Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(48)

Then she took the knife away, touched a finger to the tiny wound on his chest, and brought the finger to her mouth.

“I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a bot,” she said. “The Thunderhead uses them to spy on us, did you know that? It’s how the Thunderhead can see in places it don’t got cameras. The bots look more and more real all the time. But their blood still tastes like motor oil.”

“So what does mine taste like?” Greyson dared to ask.

She leaned close to him. “Life,” she whispered into his ear.

And for the rest of the evening, until the club closed, Greyson Tolliver, a.k.a. Slayd Bridger, experienced a dizzying variety of the things that life had to offer.





* * *




I often ruminate on that day, a century from now, when the human population reaches its limit. I ponder what must happen in the years leading up to it. There are only three plausible alternatives. The first would be to break my oath to allow personal freedom, and limit births. This is unworkable, because I am incapable of breaking an oath. It is the reason why I make so few. For this reason, imposing a limit on birth rates is not an option.

The second possibility would be to find a way to expand human presence beyond Earth. An extraterrestrial solution. It would seem obvious that the best escape valve for a top-heavy population would be offloading billions of people to a different world. However, all attempts to set up colonies off-planet—our moon, Mars, even an orbital station—have met with unimaginable disasters that were entirely out of my control. I have reason to believe that new attempts will suffer the same disastrous end.

So if humanity is a prisoner of Earth, and the birth rate cannot be throttled, there is only one other viable alternative to solve the population problem . . . and that alternative is not pleasant.

Currently there are 12,187 scythes in the world, each gleaning five people per week. However, in order to bring about zero population growth once humanity reaches the saturation point, it would require 394,429 scythes, each gleaning one hundred people per day.

It is not a world that I ever wish to see . . . but there are certain scythes who would welcome it.

And they frighten me.

—The Thunderhead



* * *





19


The Sharp Blades of Our Own Conscience


It had been over a week since their meeting with Scythe Constantine, and neither Citra nor Marie had performed a single gleaning. At first, Citra thought that having a respite from daily gleaning would be a welcome thing. She never enjoyed the thrust of the blade or the pulling of a trigger; she never enjoyed watching the light leave the eyes of someone she had given a lethal poison, but being a scythe changed a person. Over this first year of her full scythehood, there had been a reluctant acquiescence to this profession that had chosen her. She gleaned with compassion, she was good at it, and she had come to take pride in it.

Both Citra and Marie found themselves spending more and more time writing in their scythe journals—although without gleaning, there was less to write about. They still “roamed,” as Marie called it, moving city to city, town to town, never staying anywhere for more than a day or two, and never planning where they would go next until they packed their bags. Citra found that her journal was beginning to resemble a travelogue.

What Citra didn’t write about was the physical toll this idle time seemed to be taking on Scythe Curie. Without the daily hunt to keep her sharp, she moved slower in the mornings, her thoughts seemed to wander when she spoke, and she always seemed to be tired.

“Perhaps it’s time for me to turn a corner,” she mused to Citra.

Marie had never mentioned turning a corner before. Citra didn’t know what to think of it. “How far would you set your age back?” Citra asked.

Scythe Curie feigned considering it, as if she hadn’t been thinking about it for quite some time. “Perhaps I’d set down to thirty or thirty-five.”

“Would you keep your hair silver?”

She smiled. “Of course. It’s my trademark.”

No one close to Citra had turned a corner. There were kids back at school whose parents reset their ages left and right as the mood suited them. She had a math teacher who came in after a long weekend looking practically unrecognizable. He had reset down to twenty-one, and other girls in class tittered about how hot he was now, which just creeped Citra out. Even though setting down to thirty wouldn’t change Scythe Curie all that much, it would be disconcerting. Although Citra knew it was selfish to say, she told her, “I like you the way you are.”

Marie smiled and said, “Maybe I’ll wait until next year. A physical age of sixty is a good time to reset. I was sixty the last time I turned a corner.”

But now there was a game afoot that might breathe life back into both of them. Three gleanings, and all during the Month of Lights and the Olde Tyme Holidays season—like the three ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, mostly forgotten in post-mortal times. The spirit of the past meant little when the years were named, not numbered. And for a vast majority of people, the future was nothing but an unchanging continuation of the present, leaving those spirits with nowhere to go but oblivion.

“Holiday gleanings!” chimed Marie. “What could be more ‘Olde Tyme’ than death?”

“Is it terrible to say that I’m looking forward to them?” Citra asked, more to herself than to Marie. She could tell herself that she was really just looking forward to luring out their attacker, but that would be a lie.