Scythe (Arc of a Scythe, #1)

by Neal Shusterman

But Rowan cared. If he was going to put pen to paper—if he was going to do what a scythe does—he would do it right or not at all. And so far, as he looked at his painfully blank page, he was leaning toward “not at all.” He watched Citra as she wrote, completely absorbed in her journal. From where he sat, he couldn’t read what she had written, but he could tell it was in fine penmanship. It figures she would take penmanship in school. It was one of those classes people took just to be superior. Like Latin. He supposed he’d have to learn to write in cursive if he became a scythe, but right now he’d be stuck with inelegant, sloppy printing. He wondered, had Citra and he been in the same school, would they have gotten along? They probably wouldn’t have even known each other. She was the type of girl who participates, and Rowan was the kind of kid who avoids. Their circles were about as far from intersecting as Jupiter and Mars in the night sky. Now, however, they had been pulled into convergence. They were not exactly friends—they were never given the opportunity to develop a friendship before being thrust into apprenticeship together. They were partners; they were adversaries—and Rowan found it increasingly hard to parse his feelings about her. All he knew was that he liked watching her write.

“That was impressive,” she told Rowan on the long ride home. “Yeah, right until I puked on the riverbank.” “But that was only after he was gleaned,” Citra pointed out. “You gave that man strength to face death.” Rowan shrugged. “I guess.” Citra found it both maddening and endearing how modest he could be.

“What did I do wrong this time, Your Honor?” To Rowan, the phrase “Your Honor” had become a profanity, and he couldn’t help but spit it out like one. “I cleanly decapitated five of them, eviscerated three, and I severed the aortas of the rest. If any of them had actually been alive, they would be dead now. I did just what you wanted.” “That’s the problem,” said the scythe. “It’s not what I want, it’s what you want. Where is your passion? You attack like a bot!” Rowan sighed, sheathing his blade. Now would come a lecture, or more accurately, an oration, because Scythe Goddard loved nothing more than performing to the gallery, even if it was just a gallery of one.

“Do you remember the pain when we beat you down?” Volta asked one afternoon, at the end of memory training. “How could I ever forget?” “There are three reasons for it,” Volta told him. “The first is to connect you with our ancestors, reliving the pain, and the fear of pain, because that’s what led to civilization and humanity’s advancement beyond its own mortality. The second is a rite of passage—something sorely missing in our passive world. But the third reason may be the most important: Being made to suffer pain frees us to feel the joy of being human.” To Rowan it sounded like more empty platitudes—but Volta wasn’t like Goddard that way. He didn’t usually speak in lofty, meaningless ideas. “I felt plenty of joy in my life without having to be beaten to a pulp,” Rowan told him. Volta nodded. “You felt some—but just a shadow of what it can be. Without the threat of suffering, we can’t experience true joy. The best we get is pleasantness.” Rowan had no response to that, because it struck him as true. He had led a pleasant life. His biggest complaint was being marginalized. But didn’t everyone feel marginalized? They lived in a world where nothing anyone did really mattered. Survival was guaranteed. Income was guaranteed. Food was plentiful, and comfort was a given. The Thunderhead saw to everyone’s needs. When you need nothing, what else can life be but pleasant? “You’ll get it eventually,” Scythe Volta told him. “Now that your pain nanites are dialed to zero, it’s inevit...