The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,105

and I will forgive you if you renounce your destructive ways and serve us in peace.”

The Sibilants looked past him to the doors of the concert hall. Their goal was so close, but there was something commanding about this young man before them. Something… divine.

“I give you a sign,” he said, “from the Thunderhead, to whom I alone can speak, and to whom I alone can intercede on your behalf.”

Then he spread out his arms… and out of the sky they came. Mourning doves. A hundred of them swooping in from all directions, as if they had been waiting all this time in the eaves of every building in the city! They landed on him, perching on his arms, his body, his head, until he could not be seen anymore. They covered him from head to toe, their light-brown bodies and wings like a shell, like an armor around him—and the color of it. The pattern of the feathers enveloping him, the way they moved. The sibilant Tonists realized what he now resembled.

He looked like a storm cloud. A Thunderhead billowing with wrath.

Suddenly the birds took off in all directions, leaving him and disappearing back to the hidden corners of the city from whence they came.

All was silent but for the last flapping of departing wings. And in that silence the Toll spoke in nearly a whisper.

“Now drop your weapons and fall to your knees.”

And they did.

* * *

Being a dead prophet was much better than being a live one.

When you were dead, you weren’t obliged to fill your days with a mind-numbing parade of supplicants. You were free to go where you wanted, when you wanted—and more importantly, where you were needed. But the best part about it was that nobody tried to kill you.

Being dead, Greyson Tolliver concluded, was much better for his peace of mind than being alive.

Since his public demise, Greyson had spent over two years traveling the world in an attempt to wrangle in the sibilant Tonists that were popping up everywhere. He and everyone with him traveled as modestly as possible. Public trains, commercial airlines. Greyson never wore his embroidered scapular and violet tunic when they traveled. They were all incognito in simple, drab Tonist attire. No one asked questions of Tonists for fear that they’d start espousing their beliefs. Most people would look the other way, avoiding eye contact.

Of course, if Curate Mendoza had his way, they would travel the world in a private jet with vertical landing capability, so the Toll could plop out of the sky like an actual god-machine. But Greyson forbade it, feeling there was already too much hypocrisy in the world.

“Tonists are not supposed to be materialistic,” he told Mendoza.

“Neither are scythes,” Mendoza pointed out, “and how did that work out?”

Nevertheless, this wasn’t a democracy. What the Toll said was law among them, no matter who disagreed with it.

Sister Astrid was on Greyson’s side.

“I think your resistance to extravagance is a good thing,” she said. “And I imagine the Thunderhead agrees.”

“As long as we get where we’re going by the time we need to get there, the Thunderhead has no opinion,” Greyson told her. Although he suspected that the Thunderhead was rerouting trains and flights to speed their way to their destinations. Greyson supposed that if the Toll proclaimed they must travel by mule, the Thunderhead would somehow supply them with racing mules.

Even with modest travel, Mendoza always managed to find a way to make their arrival dramatic and impressive enough to shake sibilant Tonists to their corroded foundations. Whatever strange and disturbing things they were doing, Greyson would reveal himself to them as the Toll and denounce them, renounce them, and basically shut them down, leaving them begging for his forgiveness.

The trick with the birds had been Greyson’s idea. It was easy enough. All Earth’s creatures had nanites so that the Thunderhead could monitor their populations—which meant that the Thunderhead had a back door into each species’s behavior.

The scythedom had done something similar with the sea life around Endura, turning them into a free-range aquarium. But unlike that ill-fated technology, the Thunderhead did not manipulate the animals for human pleasure—or, as it turned out in the end—human pain. It only controlled a creature if that creature was in danger of becoming roadkill, or engaging in any other behavior that would end its life. As there were no revival centers for wild animals, it was the most effective way to allow them to live the full length of