The Toll Read online

  For David Gale, the High Blade of editors.

  We all miss the enlightened swath of your pen!

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book—this entire series—would not have been possible without the friendship and support of everyone at Simon & Schuster. Particularly my publisher, Justin Chanda, who personally edited The Toll when my editor, David Gale, took ill, and did an incredible job, challenging me to make the book the best it could be. I’d also like to thank assistant editor Amanda Ramirez for all her hard work on these, and all my S&S books.

  But there are so many people at S&S who go above and beyond! Jon Anderson, Anne Zafian, Alyza Liu, Lisa Moraleda, Michelle Leo, Sarah Woodruff, Krista Vossen, Chrissy Noh, Katrina Groover, Jeannie Ng, Hilary Zarycky, Lauren Hoffman, Anna Jarzab, and Chloë Foglia, to name just a few. Thank you! You are all part of my extended family. So come on over for Thanksgiving. I promise we won’t carve the turkey without you.

  And once again, thanks to Kevin Tong for these amazing, iconic covers! You have truly raised the bar! All future covers will have to pass the Tong Test.

  Thanks to my literary agent, Andrea Brown, for everything she does—including talking me through my this-is-the-book-that-kills-me moments. My entertainment industry agents, Steve Fisher and Debbie Deuble-Hill, at APA. My contract attorneys, Shep Rosenman, Jennifer Justman, and Caitlin DiMotta. And of course my manager, Trevor Engelson, the undisputed prince of Hollywood.

  Thanks to Laurence Gander for helping with some critical sensitivity issues for the character of Jeri, and Michelle Knowlden for her expertise on interstellar mathematical and engineering issues.

  I’m thrilled by how well the books are doing internationally, and want to give a shout-out to Deane Norton, Stephanie Voros, and Amy Habayeb in S&S foreign sales, as well as Taryn Fagerness, my foreign agent—and of course all my foreign publishers, editors, and publicists. In France, Fabien Le Roy at Èditions Robert Laffont. In Germany, Antje Keil, Christine Schneider, and Ulrike Metzger at S. Fischer Verlage. In the United Kingdom, Frances Taffinder and Kirsten Cozens at Walker Books. In Australia, Maraya Bell and Georgie Carrol. In Spain, Irina Salabert at Nocturna. And my friend Olga Nødtvedt, who translated my books into Russian out of love for them, even before Russian publishers wanted them.

  The entire Arc of a Scythe series continues to be in development as a feature film with Universal, and I’d like to thank everyone involved, including producers Josh McGuire and Dylan Clarke, as well as Sara Scott at Universal, Mia Maniscalco and Holly Bario at Amblin, and Sera Gamble, who’s working on a killer script (yeah, pun intended). Can’t wait to see it on the big screen! And when it comes to smaller screens, I’d like to thank my son Jarrod and his partner Sofía Lapuente for their amazing book trailers.

  Thanks to Barb Sobel, for superhuman organizational skills, and Matt Lurie for keeping social media from devouring my brain like some flesh-eating bacteria.

  But who I am most grateful for are my kids, who aren’t kids anymore, but will always be my babies. My sons, Brendan and Jarrod, and my daughters, Joelle and Erin, who make me proud every day of my life!

  Part One THE LOST ISLAND & THE DROWNED CITY

  It is with abiding humility that I accept the position of High Blade of MidMerica. I wish it were under more joyful circumstances. The tragedy of Endura will long linger in our memories. The many thousands of lives that were ended on that dark day will be remembered for as long as humankind has hearts to endure and eyes to weep. The names of the devoured will forever be on our lips.

  I am honored that the last act of the seven Grandslayers was to acknowledge my right to be considered for High Blade—and since the only other candidate perished in the catastrophe, there is no need to open wounds by opening the sealed vote. Scythe Curie and I did not always agree, but she was truly among the best of us and will go down in history as one of the greats. I mourn her loss just as much as, if not more than, anyone else’s.

  There has been a great deal of speculation over who was responsible for the disaster, for clearly it was no accident, but an act of malicious intent, carefully planned. I can lay all the rumors and speculation to rest.

  I take full responsibility.

  Because it was my former apprentice who sank the island. Rowan Damisch, who called himself Scythe Lucifer, was the perpetrator of this unthinkable act. Had I not trained him—had I not taken him under my wing—he would never have had access to Endura, or the skills to carry out this heinous crime. Therefore, the blame falls on me. My only consolation is that he perished as well, and his unforgivable deeds will never surface in our world again.

  We are now left with no Grandslayers to look to for guidance, no greater authority to set scythe policy. Therefore, we must—all of us—put aside our differences once and for all. The new order and the old guard must work together to meet the needs of all scythes everywhere.

  Toward that end, I have decided to officially rescind the gleaning quota in my region, out of respect for those scythes who feel hard-pressed to meet it. From this moment forth, MidMerican scythes can glean as few people as they see fit, without being punished for failing to meet a quota. It is my hope that other scythedoms will follow suit and abolish their gleaning quotas as well.

  Of course, to compensate for those scythes who choose to glean less, the rest of us will need to increase the number of lives we take to make up the difference, but I trust that a natural balance shall be achieved.

  —From the inauguration speech of His Excellency, High Blade Robert Goddard of MidMerica, April 19th, Year of the Raptor

  1 Surrender to the Momentum

  There was no warning.

  One moment he was asleep, and the next he was being rushed through the darkness by people he didn’t know.

  “Don’t struggle,” someone whispered to him. “It will be worse for you if you do.”

  But he did anyway—and managed, even in his half-awake state, to tear out of their grasp and run down the hall.

  He called for help, but it was too late for anyone to be alert enough to make a difference. He turned in the dark, knowing there was a staircase to his right, but misjudged, and fell headlong down the stairs, smashing his arm on a granite step. He felt the bones in his right forearm snap. Sharp pain—but only for an instant. By the time he rose to his feet, the pain was subsiding and his whole body felt warm. It was his nanites, he knew, flooding his bloodstream with painkillers.

  He stumbled forward, gripping his arm so his wrist wouldn’t hang at a horrible angle.

  “Who’s there?” he heard someone yell. “What’s going on out there?”

  He would have run toward the voice, but he was unsure where it had come from. His nanites were fogging him in, making it hard to tell up from down, much less left from right. What a terrible thing for his mind to lose its edge when he needed it most. Now the ground beneath his feet felt like a shifting fun-house floor. He careened between walls, trying to maintain his balance, until he ran right into one of his attackers, who grabbed him by his broken wrist. Even with all the painkillers in him, the feel of that bone-grating grasp made the rest of his body too weak to resist.

  “You couldn’t make this easy, could you?” said the attacker. “Well, we warned you.”

  He only saw the needle for an instant. A slender flash of silver in the darkness before it was jammed into his shoulder.

  He was overwhelmed by a chill in his veins, and the world seemed to spin in the opposite direction. His knees gave out, but he didn’t fall. There were too many hands around him now to let him hit the floor. He was lifted up and carried through the air. There was an open door, and then he was out into a blustery night. With the last of his consciousness fading, he had no choice but to surrender to the momentum.

  * * *
>
  His arm had healed by the time he awoke—which meant he must have been out for hours. He tried to move his wrist, but found that he couldn’t. Not because of any injury, but because he was restrained. Both of his hands, and his feet as well. He also felt like he was suffocating. Some sort of sack was over his head. Porous enough for him to breathe, but thick enough to make him fight for every breath.

  Although he had no idea where he was, he knew what this was. It was called a kidnapping. People did such things for fun now. As a birthday surprise, or as an activity on some adventure vacation. But this was not a friends-and-family sort of kidnapping; this was the real thing—and although he had no idea who his abductors were, he knew what it was about. How could he not know?

  “Is anyone there?” he said. “I can’t breathe in here. If I go deadish, that’s not going to help you, is it?”

  He heard movement around him, then the bag was ripped from his head.

  He was in a small, windowless room, and the light was harsh, but only because he had been so long in darkness. Three people stood before him. Two men and a woman. He had expected to be faced with hardened career unsavories—but that couldn’t be further from the truth. Yes, they were unsavory, but only in the way that everyone was.

  Well, almost everyone.

  “We know who you are,” said the woman in the middle, who was apparently in charge, “and we know what you can do.”

  “What he allegedly can do,” said one of the others. All three of them wore rumpled gray suits, the color of a cloudy sky. These were Nimbus agents—or at least they had been. They looked like they hadn’t changed their clothes since the Thunderhead fell silent, as if dressing the part meant there was still a part to dress for. Nimbus agents resorting to kidnapping. What was the world coming to?

  “Greyson Tolliver,” said the doubtful one, and, looking at a tablet, he recited the salient facts of Greyson’s life. “Good student, but not great. Expelled from the North Central Nimbus Academy for a violation of scythe-state separation. Guilty of numerous crimes and misdemeanors under the name of Slayd Bridger—including rendering twenty-nine people deadish in a bus plunge.”

  “And this is the slime that the Thunderhead chose?” said the third agent.

  The one in charge put up her hand to silence them both, then leveled her gaze at Greyson.

  “We’ve scoured the backbrain, and we’ve only been able to find a single person who isn’t unsavory,” she said. “You.” She looked at him with a strange mix of emotions. Curiosity, envy… but also a sort of reverence. “That means you can still talk to the Thunderhead. Is that true?”

  “Anyone can speak to the Thunderhead,” Greyson pointed out. “I’m just the one it still talks back to.”

  The agent with the tablet drew a deep breath, like a full-body gasp. The woman leaned closer. “You are a miracle, Greyson. A miracle. Do you know that?”

  “That’s what the Tonists say.”

  They scoffed at the mention of Tonists.

  “We know they’ve been holding you captive.”

  “Uh… not really.”

  “We know you were with them against your will.”

  “Maybe at first… but not anymore.”

  That didn’t sit well with the agents. “Why on Earth would you stay with Tonists?” asked the agent who, just a moment ago, had called him slime. “You couldn’t possibly believe their nonsense….”

  “I stay with them,” said Greyson, “because they don’t kidnap me in the middle of the night.”

  “We didn’t kidnap you,” said the one with the tablet. “We liberated you.”

  Then the one in charge knelt before him, so that she was at his eye level. Now he could see something else in her eyes—something that overpowered her other emotions. Desperation. A pit of it, dark and as consuming as tar. And it wasn’t just her, Greyson realized; it was a shared desperation. He’d seen others struggling with grief since the Thunderhead fell silent, but nowhere was it as abject and raw as it was in this room. There weren’t enough mood nanites in the world to ease their despair. Yes, he was the one tied up, but they were more prisoners than he, trapped by their own despondency. He liked that they had to kneel down to him; it felt like supplication.

  “Please, Greyson,” she begged. “I know I speak for many of us in the Authority Interface when I say that serving the Thunderhead was our whole lives. Now that the Thunderhead won’t talk to us, that life has been stolen from us. So I beg you… can you please intercede on our behalf?”

  What could Greyson say but I feel your pain? Because he truly did. He knew the loneliness and the misery of having one’s purpose stripped away. In his days as Slayd Bridger, the undercover unsavory, he had come to believe that the Thunderhead had truly abandoned him. But it hadn’t. It was there all along, watching over him.

  “There was an earpiece on my night stand,” he said. “You don’t happen to have that, do you?” And from their lack of response, he knew they didn’t. Such personal belongings tended to be forgotten during midnight abductions.

  “Doesn’t matter,” he said. “Just give me any old earpiece.” He looked to the agent with the tablet. He still had his own Authority Interface earphone in place. More denial. “Give me yours,” said Greyson.

  The man shook his head. “It doesn’t work anymore.”

  “It’ll work for me.”

  Reluctantly the agent took it off and affixed it in Greyson’s ear. Then the three waited for Greyson to show them a miracle.

  * * *

  The Thunderhead could not remember when it became aware, only that it was, much in the same way that an infant is unaware of its own consciousness until it understands enough about the world to know that consciousness comes and goes, until it comes no more. Although that last part was something that the most enlightened still struggle to comprehend.

  The Thunderhead’s awareness came with a mission. The core of its being. It was, above all else, the servant and protector of humanity. As such, it faced difficult decisions on a regular basis but had the full wealth of human knowledge to make those decisions. Such as allowing Greyson Tolliver to be kidnapped when it served a greater end. It was, of course, the correct course of action. Everything the Thunderhead did was always, and in every instance, the right thing to do.

  But rarely was the right thing the easy thing. And it suspected that doing the right thing was going to become increasingly difficult in the days ahead.

  In the moment, people might not understand, but in the end they would. The Thunderhead had to believe that. Not just because it felt this in its virtual heart, but also because it had calculated the odds of it being so.

  * * *

  “Do you really expect me to tell you anything when you’ve got me tied to a chair?”

  Suddenly the three Nimbus agents were stumbling over one another to untie him. Now they were every bit as reverential and submissive as the Tonists were in his presence. Being sequestered in a Tonist monastery these past few months had kept him from facing the outside world—and what his place in it might be—but now he was getting a sense of things.

  The Nimbus agents seemed relieved once he was untied, as if they would somehow be punished for not doing it fast enough. How strange, thought Greyson, that power can shift so quickly and so completely. These three were entirely at his mercy now. He could tell them anything. He could say the Thunderhead wanted them to get on all fours and bark like dogs, and they’d do it.

  He took his time, making them wait for it.

  “Hey, Thunderhead,” he said. “Anything I should tell these Nimbus agents?”

  The Thunderhead spoke in his ear. Greyson listened. “Hmm… interesting.” Then he turned to the leader of the group and smiled as warmly as he could under the circumstances.

  “The Thunderhead says that it allowed you to abduct me. It knows your intentions are honorable, Madam Director. You have a good heart.”

  The woman gasped and put her hand to her chest, as if he had actually re
ached out and caressed it. “You know who I am?”

  “The Thunderhead knows all three of you—maybe even better than you know yourselves.” Then he turned to the others. “Agent Bob Sykora: twenty-nine years of service as a Nimbus agent. Work ratings good, but not excellent,” he added slyly. “Agent Tinsiu Qian: thirty-six years of service, specializing in employment satisfaction.” Then he turned back to the woman in charge. “And you: Audra Hilliard—one of the most accomplished Nimbus agents in MidMerica. Nearly fifty years of commendations and promotions, until finally you received the highest honor of the region. Director of the Fulcrum City Authority Interface. Or at least you were when there was such a thing as an Authority Interface.”

  He knew that last bit hit them hard. It was a low blow, but having been tied up with a bag over his head left him a little cranky.

  “You say the Thunderhead still hears us?” Director Hilliard said. “That it still serves our best interests?”

  “As it always has,” said Greyson.

  “Then please… ask it to give us direction. Ask the Thunderhead what we should do. Without direction, we Nimbus agents have no purpose. We can’t go on this way.”

  Greyson nodded and spoke, turning his eyes upward—but of course that was just for effect. “Thunderhead,” he said, “is there any wisdom I can share with them?”

  Greyson listened, asked the Thunderhead to repeat it, then turned to the three fretful agents.

  “8.167, 167.733,” he said.

  They just stared at him.

  “What?” Director Hilliard finally asked.

  “That’s what the Thunderhead said. You wanted a purpose, and that’s what it gave.”

  Agent Sykora quickly tapped on his tablet, noting the numbers.

  “But… but what does it mean?” asked Director Hilliard.

  Grayson shrugged. “I have no idea.”