The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  He knew he probably should have scrambled away from her the first chance he got, but when her hands fell away from him, he found that it was actually kind of nice, lying on top of a warm, wriggling Glade.

  He cackled in surprised pain when she jammed one finger in his ear and one in his eye. Kupier contracted like a snail and rolled right off of her. Only to have her stand over him, one booted foot at his neck.

  He didn’t think twice before he used one of his long arms and grabbed her by the belt, sending her into a tumbling pile on top of him. So, she was faster, more ruthless, had better technique, and was determined to win. Kupier figured he only had one more tactic that might get him out of this scuffle as the winner. He gripped Glade tight around the ribs and smashed her to him, knee to knee, hip to hip, in an inextricable bear hug.

  He laughed again as she struggled against him, the rage apparent in her voice.

  “Stop. Laughing,” she growled, each word punctuated with a vicious punch to his ribs. It was just enough to have his arms loosen, and she pushed up and away from him, one hand closing over his throat.

  A voice rang out and cut through the sound of their harsh breathing. “Kupier!” Both Kupier and Glade’s heads snapped to the side.

  It was Aine who had spoken from the doorway of the room. She was out of breath, as if she’d been running, and she frowned at the way Glade was crouched over Kupier, the Datapoint’s hand on Kupier’s throat.

  But Aine’s eyes only sought Kupier’s. “We’re here.”

  Kupier nodded and sat up. He was vaguely surprised when Glade immediately released him, sitting back on her haunches. Their faces were just a foot apart as they both panted, facing each other. Kupier’s elbows rested on his pulled-up knees.

  “Where are we?” Glade asked. And it was almost like it was the very first time they’d ever actually spoken to one another. This wasn’t a test. This wasn’t her desperately trying to size him up or grab whatever information she could. She wasn’t looking for a way to get her way or win. She was just asking him. Genuinely asking a question. And, more than that, she was expecting a genuine answer. She trusted him to tell her the truth, without subterfuge, or scorn, or rebuke. And that, Kupier knew, was a huge step in the right direction.

  He rose up and extended a hand to her, hauling her up from the ground.

  “Charon,” he answered, holding those dark brown eyes of hers with his own blue ones. “Home.”

  Chapter Nine

  I don’t know what I was expecting Charon to be like. But this wasn’t it. It was a wasteland. Everyone knew that Charon was a colony that had barely survived. Since its exile from the solar system all those years ago, it had just barely limped along. But looking down at it from the ship, I saw how bleak it really was. They hadn’t survived; they’d nearly destroyed themselves. There were no signs of life on the surface. There were only burn marks and pitted craters indicating warfare.

  Sullia and I had watched it coming closer and closer in the small port windows of our bedrooms. With its red splotches and gray, pockmarked surface, it looked supremely desolate.

  “Where’s the colony?” Sullia had called to me from her room.

  “Must be underground,” I’d called back.

  It wasn’t the only one of our solar system’s cols that were underground, but it was the first one I’d ever been to. Io’s colony was above ground. Heated by the volcanic activity all around us, we lived inside of a giant dome of synthetic gases that protected us. The same as the Enceladus colony and the Europa colony. The Moon colony was mostly underground, with just a few outposts on the surface.

  “Christ,” Sullia griped. Underground colonies were not highly thought of. With their being characterized by dark and dirt, the only people who ever saw them were usually the people who were born there.

  Now, three hours after I’d been told we were arriving on Charon, we landed. Docked well underneath the great mountain on the surface, Sullia and I were side by side as we stepped off the Ray and into Moat, the main city of Charon.

  Well, actually we stepped onto a dingy, dark landing pad. But it was located within the city limits.

  I had no idea what to expect. No one had told me what we were doing here, what was expected of me, or how long we’d be here.

  “Don’t look so worried, DP-1,” a familiar voice said in my ear as he brushed past me on the landing pad. “We’ve got oxygen on Charon.”

  I scowled at Kupier as he bounded toward a group of people waiting on the far side of the cavernous room.

  “Kup!” A little girl’s voice shouted, and then I spotted her. Dark haired and slight, she practically flew across the room and into his arms. Kupier immediately tossed her into the air before squeezing her tight.

  He said something low that had her laughing in delight.

  A minute later, a tall, thin woman came over and reached for him. She had dark hair, too, down her back, and they embraced with the little girl held between them.

  “Mom! Misha!” Oort hollered practically in my ear moments before he raced across the landing pad to join his family.

  A strange tug inside of my chest had me practically wincing. I had no idea how my sisters would greet me if they saw me now. Would they shout my name and sprint toward me? Would they be shy? Or worse, would they be scared?

  “Glade! Sullia!” Kupier called across the landing pad, motioning us over.

  Aine pushed past me, making me stumble forward as she sent one scathing look over her shoulder at me before she headed off in another direction, alone. I watched as the Ferrymen we’d been riding with over the last weeks dispersed, calling things to one another. Some of them greeted family; others didn’t.

  A group of men in gray clothing were opening up the belly of the ship, hauling out goods I hadn’t even realized we were carrying.

  Sullia tugged on me. “Come on,” she muttered.

  But by the time we’d made it over to Kupier’s family, she had a bright smile pasted to her face.

  “Glade, Sullia, this is my mother, Owa, and my little sister, Misha.” The two of them nodded at us, Misha looking intrigued and Owa looking suspicious. “You’ll be staying with us.”

  He must have cleared it with his family, because none of them looked surprised at this latest bit of news. I, however, felt like I’d been hit with a sock full of volcanic rocks. He was bringing us to his home? What the heck was that about? My head hurt as I tried to analyze this new piece of information. What kind of game was he playing?

  Sullia was already smiling that sickly-sweet smile of hers and demurely clasping her hands in front of her chest. In comparison, I must have looked like he’d just told us we were going to be attempting to colonize the sun.

  Kupier caught my eye and leaned around Sullia to clap my mouth closed with one hand. He winked and shrugged at the same time. Just go with it, he was saying. I shrugged back, still completely off kilter.

  Two hours later, I still hadn’t regained my balance. Even as I sat quietly on a small mattress that Kupier’s mom had made up for me. Sullia was reclined on the one next to mine. I was extremely confused about a few different things. I still couldn’t believe that Kupier was letting Datapoints stay with his family, first of all.

  But the other and almost more confusing point was all that we’d seen on the way to Kupier’s home. The underground city of Moat wasn’t decrepit and barely hanging on to life, the way I’d always heard. It was teeming with activity. Yes, it was as dark and dingy as all underground colonies were, but there were people laughing and chatting on every corner. Children raced around on small wheeled crafts. There were house cats flirting in the windows of the crammed-in housing. And more than that, the people looked pretty well fed. Maybe not as well fed as we were on the Station, but this was not a city on the brink of desolation. I didn’t understand. It didn’t jibe with anything that we’d been told about the lost colony of Charon.

  “I can’t believe they’re making us sleep in the pantry,” Sullia griped from w
here she lay beside me.

  I looked around us. It wasn’t exactly the pantry. But it was definitely a small room located off of the kitchen. There were packed dirt floors, just like everywhere else in the house, but our mattresses rested on a colorful woven rug.

  I shrugged. “Who cares? The blankets are warm.”

  I traced one hand over the heavy green blanket that sat on my bed. It was lumpy and irregular, looking like it had been washed a thousand times. A mom had made this bed. Kupier’s mom with her pretty, tired eyes and slender hands had come in here and made this bed. For me. The thought stunned me for some reason.

  I couldn’t remember the last time a mom had done anything for me.

  And there it was. A memory of my mother. I was maybe eight years old. It was three years after the Culling. We’d been on our own for that long. I’d come in from playing outside and I was dirty – my hands and my pants, both. My mother was making dinner in the kitchen and I started to wash up without her having to ask. My mother had come up behind me and kissed the top of my head. She braided my hair back, the way she often did, while I finished getting the black volcanic ash out from under my fingernails. When I was done washing up, I liked the feel of her playing with my hair so much that I started in on the small pile of dishes that sat in the sink. I washed each one and set them aside to dry.

  “You help me so much, Gladey,” my mother had whispered then, squeezing my shoulders. “What would I do without you?”

  I'd shrugged, already practical – even at eight years old. “I’m not going to leave you, Mama. You won’t have to find out what you’d do without me.”

  I’d turned and looked at her over my shoulder, and she’d looked so much older than I’d ever seen her look. She looked exactly like that one photo of her mother that she kept in a drawer in her bedroom.

  “You’re so strong,” she’d whispered to me. “So strong it scares me.”

  I’d never understood what she meant by that until after we’d gotten back my results for the Datapoint testing. She’d known, even after all of her warnings, that I wasn’t going to be able to blend in forever. I was destined to be a Datapoint. And there was nothing she could do to hide it.

  “You alright?”

  I jumped a little and turned to face Kupier in the stooped doorway. Tracing a hand through my hair, I nodded. It had felt strange to think about my mother, as I almost never let myself do it. But I was alright. I nodded again.

  “Okay,” he said slowly, like he didn’t believe me. His bright blue eyes bounced between my brown ones for a moment. And then he reached into the room, gripping the doorway with one hand and grabbing for my hand with the other. “Come on out here a second.”

  He hauled me right off the mattress so fast that an involuntary breath of happy noise puffed out of me.

  “You too, Sullia.” But I noticed that he didn’t reach for her.

  I wondered for half a second if Kupier could see through Sullia the same way that I could. I wasn’t sure why, but I hoped he could.

  We followed Kupier out of our room and through the kitchen where we’d heard someone clanking around a while ago. Some unfamiliar but savory scent curled through the air and my stomach growled in response.

  He ducked through another low doorway and I followed him. The whole house was low to the ground and dim, the way any underground colony’s homes would be. But somehow, it was still homey. It was scrupulously clean, despite the packed dirt floors, and there were bursts of color in every room.

  The room we stepped into was a dining room of sorts with a low metal table that was maybe a foot off the ground. His family sat around the table, directly on a colorful rug. I couldn’t help but inhale hard at the scents wafting off the dishes that sat before us.

  “Join us,” Owa said from where she sat at the head of the table. Her voice was friendly, though her eyes were still a touch distrustful as they batted back and forth between Sullia and I. I didn’t blame her.

  We were eating with Kupier’s family. In his childhood home. I still couldn’t believe it.

  We don’t have to be enemies.

  Sullia was already folding herself down next to Oort, that same silky smile pasted on her face. I only sat once I felt rough palms at my shoulders. Kupier practically forced me to take a seat at the table, and when I looked back he was shaking his head at me, a playful smile at his lips.

  He strode around and sat across from me, his mother on one side and Misha on the other.

  “So,” Owa said from my left. “Kupier tells me you’re from Io?”

  She served food onto my plate. I forced myself to look up at her kind face. For some reason, looking at her was like looking into a bright light. With her dark hair and dark eyes, she didn’t look a thing like my mother. But this wasn’t the Station. It wasn’t the Ray. This was a home. The first home I’d been in since my own. And it made words stick in my throat.

  I nodded instead of speaking.

  “And you’re from…” Owa prompted Sullia.

  Sullia’s eyes narrowed for just a second, with that suspicion that ran so naturally through her veins. “Enceladus.”

  “I’ve been there,” Owa said quietly. “It’s lovely. Especially the view of Saturn.”

  “We saw a Saturnian eclipse, Mana,” Oort said, his mouth full of food. I knew that Mana was a term for mother that was often used in the outer cols, so at least that was as I might have expected. “Saturn was in Taurus!”

  I knew that Oort was young, but right then, with his eyes bright and his mouth full of food, I wondered how Owa had ever let him board the Ray.

  “Is that right?” Owa smiled, her eyes darting straight to Kupier.

  Kupier merely grunted; he was bent over his plate, cramming a bite into his already full mouth.

  “I’d never seen anything like it.” The words were out of my mouth before I could think twice. Every head at the table turned to look at me, and instead of saying anything else, I jammed my first bite of food into my mouth. I couldn’t stop my eyes from widening as the flavors uncurled over my tongue. “Oh my God.”

  I clapped a hand over my mouth as I savored the bite. Good Lord. It was literally the best thing I’d ever tasted. I hadn’t expected much when I’d seen the brown stew and the equally brown bread. But the flavor was complicated and warm and… Kupier was grinning at me.

  “Nobody can resist Mana’s cooking.” That smile of his lit his blue eyes. I swallowed hard as I watched him whisper something to his mother. She smiled back at him, small but true. And as I studied her sophisticated face, I saw Kupier there. The line of her nose, the height of her cheekbones. Kupier looked like his mother. The realization surprised me, because he was so plain and she was so… but the thought trailed off as I studied him, too.

  Because, sitting there in the dim but colorful light of his childhood home? He suddenly didn’t look plain to me at all. His hair had grown out since I’d first seen him. He wore a soft blue shirt with a hood bunched at the back. Something that had been washed a hundred times, just like my blanket in the other room. He looked comfortable, but Kupier always looked comfortable. This was somehow different. The lines at the sides of his mouth were deep while he tore a piece of bread for his sister, like he was holding in a smile.

  My stomach did that thing again. That clenching, tugging thing. I instantly dropped my gaze away from him. I felt the tickle of someone’s eyes on me and, when I looked up, it was to see Owa studying me. She didn’t drop her eyes immediately, and I was confused by the look on her face. Knowing and surprised all at once. I wondered, briefly, what she saw when she looked at me.

  When Kupier crept across the kitchen in the dead of night, he was fully prepared to get punched in the face for waking a sleeping Datapoint. He just hoped Glade would do it quietly. He didn’t want to wake Sullia.

  After three days at home, he was positive now that he didn’t trust Sullia. He didn’t trust that smile of hers. The one that said she was happy to be here. He didn’t trust her wh
en she spoke and he didn’t trust her when she was silent. If he hadn’t seen firsthand just how well Glade could handle herself in a fight, he wouldn’t have wanted the two of them to sleep in one room. Not that there was any room to spare in his mother’s tiny house. He and Oort were already sleeping on the floor in Misha’s tiny bedroom.

  Kupier sighed. He had to remind himself that Misha and Mana didn’t need more room than they had. It was just the two of them most of the time.

  Kupier pushed his thoughts away as he came to stand in the doorway of the Datapoints’ room. He frowned. He didn’t like thinking of them this way. As the Datapoints. It lumped Glade in with Sullia, and to Kupier, they couldn’t have been more different.

  Kupier held still for a minute and let his eyes adjust to the darkness of their room. Sullia slept on her back, her face resting but not relaxed. She looked like she could open her eyes and be perfectly awake at any given second.

  Glade, on the other hand, was curled on her side like a toddler. She was just a lump under her blanket, only that river of shiny hair visible. Kupier wasn’t sure why that made him want to laugh out loud, but he swallowed it down and quietly leaned forward, nudging her foot with his.

  He’d expected to slowly rouse her from sleep, but the second they touched, she whipped back the covers, her eyes clear and scanning the room. If it hadn’t been for the way she blinked, fast and then faster, he would have thought she hadn’t been sleeping at all.

  She caught sight of him in the doorway and he instantly held a finger over his mouth and looked pointedly at Sullia.

  Glade sat up, the covers falling away and her hair tumbling everywhere. Kupier looked at her because it felt good to look at her. She was all soft from sleep, her dark hair and eyes inky in the shadowy room. She reached for a sweatshirt on the floor next to her and tugged it on as she followed him out into the kitchen.

  “What?” she asked him, rubbing the heel of her hand into one eye.

  “I want you to come somewhere with me.”