The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,18

last catch.

“There weren’t many options when it came to ships,” Director Hilliard had told everyone. “We had to take what we could get.”

As it turns out, Loriana wasn’t the only one chosen for this mission. Hundreds of Nimbus agents had been brought in. Now they populated a dozen mismatched ships. A bizarre ragtag flotilla bound for the South Pacific.

“8.167, 167.733,” Hilliard told them in the preliminary briefing. “These numbers were given to us by a reliable source,” she said. “We think they represent coordinates.” Then she brought up a map and pinpointed a spot somewhere between Hawaii and Australia. The targeted spot showed nothing but empty sea.

“But what makes you think they’re coordinates,” Loriana asked the director after the briefing. “I mean, if all you had were random numbers, they could mean anything – how can you be sure?”

“Because,” the director confided, “as soon as I spoke my suspicion that they might be coordinates, I began to receive advertisements for ship charters in Honolulu.”

“The Thunderhead?”

Hilliard nodded. “While it’s against the law for the Thunderhead to communicate with unsavories, it’s not against the law to imply.”

On the fourth day out – still several hundred miles from the coordinates – things began to get weird.

It began with the autopilot losing its connection to the Thunderhead. Without that connection, it could still navigate, but couldn’t problem solve. It was just a mindless machine. Not only that, but they lost all radio connection to the outside world. This sort of thing simply didn’t happen. Technology functioned. Always. Even after the Thunderhead went silent. And in the void of answers, speculation quickly became incendiary.

“What if this is worldwide?”

“What if the Thunderhead is dead?”

“What if we’re truly alone in the world now?”

There were people who were actually glancing at Loriana, as if she might lighten things with a silver lining.

“We’ll turn around,” blustered one of the agents – Sykora was his name – a small-minded man who had been a naysayer from the beginning. “We’ll go back and forget about this nonsense.”

It was Loriana who made the crucial observation as she looked at the blinking error screen.

“It says we’re thirty nautical miles from the nearest network buoy,” she said. “But they’re supposed to be twenty miles apart, aren’t they?”

A quick check of the buoy grid showed no signals. Which meant the Thunderhead had no presence in these waters.

“Interesting…” said Director Hilliard. “Good catch, Agent Barchok.”

Loriana wanted to preen from the praise but didn’t let herself.

Hilliard took in the uncharted waters ahead. “Did you know that the human eye has a huge patch of nothing just off the center of its field of vision?”

Loriana nodded. “The blind spot.”

“Our brains tell us there’s nothing to see there and fill in the blanks so we don’t even notice it.”

“But if the Thunderhead has a blind spot, how would it even know that it exists?”

Director Hilliard raised her eyebrows.

“Maybe someone told it…”

I continue to keep this journal, even though there is no need. A daily endeavor is difficult to break once it becomes engrained in who we are. Munira assures me that, come what may, she will find a way to slip this journal into the archive at the Library of Alexandria. That would be a first! A scythe who continues their dutiful journaling even after death.

We have been here at the Kwajalein Atoll for six weeks now, with no communication from the outside world. While I itch to hear news of Marie, and how she fared at the inquest on Endura, I cannot dwell on it. Either all went well, and she is presiding over MidMerica as High Blade … or it did not go her way, and our task becomes an even greater challenge. All the more reason to unlock the secret of the atoll and access the wisdom of the founding scythes. Their contingency plan for the scythedom’s failure, whatever it is, could be the only thing that can save it.

Munira and I have taken up residence in the bunker we found. We’ve also constructed a rudimentary canoe that is small enough to evade the island’s security system. It can’t go any distance, of course, but we’ve been using it to paddle out to the nearer islands of the atoll. We’ve been finding much the same there as we found here, evidence of earlier habitation. Concrete slabs, fragments of foundations. Nothing extraordinary.

We have, however, learned the original purpose of the place – or at least how it was used toward the end of the mortal age. The