The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,15

I’m thinking that wasn’t the first corner you’ve turned.”

Jerico took a moment, considering how best to answer.

“I’m not the age that I tell my crew,” Jerico finally admitted. Because a half-truth was better than no truth at all.

The enduring heart – the one for which the great floating city was named – was the oldest living heart in the world, kept alive by electrical stimulation and rejuvenating nanites so that it was forever young. It had beat over nine billion times, and was a symbol of humanity’s conquest of death. However, it died when the island sank and power was cut to its electrodes.

As Scythe Possuelo had said, it was, indeed, protected within an impact-resistant tempered-glass case … but the case could not stand the pressure so far down, and it imploded long before reaching bottom. As for the heart itself – or what was left of it after the implosion – it would not turn up among the debris the salvage team eventually found. No doubt it had been devoured – if not by the carnivorous sea life that had been lathered into an artificial feeding frenzy, then by some lucky scavenger who just happened to be passing by.

While all the other salvage teams were satisfied to go after easier salvage, Jeri Soberanis’s crew labored tirelessly with little to show for its efforts for weeks. While other crews were bringing up treasure troves, Captain Soberanis brought up virtually nothing.

With the towers of the drowned city leaning at steep angles, ripping free and tumbling with the slightest provocation into the depths, it was too dangerous to actually send crewmembers down. While amphibious Tasmanians were fine for shallow salvages, they couldn’t dive past sixty meters without a pressure suit. They had already lost one robotic sub, crushed by a plunging refrigerator that came crashing through the window of a shifting tower. True, anyone who was killed could be sent off for revival, but that required being able to retrieve their bodies from the trench. It was simply not worth the risk.

Possuelo, usually a man of measured demeanor and not easily riled, was now prone to fits of frustration.

“I realize that this is a delicate process,” Possuelo said after the fifth week of remote deep dives, “but sea slugs move faster than you and your crew!”

What made his frustration worse was the arrival of more and more scythe yachts. Representatives from nearly every scythedom in the world had shown up – because everyone knew that he was after the Vault of Relics and Futures. It was fine when it remained in a place too cold and too deep for even sunlight to reach – but out of sight did not mean out of mind.

“Your Honor, forgive my impertinence,” Jeri told Sydney – because now they were most certainly on a first-name basis, “but it’s a steel vault sealed within another steel vault, buried beneath a thousand tons of wreckage on the side of a dangerous slope. Even if it wasn’t at the bottom of the sea, it would be hard to reach. It requires meticulous engineering, effort, and above all, patience!”

“If we don’t wrap this up in short order,” railed Possuelo, “Goddard will swoop in and take everything we bring up!”

Yet Goddard’s presence at the site was, thus far, conspicuously absent. He had sent no salvage teams or representatives to ensure he got his share of the diamonds. Instead he raved publicly about defiling hallowed waters and dishonoring the dead, claiming he wanted no part of anything that was found down there. But it was all posturing. He wanted those diamonds as much as anyone, if not more.

Which meant that he had a plan to get them.

There was no denying that Goddard had a knack for getting whatever he wanted, and that kept every scythedom in the world on edge.

“Scythedom.”

That word used to mean the global organization as a whole – but now regional thinking had taken over. There was no sense of a world scythedom anymore – only provincial politics and petty grievances.

Possuelo had nightmares of a world where Goddard had all the diamonds and could handpick every single new scythe. Were that to happen, the world would tilt so heavily toward his so-called new order, it would tip off its axis. And the voices of those who resisted him would be lost in the pained wails of those he so gleefully gleaned.

“Will you ever tell me what’s in the vault that’s put such a bee in everyone’s bonnet?” Jeri asked