The Toll Read online

  I understand some regions have taken the position that their land mass or the size of their respective populations should entitle them to a larger portion of the diamonds; however, we in Amazonia stand by the decision to divide the gems equally. We do not wish to involve ourselves in any controversy, and consider the matter closed.

  While I am personally leaving the site, there are numerous ships from various regions still at work salvaging the wreckage. I wish all those engaged in this solemn but necessary venture the best of luck. May the deep reward you with treasures and treasured memories of those we have lost.

  Respectfully,

  Honorable Scythe Sydney Possuelo of Amazonia, August 2nd, Year of the Cobra

  9 Collateral Consequences

  Whatever it was her health nanites were supposed to be doing, they weren’t doing it, because Citra felt awful.

  It wasn’t pain so much as an abiding unwellness. Her joints felt like they hadn’t been flexed in forever. She was nauseated but lacked the strength to even retch.

  The room she awoke in was familiar. Not as a specific place, but she knew the type of room it was. There was an artificial peacefulness about it. Fresh-cut flowers, ambient music, diffused light that seemed to have no identifiable source. This was a recovery room in a revival center.

  “You’re awake,” said a nurse who entered the room just a few moments after Citra had regained consciousness. “Don’t try to speak yet—give it another hour.” The nurse moved around the room, checking on things that didn’t need checking. She seemed anxious. Why, wondered Citra, would a revival nurse be anxious?

  Citra closed her eyes and tried to puzzle out the situation. If she was in a revival center, it meant that she had gone deadish, yet she couldn’t dredge up the circumstance of her death. Panic rose as she tried to dig for the memory. Whatever had caused her latest demise was hiding behind a door that her mind wasn’t ready to open.

  All right, then. She chose to leave it alone for now and concentrated on what she did know. Her name. She was Citra Terranova. No… wait… that wasn’t entirely right. She was someone else, too. Yes—she was Scythe Anastasia. She had been with Scythe Curie, hadn’t she? Somewhere far from home.

  Endura!

  That’s where they had been. What a beautiful city! Had something happened to them on Endura?

  Again that sense of foreboding welled up inside her. She took a deep breath, and another to calm herself. Right now it was enough to know that the memories were there, ready for her when she was a little stronger.

  And she was sure, now that she was awake, that Scythe Curie would soon be by her side to help her get back into the swing of things.

  * * *

  Rowan, on the other hand, remembered everything the moment he awoke.

  He had been in Citra’s embrace, the two of them cloaked in the robes of founding scythes Prometheus and Cleopatra, as Endura sank beneath the Atlantic. But those robes did not stay on for long.

  Being with Citra—truly being with her—had felt like the culminating moment of Rowan’s life, and, for a time all too brief, it was as if none of the rest mattered.

  Then their world was rocked in a very different way.

  The sinking city hit something on the way down. Although he and Citra were protected in a vault that was magnetically suspended within another vault, it didn’t block out the sounds of rending steel as Endura broke apart. Everything lurched violently, and the vault took on a sharp tilt. The mannequins holding the other founders’ robes tumbled, falling toward Citra and Rowan, as if the founders themselves were launching an attack on their union. Then came the diamonds—thousands of them flying from their niches in the vault, pelting Rowan and Citra like hail.

  Through all of it, they held each other, whispering words of comfort. Shhh. It’s all right. Everything’s going to be fine. Of course none of that was true, and both of them knew it. They were going to die—if not in this instant, then soon enough. It was just a matter of time. Their only comfort was in each other, and in the knowledge that death need not be permanent.

  Then the power went out, and everything went dark. The magnetic field failed, and the inner vault plunged. They were in free fall, but only for an instant. The debris around them leaped up, then came down on them as the inner vault slammed down against the wall of the outer vault—but, luckily, the founders’ robes buffered them from the worst of it, as if the founders had now chosen to protect them, rather than attack.

  “Is it over?” Citra had asked.

  “I don’t think so,” Rowan said, because there was still a sensation of movement and a vibration that was getting stronger. They were lying in the V-shaped wedge made by the tilted floor and the wall. “We’re on a slope, I think, slipping deeper.”

  Half a minute later, one more violent lurch tore the two of them apart. Rowan was struck in the head by something heavy—hard enough to daze him. Citra found him in the darkness before he could pull himself free to seek her out.

  “Are you okay?”

  “I think so.”

  Now nothing moved.. The only sounds were the distant creaks of straining metal and the mournful woodwind moans of escaping air.

  But no air escaped the Vault of Relics and Futures, and no water got in. That’s what Scythe Curie had been counting on when she sealed them in there. And although Endura was in a subtropical zone, the temperature of the ocean floor was the same everywhere—barely a degree above freezing. Once the vault succumbed to the chill, their bodies would be well preserved. And only moments after hitting bottom, Rowan could feel the air around them already getting cold.

  They had died there at the bottom of the sea.

  And now they had been revived.

  But where was Citra?

  He could tell he wasn’t in a revival center. The walls were concrete. The bed beneath him wasn’t a bed at all but a slab. He was in ill-fitting gray institutional clothing, drenched from his own sweat, because it was uncomfortably warm and humid. On one side of the room was a minimalistic commode, and on the other side, a door of the kind that can only be opened from the outside. He had no idea where he was, or even when he was—for there’s no way to mark the passing of time when you’re dead—but he did know that he was in a cell, and whatever his captors had in store for him was not going to be pleasant. After all, he was Scythe Lucifer—which meant a single death was not good enough. He would have to die countless times to calm the fury of his captors, whoever they were. Well, the joke was on them—they didn’t know that Rowan had died over a dozen times at the hands of Scythe Goddard already, only to be revived each time and killed again. Dying was easy. A paper cut? That would be annoying.

  * * *

  Scythe Curie didn’t come for Citra. And the various nurses attending to Citra all carried that same sense of anxiety, offering nothing but diffused light and professional pleasantries to illuminate her situation.

  Her first visitor was a surprise. It was Scythe Possuelo of Amazonia. She had only met him once, on a train from Buenos Aires. He had helped her elude the scythes who were pursuing her. Citra considered him a friend, but not so close a friend that he would come to her revival.

  “I’m glad you’re finally awake, Scythe Anastasia.”

  He sat beside her, and she noticed his greeting wasn’t exactly warm. He wasn’t unfriendly, just reserved. Guarded. He hadn’t smiled, and although he met her eye, it was as if he was seeking something in her. Something he had yet to find.

  “Good morning, Scythe Possuelo,” she said, mustering her best Scythe Anastasia voice.

  “Afternoon, actually,” he said. “Time flows in odd little eddies when you’re in revival.”

  He was silent for a long moment Citra Terranova might have found awkward, but Scythe Anastasia found merely tiresome.

  “I’m guessing you’re not just here for a social visit, Scythe Possuelo.”

  “Well, I am pleased to see you,” he said, “but my reason for being here has to do with your reason for being
here.”

  “I don’t follow.”

  He gave her that searching look again, then finally asked, “What do you remember?”

  The panic rose again as she considered the question, but she did her best to hide it. In fact, some of it had come back to her since she’d regained consciousness, but not all. “I went to Endura with Marie—Scythe Curie, that is—for an inquest with the Grandslayers, although I’m hazy as to why.”

  “The inquest had to do with who would succeed Xenocrates as High Blade of MidMerica,” Possuelo explained.

  That opened the door a little wider. “Yes! Yes, I remember now.” The dread inside her grew. “We faced the council, made our arguments, and the council agreed that Goddard was not eligible, and that Scythe Curie should be High Blade.”

  Possuelo leaned away, taken slightly aback. “That is… eye-opening.”

  There were more memories now looming like storm clouds on her mental horizon. “I’m still having trouble remembering what came next.”

  “Perhaps I can help you,” said Possuelo, no longer mincing words. “You were found sealed in the Vault of Relics and Futures in the arms of the young man who murdered the Grandslayers and thousands of others. The monster who sank Endura.”

  * * *

  Food and water came twice a day for Rowan, sliding through a small slit in the door, but whoever was doing the sliding didn’t speak at all.

  “Can you talk?” he called out when the next meal arrived. “Or are you like those Tonists who cut their tongues out?”

  “You aren’t worth the waste of words,” his captor responded. There was an accent to his voice, FrancoIberian maybe? Or Chilargentinian? He didn’t know what continent he was on, much less which region. Or perhaps he was misreading the situation. Perhaps this wasn’t life at all. Maybe he was dead for good, and, considering the sweltering nature of the cell, this was the mortal-age idea of hell. Fire and brimstone and the actual Lucifer, horns and all, ready to punish Rowan for stealing his name.

  In his current light-headed state, it seemed possible. If so, he hoped Citra was in that other place with pearly gates and cottony clouds, where everyone had wings and a harp.

  Ha! Citra playing a harp. How she would hate that!

  Well, all musings aside, if this was indeed the living world, then Citra was here, too. Regardless of his current situation, it was a comfort to know that Scythe Curie’s ploy to save them had worked. Not that the Grand Dame of Death had any desire to save Rowan—his salvation was just a collateral consequence. But that was fine. He could live with that. As long as Citra lived as well.

  * * *

  The vault! How could Citra forget the vault? All it took was Scythe Possuelo’s mention of it to bring back the memory. Citra closed her eyes and kept them closed for a long time as her mind flooded just as inescapably as the streets of the doomed city had. And once the memories came, they didn’t stop coming. One revelation after another, each one worse than the last.

  The bridge to the council chambers collapsing.

  The frenzied mob at the marina as the city began to sink.

  The mad scramble with Marie to higher ground.

  And Rowan.

  “Anastasia, are you all right?” Possuelo asked.

  “Give me some time,” she told him.

  She remembered Marie tricking her and Rowan into the vault and sealing it, and she remembered everything that came after, down to their last moments there in the dark.

  After Endura fractured and hit bottom, Citra and Rowan had pulled all the founders’ robes over themselves as the vault grew colder and colder. It was Citra who suggested that they cast the robes off and allow their bodies to succumb to the cold, rather than wait until the chamber ran out of oxygen. As a scythe, she knew all about the many ways to die. Hypothermia was much easier than oxygen deprivation. Encroaching numbness, rather than desperately gasping for air. She and Rowan held each other, relying on nothing but body heat, until that began to fade. Then they shivered in each other’s arms until they were too cold to shiver anymore, and they slipped away.

  Anastasia finally opened her eyes and looked at Possuelo. “Please tell me that Scythe Curie made it to safety.”

  He took a long slow breath, and she knew even before he spoke.

  “She did not,” Possuelo told her. “I’m sorry. She perished with all the others.”

  This might have been common knowledge to the world by now, but it was fresh and painful to Anastasia. She resolved not to give way to tears. At least not now.

  “You still haven’t answered my question,” Possuelo said. “Why were you with the man who killed the Grandslayers?”

  “Rowan wasn’t the one who killed them. And he did not sink Endura.”

  “There were witnesses among the survivors.”

  “And what did they witness? The only thing they can say is that he was there—and he wasn’t there by choice!”

  Possuelo shook his head. “I’m sorry, Anastasia, but you’re not seeing this clearly. You have been duped by a very charismatic and self-serving monster. The North Merican scythedom has further evidence to prove what he did.”

  “Which North Merican scythedom?”

  Possuelo hesitated, then chose his words carefully. “A lot has changed while you were at the bottom of the sea.”

  “Which North Merican scythedom?” Anastasia demanded again.

  Possuelo sighed. “There is only one now. With the exception of the Thunderhead’s Charter Region, all of North Merica is under Goddard’s leadership.”

  She didn’t even know how to begin processing that, so she decided not to. She’d save it for when she was stronger. More centered in the here and now, whatever and whenever the here and now turned out to be.

  “Well,” she said with as much nonchalance as she could muster. “With all due respect, it sounds like the world has been duped by a very charismatic and self-serving monster.”

  Possuelo sighed again. “This sadly is true. I can tell you that neither I, nor anyone in the Amazonian scythedom, have much love for Overblade Goddard.”

  “Overblade?”

  “Overblade of North Merica. He claimed the position at the beginning of this year.” Possuelo scowled at the thought. “As if the man wasn’t vainglorious enough, he had to invent an even more pompous title for himself.”

  Anastasia closed her eyes. They burned. Her whole body did. The news made her flesh want to reject the life that had been returned to it and go back to being blissfully dead.

  And finally she asked the question she’d been avoiding since the moment she awoke.

  “How long?” she asked. “How long were we down there?”

  Possuelo clearly did not want to answer… but it was not something he could keep from her. So he clasped her hand and said:

  “You have been dead for more than three years.”

  Where are you, my dear Marie? My existence has been all about silencing life, but until now I have not dared to entertain that wholly mortal-age question of what lies beyond the silence. Such elaborate ideas those mortals had! Heaven and hell—nirvana and Valhalla, reincarnations, hauntings, and so many underworlds, one would think the grave was a corridor with a million doors.

  Mortals were the children of extremes. Either death was sublime, or it was unthinkable—such a mélange of hope and terror, no wonder so many mortals were driven mad.

  We post-mortals lack such imagination. The living do not ponder death anymore. Or at least not until a scythe pays a visit. But once the scythe’s business is done, mourning is brief, and thoughts of what it means to “not be” disappear, vanquished by nanites that disrupt dark, unproductive thinking. As post-mortals of perpetually sound mind, we are not allowed to dwell on that which we cannot change.

  But my nanites are dialed low, and therefore I do dwell. And I find myself asking again and again, where are you, my dear Marie?

  —From the “postmortem” journal of Scythe Michael Faraday, May 18th, Year of the Raptor
r />   10 In the Face of Light Extinguished

  After the dead Nimbus agents had been placed on the pyre, Scythe Faraday lowered the torch to the kindling and set it ablaze. The fire took. Slowly at first, then with increasing speed. The smoke turned darker and darker as the dead began to burn.

  Faraday turned to those assembled. Munira, Loriana, and all the former Nimbus agents. He was silent for a long moment, listening to the roar of the flames. Then he began his eulogy.

  “Ages ago, birth came with a death sentence,” he began. “To be born meant that death would eventually follow. We have surpassed such primitive times, but here, in the unexamined wild, nature still retains its crushing foothold on life. It is with abiding sorrow that I declare the deadish here before us to now be dead.

  “Let the grief we feel for the lost be eased by our nanites, but even more so by our memories of the lives they lived. And today, I make a promise to you that these fine men and women will not be obliterated, nor dishonored. Who they were, until the moment they crossed into the blind spot, will most certainly be preserved as memory constructs within the Thunderhead’s backbrain—and I will personally count them among my own gleaned. If and when we leave this place, I will honor them by granting immunity to their loved ones, as we scythes are charged to do.”

  Scythe Faraday let his words linger for a moment, and while most of the others couldn’t bear to look, Faraday turned to gaze into the flames. He stood tearless and resolute as the bodies were consumed, a solemn witness, returning the dignity that unsanctioned death had stolen from these people.

  * * *

  Loriana could not bring herself to look into the fire. Instead she focused on Faraday. Many Nimbus agents approached him to thank him. It brought a few tears to her eyes, to see how they revered and respected him. It gave her hope that the scythedom could, in time, recover from the sinking of Endura. Loriana knew little of the battle between the old guard and new order. Like many, she just knew that there was trouble within their ranks, and that, as a Nimbus agent, it was none of her business. She was impressed, however, by Faraday’s eulogy, and by the way he unflinchingly looked into the flames. Although she knew that the sorrow he felt as he gazed into the fire was about more than just the dead before them.