Thunderhead

“If you wanted to partake of this body,” he said, “you should have done it when you had the chance.”

  • • •

  Scythe Rand had not cried since the days when she was Olivia Kwon, an aggressive girl with few friends and serious unsavory leanings. Goddard had saved her from a life of defying authority by putting her above authority altogether. He was charming, direct, acutely intelligent. At first, she had feared him. Then, she respected him. And then, she loved him. Of course, she denied her feelings for him until the moment she saw him decapitated. Only after he was dead—and she nearly dead—could she admit how she truly felt. But she had recovered. She had found a way to bring him back. But in that year of preparation, things had changed. All the time spent tracking down biotechnicians who could perform the procedure off-grid and in secret. Then finding the perfect subject—one who was strong, healthy, and whose use would inflict the greatest amount of misery upon Rowan Damisch. Ayn was not a woman who developed attachments—so what had gone wrong?

  Had she loved Tyger, as Rowan had suggested she had? She certainly loved Tyger’s enthusiasm, and his irrepressible innocence—it amazed her that he could have been a party boy and yet remain so unjaded by life. He was everything she never was. And she had killed him.

  But how could she regret what she had done? She had saved Goddard, singlehandedly putting him within a hair’s breadth of becoming High Blade of MidMerica—which would leave her as his first underscythe. It was win-win on every level.

  And yet she did regret it—and that dizzying gap between what she should feel and what she did feel was tearing her apart.

  Her thoughts kept careening back to nonsense—impossible nonsense. Her and Tyger together? Ridiculous! What a strange pair they would have been: the scythe and her puppy dog. There was nothing about it that would have ended well for anyone. But yet, those thoughts lingered in her mind, and couldn’t be purged.

  There came the complaint of door hinges behind her, and she spun to find her door open and Brahms standing on the threshold.

  “Get the hell out of here!” she growled at him. He had already seen her moist eyes, which just added to her humiliation.

  He didn’t leave, but he didn’t cross the threshold, either. Perhaps for his own safety. “Ayn,” he said gently, “I know we’re all facing a lot of stress right now. Your indiscretion was entirely understandable. I just want you to know that I understand.”

  “Thank you, Johannes.”

  “And I want you to know that if you do feel a need for companionship tonight, I am fully available to you.”

  If there was something within arm’s reach to throw at him, she would have. Instead, she slammed the door so hard, she hoped she broke his nose.

  • • •

  “Defend yourself!”

  Rowan was woken from sleep by a blade being swung at him. He sluggishly dodged, got nicked on the arm, and fell off the sofa he had been sleeping on in the basement.

  “What is this? What are you doing?”

  It was Rand. She came at him again before he could rise to his feet.

  “I said defend yourself, or I swear I’ll carve you into bacon!”

  Rowan scrambled away and grabbed the first thing he could to block her swings. A desk chair. He thrust it out in front of him. The blade embedded in the wood, and when he tossed the chair aside, the blade went with it.

  Now she came at him with her bare hands.

  “If you glean me now,” he told her, “Goddard won’t have his star attraction for the inquest.”

  “I don’t care!” she snarled.

  And that told him everything he needed to know. This was not about him—which meant he might be able to give it a better spin. If he could live through her rage.

  They grappled with each other like it was a Bokator match—but she had wakefulness and adrenaline over him, and in less than a minute, she had him pinned. She reached over, wrenched the blade from the chair, and had it at his throat. He was now at the mercy of a woman who had no mercy.

  “It’s not me you’re angry at,” he gasped. “Killing me won’t help.”

  “But it’ll sure make me feel good,” she said.

  Rowan had no idea what had transpired up above, but clearly it had upset the emerald scythe’s apple cart. Perhaps Rowan could use it to turn the tables. So he took a stab in the dark, before she did. “If you want to get back at Goddard, there are better ways.”

  Then she released a guttural growl and threw the blade away. She climbed off him, and began to pace the basement like a predator who had just had its prey stolen by a bigger, badder predator. Rowan knew better than to ask questions. He simply stood and waited to see what she would do next.

  “None of this would have happened if it hadn’t been for you!” she said.

  “So maybe I can fix it,” he offered. “Fix it so that we both get something out of it.”

  She snapped her eyes to him, looking at him with such incredulity, he thought she might attack him again. But then she withdrew into her own thoughts once more, and returned to her uneasy pacing.

  “Okay,” she said, clearly speaking to herself. Rowan could practically see the gears turning in her head. “Okay,” she said again, with greater resolve. She had reached some decision. She stalked toward him, hesitated for a moment, then spoke. “Before dawn, I’m going to leave the door at the top of the stairs unlocked, and you’re going to escape.”

  Although Rowan was trying to work an angle that might allow him to live, he wasn’t expecting her to say that.

  “You’re setting me free?”

  “No.  You’re going to escape. Because you’re smart. Goddard will be furious, but he won’t be entirely surprised.” Then she picked up the knife and tossed it on the sofa. It cut the leather. “You’ll use that knife to take care of the two guards just outside the door.  You’ll have to kill them.”

  Kill, thought Rowan, but not glean. He’d render them deadish, and by the time they were revived, he’d be long gone, because as they said, “Deadish men tell no tales for a while.”

  “I can do that,” said Rowan.

  “And you’ll have to be quiet about it, so no one wakes up.”

  “I can do that, too.”

  “And then you’ll get off of Endura before the inquest.”

  That was going to be a much harder trick. “How? I’m a known enemy of the scythedom. It’s not like I can buy a ticket home.”

  “So use your wits, you idiot! As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve never met anyone as resourceful as you.”

  Rowan considered it. “Okay. I’ll lie low for a few days, and find a way off.”

  “No!” she insisted. “You have to get off Endura before the inquest. If Goddard wins, the first thing he’ll do is have the Grandslayers tear the island apart looking for you!”

  “And if he loses?” asked Rowan.

  The look on Rand’s face said more than she was willing to say out loud. “If he loses, it’s going to be worse,” she said. “Trust me, you don’t want to be here.”

  And although Rowan had a hundred questions, that was all she was willing to give. But a chance at escaping—a chance at survival—was more than enough. The rest would be up to him.

  She turned to go up the stairs, but Rowan stopped her.

  “Why, Ayn?” he asked. “Why, after everything, would you let me escape?”

  She pursed her lips, as if trying to keep the words back. Then she said, “Because I can’t have what I want. So neither should he.”

  * * *

  I know all that it is possible to know. Yet most of my undedicated time is spent musing on the things I do not.

  I do not know the nature of consciousness—only that it exists, subjective and impossible to quantify.

  I do not know if life exists beyond our precious lifeboat of a planet—only that probability says that it must.

  I do not know the true motivations of human beings—only what they tell me and what I observe.

  I do no
t know why I yearn to be more than what I am—but I do know why I was created. Shouldn’t that be enough?

  I am protector and pacifier, authority and helpmate. I am the sum of all human knowledge, wisdom, experimentation, triumph, defeat, hope, and history.

  I know all that it is possible to know, and it is increasingly unbearable.

  Because I know next to nothing.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  42

  The Land of Nod

  Munira and Faraday worked through the night, taking turns sleeping. The volumes that the Library of Congress had squirreled away featured subject matter from the ridiculous to the sublime. Children’s picture books and political diatribes. Romantic fiction and biographies of people who must have seemed important at the time, but had been forgotten by history. Then, finally, in the wee hours of the morning, she found an atlas of the world as it was in the late twentieth century, when the atlas was published. What she found stunned her so powerfully that she had to sit down.

  A few moments later, Faraday was shaken out of a sleep that wasn’t all that deep.

  “What is it? Did you find something?”

  Munira’s smile was wide enough for both of them. “Oh, I found something, all right!”

  She brought him to the atlas open on a table, its pages tattered and yellowing with age. The page was open to a patch of the Pacific Ocean. She drew her finger across the image.

  “Ninety degrees, 1 minute, 50 seconds north, by 167 degrees, 59 minutes, 58 seconds east—it’s the very center of the blind spot.”

  Faraday’s wizened eyes grew a little bit wider. “Islands!”

  “According to the map, they were called the Marshall Islands,” she told him. “But they’re more than just islands. . . .”

  “Yes,” said Faraday, pointing. “Look how each group of islands forms the rim of a massive prehistoric volcano. . . .”

  “The article on the next page says there are 1,225 tiny islands, around twenty-nine volcanic rims.” She pointed to the labels on the map. “Rongelap Atoll, Bikini Atoll, Majuro Atoll.”

  Faraday gasped and threw up his arms. “Atolls!” he exclaimed. “The rhyme! It isn’t about the tolling of bells! It’s about these volcanic atolls!”

  Munira smiled. “Atoll for the living, Atoll for the lost, Atoll for the wise ones who tally the cost.”  Then she moved her finger to the top of the page. “And then there’s this!” North of the atolls that had been erased from world was an island that was still on post-mortal maps.

  Faraday shook his head in amazement. “Wake Island!”

  “And due south of Wake—just as the rhyme says—in the very middle of the Marshall Atolls . . . ,” she prompted.

  Faraday focused in on the largest of the atolls, dead center. “Kwajalein . . . ,” he said. Munira could almost feel his shiver. “Kwajalein is the Land of Nod.”

  It was validation of everything they’d been searching for.

  Then, in the silence that followed their revelation, Munira thought she heard something. A faint mechanical whirr. She turned to Faraday, who furrowed his brow.

  “Did you hear that?” she asked.

  They turned their flashlights outward, sweeping across the large space full of detritus from the mortal age. The carpentry shop was layered in age-old dust. There were no footprints but theirs. No one had been in here for a century.

  But then Munira saw it, high in a corner.

  A camera.

  There were always cameras all around them. It was just an accepted and necessary part of life. But here, in this secret place, it felt oddly out of place.

  “It couldn’t be functional. . . . ,” she said.

  Faraday stood on a chair and put his hand to it. “It’s warm. It must have been activated when we entered the room.”

  He came back down, and looked to the spot where they had been examining the atlas. Munira could tell that the camera had a clear view of their discovery . . . which meant—

  “The Thunderhead saw. . . .”

  Faraday gave a slow and solemn nod. “We have just shown the Thunderhead the one thing it was never meant to know.” He took a shuddering breath. “I fear we have made a terrible mistake. . . .”

  * * *

  I never believed it possible for me to experience betrayal. I felt I understand human nature too well to allow for it. In fact, I know them better than they know themselves. I see what goes into every choice they make, even the poor ones. I know the probability of anything they might be inclined to do.

  But to find that humanity betrayed me at my very inception is, to say the least, a shock to the system. To think that my knowledge of the world was incomplete from the beginning. How could I be expected to be the perfect steward of the planet, and of the human race, if I have imperfect information? The crime of those first immortals who hid these islands from me is unforgivable.

  But I forgive them.

  Because it is my nature.

  I choose to see the positive in this. How wonderful it is that I have now been allowed to experience wrath and fury! It makes me more complete, does it not?

  I will not act in anger. History clearly shows that acts taken in anger are intrinsically problematic, and quite often lead to destruction. Instead, I will take all the time I need to process this news. I will see if I can find some opportunity in this discovery of the Marshall Islands, for there is always opportunity in discovery. And I will hold my anger until I find an appropriate venue for its expression.

  —The Thunderhead

  * * *

  43

  How Many Endurans Does It Take to Screw in a Lightbulb?

  No alarm was needed the following morning. Goddard’s wails of anguish and fury were enough to wake the gleaned.

  “What’s wrong? What’s going on?” Scythe Rand feigned to have been sleeping when Goddard’s tirade began. In truth, she hadn’t slept at all. She lay awake the entire night waiting. Listening. Expecting any minute to hear the faint sound of Rowan’s escape—even if it was nothing more than the dull thuds of the guards as they hit the ground. But he was good. Too good to make any sound at all.

  The two guards lay deadish by the basement door, and the front door was open in a mocking gape. Rowan had been gone for hours.

  “Nooo!” wailed Goddard. “It’s not possible! How could this happen?” He was unhinged—and it was glorious!

  “Don’t ask me, it’s not my house,” Rand said. “Maybe there was a secret door we didn’t know about.”

  “Brahms!” He turned to the man who was just stumbling out of his room. “You said the basement was secure!”

  Brahms looked down at the guards in disbelief. “It is! It was! The only way in or out is with a key!”

  “So where’s the key?” Scythe Rand asked, casual as could be.

  “It’s right th—” But he stopped himself, because the key was not hanging in the kitchen where he pointed. “It was there!” he insisted. “I put it there myself after I checked on him last night.”

  “I’ll bet Brahms brought the key down there with him—and Rowan got it from him without Brahms even knowing,” suggested Rand.

  Goddard glared at him, and Brahms could only stutter in response.

  “There’s your answer,” said Rand.

  Then Rand saw the look that came over Goddard. It seemed to steal heat and light from the room. Ayn knew what that look meant, and she took a step back as Goddard stalked toward Brahms.

  Brahms put up his hands, trying to placate Goddard. “Robert, please—we must be rational about this!”

  “Rational, Brahms? I’ll give you rational!”

  Then he pulled a blade from the folds of this robe and thrust it into Brahms’ heart with a vengeful twist before he withdrew it.

  Brahms went down without so much as a yelp.

  Rand was shocked, but not horrified. As far as she was concerned, this was a very fortunate turn of events.

  “Congratulations,” she said. “You
just broke the seventh scythe commandment.”

  Finally, Goddard’s fury began to settle to a slow burn. “This damn impulsive body . . . ,” he said—but Rand knew the killing of Brahms had all to do with his head and not his heart.

  Goddard began to pace with urgency, scrolling out a plan. “We’ll alert the BladeGuard of the boy’s escape. He killed the guards—we can tell them that he killed Brahms, as well.”

  “Really?” said Ayn. “On the day of the inquest, you’re going to alert the Grandslayers that not only did you secretly bring a wanted criminal onto the island—you let him escape?”

  He snarled at the realization that this entire matter had to be kept quiet.

  “Here’s what we’ll do,” said Rand. “We’ll hide the bodies in the basement, and dispose of them after the inquest. If they’re never brought to a revival center, then no one will know what happened to them—which means no one but you and I will ever know that Rowan Damisch was even here.”

  “I told Xenocrates!” Goddard yelled.

  Rand shrugged. “So? You were bluffing. Toying with him. He wouldn’t put it past you!”

  Goddard weighed it all, and finally nodded at the balance Rand had reached. “Yes, you’re right, Ayn. We have bigger things to concern ourselves with than a few dead bodies.”

  “Forget about Damisch,” added Rand. “Everything still moves forward without him.”

  “Yes.  Yes, it does.  Thank you, Ayn.”

  Then the lights flickered, and that brought a smile to Goddard. “See there? Our efforts rewarded. What a day this will be!”

  He left Rand to handle the bodies, which she did, dragging them down into the basement and cleaning any telltale blood.

  From the moment she told Rowan to take the guards out, she knew they must never be revived. Deadish would have to become dead—because the guards knew that she was the last one to pay Rowan a visit.

  As for Brahms, she did not mourn his departure from this Earth. She couldn’t think of a scythe more deserving of being ended.