Thunderhead (Arc of a Scythe #2)(50)

Greyson hesitated. “I haven’t found out yet,” he lied. “But what’s more important are the people she knows.”

“She?” Traxler raised that eyebrow again, and Greyson silently cursed himself. He had been trying as hard as he could not to reveal anything about Purity—not even her gender. But now it was out, and there was nothing he could do about it

“Yes. I think she’s connected with some pretty shady people, but I haven’t met them yet. They’re the ones we should be worried about, not her.”

“I’ll make that determination,” Traxler told him. “In the meantime, it would behoove you to go as deep as you can go.”

“I’m deep,” Greyson told him.

Traxler looked him in the eye. “Go deeper.”

? ? ?

Greyson found that when he was with Purity, he didn’t think about Traxler, or his mission. He just thought about her. There was no question that she was involved in criminal activity—and not just pretend-crimes, like most unsavories, but the real thing.

Purity knew ways to fly beneath the Thunderhead’s radar, and taught them to Greyson.

“If the Thunderhead knew all the things I did, it would relocate me, the way it did to you,” Purity told him. “Then it would tweak my nanites to make me think happy thoughts. It might even supplant my memory completely. ?The Thunderhead would cure me. But I don’t want to be cured. I want to be worse than unsavory; I want to be bad. Honestly and truly bad.”

He had never thought of the Thunderhead from the perspective of an unrepentant unsavory. ?Was it wrong for the Thunderhead to rehabilitate people from the inside out? Should evil people be allowed the freedom to be evil, without any safety nets? Is that what Purity was? Was she evil? Greyson found he had no answers to the questions swimming in his head.

“How about you, Slayd?” she asked him. “Do you want to be bad?”

He knew what his answer was 99 percent of the time. But when he was in her arms, his whole body screaming with the sensation of being with her in that moment where the clear crystal of his conscience fractured into jade, his answer was a resounding “yes.”

? ? ?

The third of Scythe Anastasia’s gleanings was the most complicated to accomplish. The subject was an actor by the name of Sir Albin Aldrich. The “sir” was a fictional title, since no one was actually knighted anymore, but sounded much more impressive for a classically trained actor. Citra had known his profession when she had chosen him, and suspected he would want a theatrical end, which Citra would be more than happy to provide—but his request surprised even her.

“I wish to be gleaned as part of a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which I will be playing the title role.”

Apparently, the day after she had selected him for gleaning, he and his repertory company had dropped the show they had been rehearsing and prepared for a single performance of the famed mortal-age tragedy.

“The play holds so little meaning for our times, Your Honor,” he explained to her, “but if Caesar doesn’t just pretend to die—if, instead, he is gleaned, and the audience witnesses it—perhaps the play will linger with them, as it must have in the Age of Mortality.”

Scythe Constantine was livid when Citra explained the request to him.

“Absolutely not! Anyone could be in that audience!”

“Exactly,” Citra told him. “And everyone there will either work for the theater group, or have prepurchased tickets. Which means that you can vet everyone before the night of the performance. You’ll know if there’s anyone there who’s not supposed to be.”

“I’ll need to double the contingent of undercover guards. Xenocrates won’t like it!”

“If we catch the culprit, he’ll love it,” Citra pointed out, and Scythe Constantine couldn’t disagree.

“If we go through with this,” he said, “I will make it clear to the High Blade that it was at your insistence. If we fail, and your existence is ended, the blame will be yours and yours alone.”

“I can live with that,” Citra told him.

“No,” Scythe Constantine pointed out, “you won’t.”

? ? ?

“We have a job,” Purity told Greyson. “The kind of job you’ve been looking for. It’s not exactly going over the falls in a raft, but it’s a thrill that’s gonna leave a whole lot of legacy.”

“It was an inner tube, not a raft,” he corrected. “What kind of job?” He found himself as wary as he was curious. He had become accustomed to the pattern of life now. ?The days moving through unsavory circles, and the nights with Purity. She was a force of nature, as nature was in the old days. ?A hurricane before the Thunderhead knew how to diffuse its devastating power. An earthquake before it knew how to redistribute its violent shaking into a thousand small tremors. She was the untamed world—and although Greyson knew he saw her in absurd shades of grandeur, he indulged it, because lately indulgence was what he had become about. Would this job change that? Agent Traxler had told him to go deeper. Now he was so deep in his own unsavorism, he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to come up for air.

“We’re gonna mess with everything, Slayd,” she told him. “We’re gonna mark the world like animals do, and leave behind a scent that’ll never go away.”