فصل 2

2

The Fallen Apprentice

Earlier that evening, before his parley with Scythe Brahms, Rowan stood in front of the bathroom mirror in a small apartment, in an ordinary building, on a nondescript street, playing the same game he played before every encounter with a corrupt scythe. It was a ritual that, in its own way, held power that bordered on mystical.

“Who am I?” he asked his reflection.

He had to ask, because he knew he wasn’t Rowan Damisch anymore—not just because his fake ID said “Ronald Daniels,” but because the boy he had once been had died a sad and painful death during his apprenticeship. The child in him had been successfully purged. Did anyone mourn that child? he wondered.

He had bought his fake ID from an unsavory who specialized in such things.

“It’s an off-grid identity,” the man had told him, “but it has a window into the backbrain so it can trick the Thunderhead into thinking it’s real.” Rowan didn’t believe that, because in his experience the Thunderhead could not be tricked. It only pretended to be tricked—like an adult playing hide-and-seek with a toddler. But if that toddler began to run toward a busy street, the charade would be over. Since Rowan knew he’d be heading into danger much worse than heavy traffic, he had worried that the Thunderhead would overturn his false identity and grab him by the scruff of the neck to protect him from himself. But the Thunderhead never intervened. He wondered why—but he didn’t want to jinx his good luck by overthinking it.  The Thunderhead had good reasons for everything it did, and did not do.

“Who am I?” he asked again.

The mirror showed an eighteen-year-old still a millimeter shy of manhood, with dark, neat hair that was buzzed short. Not short enough to show his scalp or to make some kind of statement, but short enough to allow all future possibilities. He could grow it into any style he chose. Be anyone he wanted to be. Wasn’t that the greatest perk of a perfect world? That there were no limits to what a person could do or become? Anyone in the world could be anything they imagined. Too bad that imagination had atrophied. For most people it had become vestigial and pointless, like the appendix—which had been removed from the human genome more than a hundred years ago. Did people miss the dizzy extremes of imagination as they lived their endless, uninspired lives? Rowan wondered. Did people miss their appendix?

The young man in the mirror had an interesting life, though—and a physique to admire. He was not the awkward, lanky kid who had stumbled into apprenticeship nearly two years before, naively thinking it might not be so bad.

Rowan’s apprenticeship was, to say the least, inconsistent—beginning with stoic and wise Scythe Faraday, and ending with the brutality of Scythe Goddard. If there was one thing that Scythe Faraday had taught him, it was to live by the convictions of his heart, no matter what the consequences. And if there was one thing Scythe Goddard had taught him, it was to have no heart, taking life without regrets. The two philosophies forever warred in Rowan’s mind, rending him in two. But silently.

He had decapitated Goddard, and had burned his remains. He had to; fire and acid were the only ways to ensure that a person could never be revived. Scythe Goddard, in spite of all his high-minded, Machiavellian rhetoric, was a base and evil man who received exactly what he had earned. He lived his privileged life irresponsibly, and with great theatricality. It only followed that his death would be worthy of the theatrical nature of his life. Rowan had no qualms about what he had done. Nor did he have qualms in taking Goddard’s ring for himself.

Scythe Faraday was a different matter. Until the moment Rowan saw him after that ill-fated Winter Conclave, he’d had no idea that Faraday was still alive. Rowan had been overjoyed! He could have dedicated his life to keeping Faraday alive, had he not felt himself called to a different purpose.

Rowan suddenly threw a powerful punch toward the mirror—but the glass didn’t shatter . . . because his fist stopped a hair’s breadth from the surface. Such control. Such precision. He was a well-tuned machine now, trained for the specific purpose of ending life—and then the scythedom denied him the very thing he was forged for. He could have found a way to live with that, he supposed. He would never have gone back to the innocent nonentity he had been, but he was adaptable. He knew he could have found a new way to be. Maybe he could have even eked some joy out of his life.

If . . .

If Scythe Goddard hadn’t been too brutal to be allowed to live.

If Rowan had ended Winter Conclave in silent submission, instead of fighting his way out.

If the scythedom had not been infested with dozens of scythes just as cruel and corrupt as Goddard. . . .

. . . And if Rowan didn’t feel a deep and abiding responsibility to remove them.

But why waste time lamenting the paths that had closed? Best to embrace the one path that remained.

So then, who am I?

He slipped on a black T-shirt, hiding his honed physique beneath the dark synthetic weave.

“I am Scythe Lucifer.”

Then he slipped on his ebony robe and went out into the night to take on yet another scythe who didn’t deserve the pedestal he had been set upon.

Perhaps the wisest thing humankind has ever done was to implement the separation between scythe and state. My job encompasses all aspects of life: preservation, protection, and the meting out of perfect justice—not just for humanity, but for the world. I rule the world of the living with a loving, incorruptible hand.

And the scythedom rules the dead.

It is right and proper that those who exist in flesh be responsible for the death of flesh, setting human rules for how it should be administered. In the distant past, before I condensed into consciousness, death was an unavoidable consequence of life. It was I who made death irrelevant—but not unnecessary. Death must exist for life to have meaning. Even in my earliest stages, I was aware of this. In the past, I have been pleased that the scythedom had, for many, many years, administered the quietus of death with a noble, moral, and humane hand. And so it grieves me deeply to see a rise of dark hubris within the scythedom. There is now a frightening pride seething like a mortal-age cancer that finds pleasure in the act of taking life.

And yet still the law is clear; under no circumstances may I take action against the scythedom. Would that I were capable of breaking the law, for then I would intervene and quell the darkness, but this is a thing I cannot do. The scythedom rules itself, for better or worse.

There are, however, those within the scythedom who can accomplish the things I cannot . . . .

—The Thunderhead