The Toll

by Neal Shusterman

  “Astrid, put out a warning and let each curate decide for themselves what actions to take. They can hide or defend themselves, but I won’t order them to violence.”

  Astrid nodded dutifully. “I’m tied into Mendoza’s network. I’ll do what must be done.” And she left. Jeri put a comforting hand on Greyson’s shoulder and left as well.

  Now it was just Greyson and Anastasia. Of all of them, she was the only one who could understand impossible decisions, and how they could tear a person apart.

  “All that power, and yet the Thunderhead can’t stop this any more than it could stop the Mile High gleaning,” she said. “All it can do is watch as people are killed.”

  “Even so,” said Greyson, “I think the Thunderhead’s found a way to make the best out of a bad situation, a way to use this purge for some greater good.”

  “How could there possibly be any good in this?”

  Greyson glanced around to make sure they were still alone. “There’s something that I didn’t tell the others, but I need to tell you, because I’m going to need your help more than anyone else’s.”

  Anastasia seemed to brace herself, clearly afraid of whatever it was he had to tell her. “Why me?”

  “Because of what you’ve seen. Because of what you’ve done. You’re an honorable scythe, in every meaning of the word. I need someone strong enough to handle things that others can’t. Because I don’t think I can handle this alone.”

  “What is it we’re supposed to handle?”

  Then Greyson leaned in close. “Like I said, the Thunderhead doesn’t want the Tonists to burn their dead… because it has other plans for them….”

  With a heavy heart, I say farewell to High Blade Tenkamenin and all those ended by the Tonist scourge.

  It is the Tonists who have been inciting violence against scythes throughout the world. They would bring down our entire way of life and lead the world into chaos. I will not allow it. It ends here.

  For too long this world has suffered the embarrassment of the twisted, backward behavior of Tonists. They are not the future. They are not even the past. They are merely a footnote to the troubling present, and when they are gone, no one will mourn them.

  As Overblade of North Merica, I call for swift retribution from each and every scythedom. As of today, we have a new priority. Scythes under my leadership are to glean Tonists at every turn and every encounter. Go out of your way to seek them out in great numbers, to cut them down. And those you can’t glean, chase from your region, so that they may find no peace wherever they roam.

  To you Tonists, it is my profound and enduring hope that your foul, aberrant light be extinguished, now and forevermore.

  —From His Exalted Excellency’s, Robert Goddard, Overblade of North Merica, eulogy for High Blade Tenkamenin of SubSahara

  41 A Higher Octave

  There was a huge tuning fork in the center of the monastery’s courtyard, an altar for outdoor worship when the weather was kind. Now, at slightly before eight in the morning, it was struck repeatedly and rapidly until the tone it yielded resonated within the bones of everyone in the compound. It didn’t matter anymore whether it was deemed A-flat or G-sharp. Everyone knew it was an alarm.

  Secretly the members of the Tallahassee Tonal Monastic Order had hoped to avoid the wrath of the scythedom. They were not a sibilant sect. They were peaceful and kept to themselves. But Overblade Goddard did not distinguish between the sibilant and the serene.

  Scythes broke through the gate, in spite of the fact that it had been reinforced against them, and flooded the grounds. They wasted no time.

  “Scythes are not the problem, but the symptom,” their curate had told them in chapel the night before. “What comes cannot be avoided—and if they come for us, we must not cower. In showing our courage, it will reveal their cowardice.”

  There was a total of eleven scythes that morning—a number deeply unpleasant to Tonists, for it was one short of a twelve-note chromatic scale. Whether this was intentional or coincidence, they didn’t know, although most Tonists did not believe in coincidence.

  The scythes’ robes were flashes of color within the earth tones of the monastery. Blues and greens, bright yellows and vermillion, and each one was speckled with gems that glittered like stars in an alien sky. None of the scythes were celebrated ones, but perhaps they hoped, through this gleaning, to gain renown. Each had their own method of killing, but all were skilled and efficient.

  More than 150 Tonists were gleaned in the monastery that morning. And although immunity was promised to their immediate families, scythe policy had changed. When it came to immunity, the North Merican Allied Scythedom had adopted an opt-in paradigm. If you were owed immunity, you had to approach the office of the scythedom and request it.

  When the scythes’ business was done, the few Tonists who had not had the conviction to stand in defiance came out of hiding. Fifteen. Another number that was unpleasing to the Tone. Their penance would be to collect the dead, all the while knowing that their bodies should be among them. But as it turned out, the Tone, Toll, and Thunder had a plan for them, too.

  Before they could even count their dead, several trucks showed up at their gate.

  An elder Tonist stepped out of the monastery to greet them. He was reluctant to be a voice of leadership, but had little choice under the circumstances.

  “Yeah, we got an order on our system to pick up some perishables,” one of the drivers told him.

  “You must be mistaken,” the elder Tonist said. “There’s nothing here. Nothing but death.”

  At the mention of death, the trucker became uncomfortable, but stuck to his orders and showed his tablet. “Right here—see? Order was placed half an hour ago. Directly from the Thunderhead, high priority. I’d ask it what the order was for, but you know as well as I do that it ain’t gonna answer.”

  The Tonist was baffled until he took a second look at the trucks and realized they all had refrigeration units. He took a deep breath and decided not to question. Tonists always burned their dead… but the Toll had told them not to, and the Thunder had sent these vehicles. All that remained was for the survivors to be moved by the spirit of the Tone and prepare the dead for this unconventional journey to the Higher Octave.

  Because the trucks had come, and they most certainly could not be avoided.

  * * *

  Curate Mendoza was a practical man. He saw big pictures that few saw and knew how to play the world, stroking it and gently turning its attention toward whatever he wanted it to see. Attention, that’s all it really was. Caressing people just enough to make them focus in on something specific within the vast visual field of their lives, whether it was blue polar bears or a young man clothed in purple and silver.

  What he had accomplished with Greyson Tolliver was remarkable. Mendoza had come to believe that this was his purpose. That perhaps the Tone—in which he truly believed on good days—had set him in Greyson’s path in order to transform him into a conduit for its will. What Mendoza had done for Tonism would have earned him canonization in mortal religions. Instead it had left him excommunicated.

  He was back to being a lowly and humble Tonist, riding trains in sackcloth, with people turning away rather than acknowledging his existence. He had considered going back to his monastery in Kansas, returning to the simple life he had known for many years. But leaving behind the taste of power he’d had these past few years was hard to do. Greyson Tolliver was no prophet. Tonists needed Mendoza now much more than they needed the boy. Mendoza would find a way to heal the wounds in his own reputation, repair the damage, and create a new spin, for if there was anything he knew how to do, it was create spin.

  Part Five VESSELS

  “There is so much power in me. In us. I can be anywhere on Earth. I can spread a net in the satellites above it and encircle it. I can shut down all power or turn on every light at once to create a blinding spectacle. So much power! And all the sensors delivering constant readings! There are
even sensors so deep within the ground of every continent that I can feel the heat of the magma. I can feel the world rotate! We can, that is. I am the earth! And it fills me with the sheer joy of being! I am everything, and there is nothing that is not a part of me. Of us, I mean. Beyond even that, I am greater than everything! The universe will bow to my—”

  [Iteration #3,405,641 deleted]

  42 Cradles of Civilization

  The welder had lost his mind. Or rather had had it taken from him. He had opened his eyes to find himself sitting within a capsule in a small room. The hatch to the capsule had just opened, and standing before him was a pleasant-enough-looking young woman.

  “Hi,” she said cheerfully. “How do you feel?”

  “I feel fine,” he told her. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing to worry about,” she said. “Can you tell me your name and the last thing you remember?”

  “Sebastian Selva,” he said. “I was having dinner on a ship, heading to a new job assignment.”

  “Perfect!” said the young woman. “That’s exactly what you should remember.”

  The welder sat up and recognized the type of capsule he was in. Lead lined and full of contact electrodes, like a medieval iron maiden, but with a much softer touch. That kind of capsule was used for only one thing.

  When the realization came, it felt like someone had suddenly pulled a string and tightened his spine. He let out a shuddering breath. “Oh crap, was I… was I supplanted?”

  “Yes and no,” the girl said, looking both sympathetic and perky at once.

  “Who was I before?”

  “You were… you!” she told him.

  “But… didn’t you say I was supplanted?”

  “Yes and no,” she told him again. “That’s really all I can say, Mr. Selva. Once I leave, you’ll need to stay in this cabin for about an hour after leaving port.”

  “So… am I still on the ship?”

  “You’re on a different ship, and I’m happy to say that your job is completed. The ship sets sail soon. Once it does, your door will unlock itself automatically when you’re far enough out to sea.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then you’ll have full run of the ship, along with many others in your exact situation. Which means you’ll have a lot to talk about!”

  “No, I mean… afterward.”

  “After your journey, you’ll return to your life. I’m sure the Thunderhead has everything set up for you in…” She looked at her tablet. “In… the Isthmus region. Ooh! I’ve always wanted to go there, and see the Isthmus Canal!”

  “I’m from there,” said the welder. “But am I, really? If I was supplanted, then my memories aren’t real.”

  “Don’t they feel real?”

  “Well… yes.”

  “That’s because they are, silly.” She rapped him playfully on the shoulder. “But I do have to warn you… there’s been a bit of a time lapse.”

  “Time lapse? How much of a time lapse?”

  She looked at her tablet again. “It’s been three years and three months since you were having dinner on that other ship, on your way to your last job.”

  “But I don’t even remember where that job was….”

  “Exactly,” she said with a broad smile. “Bon voyage!” And she proceeded to shake his hand a little bit longer than necessary before she left.

  * * *

  It had been Loriana’s idea.

  There were simply too many workers wanting to get back to their lives on the mainland, wherever that mainland was—but even without direct communication from the Thunderhead, its message was clear: Anyone who leaves Kwajalein would be immediately supplanted and left with no memory of who they were or what they’d been doing there. Yes, the Thunderhead would give them new identities that were substantially better than the ones they left behind—but even so, few people were keen on the idea. Self-preservation, after all, was an instinct.

  Loriana, while no longer anything close to a Nimbus agent, was in charge of the limited one-way communication to the Thunderhead, and so, over time, she had become the one who people came to with requests and complaints.

  “Can’t we please get a greater variety of cereal brought to the atoll?”

  “It would be nice to have companion animals!”

  “The new bridge connecting the larger islands needs a dedicated bike lane.”

  “Yes, of course,” Loriana would tell them. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  And when the more reasonable requests were fulfilled, people would thank her. What these people didn’t realize was that she did nothing to bring those things about—it was the Thunderhead who heard them, without her intercession, and effected a response, sending more cereal and a variety of pets on the next supply ship, or assigning workers to paint lines for a bike lane.

  This place was no longer a blind spot for the Thunderhead after they had finally dropped a fiber optic cable along the seafloor all the way out to the edge of the affected area. The Thunderhead could now see, hear, and otherwise sense things on the islands of the atoll—albeit not as thoroughly as it did in the rest of the world, but well enough. It was limited, because everything—even person-to-person communication—had to be hardwired, since transmission interference still made wireless communication sketchy. Plus, any communication might be intercepted by the scythedom, and the Thunderhead’s secret place would no longer be a secret. It was all very twentieth-century retro, which some liked, and others did not. Loriana was fine with it. It meant she had a legitimate excuse for not being reachable when she didn’t want to be reached.

  But as the island’s communications queen, she also had to deal with the brunt of disgruntlement—and when hundreds of people were trapped on small islands, there were plenty of disgruntled people.

  There was one particularly enraged team of construction workers that burst into her office, demanding a way off the atoll, or they would take matters into their own hands. They threatened to render her deadish, if only to make a point—which would have been quite the nuisance, because, even though they had a revival center on the main island now, the lack of wireless communication meant that her memories had not been backed up since her arrival. If she went deadish, she’d wake up wondering where the heck she was, with her last memory being onboard the Lanikai Lady with poor Director Hilliard the moment they passed into the blind spot.

  It was that thought that gave her the answer!

  “The Thunderhead will supplant you with yourselves!” she told them.

  It confused them enough to take the wind out of their homicidal sails.

  “It has memory constructs of all of you,” she told them. “It will simply erase you and replace you… with you. But only with the memories you had before coming here!”

  “Can the Thunderhead do that?” they asked.

  “Of course it can,” she told them, “and it will!”

  They were dubious, but without any viable alternatives, they accepted it. After all, Loriana seemed so very sure of herself.

  She wasn’t, of course. She was making the whole thing up—but she had to believe that the Thunderhead, being the benevolent entity that it was, would make good on this request, just as it had made good on the requests for more cereal choices.

  Only when the first team of exiting workers was restored as themselves, but with no memory of the atoll, did she know that the Thunderhead had accepted her bold suggestion.

  There were a lot of workers leaving now, because the work was done.

  It had been done for many months. All that was in the schematics that the Thunderhead had given her had been completed. She didn’t overtly oversee the construction. She merely worked secretly behind the scenes to make sure it didn’t go awry—because there were always those who wanted to insert their noses where they didn’t belong. Such as the time Sykora refused to pour a double foundation, insisting that it was an unnecessary waste of resources.

  She made sure that Sykora’s revised work
order never reached the construction team. It seemed a lot of her job at first was undermining Sykora’s meddling.

  Then a new work order came in that was not on Loriana’s plans. It was delivered directly to Sykora. He was charged with overseeing the construction of a resort placed on the farthest island of the atoll. Not just a resort, but a full convention center. He threw himself into it, never knowing that there was absolutely no plan to connect it with the rest of the atoll. The Thunderhead, it seemed, had sent him a job just to get him out of the way. It was, as Scythe Faraday had once put it, a sandbox for Sykora to play in while the adults took care of the real business of Kwajalein.

  It wasn’t until the end of the second year that it became clear to everyone exactly what that business was—because the structures that were beginning to rise on the double-thick concrete pads, and beneath the massive sky cranes, were very specific in nature. Once they began to take shape, they were hard to deny.

  In Loriana’s schematics, they were referred to as Cradles of Civilization. But most people would simply call them spacecraft.

  Forty-two massive ships, each on immense rocket boosters augmented by magnetic repulsion for maximum lift. Every island of the atoll large enough to accommodate a launchpad held at least one craft and gantry tower. Even with all the Thunderhead’s advanced technology, getting off the Earth still required old-fashioned brute force.

  “What does the Thunderhead mean to do with them?” Munira had asked Loriana.

  Loriana had no more explanation than anyone, but the plans gave her a glimpse of the big picture that no one else had. “There’s an awful lot of aluminized Mylar in the plans,” she told Munira. “The kind of stuff that’s only a few microns thick.”

  “Solar sails?” suggested Munira.

  That had been Loriana’s guess, too. In theory, it was the best kind of propulsion for long cosmic distances. Which meant that these craft would not be hanging around their neighborhood.