The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,175

“You have all day to make up your mind.”

Right. All day to make the most important decision of her life – a decision that could not be undone. She would never see her parents, or anyone she knew before arriving on the atoll, ever again. She was leaning handily toward no.

Cirrus was gone now – uploaded onto the ships, luxuriating in its own backbrain. Or backbrains, since there were now dozens of it. Them.

Now Loriana had to be the authority answering people’s questions. And then the Toll showed up at launch control, not looking much like the Toll without his fancy accoutrements. He was out of breath and looked like he was trying to outrun a scythe. Turns out she wasn’t far off the mark.

That morning, Citra brought Rowan to the bunker to show him what she and Faraday had discovered, only to find that Munira and Faraday were already there. Munira looked her up and down. “You surrendered your ring, but you’re still wearing your robe,” Munira pointed out.

“Old habits die hard,” said Faraday, and laughed at his own pun.

The truth was Citra’s only change of clothes was on the container ship, and she wasn’t going back there. She was sure she’d find something before the launch. And if not, there’d be clothes onboard, because if there was one thing the Thunderhead was good at, it was attention to detail.

Rowan looked at the transmitter through the dusty glass. “Old technology?”

“Lost technology,” Faraday corrected. “At least lost to us. We can’t even be sure what it does.”

“Maybe it kills bad scythes,” Munira suggested.

“No,” said Rowan, “that would be me.”

There was something on the edge of Citra’s hearing that only now caught her attention. She cocked her head to listen.

“Do you hear that?” said Citra. “It sounds like some sort of alarm.”

Loriana tripped the tsunami alarm on every island of the atoll. Although the wave that was coming wasn’t coming by sea.

“How sure are you about this?” she asked the Toll.

“I’m positive,” he said, still out of breath.

“Is this as bad as I think it is?”

“Worse.”

And so she fired up the loudspeaker system.

“Attention! Attention!” Her voice rose above the alarm. “Scythes are headed our way. Repeat, scythes are headed our way. The entire atoll has been marked for gleaning.” She heard her own words echoing outside, and it chilled her.

She muted the microphone and turned to the Toll. “How long have we got?”

“I have no idea,” the Toll said.

“Didn’t the Thunderhead tell you?”

Greyson huffed in frustration. “It can’t interfere with scythe affairs.”

“Great,” said Loriana. “If the Thunderhead could break its own rules just once, our lives would be so much easier.”

That was true, but in spite of how maddening it was, Greyson knew a deeper truth. “If it could break its own rules, it wouldn’t be the Thunderhead,” he said. “It would just be a scary AI.”

She flicked the microphone back on. “We have less than an hour,” she announced. “Either find a way off the atoll now, or get to one of the ships – any of them – as soon as you can! Because we’re launching early.”

She turned off the microphone. The Thunderhead couldn’t interfere, and the Cirri were all snug and secure aboard the ships. They were on their own.

“This is not how this was supposed to go.”

She looked at the launch control screen before her; a map showed the position of each ship. Not a single living soul on any of them yet. “The farthest ships will take at least forty-five minutes to get to,” she told the Toll. “Let’s hope I wasn’t lying about the time.”

The announcement was greeted first with disbelief, then confusion, then panic. Within minutes everyone mobilized. Many had not yet made their decision, but now the decision had been made for them. Years in space, or death by scythe. Suddenly the choice wasn’t very hard at all.

If the Thunderhead could have seeded the sky and coaxed cloud cover to hide the atoll from view, it would have – but it still did not have influence over weather in the blind spot. But then again, even if it did, it could still do nothing. Any attack on Kwajalein would be a scythe action. Just as the Thunderhead could not interfere on the moon or Mars or the orbital station, it could not lift a virtual finger to stop this. All it could do was watch everything it had worked for be destroyed once again. The Thunderhead knew no hatred. But thought that, perhaps,