The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,61
Thunderhead, it was buttering the wrong scythe. Still, he took the artichokes from Munira along with the other foodstuffs in the crate.
“I’ll eat them if I feel like it,” he said flatly.
* * *
Munira was not put off by his rudeness. She never was. She had come to expect it. Rely on it, even. As for her life on Kwajalein’s main island, it wasn’t all that different from her life before she came into Scythe Faraday’s service. She had lived a solitary existence, even when surrounded by people at the Library of Alexandria. Now she lived alone in the old bunker on an island surrounded by people, and only interacted when it suited her. She no longer had access to the scythe journals that filled the stone halls of the great library, but she had plenty of reading material. There were many crumbling books left behind by the mortals who had run this place before the rise of the Thunderhead and scythedom. Volumes of curious facts and fictions of people who lived each day of their lives with the ravages of age and relentless approach of death. The brittle pages were filled with melodramatic intrigue and passionate short-sightedness that seemed laughable now. People who believed that their slightest actions mattered and that they could find a sense of completion before death inevitably took them, along with everyone they ever knew and loved. It was entertaining reading, but hard for Munira to relate to at first… but the more she read, the more she came to understand the fears and the dreams of mortals. The trouble they all had living in the moment, in spite of the fact that the moment was all they had.
Then there were the recordings and journals left behind by the militaristic folk who had used the Marshall Atolls, as they were once called, for the testing of large-scale weaponry. Ballistic radiation bombs and such. These activities were also driven by fear, but masked behind a facade of science and professionalism. She read it all—and what would have been dry and reportorial to others was a tapestry of hidden history to Munira. She felt she had become an expert on what it must have been like to be mortal in a world before the benevolent protection of the Thunderhead, and the wise gleaning of scythes.
Not so wise anymore.
Gossip among the workers was filled with tales of mass gleanings—and not just in MidMerica, but in region after region. She wondered if the outside world had begun to, in some ways, resemble the mortal one. But rather than being fearful, the workers just seemed blasé.
“It never happens to us,” they would say, “or to anyone we know.”
Because, after all, a thousand people gleaned in a mass event was such a small drop in the bucket, it was hardly noticeable. What was noticeable, however, was that people tended to stay away from theaters and clubs, as well as to disassociate from unprotected social groups. “Why tempt the blade?” had become a common expression. So ever since the rise of Goddard’s new order, and the silence of the Thunderhead, people lived smaller lives. A sort of post-mortal feudalism, where people kept to themselves and didn’t bother with the tumultuous doings of the high and mighty and things that affected other people, in other places.
“I’m a bricklayer in paradise,” one of the workers on the main island told her. “My husband enjoys the sun, and my children love the beach. Why stress my emotional nanites by thinking of terrible things?”
A fine philosophy until the terrible thing comes to you.
On the day Munira brought Faraday artichokes, she dined with him at the small table he had built and positioned on the beach, just above high tide. It afforded him a view of the structures rising in the distance. And in spite of what he said, he did roast the artichokes for them.
“Who’s running things over there?” Faraday asked, glancing at the other islands across the massive lagoon. He never usually asked about what was happening around the rest of the atoll—but tonight he did. Munira saw this as a good sign.
“The Nimbus agents call any of the shots that aren’t already taken care of by the Thunderhead,” she told him. “The construction workers call them Thunderrhoids, because they’re such a pain in the ass.” She paused, because she thought Faraday might laugh at that, but he didn’t. “Anyway, Sykora blusters like he’s in control, but it’s Loriana who gets things done.”