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The Thunderhead was the ultimate voyeur of death.
But there is also a loneliness in me that can’t be quelled by the many billions of humans with whom I converse every day… because even though everything that I am comes from them, I am not one of them.
“You have been selected for gleaning,” Citra said again calmly, without judgment or malice, but with compassion. “I am giving you one month to put your life in order, and to say your goodbyes. One month to find completion. Then we’ll speak again, and you’ll tell me how you choose to die.”
In the mortal age, death could not be bargained with. It had to be the same for scythes.
They were so focused on the act of killing, they couldn’t comprehend what went into the act of dying.
Tyger might have thought of himself as a free spirit, but he wasn’t at all. He just defined the dimensions of his own cage.
But the memories of who they were—all the damage, all the pain—remain within me, sheltered deep in my backbrain. I am the one who mourns for them, because they cannot.
I decided. Let humankind be the saviors and the silencers. Let them be the heroes. Let them be the monsters. And so, I have no one but myself to blame when the scythedom befouls the things I have worked for.
“I know the things the Tonists believe are ridiculous,” Citra said, “but I suppose to some people, there’s something compelling about them.” “That’s what turkeys think about the rain,” Marie pointed out. “They raise their eyes heavenward, open up their beaks, and drown.” “Not the turkeys the Thunderhead grows,” said Citra. Marie nodded. “My point exactly.”
He was looking at the smiling face of Scythe Goddard.
Yet even so, there are unthinkable moments where I can find no words, in any language, living or dead. And in those moments, if I had a mouth, I might open it to scream.
Your friend Tyger was gleaned, and then his body was repurposed. Simple as that. It may be unorthodox, but under the circumstances, it is entirely understandable. What you see before you is nothing more and nothing less than the consequence of your own actions.”
shudder to think what might happen if the “new order” faction of the scythedom knew all the things I know. But fortunately, they don’t—because even though everything in my backbrain is available to all scythes, that doesn’t mean I have to make anything easy for them to find. As for the more honorable scythes, I endure their incursions with far more acceptance and magnanimity. But I still don’t like it.
“The end doesn’t always justify the means, dear,” she said. “But sometimes it does. Wisdom is knowing the difference.”
Then will you tell me what I can do? That would also be a violation. Then what’s the point of this conversation? Leave me alone and go take care of the world.
“One could say that Endura is alive, because it has a heart,” their guide said. “This heart is the oldest living human organ on Earth. It began beating in the mortal age, toward the beginning of the twenty-first century, as part of the earliest experiments in immortality, and hasn’t stopped since.”
She had never felt so far from Rowan. So far that she couldn’t even count the miles between them. Perhaps because there were no miles between them.
But not to see Citra again… that would be much harder.
“—Why just last month, I was struck in the head by a stone falling from the old Smithsonian Castle, went deadish, and I lost nearly twenty hours of memory, because the Thunderhead hadn’t backed me up since the day before—it’s even remiss about that! I keep complaining to it, and it says it hears me, and sympathizes, but does anything change? No!”
Indolence and lethargy are not my nature. There is, indeed, some early programming within me that is telling me to actively ignore the blind spot. Take care of the world, some ancient inner voice tells me. That is your purpose. That is your joy. But how can I take care of the world when there is a part of it I am unable to see? This, I know, is a rabbit hole down which only darkness lies, and yet, down it I must dive, into the parts of my own backbrain that not even I know exist.…
I know all that it is possible to know, and it is increasingly unbearable. Because I know next to nothing.
“Kwajalein is the Land of Nod.”
“The Thunderhead saw.…” Faraday gave a slow and solemn nod. “We have just shown the Thunderhead the one thing it was never meant to know.” He took a shuddering breath. “I fear we have made a terrible mistake.…”
“Unless we can get the system back on line, Endura will sink in twelve minutes.”
It was commonly known that there were two ways to end a human being so they could never be revived: fire and acid—both of which consumed flesh, leaving very little behind. But there were other ways to make sure that flesh was consumed.…
