The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)
Page 15
And I’d never see Kupier again.
“Unless,” Sullia spoke again, her eyes watching me closely. “You don’t want to come?”
I glared up at her and, in that moment, I thought I hated her. She was so sure of what she wanted, who she was. She had been from the very start and it drove me insane. I would never in a million years want to be anything like Sullia. But I envied her knowledge of herself. Of the surety of her decision. And now she was going to watch me struggle.
“Look, Glade, I don’t care if you come or not. But I’m walking out of here in two minutes. And I’m going back to the Station.”
Images of the Station flashed before my eyes. The gray hallways. The brown blankets on my bed. The door of the simulator. Even Haven’s office. I thought of the last conversation I’d had with him.
My stomach roiled when I thought of my sisters. If I stayed here, the Authority would officially be down a Datapoint. The recruitment period for the next group of Datapoints was coming up in eight months. There was no doubt in my mind who they’d select to fill my space. I thought of how Haven had bent the rules and done preliminary testing on Daw and Treb. God, they could be at the Station right now for all I knew. I hadn’t let myself think about it when there’d been no chance for escape. But right now? When a rover skip had a ticket for my way back to the Station, I couldn’t ignore it. Every second I spent away from the Station was one more second my sisters were in danger.
My decision was made. Quickly, I rose and slipped my shoes and sweatshirt on. Sullia and I were silent as we crept through the house.
We were out the front door in seconds, and sneaking through the fourth level and toward the landing pad which was all the way up on the first level.
I felt myself disappearing into the dark of the alleyways. Away from Kupier. Away from his house. I didn’t look back. Not once.
It wasn’t until Sullia and I were tucked deep into the belly of the rover skip. Until we’d taken off and were orbiting Charon. Until she was pulling me into the cockpit of the smaller skip that we’d escape in. It wasn’t until then that I realized whose sweatshirt I wore.
Chapter Thirteen
Dahn Enceladus’ thumbs hurt. That’s how long he’d been messing around with the old gaming device he’d shared with Glade. Outwardly, he’d accepted the fact, as had every other Datapoint in the Station. Inwardly… well, he wasn’t quite sure what was happening inwardly, but he was certain it wasn’t acceptance.
Why else would he be spending all of his free time on the pilot deck, staring out the windows and messing around on the gaming device? Of course, it wasn’t his free time exactly. His free time he was still spending by Jan Ernst Haven’s side. That was still spent practicing and honing and excelling. But his sleeping time? That was spent on this pilot deck. When the rest of the Station was in their bunks. When only a reserve pilot or two manned the abandoned deck, Dahn sat in the shadows, looking out at the asteroid belt.
The game beeped in his hands and Dahn frowned at it. He was sick of programming these puzzles himself. He missed the way that Glade programmed. She was a wall. And tricky and unexpected. He hadn’t had a good puzzle since she’d been gone. He missed how cocky she’d been when she’d solve his faster than he’d solve hers. He missed her frown.
Dahn felt that same annoying tightening in his throat that he’d been feeling ever since she’d been abducted. He swallowed it down. It was annoying and pathetic and he was sick to death of both of those feelings.
He hadn’t fallen behind in his work as a Datapoint yet, but he worried that if things went on like this any longer, it would start to show in his performance. He wouldn’t disappoint himself in that way. And he wouldn’t disappoint Jan Ernst Haven.
Dahn rose, telling himself, the way he did every night, that this was the last night he’d come to the pilot deck when he should be sleeping. This was the last night he’d mess around on the gaming device. This was the last night he’d think of Glade Io with a tight throat. This was the last night he’d wonder if there was more he could have done.
He was halfway across the pilot deck when a bright, glinting flash caught his eye through one of the pilot’s windows.
Probably just something metallic shining off one of the neighboring asteroids. But there, in the direction it had come from, was something strange moving through space.
It wasn’t an asteroid – it was a craft.
This in itself wasn’t that unusual. There were supply skips that came in and out of the Station’s orbit all the time, and Dahn cursed himself for the small skip in his heartbeat when he saw it. It wasn’t Glade.
He wondered, in what he hoped was a detached way, when he’d stop hoping. It was an involuntary reaction that he desperately wished he could control.
But he kept his eyes on the craft. It looked too small to be a supply skip. Dahn stepped closer to the window.
“Oren,” he called out to the reserve pilot who was currently sitting in the back of the pilot deck – Oren being the only one assigned to the night shift.
“I see it,” the pilot called back, frowning at the equipment in front of him as he tracked the craft on the radar.
“Is there a shipment scheduled?” Dahn asked, trying like hell to keep his voice steady.
“Ah…” Oren clicked open the schedule and checked it. “Not until 5 a.m.”
“Maybe they’re back from the testing early,” Dahn said, half to Oren and half to himself. They’d sent out a group of experienced Datapoints to perform testing on new prospects earlier that month. But they weren’t scheduled to return for another week.
“No, there isn’t any integrated tech in that craft,” Oren called back, studying the monitors. “Two life forms, though.”
Oren and Dahn exchanged eye contact. They both slowly looked back out toward the window, to where the craft had gotten closer. It was a strange craft; it looked like two different skips had been soldered together to make it. And it moved strangely, too. Clumsy but fast. Dahn blinked. There was no mistaking it. That was a Ferryman’s skip.
He looked back at Oren and the two of them made eye contact again for one heavy second.
“No!” Dahn yelled, but he didn’t manage to stop the reserve pilot from flipping the emergency switch.
Sirens and light filled the pilot deck, the same as they did every room in the entire station.
“Damn it!” Dahn screamed, realizing that at that very moment Datapoints were jumping out of bed and sprinting to their battle posts. He didn’t know who for sure was on that craft, but he had a good idea. And he didn’t want a thousand guns pointed in her direction.
The phone sitting at the pilot’s left started ringing. He sprinted across the pilot deck and batted Oren’s hand away.
“It’s Dahn Enceladus,” he said into the receiver. “Sir, it’s her. I know it’s her. Two lifeforms, no integrated tech. Same style of craft that Cast used to get back here. It’s her.”
He heard Jan Ernst Haven’s heavy breath through the phone and Dahn held his tongue, though there was so much more he wanted to say.
“Put on the tractor beam.”
Dahn felt something burst in his chest. They were going to reel the craft in. Not shoot it into oblivion. He smacked the phone into the pilot’s hand and immediately started engaging the codes for the tractor beam.
Oren silenced the battle sirens and engaged others. The Datapoints weren’t needed at their battle posts. But the tactical team was needed on the landing dock.
Dahn didn’t let himself think about the number of armed Datapoints who were going to be pointing their weapons at that craft at the very second it landed. Instead, he focused the entirety of his energy on the tractor beam. It was extremely strong and had to be guided perfectly, or else all sorts of space detritus could wind up getting sucked into the landing deck.
Dahn located the craft on the radar and then carefully locked the beam onto it. A bead of sweat rolled down his spine as he engaged the beam. He looked up, out thr
ough the windows, and watched as the funky little spacecraft was caught in the beam, visible as only a disturbance in space, a clear line summoning the craft forward.
The second he confirmed the spacecraft was locked in to the tractor beam, he was sprinting away, out of the pilot deck and down toward the landing area. He wasn’t supposed to be. He wasn’t a member of the tactical team. But there wasn’t any stopping him as he barreled from hallway to hallway, jumping an entire flight of stairs at once and then skidding through to the landing pad.
The tactical team was already assembling and he marveled at their readiness. He knew they’d been sleeping just moments before. And now, here they were – dressed, armed and arranged in perfect defensive formation.
Dahn’s eyes went immediately to the vacuum doorway that would remain sealed until the outside doors of the Station closed again. The tractor beam seemed to tremble as it dragged the craft in.
Whoever was driving the craft was skilled. The tractor beam could drag you in, but it sure couldn’t land you. Dahn watched, his breath in his chest, as the spacecraft touched down.
The second that the vacuum doorway started sliding open, Dahn was sprinting forward.
“Datapoint!” someone from the tactical team screamed at him. But he didn’t even pause. He certainly didn’t stop.
“Datapoint, stand down!”
He still didn’t stop.
The ground exploded near his feet and Dahn fell to his knees. He stayed down, the blast reverberating in his ears. He knew they were right. He was sprinting toward an enemy spacecraft with nothing more than hope in his chest.
This was insane.
He stayed down, his eyes locked on the craft as a door opened up out of the side.
“Identify yourselves!” The tactical team was creeping forward, and Dahn’s tech counted each of them, and their weapons. All armed.
“Sullia Enceladus and Glade Io.” That was Sullia’s voice.
“Show us your tech!”
Without hesitation, two slender arms came out of the door, revealing the crystal-like technology that only a Datapoint could possibly have.
“Come out, hands up, and slowly!”
Two figures emerged, carefully picking their way down the stairs of the craft. Dahn’s heart leapt in his chest – because there she was. And she looked… terrible. There were dark lines under her eyes and her cheeks were sunken. Neither of the exiting Datapoints looked like they’d had anything to eat or drink in days.
Sullia pulled forward and Glade stumbled after her.
It was the stumble in her step that had Dahn rising to his feet again. In all of his years knowing her, he’d never seen Glade Io stumble like that. She didn’t walk with her chin down or sadness lining her face. She was proud and serious-faced and steady, always.
He took a step forward.
“Dahn Enceladus! They’re not cleared yet!” That was from the leader of the tactical team, sensing Dahn’s need to go closer and stay closer.
But Glade stumbled again and Dahn took off like a shot. He couldn’t stand there and watch her like that. Especially after Glade looked up and saw him sprinting across the loading deck. Her eyes lit for just a second and something like relief flashed over her face. She let go of Sullia’s shoulder, and in a move that overwhelmed him, lifted her arms to Dahn.
He was just three feet from them when he pulled up short. His integrated tech was going crazy, blinking and beeping about all the armed weapons pointed at his back.
Breathing heavy, his eyes wide, he took a step toward Glade.
“Get away from them! Don’t touch them!” It was Jan Ernst Haven’s voice that called out from the back of the landing deck now. “Their tech is dead! Don’t trust them. Get away!”
Dahn jumped back from Glade as if he’d been burned, heeding Haven’s orders and scrambling away from her.
He’d known that their tech was dead, and he felt a blazing humiliation that it hadn’t occurred to him that they shouldn’t be trusted until they were re-integrated. He should have realized that. But he was too anxious to get to Glade. To make sure she was alright.
Glade frowned at him as she dropped her arms, her eyes going back and forth between Dahn and Haven.
Dahn moved even further back from her, until he was ten feet away. He didn’t leave the room, though, and his eyes didn’t leave hers. Not even as two tactical technicians rushed forward in front of Jan Ernst Haven. Not even when those technicians raised their neutralizing rays. Not even when he watched the electricity swirl out from the ends of those rays and center onto the tech on both Sullia and Glade’s arms.
Dahn stood there silently and he watched as Glade immediately fell to the ground, her body writhing in excruciating pain for a moment and then another. Until she fell limp. Unconscious and inert. It was only after Haven’s brisk nod that Dahn went to her side, and scooped her up in his arms and carried her out.
I was having the nightmare about integrating. The one that had plagued me for months. It always felt so real. The blue light burning my eyes. My limbs strapped down to an operating table. The tech burning my skin, trying to bore its way into my brain.
But it had never felt quite this real.
I took a deep breath and tasted metal in my mouth, smelled burning flesh. It was my own. I realized, with a horrible lurch in my stomach, that this wasn’t a dream. I was on the integration table again. They were activating my tech. I had to sync again. I had to let it back in all over again.
This should have been easy. I’d already done it once. I didn’t intend to suffer on the table for days on end again. I stopped struggling against my bonds, letting the blue light sink into my dilated pupils. I breathed through the burning pain on my arm and on my cheek.
“That’s right.”
I heard the voice in my ear and knew who was with me. I didn’t even have to catch sight of his silver hair. He was there. Coaching me through it.
And when I synced this time, it wasn’t excruciating. It wasn’t even pain. But it was uncomfortable. It was like, in my time with the Ferrymen, my mind had become an amorphous cloud. And now I had to smooth out my edges and fit it all into a perfect bowl. But I did it. It was almost like falling asleep.
The last thought I had before I let the tech sync with me was of Kupier. Of his laughing face as we’d fought in the main room of the Ray.
“That’s enough,” Haven’s voice spoke in the first moment after the sync was complete. The blue light switched immediately off, and I was surprised. The first time I’d ever synced, they’d left me on the table for hours afterwards.
I mentally flexed my tech. It was both foreign and familiar, a welcome intrusion as the readouts appeared in my vision. Distances to nearest objects, how many heartbeats in the room. How many weapons. Here was the thing I’d come to rely on. I no longer felt that vulnerable blindness that I’d felt the entire time I’d been on the Ray.
I felt the technicians unstrap my wrists and legs, and I automatically rubbed at the bruised skin.
It was a relief to be back at the Station, I realized. I looked around at the steel walls, the brown carpet. I knew what each day was going to be like on the Station. The only thing I had to concentrate on was becoming the best Datapoint I possibly could. I glanced over at Haven, looking at him fully for the first time since coming back.
“Dramatic entrance,” he said in that reedy voice of his.
I shrugged. “Our coms were broken. And we’d been out of food and water for two days. We were pretty desperate to get here.”
He paused. “You must have been traveling for some time.”
I spoke carefully. My eyes on his. “Charon is a long way away.”
“So it is. Sullia said the same thing.” His silvery eyes went back and forth between mine and I realized that he was trying to figure out whether or not I was lying. I’d thought I’d return home a hero for surviving a Ferryman ordeal. But, I realized, with a sinking of my heart, that we were not leaving the room right now.
“You’ll understand, I think, that we’ll be a bit cautious with you until we understand what happened?”
“Cautious?” I asked slowly, though I already knew exactly what he meant. I just didn’t want it to be true.
He cleared his throat. “No stone unturned, Datapoint.”
I opened my mouth to say something else, but he was already walking out. Leaving me in the room alone with everyone who’d supervised my syncing. But none of them looked at me as they cleared their things to pack them away.
When the last person left, quietly closing the door behind her and leaving me alone in the empty room, I wondered how long it would be until the tactical team came for me.
It wasn’t long at all.
Dahn avoided the medical wing of the Station for three days. He knew what they were doing to her. He knew that they were interrogating her. He also knew that almost no one came out of those interrogations the same.
Part of him couldn’t help but be relieved that, for the first time in a month, he knew where she was. Even if it was in the medical wing. In hell.
The interrogations, as all of them were taught in training, were as much for information as they were for testing loyalty. They were designed to show who you really were. Through torture and deprivation.
“I heard she’s doing well,” Cast said as he came into Dahn’s room unannounced. He’d been visiting Dahn often since everything had happened with the Ferrymen.
“What’s that?” Dahn asked, looking up from the gaming device he was programming.
“Iona, this girl I know on the tactical team, I heard her saying that Glade was surviving. She hasn’t cracked yet. In any direction.”
Dahn frowned and looked back at the screen of the gaming device. “That doesn’t mean much.”
“It means that she probably wasn’t compromised while she was with the Ferrymen.” Cast narrowed his eyes when Dahn didn’t agree with him. “Come on, you know they would have figured it out by now if she’d switched loyalties.”