Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,72
Curie took her time in answering. Finally she said, “There’s no one in my life who knows me by that name.”
“What about your family? They must be still around—after all, they have immunity from gleaning as long as you’re alive.”
She sighed. “I haven’t been in touch with my family for more than a hundred years.”
Citra wondered if that would happen to her. Do all scythes lose the ties to everyone they had known—everything they had been before they were chosen?
“Susan,” Scythe Curie finally said. “When I was a little girl, they called me Susan. Suzy. Sue.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Susan.”
Citra found it next to impossible to imagine Scythe Curie as a little girl.
• • •
When they got home, Citra uploaded her pictures to the Thunderhead without worrying if the scythe saw, because there was nothing unusual or suspicious about that—everyone uploaded their photos. It would have been suspicious if she hadn’t.
Then, later that night, when Citra was sure Scythe Curie was asleep, she went to the study, got online, and retrieved the pics—which was easy to do since they were tagged. Then she dove into the backbrain, following all the links the Thunderhead had forged to her images. She was led to other pictures of her family, as well as other families that resembled hers in some way. Expected. But there were also links to videos taken by streetcams in the same locations. That’s just what she was looking for. Once she created her own algorithm to sort out the irrelevant photos from the streetcams, she had a full complement of surveillance videos. Of course, she was still left with millions of randomly accessed, unordered files, but at least now they were all streetcam records of Scythe Faraday’s neighborhood.
She uploaded an image of Scythe Faraday to see if she could isolate videos in which he appeared, but as she suspected, nothing came back. The Thunderhead’s hands-off policy when it came to scythes meant that scythe’s images were not tagged in any way. Still, she had successfully narrowed the field from billions of records to millions. However, tracking Scythe Faraday’s movements on the day he died was like trying to find a needle in a field of haystacks that stretched to the horizon. Even so, she was determined to find what she was looking for, no matter how long it took.
* * *
Gleanings should be iconic. They should be memorable. They should have the legendary power of the greatest battles of the mortal age, passed down by word of mouth, becoming as immortal as we are. That is, after all, why we scythes are here. To keep us connected to our past. Tethered to mortality. Yes, most of us will live forever, but some of us, thanks to the Scythedom, will not. For those who will be gleaned, do we not, at the very least, owe them a spectacular end?
—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Goddard
* * *
24
An Embarrassment to Who and What We Are
Numb. Rowan could feel himself growing numb—and while it might have been a good thing for his beleaguered sanity, it was not a good thing for his soul.
“Never lose your humanity,” Scythe Faraday had told him, “or you’ll be nothing more than a killing machine.” He had used the word “killing” rather than “gleaning.” Rowan hadn’t thought much of it at the time, but now he understood; it stopped being gleaning the moment one became desensitized to the act.
Yet this great plain of numbness was not the worst place to be. Numbness was a mere purgatory of gray. No, there was a much worse place. Darkness masquerading as enlightenment. It was a place of royal blue studded with diamonds that glistened like stars.
• • •
“No no no!” chided Scythe Goddard as he watched Rowan practice bladecraft with a samurai sword on cotton-stuffed dummies. “Have you learned nothing?”
Rowan was exasperated, but he kept it just beneath a simmer, counting to ten in his head before turning to face the scythe, who approached across the expanse of the estate’s front lawn, now littered with fluff and cottony remains.
“What did I do wrong this time, Your Honor?” To Rowan, the phrase “Your Honor” had become a profanity, and he couldn’t help but spit it out like one. “I cleanly decapitated five of them, eviscerated three, and I severed the aortas of the rest. If any of them had actually been alive, they would be dead now. I did just what you wanted.”