Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1)(88)

Citra tried to picture a map and get a sense of how far from home she was, but just trying to imagine it made her head spin again.

“The Thunderhead saw fit to take you as far from the clutches of Scythe Xenocrates, and the corruption of the MidMerican Scythedom, as possible. But the moment you revived, they were notified of your location, as is the law.”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“A friend of a friend of a friend is a Nimbus agent. Word got to me only yesterday, and I came as quickly as I could.”

“Thank you,” said Citra. “Thank you for coming.”

“Thank me once you are safe. Now that you’ve been revived and Xenocrates knows where you are, you can bet he’s notified the local scythes. I’m certain a team has been dispatched to retrieve you, which means we need to get you out of here now.”

With a shattered body that was still healing and nanites pumping an endless stream of opiates into her system, Citra could barely move, much less walk. Her bones ached, her brain felt like it was floating in a jar, her muscles were knotted, and trying to put weight on her feet was excruciating because there was simply too much pain to tamp down. No wonder the nurse had wanted her to remain unconscious.

“This won’t do,” said Scythe Curie, and took Citra up into her arms, carrying her.

The revival center hallways seemed endless, and each time Citra was jostled, her whole body throbbed. Finally, she found herself spread out on the backseat of an off-grid car that Scythe Curie drove at what seemed to Citra to be a breakneck speed. ?The thought made her laugh weakly. What an odd expression, when the breaking of her neck had seemed to happen in slow motion. Flurries blowing past the windows appeared to be a blizzard at this speed. It was hypnotic. At last numbness began to overtake her, and she felt sleep begin to envelop her like quicksand. . . .

. . . But the moment before Citra lost consciousness, she remembered just a hint of a dream that may not have been a dream at all. A conversation in a place that was neither life nor death, but a womb between the two.

“The Thunderhead . . . it spoke to me,” Citra said, forcing herself to stay conscious just long enough to get this out.

“The Thunderhead doesn’t speak to scythes, dear.”

“I was still dead . . . and it told me a name. The man who killed Scythe Faraday.” But the quicksand pulled her down before she could say any more.

? ? ?

Citra awoke in a cabin, and for a moment thought she might have hallucinated all of it. The Thunderhead, the revival center, the car ride in the snow. For that moment she thought she was still in the rooftop residence of High Blade Xenocrates, waiting for the tor-turé to begin. But no—the light here was different, and the wood in the cabin around her was a lighter shade. Outside the window, she could see snowy mountains closer than they were before, although the flurries had stopped.

Scythe Curie came in a few minutes later with a tray and a bowl of soup. “Good, you’re awake. I trust you’ve healed enough over the past few hours to be a little more coherent, and a little less miserable.”

“Coherent, yes,” said Citra. “Less miserable, no. Just a different kind of misery.”

Citra sat up, feeling only a little bit loopy now, and Scythe Curie put the tray with the large bowl of soup in her lap. “It’s a chicken soup recipe passed down for more generations than anyone remembers,” she told Citra.

The soup looked fairly standard, but there was a round moon-like mass in the middle. “What’s that?”

“The best part,” said Scythe Curie. “A sort of a dumpling made from the ground crumbs of unleavened bread.”

Citra tried the soup. It was flavorful and the moon-ball unique and memorable. Comfort food, thought Citra, because somehow it made her feel safe from the inside out. “My grandmother said it could actually heal a cold.”

“What’s a cold?” asked Citra.

“A deadly illness from the mortal age, I suppose.”

It was amazing to think that someone only two generations older than Scythe Curie could have known what it was like to be mortal—fearing for her life on a daily basis, knowing that death was a certainty rather than an exception. Citra wondered what Scythe Curie’s grandmother would think of the world now, where there was nothing left for her soup to cure.

When the soup was done, Citra steeled herself for what she knew she must tell the scythe.

“There’s something you need to know,” Citra said. “Xenocrates showed me something he said Scythe Faraday wrote. It was his handwriting, but I don’t know how he could have written it.”

Scythe Curie sighed. “I’m afraid he did.”

Citra was not expecting that. “So you’ve seen it then?

Scythe Curie nodded. “Yes, I have.”

“But why would he write that? He said I wanted to kill him. That I was plotting horrible things. None of that was true!”

Scythe Curie offered Citra the slimmest of grins. “He wasn’t talking about you, Citra,” she explained. “He wrote that about me.”

? ? ?

“When Faraday was still a junior scythe—all of twenty-two years old—he took me on as an apprentice,” said Scythe Curie. “I was seventeen and full of righteous indignation at a world that was still heaving in the throes of transformation. Immortality had been a reality for barely fifty years. There was still discord, and political posturing, even fear of the Thunderhead, if you could imagine that.”