Thunderhead

by Neal Shusterman

“Why am I not surprised?”

  “And anyway, I don’t want the kind of job the AI would give me. I want a job that suits me.”

  “And what might suit you?”

  Now it was his turn to give her a licentious grin. “The kind that gets my blood pumping. The kind that my Nimbo won’t ever offer me.”

  “The boy with the puppy-dog eyes is looking for trouble,” Purity teased. “Wonder what he’ll do when he finds it!”

  She licked her lips, then wiped them on her sleeve.

  • • •

  The wine turned out to be some sort of acid. “Fluoro-flerovic, is my guess,” said Purity. “Explains the plastic bottle. It’s probably Teflon, because the stuff eats through anything else.”

  They poured it around the base of several of the cell bars. It started to eat away at the iron, releasing noxious fumes that taxed the healing nanites in their lungs. In less than five minutes, they were able to kick out the bars and escape.

  The cell block was a study in mayhem. Now that a good number of the evening’s “inmates” had finished their meals and escaped, they were tearing the place up. Guards were chasing them, they were chasing guards. There were food fights and fist fights—and whenever someone fought with the guards, the guards always lost, no matter how brawny they looked and how well they were armed. Half of the guards ended up locked in cells themselves, to be taunted by the unsavories. The remaining staff threatened to call in something called “the national guard” to put the riot down. It was all great fun.

  Greyson and Purity eventually made it all the way to the warden’s office. They kicked out the warden, and the instant the door was locked, Purity got back to what she had begun in the cell.

  “Private enough for ya?” she asked, but didn’t wait for a response.

  Five minutes later—when she had Greyson at his most vulnerable—she turned the tables on him.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” she said, whispering into his ear. “It’s no accident that you ended up in my cell, Slayd. I arranged it.”

  Then a knife that seemed to come from nowhere appeared in her hand. He immediately began to struggle, but it was no use. He was on his back, unable to move—she had him pinned. She pressed the tip of the blade to his bare chest, just beneath his sternum. An upward jab would go right through his heart. “Don’t move or I might slip.” He had no choice. He was completely at her mercy. If he had truly been an unsavory, he would have seen this coming, but he was too trusting. “What do you want?”

  “It’s not what I want, it’s what you want,” she said. “I know you’ve been asking around for work. Real work. ‘Heart-pounding’ work, as you called it. So my friends brought you to my attention.” She looked him in the eyes, like she was trying to read something there, then tightened her grip on the knife.

  “If you kill me, I’ll just be revived,” he reminded her, “and you’ll get your hand slapped by the AI.”

  She put pressure on the knife. He gasped. He thought she’d push it in all the way up to the hilt, but instead she barely broke his skin. “Who said I wanted to kill you?”

  Then she took the knife away, touched a finger to the tiny wound on his chest, and brought the finger to her mouth.

  “I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a bot,” she said. “The Thunderhead uses them to spy on us, did you know that? It’s how the Thunderhead can see in places it don’t got cameras. The bots look more and more real all the time. But their blood still tastes like motor oil.”

  “So what does mine taste like?” Greyson dared to ask.

  She leaned close to him. “Life,” she whispered into his ear.

  And for the rest of the evening, until the club closed, Greyson Tolliver, a.k.a. Slayd Bridger, experienced a dizzying variety of the things that life had to offer.

  * * *

  I often ruminate on that day, a century from now, when the human population reaches its limit. I ponder what must happen in the years leading up to it. There are only three plausible alternatives. The first would be to break my oath to allow personal freedom, and limit births. This is unworkable, because I am incapable of breaking an oath. It is the reason why I make so few. For this reason, imposing a limit on birth rates is not an option.

  The second possibility would be to find a way to expand human presence beyond Earth. An extraterrestrial solution. It would seem obvious that the best escape valve for a top-heavy population would be offloading billions of people to a different world. However, all attempts to set up colonies off-planet—our moon, Mars, even an orbital station—have met with unimaginable disasters that were entirely out of my control. I have reason to believe that new attempts will suffer the same disastrous end.

  So if humanity is a prisoner of Earth, and the birth rate cannot be throttled, there is only one other viable alternative to solve the population problem . . . and that alternative is not pleasant.

  Currently there are 12,187 scythes in the world, each gleaning five people per week. However, in order to bring about zero population growth once humanity reaches the saturation point, it would require 394,429 scythes, each gleaning one hundred people per day.

  It is not a world that I ever wish to see . . . but there are certain scythes who would welcome it.

  And they frighten me.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  19

  The Sharp Blades of Our Own Conscience

  It had been over a week since their meeting with Scythe Constantine, and neither Citra nor Marie had performed a single gleaning. At first, Citra thought that having a respite from daily gleaning would be a welcome thing. She never enjoyed the thrust of the blade or the pulling of a trigger; she never enjoyed watching the light leave the eyes of someone she had given a lethal poison, but being a scythe changed a person. Over this first year of her full scythehood, there had been a reluctant acquiescence to this profession that had chosen her. She gleaned with compassion, she was good at it, and she had come to take pride in it.

  Both Citra and Marie found themselves spending more and more time writing in their scythe journals—although without gleaning, there was less to write about. They still “roamed,” as Marie called it, moving city to city, town to town, never staying anywhere for more than a day or two, and never planning where they would go next until they packed their bags. Citra found that her journal was beginning to resemble a travelogue.

  What Citra didn’t write about was the physical toll this idle time seemed to be taking on Scythe Curie. Without the daily hunt to keep her sharp, she moved slower in the mornings, her thoughts seemed to wander when she spoke, and she always seemed to be tired.

  “Perhaps it’s time for me to turn a corner,” she mused to Citra.

  Marie had never mentioned turning a corner before. Citra didn’t know what to think of it. “How far would you set your age back?” Citra asked.

  Scythe Curie feigned considering it, as if she hadn’t been thinking about it for quite some time. “Perhaps I’d set down to thirty or thirty-five.”

  “Would you keep your hair silver?”

  She smiled. “Of course. It’s my trademark.”

  No one close to Citra had turned a corner. There were kids back at school whose parents reset their ages left and right as the mood suited them. She had a math teacher who came in after a long weekend looking practically unrecognizable. He had reset down to twenty-one, and other girls in class tittered about how hot he was now, which just creeped Citra out. Even though setting down to thirty wouldn’t change Scythe Curie all that much, it would be disconcerting. Although Citra knew it was selfish to say, she told her, “I like you the way you are.”

  Marie smiled and said, “Maybe I’ll wait until next year. A physical age of sixty is a good time to reset. I was sixty the last time I turned a corner.”

  But now there was a game afoot that might breathe life back into both of them. Three gleanings, and all during the Month of Lights and the Olde Tyme Holidays season—like the three ghosts of Chr
istmas Past, Present, and Future, mostly forgotten in post-mortal times. The spirit of the past meant little when the years were named, not numbered. And for a vast majority of people, the future was nothing but an unchanging continuation of the present, leaving those spirits with nowhere to go but oblivion.

  “Holiday gleanings!” chimed Marie. “What could be more ‘Olde Tyme’ than death?”

  “Is it terrible to say that I’m looking forward to them?” Citra asked, more to herself than to Marie. She could tell herself that she was really just looking forward to luring out their attacker, but that would be a lie.

  “You’re a scythe, dear. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  “Are you saying that Scythe Goddard was right? That in a perfect world, even scythes should enjoy what they do?”

  “Certainly not!” Marie said with appropriate indignation. “The simple pleasure of being good at what you do is very different from finding joy in the taking of life.” Then she took a long look at Citra, gently held her hands, and said, “The very fact that you are tormented by the question means you are a truly honorable scythe. Guard your conscience, Anastasia, and never let it wilt. It is a scythe’s most valuable possession.”

  • • •

  The first of Scythe Anastasia’s three gleanings was a woman who chose to splat from the highest building in Fargo, which was not known for its high buildings. Forty stories, however, was more than enough to do the job.

  Scythe Constantine, half a dozen other scythes, and an entire phalanx of the BladeGuard hid themselves in strategic locations around the rooftop, as well as throughout the building and the streets around it. They vigilantly waited, on the lookout for a murderous plot beyond the scheduled murderous plot.

  “Will this hurt, Your Honor?” the woman asked as she looked down from the edge of the icy, windswept roof.

  “I don’t think so,” Scythe Anastasia told her. “And if it does, it will only be for a fraction of a second.”

  For it to be an official gleaning, the woman couldn’t leap on her own; Scythe Anastasia had to actually push her. Oddly, Citra found pushing the woman off the roof far more unpleasant than gleaning with a weapon. It reminded her of that terrible time when she was a child that she had pushed another girl in front of a bus. Of course, the girl was revived, and in a couple of days was back in school as if nothing had happened. This time, however, there would be no revival.

  Scythe Anastasia did what she had to do. The woman died on schedule with neither fanfare nor incident, and her family kissed Scythe Anastasia’s ring, solemnly accepting their year of immunity. Citra was both relieved and disappointed that no one had come out of the woodwork to challenge her.

  • • •

  Scythe Anastasia’s next gleaning, a few days later, was not quite as simple.

  “I wish to be hunted by crossbow,” the man from Brew City told her. “I ask that you hunt from sunrise to sunset in the woods near my home.”

  “And if you survive the hunt without being gleaned?” Citra asked him.

  “I’ll come out of the woods and allow you to glean me,” he said, “but for surviving the full day, my family will receive two years of immunity instead of just one.”

  Scythe Anastasia nodded her agreement in the stoic and formal manner she had learned from Scythe Curie. A perimeter was set up to mark the boundaries within which the man could hide. Again, Scythe Constantine and his team monitored for intruders and any nefarious activity.

  The man thought he was a match for Citra. He wasn’t. She tracked him and took him out less than an hour into the hunt. A single steel arrow to the heart. It was merciful, as all of Scythe Anastasia’s gleanings were. He was dead before he hit the ground. Yet even though he hadn’t made it through the day, she still gave his family two years of immunity. She knew she’d catch hell for it in conclave, but she didn’t care.

  Through the entire gleaning, there was no sign of any plot or conspiracy against her.

  “You should be relieved, not disappointed,” Scythe Curie told her that night. “It probably means that I was the sole target, and you can rest easy.” But Marie was certainly not resting easy, and not just because she was the probable target.

  “I fear that this goes beyond just a vendetta against me or you,” Scythe Curie confided. “These are troubling times, Anastasia. There’s too much violence afoot. I long for the simple, straightforward days, when we scythes had nothing to fear but the sharp blades of our own conscience. Now there are enemies within enemies.”

  Citra suspected there was truth in that. The attack on them was a small thread in a much larger tapestry that could not be seen from where they stood. She couldn’t help but sense that there was something huge and threatening just beyond the horizon.

  • • •

  “I’ve made a contact.”

  Agent Traxler raised an eyebrow. “Do tell, Greyson.”

  “Please, don’t call me that. Just call me Slayd. It’s easier for me.”

  “All right then, Slayd, tell me about this contact of yours.”

  Until today, their weekly probation meetings had been uneventful. Greyson reported on how well he was adapting to being Slayd Bridger, and how effectively he was infiltrating the local unsavory culture. “They’re not so bad,” Greyson had told him. “Mostly.”

  To which Traxler had responded, “Yes, I’ve found that in spite of the attitude, unsavories are harmless. Mostly.”

  Funny, then, that the ones who were not harmless were the ones Greyson was drawn to. The one. Purity.

  “There’s this person,” he told Traxler. “This person who offered me a job. I don’t know the details of it, but I know that it’s in violation of  Thunderhead law. I think there’s a whole group of people operating in a blind spot.”

  Traxler took no notes. He wrote nothing down. He never did. But he always listened intently. “Those spots aren’t blind anymore once someone’s watching,” Traxler said. “So does this person have a name?”

  Greyson hesitated. “I haven’t found out yet,” he lied. “But what’s more important are the people she knows.”

  “She?” Traxler raised that eyebrow again, and Greyson silently cursed himself. He had been trying as hard as he could not to reveal anything about Purity—not even her gender. But now it was out, and there was nothing he could do about it

  “Yes. I think she’s connected with some pretty shady people, but I haven’t met them yet. They’re the ones we should be worried about, not her.”

  “I’ll make that determination,” Traxler told him. “In the meantime, it would behoove you to go as deep as you can go.”

  “I’m deep,” Greyson told him.

  Traxler looked him in the eye. “Go deeper.”

  • • •

  Greyson found that when he was with Purity, he didn’t think about Traxler, or his mission. He just thought about her. There was no question that she was involved in criminal activity—and not just pretend-crimes, like most unsavories, but the real thing.

  Purity knew ways to fly beneath the Thunderhead’s radar, and taught them to Greyson.

  “If the Thunderhead knew all the things I did, it would relocate me, the way it did to you,” Purity told him. “Then it would tweak my nanites to make me think happy thoughts. It might even supplant my memory completely.  The Thunderhead would cure me. But I don’t want to be cured. I want to be worse than unsavory; I want to be bad. Honestly and truly bad.”

  He had never thought of the Thunderhead from the perspective of an unrepentant unsavory.  Was it wrong for the Thunderhead to rehabilitate people from the inside out? Should evil people be allowed the freedom to be evil, without any safety nets? Is that what Purity was? Was she evil? Greyson found he had no answers to the questions swimming in his head.

  “How about you, Slayd?” she asked him. “Do you want to be bad?”

  He knew what his answer was 99 percent of the time. But when he was in her arms, his whole body screaming with the sensation of being
with her in that moment where the clear crystal of his conscience fractured into jade, his answer was a resounding “yes.”

  • • •

  The third of Scythe Anastasia’s gleanings was the most complicated to accomplish. The subject was an actor by the name of Sir Albin Aldrich. The “sir” was a fictional title, since no one was actually knighted anymore, but sounded much more impressive for a classically trained actor. Citra had known his profession when she had chosen him, and suspected he would want a theatrical end, which Citra would be more than happy to provide—but his request surprised even her.

  “I wish to be gleaned as part of a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in which I will be playing the title role.”

  Apparently, the day after she had selected him for gleaning, he and his repertory company had dropped the show they had been rehearsing and prepared for a single performance of the famed mortal-age tragedy.

  “The play holds so little meaning for our times, Your Honor,” he explained to her, “but if Caesar doesn’t just pretend to die—if, instead, he is gleaned, and the audience witnesses it—perhaps the play will linger with them, as it must have in the Age of Mortality.”

  Scythe Constantine was livid when Citra explained the request to him.

  “Absolutely not! Anyone could be in that audience!”

  “Exactly,” Citra told him. “And everyone there will either work for the theater group, or have prepurchased tickets. Which means that you can vet everyone before the night of the performance. You’ll know if there’s anyone there who’s not supposed to be.”

  “I’ll need to double the contingent of undercover guards. Xenocrates won’t like it!”

  “If we catch the culprit, he’ll love it,” Citra pointed out, and Scythe Constantine couldn’t disagree.

  “If we go through with this,” he said, “I will make it clear to the High Blade that it was at your insistence. If we fail, and your existence is ended, the blame will be yours and yours alone.”

  “I can live with that,” Citra told him.