at my back.

  “Almost there!” I shouted over my shoulder to him, and I saw behind me that three of the Ferrymen who’d been running with me had stopped, and were crouching with their shields now, forming a sort of barricade on the street, buying me time. Beyond them was a group of men in the distance. They wore no uniform in particular, but I could tell by the way they ran in formation that they’d had training of some kind.

  I turned back, just in time to slide up to the building that housed the Database. Kupier and I had been over it and over it. The building butted up to its neighbors on either side. There was no way in other than the front door, which looked like any other part of the face of the building. Just a long, seamless, mirrored glass. Only, it had a small handhold and a small screen that housed its security system. The front door was encrypted with fingerprint technology, retina recognition, passcodes that were twenty digits long, a small, special key that only members of the Authority possessed, and…

  “There!” I shouted, unhooking my hacking keyboard from the small screen and swinging open the door. I couldn’t help but crack my fingers as I jogged into the room, the Ferrymen who’d remained with me flanked me again, some of them whooping with joy at our easy entry.

  As soon as the door swung shut behind us, I knew that whoever tried to follow us was going to have a hell of a time getting in. The lock wasn’t going to follow any of its original failsafe precautions. It was going to take a hacker of my caliber, at least.

  But I didn’t dwell on it. The glass of the building was also mirrored on the inside, so as I jogged toward the spiral staircase in the middle of the great room we’d entered into, I saw a hundred reflections of myself, and of my comrades. A great bang came from the street, shaking the glass room on its hinges and spurring me on. If the Authority soldiers were making headway towards us, then I couldn’t hesitate.

  I sprang toward the spiral staircase that led both up and down. My hand clamping onto the twisting banister, I basically fell down the stairs in as controlled a fall as I could manage. My feet slammed onto the ground in an utterly dark room, lit only from the square of light in the ceiling that reflected light from the mirrored room. I heard the landing feet of Wells and three other Ferrymen.

  Flashlights clicked on. I held out my hand and Wells tossed me his. There was the dull hum of computers all around us, and the room had a strangely dingy taste to the air. As if we were deep underground, though I knew we were only maybe twenty feet down. I guided the beam around the room and realized, with a jolt, that it was huge, much larger than the room above us. And it was mostly empty, besides a bank of screens and monitors all lashed together directly in the middle. They weren’t much larger than the simulator back on the Station. I blinked at the configuration.

  So strange. I’d expected the height of technology. The pinnacle of human invention. Sleek lines and perfection. But this, this looked like a Ferryman child had lashed this conglomeration of technologies together. It was nothing more than a raft of monitors. This housed the Authority’s Database?

  Something clicked into place. Of course. This hadn’t been engineered by computer geniuses and designers. No. That would have required too many hands in the pot. Too many chances for someone to detect the virus that had been implanted in the culling program. And… perhaps other viruses elsewhere in the Database? Ones I hadn’t even imagined? How many other secret changes had been made to this system that our government depended on?

  I realized as I stared at the strange island of monitors, that this was essentially a window into Haven’s brain. The man had designed this all by himself. Or with minimal help. This wasn’t a revolutionary system of technology. No. This was the best that Haven had been able to come up with.

  I didn’t let its hodgepodge exterior fool me, though. I’d seen the Database from the inside. When I’d hacked it from the Station. I knew what these monitors housed. It was something that had perhaps been created on these lashed-together screens, but it itself was an elegant, brutal beast. Haven controlled every single Datapoint from the program that lived inside those computers. It both lived there and didn’t. It could be accessed remotely, but it could only be killed from here.

  I cracked my knuckles again and jogged a circle around the bank of computers. It looked strangely like a brain. There were no obvious places to hook up to it. Which meant I’d need to do it wirelessly, which meant… yup. Killer tech time.

  I took a deep breath and tossed the flashlight back to Wells. I saw that all the Ferrymen in the room were staring at me now, too. Waiting. I realized that I actually did recognize them all. There was Wells, of course. And Royta, who’d recently passed her pilot’s training, but had apparently opted into this mission. Nis, Nix’s brother. And Oort. Kupier’s brother. They’d all come here to protect me.

  I watched them all subconsciously shift their grips on their weapons as I raised the reactivation wand. I cleared my throat. “Everyone got their chips in place?”

  Four hands rose up to touch the necklaces holding the chips over their hearts. Truthfully, I had no idea what might happen when I activated my tech. Hopefully, I’d remain in control long enough to destroy the Database. But worst come to worst, I knew I wouldn’t cull any of the Ferrymen. Snap them in half with my out-of-control
Datapoint kung fu? Maybe. But at least I wouldn’t be culling them.

  “Alright. Let’s get this over with.” The ceiling shook as another bang from outside trembled the building on its foundation. I wondered if that noise was from the Authority men or from the Ferrymen.

  I couldn’t waste another second.

  I flicked on the reactivation wand and felt its vibrating hum ricochet up my arm. One deep breath later, I waved it over top of my tech.

  Chapter Seventeen

  A cacophonous screeching filled my ears so suddenly, and so completely, I was barely aware that I’d fallen to my hands and knees. There wasn’t thought. There was only a white sheet of sensation that was both immensely pleasurable and excruciatingly painful. My body was simply a live wire, electric sensation, threatening to tear me in two.

  Sync! I commanded myself. I was going to kill myself if I didn’t allow myself to sync – my brain couldn’t go on if it continued in two different directions. Sync!

  I forced my muscles to go lax, my brain to go blank. There was no Glade. There was no heart. There was no soul. There was only my brain and this computer implanted into me. There were just two things that could be one if I let them. I just had to let them. Sync. Sync. Sync-sync-sync-sync.

  I forced a giant breath into my lungs as my vision cleared. My sweaty cheek was slick against the cool floor of the basement room. There. There was the bank of computers. My mission. I glanced up at the Ferrymen in front of me and immediately identified them as potential unknowns. I waited for a beat, but my tech couldn’t read their brainwaves. The chips were working! I couldn’t read them as cullables. My tech didn’t force me to go cull them like it might have in the past. My tech provided read-out after read-out of their pulses, which weapons they were equipped with, and their possible motives. But it did not urge me to annihilate them.

  I almost laughed with the relief of it. This meant two things. That their chips were working and that Haven had either disconnected himself from my tech when I left, or he hadn’t realized I’d reconnected yet. Neither my tech nor Haven was controlling my will. Either way, I’d take it.

  I turned to the bank of monitors and my tech immediately provided a dizzying array of options for how to infiltrate it.

  There! I stepped forward and flicked on one of the screens – the one that my tech had just commanded me to upon knowing my goal.

  Perfect. It was a simple interface, user-friendly. I’d enter this way. Three keystrokes, a backdoor from my tech, two disable codes, and a counter-virus later, and I was in. I ceased to see with my eyes, hear with my ears, or even feel my own skin. Eyes closed, I was in my own brain, completely in my tech and completely in the world of the Database.

  Dahn would never, for as long as he lived, forget the moment he clattered down the spiral metal staircase to the basement where the Database was being held.

  He was still hurting from his battle with the Ferrymen which had freed him from his cage. And had ended up with two of them dead. He hadn’t, however, killed the nurse who’d led him back to the land of the healthy. She’d held her hands over her head and he’d spared her, choosing to sprint away into the Earthen night.

  Dahn had simply refused to believe what he was seeing as he’d left the Ray, however. This perfectly inhabitable Earth. Evidence that a chosen few had obviously been living here for decades. He ignored it all and sought out Glade.

  He’d been in the street for mere minutes when he’d come across a different Datapoint, though. Sullia. She looked even worse than the last time he’d seen her, right after she’d culled Enceladus. They collided into one another and the contact reactivated Dahn’s tech. He took a lungful of night air. Thank God. He had his weapons back. It was the first real breath he’d taken in what felt like months.

  “This way!” Sullia shouted, and he realized that she was dragging him along, not surprised at all to see him. “My tech sensed you on board the Ferryman ship. We need you.”

  Dahn didn’t have to guess who the ‘we’ was. Haven and Sullia.

  And if Haven and Sullia had need of him, then perhaps he wasn’t automatically sentenced to the death or imprisonment that he’d assumed would be in store for him. His tech urged him along and, before he knew it, he was running alongside Sullia, through the streets of Earth.

  Dahn could not, for the life of him, believe that he was there – on Earth. He wondered, not for the first time in the last few months, how much he didn’t know about his own history, his own people, his own civilization. Was this the only city on Earth? How many citizens were here? Was it an experiment? Would the rest of the solar system one day be welcomed back?

  There was no more time for questions when he and Sullia skidded onto a street where soldiers and Ferrymen fought hand to hand. There were ten times more soldiers than Ferrymen, but that didn’t seem to matter since the Ferrymen fought as viciously as a Datapoint might. There were flying kicks and gut punches. The Ferrymen used the soldiers’ own weapons against them as they slashed and fought to hold the line of soldiers at bay.

  Sullia and Dahn sprinted past them, and there was too much going on for the Ferrymen to do more than yell as they made their way toward a strangely reflective building. The world was mirrored in the windows of the building. And so was the man who waited patiently out front. Haven. In all his silver glory.

  “Dahn Enceladus. How good to see you,” he said in that reedy voice of his. “Perhaps you wouldn’t mind…” he gestured toward the locked door and Dahn understood immediately that he was needed to hack in. Which probably meant that Glade had locked Haven out. Which probably meant that Glade was inside this building. Which meant that, once again, Dahn was chasing Glade.

  Something seemed to snap inside of him as he stepped forward toward the screen, preparing his tech to hack it.

  This was the last time, he promised himself. The last time he’d chase her. The last time he did Haven’s bidding. The last time he was their mutual pawn in whatever game they were playing.

  He started hacking the screen and dimly heard Haven and Sullia behind him.

  “Was she secure when you left her?”

  Sullia paused. “I didn’t check.”

  “Why?” There was a world of accusation in Haven’s single-worded question.

  “Because you were commanding me to apprehend Dahn Enceladus. I didn’t have time to see to Kalis Rome.”

  The Authority member? Were they keeping her somewhere? For protection?

  Dahn reached forward and slammed open the door. It had taken him less than two minutes to hack it. Obviously, Glade hadn’t been planning on him. It gave him a smug satisfaction to know that he was better than her at something. Just one thing, but he clung to it.

  Haven pounded forward, Sullia behind him and Dahn behind her. He considered, for a moment, not going into the building. What if there was a world where he didn’t have to chase Glade? What if there was a world where he didn’t have to follow Haven’s instructions no matter how reprehensible they were? He was apparently in the heart of the Authority right now. Where he’d fought to be his entire life. He could go find Kalis Rome. Tell her everything he knew about Haven, about Glade, about the Station. He could confess it all, and see if she might have mercy on him. Here was a chance to ally himself with someone new, to start his life all over.

  But he heard a scream from inside the building. Far away and echoing, but he would have recognized that voice from anywhere. It was Glade Io, screaming for her life.

  And just like that, he was sprinting after Haven and Sullia, sliding down the staircase after them and pulling up short at what he saw.

  There he was, in a dank room with nothing but a deranged pile of computer monitors, and his eyes quickly traveled around it, taking in his surroundings. The room was cavernous and dark, and Ferrymen he only dimly recognized charged toward them in what seemed like a strange slow motion. Dahn realized that the shock of what he was seeing was stunning him, plunging him into a place where time moved glacier-slow. He h
eard shouts and battle cries, watched Sullia clash with two Ferrymen at once, but all he could do was stare at the person with her head flung back and her face open in pain and connection and purpose. She stared wide-eyed at the ceiling, her gaze dark, her black hair river-ing backwards. Glade Io’s arms were out-flung as she stood there as if she were offering herself to the gods. And maybe she was. Who could know what was happening in that mysterious brain of hers? She was synced with her tech, though – his own tech told him that much – and she was doing something to the bank of computers in front of her. Dimly, he understood that it was the Database she was messing with. But his brain merely shorted out at the sight of her in her element.

  She looked powerful and competent and wild and out of control all at once. It was at that moment, staggering backwards, one hand clamped over his chest, that Dahn Enceladus realized that he would always love her. That was his burden. He’d made his choices, formed his brain and his belief system, and there was no room for anything else. There wasn’t even room enough to know her, or really understand her. But that didn’t stop his heart from loving her. He knew, in a different world, where Haven had never chosen him, where he hadn’t been raised and groomed to be a Datapoint, that he, Dahn Enceladus, might have met Glade and loved her the way a normal man, with a human heart, would be able to. But as it was, he’d simply love her like this, with as much of himself as he could. And he’d never be able to stop it.

  My tech navigated the Database with deadly speed and accuracy. A killing pain rose in my skull and I knew that my brain was falling behind my tech, unable to keep up. It didn’t need me. It barely even wanted me. I was simply a vessel for my tech’s own brain.

  But it wasn’t autonomous. No. I still had a say as to what happened in my mind. Stubbornly, I brought my tech to heel with a scream that sounded, even to my own ears, like my life was ending. I didn’t know how much longer I had until Haven realized I was synced. I knew that, if he were also in my head, I’d have no chance at controlling my tech. This was my moment. My only moment.