The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,18

it’s not against the law to imply.”

* * *

On the fourth day out—still several hundred miles from the coordinates—things began to get weird.

It began with the autopilot losing its connection to the Thunderhead. Without that connection, it could still navigate, but couldn’t problem solve. It was just a mindless machine. Not only that, but they lost all radio connection to the outside world. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Technology functioned. Always. Even after the Thunderhead went silent. And in the void of answers, speculation quickly became incendiary.

“What if this is worldwide?”

“What if the Thunderhead is dead?”

“What if we’re truly alone in the world now?”

There were people who were actually glancing at Loriana, as if she might lighten things with a silver lining.

“We’ll turn around,” blustered one of the agents—Sykora was his name—a small-minded man who had been a naysayer from the beginning. “We’ll go back and forget about this nonsense.”

It was Loriana who made the crucial observation as she looked at the blinking error screen.

“It says we’re thirty nautical miles from the nearest network buoy,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be twenty miles apart, aren’t they?”

A quick check of the buoy grid showed no signals. Which meant the Thunderhead had no presence in these waters.

“Interesting…,” said Director Hilliard. “Good catch, Agent Barchok.”

Loriana wanted to preen from the praise but didn’t let herself.

Hilliard took in the uncharted waters ahead. “Did you know that the human eye has a huge patch of nothing just off the center of its field of vision?”

Loriana nodded. “The blind spot.”

“Our brains tell us there’s nothing to see there and fill in the blanks so we don’t even notice it.”

“But if the Thunderhead has a blind spot, how would it even know that it exists?”

Director Hilliard raised her eyebrows.

“Maybe someone told it….”

I continue to keep this journal, even though there is no need. A daily endeavor is difficult to break once it becomes engrained in who we are. Munira assures me that, come what may, she will find a way to slip this journal into the archive at the Library of Alexandria. That would be a first! A scythe who continues their dutiful journaling even after death.

We have been here at the Kwajalein Atoll for six weeks now, with no communication from the outside world. While I itch to hear news of Marie, and how she fared at the inquest on Endura, I cannot dwell on it. Either all went well, and she is presiding over MidMerica as High Blade… or it did not go her way, and our task becomes an even greater challenge.  All the more reason to unlock the secret of the atoll and access the wisdom of the founding scythes. Their contingency plan for the scythedom’s failure, whatever it is, could be the only thing that can save it.

Munira and I have taken up residence in the bunker we found. We’ve also constructed a rudimentary canoe that is small enough to evade the island’s security system. It can’t go any distance, of course, but we’ve been using it to paddle out to the nearer islands of the atoll. We’ve been finding much the same there as we found here, evidence of earlier habitation. Concrete slabs, fragments of foundations. Nothing extraordinary.

We have, however, learned the original purpose of the place—or at least how it was used toward the end of the mortal age. The entire Kwajalein Atoll was a military installation. Not for the actual waging of war, but as a proving ground for emergent technologies. While some of the other nearby atolls were blasted with tests of nuclear weaponry, this atoll was used for the testing of rockets—as well as for the launching of spy satellites—some of which might even still be in the Thunderhead’s observational satellite network.

It’s obvious now why the founding scythes chose this place; it was already protected by layers of secrecy. Thus, with a foundation of shadow already in place, it made it easier to erase from the world completely.

If only we could access everything in the bunker, we might learn how the founding scythes repurposed this place. Unfortunately, we can’t get beyond the uppermost level. The rest of the installation is behind a door with double gem-locks that require two scythes—one standing on either side of the door—to open.

As for the island’s defense system, we don’t know how to disable it, but being very literally under the radar makes it a moot point. The problem is, now that we are here—whether we find anything or