The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,49

would have to grant them immunity—and invariably someone in the MidMerican scythedom would find out where she had done the gleaning. This was much cleaner. People could be dispatched by the BladeGuards, and ambudrones would quickly arrive to carry the bodies to a revival center—problem solved.

Today, however, no one was present, which the guards found mildly disappointing.

“Wait outside,” she told them once they had done their sweep; then she climbed the ice steps and entered.

Inside were about a dozen niches with holographic welcome screens and an interface so simple, the dearly departed’s pet could probably use it. Scythe Rand stepped toward an interface, and the moment she did, it went blank. The screen now flashed:

“SCYTHE PRESENCE DETECTED;

MANUAL ACCESS ONLY.”

She sighed, plugged in an old-fashioned keyboard, and started coding.

* * *

What might have taken hours for another scythe only took about forty-five minutes for her. Of course, she’d been doing this enough that she was getting better at it.

Finally, a face, ghostly and transparent, materialized before her. She took a deep breath and regarded it. It wouldn’t speak until spoken to. After all, it wasn’t alive; it was just artifice. A detailed recreation of a mind that no longer existed.

“Hello, Tyger,” she said.

“Hi,” the construct responded.

“I’ve missed you,” Ayn told it.

“I’m sorry… do I know you?”

It always said that. A construct did not make new memories. Each time she accessed it, it was like the first time. There was something both comforting and disturbing about that.

“Yes, and no,” she said. “My name is Ayn.”

“Hi, Ayn,” it said. “Cool name.”

The circumstances of Tyger’s death had left him without a backup for months. The last time his nanites had uploaded his memories to the Thunderhead’s database was just before meeting her. That had been intentional. She had wanted him off-grid. Now she regretted it.

She had already determined on a previous sanctum visit that the last thing Tyger’s construct remembered was being on a train, heading to some high-paying party job. It hadn’t been a party at all. He was paid to be a human sacrifice, although he hadn’t known it at the time. His body was trained to be that of a scythe. And then she stole that body from him and gave it to Goddard. As for the remaining part of Tyger—the part above the neck—it was deemed to serve no further purpose. So it was burned, and the ashes were buried. Ayn had buried those ashes herself in a tiny unmarked grave that she wouldn’t be able to find again if she tried.

“Uh… this is… awkward,” Tyger’s construct said. “If you’re gonna talk to me, talk, because I’ve got other things to do.”

“You don’t have anything to do,” Scythe Rand informed it. “You’re a mental construct of a boy who I gleaned.”

“Very funny,” it said. “Are we done here? Because you’re really freaking me out.”

Rand reached down and hit the reset button. The image flickered and came back.

“Hi, Tyger.”

“Hi,” the construct said. “Do I know you?”

“No,” she said. “But can we talk anyway?”

The construct shrugged. “Sure, why not?”

“I want to know what your thoughts are. About your future. What did you want to be, Tyger? Where did you want your life to go?”

“Not sure, really,” said the construct, ignoring the way she spoke about Tyger in past tense, the same way it ignored being a floating hologram in an unfamiliar location.

“I’m a professional partier now, but you know how that is, right? It gets old real quick.” The construct paused. “I was thinking maybe I’d travel and see different regions.”

“Where would you go?” Ayn asked.

“Anywhere, really. Maybe I’d go to Tasmania and get wings. They do stuff like that there, you know? They’re not like wing wings, but more like those flaps of skin you see on flying squirrels.”

It was so clear that this was just part of a conversation that Tyger once had with someone else. Constructs had no ability to be creative. They could only access what was already there. The same question would always bring forth the same response. Word for word. She had heard this one a dozen times, yet she tortured herself time and again by listening to it.

“Hey—I’ve done a lot of splatting—with those wing thingies, I could jump off of buildings and never have to actually splat. That would be the best splat ever!”

“Yes, it would be, Tyger.” Then she added something she hadn’t said before. “I’d like to go there with you.”

“Sure! Maybe we could get together a whole bunch of us to