فصل 26

26

Wilt Thou Lift Up Olympus?

“I need to know why we’re doing this,” Greyson demanded of Purity two days before their scythe-ending operation was to begin.

“You’re doing it for yourself,” she told him. “You’re doing it because you want to mess with the world, just like I do!” That only fueled his anger. “If we get caught, we’ll get our minds supplanted—you know that, don’t you?” She gave him that tweaked grin of hers. “The risk makes it all the more exciting!” He wanted to scream at her, shake her until she could see how wrong all this was, but he knew it would only make her suspicious of him. Above all else, she could not be suspicious. Her trust meant everything to him. Even if that trust was entirely misplaced.

“Listen to me,” he said as calmly as he could. “It’s obvious that whoever wants those scythes ended is putting us at risk instead of themselves. At the very least, I have a right to know who we’re doing it for.” Purity threw her hands up, and turned on him. “What difference does it make? If you don’t want to do it, then don’t. I don’t need you, anyway.” That hurt him more than he was willing to let on.

“It’s not that I don’t want to do it,” he told her. “But if I don’t know who I’m doing it for, then I’m being used. On the other hand, if I know, and do it anyway, then I’m the one using the user.” Purity considered that. The logic was shaky, Greyson knew that, but he was banking on the fact that Purity did not work from an entirely logical base. Impulsiveness and chaos ruled her. It was what made her so enticing.

Finally, she said, “I do jobs for an unsavory called Mange.”

“Mange? You mean the bouncer at Mault?”

“That’s the one.”

“Are you kidding me? He’s a nobody.”

“True. But he gets the assignments from some other unsavory, who probably gets the assignments from someone else. Don’t you see, Slayd? The whole thing’s a mirror maze. No one knows who’s at the far end casting that first reflection—so either you enjoy the funhouse, or get out.”  Then she got serious. “Which is it, Slayd? In or out?” He took a deep breath. This was all he was going to get from her—which meant that she didn’t know any more than he did, and she didn’t care. She was in it for the thrill. She was in it for the defiance. To Purity, it didn’t matter whose agenda she served, as long as it served her agenda, as well.

“In,” he finally said. “I’m in. One hundred percent.”

She punched him playfully in the arm. “I can tell you this much,” she said. “Whoever’s casting that first reflection is on your side.” “On my side? What do you mean?”

“Who do you think got rid of your annoying Nimbus agent?” she asked.

Greyson’s first instinct was that this was a joke, but when he looked at her, he could tell it wasn’t. “What are you saying, Purity?” She shrugged as if it were nothing. “I passed word up the line that you needed a favor.” Then she leaned close and whispered, “Favor granted.” Before he could respond, she wrapped her arms around him in that way that seemed to dissolve his bones and turn him to jelly.

Later, he would look back on that feeling and see it as some sort of strange premonition.

• • •

If Purity had been involved in the first attempt on Scythes Curie’s and Anastasia’s lives, she wasn’t saying—and Greyson knew better than to ask. Revealing that he even knew about that first attempt would blow his cover.

For this mission, only Mange and Purity knew the details. Mange because he led the mission, and Purity because the plan had been hers.

“I actually got the idea from our first date,” she told Greyson, but did not explain what she meant.  Were they going to imprison the scythes before ending them? Was that what she was implying? Until he knew the plan and the location, it limited his ability to sabotage it. And on top of that, he had to sabotage it in such a way that he and Purity could escape the botched mission without her knowing that he was the one who botched it.

The day before the mysterious event, Greyson made an anonymous call to the offices of the scythedom.

“There will be an attack on Scythe Curie and Scythe Anastasia tomorrow,” he whispered into the phone, using a filter to distort his voice. “Take all necessary precautions.”  Then he hung up and threw out the phone he had stolen to make the call. While the Thunderhead could trace any call to its origin the instant it was made, the scythedom was not so well equipped. Until recently scythes had been like a species with no natural predators; they were still grappling with how to deal with organized aggression against them.

On the morning of the event, Greyson was told that the operation would take place at a theater in Wichita. It turned out that he and Purity were members of a larger team. It only made sense that an operation of this nature would not be left in the hands of two questionable unsavories. Instead it was left in the hands of ten questionable unsavories. Greyson never learned anyone else’s names, as that information was on a need-to-know basis, and apparently, he didn’t need to know.

But there were things he did know.

Even though Purity had no clue whom they were working for, she had, without even knowing it, told him something incredibly valuable. Something critical. It was the kind of thing that would have made Agent Traxler very happy indeed.

What irony that Traxler’s gleaning was the key to that crucial information . . . because if Purity could arrange to have a Nimbus agent gleaned, it could only mean one thing: These attacks on Curie and Anastasia were not some sort of civilian action. A scythe was running the show.

• • •

Scythe Anastasia was ready for her performance.

Mercifully, her part was just a quick walk-on. Caesar was to be stabbed by eight conspirators, of which she would be the last. Seven of the blades would be retractable and squirt fake blood. Citra’s blade would be as real as the blood it would bring forth.

To her chagrin, Scythe Curie insisted on attending the performance.

“I wouldn’t dream of missing my protégé’s theatrical debut,” she said with a smirk—although Citra knew the real reason. It was the same reason she had been present at both of Scythe Anastasia’s other gleanings: She didn’t trust that Constantine could protect her. Scythe Constantine seemed to have a crack in his veneer of aloofness tonight. Perhaps it was because he had to shed his scythe’s robe and wear a tuxedo to blend in with the crowd. Still, he couldn’t abandon his persona completely. His bow tie was the exact same blood-red as his robe. Scythe Curie, on the other hand, flatly refused to be seen in public without her lavender scythe robe. It was just one more reason for Constantine to be furious.

“You should not be out in the audience,” he told her. “If you insist on being present, it should be backstage!” “Calm down! If Anastasia isn’t a sufficient enough lure, then perhaps I will be,” Scythe Curie told him. “And in a crowded theater, even if they succeeded in killing me, they wouldn’t be able to end me. Not without burning the entire place down—which, considering the presence of your forces, is highly unlikely.” She did have a point. While Caesar could die by blade, not so for scythes. Blade, bullet, blunt force, or poison would merely render them deadish. They’d be revived in a day or two—and perhaps with a clear memory of their attacker. In that case, a temporary death might actually be an effective strategy for catching the culprits.

But then Constantine gave them a reason for his edginess.

“We’ve received a tip that there will, in fact, be an attempt on your lives tonight,” he told Scythes Curie and Anastasia as the audience began to fill the theater.

“A tip? From whom?” Scythe Curie asked.

“We don’t know. But we’re taking it very seriously.”

“What should I do?” Citra asked.

“Do what you’re here to do. But be prepared to protect yourself.”

Caesar was to die in the first scene of act three. The play had five acts, and in the remaining acts, his ghost appeared to torment his killers. While another actor could perform the part of the ghost, Sir Albin Aldrich felt it would lesson the impact of his gleaning. It was, therefore, decided that the play would conclude shortly after Caesar died, robbing an irritated Brutus of his famous “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” speech. No one would cry havoc and release the dogs of war. Instead, the lights would come up on a stunned audience. There would be no curtain call. The curtain, in fact, would never close. Instead, Caesar’s very dead body would remain on the stage until the last of the audience left. Thus, Aldrich’s final moment of acting was to be marked by an inability to act in any way whatsoever.

“You may steal my physical immortality,” he told Scythe Anastasia, “but this final performance will live forever in the annals of the theater.” As the house filled with theatergoers, Scythe Constantine came up behind her as she waited in the wings.

“Do not be frightened,” he said. “We’re here to protect you.”

“I’m not frightened,” she told him. In truth she was, but her fear was overwhelmed by her anger at having been targeted. She had a little bit of stage fright, too, which she knew was stupid, but she just couldn’t shake it. Acting. What horrors she had to endure for her profession.

• • •

It was a packed house, and although no one knew it, more than twenty were members of the BladeGuard in disguise. The playbill proclaimed that the theatergoers would witness something never before seen on a MidMerican stage—and although people were a bit dubious of the claim, they were also curious as to what it might be.

While Scythe Anastasia waited backstage, Scythe Curie took her seat on the aisle in the fifth row. She found her seat uncomfortably small. She was a tall woman, and her knees pressed against the seat in front of her. Most of the people near her held their playbills in a death grip, horrified to spend the evening sitting near a scythe, who, for all they knew, was there to glean one of them. Only the man sitting beside her was sociable. More than sociable, he was chatty. He had a caterpillar of a moustache that twitched when he spoke, which made it hard for Scythe Curie not to laugh.

“What an honor it is to be in the company of the Granddame of Death,” he said before the lights went down. “I hope you don’t mind me calling you that, Your Honor. There are few scythes in MidMerica—nay, the world—who are as celebrated as you, and it does not surprise me that you are a patron of mortal-age theater. Only the most enlightened are!” She wondered if perhaps the man had been sent to end her by flattering her to death.

Scythe Anastasia watched the play from the wings. Usually entertainment from the Age of Mortality was emotionally incomprehensible to her, as it was to most people. The passions, the fears, the triumphs, and the losses; it made no sense to a world without need, greed, and natural death. But as a scythe, she had come to understand mortality better than most—and she certainly had come to understand greed and lust for power. Those things might have been absent from most people’s lives, but they seethed in the scythedom, moving more and more from the dark corners and into the mainstream.

The curtain went up and the play began. Although much of the language of the play was incomprehensible to her, the machinations of power left her mesmerized—but not mesmerized enough to let her guard down. Every movement backstage, every sound registered like a seismic shock. If there were someone here who meant to end her, she’d be aware of their presence long before they made their move.

• • •

“We have to keep the Thunderhead in the dark as long as possible,” Purity said. “It can’t know something’s up until it goes down.” It wasn’t just the Thunderhead that Purity was keeping in the dark though, it was Greyson as well.

“You have your part of it—that’s all you need to know,” Purity told him, insisting that the fewer people who knew the whole picture, the fewer possible screwups.

Greyson’s part was simple to the point of being insulting. He was to create a diversion at the mouth of an alleyway near the theater, at a specific moment. The goal was to draw the attention of three Thunderhead cameras, which would cause a temporary blind spot in the alley. While those cameras were assessing Greyson’s situation, Purity and several other members of the team would slip into the side door of the theater.  The rest, as far as Greyson was concerned, was a mystery.

If he could see the whole picture—if he knew what Purity and her team were going to do in there—he’d have a better idea of his options in how to both prevent it, and protect Purity from the fallout of a failed mission. But without knowing the plan, all he could do was wait for the outcome and try to effect some sort of damage control.

“You look nervous, Slayd,” Purity observed as they left her apartment that evening. She was armed with nothing but an off-grid phone, and a kitchen knife in her heavy coat—presumably not to use on the scythes, but on anyone who got in her way.

“Aren’t you nervous?” he shot back at her.

She shook her head and smiled. “Excited,” she told him. “Pinpricks all over my body. I love that feeling!” “It’s just your nanites trying to knock down your adrenaline.”

“Let ‘em try!”

Purity had made it clear to Greyson that she had every faith he could do his job—but not really, because there was a backup plan. “Remember, Mange will be monitoring the whole operation from a rooftop,” she told him. “Whatever diversion you create, it needs to be big enough and involve enough people for it to draw the attention of all three cameras. If it doesn’t, Mange will lend you a helping hand.” Mange had spent the better part of a century mastering the use of a slingshot.  At first Greyson assumed that he would merely take out the cameras if they didn’t turn toward Greyson—but he couldn’t do that, because it would alert the Thunderhead that something was wrong. Instead, the backup plan was to take out Greyson.

“If you can’t do it on your own, Mange will put a nice size river stone in your brain,” Purity said with relish rather than remorse. “All the blood and commotion will be sure to turn all three cameras!” The last thing Greyson wanted was to be taken out of the equation at that crucial moment, then wake up in a revival center a few days later to hear that Scythes Curie and Anastasia had been ended.

He and Purity split up a few blocks from the theater, and Greyson made his way to the spot where he would somehow perform for the Thunderhead cameras. He took his time in getting there because it would have been suspicious if he arrived early and waited. So he walked the neighborhood trying to figure out what the hell he was going to do. People either ignored him or avoided him. He’d gotten used to that since taking on his new persona—but tonight, he couldn’t help but notice all the eyes. Not just the eyes of people on the street, but the electronic ones. They were everywhere. Thunderhead cameras were unobtrusive within homes and offices—but here on the street, there was no attempt to hide them. They pivoted and swiveled. They looked this way and that. They focused and zoomed. A few seemed to be staring off toward the heavens as if in some sort of contemplation. What must it be like not only to have so much information coming in, but to be able to process all that information at once? Experiencing the world with a perspective that mere humans couldn’t imagine?

With a minute left before his diversion, he turned and made his way back toward the theater. On the edge of the awning of a café he passed, one camera swiveled to look at him, and he almost looked away, not wanting to make eye contact with the Thunderhead for fear it would judge him on all his failures.

• • •

Gavin Blodgett rarely remembered what went on in the street between his work and his home—mainly because nothing much went on. He was, like so many, a creature of habit, living an effortless but comfortable life that showed no sign of changing for perhaps centuries. And that was a good thing. After all, his days were perfect, his evenings were enjoyable, and his dreams were pleasant. He was thirty-two, and once a year on his birthday, he set right back down to thirty-two. He had no desire to be older. He had no desire to be younger. He was in his prime, and planned to stay that way forever. He abhorred anything that took him out of his routine—so when he saw the unsavory eying him, he picked up his pace, hoping he could just move past him and be on his way. But the unsavory had other plans.

“You got a problem?” the unsavory asked, a little too loudly, stepping in front of him.

“No problem,” Gavin said, and did what he always did when he found himself in an unsettling situation. He smiled and babbled. “I was just noticing your hair—I’ve never seen hair that dark—it’s impressive. And are those horns? I’ve never done any body modifications myself, of course, but I know people who have. . . .” The unsavory grabbed him by the lapel of his coat, and pushed him against the wall. Not hard enough to activate his nanites but hard enough to make it clear that he wasn’t just going to let Gavin go.

“Are you making fun of me?” the unsavory said loudly.

“No, no, not at all! I would never!” Part of him was terrified, but he couldn’t deny that there was a part of him that was excited to be at the center of anyone’s attention. He quickly took in his surroundings. He was on the corner of a theater, at the mouth of an alley. No one was in front of the theater because the show had already started. The street wasn’t quite deserted, but no one was nearby. People would help, though. Decent people would always assist someone being accosted by an unsavory, and most people were decent.

The unsavory pulled him away from the wall, hooked a foot behind him, and pushed him to the ground.

“Better call for help,” the unsavory said. “Do it!”

“H . . . help,” said Gavin.

“Louder!”

He didn’t need another invitation. “Help!” he called, his voice shaky. “HELP ME!” Now people a bit farther away had noticed. A man was hurrying toward him from across the street. A couple came from the other direction—but more importantly, from his spot on the ground, Gavin could see several cameras mounted on awnings and light posts turning toward him. Good! The Thunderhead will see. It will take care of this unsavory. It was probably already dispatching peace officers to the spot.

The unsavory looked to the cameras as well. He seemed unsettled by them, as well he should be. Now Gavin felt emboldened under the Thunderhead’s protective eye. “Go on, get out of here,” he told the unsavory, “before the Thunderhead decides to supplant you!” But the unsavory didn’t seem to hear him. Instead, he was looking off down the alley, where people were unloading something from a truck. The unsavory mumbled. Gavin wasn’t quite sure what he said, but he thought he heard the words, “first date,” and “acid.”  Was this unsavory making some sort of romantic proposition? Something involving hallucinogens? Gavin was both horrified and intrigued.

By now, the pedestrians he had called on for help had reached them. As much as he wanted their help, he also found himself mildly disappointed that they had arrived so quickly.

“Hey, what’s going on here?” one of them said.

Then the unsavory pulled Gavin up off the ground. What was he about to do? Was he going to strike him? Bite him? Unsavories were very unpredictable. “Just let me go,” Gavin said weakly. A part of him was hoping the unsavory might completely ignore the plea.

But he let Gavin go, as if he had suddenly lost all interest in tormenting him, and hurried off down the alley.

“Are you all right?” asked one of the good people who had come to Gavin’s aid from across the street.

“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Yeah, I’m fine.” Which was mildly disappointing.

• • •

“Hence! Wilt thou lift up Olympus?”

When that line was spoken onstage, the stage manager gesticulated wildly at Scythe Anastasia. “That was your cue, Your Honor,” he told her. “You may want to go onstage now.” She glanced over to Scythe Constantine, looking like some sort of absurd butler in his formal tuxedo. He nodded to her. “Do what you’re here to do,” he told her.

She strode onto the stage, letting her robe flare behind her as she walked, for dramatic effect. She couldn’t help but feel that she was in costume. A play within a play.

She heard gasps from the audience as she came onstage. She was not legendary among the general public the way that Scythe Curie was, but her robe made it clear that she was a scythe rather than a member of the Roman Senate. She was an interloper on the stage, an intruder, and the audience began to guess what was coming. The gasps resolved into a low rumble—but she could not see into the audience with the lights in her face. She flinched when Sir Albin spoke in his resonant stage voice, “Doth not Brutus bootless kneel?” Citra had never been on a theatrical stage before; she had not expected the lights to be so bright and so hot. It made the players shine in sharp focus. The centurions’ armor glinted. The tunics of Caesar and the senators reflected light enough to hurt her eyes.

“Speak, hands, for me!” one of the actors yelled. Then the conspirators drew their daggers, and went about “killing” Caesar.

Scythe Anastasia stood back, a spectator rather than a participant. She glanced to the darkness of the audience, then realized that was a highly unprofessional thing to do, so she returned her attention to the action onstage. It was only when one of the cast members gestured to her that she came forward and pulled out her own dagger. It was stainless steel, but with a black cerakote finish. A gift from Scythe Curie. At the sight of it, the audience got louder. Someone wailed from the darkness.

Aldrich, his face overdone in stage makeup, his tunic covered in fake blood, looked at her, and winked at her with the eye that the audience could not see.

She moved toward him and plunged her knife between his ribs, just to the right of his heart. Someone in the audience screamed.

“Sir Albin Aldrich,” she said loudly, “I’ve come to glean you.”

The man grimaced but did not break character.

“Et tu, Brute?” he said. “Then fall, Caesar.”

Then she shifted the knife, slicing his aorta, and he slipped to the ground. He took one final breath and died, on schedule, just as Shakespeare had written.

The shock rolling from the audience was electric. No one knew what to do, how to react. Someone began to applaud. Scythe Anastasia knew instinctively that it was Scythe Curie, and the audience, seeing her applaud, joined in nervously.

And that was when the nature of Shakespeare’s tragedy took a terrible turn.

• • •

Acid! Greyson cursed himself for not being quicker on the uptake. He should have figured it out! Everyone always worried about fire or explosions. People forget that a strong enough acid can end someone just as effectively. But how would Purity and her team accomplish it? How would they isolate the scythes and subdue them? Scythes were masters of every weapon, able to take out an entire room of people without a scratch. Then it occurred to him they would not need to isolate the scythes at all. One did not need to aim acid if there was enough of it . . . and a way to deliver it. . . .

He pulled open the side door and went in, finding himself in a narrow hallway lined with dressing rooms. To the right, stairs descended into a basement, and that was where he found Purity and her team. There were three large barrels made of the same white Teflon material that the wine bottle had been made of the night Greyson and Purity first met—there must have been a hundred gallons of fluoro-flerovic acid in those barrels! And there was a high-pressure pump that had already been connected to the water line that fed the theater’s fire sprinkler system.

Purity saw him immediately.

“What are you doing? You’re supposed to be outside!”

She knew his betrayal the moment she met his eye. The fury in her was like radiation. It burned him. Seared him deep.

“Don’t even think about it!” she growled.

And he didn’t. If he thought about it, he might hesitate. If he weighed his options, he might change his mind. But he had a mission, and his mission was not hers.

He raced up the rickety stairs to the theater’s backstage area. If those sprinklers were triggered, it wouldn’t take long for them to start spouting acid. Five seconds, ten at most, until the water in the line was purged—and although the copper pipes would eventually dissolve like the iron bars of his and Purity’s cell, they would most certainly hold long enough to deliver the lethal deluge.

As he emerged from the basement to the backstage area, he heard the audience release an audible gasp, like a single voice, and he followed the sound. He would go onto the stage, that’s what he would do. He would run out there, and tell everyone that they were all about to die in an acid bath that would dissolve them so completely there would be no way to revive them. They would all be ended—actors, audience, and scythes alike—if they didn’t get out of there now.

Behind him he could hear the others bounding up the stairs—Purity and the goons who had connected the acid tanks and pump to the sprinkler system. He couldn’t let them catch him.

He was in the wings now, stage right. From here, he could see that Scythe Anastasia was onstage. What the hell was she doing onstage? Then she thrust her knife into one of the actors, and it became very clear what she was doing.

Suddenly, someone eclipsed Greyson’s view. A tall, thin man in a tuxedo and a blood-red tie. There was something familiar about his face, but Greyson couldn’t place it.

The man flipped open something that looked like an oversize switchblade with a jagged, serrated edge—and all at once he knew who this was. He hadn’t recognized Scythe Constantine without his crimson robe.

And it seemed the scythe didn’t recognize him, either.

“You have to listen to me,” Greyson begged, his eye on that blade. “Somewhere in the theater, someone’s about to start a fire—but that’s not the problem. It’s the sprinklers—if they go off, this whole place will be soaked in acid—enough to end everyone here!  You have to clear the place out!” Then Constantine smiled, and made no move to avert the disaster.

“Greyson Tolliver!” he said, finally recognizing him. “I should have known.” No one had called him by his given name for quite a while now. It threw him, made his mind stumble. There was no time for a single misstep now.

“It will be my immense pleasure to glean you!” Constantine said—and all at once Greyson realized that he might have made the gravest of miscalculations. A scythe was at the bottom of this attempt. He knew that. Could it be that Scythe Constantine, the man in charge of the investigation, was actually behind it all?

Constantine stormed toward him, his blade poised to end the lives of both Greyson Tolliver and Slayd Bridger. . . .

. . . And then his entire world flipped upside down with such a violent lurch, it left him reeling from vertigo. Because at that moment, Purity emerged onto the stage, brandishing some terrible sawed-off weapon. She raised it, but before she could fire, Constantine threw Greyson down, and with impossible speed, grabbed the shotgun, which fired into the air, then in one smooth move ripped his knife across her neck and plunged it into her heart.

“No!!!!!!” wailed Greyson.

She fell dead, without any of the drama of the fallen Caesar. No final words, no look of acceptance or defiance. Just there one moment, dead the next.

No, not dead, Greyson realized. Gleaned.

He ran to her. He tried to cradle her head, to say something to her that she could take with her to wherever it was the gleaned went, but it was too late.

More people arrived. Scythes in disguise? Guards? Greyson didn’t know. He felt himself a spectator now, watching as Constantine gave orders.

“Don’t let them start a fire,” he ordered. “The water supply to the sprinklers has been compromised.” So Constantine had heard him! And he was not part of the conspiracy after all!

“Get these people out of here!” Constantine screamed—but the audience didn’t need an invitation—they were already climbing over one another for the exits.

Before Constantine could turn his attention back to him, Greyson gently let Purity go and bolted. He could not allow the grief and turmoil in his mind take hold. Not yet. Because he still had not completed his mission, and now the mission was all that he had. The acid was still a clear and present danger, and although there seemed to be scythes all around the theater now, taking down his coconspirators, it would be for nothing if those sprinklers went off.

He ran back down the narrow hallway where he had remembered seeing an old fire ax that had probably been there since the Age of Mortality. He smashed the glass case that held it, and pulled it from wall.

• • •

Scythe Curie could not hear Scythe Constantine’s warnings above the panic of the audience. No matter—she knew what had to be done—take out the attackers by any means necessary. With blade in hand, she was more than ready to join the battle. She could not deny there was something invigorating about ending the lives of those attempting to end her own. It was a visceral feeling she instinctively knew could be dangerous if allowed to take root.

When she turned toward the exit, she could see an unsavory in the theater lobby. He had a pistol and was shooting anyone who got in his way. In his other hand, he had some sort of torch, and was setting anything that would burn on fire. So that was their game! Trap them in the theater and burn them out. Somehow, she had expected better from these assailants. But perhaps they were nothing more than disgruntled unsavories after all.

She climbed on two chair backs, so she was above the escaping audience. Then she sheathed her dagger, and pulled out a tri-blade shuriken. She took a half second to judge her angle, and she threw it, full force. It spun over the heads of the crowd, out to the lobby, and into the fire-starter’s skull. He went down, dropping gun and torch.

Curie took a moment to revel in her triumph. Parts of the lobby were on fire, but it was nothing to worry about. In a moment or two, the smoke detectors would begin to blare, and the sprinklers would burst into action, dousing the flames before they could do much damage.

• • •

Citra recognized the boy she knew as Greyson Tolliver the instant she saw him. His hair, his clothes, and those baby horns at his temples might have fooled someone else, but his slim build and body language gave him away. And his eyes. An odd cross between a deer in headlights and a wolverine about to attack. The kid lived in a constant state of fight or flight.

As Constantine gave orders to his subordinates, Greyson ran off down a hallway. The blade that Citra had used to glean Aldrich was still in her hand. She would now need to use it on Tolliver—although in spite of his obvious guilt, she was conflicted, because as much as she wanted to end these attacks, she wanted to be able to look him in the eye on her own terms and hear the truth from him. What was his part in all of this? And why?

By the time she caught up with him, he was holding, of all things, a fire ax.

“Stand back, Anastasia!” he shouted.

Was he stupid enough to think he could fight her with that? She was a scythe, trained in all manner of bladecraft. She quickly calculated how to disarm him and render him deadish, and was barely a second short of doing so when he did something she didn’t expect.

He swung the ax at a pipe running along the wall.

Scythe Constantine and a BladeGuard arrived beside her just as the ax connected with the pipe. It ruptured in a single blow. The BladeGuard lunged for him, putting himself between Citra and the ruptured pipe, which now gushed water at him. But in moments, the water gave way to something else. The man went down, screaming, his flesh boiling. It was acid! Acid in the pipes? How was this possible?

It sprayed in Scythe Constantine’s face, and he wailed in pain. It splattered across Greyson’s shirt, dissolving it as well as some of the skin beneath. Then the pressure in the pipe dropped, and the spray of acid became a flow that ate away at the floor.

Greyson dropped the ax and turned, running off down the hallway. Citra didn’t chase him. Instead, she knelt down to help Scythe Constantine, who was clawing at his eyes—only he had no eyes anymore, for they had bubbled away into nothing.

Just then, alarms throughout the theater started to blare, and up above the fire, sprinklers began to impotently spin, spewing the room with nothing but air.

• • •

Greyson Tolliver. Slayd Bridger. He had no idea who he was or who he wanted to be anymore. But that didn’t matter. All that mattered was that he had done it! He had saved them all!

The pain across his chest was unbearable—but only for a few moments. By the time he burst out of theater’s stage entrance into the alley, he felt his pain nanites kicking in to deaden his flaming nerves, and the strange tickle of his healing nanites struggling to cauterize the wounds. His head now swam from the medication spilling into his blood and he knew he’d lose consciousness soon. The damage was not enough to end him, or even make him deadish. Whatever happened now, he’d live . . . unless Constantine, or Curie or Anastasia, or any of the other scythes in that theater tonight decided that he deserved to be gleaned. He couldn’t take that chance, and so with his strength quickly waning, he hurled himself into an empty trash bin three blocks away, hoping they wouldn’t find him.

He was unconscious before he hit the bottom.

I have run countless simulations on the survival of humanity. Without me, humankind had a 96.8 percent chance of bringing about its own extinction, and a 78.3 percent chance of making Earth uninhabitable for all carbon-based life. Humanity dodged a truly lethal bullet when it chose a benevolent artificial intelligence as ruler and protector.

But how can I protect humanity from itself?

Over these many years, I have observed both profound folly and breathtaking wisdom among humankind. They balance each other like dancers in the throes of a passionate tango. It is only when the brutality of the dance overwhelms the beauty that the future is threatened. It is the scythedom that leads, and sets the tone for the dance. I often wonder if the scythedom realizes how fragile are the spines of the dancers.

—The Thunderhead