Scythe

by Neal Shusterman

  There are laws against impersonating workers in any profession, but no law preventing anyone from impersonating a scythe. Since the Thunderhead has no jurisdiction over the Scythedom, it cannot pass any laws concerning us. It was an unforeseen glitch in the separation of Scythe and State.

  However, it wasn’t a glitch for long. In the Year of the Stingray, at the Sixty-Third World Conclave, it was decided that all such imposters shall be gleaned on sight, publicly, and most violently.  While one might expect such an edict to produce a bloodbath, very few gleanings ever took place. Once word got out, the posers shed their false robes and vanished into the woodwork of the world. To this day the edict remains, but rarely needs to be invoked, because few are foolish enough to impersonate a scythe.

  And yet now and again, I hear at conclave the rare tale of a scythe coming face to face with an imposter and having to glean them. Usually the conversation is about the inconvenience of it. How the scythe must then track down the imposter’s family to grant immunity and such.

  But I wonder more about the imposter. What was it they hoped to achieve? Was it the lure of the forbidden? Were they enticed by the danger of being caught? Or did they simply wish to leave this life so badly that they chose one of the few direct paths to annihilation?

  —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie

  * * *

  21

  Branded

  The party continued for another day. A festival of excess on all levels. Rowan joined in the revelry, but it was more out of obligation than anything. He was the center of attention, the celebrity of the moment. In the pool beautiful people bobbed toward him, at the buffet guests cleared the way so he could always be at the front of the line. It was awkward, yet heady. He couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that enjoyed the surreal nature of celebratory attention. The lettuce elevated to a place of honor.

  It was only when the other scythes in attendance shook his hand and wished him luck in his mortal competition against Citra that he sobered and remembered what was at stake.

  He borrowed brief snippets of sleep in the cabana, always awakened by music, or raucous laughter, or fireworks. Then, late in the afternoon of the second day, when Scythe Goddard had enough, he merely whispered so and word spread quickly. In less than an hour the guests had left, and servants began to clean the detritus of revelry from the eerily silent grounds. Now only the other residents of the estate remained: Scythe Goddard, his three junior scythes, the servants, and the girl, Esme, who peered out of her bedroom window at Rowan like a wraith, as he sat in Goddard’s cabana, awaiting whatever came next.

  Scythe Volta approached, his yellow robes rippling in the breeze. “What are you still doing out here?” he asked.

  “I have nowhere else to be,” Rowan told him.

  “Come with me,” Volta said. “It’s time to begin your training.”

  • • •

  There was a wine cellar in the basement of the main house. Hundreds, perhaps thousands of bottles of wine rested in brick alcoves. A bare minimum of bulbs lit the space, casting long shadows and making the alcoves seem like portals to undisclosed hells.

  Scythe Volta led Rowan to the central chamber of the cellar, where Goddard and the other scythes waited. Scythe Rand produced a device from her green robe. It looked like a cross between a gun and a flashlight.

  “Do you know what this is?” she asked.

  “It’s a tweaker,” Rowan told her. He’d had the occasion several years ago to have his nanites tweaked when his teachers decided his moodiness had crossed the line into depression. That was five or six years ago. The tweaking was painless, and the effect subtle. He hadn’t noticed much of a change, but everyone agreed that he had begun to smile more.

  “Arms out, legs spread,” said Scythe Rand. Rowan did as he was told and Scythe Rand passed the tweaker all over his body like some sort of magic wand. Rowan felt a mild tingling in his extremities that quickly faded. She stepped back, and Scythe Goddard approached.

  “Have you ever heard the expression ‘being made?’” asked Scythe Goddard. “Or being ‘jumped in?’”

  Rowan shook his head, noticing that the other scythes had positioned themselves around him, leaving Rowan at the center of their circle.

  “Well, you are about to find out what it means.”

  The other scythes then removed their cumbersome outer robes. Now down to their tunics and knickers, they took aggressive stances. There was a look of determination on each of their faces, and maybe a little bit of joyous anticipation. Rowan knew what was about to happen an instant before it began.

  Scythe Chomsky, the largest of them, stepped forward and, without warning, swung his fist, connecting with Rowan’s cheek so hard, he spun around, lost his footing, and fell to the dusty floor.

  Rowan felt the shock of the punch, the jagged bolt of pain, and waited for the telltale warmth of his nanites releasing pain-killing opiates into his bloodstream. But relief didn’t come. Instead the pain swelled.

  It was horrible.

  Overwhelming.

  Rowan had never experienced such pain—he never knew such pain could even exist.

  “What did you do?” he wailed. “What did you do to me?”

  “We turned off your nanites,” Scythe Volta said calmly, “so you could experience what our ancestors once did.”

  “There’s a very old expression,” Scythe Goddard told him. “‘To be painless is to be gainless.’” He gripped Rowan warmly on the shoulder. “And I wish you to gain much.”

  Then he stood back, signaled the others to advance, and they began to beat Rowan to a pulp.

  • • •

  Recovery without the aid of healing nanites was a slow, miserable process that seemed to get worse before it got better. The first day Rowan longed to die. The second day he thought he actually might. His head pounded, his thoughts swam. He slipped in and out of consciousness with little warning. It was hard to breathe, and he knew he had several broken ribs. And although Scythe Chomsky had painfully popped his dislocated shoulder back into place at the end of his beating, it still ached with each heartbeat.

  Scythe Volta visited him several times a day. He sat with Rowan, spoon-feeding him soup, and blotting where it spilled from his split, swollen lips. There seemed to be a halo around him, but Rowan knew it was just optical damage that caused the effect. He wouldn’t be surprised if he had detached retinas.

  “It burns,” he told Volta as the salty soup spilled over his lips.

  “It does for now,”  Volta told him with genuine compassion. “But it will pass, and you’ll be better for it.”

  “How could I be better for any of this?” he asked, horrified at how distorted and liquid his words sounded, as if he were speaking through the blowhole of a whale.

  Volta fed him another spoonful of soup. “Six months from now, you tell me if I was right.”

  He thanked Volta for taking the time to visit him when no one else did.

  “You can call me Alessandro,”  Volta said.

  “Is that your real name?” Rowan asked.

  “No, idiot, it’s Volta’s first name.”

  Rowan supposed that’s as close as anyone got to knowing anyone else in the Scythedom.

  “Thank you, Alessandro.”

  • • •

  On the evening of the second day, the girl—the one who Goddard said was so important—came into his room in between deliriums. What was her name again? Amy? Emmy? Oh yes—Esme.

  “I hate that they did this to you,” she said with tears in her eyes. “But you’ll get better.”

  Of course he’d get better. He didn’t have any choice in the matter. In mortal days, one died or recovered. Now there was only one option.

  “Why are you here?”

  “To see how you were getting on,” she said.

  “No . . . I mean here, in this place?”

  She hesitated before she spoke. Then she looked away. “Scythe Goddard and his friends came to a mall
near where I lived. They gleaned everyone in the food court except for me. Then he told me to come with him. So I did.”

  It didn’t explain anything, but it was the only explanation she offered—perhaps the only one she knew. From what Rowan could see, this girl served no discernible function at the estate.  Yet Goddard gave orders that anyone who ran afoul of her would be severely disciplined. She was not to be bothered in any way, and was allowed free run of the estate. She was the biggest mystery he’d encountered yet in Scythe Goddard’s world.

  “I think you’ll be a better scythe than the others,” she told him, but gave no explanation as to why she thought so. Perhaps it was a gut feeling, but she couldn’t be more wrong.

  “I won’t be a scythe,” he told her. She was the first person he confessed it to.

  “You will if you want to,” she said. “And I think you’ll want to.”

  Then she left him to ponder the pain and the possibility.

  • • •

  Scythe Goddard didn’t show his face in Rowan’s room until day three.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked. Rowan wanted to spit at him, but knew it would hurt too much, and might even bring about a second beating.

  “How do you think I’m feeling?” Rowan answered.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and studied Rowan’s face. “Come see yourself.” Then he helped Rowan out of the bed, and Rowan hobbled to an ornate wardrobe on which was a full-length mirror.

  Rowan barely recognized himself. His face was so swollen it was pumpkin-like. Purple bruises all over his face and body were mottling to all shades of the spectrum.

  “Here is where your life begins,” Goddard told him. “What you see is the boy dying. The man will emerge.”

  “That’s such a load of crap.” Rowan said, not even caring what response it might evoke.

  Goddard merely raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps . . . but you can’t deny this is a turning point in your life, and every turning point must be marked by an event—one that burns itself into you as indelibly as a brand.”

  So now he was branded. Yet he suspected this was just the beginning of a much larger trial by fire.

  “The world longs to be like us,” Goddard told Rowan. “Taking and doing what we choose, with neither consequence nor remorse. They would steal our robes and wear them if they could. You have been given an opportunity to become greater than royalty, so at the very least it requires this rite of passage that I have provided for you.”

  Goddard stood there, studying Rowan a few moments more.  Then he pulled out the tweaker from his robes. “Arms up, legs spread.”

  Rowan took as deep a breath as he could, and did as he was told. Goddard wanded him. Rowan felt tingling in his extremities, but when it was done, he didn’t feel the warmth of opiates or the deadening of his pain.

  “It still hurts,” Rowan told him.

  “Of course it does. I didn’t activate your painkillers, just your healing nanites. You’ll be good as new by morning, and ready to begin your training. But from this moment on, you’ll feel every measure of your body’s pain.”

  “Why?” Rowan dared to ask. “What person in their right mind would want to feel that kind of pain?”

  “Rightmindedness is overrated,” Goddard said. “I’d rather have a mind that’s clear than one that’s ‘right.’”

  * * *

  In the business of death, we scythes have no competition. Unless, of course, you consider fire. Fire kills just as swiftly and completely as a scythe’s blade. It’s frightening, but also somehow comforting to know that there’s one thing the Thunderhead can’t fix. One type of damage that revival centers are powerless to undo. Once one’s goose is cooked, it is truly and permanently cooked.

  Death by fire is the only natural death left. It almost never happens, though. The Thunderhead monitors heat on every inch of the planet, and the fighting of fires often begins before one can even smell smoke. There are safety systems in every home and every office building, with multiple levels of redundancy, just in case. The more extreme tone cults try to burn their deadish, to make it permanent, but ambu-drones usually get to them first.

  Isn’t it good to know that we are all safe from the threat of the inferno? Except, of course, when we’re not.

  —From the gleaning journal of H.S. Curie

  * * *

  22

  Sign of the Bident

  Citra’s days were filled with training and gleaning.

  Each day Citra would go out with Scythe Curie to towns that were selected completely at random. She would watch as the scythe prowled the streets and malls and parks, becoming like a lioness in search of vulnerable prey. Citra learned to see the signs of the “stagnant,” as Scythe Curie called them—although Citra was not as convinced as she about their readiness to be gleaned. Citra wondered how many of her own days had been filled with worldweariness before becoming an apprentice to death. If Scythe Curie had come across Citra on one of those days, would the woman have gleaned her?

  They passed an elementary school one day as it was letting out, and Citra had a sinking feeling that she would glean one of the students.

  “I never glean children,” Scythe Curie told her. “I’ve never found a child who seemed stagnant, but even if I did, I wouldn’t do it. I’ve been admonished in conclave about it, but they’ve never taken disciplinary action against me.”

  Scythe Faraday had no such rule. He had been strictly about statistics from the Age of Mortality. Fewer preadolescents died in those days, but they did die on occasion. In their time together, Citra had known him to only do one such gleaning. He did not invite Rowan or her, and at dinner that night he broke into uncontrollable sobbing and had to excuse himself. If Citra was ordained, she vowed to follow a policy like Scythe Curie, even if it got her in trouble with the selection committee.

  Almost every night, she and the scythe would prepare dinner for mourning family members. Most would leave with their spirits lifted. Some would remain inconsolable, resentful, hateful, but they were in the minority. Such was life and death for Citra in the days before the Harvest Conclave. She couldn’t help but think of Rowan and wonder how he was faring. She longed to see him, but she dreaded it at the same time, because she knew in a few short months she’d be seeing him for the last time, one way or another.

  And she held on to the narrow hope that if she could prove Scythe Faraday was taken out by a fellow scythe, perhaps that could be a monkey wrench hurled into the relentless gearworks of the Scythedom. A monkey wrench that would free Citra from having to glean or be gleaned by Rowan.

  • • •

  Most of the bereaved that Citra had to notify were the same: husbands, wives, children, parents. At first she had resented that Scythe Curie made her the front line for these heartbroken people, but soon she came to understand why. It wasn’t so that Scythe Curie could avoid it, but so that Citra could experience it and learn how to show compassion in the face of tragedy. It was emotionally exhausting, but rewarding. It was preparing her to be a scythe.

  Only one time did her post-gleaning experience differ. The first part of her job was tracking down the immediate family of the gleaned. There was one woman who seemed to have no immediate family; just one estranged brother. It was odd in this time when extended families were more often than not a convoluted web that spanned six living generations or more. Yet this poor woman had only a brother. Citra mapped out the address, went there, but wasn’t paying all that much attention. She didn’t know where she was until she was right in front of the place.

  It wasn’t a home—not in the traditional sense—it was a monastery. A walled adobe compound styled after the historical missions. But unlike those ancient structures, the symbol at the apex of the central steeple was not a cross, but a two-pronged tuning fork. The bident. It was a sign of the tone cults.

  This was a Tonist monastery.

  Citra shivered in the way anyone shivers at the prospect of something vaguely alien and darkly m
ystic.

  “Stay away from those lunatics,” her father once told her. “People get sucked in and are never seen again.” Which was a ridiculous thing to say. No one truly disappears in this day and age. The Thunderhead knows exactly where everyone is at all times. Of course, it doesn’t have to tell.

  Under other circumstances, Citra might have heeded her father’s advice. But she was making a bereavement call, and that trumped any trepidation.

  She entered the compound through a gated arch. The gate wasn’t locked. She found herself in a garden full of white, rich-smelling flowers. Gardenias. Tone cults were all about aroma and sounds. They gave little value to the sense of sight. In fact, the more extreme Tonist groups actually blinded themselves, and the Thunderhead reluctantly allowed it, preventing their healing nanites from restoring sight. It was awful, and yet was one of the few expressions of religious freedom left in a world that had laid its various gods to rest.

  Citra followed a stone path through the garden to the church on which stood the sign of the fork, and she pushed her way through the heavy oak doors into a chapel lined with pews. It was dim, even though there were stained glass windows on either side. They were not from the mortal age, but were Tonist in nature. They depicted various strange scenes: a shirtless man carrying a huge tuning fork on his burdened back; a stone fracturing and shooting forth bolts of lightning; crowds running from a nasty vermiform creature in the form of a double helix that spiraled out of the ground.

  She didn’t like the images and didn’t know what these people believed, only that it was laughable. Ludicrous. Everyone knew that this so-called religion was just a hodgepodge of mortal age faiths slapped together into a troubling mosaic. Yet somehow there were people who found that strange ideological mosaic to be enticing.

  A priest, or monk, or whatever you call a cult clergyman, was at the altar, chanting in monotone and dousing lit candles one by one.