فصل 33

Immortality cannot temper the folly or frailty of youth. Innocence is doomed to die a senseless death at our own hands, a casualty of the mistakes we can never undo. So we lay to rest the wide-eyed wonder we once thrived upon, replacing it with scars of which we never speak, too knotted for any amount of technology to repair.  With each gleaning I commit, with each life taken for the good of humanity, I mourn for the boy I once was, whose name I sometimes struggle to remember.  And I long for a place beyond immortality where I can, in some small measure, resurrect the wonder, and be that boy again.

—From the gleaning journal of H.S. Faraday

33

Both the Messenger and the Message

Citra carried him inside. She set him on a sofa, and made a tourniquet to staunch the blood. He groaned, beginning to rouse, and when he broke the tenuous surface of consciousness, his first thought was of her.

“You should not be here,” he said, his words weak and slurred—an effect of his pain nanites flooding his system. Still, he grimaced in bleary agony.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” she told him. “This is too much for your nanites to handle.” “Nonsense. They’ve already taken the edge off the pain. As for healing, they’ll do the job without intervention.” “But—”

“I have no other option,” he told her. “Going to a hospital will alert the Scythedom that I’m still alive.” He shifted position, grimacing only slightly. “Between nature and nanites, my knee will heal. It will just take time, of which I have no shortage.” She elevated his leg, bandaged it, then sat on the floor beside him.

“Were you so resentful of my leaving that you had to exact your revenge in flesh?” he asked, only half joking. “Are you so offended that I managed a method of secretly retiring, instead of actually gleaning myself?” “I thought you were someone else,” she told him. “Someone named Gerald Van Der Gans. . . .” “My birth name,” he told her. “A name I surrendered when I became Honorable Scythe Michael Faraday. But none of this explains your presence here. I freed you, Citra—you and Rowan both. By faking my own gleaning, you were both freed from your apprenticeship. You should be back in your old life, forgetting that I had plucked you from it. So why are you here?” “You mean you don’t know?”

He pulled himself up slightly so he could see her more directly. “Don’t know what?” And so she told him everything. How, instead of being freed, she and Rowan had ended up with Scythes Curie and Goddard. How Xenocrates had tried to pin Faraday’s murder on her, and how Scythe Curie had helped her get to him. As she spoke, he put his hands to his eyes as if he might gouge them out.

“To think I was complacent here, while all this was going on.”

“How could you not know?” she asked, for in her mind he always seemed to know everything, even the things he could not possibly know.

Scythe Faraday sighed. “Marie—Scythe Curie, that is—is the only member of the Scythedom who knows I’m still alive. I am completely off-grid now. The only way to reach me would be in person. So she sent you. You are both the messenger and the message.” The moment became uncomfortable. Thunder rumbled in from the sea, much closer now. The flashes of lightning brighter. “Is it true you died seven deaths for her?” Citra asked.

He nodded. “And her for me. She told you that, did she? Well, it was a very long time ago.” Outside the rain finally began to fall, surging in fits and starts. “I love the way it rains here,” he told her. “It reminds me that some forces of nature can never be entirely subdued. They are eternal, which is a far better thing to be than immortal.” And so they sat listening to the soothing randomness of the rain until Citra began to grow too weary to even think.

“So what happens now?” she asked.

“Very simple, actually. I heal, and you rest. Anything beyond that is a conversation for a future date.” Then he pointed. “The bedroom’s in there. I expect a full night’s sleep from you, followed by a recitation of your poisons in the morning, in order of toxicity.” “My poisons?”

In spite of his pain and drug-induced haze, Scythe Faraday smiled. “Yes, your poisons. Are you my apprentice or not?” Citra couldn’t help but smile right back at him. “Yes, Your Honor, I am.”