The Authority (The Culling Trilogy Book 2)

by Ramona Finn

  I was there, in my bunk on the Station, but I couldn’t stop thinking about our trip to Europa a few months back. When I was supposed to help him cull. I was his second. And then the time came—he was fatigued, and needed me to take a small group of the cullable. It had been such an expected and reasonable moment. But my heart hadn’t let me do it. I’d collapsed, freaked out, and panicked.

  He’d culled them for me and then practically carried me out of there. I’d wondered and wondered why that had happened to me. And now I knew for sure.

  On some level, I’d always known that Kupier was telling the truth. I just hadn’t wanted to believe it. I’d told myself that it didn’t make sense. But then I’d been faced with more than a simulation, my first real culling, and the task had felt unnatural, cruel and inhuman.

  Because Haven was a liar. Because the Culling program that worked with our integrated tech was compromised. Because we weren’t just culling murderous, violent people. We were culling free thinkers.

  I squeezed my eyes shut and pictured my father in the moments after he’d been culled. He’d lain so awkwardly on the ground. Flat. He’d never lain down flat when he slept. He’d always been on his side or with one knee bent up, one elbow behind his head. But the life had been yanked from the shell of his body by some Datapoint and he’d fallen to the ground like a doll.

  Just like all those people on Europa.

  As Dahn had dragged me back to the skip to get us the hell out of there, there’d been a dead man on the street. The toes of his boots pointing straight at the sky.

  Had he been one of the violent?

  Or had he been one of the rebellious? The open minded? The revolutionaries?

  The brainwaves that Haven’s virus worked to eliminate largely matched the brainwaves of people like the Ferrymen. People who questioned authoritarian control. Innovators, artists, poets. People who were reticent about being controlled by a distant government. And controlled with the threat of instant death, too. These were the people who Haven wanted wiped from our solar system. And these were the people who Datapoints were poised and ready to wash away, as if they’d never existed.

  No, I corrected myself as a pain in my stomach opened up like a flower. It was no longer the responsibility of all Datapoints. It was my responsibility. In a little over a month, I was going to connect my tech to a power source, use the Database, and cull every single person that Haven wanted me to.

  Or that was the plan, anyways.

  I knew for sure now, staring into the dark, that it had never been my plan. Some part of my heart had known, since I’d last seen Kupier in person, that I would never be a part of a real Culling again. The simulations were relatively harmless, as I was the only one who got caught in the crossfire with that—I would leave those so exhausted that I was sick. But a real Culling? No.

  The only one I’d ever even been an auxiliary part of, the one on Europa, had torn something inside of me in two. It hadn’t felt the way they’d always said it would. The way that Haven had said it would. Like I was doing the job I had been trained for. It had felt like I was lining people up for slaughter.

  And, oh, would you look at that? Apparently, that was exactly what I’d been doing.

  I sat up in my bunk and reached for the curtain around my bed, sliding it back silently. I let my bare feet sit on the cold metal floor and looked across the bunk room toward Cast’s empty bed. He was still in the infirmary.

  For the first time since I’d discovered my mother was alive and on the Station, I wondered if I could bring myself to leave without her.

  She was obviously avoiding me. She didn’t care that I’d found the information that she’d come here to get, which told me she had another agenda altogether that she hadn’t told me about. And the Culling was getting closer with each passing second. They couldn’t make me cull if I was long gone, but if I was still here and they managed to plug me into a power source? Well, let’s just say I didn’t trust my new tech enough to be sure that it wouldn’t force me to cull, whether I and my heart were willing participants or not.

  I sat there for an hour, and then the lights in the hallway buzzed and blinked on and I knew the kitchens would open the dining hall for the early risers in a few minutes. Another night on the Station with almost no sleep to my name. God, I hated it there.

  I was just about to rise when a small movement in the corner of my darkened room had me freezing. My tech detected a heartbeat, breath—my mother?—and foreign integrated tech. My heart plummeted. It was another Datapoint. And one sneaking in behind my bed. So, probably not one with golden intentions.

  “Sullia.”

  The shadow froze and I caught just a flash of something magenta. Her new hair color?

  I slid out of my bed and flicked on the fluorescent overheads. My feet were bare and I wore only a T-shirt and some sweatpants. Her image, standing against the wall, was a washed-out gray as my eyes quickly adjusted to the harsh lighting.

  Her hair was a deep, unnatural red and her beautiful face was a mask of disdain. I’d half expected the light to glint off some knife in her hand or a vial of black poison, or whatever she’d brought here to kill me with. But Sullia stood there, empty handed, except… something clear and shiny was in between the fingers of her left hand.

  I squinted at it.

  Until I recognized it.

  The comm. She had Kupier’s comm in her hand.

  My heart skipped once, twice, and a third time before it started racing like crazy. Suddenly, the corner I was painted into had gotten just a little bit bigger. Even though the comm was compromised, and I didn’t know who was listening in on the messages, I knew for a fact that Kupier was also reading the messages. There was finally, FINALLY, a way to notify someone that there was a bomb headed to Charon in the form of a one-man skip. All I had to do was get that comm and I could send the information along. Even if it was hacked and it pointed fingers back to me, I could run and get off the Station. I wasn’t trying to preserve my spot here anymore, after all. I had no plan besides to live until tomorrow, keep my sisters safe, somehow, and make sure Charon didn’t get ka-blammed.

  And for the first time in a while, it kind of seemed like I lived in a world where each of those things might happen.

  My eyes tracked up to Sullia’s and I hardened my expression. I wanted her to question whether or not I knew what it was. I wanted to give away nothing.

  Good thing I’d been trained as a freaking Datapoint. Turning my face inhuman wasn’t exactly hard for me.

  Sullia and I stood ten feet apart in the cold, dim bunk room. She wore her training jumpsuit and the hard-toed boots that were a part of our uniform. Her hair was pulled back into an intricate braid. Honestly, she looked like she was about to go into battle.

  A sick thrill ran through me. Half of me welcomed the idea of a fight. The half of me that had been backed into a corner. The half of me that didn’t trust Kupier anymore, that didn’t have a way of getting off the Station in place, that was being avoided by my mother. The half of me that had been turned into a killing machine by Haven. That was the half of me that thought, you know what? Let’s do this. Let the best Datapoint win. If she killed me, she killed me.

  The other half of me just felt tired.

  I was out of guesses. Nothing could surprise me simply because nothing in my world was what it seemed.

  “You forgot the knife,” I told her.

  She blinked at me and slid a few feet in one direction along the wall. I slid that way, as well, keeping a solid ten feet of distance between us.

  “What?” she asked.

  “You’re obviously here to try and kill me again, but you seem to have forgotten your murder weapon.”

  She frowned at me, and it made her terrible face even more beautiful. “I didn’t try to kill you.”

  “I saw you, Sullia. Someone used an interrogation taser on me and then you were bending over my tech.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest and sent a mirthless
laugh up into the air, her head leaning back against the wall behind her. “That doesn’t mean I was trying to kill you. Trust me,” she said as she lifted her head and daggered her eyes into mine. “If I’d tried, you wouldn’t be standing here right now.”

  “So, what then? You were just attempting to destroy my tech?” It did make sense. “You knew that if you killed me, you’d be suspect number one. So, you screwed up my tech and made it look like a Ferryman attack so that you wouldn’t be implicated and I would be down for the count for a while?”

  She shrugged. “You recovered fast. So, no harm done either way.”

  I noticed her eyes flicker to the new tech on my arm and I, for one sick second, was almost glad that Haven had had it implanted into me. It gave me some small bit of leverage over her.

  “I suppose I should be thanking you,” I said.

  She narrowed her eyes, but didn’t fall into my question.

  “For providing me with the opportunity to need new tech…” I held up my arm and showed it to her, though I was certain she’d already scoped it out. “You wouldn’t believe the things I can do with this.”

  She sneered then. “I don’t care what kind of tech they give you; I don’t care what kind of faith Haven might have in you. You don’t have what it takes to cull. You’re the wrong Datapoint for this job and I’m going to prove it.”

  Her face was surprisingly contorted. She looked a little tweaked, to be honest. I knew she hated me, but this looked… beyond. I thought of the interrogations we’d both been through after we’d been kidnapped by the Ferrymen. It had been days bleeding into the next, excruciating pain, and questions with no answers. We’d been allowed to re-integrate with the population as non-traitors, but I hadn’t been the same after that.

  I’d heard what the Ferrymen believed, what Kupier believed, and I’d turned my back on it and come home, to the Station. To the life of a Datapoint. To everything I knew and believed in. But I’d come home to days of skin-melting pain and suspicion. It had changed me. It had forever altered how I felt about the Authority. How could that system of government that had trained me, picked me, and protected me, have inflicted that much pain on me?

  Now, looking across the room at Sullia’s crazed scowl, I wondered what effect it had had on her. She was a certified sociopath, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t human. It must have affected her. And she’d then had to go back into interrogations after she’d attacked me a few months before. Sent to the interrogations twice in a matter of weeks. That would leave a mark.

  I made fists out of my hands in an attempt to prevent the rising feeling within me. I missed the good old days, the days before Kupier, when I was just embracing my inner Datapoint and pretending that I never had any feelings about anything.

  So much easier.

  But here I was, glaring at Sullia half because she was a garbage chute of a person but also because I was starting to sympathize with her. No one deserved two rounds with the interrogators. Maybe not even Sullia.

  “Well,” I said, making my voice as dull as I could, because I knew it would really piss her off. “Then what are you doing here?”

  She narrowed her eyes and glared at me.

  “You obviously weren’t expecting me to be awake…” I goaded her. “And you’ve figured out that you can’t kill me. And even when you destroy my tech, they just upgrade me. So, what’s next in the mind of Sullia?”

  I took a step toward her, my head cocked to one side.

  She took a step toward me in return, her breathing tight and furious. I watched as her hand tightened around the comm then, and it all suddenly made sense. I wasn’t sure how much she knew about the small device in her hand, but she obviously knew enough to know that it would get me in trouble if she planted it on me and rang the alarm. She obviously knew that I’d been hiding it in my tech if she’d stripped it from my tech after she’d attacked me.

  “Ah,” I guessed. “You were going to plant something on me and get me thrown back into interrogations? Cute plan.” I’d said the words as if I didn’t care at all, but honestly, the plan made my heart race. Because it probably would have worked. If the technicians here on the Station had gotten that comm, and been able to prove that the thing in Sullia’s hand was a device used to communicate with Ferrymen? Well… I didn’t even think Haven’s devotion to my skills could have saved me. Not only would I have been considered a traitor of the highest order, but I would have been the most powerful traitor that could possibly exist. They wouldn’t hesitate to kill me if all that came to pass. Or rip my tech from me and keep me to rot some place. I had no doubt that my fate would be one or the other.

  It was a good plan, too. If I’d only been asleep.

  Effing Sullia.

  She eyed me some more before taking a step toward me again. “I wouldn’t even feel bad about it. It’s exactly what you deserve. I’d just be exposing you for the traitor that you are.”

  “Sullia, you wouldn’t feel bad if you had a kitten thrown into interrogations. Don’t act like this is some sort of morality crusade. You want me off this Station and out of the Datapoint program for one reason and one reason only.”

  She glared at me.

  “You want my place,” I told her with complete certainty. “You want to be number one and it kills you that you’re not. You’re not even number two. Dahn is. You’re a distant number three who’s been trained up real nice to clean up my leftovers after the big show.”

  Sullia charged me, just as I’d known she would, and I absorbed the full weight of her as we slammed onto the floor. I used her momentum to keep us rolling and I grinned in sick satisfaction as her shin slammed against the metal leg of Cast’s empty bunk.

  But she was clawing her way back at me in less than a second. Her teeth bared and her hands stretching for my throat.

  Good. Let her come.

  The closer the better. It was my only chance to get the comm from her. Her tense, grasping fingers barely grazed my neck before I was kicking one leg out from under her and slamming her down onto her back.

  I could feel Sullia reaching out to me with her tech now. She was doing what she’d done to me once before—she was losing her mind to rage and trying to cull me. Despite her carefully laid plans of not killing me. This girl was officially cracked.

  I tried not to laugh in her face as my own far superior tech basically swatted her attempt back at her so hard that she screamed and clutched her temples.

  “Stick to the plan, Sullia,” I goaded her. “You’re not supposed to kill me. You’re supposed to implicate me. Remember?”

  She screamed in anger and scratched at my face. She got a little bit of traction with one nail and I felt the hot rise of blood on my skin.

  Her satisfaction was short-lived, though, as my tech, apparently fueled by my pain, lashed out at her again. This time, both Sullia and I were confused at what was happening. I wasn’t rebounding her attempt to cull me. I was generating something within my tech and… and attaching it to her? Through my tech, I could see the hot strings of pulsing energy, but I was sure they were invisible to Sullia.

  Orange, glowing ropes wriggled from my tech to hers and I watched in horrified fascination as my tech completely took over the reins to do whatever the hell it was going to do to Sullia.

  She must have been mystified by the look on my face as I watched the inexplicable energy leave my tech and spiral toward hers. I both wanted it to happen and didn’t. She was frozen now, pinned beneath me.

  “Glade?” she asked, her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it. She knew something was happening.

  And then she started fighting harder than I’d ever seen someone fight. She was trying desperately to buck me off of her, to kick me away. To get the hell away from whatever I was sending toward her. I knew she couldn’t see it, from the way her eyes pinwheeled to every corner of the room in her desperate attempt to free herself, but apparently, she could sense it coming—because she fought.

  And she fought ha
rd, but the second the orange energy touched her tech, Sullia stopped fighting. Her body was far from limp, though. Her back bowed and her mouth opened in a silent scream. Instantly, the whites of her eyes went scary bloodshot.

  I stared down in horror as the skin around the place where her tech was embedded began peeling away, as if it were ash in a fire. I realized that the arm I had clamped beneath my palm was burning hot under my skin.

  “Stop!” I yelled. “Stop!”

  I closed my eyes and synced with my tech. Furious and horrified all at once. I’d never been so out of control of my own tech before. And here it was killing someone. Brutally. Burning her alive.

  “Stop!” I gritted this last demand out between clamped teeth as I yanked my arm free of the orange energy, as if I were breaking a high intensity stream of water. The energy died between us and Sullia breathed. She was wheezy and weak, and her breath ended on a little sob.

  I scrambled away from her.

  “Sullia,” I gasped, completely unsure of what to say to her. “I—”

  But there was nothing to say. I didn’t mean to? I didn’t know what that was? I was out of control? The truth was, I had wanted to hurt Sullia. Because of all the ways she’d hurt me. And then it had been done, over with. My tech had taken the decision out of my hands as if it had never even been a decision for me to make at all.

  She breathed hard, a strange two-toned whistle coming out of her with every inhale.

  I moved even farther away until my back was up against my own bed. She was still splayed out on the floor. It was then that I saw the harsh hallway lighting reflecting off of a smattering of broken pieces of glass under Sullia’s hand.

  Feeling my eyes there, her hand twitched and opened. There was blood on her palm. She made a growly sound as she hauled herself up, cradled her hand in her lap, and yanked a jagged piece of the glass comm out of her hand. She tossed it on the ground with the other shards.

  The comm was broken. Gone.

  Again.

  Sullia hauled herself up to sitting position, her eyes blazing. She had to breathe deep to speak. There was a horrible burning tang still on the air. “I’m right about you, Glade. You’re a traitor. And you don’t deserve that weapon.” She nodded toward the tech on my arm. “I would be worried that you’re going to waltz it right over to the Ferrymen, but who cares if you do? You don’t even know how to use it. You couldn’t even kill me just now.”