Scythe

by Neal Shusterman

  To be a scythe, he explained, meant that one had to be well-versed in all methods. Citra realized that being “well-versed” meant she would have to participate in various types of gleaning. Would he have her pull the trigger? Thrust the knife? Swing the club? She wanted to believe she wasn’t capable of it. She desperately wanted to believe she wasn’t scythe material. It was the first time in her life that she aspired to fail.

  • • •

  Rowan’s feelings on the matter were mixed. He found that Scythe Faraday’s moral imperative and ethical high ground infused Rowan with purpose—but only in the scythe’s presence. When left to his own thoughts, Rowan doubted everything. Burned into his mind was the look on that woman’s face as she fearfully yet obediently opened her mouth to be poisoned. The look on her face the moment before she bit down. I am an accomplice to the world’s oldest crime, he told himself in his loneliest moments. And it will only get worse.

  While the journals of scythes were public record, an apprentice still had the luxury of privacy. Scythe Faraday gave Rowan and Citra pale leather-bound volumes of rough-edged parchment. To Rowan it looked like a relic from the dark ages. He wouldn’t have been surprised if Faraday gave them a feather quill to go with it. Mercifully, however, they were allowed to use normal writing utensils.

  “A scythe’s journal is traditionally made of lambskin parchment and kid leather.”

  “I assume you mean ‘kid’ as in ‘goat,’” Rowan said, “and not ‘kid’ as in ‘kid.’”

  That finally made the scythe laugh. Citra seemed to be annoyed that he had made Faraday laugh—as if it put him a point ahead of her. Rowan knew that as much as she hated the idea of being a scythe, she would jockey for position over him because that’s how she was hardwired. Competition was in her very nature; she couldn’t help herself.

  Rowan was much better at picking his battles. He could compete when necessary, but rarely got caught up in petty one-upsmanship. He wondered if that would give him an advantage over Citra. He wondered if he wanted one.

  Being a scythe would not have been his life choice. He had not made any life choices yet, so he had no real clue what he would do with his eternal future. But now that he was being mentored by a scythe, he began to feel he might have the mettle to be one. If Scythe Faraday had selected him as morally capable of the job, perhaps he was.

  As for the journal, Rowan hated it. In a large family where no one particularly cared to hear his thoughts on anything, he had become accustomed to keeping his thoughts to himself.

  “I don’t see what the big deal is,” Citra said as they worked in their journals after dinner one evening. “No one will ever read it but you.”

  “So why write it?” Rowan snapped back.

  Citra sighed as if talking to a child. “It’s to prepare you for writing an official scythe’s journal. Whichever one of us gets the ring will be legally obligated by commandment six to keep a journal every day of our lives.”

  “Which I’m sure no one will read,” added Rowan.

  “But people could read it. The Scythe Archive is open to everyone.”

  “Yeah,” said Rowan, “like the Thunderhead. People can read anything, but no one does. All they do is play games and watch cat holograms.”

  Citra shrugged. “All the more reason not to worry about writing one. If it’s lost among a gazillion pages, you can write your grocery list and what you ate for breakfast. No one will care.”

  But Rowan cared. If he was going to put pen to paper—if he was going to do what a scythe does—he would do it right or not at all. And so far, as he looked at his painfully blank page, he was leaning toward “not at all.”

  He watched Citra as she wrote, completely absorbed in her journal. From where he sat, he couldn’t read what she had written, but he could tell it was in fine penmanship. It figures she would take penmanship in school. It was one of those classes people took just to be superior. Like Latin. He supposed he’d have to learn to write in cursive if he became a scythe, but right now he’d be stuck with inelegant, sloppy printing.

  He wondered, had Citra and he been in the same school, would they have gotten along? They probably wouldn’t have even known each other. She was the type of girl who participates, and Rowan was the kind of kid who avoids. Their circles were about as far from intersecting as Jupiter and Mars in the night sky. Now, however, they had been pulled into convergence. They were not exactly friends—they were never given the opportunity to develop a friendship before being thrust into apprenticeship together. They were partners; they were adversaries—and Rowan found it increasingly hard to parse his feelings about her. All he knew was that he liked watching her write.

  • • •

  Scythe Faraday was strict on his no-family policy. “It is ill-advised for yo,u to have contact with your family during your apprenticeship.” It was difficult for Citra. She missed her parents, but more than that, she missed her brother, Ben—which surprised her, because at home, she never had much patience for him.

  Rowan seemed to have no problem with being separated from his family.

  “They’d much rather have their immunity than have me around, anyway,” he told Citra.

  “Boo hoo,” Citra said. “Am I supposed to feel sorry for you?”

  “Not at all. Envious maybe. It makes it easier for me to leave it all behind.”

  Scythe Faraday did bend his own rule once, however. About a month in, he allowed Citra to attend her aunt’s wedding.

  While everyone else was dressed in gowns and tuxedos, Scythe Faraday did not allow Citra to dress up, “Lest you feel yourself a part of that world.” It worked. Wearing simple street clothes amid the pageantry made her feel even more the outsider—and the apprentice armband made it worse. Perhaps this was the reason Faraday allowed her to attend—to make crystal clear the distinction between who she had been and who she was now.

  “So, what’s it like?” asked her cousin Amanda. “Gleaning and stuff. Is it, like, gross?”

  “We’re not allowed to talk about it,” Citra told her. Which was not true, but she had no interest in discussing gleaning like it was school gossip.

  She should have nurtured that conversation, however, instead of shutting it down, because Amanda was one of the few people who spoke to her. There were plenty of sideways glances and people talking about her when they thought she wasn’t watching, but most everyone avoided her like she carried a mortal-age disease. Perhaps if she already had her ring they might try to curry favor in hopes of receiving immunity, but apparently as an apprentice she offered them nothing but the creeps.

  Her brother was standoffish, and even speaking to her mother was awkward. She asked standard questions like “Are you eating?” and “Are you getting enough sleep?”

  “I understand there’s a boy living with you,” her father said.

  “He has his own room and he’s not interested in me at all,” she told him, which she found oddly embarrassed to admit.

  Citra sat through the wedding ceremony, but excused herself before the reception and took a publicar back to Scythe Faraday’s house, unable to bear another minute of it.

  “You’re back early,” Scythe Faraday commented when she returned. And although he feigned surprise, he had set her place for dinner.

  * * *

  Scythes are supposed to have a keen appreciation of death, yet there are some things that are beyond even our comprehension.

  The woman I gleaned today asked me the oddest question.

  “Where do I go now?” she asked.

  “Well,” I explained calmly, “your memories and life-recording are already stored in the Thunderhead, so it won’t be lost. Your body is returned to the Earth in a manner determined by your next of kin.”

  “Yes, I know all that,” she said. “But what about me?”

  The question perplexed me. “As I said, your memory construct will exist in the Thunderhead. Loved ones will be able to talk to it, and your construct will respond.”


  “Yes,” she said, getting a bit agitated, “but what about me?”

  I gleaned her then. Only after she was gone did I say, “I don’t know.”

  —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie

  * * *

  8

  A Matter of Choice

  “I will glean alone today,” Scythe Faraday told Rowan and Citra one day in February, the second month of their apprenticeship. “While I am gone I have a task for each of you.” He took Citra into the weapons den. “You, Citra, shall polish each of my blades.”

  She had been in the weapons den nearly every day for lessons, but to be there alone, nothing but her and instruments of death, was entirely different.

  The scythe went to the blade wall, which had everything from swords to switchblades. “Some are merely dusty, others tarnished. You shall decide what type of care each one needs.”

  She watched the way his eyes moved from one blade to another, lingering long enough, perhaps, to recall a memory.

  “You’ve used them all?” she asked

  “Only about half of them—and even then, for only one gleaning.” He reached up and pulled a rapier from the fourth wall—the one with the older-looking weapons. This one looked like the kind one of the Three Musketeers might have used. “When I was young, I had much more of a flair for drama. I went to glean a man who fancied himself a fencer. So I challenged him to a duel.”

  “And you won?”

  “No, I lost. Twice. He skewered me through the neck the first time and tore open my femoral artery the second—he was very good. Each time, after I woke up in the revival center, I returned to challenge him. His wins bought him time—but he was chosen to be gleaned, and I would not relent. Some scythes will change their minds, but that leads to compromise, and it favors the persuasive. I make my decisions firm.

  “In the fourth bout, I pierced his heart with the tip of my blade. As he breathed his last, he thanked me for allowing him to die fighting. It was the only time in all my years as a scythe that I had been thanked for what I do.”

  He sighed, and put the rapier back in what Citra realized was a place of honor.

  “If you have all these weapons, why did you take our knife that day you came to glean my neighbor?” Citra had to ask.

  The scythe grinned. “To gauge your reaction.”

  “I threw it away,” she told him.

  “I suspected as much,” he said. “But these you will polish.” Then he left her there.

  When he was gone, Citra studied the weapons. She was not particularly morbid, but she found herself wanting to know which blades had been used, and how. It seemed to her that a noble weapon deserved to have its story passed down, and if not to her and Rowan, then who?

  She pulled a scimitar from the wall. A heavy beast that could decapitate you with a single swing. Had Scythe Faraday used it for a beheading? It was, in a way, his style: swift, painless, efficient. As she moved it clumsily through the air, she wondered if she had the strength to behead someone.

  My god, what am I becoming?

  She put the weapon on the table, grabbed the rag, and rubbed polish on it, and when she finished she went to the next, and the next, trying not to see her reflection in each of the gleaming blades.

  • • •

  Rowan’s task was not as visceral, but was even more troubling.

  “Today, you shall lay the groundwork for my next gleaning,” Scythe Faraday told him, then gave him a list of parameters that tomorrow’s subject should have. “All the information you need is in the Thunderhead, if you’re clever enough to find it.” Then he left for the day’s gleaning.

  Rowan almost made the mistake of giving the list of parameters to the Thunderhead and asking it for a subject—until he remembered that asking the Thunderhead for assistance was strictly forbidden for scythes. They had full access to the great cloud’s wealth of information, but could not access its algorithmic “conscious” mind. Scythe Faraday had told them of a scythe who tried to do so. The Thunderhead itself reported him to the High Blade, and he was “severely disciplined.”

  “How is a scythe disciplined?” Rowan had asked.

  “He was put to death twelvefold by a jury of scythes, then revived each time. After the twelfth revival, he was on probation for a year.”

  Rowan imagined a jury of scythes would be very creative in their methods of punishment. He suspected that dying twelve times at the hands of scythes would be a lot worse than splatting.

  He began to enter search parameters. He was instructed to have his search include not just their city, but all of MidMerica—which stretched nearly a thousand miles across the middle of the continent. Then he narrowed the search to towns with populations under ten thousand that were also on the banks of rivers. Then to homes or apartments that were within one hundred feet of the river bank. Then he searched for people twenty and older who lived in those residences.

  That gave him more than forty thousand people.

  He had done that in five minutes. The next few requirements were not going to be as easy to nail down.

  The subject must be a strong swimmer.

  He got a list of every high school and university in each river town, and cross-referenced everyone who had been on a swim team for the past twenty years or had registered for a triathlon. About eight hundred people.

  The subject must be a dog lover.

  Using Scythe Faraday’s access code, he found the subscription lists of every publication and blog dealing with dogs. He accessed pet store databases to get a list of anyone who made regular purchases of dog food over the past few years. That brought the number down to one hundred twelve names.

  The subject must have a history of heroism in a nonprofessional capacity.

  He painstakingly searched for words like “hero,” “bravery,” and “rescue,” for all one hundred twelve names. He thought he’d be lucky if a single one came up—but to his surprise, four of them were noted as having done something heroic at some point in their lives.

  He clicked on each name and brought up four pictures. He immediately regretted it, because the moment those names had faces, they became people instead of parameters.

  A man with a round face and a winning smile.

  A woman who could have been anyone’s mother.

  A guy with a bad case of bed-hair.

  A man who looked like he hadn’t shaved in three days.

  Four people. And Rowan was about to decide which one would die tomorrow.

  He immediately found himself leaning toward the unshaven man, but realized he was showing a bias. A person shouldn’t be discriminated against because he hadn’t shaved for a picture. And was he ruling out the woman just because she was a woman?

  Okay then, the guy with the smile. But was Rowan overcompensating now by choosing the most pleasant-looking of them?

  He decided to learn more about each of them, using Faraday’s access code to dig up more personal information than he really should have been allowed to; but this was a person’s life he was dealing with—shouldn’t he use any means necessary to make his decision fair?

  This one had run into a burning building in his youth to save a family member. But this one has three young kids. But this one volunteers at an animal shelter. But this one’s brother was gleaned just two years ago. . . .

  He thought each fact would help him, but the more he came to know about each of them, the harder the decision became. He kept digging into their lives, getting more and more desperate, until the front door opened and Scythe Faraday returned. It was dark out. When had night fallen?

  The scythe looked weary, and his robes were splattered with blood.

  “Today’s gleaning was . . . more troublesome than expected,” he said. Citra came out of the weapons den. “All blades are now polished to a perfect shine!” she announced.

  Faraday gave her his nod of approval. Then he turned to Rowan, who still sat at the computer. “And who do we glean next?”

  “I . . . uh
. . . narrowed it down to four.”

  “And?” said the scythe.

  “All four fit the profile.”

  “And?” said the scythe again.

  “Well, this one just got married, and this one just bought a house—”

  “Pick one,” said the scythe.

  “—and this one received a humanitarian award last year—”

  “PICK ONE!” yelled the scythe with a ferocity Rowan had never heard from the man. The very walls seemed to recoil from his voice. Rowan though he might get a reprieve, as he had when Faraday asked him to hand that woman the cyanide pill. But no; today’s test was very different. Rowan looked to Citra, who still stood in the doorway of the weapons den, frozen like a bystander at an accident. He was truly alone in this awful decision.

  Rowan looked to the screen, grimacing, and pointed to the man with bed-hair. “Him,” Rowan said. “Glean him.”

  Rowan closed his eyes. He had just condemned a man to death because he’d had a bad hair day.

  Then he felt Faraday put a firm hand on his shoulder. He thought he’d get a reprimand, but instead, the scythe said, “Well done.”

  Rowan opened his eyes. “Thank you, sir.”

  “Were this not the hardest thing you’ve ever done, I’d be concerned.”

  “Does it ever get easier?” Rowan asked.

  “I certainly hope not,” the scythe said.

  • • •

  The following afternoon, Bradford Ziller returned from work to find a scythe sitting in his living room. The scythe stood up as Bradford entered. His instincts told him to turn and run, but before he did, a teenage boy with a green armband, who had been standing off to the side, closed the door behind him.

  He waited with increasing dread for the scythe to speak, but instead the scythe gestured to the boy, who cleared his throat and said, “Mr. Ziller, you have been chosen for gleaning.”

  “Tell him the rest, Rowan,” said the scythe patiently.