Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(61)

“I had a dream that you came to my school and gleaned all the jerks,” he told her.

“Really?” Citra said. “What color were my robes?”

He hesitated. “Turquoise, I think.”

“Then that will be the color I’ll choose.”

Ben beamed.

“What will we call you once you’re ordained?” her father said, treating it as if it were a certainty.

Citra hadn’t even considered the question. She never heard a scythe referred to by anything but their Patron Historic or “Your Honor.” ?Were family members bound to that as well? She hadn’t even chosen her Patron yet. She dodged the question by saying, “You’re my family, you can call me whatever you like,” hoping that was true.

They strolled around town. Although she didn’t tell them, they passed the small home where she had lived with Rowan and Scythe Faraday. They passed the train station nearest the home. And everywhere they went, Citra made a point to take a family picture . . . each from an angle very close to that of the nearest public camera.

? ? ?

The day was emotionally exhausting. Citra wanted to stay longer, and yet a big part of her couldn’t wait for Scythe Curie to arrive. She resolved not to feel guilty about that. She’d had more than her share of guilt. “Guilt is the idiot cousin of remorse,” Scythe Faraday had been fond of saying.

Scythe Curie didn’t ask Citra any questions about her visit on the way home, and Citra was content not to share. She did ask the scythe something, though.

“Does anyone ever call you by your name?”

“Other scythes—ones I’m friendly with, will call me Marie.”

“As in Marie Curie?”

“My Patron Historic was a great woman. She coined the term ‘radioactivity,’ and was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize, back when such things were awarded.”

“But what about your real name? The one you were born with?”

Scythe Curie took her time in answering. Finally she said, “There’s no one in my life who knows me by that name.”

“What about your family? They must be still around—after all, they have immunity from gleaning as long as you’re alive.”

She sighed. “I haven’t been in touch with my family for more than a hundred years.”

Citra wondered if that would happen to her. Do all scythes lose the ties to everyone they had known—everything they had been before they were chosen?

“Susan,” Scythe Curie finally said. “When I was a little girl, they called me Susan. Suzy. Sue.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Susan.”

Citra found it next to impossible to imagine Scythe Curie as a little girl.

? ? ?

When they got home, Citra uploaded her pictures to the Thunderhead without worrying if the scythe saw, because there was nothing unusual or suspicious about that—everyone uploaded their photos. It would have been suspicious if she hadn’t.

Then, later that night, when Citra was sure Scythe Curie was asleep, she went to the study, got online, and retrieved the pics—which was easy to do since they were tagged. Then she dove into the backbrain, following all the links the Thunderhead had forged to her images. She was led to other pictures of her family, as well as other families that resembled hers in some way. Expected. But there were also links to videos taken by streetcams in the same locations. That’s just what she was looking for. Once she created her own algorithm to sort out the irrelevant photos from the streetcams, she had a full complement of surveillance videos. Of course, she was still left with millions of randomly accessed, unordered files, but at least now they were all streetcam records of Scythe Faraday’s neighborhood.

She uploaded an image of Scythe Faraday to see if she could isolate videos in which he appeared, but as she suspected, nothing came back. The Thunderhead’s hands-off policy when it came to scythes meant that scythe’s images were not tagged in any way. Still, she had successfully narrowed the field from billions of records to millions. However, tracking Scythe Faraday’s movements on the day he died was like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks that stretched to the horizon. Even so, she was determined to find what she was looking for, no matter how long it took.





* * *





Gleanings should be iconic. They should be memorable. They should have the legendary power of the greatest battles of the mortal age, passed down by word of mouth, becoming as immortal as we are. That is, after all, why we scythes are here. To keep us connected to our past. Tethered to mortality. ?Yes, most of us will live forever, but some of us, thanks to the Scythedom, will not. For those who will be gleaned, do we not, at the very least, owe them a spectacular end?

—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Goddard



* * *





24


An Embarrassment to Who and What We Are



Numb. Rowan could feel himself growing numb—and while it might have been a good thing for his beleaguered sanity, it was not a good thing for his soul.

“Never lose your humanity,” Scythe Faraday had told him, “or you’ll be nothing more than a killing machine.” He had used the word “killing” rather than “gleaning.” Rowan hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now he understood; it stopped being gleaning the moment one became desensitized to the act.