The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,26

it never outright fired people. Certainly not enough people to fill a dozen vessels.

Loriana pursed her lips. Clearly there was something she wasn’t saying, which made Faraday all the more curious. He said nothing and waited with that patient impatience that scythes were so very good at. Finally, she spoke.

“How long have you been here on this island?” she asked.

“Not long in the grand scheme of things,” Faraday told her. “Just six weeks.”

“Then… you don’t know…”

There were few things that truly frightened Scythe Michael Faraday. But the prospect of an incalculable unknown was high on his list of personal fears. Especially when it was presented in a particular tone of voice. The kind that usually preceded the phrase “You’d better sit down.”

“Don’t know what?” he dared to ask.

“Things have… changed… since you got here,” Loriana said.

“For the better, I hope,” Faraday said. “Tell me, did Scythe Curie win her bid to become High Blade of MidMerica?”

Agent Barchok pursed her lips again. “I think you’d better sit down,” she said.

* * *

Munira did not like taking orders from this junior Nimbus agent, but she understood why Faraday had deferred to her. These were her people in the pods, so she would know best how to deal with them. And besides, Munira was aware that her own reaction was childish. This young woman, who had just survived a devastating trauma, needed a moment of control far more than Munira needed her pride pandered to.

Munira counted thirty-eight safety pods beached on the sands of the atoll. Not one of their ships had survived the attack. Bodies were already beginning to wash up on the shore, and in the tropical heat, the dead would quickly become nonviable. Even if rescue eventually came, there was no way to preserve them long enough to ship them out for revival. Which meant that the dead would stay dead. They would have to be buried or, more likely, burned, because they had no tools that could dig deep enough into the rocky atoll.

What a mess. Problems would do nothing but compound. The atoll had no fresh water, except for the rainwater they collected. The coconut palms and wild fruit trees provided enough sustenance for two, but not for all these people packed within the pods. In no time at all, they’d be left with a diet of whatever they could bring in from the sea.

Although the girl didn’t know why they were sent to these coordinates, Munira did. The Thunderhead had overheard Munira and Faraday plotting back when they were in the old Library of Congress. They had inadvertently made it aware of the blind spot, and the Thunderhead had sent these agents to find out what had been hidden from it.

Late in the afternoon, the pods began to open as those within regained consciousness. Munira and Loriana attended to the living, while Scythe Faraday ministered to the dead who washed ashore. He did so with loving care, treating them with the kind of honor and respect that new-order scythes did not.

“He’s one of the good ones,” Loriana said.

“Many of them are,” Munira told her, a bit irritated by Loriana’s assumption that good scythes were hard to find. “They just don’t insist on the spotlight the way the dishonorable ones do.”

Faraday seemed to be overwhelmed by grief as he tended to the dead Nimbus agents. Munira had yet to know the reason, so she just assumed it was his way.

In total, 143 survived. Everyone was equally stunned by the turn of events that had landed them here, and at a loss as to how to proceed.

“What is there to eat?” they were already asking.

“Whatever you can catch,” Munira bluntly told them. None of them liked the sound of that.

* * *

Loriana found that keeping busy was the best way to avoid panicking at their current situation, and, in a vacuum of leadership, most people were willing to take direction from her—something they probably never would have done in the comfort of the AI offices. She supposed that people used to a bureaucracy found security in following directions. After all, she always had.

But now, since Director Hilliard’s pod had not yet opened, she was the one telling people where to be and what to do, and it tickled her that they listened. Or at least most of them did.

“On whose authority are you giving us orders?” Agent Sykora asked.

Was it evil of Loriana to be disappointed that he had survived? Loriana smiled warmly at him. “By the authority of