The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,28

Atlantic. But those robes did not stay on for long.

Being with Citra—truly being with her—had felt like the culminating moment of Rowan’s life, and, for a time all too brief, it was as if none of the rest mattered.

Then their world was rocked in a very different way.

The sinking city hit something on the way down. Although he and Citra were protected in a vault that was magnetically suspended within another vault, it didn’t block out the sounds of rending steel as Endura broke apart. Everything lurched violently, and the vault took on a sharp tilt. The mannequins holding the other founders’ robes tumbled, falling toward Citra and Rowan, as if the founders themselves were launching an attack on their union. Then came the diamonds—thousands of them flying from their niches in the vault, pelting Rowan and Citra like hail.

Through all of it, they held each other, whispering words of comfort. Shhh. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine. Of course none of that was true, and both of them knew it. They were going to die—if not in this instant, then soon enough. It was just a matter of time. Their only comfort was in each other, and in the knowledge that death need not be permanent.

Then the power went out, and everything went dark. The magnetic field failed, and the inner vault plunged. They were in free fall, but only for an instant. The debris around them leaped up, then came down on them as the inner vault slammed down against the wall of the outer vault—but, luckily, the founders’ robes buffered them from the worst of it, as if the founders had now chosen to protect them, rather than attack.

“Is it over?” Citra had asked.

“I don’t think so,” Rowan said, because there was still a sensation of movement and a vibration that was getting stronger. They were lying in the V-shaped wedge made by the tilted floor and the wall. “We’re on a slope, I think, slipping deeper.”

Half a minute later, one more violent lurch tore the two of them apart. Rowan was struck in the head by something heavy—hard enough to daze him. Citra found him in the darkness before he could pull himself free to seek her out.

“Are you okay?”

“I think so.”

Now nothing moved.. The only sounds were the distant creaks of straining metal and the mournful woodwind moans of escaping air.

But no air escaped the Vault of Relics and Futures, and no water got in. That’s what Scythe Curie had been counting on when she sealed them in there. And although Endura was in a subtropical zone, the temperature of the ocean floor was the same everywhere—barely a degree above freezing. Once the vault succumbed to the chill, their bodies would be well preserved. And only moments after hitting bottom, Rowan could feel the air around them already getting cold.

They had died there at the bottom of the sea.

And now they had been revived.

But where was Citra?

He could tell he wasn’t in a revival center. The walls were concrete. The bed beneath him wasn’t a bed at all but a slab. He was in ill-fitting gray institutional clothing, drenched from his own sweat, because it was uncomfortably warm and humid. On one side of the room was a minimalistic commode, and on the other side, a door of the kind that can only be opened from the outside. He had no idea where he was, or even when he was—for there’s no way to mark the passing of time when you’re dead—but he did know that he was in a cell, and whatever his captors had in store for him was not going to be pleasant. After all, he was Scythe Lucifer—which meant a single death was not good enough. He would have to die countless times to calm the fury of his captors, whoever they were. Well, the joke was on them—they didn’t know that Rowan had died over a dozen times at the hands of Scythe Goddard already, only to be revived each time and killed again. Dying was easy. A paper cut? That would be annoying.

* * *

Scythe Curie didn’t come for Citra. And the various nurses attending to Citra all carried that same sense of anxiety, offering nothing but diffused light and professional pleasantries to illuminate her situation.

Her first visitor was a surprise. It was Scythe Possuelo of Amazonia. She had only met him once, on a train from Buenos Aires. He had helped her elude the scythes who