Scythe

Citra is revived and returns to the jurisdiction of the Scythedom. Curie is there. She tells Citra that the Nimbus agents took her far south, where Xenocrates will have a hard time reaching her. Upon Citra’s revival, however, the Thunderhead was legally obligated to notify Xenocrates of her location. Curie lifts her and carries Citra out of the room before she loses consciousness.

Citra wakes in a cabin, and Curie brings her soup. She tells Curie about the note that Faraday wrote. Curie already knows, but she tells Citra that Faraday wrote the note about her, not about Citra. As a 17-year-old, she apprenticed to Faraday when he was only 22. She was infatuated with him and he was a rising star, only gleaning the wicked. One evening she went into his room, planning to have sex with him. He stopped her when she entered the room and sent her away. That night, he wrote the page in his journal, thinking she had come to hurt him. The next day she confessed that she was in love with him. He was flattered but did not allow things to go further. She became a scythe two months later, and they separated. Fifty years later they became lovers, breaking the ninth commandment, although they told themselves they were merely companions, not romantically involved. As a joke, Faraday showed her the page he had written in his journal about her 50 years earlier. After seven years they were discovered by Prometheus, the first World Supreme Blade (the leader of all scythes): “It wasn’t just a regional scandal—it had worldwide implications” (347). Before the Global Conclave, Prometheus sentenced them each to suffer seven deaths and then to have no contact with each other for 70 years. After those 70 years passed, they were friends but nothing more.

A female scythe appears at the door and speaks to Curie in a language called “Spanic.” Curie gives Citra a burlap robe and tells her that she has to leave, impersonating a “lone pilgrim,” a wandering member of a tone cult. Curie gives her an address and tells her to go there to meet someone. The other scythe tells them the guards have arrived.

Citra runs outside to where a car is waiting for her. When she is a couple of miles away, she looks at the paper Curie gave her. It has an address and the name “Gerald Van Der Gans” on it.

Citra has to change “publicars” every 60 minutes to avoid being tracked by scythe navigational devices. She puts on the Tonist frock and spends a day narrowly avoiding the guards during her car changes. Curie has instructed her to go to Buenos Aires and then to take a train across the border of Amazonia. From then on, no one will detain her or help Xenocrates by interfering with her.

At the Buenos Aires train station, she escapes the guards when a group of Tonists asks her to join them and she walks in the middle of their group. She holds her breath as much as she can to avoid alerting the DNA detectors that the guards are using to scan people in the station.

On the train, she is in the restroom when a scythe bursts in and says she has been selected for gleaning. When she tells him that she is a scythe’s apprentice, he smiles and says that she has to come with him to stay safe: He knows she is the one the guards are looking for. His name is Scythe Possuelo. Possuelo manages to get Citra’s pursuers off the train once they pass the Amazonian border, citing laws of jurisdiction that require all scythes to register before crossing the border. Citra changes back into her street clothes.

Citra eventually reaches a beach where the address from Curie’s note is located. From a hiding place, she watches a man come out of a home onto his back porch. She aims at his knee and fires. Then she races forward, prepared to question him before taking revenge for Faraday’s murder. However, when she reaches the man, it is Faraday himself.

Citra carries him inside. She apologizes and says that she thought he was Gerald Van Der Gans. This was Faraday’s birth name. He wants to know why she is there; he does not know what has happened to her since his disappearance because Curie is the only scythe who knows he is still alive. He tells Citra that he needs to heal and that she needs to sleep. In the morning he will expect her to recite her poison knowledge to him since she is still his apprentice.

In his eight months of training, Rowan has now killed thousands of live targets. Goddard says he has exceeded his expectations, which were high to begin with. Rowan has come to enjoy the killing, although he hates himself for it, like Volta. Rowan has heard of Citra’s disappearance but does not know the whole story. The day after her disappearance, Goddard took them on a mass gleaning, killing everyone at a harvest festival. By the end, Goddard did not want to be finished and vowed to institute an era of unlimited gleanings.

Citra returns to Falling Water. She has been cleared of all wrongdoing. Mandela sends her a note of apology, but there is none from Xenocrates. Curie says that the future of the Scythedom is at stake and that Citra must win the ring. Citra says that she does not know if she’ll be able to glean Rowan. Curies tells her, “It will be the second most painful thing you’ll ever do” (378), but she does not say what the most painful thing will be.

Goddard leads another gleaning three days before Winter Conclave even though he and his apprentices have met their quota. After the gleaning, they will return for a New Year’s party. As they leave by helicopter, Goddard says that they are about to provide a much-needed service and “dispense with some rabble” (381). They land in a public park and begin to walk. Goddard announces that today is Rowan’s inauguration: He will perform his first gleaning. He will act as Goddard’s proxy, and Goddard welcomes anyone to try and discipline either of them in the aftermath. Rowan is afraid that he will be so good at gleaning that he will love doing it.

They approach a Tonist monastery. Goddard says their goal is to glean everyone inside. Before entering with the others, he orders Rowan to stay by the gate with his sword and prevent anyone from leaving. The sounds inside are horrifying to Rowan. He sees a woman trying to keep a baby from crying and helps her leave. He sees Volta as he comes around a corner. Volta is sobbing with his sword on the ground. He is covered in blood. Volta says he went into a room, hoping it was an office. It was a children’s classroom, and he gleaned them all along with their teacher. Rowan realizes that the blood on Volta’s arms is not from the gleaning. He has cut his own wrists. He tells Rowan that his real name is Shawn Dobson and then dies.

Faraday writes, “My greatest wish for humanity is not for peace or comfort or joy. It is that we all still die a little inside when we witness the death of another. For only the pain of empathy will keep us human” (388).

Goddard is in a room with the last survivor next to a bowl of dirty water and a tuning fork. Rowan tells Goddard that Volta is dead and that he will not take his place. He shouts that Goddard is a monster and that he makes other people killers like himself. Rowan realizes that for months, this is the reason Goddard has always made him keep one target alive: to whet his appetite for today. Rowan runs forward, impales Goddard on his sword, and takes his ring away. Chomsky and Rand enter the room and see Goddard’s body. They begin to fight Rowan. He breaks Rand’s spine with a kick and kills Chomsky with the tuning fork mallet.

Rowan goes out front wearing Goddard’s robe. He orders the arriving fire crew to let the building burn to the ground. He holds up his ring and the fire chief kisses it. Rowan watches the building burn and thinks, “I have become the monster of monsters […] The butcher of lions. The executioner of eagles” (395). He knows that the fire will burn the other scythes’ bodies until they are beyond revival.