Scythe

by Neal Shusterman

  “He’s so well-groomed!”

  Goddard took a moment to turn to the crowd and sweep his hand in a royal wave. Then he focused on one girl from the audience, held her gaze, pointed at her, then continued on up the stairs, saying nothing.

  “He’s so strange!”

  “He’s so mysterious!”

  “He’s so charming.”

  As for the girl he singled out, she was left impressed and terrified and confused by his momentary attention—which was precisely the intent.

  So focused was the crowd on Goddard and his colorful entourage, no one much noticed Rowan bringing up the rear as they climbed the steps to the entrance.

  Goddard’s crew weren’t the only scythes up for the show. Scythe Kierkegaard had a crossbow slung over his shoulder. Not that he had any intention of using it today—it was merely a part of the spectacle. Still, he could have aimed at just about anyone in the audience and taken them out. The knowledge of that made the crowd all the more excited. No one had ever been gleaned on the Capitol steps before a conclave, but that didn’t mean that it couldn’t happen.

  While most scythes approached down the main avenue, Scythe Curie and Citra made their entrance from a side street, to avoid being the focus of the crowd’s attention for as long as possible. As the stately scythe pushed through the crowd of onlookers, a rumble erupted from the people closest to her as they realized who it was moving among them. People reached out to touch her silky lavender robe. She endured this as a matter of course, but one man actually grabbed the fabric and she had to slap his hand away.

  “Careful,” she said, meeting his eye. “I don’t take kindly to the violation of my person.”

  “I apologize, Your Honor,” said the man. Then he reached for her hand, intent on touching her ring, but she pulled her hand away from him.

  “Don’t even think about it.”

  Citra pushed her way in front of Scythe Curie to help clear a path for her. “Maybe we should have taken a limo,” Citra said. “At least that way we wouldn’t have to fight our way through.”

  “That’s always been a little too elitist for me,” Curie said.

  As they cleared the crowd, a sudden gust came down the wide Capitol steps, catching Scythe Curie’s long silver hair and blowing it back like a bridal train, making her look almost mystical.

  “I knew I should have braided it today,” she said.

  As she and Citra climbed the white marble steps, someone to their left shouted, “We love you!”

  Scythe Curie stopped and turned, unable to find the speaker, so she addressed them all.

  “Why?” she demanded, but now, under her cool scrutiny, no one responded. “I could end your existence at any moment; why love me?”

  Still no one answered—but the exchange attracted a cameraman who moved forward, getting a little too close. Scythe Curie smacked the camera so hard, it wrenched the man’s whole body around, and he nearly dropped it. “Mind your manners,” said the scythe.

  “Yes,  Your Honor. Sorry,  Your Honor.”

  She continued up the steps with Citra behind her. “Hard to imagine that I used to love this attention. Now I’d avoid it entirely if I could.”

  “You didn’t seem this tense at the last conclave,” Citra noted.

  “That’s because I didn’t have an apprentice being tested. Instead, I was the one testing other scythes’ apprentices.”

  A test that Citra had failed spectacularly. But she didn’t feel like bringing that up.

  “Do you know what today’s test will be?” Citra asked as they reached the top of the stairs and stepped into the entry vestibule.

  “No—but I do know that it’s being administered by Scythe Cervantes, and he tends to be very physically minded. For all I know, he’ll have you tilting at windmills.”

  As before, the scythes greeted one another in the grand rotunda, waiting for the assembly room doors to open. Breakfast was set out on tables in the center of the rotunda, featuring a pyramid of Danish that must have taken hours to assemble but seconds to fall as scythes carelessly took the lower Danish without regard to the ones above. The waitstaff scrambled to gather the fallen pastries before they could be ground underfoot. Scythe Curie found it all very amusing. “It was foolhardy of the caterer to think that scythes would leave anything in a state of order.”

  Citra spotted Junior Scythe Goodall—the girl who had been ordained at the last conclave. She had her robes made by Claude DeGlasse, one of the world’s preeminent fashion designers. It had been a monumental mistake, because today’s designers were all about shocking people out of their happy place. Scythe Goodall’s orange-and-blue-striped robe made her look more like a circus clown than a scythe.

  Citra couldn’t help but notice how Goddard and his junior scythes were the center of even more attention than at the Vernal Conclave. Although there were a number of scythes who turned a cold shoulder, even more crowded them, seeking to ingratiate themselves.

  “There are more and more scythes who think like Goddard,” Scythe Curie said quietly to Citra. “They’ve slipped between the cracks like snakes. Infiltrating our ranks. Supplanting the best of us like weeds.”

  Citra thought about Faraday, a decent scythe most certainly choked out by the weeds.

  “The killers are rising to power,” Scythe Curie said. “And if they do, the days of this world will be very dark indeed. It is left to the truly honorable scythes to stand firm against it. I look forward to the day you join in that fight.”

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” Citra had no problem fighting the good fight if she became a scythe. It was the events that would lead up to it that she couldn’t bear to consider.

  Scythe Curie went off to greet several of the old-guard scythes who held true to the founders’ ideals. That’s when Citra finally spotted Rowan. He didn’t bask in the false glow of Goddard. Instead, he was his own little center of attention. He was surrounded by other apprentices, and even a few junior scythes. They chatted, they laughed, and Citra found herself feeling slighted that Rowan hadn’t even sought her out.

  • • •

  Rowan had, in fact, tried to find her, but by the time Citra entered the rotunda, Rowan had already been set upon by unexpected admirers. Some were envious of his position with Goddard, others were just curious, and others were clearly hoping to attach themselves to his rising star. Political positioning started young in the Scythedom.

  “You were there at that office building, weren’t you?” one of the other apprentices said—a “spat,” one of the new ones, at conclave for the first time. “I saw you in the videos!”

  “He wasn’t just there,” said another spat. “He had Goddard’s freaking ring, handing out immunity!”

  “Wow! Is that even allowed?”

  Rowan shrugged. “Goddard said it was, and anyway, it wasn’t like I asked him to give me his ring. He just did it.”

  One of the junior scythes sighed wistfully. “Man, he must really like you if he let you do that.”

  The thought that Goddard might actually like him made Rowan uncomfortable—because the things that Goddard liked, Rowan categorically despised.

  “So what’s he like?” one girl asked.

  “Like . . . no one I’ve ever met,” Rowan told her.

  “I wish I was his apprentice,” said one of the spats, then grimaced like he had just bitten into a rancid cheese Danish. “I was taken on by Scythe Mao.”

  Scythe Mao, Rowan knew, was another showboater, enjoying the celebrity of his public image. He was notoriously independent and didn’t align himself with the old guard or the new. Rowan didn’t know if he was a man who voted his own conscience or sold his vote to the highest bidder. Faraday would have known. There were so many things Rowan missed about being Faraday’s apprentice. The inside scoop was one of them.

  “Goddard and his junior scythes totally owned the Capitol steps when they came up,” said an apprentice Rowan remembered from last conclave—the one who knew his poisons. “T
hey 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, and spoke quietly. “If that’s your only evidence, it’s pretty weak.”

  “I know. So I kept digging.” She swiped back and replayed the scene of Faraday walking toward the station.

  “There were five witnesses. I couldn’t track them down without digging into the Scythedom’s records, and if I did that, they’d know I was looking. But it only makes sense that those witnesses would have gone up these stairs, too, right? There were eighteen people who went up the stairs around the time that Faraday died. Some of them probably got on this first train.” She pointed to the train leaving the station. “But not all of them. Of those eighteen people, I was able to identify about half of them. And three of them were granted immunity that very day.”

  It was enough to take the wind out of Rowan and make him feel lightheaded. “They were bribed to say it was a self-gleaning?”

  “If you were just an ordinary citizen and witnessed one scythe killing another, and then were offered immunity to keep your mouth shut, what would you do?”

  Rowan wanted to believe he’d seek justice, but he thought back to the days before he became an apprentice, when the appearance of a scythe was the most frightening thing he could imagine. “I’d kiss the ring and keep my mouth shut.”

  Across the rotunda, the doors of the conclave chamber opened and the scythes began to file in.

  “Who do you think did it?” Rowan asked.

  “Who had the most to gain by getting Faraday out of the picture?”

  Neither of them needed to say it out loud. They both knew the answer. Rowan knew that Goddard was capable of unthinkable things, but would he kill another scythe?”

  Rowan shook his head, not wanting to believe it. “That’s not the only explanation!” he told her. “It might not have even been a scythe at all. Maybe it was the family member of someone he gleaned. Someone who wanted revenge. Anyone could have taken his ring, pushed him into the path of the train, and used the ring to give immunity to the witnesses. They’d have to stay quiet then, or they’d be considered accomplices!”

  Citra opened her mouth to refute it, but closed it again. It was possible. Even though using Faraday’s ring would have frozen the killer’s finger, it was possible. “I didn’t think of that,” she said.

  “Or what about a Tonist? The tone cults hate scythes.”

  The rotunda was quickly emptying. They left the alcove and moved toward the chamber doors. “You don’t have enough facts to accuse anyone of anything.” Rowan said. “You should let it sit for now.”

  “Let it sit? You can’t be serious.”

  “I said for now! You’ll have full access to the Scythedom’s records once you’re ordained, and you’ll be able to prove exactly what happened.”

  Citra stopped in her tracks. “What do you mean once I’m ordained. It could just as easily be you. Or is there something I’m missing?”

  Rowan pursed his lips, furious at himself for the slip. “Let’s just get inside before they close the doors.”

  • • •

  The rituals of conclave were just as they had been before. The tolling of the dead. The washing of hands, grievances, and discipline. Once again an anonymous accusation was leveled against Scythe Goddard—this time accusing him of handing out immunity too freely.

  “Who brings this accusation?” Goddard demanded. “Let the accuser stand and identify his or herself!”

  Of course no one took credit, which allowed Goddard to retain the floor. “I will admit that his accusation has merit,” Goddard said. “I am a g
enerous man, and have perhaps been too liberal in my doling of immunity. I make no excuses and am unrepentant. I throw myself on the mercy of the High Blade to levy my punishment.”

  High Blade Xenocrates waved his hand dismissively. “Yes, yes, just sit down, Goddard. Your penance will be to shut up for a whole five minutes.”

  That brought a round of laughter. Goddard bowed to the High Blade and took his seat. And although a few scythes—including Scythe Curie—tried to object, pointing out that historically, scythes who over-used their ring had their power to grant immunity limited to the families of the gleaned, their complaints fell on deaf ears. Xenocrates overruled all objections in the interest of speeding up the day’s proceedings.

  “Amazing,” said Scythe Curie quietly to Citra. “Goddard’s becoming untouchable. He can get away with anything. I wish someone would have had the foresight to glean him as a child. The world would be better off.”

  Citra avoided Rowan at lunch, afraid that being seen together more than they already had been might raise suspicion. She stood by Scythe Curie for lunch, and the scythe introduced Citra to several of the greatest living scythes: Scythe Meir, who had once been a delegate to the Global Conclave in Geneva; Scythe Mandela, who was in charge of the bejeweling committee; and Scythe Hideyoshi, the only scythe known to have mastered the skill of gleaning through hypnosis.

  Citra tried not to be too starstruck. Meeting them almost gave her hope that the old guard, could triumph against the likes of Goddard. She kept glancing over at Rowan, who, once more, couldn’t seem to get away from the other apprentices, although she didn’t know how hard he tried.

  “It’s a bad sign,” said Scythe Hideyoshi, “when our young hopefuls gravitate so openly to the enemy.”

  “Rowan’s not the enemy,” Citra blurted, but Scythe Curie put a hand on her shoulder to quiet her.

  “He represents the enemy,” Scythe Curie said. “At least he does to those other apprentices.”

  Scythe Mandela sighed. “There shouldn’t be enemies in the Scythedom. We should all be on the same side. The side of humanity.”

  It was generally agreed among the old guard that these were troubling times, but aside from raising objections that were repeatedly dismissed, no one took action.