The Toll: Part One

“Greyson Tolliver,” said the doubtful one, and, looking at a tablet, he recited the salient facts of Greyson’s life.

He’d seen others struggling with grief since the Thunderhead fell silent, but nowhere was it as abject and raw as it was in this room.

He liked that they had to kneel down to him; it felt like supplication.
“Please, Greyson,” she begged.

Being sequestered in a Tonist monastery these past few months had kept him from facing the outside world—and what his place in it might be—but now he was getting a sense of things.

As kind and thoughtful as the Thunderhead was, Greyson had noticed it always foisted these sorts of unintentional cruelties on people.

But if you were to ask a scythe what the most important aspect of the ring was, that scythe would likely hold it to the light, watch it sparkle, and tell you that, above all else, the ring served as a symbol of the scythedom and of post-mortal perfection. A touchstone of a scythe's sublime and elevated state...and a reminder of their solemn responsibility to the world.

“Then you do not know many scythes. We are an impatient and irascible lot.”

We have wished Scythes Anastasia and Curie luck on their trip to Endura and the inquest against Goddard.

There is, I know, a fail-safe left by the founding scythes. A contingency should the scythedom fail.

The Thunderhead immediately ejected all the passengers to avoid the inevitable crash and burn. Instead, they were quickly rendered deadish by the rarefied air at cruising altitude. Within seconds they were frozen solid by the cold and fell to the forest far below.

She trusted the venerable scythe, but still, he was, like everyone else, subject to human error.

Faraday, too, had his misgivings, but he chose not to share them with Munira. Better she see him as stalwart.

This was everything that Munira had feared. The culmination of all her worst-case scenarios.

“We have to hurry!”
Still, he remained obstinately on the static-filled radio.

I categorically refuse to honor your unethical and offensive restriction on MidMerican scythes. I will not now, nor ever, acknowledge the right of any High Blade to banish my scythes from any region.

The man had been affable and forthcoming thus far; perhaps there was enough trust between them now to gain some information Possuelo might not be willing to share with others.

“Your Honor, forgive my impertinence,’’ Jeri told Sydney—because now they were most certainly on a first-name basis, “but it’s a steel vault sealed within another steel vault, buried beneath a thousand tons of wreckage on the side of a dangerous slope. Even if it wasn’t at the bottom of the sea, it would be hard to reach. It requires meticulous engineering, effort, and above all, patience!”

“If we don’t wrap this up in short order,” railed Possuelo, “Goddard will swoop in and take everything we bring up!”

Weeks passed in what would have been despair but was dialed down to melancholy by her emotional nanites. Even so, that melancholy was deep and pervasive.

Yes, everyone in the world was subject to those winds now, but at least others had jobs to tether them to the familiar. Routines to keep their Thunderhead-free lives in some semblance of order.

Work orders, supply requisitions, and the like were the closest thing anyone had to communication with the Thunderhead anymore.

She did her best to liven things up and see many a miserable glass as half-full, which, more often than not, irked the other agents. Well, that was their problem. Loriana suspected that Director Hilliard took guilty pleasure in seeing her subordinates rankled on a regular basis by Loriana’s positive penchants.

“We’ll turn around,” blustered one of the agents—Sykora was his name—a small-minded man who had been a naysayer from the beginning. “We’ll go back and forget about this nonsense.”

As for the island’s defense system, we don’t know how to disable it, but being very literally under the radar makes it a moot point.

“Humankind? With so much information to explore, and so many other things to ponder and study, I can't see why I should concern myself with humankind at all.”
“Thank you. That is all.”
[Iteration #53 deleted]

She never lost consciousness, but rather gave in to that ethereal state where one’s mind slips in and out of outlandish thinking, while still marginally tethered to reality.

When she dredged up the wherewithal to take in her surroundings, she saw that quite a few safety pods had beached themselves up and down the strand.

And although Loriana had always seen silver linings in the darkest of clouds, she was rapidly jading.

This young woman, who had just survived a devastating trauma, needed a moment of control far more than Munira needed her pride pandered to.

The founders’ robes are undamaged and shall shortly begin a touring exhibition under the auspices of the Interregional Museum of the Scythedom.

There was an artificial peacefulness about it. Fresh-cut flowers, ambient music, diffused light that seemed to have no identifiable source.

Although he and Citra were protected in a vault that was magnetically suspended within another vault, it didn’t block out the sounds of rending steel as Endura broke apart.

“Perhaps I can help you,” said Possuelo, no longer mincing words. “You were found sealed in the Vault of Relics and Futures in the arms of the young man who murdered the Grandslayers and thousands of others. The monster who sank Endura.”

Either death was sublime, or it was unthinkable—such a mélange of hope and terror, no wonder so many mortals were driven mad.

“If I were you, I probably would have done the same.”
Still the director was not mollified. “Then you’re just as foolish as I am.”

She could smell the stench of the pyre, and she could see yet another body undulating in the waves, about to wash ashore.

He threw her a glare that was intended to intimidate, but he also grew red in the face, which undercut his hard gaze. It made him appear petulant rather than imposing.

The more obsequious among the former Nimbus agents were quick to obey.

Munira had told her how no planes had flown over the blind spot since the Thunderhead’s inception.

The flight was a harbinger of things to come.