The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  My body rolled in the dark as my lungs screamed. I was going to drown. I was going to drown in the dark and quiet and that was it. The end of Glade Io. Dead and drowned in the dark.

  “Breathe.” A voice bit its way through the darkness and I startled, my lungs convulsing in my chest as they begged for air.

  “You can breathe,” the voice said again.

  I didn’t have a choice but to try. I was going to die either way. I gave up. Breath exploded as I reflexively released out and in, taking a deep, desperate gulp.

  I was greedy, lusting for air as I took huge drinks of it. The burn in my lungs subsided and my brain stopped swimming.

  I realized three things all at once. One, that I wasn’t in the complete darkness. There was a dim light maybe ten feet away from me. Two, that I wasn’t in water, though it rather felt like it. I was floating without gravity and the air had a strange quality to it, slippery and disorienting. Three, that three people were lining a wall ahead of me, and they were staring at me.

  Two of them were Cast and Sullia. On their knees with their hands tied in front of them. The third was a girl, tall, thin, and with no hair on her head. She stared at me with undisguised hatred as she held a gun toward Cast and Sullia.

  “Let her down,” the girl said in a surprisingly low voice. Husky.

  There was a buzzing, a click, and half a second later, I was tumbling to the floor. The strange air that I’d thought was water had receded and I was subject to gravity once again.

  “Get up,” a voice said from behind me.

  Still gasping on my knees, I looked behind me to see a boy of about Cast’s age. He was stocky and wide. He had a sturdy look about him that was offset by the pale, fragile blue of his eyes. I eyed his gun as warily as I had the tall girl’s, but the boy didn’t have the same ringing hatred in his expression.

  Allowing myself one more gasping second, I sat back on my haunches. It wasn’t more than a moment before I felt cold metal at my wrists and realized I was being shackled in the same way that Cast and Sullia were.

  The boy, pressing the gun into the side of my neck, dragged me up by the shackles and over to Cast and Sullia.

  “Up,” the tall girl said to all three of us.

  We followed them out of the strange, dark room and into a blindingly bright hallway. I hissed against the light and had to wonder how long I’d been out for if my eyes were taking this long to adjust. Still disoriented, my eyes burning, I gasped in surprise when the boy’s hand gripped my shoulder and shoved me sideways into a room not much bigger than a closet. I stumbled, barely getting my footing before the door slammed behind me, cutting out most of the light. Only pinpricks of stars from the tiny window at the top of the room illuminated anything.

  I heard two more slams just seconds later and realized these were holding cells for the three of us.

  Two sets of footsteps disappeared down the hall and a distant door slammed.

  “Glade?” Cast’s voice whispered in the dark from my left.

  “Yeah.” My voice sounded like it had been shaved to the bone. There was almost nothing left of it. Just sun-bleached feathers.

  “I-I,” his voice sounded years younger than he actually was. I thought involuntarily of my sisters. “I can’t feel my tech. My tech is dead. It doesn't look damaged, but it’s quiet.”

  My brow furrowed as I looked down at my own tech. My hands were shackled at the wrist, so I tipped my arms to one side to get a better view. The motherboard in my arm. It was as iridescent as ever, looking for all the world like it was working. I twisted my hands in the shackles so that I could just brush my fingers over it. But I felt no corresponding buzz in the tech on my face. I let my joined hands trace up to my cheek, something I almost never did. I gently slid my palm over the tech that was implanted there. I could feel its cool edges against my skin, but it was ominously quiet: no information, no attempt to sync. Nothing.

  I closed my eyes and attempted to sync. Nothing. I huffed out a frustrated breath. Again. Nothing.

  I froze, my blood turning to ice as I put the pieces together. For the first time in over two years, there was silence. There was no tug of war. There was no tech. There was only me. Only Glade Io in this skull of mine. I was both dismayed and relieved. Free and terrified. I hadn’t realized how much I’d relied on the tech – the constant whisper of it guiding me, informing me – until it was silent. Just a dead synthetic thing stuck in my skin.

  “It was a dampener,” I said.

  “What?” Cast’s voice was getting more and more anxious.

  “That thing they put us through,” I explained. “That thing where you felt like you were drowning? Part of you kind of was. Our tech was drowning. Even if our bodies weren’t. It’s a kind of machine that Ferrymen use. A weapon.”

  “Is my tech… dead?” There was a note of grief in his voice. I wasn’t sure why that disturbed me so badly.

  “Not permanently. They can hardwire it again in the Station.”

  There was silence then, and I imagined that the other two were probing the dead zone where their tech had been, exactly the same way I was.

  “Why?” Cast asked after a few quiet minutes.

  “Christ!” Sullia griped in frustration. “How your intellect scores got you admitted to the Datapoint program, I’ll never know. Don’t be an idiot, Cast! They’re disabling our main weapons. If we have our tech, we can talk to their skip, communicate with their guns, their computers; hell, we could even communicate with the Station.”

  “We’re blind this way,” I finished for her.

  “What the hell would they want with a blind Datapoint?”

  It was a good question he’d asked, and I had no idea of the answer. “I haven’t spent a ton of time pondering the thought process of a Ferryman, Cast.”

  It was an hour before any of us spoke again. I crouched in the corner, my back against the cold wall, still unnerved by the silence within me, the silence without my tech. Honestly, I could only think of two reasons why they’d want to kidnap Datapoints. Either we were hostages that they were going to use as leverage for something they really wanted. Or we were a statement waiting to be made. The Ferrymen were always trying to stir up dissent in the colonies. I could only imagine the reaction of the colonies to a televised execution of three Datapoints.

  I was glad that part of our training had included hand-to-hand combat. I thought of the two Ferrymen that had brought us to our cells. Neither of them had looked like pushovers. But I also didn’t think they could take me, Cast, and Sullia if we hadn’t just had our brains scrambled by the dampener.

  I sighed and ran my hand over my tech one more time. When it was dead like this, it felt so foreign and intrusive. When it was on, it was integrated into my nervous system, and I could feel its response when I touched it. It was like another part of my body. But this way, in the dark of the Ferrymen’s skip, it was as clunky and alien as the gaming device I’d left behind at the Station.

  “He called for you,” Cast’s voice came out of the darkness.

  “What’s that?” I asked as I watched the light of the stars filter in through the thin slats of windows at the tops of our cells.

  “Dahn did. Right after the skip docked onto the Station. You disengaged from the mainframe to jump out of the way of the hole they were cutting. But Dahn was yelling for you through the computer, across the Station.”

  My brow furrowed. “What did he say?”

  “Just your name.”

  I couldn’t think of a single thing to say to that, and so I stayed quiet for long enough for Cast to continue on. “I think the rest of them realized what was happening before we did. That they were docking and about to either take us or kill us. They must have had a better vantage point.”

  I might have pondered that for longer if something hadn’t caught my attention. The skip we were on wasn’t traveling – I knew it from the way the light patterned across the ceiling of our jail cells, looking oddly familiar. It was a rising an
d falling of light, like a ship on the ocean. Slowly I rose up, leaning my back against the wall. My wrists still shackled, I felt along the walls of the cell for any kind of foot or handhold. There! I grabbed the edge of a small shelf at about eye level. My bad leg twinged beneath my weight, but I ignored it, used to it at this point. Boosting myself up just high enough, I could just barely peek out of the thin slat of the window at the top of the cell.

  “Hey,” I whispered to the other two as I let myself down. “We’re still in the Asteroid belt.”

  “What?” Cast whispered back excitedly.

  Sullia said nothing.

  “I just looked out the window and saw Teros,” I said, naming one of the major asteroids that the Station stayed downwind of, so to speak. Teros took the brunt of most asteroid collisions and generally cleared a path for us.

  “From what angle?” Sullia asked sharply.

  “About 30 degrees sunwise from our normal view,” I guessed. “Though it’s harder to tell without the tech.”

  “That’s travelable in a short-range skip!” Cast whispered excitedly.

  Why the hell the Ferrymen were docking so close to the Station I had no heavenly clue, but either way, Cast was right. It might be our ticket out of here.

  “Alright,” I whispered, mostly to myself. “We gotta get the hell out of these cells.”

  “Are you joking, Glade?” Sullia’s voice cut through the dark. “That’s idiotic. You’re gonna get yourself caught.”

  “I’m already caught,” I answered dryly, one eyebrow halfway up my forehead.

  I hated everything about not having my integrated tech. Including how much I hated it. I didn’t like the realization that I’d completely relied on it. But here, in the dark, belly-crawling down one of the dimly lit Ferrymen hallways in the back half of their skip? Well, I really wished I had my tech to tell me if there were any warm bodies in the vicinity. I wanted my tech to pull up a blueprint of the skip. Without it, I didn’t know where we were in the asteroid belt, or which direction we were traveling; I didn’t even know what time it was for God’s sakes.

  Sneaking around the skip without my tech was like having my ears stuffed with cotton and putting a patch over one eye. I felt clunky and useless without it.

  And that made me angry.

  I dragged myself along the floor of a silent hallway. My leg hurt, but I ignored it. There was a doorway spilling out dim light up ahead. Screw the Ferrymen who’d taken away my greatest tool. I could escape from this broken-down piece of tin with or without my integrated tech. I laid one cheek on the floor and slid myself forward. Just my forehead and one eye peeked through the door.

  A storage room, it looked like. Pilot suits and helmets. In one corner was a box of what looked like replacement burners. Hopefully, that meant we were somewhere close to the landing pad. But I also didn’t fool myself into thinking these idiots were anywhere close to being organized. I moved on, sliding past the door almost silently.

  “Why didn’t she come with us?” Cast asked from behind me. For probably the thirtieth time since we’d left Sullia behind in her cell.

  His voice was just the husk of a whisper. I knew he wasn’t asking me as much as he was asking himself. It didn’t make sense to him at all that she would have chosen to stay in her cell.

  It made perfect sense to me. All you had to do was integrate one piece of information into the equation. Sullia didn’t care about the Authority. She didn’t care about getting back to the Station to continue her training as a Datapoint. Sullia cared about Sullia. And the best move for her immediate safety was, admittedly, not potentially getting caught by Ferrymen as we tried to sneak out.

  I understood it as well as I understood that I was currently sliding along a rusty floor, a thirteen-year-old kid at my feet, as I peeked in one doorway and then the next, searching for the landing pad of the skip.

  I figured a craft this size had to have short-range skips. And yeah, sure enough, twenty minutes after we’d left our cells, here we were. My wrists ached from yanking them free of the shackles. I’d thought I’d break a finger from all the tensile strength it had taken to twist my cuffs into the shape I’d needed to pick the lock of our cell doors. But, it turns out that staring into almost certain death can make a girl freaky strong. I’d jimmied my cell door and then Cast’s. Sullia was still caged up like a chicken in a coop. Good luck.

  “Found ‘em,” I whispered back to Cast, whose eyes shown in the dark, his hair flopping across his forehead.

  I thought of my sisters for one tight moment and I realized that I had to get Cast the hell off this craft. Ferrymen were dangerous, unpredictable, and were known throughout the cols as murderers. Of citizens and of Datapoints. Whatever they wanted from Cast, they were not gonna get it – not as far as I was concerned.

  I peeked back in the doorway of the landing pad, making sure there wasn’t anyone in there. A light burned in the far back corner of the cavernous garage, making the three small skips appear shadowed and dinosaur-like.

  One of the skips was obviously out of commission. It rested on its side, its rear door ajar and a smattering of tools laying on the floor around it. The second was just a lander. Skips like that were used for lunar landings, or on the cols, not for going skip to skip or back and forth among vessels in space.

  But the third? Bingo.

  A short-range skip. It sat all the way across the landing pad, fifty feet from our door. The cockpit was tiny, but Cast and I could fit if we half sat on one another. Sullia’s sullen face flashed across my mind’s eye and regret lanced through me. Maybe I should have tried to talk her into it.

  But no, Sullia didn’t listen to anybody. Least of all me. Well, then, maybe I should have knocked her out and dragged her away.

  I sighed, scanning the room one more time. In the opposite corner from the short-range, there was a – surprise, surprise – makeshift command station in one corner. Made up of a few ancient desktops wired into what looked like keyboards from an old station. The whole thing was dusty and lilted to one side, a pile of dirty laundry in the chair next to it. These Ferrymen were a bunch of slobs.

  My eyes narrowed on the short-range skip we were aiming for. A light pulsed inside the cockpit, dimly, blue and then green. A corresponding light on the command desktop’s control panel did the same.

  Even from this distance, I could deduce the first three moves I’d have to make on the panel to get the skip up and running. Damn, I was good.

  “Okay.” I slid back down, out of the doorway, and dragged Cast’s ear over toward me. I whispered so quietly it was more air than words. “We’re both going in. There’s no one in there, but there might be alarms. You need to get into the cockpit and get the skip kicked on. I’m going to get to the control panel and sever the connection with the skip so that even if they discover we’re in there, we’re still going to be independent.”

  Cast nodded, his eyes wide, and I hesitated for just a second.

  “You passed your pilot’s training level one, right?”

  He nodded again. “In the simulators.”

  I bit back a curse. Great. Grand. “That’s fine. Look. I’ll be there to do the flying, but if I’m not—”

  “Glade!” he protested, cutting me off.

  I ignored him. “If I’m not, just fly it exactly like you would a simulator, okay? It’s not different except it’ll feel heavier when you steer. It doesn’t have to be pretty; you just have to get the hell out of here. When you’re close enough to the Station, their landing beam will do all the hard work for you, okay?”

  He nodded, his rabbit eyes giving way to determination as thoughts of the Station crossed his mind.

  Fatigue clawed at my muscles, turning my eyes scratchy. My stomach was a cavernous pit of hunger. And I really, really wanted to brush my teeth. Would I have considered this an ideal time to try and steal a short-range skip from a band of murderous Ferrymen?

  Well. Now or never.

  I peeked into the skip room a
nd then back toward Cast one last time. “I’m not even gonna ask if you’re ready,” I told him.

  He nodded, but I only saw half of it because I was already on my feet, scuttling into the room and directly toward the control panel. I could feel Cast behind me, but I couldn’t hear him. The kid was silent, just like all Datapoints. It was the first thing they taught you in training. Well, besides the whole computer-surgery-surrender-to-your-tech thing.

  I didn’t bother watching him as I skidded up to the control panel. I heard a loud click and knew he was entering the cockpit.

  Two lights started blinking on the control panel in front of me. The damn thing was so old that nothing was labeled. Lord. They even had twist buttons. I hadn’t seen those in anything but a museum. Well, looked like I was going to have to do this the old-fashioned way.

  I cracked my fingers and flicked on the screen. I said a silent prayer of thanks to Dahn for every one of the puzzles we’d solved together. Compared to those, this would be like changing the settings on an alarm clock.

  The screen was old, but I was surprised when it blinked on and showed a fairly new operating system. How the hell had they integrated that with this archaic board? I fiddled around with the keys in front of me for a second and then realized the trick. None of it corresponded the way it logically should; they used this board as a way of inputting commands in binary, not directly commanding the desktop.

  Easy enough. I resisted the urge to crack my fingers again. No need to get cocky. But again. D.A.M.N. I was good.

  I heard a few more clicks from behind me and one small grunt. I knew that Cast was getting the skip ready for takeoff, though it hadn’t been powered on yet. In a second, it would hum to life.

  I was going to have to do two things in the following seconds. One, I was going to have to sever the connection between the skip and the main craft. Two, I was going to have to do so with reckless precision, considering that the short-range skip was still going to have to talk to the craft long enough to open and close the lander doors to the outside.