Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(22)

Scythe Faraday did bend his own rule once, however. About a month in, he allowed Citra to attend her aunt’s wedding.

While everyone else was dressed in gowns and tuxedos, Scythe Faraday did not allow Citra to dress up, “Lest you feel yourself a part of that world.” It worked. Wearing simple street clothes amid the pageantry made her feel even more the outsider—and the apprentice armband made it worse. Perhaps this was the reason Faraday allowed her to attend—to make crystal clear the distinction between who she had been and who she was now.

“So, what’s it like?” asked her cousin Amanda. “Gleaning and stuff. Is it, like, gross?”

“We’re not allowed to talk about it,” Citra told her. Which was not true, but she had no interest in discussing gleaning like it was school gossip.

She should have nurtured that conversation, however, instead of shutting it down, because Amanda was one of the few people who spoke to her. There were plenty of sideways glances and people talking about her when they thought she wasn’t watching, but most everyone avoided her like she carried a mortal-age disease. Perhaps if she already had her ring they might try to curry favor in hopes of receiving immunity, but apparently as an apprentice she offered them nothing but the creeps.

Her brother was standoffish, and even speaking to her mother was awkward. She asked standard questions like “Are you eating?” and “Are you getting enough sleep?”

“I understand there’s a boy living with you,” her father said.

“He has his own room and he’s not interested in me at all,” she told him, which she found oddly embarrassed to admit.

Citra sat through the wedding ceremony, but excused herself before the reception and took a publicar back to Scythe Faraday’s house, unable to bear another minute of it.

“You’re back early,” Scythe Faraday commented when she returned. And although he feigned surprise, he had set her place for dinner.





* * *





Scythes are supposed to have a keen appreciation of death, yet there are some things that are beyond even our comprehension.

The woman I gleaned today asked me the oddest question.

“Where do I go now?” she asked.

“Well,” I explained calmly, “your memories and life-recording are already stored in the Thunderhead, so it won’t be lost. Your body is returned to the Earth in a manner determined by your next of kin.”

“Yes, I know all that,” she said. “But what about me?”

The question perplexed me. “As I said, your memory construct will exist in the Thunderhead. Loved ones will be able to talk to it, and your construct will respond.”

“Yes,” she said, getting a bit agitated, “but what about me?”

I gleaned her then. Only after she was gone did I say, “I don’t know.”

—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie



* * *





8


A Matter of Choice




“I will glean alone today,” Scythe Faraday told Rowan and Citra one day in February, the second month of their apprenticeship. “While I am gone I have a task for each of you.” He took Citra into the weapons den. “You, Citra, shall polish each of my blades.”

She had been in the weapons den nearly every day for lessons, but to be there alone, nothing but her and instruments of death, was entirely different.

The scythe went to the blade wall, which had everything from swords to switchblades. “Some are merely dusty, others tarnished. You shall decide what type of care each one needs.”

She watched the way his eyes moved from one blade to another, lingering long enough, perhaps, to recall a memory.

“You’ve used them all?” she asked

“Only about half of them—and even then, for only one gleaning.” He reached up and pulled a rapier from the fourth wall—the one with the older-looking weapons. This one looked like the kind one of the Three Musketeers might have used. “When I was young, I had much more of a flair for drama. I went to glean a man who fancied himself a fencer. So I challenged him to a duel.”

“And you won?”

“No, I lost. Twice. He skewered me through the neck the first time and tore open my femoral artery the second—he was very good. Each time, after I woke up in the revival center, I returned to challenge him. His wins bought him time—but he was chosen to be gleaned, and I would not relent. Some scythes will change their minds, but that leads to compromise, and it favors the persuasive. I make my decisions firm.

“In the fourth bout, I pierced his heart with the tip of my blade. As he breathed his last, he thanked me for allowing him to die fighting. It was the only time in all my years as a scythe that I had been thanked for what I do.”

He sighed, and put the rapier back in what Citra realized was a place of honor.

“If you have all these weapons, why did you take our knife that day you came to glean my neighbor?” Citra had to ask.

The scythe grinned. “To gauge your reaction.”

“I threw it away,” she told him.

“I suspected as much,” he said. “But these you will polish.” Then he left her there.

When he was gone, Citra studied the weapons. She was not particularly morbid, but she found herself wanting to know which blades had been used, and how. It seemed to her that a noble weapon deserved to have its story passed down, and if not to her and Rowan, then who?