Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(87)
Answering that would be a blatant interference in scythe matters. It pains me to stay silent, but I must.
You’re the Thunderhead. You’re all-powerful—can’t you find another loophole?
I am not all-powerful, Citra. I am almost all-powerful. That distinction might seem small, but believe me, it is not.
Yes, but an almost all-powerful entity can figure out a way to give me what I ask without breaking its own laws, can’t it?
Just a moment.
Just a moment.
Just a moment.
Why am I seeing a beach ball?
Forgive me. Early programming before becoming self-aware plagues me like a vestigial tail.
I have just run a battery of predictive algorithms, and there actually is a piece of information I can give you, because I have determined it’s something you have a 100 percent chance of discovering on your own.
So can you tell me who’s responsible for what happened to Scythe Faraday?
Yes I can.
Gerald Van Der Gans.
Wait—who?
Good-bye, Citra. I do hope we speak again.
But I’d have to be dead for that to happen.
I’m sure you could arrange it.
* * *
While there are only ten hard-and-fast laws to the Scythedom, there are many accepted conventions. The most darkly ironic is the understanding that no one may be gleaned who wishes to be gleaned.
The idea of truly wishing to end one’s own life is a concept completely foreign to most post-mortals, because we can’t experience the level of pain and despair that so seasoned the Age of Mortality. Our emo-nanites prevent us from plunging so deep. Only scythes, who can turn off our emotional nanites, can ever reach an impasse with our own existence.
And yet . . .
There was once a woman who knocked on my door requesting that I glean her. I never turn away visitors, so I let her in and listened to her story. Her husband of more than ninety years was gleaned five years prior. Now she wanted to be with him, wherever he was, and if he was nowhere, then at least they would be nowhere together.
“I’m not unhappy,” she told me. “I’m just . . . done.”
But immortality, by definition, means that we are never done, unless a scythe determines it to be so. We are no longer temporary; only our feelings are.
I saw no interminable stagnation in this woman, so instead of gleaning her I had her kiss my ring. The immunity was immediate and irrevocable—so she could no longer entertain thoughts of being gleaned for a full year.
I ran into her perhaps a decade later. She had turned the corner, resetting back to her late twenties. She had remarried and was expecting a child. She thanked me for being wise enough to know she was not “done” at all.
Although I accepted her thanks graciously and felt good about it in the moment, I had trouble sleeping that night. To this day, I still can’t understand why.
—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie
* * *
31
A Streak of Unrelenting Foolishness
Citra was pronounced alive at 9:42 a.m., Thursday morning, right on schedule, and passed from the jurisdiction of the Thunderhead to the jurisdiction of the Scythedom.
She woke up feeling much weaker and out of sorts than the first time she had died. She felt heavily drugged and bleary-eyed. Above her stood a nurse grimly shaking her head.
“She should not be woken this soon,” the nurse said, with an accent Citra was too tired to place. “She must have at least six hours after the pronouncement until she has recovered enough to be comfortably conscious. The girl could burst a blood vessel or blow out her heart, and have to be revived all over again.”
“I will take responsibility,” Citra heard Scythe Curie say. Citra turned her head toward Scythe Curie’s voice, and the world spun. She closed her eyes, waiting for the room to stop revolving. When the dizziness settled, she opened her eyes once more and saw that Scythe Curie had pulled her chair closer.
“Your body still needs another day to heal completely, but we don’t have time for that.” Scythe Curie turned to the nurse. “Please leave us now.”
The nurse grumbled in Spanic and stormed out of the room.
“The High Blade . . . ,” mumbled Citra, her words slurring. “He accused me of . . . of . . .”
“Shhh,” said Scythe Curie. “I know of the accusation. Xenocrates tried to keep it from me, but Scythe Mandela told me everything.”
As Citra’s eyes came into clearer focus, she saw the window behind Scythe Curie. There were mountains in the distance covered with snow, and there were flurries falling just outside. It gave Citra a moment of pause.
“How long have I been dead?” she asked. Could it be her splat was so severe that it took months to revive her?
“Not quite four days.” Then Scythe Curie turned around to see what Citra was looking at. She turned back with a grin. “The question is not of time but of place. You are in the southernmost tip of the Chilargentine Region. It is still late September, but here that means spring has just started. However, this far south, I suppose spring comes late.”