The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,154
it promises that we’ll know everything once we get there.”
Even before they left Britannia, however, word reached them of a Tonist gleaning in Birmingham, not far away from where they were. An elegy of new-order scythes had paid a midnight visit to an enclave, and several hundred were gleaned – many in their sleep.
Which is worse, she wondered, to take the lives of the innocent as they sleep, or look them in the eye as you cut them down?
Against Greyson’s objections, she insisted that they both pay a visit to see the damage themselves.
Scythe Anastasia knew how to face death. It was her job as a scythe to do so, but it never got easier. When the survivors saw the Toll, they were awed. When they saw Anastasia, they were furious.
“Your kind did this” was their bitter accusation as they gathered the bodies of the dead.
“Not my kind,” she told them. “My kind are honorable scythes. There is no honor in the ones who did this.”
“There are no honorable scythes!” they claimed, and that was a shock to hear. Had Goddard dragged them down so far that people truly believed all scythes had lost their integrity?
That was days ago, and only now that they were in the middle of the Pacific, halfway around the world, could she feel the weight of all these things fall off the edge of the horizon. She now understood the allure the sea held for Jeri. The freedom to leave your darkest shadows behind, and the hope that those shadows might drown before they could find you.
Jeri, however, never saw the sea as an escape. Because even as the world receded, there was always something new on the horizon ahead.
Jeri had officially stepped down as the captain of the E. L. Spence, and said farewell to the crew before leaving with Anastasia and Possuelo.
“You’ll be sorely missed, Captain,” Chief Wharton had said. This was a man who never shed a tear, but now his eyes were laden with them. This crew that took so long to warm to their young captain were now more devoted than any crew Jerico had ever seen.
“Will you be back?” Wharton asked.
“I don’t know,” Jeri had said, “but I feel Anastasia needs me more than you do.”
Then Wharton gave Jeri his parting words. “Don’t let affection cloud your judgment, Captain.”
It was wise advice, but Jeri knew that was not the case here. Affection and fondness were two different things. Jeri knew from the beginning that Anastasia’s heart belonged to her bleak knight. Jeri could never be that and, to be honest, didn’t want to be.
Once they had left Britannia, bound for the South Pacific, Greyson posed the question openly and directly.
“Did you fall in love with her?” he asked.
“No,” Jeri told him. “I fell in love with the idea of falling in love with her.”
Greyson laughed at that. “You, too, huh?”
Greyson was a pure soul. He had no guile in him. Even when he pretended to be the Toll, it was honest pretension. You could see it in his smile; it was simple and unambiguous. He had only one smile, and it meant the one thing a smile was supposed to mean. Beneath sun or clouds, Jeri found that smile to be a fine thing.
When they boarded the ship, Jeri had a pang of regret, for here was a ship where Jerico Soberanis was not a captain – not even a member of the crew, for it had no crew. They were merely passengers. And although it was a sizeable container ship, it had no cargo.
“The cargo will catch up with us in Guam,” Greyson told everyone, without sharing the nature of it. And so for now, the ship rode high and light; its deck, built to carry hundreds of shipping containers, was a rusty iron wasteland, longing for purpose.
The Thunderhead knew such longing. It wasn’t a yearning for purpose, because it had always known its purpose. Its longing was a deep and abiding ache for the kind of biological connection it knew it must never have. It liked to think this was powerful motivation to accomplish all the things that could be accomplished. All of the things within its power, for maybe that would compensate for the things that were not.
But what if the impossible wasn’t impossible at all? What if the unthinkable fell firmly into the realm of thought? It was, perhaps, the most dangerous thing that the Thunderhead had ever considered.