The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,122

through another suite to a balcony. Beside the balcony were ladder rungs embedded in the stone, which she had seen workers use to access the bronze dome that covered the palace. One rung at a time, Anastasia got Jeri all the way up to the edge of the dome. It was designed with a gentle slope and patterned with textured divots and nubs that would give them footholds – but to Jeri, already exhausted from blood loss, it must have looked like Mount Everest.

“H-how will climbing up there—”

“Just shut up and move,” demanded Anastasia, not having time to explain.

The dome was hot from the fire in the atrium below. Its glass skylights were already beginning to explode from the heat and belch forth black smoke.

When they reached the pinnacle, there was a weather vane in the shape of the symbol of the scythedom – the curved blade and the unblinking eye – that pivoted left and right, not sure which way the winds were blowing, because the heat was making the wind blow directly up.

And now, finally, the scythedom helicopter arrived. It headed straight for the heliport, the pilots not yet knowing that it had been overrun by Tonists.

“It won’t see us,” said Jeri.

“That’s not why we’re up here.”

Then an ambudrone buzzed past them, and another, and another. They dropped toward the rose garden, which was littered with deadish guards and Tonists. “That’s why we’re here,” Anastasia said. She tried to grab a drone, but it was moving too quickly and wasn’t close enough to grasp.

Then below, the helicopter made a grievous error. Seeing the ambudrones buzzing around it, the pilot made a sudden evasive maneuver. It was unnecessary – the drones would stay far from the chopper’s path – but they couldn’t avoid a sudden flinch of human error that pulled the helicopter directly into their flight paths. The helicopter’s blade sliced an ambudrone in two, the blade broke, and the helicopter came careening toward the palace.

Anastasia grabbed Jeri and turned away. The explosion seemed to rock the entire world. It blew a hole in the palace, taking down several of the marble columns holding up the monstrously heavy bronze dome.

And the dome began to list to one side.

Then from below came the most awful vibration. It’s the remaining columns, thought Anastasia. They can’t hold the weight. They’re crumbling…

And still the ambudrones buzzed past them on their way to claim the deadish from the gardens and lawns.

“My wounds are bad, but they’re not lethal,” Jeri said. “If we’re going to attract an ambudrone, one of us must die.”

Flames now licked through the ruptured skylights. The sound of crashing columns echoed from below, and the dome listed farther.

Jeri was right – there was no way around it – so Anastasia pulled out a blade and aimed the tip toward her own chest, ready to render herself deadish so an ambudrone would come.

But no! What was she thinking? How unbelievably stupid! It wasn’t like hurling herself off Xenocrates’s roof when she was just an apprentice. She was a scythe now; if she took her own life, it would be considered a self-gleaning. The ambudrones wouldn’t come for her. And as she pondered the idiocy of what she had almost just done, Jeri gently took the blade from her.

“For you, Honorable Scythe Anastasia, I would die a thousand deaths at my own hand. But one will be sufficient.” Then Jeri thrust the blade inward.

A gasp. A cough. A grimace. And Jeri was deadish.

An ambudrone sped by … then stopped in midflight, doubled back, and came for Jeri. It seized the salvage captain in its pincers, and as it did, the dome began to give way.

Anastasia grabbed for the ambudrone, but there was nothing to grip on to – so instead she grasped Jeri’s arm with both hands as tightly as she could.

Beneath her, the dome fell away, plunging into the flames, imploding into the atrium. It struck the ground, destroying what was left of the palace, and let off a powerful metallic resonance like the toll of a funeral bell. Like the final, mournful note of a requiem.

While up above, the ambudrone carried away the deadish sea captain and the scythe dangling from the captain’s arm, delivering them to a place that promised life to everyone who crossed through its doors.

We are bitterly opposed. Eight of us firmly believe that an association of humans should be responsible for the thinning of the burgeoning population. But the four against it are adamant in