Thunderhead: Part Four

The pouch was filled with pamphlets. Glossy little pamphlets extolling the virtues of a Tonist lifestyle.

He was exactly what he appeared to be: a Tonist zealot pushing his absurd religion.

“I’m surprised the hotel allows Tonists to peddle their ‘religion’ door to door.”

“You Tonists pretend to be wise—but your entire system of belief is fabricated. It’s nothing but convenient bits and pieces of mortal-age religions—and not even the good parts. You’ve taken it all and have stitched it together skilllessly into a clashing, motley quilt. You make sense to no one but yourselves.”

“Anyway, when Faraday offered me the opportunity to become a scythe, I jumped at it. I wanted a way to protect the rest of my family from such terrible things—even if it meant having to do terrible things myself. I became Little Miss Murder, and as I wizened, the Granddame of Death.”

Our world has become both uninspired, and untortured. A place where miracles and magic have no mystery. With the smoke blown away, and mirrors aligned, it is all revealed as manifestations of nature and technology.

And they all believe in the Great Resonance—a living vibration audible to human ears that will unify the world like a biblical messiah.

And they all believe in the Great Resonance—a living vibration audible to human ears that will unify the world like a biblical messiah.

Waiting for him there were Scythe Rand and Tyger, who was stretching and bouncing around like a prizefighter waiting for a championship bout.

Instead, he surreptitiously took in the surroundings.

Rowan glanced over to Rand, trying to read her expression. She was not her usual aloof self. Instead, she watched them intently, studying every move of the match.

Rowan began to strike and parry in a very predictable way, using all the standard moves that he knew Tyger would have countermoves for.

Then, when the moment was ripe, Rowan came down on Tyger with a combination of moves that was completely counterintuitive. They were the opposite of what Tyger would do—the antithesis of what he’d be expecting.

But if I do find it, and if I am able to travel to the very beginning of time, the ramifications are staggering. It could mean that I may very well be the Creator. I may, in fact, be God.

To her chagrin, Scythe Curie insisted on attending the performance.

“I wouldn’t dream of missing my protégé’s theatrical debut,” she said with a smirk—although Citra knew the real reason.

Decent people would always assist someone being accosted by an unsavory, and most people were decent.

Constantine stormed toward him, his blade poised to end the lives of both Greyson Tolliver and Slayd Bridger....

And then his entire world flipped upside down with such a violent lurch, it left him reeling from vertigo.

Because at that moment, Purity emerged onto the stage, brandishing some terrible sawed-off weapon.

With blade in hand, she was more than ready to join the battle. She could not deny there was something invigorating about ending the lives of those attempting to end her own. It was a visceral feeling she instinctively knew could be dangerous if allowed to take root.

By the time he burst out of the theater’s stage entrance into the alley, he felt his pain nanites kicking in to deaden his flaming nerves, and the strange tickle of his healing nanites struggling to cauterize the wounds.

The densely packed legion of advanced healing nanites being fed into his bloodstream now didn’t help his thought processes, either. They probably outnumbered his red blood cells at this point, which meant there was less blood being carried to his brain as they did their work. He imagined his blood was as viscous as mercury now.

Reports from his subordinates tallied eight unsavories gleaned at the theater.
“We’re asking for special dispensation from the High Blade to temporarily revive them for questioning,” Scythe Armstrong informed him.

Somehow, he had been erased from existence. In his place was a doppelgänger named Slayd Bridger with a truly sordid history. How Tolliver had managed not only to reimagine himself, but to overwrite his own digital footprint, was a mystery worthy of closer scrutiny.

The Great Plains Transportation Museum was an open-air repository of engines and rolling stock from every era of rail transportation. They even boasted a car from the first maglev train, hovering eternally in the very center.

He looked at her with those dark, imploring eyes, waiting for her to impart an ounce of her wisdom.

But it being winter, the vines were cold and bare, looking more like spiderwebs. He entered through a long, trellised colonnade lined with skeletal rosebushes.

The first person he saw was a woman in a Tonist sackcloth frock who offered him a smile and upturned palms as a greeting.

There was the sweet smell of incense covering something foul that Greyson soon learned was a basin of filthy water. “Primordial ooze,” Brother McCloud called it. “It’s filled with all the diseases that we’ve become immune to.”

The curate gave a short speech. A sermon, Brother McCloud called it. He spoke of his many journeys through the world in search of the Great Fork.

“I came to see how you’re getting on,” he said.
“I’m fine.”
“Adequacy is all that can be expected at this juncture, I suppose.”

“So you condone violence?”
“We condone resistance to unnatural death. Scythes are bringers of unnatural death, so anything that frustrates their blades and bullets is fine with us.”

When they weren’t sparring, Rowan was consigned to his room.

Then, at the end of each day, just as his muscles were feeling the wear of his efforts, Tyger would receive a deep tissue massage to make his knotted flesh supple.

The sun set, leaving nothing but the city lights of San Antonio and the pale glow of a rising gibbous moon, which lit the room in dim blues and long shadows.

There was something odd about the way Tyger spoke. Not just the raspy tone of his voice, but the cadence of his speech, his choice of words, and the way he enunciated them so clearly.

“You said it yourself, Tyger wasn’t much in the brains department. Everything above the neck was expendable.”

Because after what you did to me, you must be made to suffer, Rowan. I am the aggrieved party here, so it is my wishes that must be honored—and it is my wish that you live in abject misery.

Because after what you did to me, you must be made to suffer, Rowan. I am the aggrieved party here, so it is my wishes that must be honored—and it is my wish that you live in abject misery.