“This won’t do,” said Scythe Curie, and took Citra up into her arms, carrying her.
The revival center hallways seemed endless, and each time Citra was jostled, her whole body throbbed. Finally, she found herself spread out on the backseat of an off-grid car that Scythe Curie drove at what seemed to Citra to be a breakneck speed. ?The thought made her laugh weakly. What an odd expression, when the breaking of her neck had seemed to happen in slow motion. Flurries blowing past the windows appeared to be a blizzard at this speed. It was hypnotic. At last numbness began to overtake her, and she felt sleep begin to envelop her like quicksand. . . .
. . . But the moment before Citra lost consciousness, she remembered just a hint of a dream that may not have been a dream at all. A conversation in a place that was neither life nor death, but a womb between the two.
“The Thunderhead . . . it spoke to me,” Citra said, forcing herself to stay conscious just long enough to get this out.
“The Thunderhead doesn’t speak to scythes, dear.”
“I was still dead . . . and it told me a name. The man who killed Scythe Faraday.” But the quicksand pulled her down before she could say any more.
? ? ?
Citra awoke in a cabin, and for a moment thought she might have hallucinated all of it. The Thunderhead, the revival center, the car ride in the snow. For that moment she thought she was still in the rooftop residence of High Blade Xenocrates, waiting for the tor-turé to begin. But no—the light here was different, and the wood in the cabin around her was a lighter shade. Outside the window, she could see snowy mountains closer than they were before, although the flurries had stopped.
Scythe Curie came in a few minutes later with a tray and a bowl of soup. “Good, you’re awake. I trust you’ve healed enough over the past few hours to be a little more coherent, and a little less miserable.”
“Coherent, yes,” said Citra. “Less miserable, no. Just a different kind of misery.”
Citra sat up, feeling only a little bit loopy now, and Scythe Curie put the tray with the large bowl of soup in her lap. “It’s a chicken soup recipe passed down for more generations than anyone remembers,” she told Citra.
The soup looked fairly standard, but there was a round moon-like mass in the middle. “What’s that?”
“The best part,” said Scythe Curie. “A sort of a dumpling made from the ground crumbs of unleavened bread.”
Citra tried the soup. It was flavorful and the moon-ball unique and memorable. Comfort food, thought Citra, because somehow it made her feel safe from the inside out. “My grandmother said it could actually heal a cold.”
“What’s a cold?” asked Citra.
“A deadly illness from the mortal age, I suppose.”
It was amazing to think that someone only two generations older than Scythe Curie could have known what it was like to be mortal—fearing for her life on a daily basis, knowing that death was a certainty rather than an exception. Citra wondered what Scythe Curie’s grandmother would think of the world now, where there was nothing left for her soup to cure.
When the soup was done, Citra steeled herself for what she knew she must tell the scythe.
“There’s something you need to know,” Citra said. “Xenocrates showed me something he said Scythe Faraday wrote. It was his handwriting, but I don’t know how he could have written it.”
Scythe Curie sighed. “I’m afraid he did.”
Citra was not expecting that. “So you’ve seen it then?
Scythe Curie nodded. “Yes, I have.”
“But why would he write that? He said I wanted to kill him. That I was plotting horrible things. None of that was true!”
Scythe Curie offered Citra the slimmest of grins. “He wasn’t talking about you, Citra,” she explained. “He wrote that about me.”
? ? ?
“When Faraday was still a junior scythe—all of twenty-two years old—he took me on as an apprentice,” said Scythe Curie. “I was seventeen and full of righteous indignation at a world that was still heaving in the throes of transformation. Immortality had been a reality for barely fifty years. There was still discord, and political posturing, even fear of the Thunderhead, if you could imagine that.”
“Fear of it? Who could possibly be afraid of the Thunderhead?”
“People who had the most to lose: Criminals. Politicians. Organizations that thrived on the oppression of others. The point was, the world was still changing, and I wanted to help it change faster. Both Scythe Faraday and I were of similar minds about that, which, I suppose, is why he took me on. We were both driven by a desire to use gleaning as a way of hacking through the thicket to open a better path for humanity.
“Oh, you should have seen him in those days, Citra. You’ve only seen him old. He likes to remain that way to keep himself from being too tempted by a younger man’s passions.” Scythe Curie smiled as she spoke about her former mentor. “I remember I would wait outside his door at night, listening to him as he slept. I was seventeen, remember. Childish in so many ways. I thought myself in love.”
“Wait—you were in love with him?”
“Infatuated. He was a rising star who took a wide-eyed girl under his wing. Even though in those days he only gleaned the wicked, he did it with such compassion, he melted my heart each time.” Then she sobered a bit, looking a bit sheepish, which was a strange expression for steely Scythe Curie. “I actually worked up the nerve to go into his room one night, determined to climb into his bed and be with him. But he caught me halfway across his bedroom floor. Oh, I made up some silly excuse as to why I was there. I was coming in to retrieve his empty glass, or something like that. He didn’t believe me for an instant. He knew I was up to something, and I couldn’t look him in the eye. I thought he knew. I thought he was wise and could see into my soul. But at twenty-two, he was just as inexperienced in such matters as I was. He had no clue what was really going on.”
Then Citra understood. “He thought you wanted to hurt him!”
“I think all young women are cursed with a streak of unrelenting foolishness, and all young men are cursed with a streak of absolute stupidity. He didn’t see my obsession with him as love, but thought I meant him bodily harm. It was, to say the least, a very painful comedy of errors. I suppose I can understand how my advances could be misunderstood in that way. I do admit that I was an odd girl. Intense to the point of being off-putting.”
“I think you’ve grown into your intensity,” Citra said.
“That I have. In any case, he wrote of his paranoid concerns about me in his scythe’s journal, then tore it out the next day, when I broke down and confessed my love with eyeball-rolling melodrama.” She sighed and shook her head. “I was hopeless. He, on the other hand, was a gentleman, told me that he was flattered—which is the last thing any teenage girl wants to hear—and let me down as easily as he could.
“I lived in his house, and remained his apprentice, for two more awkward months. Then, when I was ordained and became Honorable Scythe Marie Curie, we parted ways. We would nod and say hello to each other at conclave. Then, nearly fifty years later, when we both had turned our first corner and were seeing the world through youthful eyes once more—but this time with the wisdom of age on our side—we became lovers.”
Citra grinned. “You broke the ninth commandment.”
“We told ourselves we didn’t. We told ourselves we were never partners, just companions of convenience. Two like-minded people who shared a lifestyle that others simply couldn’t understand—the lifestyle of a scythe. Still, we knew enough to keep it secret. That was when he first showed me the page he had written and torn out in his youth. He had held on to that ridiculous journal entry like a poorly penned love letter never sent. We kept our relationship secret for seven years. Then Prometheus found out about it.”