Thunderhead

by Neal Shusterman

  Her parents didn’t try to convince her to stay. This had become as awkward for them as it was for her. Her mother was no longer bitter about things. Now she just seemed resigned. There were tears in her eyes that she quickly hid by hugging Citra tightly, so Citra couldn’t see them—but she had.

  “Come back soon, honey,” her mother said. “This is still your home.”

  But it wasn’t anymore, and they all knew it.

  • • •

  “I’m going to learn how to drive, no matter how many times it kills me.”

  Only a day after Thanksgiving,  Anastasia—and today she was Anastasia—was more determined than ever to be at the wheel of her own destiny.  The uneasy meal with her family reminded her that she needed to create distance between who she had once been and who she was now. The schoolgirl who rode around in publicars had to be left behind if she were ever to fill the shoes in which she now stood.

  “You will drive us to today’s gleanings,” Marie told her.

  “I can do that,” she told Scythe Curie, although she didn’t feel as confident as she sounded. On their last lesson, Citra had run them into a ditch.

  “It’s mostly country roads,” Marie told her as they went out to her car, “so it will test your skills without putting too many in harm’s way.”

  “We’re scythes,” Citra pointed out. “We are harm’s way.”

  The small town on today’s agenda hadn’t seen a gleaning in over a year. Today it would see two. Scythe Curie’s would be swift, and Scythe Anastasia’s would come with a month’s delay. They had found a rhythm to their joint gleaning excursions that suited both of them.

  They pulled out from Fallingwater’s carport haltingly, as Citra still had trouble with the Porsche’s manual transmission. The concept of a clutch felt to Citra like some sort of medieval punishment.

  “What’s the point of three foot pedals?” Citra complained. “People only have two feet.”

  “Think of it as a piano, Anastasia.”

  “I hate the piano.”

  The banter made it a little bit easier on Citra, and her driving became smoother when she could complain. Still, she was only on the upswing of her learning curve . . . so things would have turned out very differently had Scythe Curie been driving.

  They were barely a quarter mile down Fallingwater’s winding private road when a figure leaped out at them from the woods.

  “It’s a splatter!” shouted Scythe Curie. It had become all the new rage for thrill-seeking teens to do impersonations of windshield bugs. Not an easy challenge, because it was very hard to catch a car on the grid by surprise—and those who were off-grid were usually seasoned drivers. Had Scythe Curie been at the wheel, she would have handily swerved around the would-be splatter and continued on without a second thought—but Citra had none of the requisite reflexes. Instead, Citra found her hands frozen on the wheel, and although she tried to punch the brake, she managed to hit the loathsome clutch instead. They barreled right into the splatter, who bounced on the hood, spiderwebbed their windshield, and flipped over the roof of the car. He had already landed behind them by the time Citra found the brake and they squealed to a halt.

  “Crap!”

  Scythe Curie took a deep breath and released it. “That, Anastasia, would definitely have caused you to fail a mortal-age driving test.”

  They got out of the car, and while Scythe Curie inspected the damage to her Porsche, Citra stormed toward the splatter, determined to give him a piece of her mind. Her first real outing behind the wheel, and some stupid splatter had to ruin it!

  He was still alive, but barely, and although he appeared to be in agony, Citra knew better. His pain nanites had kicked in the moment he had connected with the car—and road-splatters always had their nanites dialed high, so they could experience maximum damage with minimum discomfort. His healing nanites were already trying to repair the damage, but they only succeeded in prolonging the inevitable. He would be deadish in less than a minute.

  “Are you satisfied?” Citra said as she approached him. “Did you have your little thrill at our expense? We’re scythes, you know—I should glean you before the ambudrone arrives.” Not that she would, but she could.

  He met her gaze. She expected him to have a smug expression, but it seemed more desperate than anything. She wasn’t expecting that.

  “B . . . . B . . . Boo,” he said through a swelling mouth.

  “Boo?” said Citra. “Really? Sorry, but you missed Halloween by a month.”

  Then he grabbed her robe with a bloody hand, and pulled on it with more force than she thought he could have. It made her trip over her hem, and she fell to her knees.

  “Boo . . . Tr . . . Tra . . . Boo . . . Tra . . .”

  Then his hand let go, and he went limp. His eyes stayed open, but Citra had seen death enough to know that he was gone.

  Even out here in the forest, an ambudrone would come for him shortly. They hovered over even the most sparsely populated areas.

  “What a nuisance,” lamented Scythe Curie when Citra returned to her. “He’ll be up and walking again long before they can fix the damage to my car—bragging all about how he splatted a pair of scythes.”

  Still, the whole thing weighed on Citra. She didn’t know why it should. Perhaps it was his eyes. Or maybe the desperation in his voice. He didn’t seem the way she thought a road-splatter would. It gave her pause. Pause enough to consider what she might be missing about the situation. She looked around, and that’s when she spotted it: a thin wire stretched across the road, not ten feet in front of where the car came to a halt.

  “Marie? Look at this. . . .”

  The two of them approached the wire, which stretched to trees on either side. That’s when it came to her what the splatter was trying to say.

  Booby trap.

  They followed the wire to the tree on the left, and sure enough, just behind the tree was a detonator wired to enough explosives to blow a crater a hundred feet wide. Citra felt her breath stolen, and had to suck it back in. Scythe Curie’s face didn’t change. It stayed stoic.

  “Get in the car, Citra.”

  Citra didn’t argue. The fact that Marie had forgotten to call her Anastasia betrayed how worried she truly was.

  The elder scythe took the wheel this time. The hood was dented, but the car still started.  They backed up, carefully avoiding the boy in the road. Then a shadow fell over them. It made Citra gasp until she realized it was just the ambudrone arriving for the boy. It ignored them and went about its business.

  There was only one residence on that road—only two people who would be driving it that morning—so there was no question that they had been the targets. If that wire had been tripped, there wouldn’t be enough left of either of them to revive. But the day was saved by this mysterious boy, and Citra’s bad driving.

  “Marie . . . who do you think—”

  Scythe Curie cut her off before she could finish. “I am not partial to uninformed conjecture, and I would appreciate it if you did not waste your time in guessing games, either.”  Then she softened. “We’ll report this to the scythedom. They’ll investigate. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

  Meanwhile, behind them, the ambudrone’s gentle grappling claws grabbed the body of the boy who had saved their lives, and carried him away.

  * * *

  Human immortality was inevitable. Like cracking the atom, or air travel. It is not I who choose to revive the deadish, any more than it was I who decided to halt the genetic triggers of aging. I leave all decisions on biological life to the biologically living. Humanity chose immortality, and it is my job to facilitate their choice—because to leave the deadish in that state would be a severe violation of the law.  And so I collect their bodies, bring them to the nearest revival center, and return them to full working order as quickly as possible.

  What they do with their lives after they are revived is, as it has always been, entirely up to them. One might think that being ren
dered deadish might give a person increased wisdom and perspective on their lives. Sometimes it does—but such perspective never lasts. In the end, it is as temporary as their deaths.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  10

  Gone Deadish

  Greyson had never lost his life before. Most kids got deadish at least once or twice growing up. They took more chances than kids had in the mortal days because the consequences were no longer permanent. Death and disfigurement had been replaced by revival and reprimand. Even so, Greyson had never leaned toward recklessness. Certainly he’d had his share of injuries, but his cuts and bruises and even his broken arm had been summarily healed in less than a day. Losing his life was a very different kind of experience, and not one he cared to repeat any time soon. And he remembered every last bit of it, which made it even worse.

  The sharp pain of being struck by the car was already being numbed as he was launched into the air over the car’s roof. Time seemed to slow as he tumbled. There was another jolt of pain when he met the asphalt, but even then, it was one step removed from the real thing—and by the time Scythe Anastasia had reached him, the screams of his devastated nerve endings had been tamped down to a muffled discomfort. His broken body wanted to hurt, but it was forbidden to. He remembered thinking, in his opiate-induced delirium, how sad it must be for a body to want something so badly and to be completely denied.

  The morning leading up to his road-splat took a sharp turn from where he expected it to go. The way he saw it, he would simply take a publicar to the scythes’ door, warn them that there was a threat to their lives, and then be on his merry way. The threat would be theirs to deal with as they saw fit. If he was lucky he’d get away with it, and no one—least of all the Authority Interface—would know what he had done. That was the point of this whole thing, wasn’t it? Plausible deniability? The AI wouldn’t be breaking the law if Greyson acted of his own free will, and would be none the wiser if no one saw him do it.

  Of course the Thunderhead would know. It tracked the movements of every publicar, and always knew precisely where anyone was at any given time. But it also imposed upon itself very strict laws regarding personal privacy. It would not act on information that violated a person’s right to privacy. Funny, but the Thunderhead’s own laws allowed Greyson to freely break the law, as long as he did so in private.

  But his plans took an unexpected turn when his publicar pulled to the side of the road half a mile from Fallingwater.

  “I’m sorry,” the car told him in its familiar cheery tone. “Publicars are not permitted on private roads without the owner’s permission.”

  The owner was, of course, the scythedom—which never gave anyone permission for anything, and was known to glean people for asking.

  So Greyson had gotten out of the car to walk the rest of the way. He had been admiring the trees, pondering their age, wondering how many of them had been here since the Age of Mortality. It was only luck that he looked down when he did, and caught sight of the wire in his path.

  He saw the explosives only seconds before he heard the approaching car, and knew there was only one way to stop the car from barreling through. He didn’t think, he just acted—because even the slightest hesitation would have permanently ended all of them. So he hurled himself into the road, and surrendered himself to the time-honored physics of bodies in motion.

  Going deadish felt like wetting his pants (which he may have actually done), and sinking into a giant marshmallow so dense he couldn’t breathe. The marshmallow gave way to something like a tunnel that came around on itself like a snake swallowing its own tail, and then he was opening his eyes in the soft, diffused light of a revival center.

  His first emotion was relief, because if he was being revived it meant that the explosion had not gone off. If it had, there wouldn’t be anything left of him to bring back. Being here meant that he had succeeded! He had saved the lives of Scythes Curie and Anastasia!

  The next emotion that hit him was a twinge of sorrow . . . because there was no one in the room with him. When a person was rendered deadish, their loved ones were always notified immediately. It was customary for someone to be present upon awakening to welcome the revived back into the world.

  No one was there for Greyson. On the screen beside his bed was a goofy greeting card from his sisters, featuring a confused magician looking at the very dead body of his assistant, whom he had just sawed in half.

  “Congratulations on your first demise,” the card read.

  And that was it. There was nothing from his parents. He should not have been surprised. They were too used to the Thunderhead filling their role—but the Thunderhead was also silent. That troubled him more than anything.

  A nurse entered. “Well, look who’s awake!”

  “How long did it take?” he asked, genuinely curious.

  “Barely a day,” she told him. “All considered, a pretty easy revival—and since it’s your first, it’s free!”

  Greyson cleared his throat. He felt no worse than if he had taken a midday nap; a little out of sorts, a little cranky, but that was the full extent of it.

  “Has there been anyone here to see me at all?”

  The nurse pursed her lips. “Sorry, dear.” Then she looked down. It was a simple gesture, but Greyson clearly read that there was something she wasn’t saying.

  “So . . . is that it, then? Do I get to go now?”

  “As soon as you’re ready, we’ve been instructed to put you into a publicar that will take you back to the Nimbus Academy.”

  Again that look, avoiding his eyes. Rather than beating around the bush, Greyson decided to confront her directly. “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?”

  The nurse now began to refold towels that were already folded. “It’s our job to revive you, not to comment on whatever you did to leave you deadish.”

  “What I did was save two people’s lives.”

  “I wasn’t there, I didn’t see it, I don’t know anything about it. All I know is that you’ve been marked unsavory because of it.”

  Greyson was convinced he hadn’t heard her right.

  “ ‘Unsavory’? Me?”

  Then she was all smiles and cheer again. “It’s not the end of the world. I’m sure you’ll clean the slate in no time . . . if that’s what you want.”

  Then she clapped her hands together as if to wash herself of the situation, and said, “Now how about some ice cream before you go?”

  • • •

  The publicar’s preset destination was not Greyson’s dorm. It was the Nimbus Academy’s administration building. Upon arrival, he was ushered directly into a conference room with a table large enough for about twenty, but there were only three present: the chancellor of the academy, the dean of students, and another administrator whose sole purpose seemed to be glowering at him like an irritated Doberman. This was bad news coming in threes.

  “Sit down, Mr. Tolliver,” said the chancellor, a man with perfect black hair, intentionally gray around the edges. The dean tapped her pen on an open folder, and the Doberman just glared.

  Greyson took a seat facing them.

  “Do you have any idea,” said the chancellor, “the trouble you’ve brought down upon yourself and this academy?”

  Greyson did not deny it. Doing so would just drag this on, and he already wanted it over. “What I did was an act of conscience, sir.”

  The dean let out a rueful guffaw that was both insulting and belittling.

  “Either you’re exceedingly naive, or exceptionally stupid,” spat the Doberman.

  The chancellor put up a hand to quiet the man’s vitriol. “A student of this academy willfully engaging scythes, even to save those scythes’ lives, is—”

  Greyson finished it for him. “—a violation of the Separation of Scythe and State. Clause fifteen, paragraph three, to be exact.”

  “Don’t be a smart-ass,” said the dean. “It won’t help your case.”

>   “With all due respect, ma’am, I doubt anything I say will help my case.”

  The chancellor leaned closer. “What I want to know is how you knew—because it seems to me the only possible way you could have known would be if you were involved, and then got cold feet. So tell me, Mr. Tolliver, were you involved in this plot to incinerate these scythes?”

  The accusation caught Greyson completely off guard. It never occurred to him that he might be perceived as a suspect. “No!” he said. “I would never—how could you even think?—No!” Then he shut his mouth, determined to get himself back under control.

  “Then be so kind as to tell us how you knew about the explosives,” said the Doberman. “And don’t you dare lie.”

  Greyson could spill everything, but something stopped him. It would defeat the entire purpose of what he had done if he tried to deflect the blame. True, there were some things they would find out if they didn’t already know, but not everything. So he carefully picked what truths he would share.

  “I was called to the Authority Interface last week. You can check my record—there was a note about it.”

  The dean picked up a tablet, tapped a few times, then looked at the others and nodded. “That’s true,” she told them.

  “For what reason would the AI call you in?” the chancellor asked.

  Now it was time to seamlessly begin to paint a convincing fiction. “A friend of my father’s is a Nimbus agent. Since my parents have been away for a while, he wanted to check in with me, and give me advice. Y’know—which classes I should take next semester, which professors I should get in with. He wanted to give me a leg up.”

  “So he offered to pull strings,” said the Doberman.

  “No, he just wanted me to have the benefit of his advice—and to know that he had my back. I’ve been feeling kind of alone without my parents, and he knew that. He was just being kind.”

  “That still doesn’t explain—”

  “I’m getting to that. Anyway, after I left his office, I passed a bunch of agents coming out of a briefing. I didn’t hear everything, but I heard them talking about rumors of some sort of plot against Scythe Curie. It caught my attention, because she’s one of the most famous scythes there is. I heard them saying what a shame it was that they had to ignore it, and couldn’t even warn her, because it was a violation. So I thought—”