Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(83)

Scythe Curie was attentive to everything, and when Citra was done, she bowed her head and braced herself for the worst.

“I submit myself for disciplinary action,” Citra said.

“Disciplinary action,” said Scythe Curie with disgust in her voice, but that disgust was not aimed at Citra. “I should discipline myself for being so inexcusably blind to what you were doing.”

Citra released a breath that she had been holding for the last twenty seconds.

“Have you told anyone else?” Scythe Curie asked.

Citra hesitated, then realized there was no sense in concealing it now. “I told Rowan.”

“I was afraid you’d say that. Tell me Citra, what did he do to you after you told him? I’ll tell you what he did—he broke your neck! I think that’s a very good indication of where he stands on this. You can bet that Scythe Goddard knows all about your little theory by now.”

Citra didn’t even want to consider whether or not that might be true. “What we need to do is track down those witnesses and see if we can get any of them to talk.”

“Leave that to me,” Scythe Curie said. “You’ve done more than enough already. ?You need to clear it out of your head now, and focus on your studies and your training.”

“But if this really is a scandal in the Scythedom—”

“—then your best possible position would be to achieve scythehood yourself, and fight it from the inside.”

Citra sighed. That’s what Rowan had said. Scythe Curie was even more stubborn than Citra, and when her mind was made up, there was no changing it. “Yes, Your Honor.” Citra went to her room but still felt a definite sense that there was something Scythe Curie was holding back from her.

? ? ?

They came for Citra the following day. Scythe Curie had gone to the market, and Citra was doing what was expected of her. She was practicing killcraft with knives of different sizes and weights, trying to remain balanced and graceful.

There came a pounding on the door that made her drop the larger knife, almost stabbing her foot. There was a moment of déjà vu, because it was the exact same sort of pounding that came in the middle of the night when Scythe Faraday had died. Urgent, loud, and relentless.

She left the larger blade on the ground, but concealed the small one in a pocket sheath sewn into her pants. Whatever this was, she would not be unarmed when she answered the door.

She pulled open the door to reveal two officers of the BladeGuard, just as there had been that terrible night, and her heart sank.

“Citra Terranova?” one of the guardsmen asked.

“Yes?”

“I’m afraid you’ll need to come with us.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

But they didn’t tell her, and this time there was no one with them to explain. Then it occurred to her that this might not be what it seemed. How did she know that these were really BladeGuardsmen at all? Uniforms could be faked.

“Show me your badges!” she insisted. “I want to see your badges.”

Either they didn’t have any, or they didn’t want to be bothered with it, because one of them grabbed her.

“Maybe you didn’t hear me. I said come with us.”

Citra pulled out of his grip, spun around, and for just an instant considered the knife sheathed on the side of her pants, but instead delivered a brutal kick to his neck that took him down. She coiled, prepared to attack the other one, but she was an instant too late. He pulled out a jolt baton and jammed it into her side. Her own body suddenly became her enemy and she went down, hitting her head hard enough on the ground to knock her out.

When she came to, she was in a car, locked in the back, with a splitting headache that her pain nanites were struggling to subdue. She tried to lift a hand to her face, but found her hands restrained. There were steel clamps cinched on both hands and connected by a short chain. Some awful artifact from the Age of Mortality.

She pounded on the barrier between the front and back seats until finally one of the guardsmen turned to her, his gaze anything but peaceful.

“Do you want another jolt?” he threatened. “I’d be happy to give you one. After what you did, I wouldn’t mind turning the voltage into the red.”

“What I did? I haven’t done anything! What am I being accused of?”

“An ancient crime called murder,” he said. “The murder of Honorable Scythe Michael Faraday.”

? ? ?

No one read her rights. No one offered her an attorney for her defense. Such laws and customs were from a very different age. An age when crime was a fact of life, and entire industries were based on apprehending, trying, and punishing criminals. In a crime-free world, there was no modern precedent for how to deal with such a thing. Anything this complex and strange would usually be left for the Thunderhead to resolve—but this was a scythe matter, which meant the Thunderhead would not interfere. Citra’s fate was entirely in the hands of High Blade Xenocrates.

She was brought to his residence, the log cabin in the middle of a well-kept lawn that spread across the roof of a one hundred nineteen–story building.

She sat in a hard wooden chair. The cuffs on her hands were too tight, and her pain nanites were fighting a losing battle to quell the ache.

Xenocrates stood before her, eclipsing the light. This time Xenocrates was neither kind nor comforting.