The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1)

by Ramona Finn

  The second we were both fully inside the storage unit of the massive skip, Kupier grabbed my hand and yanked me down. It was so crowded with supplies that we had to crawl our way over the crates until we reached the very end of the skip, where the thrusters were.

  The giant skip was as still and dark as the far side of a moon. It was almost like it was sleeping. I was sure he was taking me to whatever corner of the skip that he’d stowed away in. My stomach tightened uneasily. Just because he’d been able to hide there didn’t mean it would be safe for us to talk there.

  What the hell was I doing? I was parlaying with a Ferryman in the middle of the Station? This was insanity.

  “Glade.” He turned to me, as if expecting my sudden hesitation. “They won’t catch us. I swear. I’m not gonna get you executed. But I’d rather not linger out here in the lion’s den, alright?” He glanced behind him toward where the thrusters were.

  I barely had to think about it. If we were gonna get caught, which I really thought was a distinct possibility, then I might as well find out why he’d come in the first place. “Let’s go.”

  Kupier grabbed my hand again and swung me down into a cellar I hadn’t noticed was there. Thanks to my Datapoint training, I landed on my feet like a cat. It was just seconds later that he was using some small, but very loud, tool to remove one panel and then another. I crawled after him through where the panels had been and glanced around at my surroundings as he reattached the panels.

  My jaw dropped. To the best of my knowledge, we were currently inside of a thruster. Big enough to stand up in, the charred chrome of the mechanism made a long, skinny cave that opened up on the far end, where the flames exploded out into space. A chill worked its way up my back. The ship was off, sleeping, but knowing that I was standing inside a veritable fireplace was giving me pause. At any second, when they engaged the thrusters, we could be burned to a crisp, like a chicken bone in a bonfire. Standing inside the quiet thruster was like watching a murderer sleep.

  I turned to Kupier, speechless.

  He nodded behind him, that grin of his already in place. My eyes focused behind me and I saw a nine-foot-long steel capsule set snugly against the rounded inner wall of the thruster. It was so sleek, and charred so black that I hadn’t even seen it before. You’d have to be looking for it to see it. It slowly registered, what I was looking at. A one-man ship. I’d heard of them before, and even seen a few pictures, but I’d never seen one in real life. And if it was what he’d taken to be able to board this supply skip, then that meant it was flame resistant.

  Kupier quietly jogged over to it and pressed on one side, and the door of the one-man skip pivoted open and he slid inside. I followed and the door closed behind me. There was very little room – we basically had to lie down to fit.

  I looked around the capsule ship and shifted as best as I could. It was a true one-man ship. There was a pilot seat that was currently fully reclined, a control panel, and a huge windshield that extended over the top and front of the capsule. I assumed there was a small bathroom behind me and enough room for a few days’ worth of food storage. But it really was remarkably small. Kupier and I both rolled to our sides to make room for one another, but even so, our feet had to stay tangled, and there was only an inch or so in between us.

  “This is how you boarded the Station? You docked inside one of the supply skips?”

  He nodded, a little smug. “Pretty cool, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I admitted, looking around the one-man ship.

  “Why’d you come?”

  Kupier sighed and rolled back just a bit so that he looked at the top of the charred black windshield. “Because I haven’t given up on you.” He tipped his head and looked at me. “If we’re being completely honest.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “You haven’t given up on taking me to Earth to hack into the Database and destroy our system of governance as we know it?”

  His jaw tightened. “Dismiss it all you want, but you’re a Ferryman at heart, Glade. The Authority just got to you before I could.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but a yelp came out instead when the huge supply skip jolted beneath us. From all directions, there were sounds of the skip coming to life.

  “Oh my God,” I muttered, staring at him in shock.

  “Shit.”

  “The ship’s gonna take off,” I breathed, pushing away from Kupier and feeling around for a way to disengage the door of the capsule ship. I had to get out of the one-man ship and get the hell out of the thruster before this thing took off into space. Otherwise, I was screwed. Royally screwed.

  “Glade, stop. Don’t—”

  My hands found the release handles and the door of the capsule ship swung open. I flung myself out and into the smooth, charred cave of the thruster. I landed on my hands and knees and started scrambling toward the opening at the other end of it. It would be a fifteen-foot drop to the floor of the landing pad, but I didn’t care. As long as I didn’t get burned alive, I’d be happy. Thrilled. Ecstatic.

  “Glade!” his voice whispered behind me, but I ignored it. I could hear other engines purring to life in the supply skip. It wouldn’t be long until the thrusters engaged.

  I was still scrambling when I felt two large hands grab me at my waist and start to yank me backward. I almost choked. Was he trying to kill me? Abduct me? Suddenly, everything that had happened to me over the last months weighed on my soul like lead. I was done with getting kidnapped and tortured and forced to be someone I wasn’t. I was getting out of this thruster if it was the last thing I did.

  I turned to the man grabbing me and I socked him in the face with every bit of strength and fury I had inside me.

  His face whipped backwards. “Christ, Glade!”

  But I didn’t stick around for much longer than that. I was scrambling out toward the open end of the thruster. I had to get out of there, and fast, before these thrusters were engaged and I was a kabob.

  I’d only scrambled a foot or two more when Kupier’s hand grabbed the collar of my shirt, yanking me back. I choked and gasped for air as my teeth dug into the side of his hand.

  “Stop!” he hissed. “Stop! Glade, you’re gonna get us both killed if you don’t get your stubborn, crazy ass back into this ship. NOW!”

  He flung me around and let me go. I stumbled toward the capsule and heard the final set of engines engage. He was right. We were out of time.

  The skip lurched underneath us again and I heard a second alarm go off. The thrusters were going to come on any second. Kupier’s hands gripped my shoulders and he shoved me forward. The door of the one-man skip was still open, and he launched the two of us inside. I banged the hell out of my elbow and I heard him swear again as he landed right on top of me. He slammed the door down and locked it.

  We were just letting out breaths of relief when the deafening roar of the thrusters exploded around us. The reinforced window of the one-man skip was already blackened and scorched, so it was still pitch dark, but the noise and the heat were enough to tell us exactly what was happening out there.

  The supply skip lurched underneath us again, and this time I could feel that we were airborne. It slid out of the landing dock and slowly out into the blackness of space. Kupier’s weight crushed me to the seat beneath me as we waited for the skip to orient itself. It was using the thrusters for small calculations, minor adjustments. But in a minute, it would engage its artificial black holes and it would skip to another part of the solar system. It wouldn’t need its thrusters then.

  Sweat beaded on our skin as the heat and the noise increased. I felt some roll down my neck and I wasn’t sure if it was mine or Kupier’s. It was just when I thought I couldn’t take another second of the heat when the thrusters suddenly fell silent. The heat in the tiny cabin of the one-man ship didn’t cease, but Kupier rolled halfway off of me and flipped a few switches. Cool, smooth oxygen pumped around us and I took a welcome breath. He flipped more switches and the windshield of the capsule skip clear
ed. I could see the night sky winking through the distant open end of the thruster.

  “Good Lord,” I mumbled, shifting so that I wasn’t completely pinned underneath him.

  “Man, you sure keep things interesting,” Kupier laughed, but it ended on a moan as he tenderly tested the skin around his eye. “It’s not gonna be fun explaining this shiner to the rest of the crew.”

  “Kupier, who the hell cares about your black eye? I just took off in a Ferryman capsule. I’m officially a rebel. Oh, Jesus.” I leaned forward and clutched my hair. “If I go back, they’re gonna kill me. If I don’t go back, they’ll enlist my sisters, no question. Shit!”

  I wheeled on him –– not that there was room to do much wheeling. “Did you plan this?” I demanded.

  “Of course not! I thought we had more time!”!” He looked truly insulted. “Glade, have I ever actually put you in danger?”

  I blinked at him. No. He hadn’t. He’d had to do some brash stuff, like kidnap me and dampen me. But he’d never really tried to hurt me or sabotage me. He wouldn’t be Kupier if he’d done those things. “Kup, what am I going to do? God. I never should have gotten on this ship. I’m so, so screwed.”

  “Okay. Just give me a second. Let me think.” He knuckled his eye for a solid thirty seconds. “Yeah, look. This really sucks, but I think I know what we can do so that you can return and not get executed.”

  I waited, breath held, for this plan. God, I hoped it was a good one.

  “In a little while,” he began, his blue eyes catching the flickering lights off the dashboard of our one-man skip, “they’ll have to engage the thrusters again. We’ll eject then and they won’t notice. We can take this skip to a Ferrymen ship we have out on the other edge of Mars. That’s what I was going to do anyways, before they took off five fucking hours early. But this way, you’ll leave me there, on the Ferryman ship, and take this one back to the Station.”

  I stared at him blankly. “You want me to take this capsule ship back to the Station? But you’ll lose it permanently. They’ll dissect every bit of technology on board!” I didn’t stop to think that maybe I shouldn’t explain all this to him. “They’ll learn a hundred things about your operation. Whatever you think about the Authority, there’s smart technicians on the Station. You have no idea what they can learn from this skip, Kupier. Do you have any idea what they’ve learned from the other two skips we brought back?”

  He shrugged, a small smile on his face. “So maybe we leave some breadcrumbs aboard all our ships here that aren’t gonna necessarily lead to much. In case of capture. And this way, you'll get to look like a hero. You’ve commandeered a precious piece of Ferryman technology.”

  “They’re gonna think it’s suspicious if I’m just randomly returning to the Station in a Ferryman capsule ship when they didn’t know I was gone in the first place.”

  “Say that you heard about the Ferrymen attacking the supply skips and you wanted to check out this one. That you’d heard of us doing the whole thruster trick before and you wanted to see. But the supply skip took off and you had to fly back in the capsule skip.”

  “Then they’ll know that I held something back from them initially and they’ll probably kill me anyways.”

  “God, I hate these assholes,” Kupier grumbled, scrunching his eyes closed. “Okay, how about this…… Tell them you saw us practicing the maneuver while you were with us, but you thought it was only docking procedure, not a way of pirating an Authority skip. So you didn’t think to mention it. But the pieces came together in the middle of the night and you had to come check it out for yourself.”

  “That might work.”

  “Or, Glade, better yet,” he said quietly, “you can say fuck it, and fuck them, and just not go back at all. That’s why I came to see you, after all, to ask you to do that. You can come to the Ferryman ship with me and throw in your lot with the bad guys.”

  I blinked at him. “Being around you exponentially increases my chances of getting killed.”

  My heart had slowed a little bit. I was accepting this reality. I’d have to return to the Station. I’d present this story, hope they believed it, and hope that my status as the chosen one would carry me through the suspicion. Otherwise, I was damning my sisters to the Station. To lives as Datapoints. To deaths as Datapoints.

  When had my life involved so many flipping dead-ends? I rolled my head to look at Kupier. So many questions. But only one made it to the top of the dog pile.

  “You seriously came all this way on the slim hope that I could be persuaded to help you, Kupier?”

  Kupier sighed, those slices of electric blue becoming sharper somehow. “I didn’t hope. I knew.”

  “You knew? How?”

  He looked up at me, and his expression was a curious mixture of surety and shyness. “Because you called me ‘Kup.’”

  “What?”

  “When you called on the com. You called me ‘Kup.’”

  I wracked my brain, trying to remember. “Oh. Uh. So?”

  He smiled then, a flash of white in the dim light. It was almost like he thought my answer was sweet. “So that means you trust me. And like me.”

  I furrowed my brow. “I’m not following.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Silly Datapoints with their stupid computer brains.” He tapped one finger on my temple. “Nicknames mean you like someone. That they’re your friend.”

  I thought of all the times he’d called me DP-1. My stomach tightened. The way it hadn’t done since the last time I’d been with him.

  “So you came all this way, risking your life over and over again, sneaking onto the Station, all because you think we’re friends?”

  He nodded and his eyes became serious. “Look, Glade, it’s no secret that I need something from you. You’re a Datapoint, and the Ferrymen need a Datapoint. Not only to disable the Authority Database on Earth, but to get onto Earth in the first place. There’s no way we can get around their shields without a Datapoint. Without this.” He traced one firm finger over the tech on my arm, the tech on my face. His eyes bolted up to mine next, and it was then that we both realized that my tech wasn’t dampened. For the first time, we were face to face and my tech was activated. I wondered how long it would take for them to realize I was gone. For them to start tracking my tech.

  His eyes hardened and he continued on, like he was determined to ignore the fact. “I thought it was a lost cause when you left. That the one Datapoint, who I trusted, didn’t trust me. So, we had to start from scratch.”

  “Is that why you’ve been attacking Station supply skips? You’ve been trying to find Datapoint technology without having to find a Datapoint?”

  He nodded. “With little to no success. One look at the new integrated tech modules that they’ve been moving, and we realized it would take a decade to build the tools necessary to implant it in one of our own. We were pretty much back to square one when you commed me.”

  “And I called you Kup.” I was just trying to keep up.

  He nodded again. “And you called me Kup. And I knew that not all hope was lost. Because you trust me.”

  I tossed my hair over one shoulder and Kupier followed it with his eyes. “Kupier, I hate to disappoint you. But I don’t think I really trust anybody right now. I mean, I trusted you to not murder my sisters if you went and rescued them for me. But you’re implying that I trust you enough to ally myself with you. To leave behind everything I know. To fight the Authority with you. Yeah. No. I don’t trust you that much.”

  Kupier grinned then, smug and satisfied. “Trust me, you totally trust me.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh, rolling my eyes. He pulled my hand down, away from where I’d been shaking my head into it. “Glade, you’re a Datapoint, so you know how to fight. You know how to calculate. How to be logical and strategic. How to analyze data of all kinds.”

  I nodded.

  “Well,” he continued. “I’m just a regular guy. But I know emotions. I know feelings, DP-1.” His
eyes flicked over my face, trying to see all of me at once. I wondered how I’d ever thought of him as plain looking. That permanent smile of his, the shadow of stubble on his chin, his eyes so blue they glowed… all of it didn’t seem plain at all. In fact, the way he looked was making it harder and harder to breathe.

  “I know feelings,” he repeated. “And you’ve got them for me.”

  He closed the distance between us, open eyes on open eyes. Kupier’s nose brushed the side of mine for half a breath before both of his lips kissed my bottom one. “You missed me, Glade.” Another breathless kiss, firmer than the last. “You like me.” Another kiss. “You trust me.”

  This kiss lingered. And bloomed. I felt heat ignite in my cheeks, on the back of my head and my waist, where he gripped me. My heart pounded like the hooves of a horse. I’d never felt so wild in all my life. Our feet were tangled and his knee nudged in between mine. I was so warm, and half of me could barely believe this was happening.

  FOOOM.

  The thrusters fired on again, just as Kupier had said they would, and I jumped a foot in the air. I didn’t get far before Kupier was pulling me back to him.

  “Kupier,” I tried, but his mouth momentarily distracted me.

  “Kupier,” I tried again.

  “Kupier!”

  “Hmm?” He pulled back from me, and his eyes were lidded and heavy.

  “You said we had to eject when the thrusters came back on.”

  “What? When the – oh. OH! Crap. Hang on.” He leaned forward and typed a quick sequence into the control panel. Our windshield was quickly blackening again as our capsule ship booted up. I held my breath, but it wasn’t more than a few more seconds before we were jetting out in a stream of blue flame, rocketing off into space just as the giant skip we’d been riding on disappeared into a black hole.

  The second we were safe from discovery, Kupier powered down the capsule’s jets and let out a long, thin breath.