Scythe (Arc of a Scythe #1) - Neal Shusterman Page 0,86

remembered from last conclave—the one who knew his poisons. “They looked so good.”

“Have you decided what color you’ll be? And what jewels you’ll have on your robe?” a girl asked, suddenly hanging on his arm like a fast-growing vine. He didn’t know which would be more awkward, pulling out of her grip or not.

“Invisible,” Rowan said. “I’ll come up the statehouse steps naked.”

“Those’ll be some jewels,” quipped one of the junior scythes, and everyone laughed.

Then Citra pushed her way through, and Rowan felt as if he was caught doing something he shouldn’t. “Citra, hi!” he said. It felt so forced, he just wanted to take it back and find another way to say it. He shrugged out of the vine girl’s grip, but it was too late, because Citra had seen it.

“Looks like you’ve made a lot of friends,” Citra said.

“No, not really,” he said, then realized he’d just insulted them all. “I mean, we’re all friends, right? We’re in the same boat.”

“Same boat,” repeated Citra with deadpan dullness but daggers in her eyes as sharp as the ones that used to hang in Faraday’s weapons den. “Good to see you too, Rowan.” Then she strode away.

“Let her go,” said the vine girl. “She’ll be history after the next conclave anyway, right?”

Rowan didn’t even excuse himself as he left them.

He caught up with Citra quickly, which told him she really wasn’t trying all that hard to get away. This was a good sign.

He gently grabbed her arm and she turned to him.

“Hey,” he said. “I’m sorry about back there.”

“No, I get it,” she said. “You’re a big deal now. You have to flaunt it.”

“It’s not like that. Do you think I wanted them fawning all over me like that? C’mon, you know me better.”

Citra hesitated. “It’s been four months,” she said. “Four months can change a person.”

That much was true. But some things hadn’t changed. Rowan knew what she wanted to hear, but that would just be another dance. Another bit of posturing. So he told her the truth.

“It’s good to see you, Citra,” he said. “But it hurts to see you. It hurts a lot, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

He could tell that reached her, because her eyes began to glisten with tears that she blinked away before they could spill. “I know. I hate that it has to be this way.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Rowan. “Let’s not even think about Winter Conclave right now. Let’s be in the here and now, and let Winter Conclave take care of itself.”

Citra nodded. “Agreed.” Then she took a deep breath. “Let’s take a walk. There’s something I have to show you.”

They walked along the outer edge of the rotunda, passing the archways where scythes wheeled and dealed.

Citra pulled out her phone and projected a series of holograms into her palm, cupping it so no one but Rowan could see. “I dug these out of the Thunderhead’s backbrain.”

“How did you do that?”

“Never mind how. What’s important is that I did—and what I found.”

The holograms were of Scythe Faraday on the streets near his home.

“These are from his last day,” Citra said. “I was able to retrace at least some of his steps that day.”

“But why?”

“Just watch.” The hologram showed him being let into someone’s home. “That’s the house of the woman he introduced us to at the market. He spent a few hours there. Then he went to this café.” Citra swiped to another video showing him going into the restaurant. “I think he may have met someone there, but I don’t know who.”

“Okay,” said Rowan. “So he was saying good-bye to people. So far it seems consistent with the things someone would do if it were their last day on Earth.”

Citra swiped again. The next video showed him going up to the stairs to a train station. “This was five minutes before he died,” Citra said. “We know that it happened at that station—but guess what? The camera on that train platform had been vandalized—supposedly by unsavories. It was down for the entire day, so there’s no visual record of what actually happened on that platform!”

A train pulled out of the station, and a moment later a train pulled in, heading in the other direction. That was the one that killed Faraday. Although Rowan couldn’t see it, he grimaced as if he had.

“You think someone killed him, and made it look like he did it himself?” Rowan looked around to make sure they weren’t being observed,