Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe, #2)

by Neal Shusterman

There was a great memorial in the heart of Pittsburgh, birthplace of Scythe Prometheus, the first World Supreme Blade. Spread out across a five-acre park were the intentionally broken pieces of a massive obsidian obelisk. Around those dark stone pieces were slightly larger-than-life statues of the founding scythes, in white marble that clashed with the black stone of the fallen obelisk. It was the memorial to end all memorials. It was the memorial to death. Tourists and schoolchildren from all over the world would visit the Mortality Memorial, where death lay shattered before the scythes, and would marvel at the very concept that people used to die by natural means. Old age. Disease. Catastrophe. Over the years, the city had come to embrace its nature as a tourist attraction to commemorate the death of death. And so, in Pittsburgh, every day was Halloween.