Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(21)

“You will drive us to today’s gleanings,” Marie told her.

“I can do that,” she told Scythe Curie, although she didn’t feel as confident as she sounded. On their last lesson, Citra had run them into a ditch.

“It’s mostly country roads,” Marie told her as they went out to her car, “so it will test your skills without putting too many in harm’s way.”

“We’re scythes,” Citra pointed out. “We are harm’s way.”

The small town on today’s agenda hadn’t seen a gleaning in over a year. Today it would see two. Scythe Curie’s would be swift, and Scythe Anastasia’s would come with a month’s delay. They had found a rhythm to their joint gleaning excursions that suited both of them.

They pulled out from Fallingwater’s carport haltingly, as Citra still had trouble with the Porsche’s manual transmission. The concept of a clutch felt to Citra like some sort of medieval punishment.

“What’s the point of three foot pedals?” Citra complained. “People only have two feet.”

“Think of it as a piano, Anastasia.”

“I hate the piano.”

The banter made it a little bit easier on Citra, and her driving became smoother when she could complain. Still, she was only on the upswing of her learning curve . . . so things would have turned out very differently had Scythe Curie been driving.

They were barely a quarter mile down Fallingwater’s winding private road when a figure leaped out at them from the woods.

“It’s a splatter!” shouted Scythe Curie. It had become all the new rage for thrill-seeking teens to do impersonations of windshield bugs. Not an easy challenge, because it was very hard to catch a car on the grid by surprise—and those who were off-grid were usually seasoned drivers. Had Scythe Curie been at the wheel, she would have handily swerved around the would-be splatter and continued on without a second thought—but Citra had none of the requisite reflexes. Instead, Citra found her hands frozen on the wheel, and although she tried to punch the brake, she managed to hit the loathsome clutch instead. They barreled right into the splatter, who bounced on the hood, spiderwebbed their windshield, and flipped over the roof of the car. He had already landed behind them by the time Citra found the brake and they squealed to a halt.

“Crap!”

Scythe Curie took a deep breath and released it. “That, Anastasia, would definitely have caused you to fail a mortal-age driving test.”

They got out of the car, and while Scythe Curie inspected the damage to her Porsche, Citra stormed toward the splatter, determined to give him a piece of her mind. Her first real outing behind the wheel, and some stupid splatter had to ruin it!

He was still alive, but barely, and although he appeared to be in agony, Citra knew better. His pain nanites had kicked in the moment he had connected with the car—and road-splatters always had their nanites dialed high, so they could experience maximum damage with minimum discomfort. His healing nanites were already trying to repair the damage, but they only succeeded in prolonging the inevitable. He would be deadish in less than a minute.

“Are you satisfied?” Citra said as she approached him. “Did you have your little thrill at our expense? We’re scythes, you know—I should glean you before the ambudrone arrives.” Not that she would, but she could.

He met her gaze. She expected him to have a smug expression, but it seemed more desperate than anything. She wasn’t expecting that.

“B . . . . B . . . Boo,” he said through a swelling mouth.

“Boo?” said Citra. “Really? Sorry, but you missed Halloween by a month.”

Then he grabbed her robe with a bloody hand, and pulled on it with more force than she thought he could have. It made her trip over her hem, and she fell to her knees.

“Boo . . . Tr . . . Tra . . . Boo . . . Tra . . .”

Then his hand let go, and he went limp. His eyes stayed open, but Citra had seen death enough to know that he was gone.

Even out here in the forest, an ambudrone would come for him shortly. They hovered over even the most sparsely populated areas.

“What a nuisance,” lamented Scythe Curie when Citra returned to her. “He’ll be up and walking again long before they can fix the damage to my car—bragging all about how he splatted a pair of scythes.”

Still, the whole thing weighed on Citra. She didn’t know why it should. Perhaps it was his eyes. Or maybe the desperation in his voice. He didn’t seem the way she thought a road-splatter would. It gave her pause. Pause enough to consider what she might be missing about the situation. She looked around, and that’s when she spotted it: a thin wire stretched across the road, not ten feet in front of where the car came to a halt.

“Marie? Look at this. . . .”

The two of them approached the wire, which stretched to trees on either side. That’s when it came to her what the splatter was trying to say.

Booby trap.

They followed the wire to the tree on the left, and sure enough, just behind the tree was a detonator wired to enough explosives to blow a crater a hundred feet wide. Citra felt her breath stolen, and had to suck it back in. Scythe Curie’s face didn’t change. It stayed stoic.

“Get in the car, Citra.”

Citra didn’t argue. The fact that Marie had forgotten to call her Anastasia betrayed how worried she truly was.