of Scythe Curie for High Blade. Stupid. Now she was dead, and he was looked upon as an instigator. Frustrating, because Constantine, who had nominated Curie, was made an underscythe. The world was so unfair.
When Goddard returned from the Endura disaster as High Blade, Morrison had quickly installed sapphires on his robe to signify an alliance with the new order. But his robe was denim, and others mocked that, on denim, sapphires looked like cheap plastic rhinestones. Well fine, maybe they did, but they still made a point. His robe told the world that he was sorry for what he had done—and after a while his contrition had earned him indifference from both sides. The old-guard scythes washed their hands of him, and the new-order scythes dismissed him. That glorious, hard-earned indifference allowed him to do what he loved more than anything in the world: Nothing.
That is, until the day he was summoned by the High Blade.
Morrison had chosen for his residence the stately home of another famous MidMerican. Not his Patron Historic, because the original Jim Morrison, while having a celebrated grave somewhere in FrancoIberia, did not have a grand residence in the Mericas, or at least not one grand enough for a scythe.
It could be traced back to the time when the boy who would one day become Scythe Morrison had visited Graceland with his parents. “Someday I want to live in a place like this,” he had told them. They scoffed at his childhood naivete. He swore that he would have the last laugh.
Once he became a scythe, he immediately set his sights on the celebrated mansion, only to discover that Scythe Presley had already claimed Graceland as his residence and showed no signs of self-gleaning any time soon. Damn. Instead, Morrison had to settle for the next best thing:
Grouseland.
It was the historic mansion of William Henry Harrison, a little-remembered mortal-age Merican president. Exercising his privilege as a scythe, Morrison kicked out the ladies of the local historical society, who ran the place as a museum, and moved in. He even invited his parents to live with him there, and although they accepted the invitation, they never seemed all that impressed.
On the day of his summons, he was watching sports, as was his penchant. Archives of classic games, because he hated the stress of not knowing who was going to win. It was the Forty-Niners versus the Patriots in a game that was only notable because Forty-Niner Jeff Fuller took a helmet-to-helmet hit so powerful it could have knocked him into an alternate dimension. Instead it broke his neck. Very dramatic. Scythe Morrison enjoyed the way Merican football was played in mortal days, when injuries could be permanent and could lay a player out in the field, experiencing true pain. The stakes were so much more real then. It was his love of mortal-age contact sports that inspired his method of gleaning. He never used weapons—all his gleanings were accomplished with his bare hands.
While the game was still suspended, awaiting the removal of the injured Fuller from the field, Morrison’s screen flashed red, and his phone buzzed. It was as if his nanites themselves were vibrating, because he could swear he felt it all the way down to the bone.
It was an incoming message from Fulcrum City.
ATTENTION! ATTENTION!
THE HONORABLE SCYTHE JAMES DOUGLAS MORRISON
IS SUMMONED TO A HIGH PRIORITY AUDIENCE
WITH HIS EXCELLENCY, THE HONORABLE ROBERT GODDARD,
HIGH BLADE OF THE MIDMERICAN SCYTHEDOM.
This could not be a good thing.
He had been hoping that Goddard had forgotten about him, and that, as High Blade, the man had so many more important things to do that a junior scythe like Morrison was not even on his radar. Perhaps it was his choice of a famous residence that had brought him to Goddard’s attention. Grouseland was, after all, the first brick home in the Indiana Territory. Damn.
Knowing that a summons from the High Blade was a drop-everything kind of command, he did just that, had his mother pack him a small bag, and called for a scythedom helicopter.
* * *
Although Scythe Morrison had never been to Endura, he imagined Goddard’s glass residence in Fulcrum City was similar to the crystalline penthouses of the late Grandslayers. In the ground-floor lobby, Jim was greeted by none other than First Underscythe Nietzsche.
“You’re late” was the entire extent of Nietzsche’s greeting.
“I came the minute I got the summons,” Morrison said.
“And at two minutes after the summons, you were late.”
Nietzsche, aside from having a name that was painfully