She took the ring, turned it in her hand, and thought about it. “I had my Patron Historic all picked out that day they denied me the ring,” she told him. “Bathsheba. She was the obsession of one king, and the mother of another. A woman in a patriarchal society who still managed to change the world. Her son was Solomon the Wise, so you could say she was the mother of wisdom.”
Munira looked at the ring for a long moment, then gave it back to Faraday. “The invitation is enough,” she said. “But if I am truly to be the mother of wisdom, I have to be wise enough to know that I can’t covet this ring anymore.”
Faraday smiled with understanding and slipped the ring back into a pocket in his robe. “It would have been nice to know Honorable Scythe Bathsheba. But I’m much happier knowing the honorable Munira Atrushi.”
“Greyson…
“Greyson…”
He wasn’t quite ready to get up. He could tell he hadn’t had much sleep, but he hadn’t expected much. With less than twenty-four hours to launch there’d be a lot to do. And a lot to consider. Like whether or not he would go.
“Greyson…”
He had done what he’d needed to do. And although there wasn’t much tying him to the world now, there wasn’t much pushing him off it, either. He could be anywhere – because wherever he was, he’d be forging a whole new life for himself.
“Greyson…”
And then there was Jeri. He couldn’t quite make out his feelings for Jeri, other than that he had them. Where that would lead was still anyone’s guess.
“Greyson…”
He finally rolled over and looked to the Thunderhead’s camera. Its voice was particularly grating today as it came through the tinny speaker of a landline squawk box.
“Good morning,” he said. “What time is—”
“I am thinking that a journey would be a good idea at this time,” the Thunderhead said.
“Yeah, I know,” said Greyson, rubbing sleep out of his eyes. “Just let me take a shower and—”
“Of course you can do that if you wish, but I don’t think you’re hearing me,” the Thunderhead said, and suddenly got louder. Much louder. “I’m thinking that a journey for everyone on the atoll would be a good idea. I’m thinking it would be an extremely good idea … right … NOW.”
Loriana hadn’t even tried to sleep. How could she? Until today she was just the communications guru, but after last night, everyone was looking to her for answers.
“It will be simple,” Cirrus had told her shortly before being loaded onto the ships. “People can choose to go, or they can choose to stay. If they stay, they’ll need to clear the launch zone until after the ships have launched – either by boat or by taking refuge on Ebadon, which is the only island in the atoll that’s far enough away. If they choose to go, have them provide a list of who they wish to travel with. Everyone may bring one backpack no larger than twenty liters.”
“That’s all?”
“The time of tangibles is over,” Cirrus said. “Anything else they wish to remember I already have images of in my backbrain.”
Loriana couldn’t stop pacing. “What about pets?”
“They will be accommodated in place of a backpack.”
“Can people choose their destinations?”
“If we allowed that, everyone would sign up for the nearest planet. I’ll announce the destination and the length of the journey once we’ve left. Will you go, Loriana?”
“I don’t know! I don’t know!”
“There’s no rush,” said Cirrus. “You have all day to make up your mind.”
Right. All day to make the most important decision of her life – a decision that could not be undone. She would never see her parents, or anyone she knew before arriving on the atoll, ever again. She was leaning handily toward no.
Cirrus was gone now – uploaded onto the ships, luxuriating in its own backbrain. Or backbrains, since there were now dozens of it. Them.
Now Loriana had to be the authority answering people’s questions. And then the Toll showed up at launch control, not looking much like the Toll without his fancy accoutrements. He was out of breath and looked like he was trying to outrun a scythe. Turns out she wasn’t far off the mark.
That morning, Citra brought Rowan to the bunker to show him what she and Faraday had discovered, only to find that Munira and Faraday were already there. Munira looked her up and down. “You surrendered your ring, but you’re still wearing your robe,” Munira pointed out.
“Old habits die hard,” said Faraday, and laughed at his own pun.
The truth was Citra’s only change of clothes was on the container ship, and she wasn’t going back there. She was sure she’d find something before the launch. And if not, there’d be clothes onboard, because if there was one thing the Thunderhead was good at, it was attention to detail.
Rowan looked at the transmitter through the dusty glass. “Old technology?”
“Lost technology,” Faraday corrected. “At least lost to us. We can’t even be sure what it does.”
“Maybe it kills bad scythes,” Munira suggested.
“No,” said Rowan, “that would be me.”
There was something on the edge of Citra’s hearing that only now caught her attention. She cocked her head to listen.
“Do you hear that?” said Citra. “It sounds like some sort of alarm.”
Loriana tripped the tsunami alarm on every island of the atoll. Although the wave that was coming wasn’t coming by sea.
“How sure are you about this?” she asked the Toll.
“I’m positive,” he said, still out of breath.
“Is this as bad as I think it is?”
“Worse.”
And so she fired up the loudspeaker system.
“Attention! Attention!” Her voice rose above the alarm. “Scythes are headed our way. Repeat, scythes are headed our way. The entire atoll has been marked for gleaning.” She heard her own words echoing outside, and it chilled her.
She muted the microphone and turned to the Toll. “How long have we got?”
“I have no idea,” the Toll said.
“Didn’t the Thunderhead tell you?”
Greyson huffed in frustration. “It can’t interfere with scythe affairs.”
“Great,” said Loriana. “If the Thunderhead could break its own rules just once, our lives would be so much easier.”
That was true, but in spite of how maddening it was, Greyson knew a deeper truth. “If it could break its own rules, it wouldn’t be the Thunderhead,” he said. “It would just be a scary AI.”
She flicked the microphone back on. “We have less than an hour,” she announced. “Either find a way off the atoll now, or get to one of the ships – any of them – as soon as you can! Because we’re launching early.”
She turned off the microphone. The Thunderhead couldn’t interfere, and the Cirri were all snug and secure aboard the ships. They were on their own.
“This is not how this was supposed to go.”
She looked at the launch control screen before her; a map showed the position of each ship. Not a single living soul on any of them yet. “The farthest ships will take at least forty-five minutes to get to,” she told the Toll. “Let’s hope I wasn’t lying about the time.”