The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,28
that didn’t need checking. She seemed anxious. Why, wondered Citra, would a revival nurse be anxious?
Citra closed her eyes and tried to puzzle out the situation. If she was in a revival center, it meant that she had gone deadish, yet she couldn’t dredge up the circumstance of her death. Panic rose as she tried to dig for the memory. Whatever had caused her latest demise was hiding behind a door that her mind wasn’t ready to open.
All right, then. She chose to leave it alone for now and concentrated on what she did know. Her name. She was Citra Terranova. No … wait … that wasn’t entirely right. She was someone else, too. Yes – she was Scythe Anastasia. She had been with Scythe Curie, hadn’t she? Somewhere far from home.
Endura!
That’s where they had been. What a beautiful city! Had something happened to them on Endura?
Again that sense of foreboding welled up inside her. She took a deep breath, and another to calm herself. Right now it was enough to know that the memories were there, ready for her when she was a little stronger.
And she was sure, now that she was awake, that Scythe Curie would soon be by her side to help her get back into the swing of things.
Rowan, on the other hand, remembered everything the moment he awoke.
He had been in Citra’s embrace, the two of them cloaked in the robes of founding scythes Prometheus and Cleopatra, as Endura sank beneath the Atlantic. But those robes did not stay on for long.
Being with Citra – truly being with her – had felt like the culminating moment of Rowan’s life, and, for a time all too brief, it was as if none of the rest mattered.
Then their world was rocked in a very different way.
The sinking city hit something on the way down. Although he and Citra were protected in a vault that was magnetically suspended within another vault, it didn’t block out the sounds of rending steel as Endura broke apart. Everything lurched violently, and the vault took on a sharp tilt. The mannequins holding the other founders’ robes tumbled, falling toward Citra and Rowan, as if the founders themselves were launching an attack on their union. Then came the diamonds – thousands of them flying from their niches in the vault, pelting Rowan and Citra like hail.
Through all of it, they held each other, whispering words of comfort. Shhh. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine. Of course none of that was true, and both of them knew it. They were going to die – if not in this instant, then soon enough. It was just a matter of time. Their only comfort was in each other, and in the knowledge that death need not be permanent.
Then the power went out, and everything went dark. The magnetic field failed, and the inner vault plunged. They were in free fall, but only for an instant. The debris around them leaped up, then came down on them as the inner vault slammed down against the wall of the outer vault – but, luckily, the founders’ robes buffered them from the worst of it, as if the founders had now chosen to protect them, rather than attack.
“Is it over?” Citra had asked.
“I don’t think so,” Rowan said, because there was still a sensation of movement and a vibration that was getting stronger. They were lying in the V-shaped wedge made by the tilted floor and the wall. “We’re on a slope, I think, slipping deeper.”
Half a minute later, one more violent lurch tore the two of them apart. Rowan was struck in the head by something heavy – hard enough to daze him. Citra found him in the darkness before he could pull himself free to seek her out.
“Are you okay?”
“I think so.”
Now nothing moved.. The only sounds were the distant creaks of straining metal and the mournful woodwind moans of escaping air.
But no air escaped the Vault of Relics and Futures, and no water got in. That’s what Scythe Curie had been counting on when she sealed them in there. And although Endura was in a subtropical zone, the temperature of the ocean floor was the same everywhere – barely a degree above freezing. Once the vault succumbed to the chill, their bodies would be well preserved. And only moments after hitting bottom, Rowan could feel the air around them already getting cold.