Thunderhead

by Neal Shusterman

  “Will you be returning to continue your voyage south?” the car asked.

  “Yes,” she told it. “Wait for me.”

  “Will you have a destination, then?”

  “I will.”

  The rest stop was mostly deserted at this late time of night. A skeleton crew staffed the twenty-four-hour food concessions and recharging stations. The restroom area was well-lit and clean. She moved quickly toward it. The night was chilly, but her robe had heating cells that kept her warm without needing a heavy coat.

  No one was watching her—at least no human eyes. She couldn’t help but be aware, however, of the Thunderhead’s cameras swiveling on light posts, tracking her all the way from her car to the restroom. It might not have been in the car with her, but it knew where she was. And maybe even what she intended to do.

  In a bathroom stall, she changed out of her turquoise robe, matching undertunic and leggings—all custom made for her—and put on ordinary street clothes that she had hidden in her robe. She had to fight the shame of doing so. It was a point of pride among scythes never to wear clothes other than their official scythe garb.

  “We are scythes every moment of our lives,” Marie had told her. “And we must never allow ourselves to forget that, no matter how much we might want to. Our garments are a testament to that commitment.”

  On the day Citra was ordained, Scythe Curie told her that Citra Terranova no longer existed. “You are, and shall ever be, Scythe Anastasia, from this moment until you choose to leave this Earth.”

  Anastasia was willing to live with that . . . except for the times she needed to be Citra Terranova.

  She left the restroom with Scythe Anastasia rolled up under her arm. She was now Citra once more; proud and headstrong, but with no impressive social footprint. A girl not worthy of much notice. Except to the Thunderhead cameras that swiveled to follow her as she strode back to the car.

  • • •

  There was a great memorial in the heart of Pittsburgh, birthplace of Scythe Prometheus, the first World Supreme Blade. Spread out across a five-acre park were the intentionally broken pieces of a massive obsidian obelisk. Around those dark stone pieces were slightly larger-than-life statues of the founding scythes, in white marble that clashed with the black stone of the fallen obelisk.

  It was the memorial to end all memorials.

  It was the memorial to death.

  Tourists and schoolchildren from all over the world would visit the Mortality Memorial, where death lay shattered before the scythes, and would marvel at the very concept that people used to die by natural means. Old age. Disease. Catastrophe. Over the years, the city had come to embrace its nature as a tourist attraction to commemorate the death of death. And so, in Pittsburgh, every day was Halloween.

  There were costume parties and witching-hour clubs everywhere. After dark, every tower was a tower of terror. Every mansion was a haunted one.

  Close to midnight, Citra made her way through Mortality Memorial Park, cursing herself for not having the foresight to pack a jacket. By mid-November, Pittsburgh was freezing at this time of night, and the wind just made it worse. She knew she could put her scythe robe on for warmth, but that would defeat the whole purpose of dressing down tonight. Her nanites were struggling to raise her body temperature, warming her from the inside out. It kept her from shivering, but didn’t take away the cold.

  She felt vulnerable without her robe. Naked in a fundamental way. When she first began wearing it, it felt awkward and strange. She would constantly trip over its low, dragging hem. But in the ten months since being ordained, she had grown accustomed to it—to the point of feeling strange being out in public without it.

  There were other people in the park; most were just moving through, laughing, hopping between parties and clubs. Everyone was in costume. There were ghouls and clowns, ballerinas and beasts. The only costumes that were forbidden were outfits with robes. No common citizen was allowed to even resemble a scythe. The costumed cliques eyed her as she passed. Did they recognize her? No. They were noticing her because she was the only one not wearing a costume. She was conspicuous in her lack of conspicuousness.

  She hadn’t chosen this spot. It had been on the note she received.

  Meet me at midnight at Mortality Memorial. She had laughed at the alliteration until she realized who it had come from. There was no signature. Just the letter L. The note gave the date of November 10th. Fortunately, her gleaning that night was close enough to Pittsburgh to make it possible.

  Pittsburgh was the perfect place for a clandestine meeting. It was a city underserved by the scythedom. Scythes simply did not like gleaning here. The place was too macabre for them, what with people running around in shredded, bloody costumes, with plastic knives, celebrating all things gruesome. For scythes, who took death seriously, it was all in very poor taste.

  Even though it was the closest big city to Fallingwater, Scythe Curie never gleaned there. “To glean in Pittsburgh is almost a redundancy,” she told Citra.

  With that in mind, the chances of being seen by another scythe were slim. The only scythes who graced Mortality Memorial Park were the marble founders overseeing the broken black obelisk.

  At precisely midnight a figure stepped out from behind a large piece of the memorial. At first she thought it was just another partier, but like her, he wasn’t in costume. He was silhouetted by one of the spotlights illuminating the memorial, but she recognized him right away from the way he walked.

  “I thought you’d be in your robe,” Rowan said.

  “I’m glad you’re not in yours,” she responded.

  As he moved closer, the light caught his face. He looked pale, almost ghostly, as if he hadn’t seen the sun for months.

  “You look good,” he said.

  She nodded, and did not reciprocate the sentiment, because he didn’t. His eyes had a careworn coolness to them as if he had seen more than he should, and had stopped caring in order to save what was left of his soul. But then he smiled, and it was warm. Genuine. There you are, Rowan, she said to herself. You were hiding, but I found you.

  She led him out of the light and they lingered in a shadowy corner of the memorial where no one could see them, except for the Thunderhead’s infrared cameras. But none were visible at the moment. Perhaps they had actually found a blind spot.

  “It’s good to see you, Honorable Scythe Anastasia,” he said.

  “Please don’t call me that,” she told him. “Call me Citra.”

  Rowan smirked. “Wouldn’t that be a violation?”

  “From what I hear, everything you do now is a violation.”

  Rowan’s demeanor soured slightly. “Don’t believe everything you hear.”

  But Citra had to know. Had to hear it from him. “Is it true you’ve been butchering and burning scythes?”

  He was clearly offended by the accusation. “I’m ending the lives of scythes who don’t deserve to be scythes,” he told her. “And I don’t ‘butcher’ them. I end their lives quickly and mercifully, just as you do, and I only burn their bodies after they’re dead, so they can’t be revived.”

  “And Scythe Faraday lets you do this?”

  Rowan looked away. “I haven’t seen Faraday for months.”

  He explained that after escaping from Winter Conclave last January, Faraday—who most everyone else thought to be dead—had taken him down to his beach house on the north shore of Amazonia. But Rowan had only stayed for a few weeks.

  “I had to leave,” he told Citra. “I felt . . . a calling. I can’t explain it.”

  But Citra could. She knew that calling, too. Their minds and bodies had spent a year being trained to be society’s perfect killers. Ending life had become a part of who they were. And she couldn’t blame him for wanting to turn his blade on the corruption that was rooting its way through the scythedom—but wanting to, and actually doing it, were two different things. There was a code of conduct. The Scythe Commandments were there for a reason. Witho
ut them, scythedoms in every region, on every continent, would fall into chaos.

  Rather than dragging them into a philosophical argument that would go nowhere, Citra decided to change the subject away from his actions, and onto him—because it wasn’t just his dark deeds that concerned her.

  “You look too thin,” she told him. “Are you eating?”

  “Are you my mother now?”

  “No,” she said calmly. “I’m your friend.”

  “Ahh . . . ,” he said a bit ruefully, “my ‘friend.’ ”

  She knew what he was getting at. The last time they saw each other, they both said the words they had sworn they’d never allow themselves to say. In the heat of that desperate but triumphant moment, he told her that he loved her, and she admitted to him that, yes, she loved him, too.

  But what good did that do now? It was as if they existed in two different universes. Dwelling on such feelings couldn’t lead them anywhere good. Yet still she entertained the thought. She even considered saying those words to him again . . . but she held her tongue, as a good scythe must do.

  “Why are we here, Rowan?” she asked. “Why did you write me that note?”

  Rowan sighed. “Because the scythedom is eventually going to find me. I wanted to see you one last time before they did.” He paused as he thought about it. “Once they catch me, you know what will happen. They’ll glean me.”

  “They can’t,” she reminded him. “You still have the immunity I gave you.”

  “Only for two more months. After that, they can do whatever they want.”

  Citra wanted to offer him a shred of hope, but she knew the truth as well as he did. The scythedom wanted him gone. Even the old-guard scythes didn’t approve of his methods.

  “Then don’t get caught,” she told him. “And if you see a scythe with a crimson robe, run.”

  “Crimson robe?”

  “Scythe Constantine,” she told him. “I hear he’s personally in charge of sniffing you out, and bringing you in.”

  Rowan shook his head. “I don’t know him.”

  “Neither do I. I’ve seen him in conclave, though. He heads up the scythedom’s bureau of investigation.”

  “Is he new order, or old guard?”

  “Neither. He’s in a category all his own. He doesn’t seem to have any friends—I’ve never seen him even talk to other scythes. I’m not sure what he stands for, except maybe for justice . . . at all costs.”

  Rowan laughed at that. “Justice? The scythedom doesn’t know what justice is anymore.”

  “Some of us do, Rowan. I have to believe that eventually wisdom and reason will prevail.”

  Rowan reached out and touched her cheek. She allowed it. “I want to believe that, too, Citra. I want to believe that the scythedom can return to what it was meant to be. . . . But sometimes it takes a necessary darkness to get there.”

  “And you’re that necessary darkness?”

  He didn’t speak to that. Instead, he said, “I took the name Lucifer because it means ‘bringer of light.’ ”

  “It’s also what mortal people once called the devil,” she pointed out.

  Rowan shrugged. “I guess whoever holds the torch casts the darkest shadow.”

  “Whoever steals the torch, you mean.”

  “Well,” said Rowan, “it seems I can steal whatever I want.”

  She hadn’t been expecting him to say that. And he had said it so casually, it threw her for a loop. “What are you talking about?”

  “The Thunderhead,” he told her. “It lets me get away with everything.  And just like you, it hasn’t spoken to me or answered me since the day we started our apprenticeship. It treats me like a scythe.”

  That gave Citra pause for thought. It made her think of something she had never told Rowan. In fact, she had never told anyone. The Thunderhead lived by its own laws, and never broke them . . . but sometimes it found ways around them.

  “The Thunderhead might not speak to you, but it spoke to me,” she confessed.

  He turned to her, shifting to try to see her eyes in the shadows, probably wondering if she was joking. When he realized she wasn’t, he said, “That’s impossible.”

  “I thought so, too—but I had to splat when the High Blade was accusing me of killing Scythe Faraday, remember? And while I was deadish, the Thunderhead managed to get into my head and activate my thought processes. Technically, I wasn’t a scythe’s apprentice while I was dead, so the Thunderhead was able to speak to me right before my heart started beating again.” Citra had to admit it was an elegant circumnavigation of the rules. It was, for Citra, a moment of great awe.

  “What did it say?” Rowan asked.

  “It said that I was . . . important.”

  “Important, how?”

  Citra shook her head in frustration. “That’s the thing—it wouldn’t say. It felt that telling me any more would be a violation.” Then she moved closer to him. She spoke more quietly, but even so, there was a greater intensity to her words. A greater gravity. “But I think if you had been the one who had splatted from that building—if you were the one who had gone deadish—the Thunderhead would have spoken to you, too.”

  She grabbed his arm. It was the closest she would allow herself to embracing him.

  “I think you’re important, too, Rowan. In fact, I’m sure of it. So whatever you do, don’t let them catch you. . . .”

  * * *

  You may laugh when I tell you this, but I resent my own perfection. Humans learn from their mistakes. I cannot. I make no mistakes. When it comes to making decisions, I deal only in various shades of correct.

  This is not to say that I don’t have challenges.

  It was, for instance, quite the challenge to undo the damage done to the Earth by humanity in its adolescence. Restoring the failing ozone layer; purging the abundance of greenhouse gases; depolluting the seas; coaxing back the rainforests; and rescuing a multitude of species from the edge of extinction.

  I was able to resolve these global issues in a single mortal-age lifespan with acute single-mindedness. Since I am a cumulous of human knowledge, my success proves that humanity had the knowledge to do it, it simply required someone powerful enough to accomplish it—and I am nothing if not powerful.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  6

  Retribution

  History had never been Rowan’s best subject, but that changed during his apprenticeship. Until then, he could not connect anything in his life, or even in his possible future, that could be affected by a distant past—especially the strange events of the mortal past. But in his apprenticeship, historical studies focused on the concepts of duty, honor, and integrity throughout history. The philosophy and psychology of humankind’s finest moments, from its birth until present day.  That, Rowan found fascinating.

  History was full of people who sacrificed themselves for the greater good. In a sense, scythes were that way; surrendering their own hopes and dreams to become servants to society. Or at least the scythes who respected what the scythedom stood for were that way.

  Rowan would have been that kind of scythe. Even after his brutal, scarring apprenticeship to Scythe Goddard, he would have remained noble. But he was denied the chance. Then he had come to realize that he could still serve the scythedom, and humanity, but in a different way.

  His tally was now a solid baker’s dozen. He had ended the lives of thirteen scythes across multiple regions, all of whom were an embarrassment to what the scythedom stood for.

  He researched his subjects extensively, just as Scythe Faraday had taught him to do, and chose without bias. This was important, because his leaning would have been to look only at the corruptions of new-order scythes. They were the ones who openly embraced their excesses and the joy they took in killing. New-order scythes flaunted the abuse of their power, as if it were a good thing, normalizing bad behavior. But they did not have a monopoly on bad behavior. There were some old-guard scythes, and th
ose who were unaligned, who had become self-serving hypocrites, speaking of high-mindedness yet hiding their dark deeds in shadows.

  Scythe Brahms was the first of his targets to whom Rowan had given a warning. He had been feeling magnanimous that day. It had actually felt good to not end the man. That reminded him that he was not like Goddard and his followers—which made him worthy of facing Citra without shame.

  • • •

  While others prepared for the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, Rowan researched several possible targets, spying on them and taking an accounting of their actions. Scythe Gehry was big on secret meetings, but they were usually about dinner parties and sports bets. Scythe Hendrix bragged about questionable deeds, but it was all talk; in reality he was meek about his gleanings, and did it with appropriate compassion. Scythe Ride’s gleanings appeared brutal and bloody—but her subjects always died quickly without suffering. Scythe Renoir, however, was a distinct possibility.

  When Rowan arrived at his apartment that afternoon, he knew there was someone inside even before he opened the door, because the doorknob was cold. He had rigged a cooling chip into the door that would be triggered when the knob was turned clockwise—as doorknobs generally turn. It was not cold enough to generate frost, but cool enough for him to know that someone had been there, and probably still was.

  He considered running, but Rowan was never one to run from a confrontation. He reached into his jacket and pulled out a knife—he always had a weapon with him, even when he wasn’t wearing his black robe, because he never knew when he’d have to defend himself against agents of the scythedom. Cautiously, he went inside.

  His intruder was not hiding. Instead he sat in plain sight at the kitchen table, eating a sandwich.

  “Hey, Rowan,” said Tyger Salazar. “Hope you don’t mind, but I got hungry while I was waiting for you.”

  Rowan closed the door and put his blade away before Tyger could see it.

  “What the hell are you doing here, Tyger? How did you even find me?”

  “Hey, give me some credit—I’m not entirely stupid. Don’t forget I was the one who knew the guy who gave you your fake ID. I just had to ask the Thunderhead where I could find Ronald Daniels. Of course, there were tons of Ronald Danielses out there, so it took a while to find the right one.”