The Toll (Arc of a Scythe #3) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,64
unsavories. So all she could do was make declarative statements.
The supply ship has arrived.
We are rationing meat.
Pier construction delayed due to bad concrete pour.
And when a ship with extra meat and fresh concrete mix arrived five days later, everyone knew the Thunderhead had gotten the message without anyone having to actually ask.
While Stirling, the communications tech, was in charge of actually tapping out the messages, he didn’t decide what messages to send. That was Loriana’s job. She was the gatekeeper for all information passing out of the island. And with so much information, she had to pick and choose what got through and what didn’t. Although the Thunderhead had set up cameras all over the atoll now, those cameras couldn’t transmit through the interference. Everything had to be recorded and physically brought out of the blind spot before it could be transmitted to the Thunderhead. There were talks about building an old-school fiber-optic cable that ran to the edge of the blind spot, but apparently it wasn’t the Thunderhead’s top priority, because it had not yet sent the supplies required to build it. So the way it stood, at best, the Thunderhead saw things a day after they happened. It made the communication center critical, since it was the only way to keep the Thunderhead informed.
On the day she received, and opened, the security pack, she slipped a message into the stack that was waiting for Stirling to send using their code system. All it said was Why me?
“Why you, what?” Stirling asked.
“Just ask it,” she told him. “The Thunderhead will know.” She had decided to not even tell him about the package, because she knew he wouldn’t leave her alone until she told him what it was.
He sighed and tapped it out. “You realize it’s not going to answer you,” he said. “It’ll probably just send you a bunch of grapes or something, and you’ll have to figure out what it means.”
“If it sends me grapes,” Loriana told him, “I’ll make wine and get drunk, and that will be my answer.”
On her way out of the bunker, she ran into Munira, who was tending to the little garden just outside the entrance. Even though the supply ships brought just about everything they needed, Munira still grew what she could.
“It makes me feel useful,” she once said. “Homegrown food tastes better to me than anything the Thunderhead farms anyway.”
“So… I received something from the Thunderhead,” she told Munira, perhaps the only person she felt safe confiding in. “I’m not sure what to do.”
Munira didn’t look up from her gardening. “I can’t talk to you about anything having to do with the Thunderhead,” she said. “I work for a scythe, remember?”
“I know… It’s just… It’s important, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
“What does the Thunderhead want you to do about it?”
“It wants me to keep it secret.”
“Then keep it secret,” Munira said. “Problem solved.”
But that was just spiral logic, too. Because information was never given by the Thunderhead without there being a purpose to it. She could only hope that the purpose would become evident. And when it did, that she didn’t screw it up.
“How is Scythe Faraday?” Loriana asked. She hadn’t seen him in months.
“The same,” Munira told her. Loriana supposed that a scythe robbed of purpose was worse than being an unemployed Nimbus agent. “Does he have any plans to start gleaning again? I mean there’s hundreds of workers all over the atoll now—that’s certainly a big enough population to glean someone here and there. Not that I’m anxious to see it or anything, but a scythe who doesn’t glean is hardly a scythe.”
“He doesn’t have plans to do anything,” Munira told her.
“So, are you worried about him?”
“Wouldn’t you be?”
* * *
Loriana’s next stop was the distribution center—a warehouse of quick and easy design, near the dock, where Sykora spent most of his time walking around and doing a lot of pointing.
Loriana was there because she needed to gauge him. To see if he was acting differently. To see if maybe he had gotten the same information she had, whether or not he was on the official distribution list. But Sykora was the same as always: bureaucratic and managerial. The undisputed master of petty projects.
After a while, he noticed her lingering there.
“Is there something I can do for you, Agent Barchok?” he asked. Although they hadn’t been actual Nimbus agents for more than a year, he still acted as if they were.