The Toll (Arc of a Scythe) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,61

islands on the far rim of the atoll. The Thunderhead respected his choice and left him alone. It kept his tiny little island out of its plans.

But not the other islands.

Some of the islets were barely large enough for a person to stand upon, but on every one that could withstand construction, something was being built.

Faraday did his best to ignore it. He cobbled himself together a shack with tools he had taken from construction crews before he left. It wasn’t much, but he didn’t need much. It was a quiet place to live out his eternity. And eternity it would be – or at least a fair slice of it – because he decided he would not self-glean, though he was greatly tempted. He vowed to live at least as long as Goddard lived, if only to secretly spite him.

As a scythe, he had a responsibility to the world, but he was done with all that. He felt no guilt in defying that first all-important scythe commandment of Thou shalt kill. He had. It was sufficient. Knowing Goddard, he was sure there was plenty of that going on without him.

Was it wrong to be separate and apart from a world he’d come to despise? He had tried this once before – in Playa Pintada on the serene northern coast of Amazonia. He was only jaded then. He didn’t yet loathe the world, just mildly disliked it. It was Citra who had rousted him out of his complacency. Yes, Citra – and look what became of all her boldness and bright intentions. Now Faraday had gone beyond jaded to being downright misanthropic. What purpose could there be for a scythe who detested the world and everyone in it? No, this time he would not be pulled back into the fray. Munira might try to drag him in, but she would fail, and she would eventually give up.

She didn’t give up, of course, but he still held on to the hope that she would. Munira would come to see him once a week, bringing food and water and seeds to grow, although his patch of the world was too small and the soil too rocky to grow much of anything. She would bring fruit and other treats that he secretly enjoyed – but he never thanked her. Not for any of it. He hoped his ungrateful nature would finally put her off, and she’d return to Israebia, and the Library of Alexandria. That’s where she belonged. He should never have pulled her off her path. Another life ruined by his meddling.

On one particular visit, Munira brought him, of all things, a bag of artichokes.

“They don’t grow here, but I suppose the Thunderhead sensed a need, and they arrived on the last supply ship,” she told him.

This, although it might not appear like it to Munira, was a substantial development. A moment worthy of note. Because artichokes were Faraday’s favorite, which meant their delivery to the island was no accident. Although the Thunderhead did not interact with scythes, it clearly knew them. It knew him. And it was, in an indirect way, reaching out to him. Well, if this was some sort of sideways gesture of goodwill from the Thunderhead, it was buttering the wrong scythe. Still, he took the artichokes from Munira along with the other foodstuffs in the crate.

“I’ll eat them if I feel like it,” he said flatly.

Munira was not put off by his rudeness. She never was. She had come to expect it. Rely on it, even. As for her life on Kwajalein’s main island, it wasn’t all that different from her life before she came into Scythe Faraday’s service. She had lived a solitary existence, even when surrounded by people at the Library of Alexandria. Now she lived alone in the old bunker on an island surrounded by people, and only interacted when it suited her. She no longer had access to the scythe journals that filled the stone halls of the great library, but she had plenty of reading material. There were many crumbling books left behind by the mortals who had run this place before the rise of the Thunderhead and scythedom. Volumes of curious facts and fictions of people who lived each day of their lives with the ravages of age and relentless approach of death. The brittle pages were filled with melodramatic intrigue and passionate short-sightedness that seemed laughable now. People who believed that their slightest actions mattered and that they could find