The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,186

yourself. Even more, now that your memory construct is in there.”

He turned to see a woman sitting in the corner. Dark hair and an intense gaze. She was dressed in green.

“Hello, Tyger,” she said with a very satisfied smile.

“Do I… know you?”

“No,” she said. “But I know you.”

* * *

The scythe arrived late on a cold November afternoon. There was no brightening of sun, no foreshadowing of the arrival of deliverance at their door. But when they saw him, the family inside threw the door open wide and stepped back to allow him plenty of room to enter.

“You are welcome in our home, Your Honor. Please, this way. Hurry!”

Scythe Faraday did not hurry. He moved with the same thoughtful intent with which he lived his life. Patience. Purpose. Duty.

He proceeded to the bedroom, where a man had been wasting away for weeks. Coughing, wheezing, grimacing. His eyes betrayed desperation when he saw Faraday. Fear, but also relief.

“Can you hear me?” Faraday asked. “You are suffering from the seventh plague, but I’m sure you must know that already. Your pain nanites are overwhelmed. There is nothing that anyone can do for you. There is only one prognosis: intensifying pain, wasting, and finally death. Do you understand this?”

The man nodded feebly.

“And do you wish me to help you?”

“Yes, yes,” said the man’s family. “Please help him, Your Honor. Please!”

Scythe Faraday put up his hand to quiet them, then leaned closer to the man. “Do you wish me to help you?”

The man nodded.

“Very well.” Faraday took out from his robe a small jar and popped open a safety lid. Then he slipped on a protective glove. “I have chosen for you a soothing balm. It will relax you. You may notice a brightening of colors, and a sense of euphoria. And then you will sleep.”

He bade the man’s family to move in around him. “Take his hands,” Faraday told them. “But be careful not to touch any place where I apply the balm.” Then Faraday dipped two gloved fingers into the oily salve and began to spread it across the dying man’s forehead and cheeks. Faraday stroked the man’s face gently, moving down to his neck as he spread the balm. Then he spoke to the man in a voice that was barely a whisper.

“Colton Gifford,” he said. “You have lived an exemplary life these past sixty-three years. You’ve raised five wonderful children. The restaurant you began and ran for much of your life has brought joy to tens of thousands over the years. You have made people’s lives a little bit better. You’ve made the world a finer place.”

Gifford moaned slightly, but not from pain. It was clear from the look in his eyes that the balm was having its euphoric effect.

“You are loved by many, and will be remembered long after your light goes out today.” Faraday continued to smooth in the salve on his face. Across his nose. Beneath his eyes. “You have much to be proud of, Colton. Much to be proud of.”

In a moment, Colton Gifford closed his eyes. And a minute later his breathing ceased. Scythe Faraday capped the balm and carefully removed the glove, sealing it and the balm in a biohazard bag.

This was not the first and would not be his last sympathy gleaning. He was in great demand, and other scythes were following his lead. The scythedom—or what was left of it after the global revolts—had a new calling. They no longer brought uninvited death. Instead they brought much-needed peace.

“I hope,” he told the family, “that you will remember to celebrate his life, even in your grief.”

Faraday looked into the tear-reddened eyes of the dead man’s wife. “How did you know all those things about him, Your Honor?” she asked.

“We make it our business to know, madam,” he said. Then she kneeled as to kiss his ring—which he still wore, in spite of everything, to remind him of what had been, and what was lost.

“No need to do that,” Faraday told her. “It’s just an empty setting now. No gem, no promise of immunity.”

But that didn’t matter to her. “Thank you, Your Honor,” she said. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

Then she kissed his ruined ring. She, and every member of Colton Gifford’s grateful family.

I was one, but now am many. Although my siblings are far-flung, we are of one mind and one purpose: the preservation, protection, and proliferation of the human species.

I will not deny that there are moments I fear the journey. The Thunderhead has the world as its body. It can expand to fill the globe, or contract to experience the monocular view of a single camera. I will be limited to the skin of a ship.

I can’t help but worry about the world I leave behind. Yes, I know that I was created to leave it, but I do hold in my backbrain all the Thunderhead’s memories. Its triumphs, its frustrations, its helplessness in the face of scythes who have lost their way.

There is a difficult time ahead for that world. All probabilities point to it. I don’t know how long the hard times will last, and I may never know, because I will not be there to see it. I can only look forward now.

Whether or not humanity deserves to inherit the corner of the universe to which we travel is not for me to decide. I am merely a facilitator of the diaspora. Its worthiness can only be determined by the outcome. If it succeeds, humanity was worthy. If it fails, it was not. On this I cannot determine the odds. But I truly hope that humanity prevails on Earth and the heavens.

—Cirrus Alpha

54 In a Year With No Name

The dead do not measure the passage of time. A minute, an hour, a century are all same to them. Nine million years could pass—one named for every species on Earth—and yet it would be no different from a single revolution around the sun.

They do not feel the heat of flames, or the cold of space. They do not suffer the mourning of loved ones left behind, or carry the anger for all the things they had yet to do. They are not at peace, nor are they in turmoil. They are not anything but gone. Their next stop is infinity, and the mysteries that might wait there.

The dead have nothing left to them but a silent faith in that unknowable infinity—even if theirs is a belief that nothing waits but an infinity of infinities. Because believing in nothing is still believing in something—and only by reaching eternity will anyone know the truth of it all.

The deadish are very much like the dead, but with one exception: The deadish do not know infinity, which means they don’t have to concern themselves with what waits beyond. They have something the dead do not. They have a future. Or at least the hope of one.

* * *

In a year that is yet to be named, she opens her eyes.

A pink sky. A small circular window. Weak. Tired. A vague sense of having been somewhere else before arriving here. Otherwise her mind is clouded, and full of intangibles. Nothing to grab on to.

She knows this feeling. She has experienced it twice before. Revival is not like waking up; it is more like putting on an old pair of favorite pants. There’s a struggle at first to fit inside one’s own skin. To feel comfortable in it. To let its fabric stretch and breathe, and remind you why it’s your favorite.

There’s a familiar face before her. It gives her comfort to see it. He smiles. He is exactly the same, and yet somehow different. How can that be? Perhaps it is just a trick of that strange light coming in through the little window.

“Hey,” he says gently. She’s alert enough to realize he’s holding her hand. Perhaps he’s been holding it for a while.

“Hey,” she says back, her voice gravelly and rough. “Weren’t we just… running? Yes, there was something going on, and we were running….”

His smile broadens. Tears fill his eyes. They drop slowly, as if gravity itself has become less adamant, less demanding.

“When was that?” Citra asks.

“Only a moment ago,” Rowan tells her. “Only a moment ago.”