Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

While there are only ten hard-and-fast laws to the Scythedom, there are many accepted conventions. The most darkly ironic is the understanding that no one may be gleaned who wishes to be gleaned. The idea of truly wishing to end one’s own life is a concept completely foreign to most post-mortals, because we can’t experience the level of pain and despair that so seasoned the Age of Mortality. Our emo-nanites prevent us from plunging so deep. Only scythes, who can turn off our emotional nanites, can ever reach an impasse with our own existence. And yet… There was once a woman who knocked on my door requesting that I glean her. I never turn away visitors, so I let her in and listened to her story. Her husband of more than ninety years was gleaned five years prior. Now she wanted to be with him, wherever he was, and if he was nowhere, then at least they would be nowhere together. “I’m not unhappy,” she told me. “I’m just… done.” But immortality, by definition, means that we are never done, unless a scythe determines it to be so. We are no longer temporary; only our feelings are. I saw no interminable stagnation in this woman, so instead of gleaning her I had her kiss my ring. The immunity was immediate and irrevocable—so she could no longer entertain thoughts of being gleaned for a full year. I ran into her perhaps a decade later. She had turned the corner, resetting back to her late twenties. She had remarried and was expecting a child. She thanked me for being wise enough to...