Scythe

16-year-old Rowan Damisch visits his friend, Tyger Salazar, in a building called the revival center. Tyger died jumping from a 39-story window. Rowan’s house has been filled with relatives, and he enjoys the quiet of the revival center. He thinks about how his mother is annoyed with his grandmother, who has “turned the corner” again and “reset all the way down to twenty-five, making her ten years younger than her daughter” (16). Rowan is committed to not resetting until he sees his first gray hair. Technology allows for a reset as young as age 21, but Rowan feels that is too young.

Tyger wakes and is excited when Rowan tells him that his “superhealing” took four days this time. Rowan has jumped—they call it “splatting”—once. However, the rush of the fall was not enough to make the annoyance of recovery and missing school worth it to him.

The day after Tyger wakes, Rowan sees a scythe at school. The scythe asks where the principal’s office is located, and Rowan takes him. The scythe immediately asks the principal to summon Kohl Whitlock—the football team’s star quarterback—to the office. When Kohl arrives, the principal leaves but Rowan stays with Kohl, who asks him to remain.

Kohl begs the scythe to spare him, and Rowan asks the scythe to show mercy. He then asks the scythe to give Kohl a reason for killing him, and Kohl shouts, “It’s just freaking random!” (22). Rowan knows that’s not the truth, and when he asks the scythe again to explain, he does: “Statistics from the Age of Mortality cite 7 percent of deaths as being automobile-related. Of those, 31 percent involved the use of alcohol, and of those, 14 percent were teenagers” (23). Kohl has a record of excessive drinking, has just bought a new car, and fits the age profile, which means he had a .303% chance of being randomly selected for gleaning.

The scythe puts on a metallic glove that he says will painlessly stop Kohl’s heart. Rowan refuses to let go of Kohl’s hand and says that if the scythe wants to glean Kohl, he’ll have to kill him as well. The scythe shocks them both, and Rowan loses consciousness. When he wakes, Kohl is dead. As he leaves, the scythe tells Rowan that no one will treat him kindly for his selfless act: “Good intentions pave many roads. Not all of them lead to hell” (26).

At lunch, Marah Pavlik—Kohl’s girlfriend—slaps Rowan and blames him for not stopping the gleaning. Rowan hears students whispering that he entered the school with the scythe and that he gave him Kohl’s name. They accuse him of gaining immunity for himself, even though he did not ask the scythe for it after Kohl’s death.

Chapter 2 ends with an entry from a scythe named Curie’s gleaning journal. Curie writes that in 2042, computational power grew great enough that humanity developed absolute knowledge. The cloud of knowledge was called The Thunderhead. 2042 was also the year when death was conquered.

In January, Citra receives an invitation to the Grand Civic Opera. There is a ticket but no signature or return address. She says she doesn’t want to go but knows that she will. She wears a dress she bought for a dance the previous year and goes to the opera, sure that the invitation is from a secret admirer. At the ticket window, she is told that she will have an escort to a box seat, which can only be obtained by the wealthiest and most influential people. When she arrives at the box, a young, unfamiliar boy is there. He introduces himself as Rowan and shows her a similar invitation that he has received. The opera—called The Force of Destiny—begins.

At intermission, as they try to guess why they have been invited, Scythe Faraday enters the box. As the second act begins, he remarks, “Tonight we witness the spectacle of human folly and tragedy. Tomorrow we shall live it” (36).

It has been two months since Kohl’s death, and Rowan has become an outcast at school. He is constantly beaten and mocked. Even Tyger refuses to associate with him. During one lunch, Rowan stood on a table and announced that the scythe was his uncle and instructed him to choose the next student for gleaning. This stopped the abuse, but he had started preparations for transfer to a new high school when the opera invitation came.

When the opera ends, Scythe Faraday gives them each a card and tells them to meet him at a specific address the following morning. At 9 am, Rowan and Citra arrive at the Museum of World Art. Faraday takes them through the art galleries, commenting on the different eras of paintings. He asks them to consider that they are seeing the works of masters who painted before 2042. He says that if he had taken them to the post-mortality galleries, the art would have been uninspired and untroubled. At lunch, Faraday tells them that due to population growth, the number of yearly gleanings must increase and that more scythes are required for the work.

He shows them a jeweled ring and says that he must give it to someone who will become his apprentice. He tells them that he has chosen both of them, but “in the end, only one of [them] will receive the ring. The other may return home to his or her old life” (42). Citra asks why they would compete for something they don’t want. Faraday calls this the paradox of a scythe: “Those who wish to have the job should not have it...and those who would most refuse to kill are the only ones who should” (42).

That evening, Citra’s parents tell her that they will support whatever decision she makes. She realizes that if she becomes a scythe, her parents will never have to worry about her or Ben being gleaned. In bed that night, she wonders if she could find purpose in gleaning. She has nothing she can think of to aspire to.

Rowan does not want to do it, but the decision is easier for him than for Citra. He already knows what it is to be an outsider, and he views the conclaves of the scythes—a meeting held three times year—as an elite club: “It would be a burden, but also the ultimate honor” (45). He thinks of the art galleries and of the paintings that seem to him as if they came from a time in which there was more meaning in life. In the morning he tells his mother that he is dropping out of school to apprentice with Scythe Faraday.

Curie’s journal entry for Chapter 3 is about her “cultural audit.” Each scythe can be audited to make sure that they are maintaining proper genetic percentages among those they glean. In her entry, her audit lists her numbers as “20 percent Caucasoid, 18 percent Afric, 20 percent PanAsian, 19 percent Mesolatino, 23 percent Other” (47). When a scythe’s numbers are unbalanced, the High Blade (the highest-ranking scythe in a particular region) assigns them their gleanings as punishment rather than allowing each scythe to choose.

Citra accepts her apprenticeship, and her family is given immunity during the year of her training. She withdraws from school. Faraday tells her and Rowan that one of them will be present at all of his gleanings and may be asked to participate. He also forbids them from acting on any romantic feelings for each other that might arise.

Faraday takes them to his modest home for their training. Citra and Rowan have a brief conversation. They agree that even though they are in competition, they are committed to keeping each other safe.

Curie’s journal entry says that “[t]he greatest achievement of the human race was not conquering death. It was ending government” (53). When the cloud of knowledge evolved into the Thunderhead, people realized that it would be better at running society than politicians. It could not be corrupted: “There was only one thing the Thunderhead was not given authority over. The Scythedom” (54). Humanity decided upon the system that would govern how death was handled in the post-mortality era.

Faraday takes Citra and Rowan to the market for food. The dread that their presence creates unsettles Citra. There are people who run away from them, people who pretend not to notice them, and people who faun all over the scythe, hoping that their flattery will spare them from a future gleaning. Citra notices two teenagers following them. She believes they are “unsavories,” people who enjoy breaking the law or coming close to doing so. One of them runs forward and kisses Faraday’s ring, which glows red. This means the unsavory has a year of immunity.

In the parking lot, Faraday shows them a 96-year-old woman. He tells them that that afternoon they will go to her office and glean her because “[f]atalities in parking lots made up 1.25 percent of all accidental deaths during the last days of the Age of Mortality” (60). The previous night he decided to choose someone from a parking lot during the shopping trip.

At her office later, Faraday gives the woman—he refers to her as Mrs. Becker—a pill that will induce death when she bites it. He allows her time to write a message to her children that he will deliver and then tells Rowan to put the pill in the woman’s mouth. He then tells the same to Citra. Both of them refuse, and Faraday tells them they have passed a test by being reluctant to kill the woman. After the woman takes the pill, Faraday asks Citra to check her for a pulse. Mrs. Becker is dead. Faraday tells them that they will present the letter to Mrs. Becker’s children at her funeral. He attends all of the funerals of his victims: “It’s my rule. It’s called ‘common decency’” (63).