The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,147

but a full convention center. He threw himself into it, never knowing that there was absolutely no plan to connect it with the rest of the atoll. The Thunderhead, it seemed, had sent him a job just to get him out of the way. It was, as Scythe Faraday had once put it, a sandbox for Sykora to play in while the adults took care of the real business of Kwajalein.

It wasn’t until the end of the second year that it became clear to everyone exactly what that business was—because the structures that were beginning to rise on the double-thick concrete pads, and beneath the massive sky cranes, were very specific in nature. Once they began to take shape, they were hard to deny.

In Loriana’s schematics, they were referred to as Cradles of Civilization. But most people would simply call them spacecraft.

Forty-two massive ships, each on immense rocket boosters augmented by magnetic repulsion for maximum lift. Every island of the atoll large enough to accommodate a launchpad held at least one craft and gantry tower. Even with all the Thunderhead’s advanced technology, getting off the Earth still required old-fashioned brute force.

“What does the Thunderhead mean to do with them?” Munira had asked Loriana.

Loriana had no more explanation than anyone, but the plans gave her a glimpse of the big picture that no one else had. “There’s an awful lot of aluminized Mylar in the plans,” she told Munira. “The kind of stuff that’s only a few microns thick.”

“Solar sails?” suggested Munira.

That had been Loriana’s guess, too. In theory, it was the best kind of propulsion for long cosmic distances. Which meant that these craft would not be hanging around their neighborhood.

“Why you?” Munira had asked when Loriana first confided in her about having the full overview of blueprints. “Why would the Thunderhead give all that to you?”

Loriana had shrugged. “I guess the Thunderhead trusts me more than anyone else not to muck it up.”

“Or,” suggested Munira, “the Thunderhead is using you as the stress test—giving it to the person most likely to screw things up—because if a plan can survive you, then it’s foolproof!”

Loriana laughed. Munira was dead serious, not at all getting the insult she had just delivered.

“I can believe that,” Loriana had said.

* * *

Munira, of course, knew what she was doing. It was great fun to tease Loriana. The truth was Munira had come to admire the girl. She came off as frazzled at times, but Loriana was one of the most capable people Munira knew. She could get more things done in a day than most people got done in a week—precisely because more “serious” people took her for granted, so she could work under everyone’s radar.

Munira did not involve herself in the construction efforts. Nor did she separate herself from the rest of the atoll, as Faraday had. She could have holed up in the old bunker indefinitely, but after the first year, she tired of it. That obdurate, impassible door just reminded her of all the things she and Faraday could not accomplish. The founders’ fail-safe, if it even existed, was sealed in there. But as information trickled in about the new order, and how Goddard was swallowing larger and larger portions of North Merica, she began to wonder if it might not be worth pushing Faraday just a little harder to come up with a plan to breach that miserable door.

While Munira had never been much of a people person, she now spent her days hearing strangers’ most personal secrets. They came to her because she was a good listener, and because she had no social ties that might make their little confessions awkward. Munira didn’t even know she had become a “professional confidant” until it showed up on her ID, replacing “librarian” as her profession. Apparently personal confidants were much in demand everywhere since the Thunderhead went silent. Used to be that people confided in the Thunderhead. It was supportive, nonjudgmental, and its advice was always the right advice. Without it, people found themselves bereft of a sympathetic ear.

Munira was not sympathetic, and not all that supportive, but she had learned from Loriana how to suffer fools politely, for Loriana was always dealing with imbeciles who thought they knew better than her. Munira’s clients weren’t imbeciles for the most part, but they talked about a whole lot of nothing. She supposed listening to them wasn’t all that different from reading the scythe journals in the stacks of the Library of Alexandria. A