The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,146

so, few people were keen on the idea. Self-preservation, after all, was an instinct.

Loriana, while no longer anything close to a Nimbus agent, was in charge of the limited one-way communication to the Thunderhead, and so, over time, she had become the one who people came to with requests and complaints.

“Can’t we please get a greater variety of cereal brought to the atoll?”

“It would be nice to have companion animals!”

“The new bridge connecting the larger islands needs a dedicated bike lane.”

“Yes, of course,” Loriana would tell them. “I’ll see what I can do.”

And when the more reasonable requests were fulfilled, people would thank her. What these people didn’t realize was that she did nothing to bring those things about—it was the Thunderhead who heard them, without her intercession, and effected a response, sending more cereal and a variety of pets on the next supply ship, or assigning workers to paint lines for a bike lane.

This place was no longer a blind spot for the Thunderhead after they had finally dropped a fiber optic cable along the seafloor all the way out to the edge of the affected area. The Thunderhead could now see, hear, and otherwise sense things on the islands of the atoll—albeit not as thoroughly as it did in the rest of the world, but well enough. It was limited, because everything—even person-to-person communication—had to be hardwired, since transmission interference still made wireless communication sketchy. Plus, any communication might be intercepted by the scythedom, and the Thunderhead’s secret place would no longer be a secret. It was all very twentieth-century retro, which some liked, and others did not. Loriana was fine with it. It meant she had a legitimate excuse for not being reachable when she didn’t want to be reached.

But as the island’s communications queen, she also had to deal with the brunt of disgruntlement—and when hundreds of people were trapped on small islands, there were plenty of disgruntled people.

There was one particularly enraged team of construction workers that burst into her office, demanding a way off the atoll, or they would take matters into their own hands. They threatened to render her deadish, if only to make a point—which would have been quite the nuisance, because, even though they had a revival center on the main island now, the lack of wireless communication meant that her memories had not been backed up since her arrival. If she went deadish, she’d wake up wondering where the heck she was, with her last memory being onboard the Lanikai Lady with poor Director Hilliard the moment they passed into the blind spot.

It was that thought that gave her the answer!

“The Thunderhead will supplant you with yourselves!” she told them.

It confused them enough to take the wind out of their homicidal sails.

“It has memory constructs of all of you,” she told them. “It will simply erase you and replace you… with you. But only with the memories you had before coming here!”

“Can the Thunderhead do that?” they asked.

“Of course it can,” she told them, “and it will!”

They were dubious, but without any viable alternatives, they accepted it. After all, Loriana seemed so very sure of herself.

She wasn’t, of course. She was making the whole thing up—but she had to believe that the Thunderhead, being the benevolent entity that it was, would make good on this request, just as it had made good on the requests for more cereal choices.

Only when the first team of exiting workers was restored as themselves, but with no memory of the atoll, did she know that the Thunderhead had accepted her bold suggestion.

There were a lot of workers leaving now, because the work was done.

It had been done for many months. All that was in the schematics that the Thunderhead had given her had been completed. She didn’t overtly oversee the construction. She merely worked secretly behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t go awry—because there were always those who wanted to insert their noses where they didn’t belong. Such as the time Sykora refused to pour a double foundation, insisting that it was an unnecessary waste of resources.

She made sure that Sykora’s revised work order never reached the construction team. It seemed a lot of her job at first was undermining Sykora’s meddling.

Then a new work order came in that was not on Loriana’s plans. It was delivered directly to Sykora. He was charged with overseeing the construction of a resort placed on the farthest island of the atoll. Not just a resort,