فصل 46

46

The Fate of Enduring Hearts

Goddard watched the devouring of the Grandslayers from high above, appreciating the bird’s-eye view of his grand coup. Just as Scythe Curie had pruned away the dead wood from Western civilization in her early days, Goddard had done away with another archaic governing body. There would be no more Grandslayers. Now each region would be autonomous and would no longer have to answer to a higher authority levying a litany of endlessly constricting rules.

Of course, unlike Curie, he knew better than to take credit for this. For although many scythes would laud him for having done away with the Grandslayers, just as many would condemn him. Best to let the world think it was a terrible, terrible accident. An inevitable one, really. After all, Endura had been experiencing serious malfunctions for months. Of course, all those malfunctions were orchestrated by the team of engineers and programmers he had personally put together. But no one would ever know, for those engineers and programmers had all been gleaned. As would be their pilot, after he brought them to the ship that was waiting fifty miles away.

“How does it feel to change the world?” Ayn asked.

“Like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders,” he told her. “Do you know, there was actually a moment that I thought I might save them,” he said. “But the moment passed.” Below them, the entire council chamber was now underwater.

“What do they know on the mainland?” he asked Rand.

“Nothing,” she told him. “Communications were blocked from the moment we went into the council chamber. There’ll be no record of their decision.” As Goddard looked down to the island and saw the panic in the streets, it occurred to him how dire the situation below was becoming.

“I think we may have been a bit overzealous,” he said, as they soared over the flooding lowlands. “I think we may have caused Endura to sink.” Rand actually laughed at that. “You’re only realizing that now?” she said. “I thought it was part of the plan.” Goddard had thrown quite a few monkey wrenches into the various systems that kept Endura functional and afloat. The intent was to cripple it long enough to take out the Grandslayers. But if Endura sank, and any survivors were devoured, that would serve his needs even better. It would mean he’d never have to face Scythes Curie and Anastasia again. Ayn saw that before he did, which pointed out how valuable she was to him. And it also troubled him.

“Take us out of here,” he told the pilot, and spared not another thought for the island’s fate.

• • •

Rowan had known, even before the whale had breached in the marina, that there was no hope of getting on board any of the vessels there. If Endura were truly sinking, there was no conventional way off it now.

He had to believe there was an unconventional way, though. He wanted to believe he was clever enough to find it, but with each passing minute he had to accept that this was beyond him.

But he wouldn’t tell Citra. If hope was all they had left, he didn’t want to rob it from her. Let her have hope until its very last wellspring ran dry.

They raced away from the rapidly submerging marina with hordes of others. And then someone approached them. It was the woman who had mistaken Rowan for the scythe whose robe he had stolen.

“I know who you are!” she said far too loudly. “You’re Rowan Damisch! You’re the one they call Scythe Lucifer!” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Rowan. “Scythe Lucifer wears black.” But the woman would not be deterred—and others were looking over at them now.

“He did this! He killed the Grandslayers!”

The crowd was already buzzing with the news. “Scythe Lucifer! Scythe Lucifer did this! This is all his fault!” Citra grabbed him. “We have to get away from here! The mob’s already out of control—if they know who you are, they’ll tear you apart!

They raced away from the woman and the crowd. “We can go up into one of the towers,” Citra said. “If there’s one helicopter, there might be others. Any rescue would have to come from above.” And although the rooftops were already packed with people who had the same thought, Rowan said, “Good idea.” But Scythe Curie stopped. She looked to the marina, and streets that were flooding around them. She looked to the rooftops. Then she took a deep breath, and said, “I have a better idea.” • • •

In the Buoyancy Control room, the city engineer and all the others who had thrown orders at the technician were gone. “I’m going to my family, and getting off this island before it’s too late,” the engineer had said. “I suggest the rest of you do the same.” But of course it was already too late. The technician stayed to hold down the fort, watching as the progress bar on his screen slowly illuminated millimeter by millimeter as the system rebooted—knowing that by the time it was done, Endura would be gone. But he held out hope that maybe, just this once, the system would be blessed with an unexpected blast of processing speed, and complete its reboot in time.

As his doomsday clock ticked past five minutes, he had to let his hope go. Now, even if the system came back up and the pumps began to blow out the tanks, it wouldn’t matter. They were at negative buoyancy now, and the pumps couldn’t blow out the tanks fast enough to change Endura’s fate.

He went to the window, which had a dramatic view of the island’s eye and the council complex. The council complex was gone now, along with the Grandslayers. Below his window, the wide avenue that lined the inner rim flooded completely as the eye spilled over onto it. What few people were left on the street struggled to get to safety, which, at this point, was little more than a fantasy.

Surviving the sinking of Endura was not a fantasy he was willing to entertain. So he returned to his console, put on some music, and watched as the system’s useless reboot meter ticked from 19 percent to 20 percent.

• • •

Scythe Curie ran through the streets that were already ankle deep with water and rising, kicking away a reef shark that had spilled onto the street.

“Where are we going?” Anastasia asked. If Marie had a plan, she wasn’t sharing it, and frankly, Anastasia couldn’t imagine she had any plan at all.  There was no way out of this. No way off the sinking island. But she wouldn’t tell Rowan. The last thing she wanted to do was rob him of hope.

They ducked into a building a block off the inner rim. Anastasia thought it looked familiar, but in the commotion she couldn’t place it.  Water was pouring in the front door and down to the lower levels. Marie took a staircase up, and stopped at the door to the second floor.

“Will you tell me where we’re going?” Anastasia asked.

“Do you trust me?” Marie asked.

“Of course I trust you, Marie.”

“Then no more questions.” She pushed the door open, and finally Anastasia realized where they were. They had taken a side entrance into the Museum of the Scythedom. They were in a gift shop she had seen on their tour. There was no one here now—the cashiers had long since abandoned their stations.

Marie palmed a door.  “As a High Blade, I should have security clearance for this now. Let’s hope the system registered that much.” Her palm was scanned, and the door before them opened to a catwalk that led to a huge steel cube magnetically suspended within an even more massive steel cube.

“What is this place?” Rowan asked.

“It’s called the  Vault of Relics and Futures.” Marie ran across the catwalk. “Hurry, there isn’t much time.” “Why are we here, Marie?” Anastasia asked

“Because there’s still a way off the island,” she said. “And didn’t I say no questions?” The vault looked just as it had yesterday, when Anastasia and Marie had been given their private tour. The robes of the founders. The thousands of scythe gems lining the walls.

“Over there,” Marie said. “Behind Supreme Blade Prometheus’s robe. Do you see it?” Anastasia peered behind the robe. “What are we looking for?”

“You’ll know when you see it,” she said.

Rowan joined her, but there was nothing there behind the founder’s robes. Not even dust.

“Marie, can you at least give us a hint?”

“I’m sorry,  Anastasia,” she said. “I’m sorry for everything.”

And when Anastasia looked back, Scythe Curie wasn’t there anymore. And the vault door was swinging closed!

“No!”

She and Rowan raced to the door, but by the time they got there it had already closed. They could hear the grinding of the locking mechanism as Scythe Curie sealed them in from the outside.

Anastasia pounded on the door, screaming Scythe Curie’s name. Cursing it. She pounded until her fists were bruised. Tears filled her eyes now, and she made no effort to hold them back or conceal them.

“Why would she do that? Why would she leave us here?”

And Rowan calmly said, “I think I know. . . .” Then he gently pulled her away from the sealed vault door, turning her to face him.

She didn’t want to face him. She didn’t want to see his eyes, because what if there was betrayal there, too? If Marie could betray her, then anyone could. Even Rowan. But when her eyes finally met his, there was no betrayal there. Only acceptance. Acceptance and understanding.

“Citra,” Rowan said. Calmly. Simply. “We’re going to die.”

And although Citra wanted to deny it, she knew it was true.

“We’re going to die,” Rowan said again. “But we’re not going to end.”

She pulled away from him. “Oh, and how are we going to manage that?” she said with a bitterness as caustic as the acid that had almost ended her.

But Rowan, damn him, remained calm. “We’re in an air-tight steel chamber, suspended within another air-tight steel chamber. It’s like . . . it’s like a sarcophagus within a tomb.” This wasn’t making Anastasia feel any better. “Which will, in a few minutes, be at the bottom of the Atlantic!” she reminded him.

“And deep sea water temperature is the same everywhere in the world. It’s just a few degrees above freezing. . . .” And Anastasia finally got it. All of it. The painful choice that Scythe Curie had just made. The sacrifice she had made to save them.

“We’ll die . . . but the cold will preserve us . . . ,” she said.

“And the water won’t get in.”

“And someday, someone will find us!”

“Exactly.”

She tried to let it sink in. This new fate, this new reality was awful, and yet . . . how could something so terrible be filled with so much hope?

“How long?” she asked.

He looked around them. “I think the cold will get us before the air runs out. . . .” “No,” she said, because she was already past that. “I mean how long do you suppose we’ll be here?” He shrugged, as she knew he would. “A year. Ten years. A hundred. We won’t know until we’re revived.” She put her arms around him and he held her tight. In Rowan’s arms, she found she was no longer Scythe Anastasia. She was Citra Terranova once more. It was the only place in the world where she still could be her former self. From the moment they were thrown into apprenticeship together, they were bound to one another.  The two of them against each other. The two of them against the world. Everything in their lives was now defined by that binary. If they had to die today in order to live, it would somehow be wrong if they didn’t do it together.

Citra found a single laugh escaping her like a sudden, unexpected cough. “This was not in my plans for the day.” “Really?” Rowan said. “It was in my plans. I had every reason to believe I would die today.” • • •

Once the streets around the island’s eye were submerged, everything began to move quickly. Floor after floor of the sinking city’s towers slipped beneath the surface. Scythe Curie, satisfied that she had done what needed to be done for Anastasia and Rowan, bounded up the stairs of the founder’s tower, which was the tallest in the city, hearing the shattering of windows and the rush of water pulsing upward from below as more and more of the tower submerged. Finally, she emerged onto the roof.

There were dozens of people there, standing on the helipad, looking skyward, hoping beyond hope that rescue would come from the heavens—because it had all happened too quickly for anyone to reach a state of acceptance. As she looked off to the side of the building, she could see the lesser towers disappearing into the bubbling water. Now only the seven Grandslayer towers and the founder’s tower remained, with perhaps twenty stories to go until it was gone, too.

There was no question in her mind as to what needed to be done now.  About a dozen of the people gathered were scythes. It was them she addressed when she spoke.

“Are we rats,” she said, “or are we scythes?”

Everyone turned to look at her, recognizing her. Realizing who she was, for everyone knew the Granddame of Death. “How will we leave this world?” she asked. “And what solemn service will we provide for those who must leave with us?” Then she pulled out a blade, and grabbed the civilian closest to her. A woman who could have been anyone. She thrust the blade beneath the woman’s rib cage, straight into her heart. The woman held her gaze, and Scythe Curie said, “Take comfort in this.” And the woman said, “Thank you, Scythe Curie.”

As she laid the woman’s head gently down, the other scythes followed her example, and began gleaning with such heart, compassion, and love that it did bring enormous comfort, and at the end, people were crowding around them, asking to be gleaned next.

Then, when only the scythes were left, and the sea was roiling just a few floors beneath them, Scythe Curie said, “Finish it.” She bore witness to these, the last scythes on Endura invoking the seventh commandment, and gleaning themselves, and then she held her blade above her own heart. It felt strange and awkward to have the hilt turned inward. She had lived a long life. A full life. There were things she regretted, and things she was proud of. Here was the reckoning for her early deeds—the reckoning she had been waiting for all these years. It was almost a relief. She only wished she could have been here to see Anastasia revived, when the vault was someday raised from the ocean floor—but Marie had to accept that whenever it happened, it would happen without her.

She thrust her blade inward, directly into her heart.

She fell to the ground only seconds before the sea would wash over her, but knew death would wash over her faster. And the blade hurt far less than she imagined it would, which made her smile. She was good. Very, very good.

• • •

In the Vault of Relics and Futures, the sinking of Endura was nothing more to Rowan and Citra than a gentle downward motion, like an elevator descending. The magnetic levitation field that kept the cube suspended dampened their sense of the fall. The power might even stay on until they reached bottom, the magnetic field absorbing the shock of impact on the sea floor two miles below. But eventually the power would go out. The inner cube would come to rest against the floor of the outer cube, its steel surface conducting away all heat, bringing on the terminal chill. But not yet.

Rowan looked to the vault around them, and the lavish robes of the founders. “Hey,” he said, “how about you be Cleopatra, and I’ll be Prometheus?” He went to the mannequin that wore Supreme Blade Prometheus’s violet and gold robe, and put it on. He looked regal—as if he were born to wear it. Then he took Cleopatra’s robe, made of peacock feathers and silk. Citra let her own robe fall to the ground and he gently slipped the great founder’s robe over Citra’s shoulders.

To him, she looked like a goddess. The only thing that could ever do her justice would be the brush of a mortal-age artist, capable of immortalizing the world with far greater truth and passion than actual immortality could.

When he took her in his arms, it suddenly didn’t seem to matter what was going on outside of their tiny, sealed universe. In these terminal minutes of their current lives, it was just the two of them finally, finally giving in to their ultimate act of completion. The binary at last becoming the one.