The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,121
the pilot made a sudden evasive maneuver. It was unnecessary—the drones would stay far from the chopper’s path—but they couldn’t avoid a sudden flinch of human error that pulled the helicopter directly into their flight paths. The helicopter’s blade sliced an ambudrone in two, the blade broke, and the helicopter came careening toward the palace.
Anastasia grabbed Jeri and turned away. The explosion seemed to rock the entire world. It blew a hole in the palace, taking down several of the marble columns holding up the monstrously heavy bronze dome.
And the dome began to list to one side.
Then from below came the most awful vibration. It’s the remaining columns, thought Anastasia. They can’t hold the weight. They’re crumbling….
And still the ambudrones buzzed past them on their way to claim the deadish from the gardens and lawns.
“My wounds are bad, but they’re not lethal,” Jeri said. “If we’re going to attract an ambudrone, one of us must die.”
Flames now licked through the ruptured skylights. The sound of crashing columns echoed from below, and the dome listed farther.
Jeri was right—there was no way around it—so Anastasia pulled out a blade and aimed the tip toward her own chest, ready to render herself deadish so an ambudrone would come.
But no! What was she thinking? How unbelievably stupid! It wasn’t like hurling herself off Xenocrates’s roof when she was just an apprentice. She was a scythe now; if she took her own life, it would be considered a self-gleaning. The ambudrones wouldn’t come for her. And as she pondered the idiocy of what she had almost just done, Jeri gently took the blade from her.
“For you, Honorable Scythe Anastasia, I would die a thousand deaths at my own hand. But one will be sufficient.” Then Jeri thrust the blade inward.
A gasp. A cough. A grimace. And Jeri was deadish.
An ambudrone sped by… then stopped in midflight, doubled back, and came for Jeri. It seized the salvage captain in its pincers, and as it did, the dome began to give way.
Anastasia grabbed for the ambudrone, but there was nothing to grip on to—so instead she grasped Jeri’s arm with both hands as tightly as she could.
Beneath her, the dome fell away, plunging into the flames, imploding into the atrium. It struck the ground, destroying what was left of the palace, and let off a powerful metallic resonance like the toll of a funeral bell. Like the final, mournful note of a requiem.
While up above, the ambudrone carried away the deadish sea captain and the scythe dangling from the captain’s arm, delivering them to a place that promised life to everyone who crossed through its doors.
We are bitterly opposed. Eight of us firmly believe that an association of humans should be responsible for the thinning of the burgeoning population. But the four against it are adamant in their resistance. Confucius, Elizabeth, Sappho, and King insist that we are simply not ready for such a responsibility any more than we were ready for immortality—but the alternative they propose terrifies me, for if we implement their plan, it will be a genie out of the bottle. Out of our control forever. I therefore stand with Prometheus and the others. We must establish an honorable worldwide society of death mongers. We shall call ourselves scythes and will create a global scythedom.
The sentient cloud, which will have nothing to do with issues of life or death, supports it, and people will come to see the wisdom of it in time. As for the four dissenters among us, they will have to accept the voice of the majority, so that we present a unified front to the world.
Still, I wonder which is worse: to mimic nature in its cruel brutality, or to take it upon ourselves, imperfect as we are, to insert into death the kindness and compassion that nature lacks.
The four in opposition argue for nature as a model, but I cannot advocate for it. Not while I still have a conscience.
—From the “lost pages” of founding scythe Da Vinci
36 Who Do You Serve?
Although the Thunderhead had predicted it, Greyson didn’t need the Thunderhead to tell him that the first repercussions from the Mile High gleaning would be from sibilant Tonists. The only question was where would it happen? Would it be against Goddard directly, or would it be somewhere less prepared for an onslaught of violent zealots?
He had his answer when he saw the first images of the burned ruins of the SubSaharan palace.