The Culling (The Culling Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  As he watched me watch him, something hardened in his expression. "So, you’re a Datapoint."

  I raised an eyebrow and leaned further into the armchair, ignoring the wince-inducing pain of my shackled ankle. I caught sight of myself in the reflection off the great window and saw that I was sitting in the exact same position that Haven had sat in earlier that day. Chin lazily on my hand, one leg crossed over the other. I was relieved it looked as lazily disdainful on me as it had on Haven. I suddenly understood it as a power move.

  “So, you’re a Ferryman?”

  There was unmistakable disgust in both of our voices, though his was also laced with something else. Something I couldn’t quite put my finger on.

  “You don’t look like I thought you might,” he said almost casually, as he tipped his head to one side and surveyed me.

  “I could say the same for you.” I raised an eyebrow even further. “Are you even old enough to have a pilot’s license? Suddenly the Ferrymen don’t seem so menacing, now that I know they’re led by a child.”

  “Funny, because the Authority seems a hell of a lot scarier now that I know they’re training children to do all of their dirty work.”

  My eyebrow fell flat back down and I kept my face as closed as I could.

  The Ferryman’s leg bounced and his fingers drummed the back of the chair, like there was a flock of birds beating at the bars inside of him. Suddenly he was up and off the chair, tracing a rough palm over his shaved head. “God,” he chuffed out to no one in particular. “I knew that most Datapoints were teenagers. But to actually see it with my own eyes…”

  He turned back to me and something old showed out of his young face. “How long have they been training you?”

  “Two years.” I wasn’t sure why I answered.

  He swallowed hard. “So, they spliced you with that weapon when you were, what, thirteen?”

  His eyes were raking across the tech on my cheek and over my arm. I thought again of the glossy, proud horse and refused to trace a hand over my tech. I held perfectly still.

  “You think of my tech as a weapon,” I guessed blandly.

  “Of course. You murder people with it, don’t you? Even under the loosest of definitions, I’d say that qualifies as a weapon.”

  The girl recoiled from Kupier as if he’d slapped her, and for a second he felt a wave of guilt.

  Good one, Kup.

  He swallowed back the urge to apologize to her. There was no place for that kind of softness in this war. He sought for what to say next.

  He wasn’t perfect – he knew that better than anybody. And he was off kilter. He’d swaggered into the room expecting to come face to face with an android. He’d known that Datapoints were humans, technically. But he’d also known that their technology was integrated so deeply into their brains that they could barely function without it. He’d expected a shell of a person. He’d expected to interface – he hadn’t expected to converse.

  And he definitely hadn’t expected this girl.

  Maybe a few years younger than him, and kinda cute. Except for the frown that could have blown a crater in the moon. Oh, yeah, and the hate lasers coming out of her eyes.

  Looking at her, the whole of the dang universe spreading out in the window behind her, and seeing how young she was, all of it came crashing down over him, the way it did every once in a while. The immensity of the atrocities the Authority was committing. This girl didn’t deserve to be turned into a weapon. To be brainwashed. The whole thought of it horrified him. Exhausted him. And Kupier was suddenly overwhelmed with missing Charon. His home planet. The one he hadn’t seen in three months.

  If he’d been on Charon, maybe he’d have been eating an early supper with his mother. Maybe he’d have been on his way out to see if he could flirt with that girl Sira who used to live a few streets over. Maybe he’d have been hot-wiring ancient four wheelers and trying not to crash them.

  Maybe.

  But what did it matter, really? He wasn’t on Charon. Shit, Charon was barely even on Charon anymore. Things had changed. The Authority had seen to that.

  Kupier’s colony, once a place where troublemakers and ‘criminals’ had been sent when the Authority didn’t know what to do with them, had slowly evolved to be something the Authority could never have predicted.

  Charon was the only completely self-sufficient colony in the solar system. It was filled with people who’d been sent away to die, and damn if they hadn’t survived. Nope. In fact, Charon had thrived. Innovated. Adapted. Invented.

  But those had been the good old days.

  The good old days that Kupier would have done absolutely anything to get back.

  Forward, Kup! Don’t look back. Learn from the past, but don’t go back there. Move forward. Always be moving forward. It was his older brother’s voice in his head. And words in his memory were all that was left of Kupier’s brother. Luce was gone. The real leader of the Ferrymen. And now Kupier was all they had left.

  Kupier shifted for a second in his chair and traced one hot palm over the leg of his jumpsuit. How could someone feel too young and too old at the same damn time?

  Of the million-and-five things he was teaching himself these days, though, letting go was one of them. He figured it was the first step in moving forward. So, he took a deep breath and concentrated on the little black-haired computer girl currently trying to set him on fire with just the look in her eyes.

  She cleared her throat and sat up a little straighter in her chair. His murderer comment had obviously plucked a chord for her.

  “If you think I’m so dangerous, then where are your bodyguards?” she asked.

  Kupier tipped his head to one side. “I don’t think you’re dangerous after your tech’s been dampened. Now, you’d have to kill me with your bare hands.” He let his eyes sweep over her, appraising. “And in hand-to-hand combat? … Now that you mention it, I think we could give each other a run for our money. You sure gave Aine a hard time. And she’s no pushover.”

  Kupier was still in shock that one of the Datapoints had been able to escape. He’d inspected the jimmied cells himself and been inordinately impressed that they’d been able to pick the locks using their own handcuffs. He’d also been very, very impressed that this girl had been able to hold off four of his best men for over three minutes while her friend had gotten away.

  He’d also been confused about why they hadn’t tried to take the other one, the taller girl Datapoint, with them.

  The black-haired girl stared him in the eye, her frown deepening even further. “Why am I here?”

  Kupier rose from his chair and strode over to the huge window that sprawled out behind her. He leaned his back against it. “What’s your name?”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Do they even let you keep your names there? Or is it just Datapoint 1, Datapoint 2, and so on.”

  “Why am I here?”

  “Or maybe it’s a lettering system, then? Datapoint A? Datapoint B?”

  “Why. Am. I. Here.”

  Kupier pulled a small blue marble from his pocket and bounced it in one hand – an old habit. She was fully facing him now, and her eyes followed the path of the marble.

  Unfortunately for her, it was gonna be a long time before she learned why she was there. Kupier didn’t need just any Datapoint for this whole thing to work; he needed a cooperative Datapoint for this whole thing to work.

  The girl’s eyes flicked up to his. He saw the fire there. She was a far cry from cooperative at the moment. He got the impression that she would shove broken glass down his throat the first chance she got. Just his luck.

  “Do you know who I am?” he asked her.

  She pulled her lips into her mouth for just a second, then let them out. “You’re a murderer.”

  He tossed the marble into his other hand and held her eyes. “Come again?”

  The girl flung her hair back behind her shoulders and it caught the light. It reminded Kupier of something – he j
ust didn’t know what. She wore all black, her horrifying tech glinted in the light, and she glared at him like a sullen child. But somehow, she still looked kind of… regal. She had that I’m-in-charge thing that Luce had had. That Kupier sincerely hoped he himself had.

  “You’re a Ferryman, no?” she asked him, her chin tipping down.

  He grinned, slow and lazy, at her words. After all these years of looking up to his brother, looking up to the stars at night, praying he could do something about the Authority, it still gave him a thrill to be identified as part of the Ferrymen. “That’s right.”

  Her eyes flicked back to the marble in his hand. “Then you’re a murderer.”

  Kupier laughed, turning his back to her for the first time. He watched the endless black of the universe rolling out before him. “Is that what they’re telling you in Datapoint school, DP-1?”

  He looked over his shoulder and saw that she was furrowing her brow at the nickname.

  “DP-1,” he explained. “Datapoint 1. Since you won’t tell me what your real name is.”

  “Yes,” she ignored him. “That’s exactly what the Authority has informed us of regarding Ferrymen. They’re pirates. Anarchists. Misguided rebels who want to bring the entire system crumbling down. They – you – kill any citizen who stands in the way, between Ferrymen and the Authority.”

  Kupier laughed again, pressing the heel of one hand against his eyes for just a second. He laughed because what the hell else could he do? It was ridiculous – insane, even. The Ferrymen murdering innocent citizens?

  “Right. Yeah. That’s exactly what we do.” He flung his hand out toward the haphazard ship. “We run a real tight genocide operation around here. You can tell from all the weapons we have.”

  Her eyes flicked around the main room, where he knew she wouldn’t see a weapon in sight. His own eyes stayed glued to the tech on the side of her face.

  “The Authority sure has a real convenient definition of ‘murderer.’” He’d said the words softly, when he’d really wanted to spit them out like razor blades.

  Her hands tightened in her lap. “Culling is not murder.”

  “Sure isn’t trial by jury, either.”

  “Trial by jury is a flawed system. Archaic and subject to human error.”

  Kupier raised both eyebrows. “Yeah, I read that textbook in school, too.” That Authority-issued textbook that explained the exact reasoning why the government-sanctioned mass killings were justified. They’d studied those textbooks on Charon as evidence of why the Authority needed to be brought down.

  He flicked the marble between his knuckles while he crossed the room and plopped himself back down in the folding chair across from her. “So, you’re telling me that the Culling isn’t subject to human error?”

  She smirked, one eyebrow raising halfway up her forehead in a way that Kupier recognized as very practiced and very effective. “Of course, it isn’t. Culling is scientific. It’s an exacting practice. It’s the whole reason why Datapoints have integrated tech.”

  She lifted her arm and Kupier felt a corresponding shiver race down his back. Even though her tech was neutralized right now, he knew exactly what she could do with it if it were activated.

  “The integrated tech shows us the brainwaves of each person. That’s how we know who gets culled. It’s scientific,” she repeated. “It’s medical.”

  “So, you think that the Culling isn’t subject to human error because Datapoints are trained to work with their integrated tech. And the tech is what decides who gets culled and who gets left alone?”

  She nodded once, tersely. But he saw the look on her face. Suspicious, hate-filled. She knew he was leading her into a trap. He did it anyways.

  “Well, tell me, DP-1. Who programs the tech?”

  She said nothing.

  Kupier stood and shoved the marble back into his pocket. “The tech wasn’t born. It didn’t spring into existence after its two tech parents decided they loved each other and wanted to make a family. This tech wasn’t a gift from God. It was designed. Engineered by humans. Maybe they were scientists, sure. But they sure as hell were humans. So ask yourself if something designed by humans could possibly be subject to human error. And now ask yourself this.” He held up two hands, a foot apart. “On the killing scale. How far apart are murder and culling?”

  He clapped his hands together, just once, loud enough to echo off the steel and glass in the room.

  The girl didn’t jump. In fact, she looked almost bored. She still said nothing.

  Kupier hoped he’d made his point, however, because his heart was racing, he didn’t think he had much more of this conversation in him.

  He faced her, his hands in his pockets again, his fingers finding the marble. “My name is Kupier.” Her bored look intensified. “And we don’t have to be enemies.”

  Kupier wasn’t surprised when he left the main chamber, the Datapoint scowling after him, and found Aine waiting in the hallway.

  Aine’s black eye had intensified in color, and he noted that she walked with a slight limp as she fell into step beside him. “We don’t need her,” Aine growled, tipping her shaved head back toward the room that held the black-haired girl.

  DP-1.

  Kupier also wasn’t surprised that this was the way his tall, tough friend felt about DP-1. DP-1 had beat the crap out of Aine not more than five hours ago. This was not something that Aine was just going to take on the chin, so to speak. Aine was a warrior, a fighter, a pilot. Honestly, she was the most loyal member of the Ferrymen, and some days, Kupier didn’t know what he would do without her.

  On other days, like right now, he wished that her pride would give it a rest for a minute.

  “And why’s that?” Kupier asked her as he gripped the roll bar at the top of a hallway and swung himself down into the makeshift kitchen.

  Aine followed suit, wincing at some hidden bruise.

  “Because you said so yourself, Kupier; we need a cooperative Datapoint. And she’s not only tried to escape, she’s done battle with your crew!”

  Kupier lifted an eyebrow as he tore the end off of a loaf of bread and tossed it on the countertop. He dug around in the cabinet for the jar of nutbutter they’d picked up from the last stellar port. “‘Done battle’ might be a little strong, Aine. I know she was fierce, but it was a barroom scuffle and you know it. She wasn’t trying to kill you. She was trying to distract you long enough for her friend to get away. And it worked.”

  Aine clapped her mouth closed for just a second, but opened it again. At six feet, she was almost as tall as Kupier. The closest she ever got to him was when she was angry. And now she was toe to toe, almost nose to nose.

  “You’re insane if you think you can talk her into your point of view, Kupier. She’s never going to work with us.”

  Kupier slowly lifted a spoonful of nutbutter in between them, popped it into his mouth, and spoke around it. “Maybe. Maybe not. But all I know is that I’m not making decisions based on hurt pride, Aine.”

  The words had her stepping back a full two steps. She was NOT doing that and he was an ass if he thought so. Well. Maybe she was doing that a little. But he was still an ass for pointing it out.

  He wasn’t an ass, though, she told herself. He was a good man. And a good leader. The thought had Aine deflating. Sometimes it killed her that he always, somehow, ended up making the right decisions, because they were almost always the opposite of what she herself would do.

  “I spoke to the other one. Sullia.”

  Those words had Kupier narrowing his eyes, studying Aine. “When I was talking to the black-haired one?”

  Aine nodded.

  Kupier, still studying Aine, tore himself a piece of bread, dipping it in the nutbutter. “And?”

  “And she’s willing to cut a deal with us.”

  Kupier scoffed. “Is that right? She just came out and said it?”

  “That’s right,” Aine snapped, her stance widening. “She told me that she had no l
ove for the Authority. She’d do whatever we wanted if it meant her getting out of here in one piece. She’ll cooperate, Kupier. She’s the one we want.”

  Something that looked sickeningly like disappointment crossed Kupier’s eyes as he gently pressed half of his sandwich into Aine’s hands and took the other half over to the sunken doorway of the kitchen. He reached up to pull himself out.

  “If she doesn’t have any loyalty to the Authority, Aine, why the hell would you think she’d have any loyalty to us?”

  He gripped the bar then, and was up and out of the kitchen in a flash.

  Aine’s mouth opened, like she was about to call something after him. But she found herself with nothing to say. Nothing at all.

  Chapter Six

  We don’t have to be enemies.

  Yeah, sure. I knew what that meant. We didn’t have to be enemies as long as I did whatever he wanted me to do.

  It had been three days since they’d jacked us from the Station. I guess they’d put two and two together, figuring that Sullia and I weren’t going to murder them while we were in deep space. Not with no idea where we were and no idea of how to navigate this sea monster they called a spaceship. They’d stopped chaining me to any surface available, and they’d let Sullia out of her cage.

  Most of the Ferrymen were keeping a wide berth between themselves and us. Except for that Aine chick who pretty much knocked into me every chance she got.

  Kupier, on the other hand, was being weirdly… nice.

  At the moment, for instance, he sat across from me, this Kupier guy, and ate a sandwich. His boots were up on one corner of the table where we sat and his chair leaning back on two legs. He took a humongous bite of his sandwich.

  “You sure you don’t want any?” he asked through about three inches of bread.

  Seriously? This guy was the leader of the Ferrymen? It still didn’t compute to me. With his ratty cargo pants, his oversized t-shirt, and a blue stocking cap on his head, the guy looked more like a stuffed animal than a hardened gang leader. But I’d seen the way the twenty or so Ferrymen on this treated him. With ultimate respect. Even now, three of them, shaved heads and all, stood scattered around the kitchen, playing bodyguard. Kupier was casual, beguiling eyes and feet on the table, as if he didn’t even notice them.