The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  When I’d come to live at the Station, I’d become hugely grateful for the skill. We were living on top of one another, surrounded by each other all day long. This willful solitariness of my mind was the closest I ever got to privacy.

  The rise and swell of their voices faded even more, and I let my mind wander between the puzzle in my hands and my sisters.

  Daw and Treb were identical. Even my mother had trouble telling them apart sometimes. But not me. I think my unemotional eye was always better at seeing the things that made them different. Daw was a worrier, her eyes always bouncing from one person to the next, trying to figure out what was going to happen next, or why someone was laughing or why they were yelling. Treb was a hider. If things got loud or exciting, she was gone in a flash. And if for some reason she couldn’t leave a room, she had this amazing ability to hide within herself. It was like the lights were out. Nobody home. She’d be deep in her own brain, doing whatever the heck she did in there.

  They made a good pair. Looked out for one another. With their identical shoulder-length blonde hair and brown eyes, they even did that twin switching thing every now and then. After I’d been selected to be a Datapoint and had had to leave Io and my family behind, it had reassured me to no end that Daw and Treb still had one another.

  My eyes slid around the bleak barracks, all steel bunks and thin brown sheets, and the blank cavernous spaces between our beds. If they had to come here, they’d definitely be split up. The first part of Datapoint training was reinforcing that the only thing that any Datapoint should rely on was their own intellect. The second their trainers got a whiff of them leaning on one another, they’d be sent to opposite ends of the Station for the rest of their training.

  Blue light in my eyes. So tired, my heart is stuttering in my chest. I don’t think I’ve slept in two days. The only sustenance I’ve had is some water they splashed over my mouth hours ago. I’m still fighting the computer surgically implanted into my brain, into my arm. I can feel the tech trying to dominate me. My brain surges up, fights back. I’m refusing to work with it. Refusing to sync. Refusing to integrate. The pain of warring with the computer makes my skull feel like it’s going to split in two. I don’t remember my life beyond this. I don’t remember a life without pain. I need to be soothed. Anything. Before I crack and dissolve into thin air. “Papa.” The word sneaks out of my lips, my voice a foreign croak to my ears. The image of him swirls into my mind. His deep frown and laughing eyes. His shocked face when I did the Mongolian jigsaw puzzle at age four. “Syb, we got ourselves a little genius!” he’d crowed at my mother, tossing me straight into the air. I can even scent the way his shirts used to smell. Cool, like shade.

  “Your father cannot save you from this, Glade Io,” a reedy voice speaks right into my ear and, for a second, a face eclipses the blue light above me. My eyes struggle to see. All I see is silver, a glinting gaze. “Your father was a murderous, violent man who was culled to save the rest of us. Thank the Authority that you never had to witness the despicable things he would have done to other citizens. Maybe even to you, or your mother, or your sisters.”

  Something cracks in my heart and I try to bring up the soothing image of my father again, but all I can see is silver.

  “Let that feed you. You will save people from that very same danger. You will cull. You will have that power. But you have to save yourself first. Your mind will not crack under this pressure. You will not fight it. You will sync. You will integrate.”

  That had been the last morning of my integration process. I’d tried to think of my father once more after Haven had retreated. But the word ‘murderous’ kept getting in the way. It would be months before I could remember the good parts of my father, but always, murderous was there, tainting every memory.

  My thoughts had shifted to my mother then, and her soft blonde hair.

  “Hide in plain sight. They can’t find you if they can’t see you.” How many times had she said it to me in my childhood? A thousand?

  It was with those words in my brain that I’d finally bent, some door in my mind opened. And I’d let the computer in.

  Yes. They break you down to make you. And then, when you think you can’t take another second of it or you’ll die, they find the very last thing you are using to soothe yourself. And they take that too. Until the only thing you have to rely on is your own intellect and the computer they splice into your being.

  “Can you believe how close we are to the Culling?”

  Cast’s voice pulled me out of my reverie. My hands paused on the keyboard of the gaming device and I looked over at him. He sounded like a kid on the night before his birthday.

  “Do you remember the last one?” I asked him, curious about the note of excitement in his voice.

  His eyes shifted over to me as he reluctantly shook his head. “I was only four or so, and my parents kept it pretty well under wraps. I didn’t know anybody who got culled.”

  I brought my eyes back to the gaming device, my face flat and frowning as usual. But my ears felt hot. I knew what was coming next.

  “Didn’t someone in your family get culled, Glade?” Sullia asked, a sickly-sweet syrup in her tone.

  “Yeah. My dad.” I answered her in as bored a voice as I could manage, my fingers playing quickly over the buttons of the keyboard.

  Cast froze beside me. We’d been friends for a year, since he came into the program, but I’d never mentioned that information to him.

  I could feel Sullia’s disappointment at my lack of reaction and I knew she was still hungry. Sullia was always hungry for the emotion of others. Maybe because she didn’t have any herself. “What was it like to grow up with a murderer?”

  I thought involuntarily of my dad’s laughing eyes. Of him kissing my mom on one side of her neck while he snuck a slice of bread out of the basket. I thought of sitting on his lap while he showed me how to tie complicated knots in a piece of old rope.

  Murderous.

  It still didn’t make sense to me. Murderous. My father. I felt, lying there on the floor of the barracks, my brain struggle against my integrated tech for just a second before it all synced up again.

  I shrugged. “He seemed just like any normal dad, I guess. But then, the Culling shows you who people really are.”

  “That’s why it’s so important,” Dahn said from beside me. I looked up in surprise. He was sitting closer to me than he had been a few minutes ago.

  Sullia frowned at him. And then at me.

  Dahn pulled one knee up to his chin and those gray eyes burned into the side of my face. “Because, like Glade said to me a minute ago, humans aren’t computers. You can never really know what someone is capable of. But the Culling shows us.”

  “The Culling keeps the rest of us safe,” Cast chimed in. His fingers played in one of his shoelaces.

  I looked back and forth between the two of them. They hadn’t said anything I hadn’t heard a hundred times before from our trainers. From Haven. But hearing Dahn and Cast speak it out right now, it hit me how much both of them truly believed it. I wondered idly how many days their integrations had taken, whether or not the sync had been a struggle for them.

  Sullia was studying me. I could feel it. So I dropped my eyes back to the gaming device and tried to focus my mind on something safer. The puzzle Dahn had made for me. The secret was in the way he’d coded it. I wasn’t going to be able to solve it as a user. I’d have to alter the—

  BAM.

  The Station juddered and lurched beneath us, and I slid a full eight inches across the floor, slamming into Dahn. One of his hands came to steady me as the startled cries of Datapoints erupted up and down the hall.

  “An asteroid?” Cast asked, coming up to his hands and knees, his blond hair in his eyes.

  Dahn’s eyes narrowed to slits. “I don’t think so, that was way too—”

  A blaring siren cut off the rest of his words. A flashing green bulb lit up over the doorways, swinging its light in time with th
e siren.

  “An attack?” Sullia exclaimed. The green light sliced across her face, illuminating her strangely gleeful expression.

  Dahn was on his feet a second later, dragging me with him. The gaming device slid out of my hands and ricocheted across the floor. I automatically started to chase after it, but Dahn’s hand was tight on my shoulder.

  “Battle posts.” His words were laced with command. For the first time, I realized how much more training Dahn had had than I. Three years went a long way in a situation like this. “Now.”

  The four of us raced out of the barracks and down toward the perimeter of the Station. I raked my memories for the classes I’d taken on Station-based battle. A green light meant that we were still dealing with a perimeter attack. Whoever it was, they hadn’t breached the Station yet.

  Another deafening boom exploded in my ears and the hallway tilted. Cast ended up in my arms and I ended up in Dahn’s. Sullia gripped a door handle and righted herself. I grabbed Cast by the scruff of his shirt and helped him stand, and then all of us were sprinting down the hall again.

  I pictured my battle chair and ran faster. I was vulnerable and exposed without it. I needed to get to my post. We swung a left down the perimeter hallway that ran the length of the Station, almost there.

  “Glade!”

  I looked back and saw Dahn behind me. I realized, with a strange sinking in my chest, that he wasn’t going with us. The trainees fought in a different, more protected part of the station. Dahn was headed off with the rest of the graduated Datapoints.

  Five steps away from me, he opened his mouth as if he were going to say something. He paused, though, shifting his weight forward, towards me. But a few seconds passed, his eyes shuttered, and his weight shifted back. He said nothing else before he turned and sprinted away from us, toward his post.

  Another explosion had me following suit and running toward my own post. I slipped and slid down the perimeter hallway until I hit the doorway to our battle chairs. The battle rooms were divided by bunk room, so just the three of us would be in this particular post. I could hear the other trainees slamming through the doors of all the rooms down the long hallway. Our room was small and dark and had three chairs side by side. Just like all of the trainee posts lining the perimeter of the Station. Three small windows sat in front of the chairs, showing slices of the black sky, currently innocuous and revealing nothing about our attackers. Cast and Sullia were already sliding into their chairs.

  The trainee battle stations lined the outside of the Station, located behind the thickest layer of artillery proof steel. Even though we were on the edge and closest to the action, we were actually in the safest position. The Station, shaped like a donut, was most vulnerable on its inside edge, where the Datapoints who manned the battle chairs there were in danger of hitting the Station itself as they attempted to pick attackers out of the sky.

  Our battle chairs were old and rickety. I slid into mine, between Cast and Sullia, and belted myself into the brown harness that x-ed over my chest. Without pausing, I plugged my left arm into the column next to me. I felt a shivery buzz skitter across me as my integrated tech synced with the Station’s battle mainframe. Now I could talk to every other Datapoint plugged in, not even having to use words. Not to mention that I could also talk directly to the Gatling gun that connected to the bottom of my chair and extended outside of the Station. Where I swiveled, so did the gun.

  I felt better already.

  “There!” Cast shouted, and I heard his voice both with my ears and in the interface between his computer and mine.

  I swiveled to the left, just as he did, and saw just the sun-bright trail of the attacking ship’s aft thrusters.

  Arm. My Gatling gun armed itself. Aim. My inner eye and the scope on top of the gun circled into focus. Engage. The lasers let loose from my gun in a gorgeous arc of jet black venom. The Station vibrated with the juddering of the Gatling guns firing from every side of me. But the attacking ship was gone, having slipped around to the other side of the Station.

  “Ferrymen,” Sullia growled from my right.

  “You saw?” Cast exclaimed, whipping around to look at her.

  “I didn’t have to,” she bit out. “Who the hell else can move that fast?”

  Sullia swiveled her chair all the way around and reached into the chest beside her for a different type of ammo. She plugged the fuel pack into the back of her gun. It was a different type of ray – less destructive, but much faster.

  “Good idea,” Cast muttered, and did the same. “You’re not gonna change your ammo, Glade?”

  I adjusted my chair to face the window again. “You guys slow them down, I’ll blow them up.”

  Cast answered my grin before he sobered, his eyes scanning the sky. “You guys really think that those are Ferrymen?”

  Ferrymen were a rebel group from the lost colony on Charon. They’d tried to separate from the Authority years ago, and hadn’t been able to survive on their own. The Ferrymen were all that was left of the off-shoot group, and they had a score to settle. They pillaged and stole any supplies that they could and, in their spare time, murdered just about any citizen they came across. They hated the Authority, and did everything they could to destabilize it.

  I watched in horrified fascination as the Ferrymen’s skip sped through our line of sight again. It was a blur of black metal and burning trails of streamlined fire. It was faster than any skip I’d ever seen.

  The skip dipped out of sight again and all three of us craned our heads to find it. Seconds later, it appeared from the opposite direction.

  “Holy smokes!” Cast yelled. “Did it circuit the Station in that time?” He didn’t bother waiting for an answer to his own question before he began letting loose with his Gatling gun again.

  The Ferrymen’s skip easily dodged the line of rays, rolling onto its back before speeding straight toward us. Was it going to…? No way. That was suicide. But it kept coming, not stopping.

  “Prepare for collision!” I screamed the words and also sent them through my integrated tech and into the computer mainframe. The Station’s battle computer, receiving the message, turned the green blinking light to a red blinking light just seconds before the Station was knocked clean off its axis.

  My skull clanked onto the metal back of my battle chair, my teeth rattling in my skull. I blinked stars out of my eyes and frustratedly shook the buzzing from my ears. The three of us were askew and tilted, mine and Sullia’s hair starting to float around our faces.

  “They’ve disrupted the gravity simulator!” she shouted in annoyance as a loose pack of ammo lifted into the air.

  Ignoring the new distraction with fierce precision, I simultaneously scanned the sky for sight of the skip and scanned my tech for any signs of damage.

  Nothing on either count.

  Until the steel underneath my feet began to squeal.

  My brain barely had time to process the noise before a half circle of flame and heat sliced through the flooring of the Station. It wasn’t a clean line by any means, but I could see exactly what was happening. Something was cutting a chunk out of the bottom of the Station. Any guesses who?

  “They didn’t collide!” I screamed. “They docked!”

  I smacked the release on my harness and flung myself out of my chair seconds before the dangerous circle was completed and the chair itself was sucked away. Cast grabbed my wrist, tugging me down from where I’d been floating, and I made somber eye contact with him. Both of us waited for the vacuum of space to suck the air from our lungs and collapse our blood vessels. To pummel our hearts into their very last beats.

  But nothing happened. There was a dark, jagged circle cut out from the bottom of the Station, and we weren’t being sucked into space. My brain was still struggling to make sense of what was going on when a light flicked on from under the dark circle. Two shiny silver hooks were tossed out of the hole and into the ship, and two people immediately followed.

  They wer
e ragged and strange looking, and I barely had time to take in anything about them other than the looks of pure hatred burning on their faces.

  Sullia released her harness and pulled a hand ray from its holster on the side of her chair. She got off one good shot before the two Ferrymen pulled weapons of their own. One of them held his arm, singed from Sullia’s ray. But they both managed to point their guns first at Sullia, and then at me and Cast.

  I expected a laser blast. A bullet. Poison.

  What I got was worse.

  A strange pulsing magnetism shot out of their guns. It looked only like a disruption in the air. Like heat. But it wasn’t heat. It was sound.

  I wished for death as a sound wave rolled over me like water in a sea. It was too loud, too much; my brain was on the verge of bursting. My hand involuntarily reached for the motherboard on my arm. My fingers tightened around it. I’d rip it out. The sound coming from their guns was targeting our integrated tech. It was scrambling the sync between our brains and our tech. It was making me want to tear the computer straight out of my brain.

  My body was tight, even floating in the air. A rictus of excruciating torture. I think I was screaming, but I couldn’t be sure. I felt nothing and everything. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the skin had been peeling from my body, my bones getting crushed to dust. I scrambled for the motherboard in my arm. I didn’t care if it killed me. The thing was coming out of me if it was the last thing I did.

  My fingernails scraped my skin as a hand closed over my mouth, and another clapped down over my eyes. Darkness fell, and then, blissfully, silence. I struggled against the black for just a second before, inexplicably, I thought of the horse, that defiant toss of its mane. And then there was only black as I tumbled into nothingness.

  Chapter Three

  I awoke at the bottom of a pit of water. And with about three seconds worth of oxygen left in my lungs.

  My long hair tangled in my fingers as my panicked brain searched for a way out. My hands hit nothing, and my eyes were wide and saw only black. I was completely submerged and had no way of knowing which way was up. If there even was an up.