“Just as long as you don’t believe it yourself,” she told him.
“When I take all this off, I’m still Greyson Tolliver,” he said.
“And when I slip out of this robe, I’m still Citra Terranova.”
He smiled broadly at that. “I never knew your given name until now. Citra. I like it.”
Hearing him say her name gave her a sudden wash of nostalgia. A yearning for a time before all this. “There aren’t many people who call me that anymore.”
He looked at her wistfully. “Funny, but it was never easy for me to talk to you before. Now it’s easier than talking with anyone else. I think we’ve become alike in a lot of ways.”
She laughed at that. Not because it was funny, but because it was true. The rest of the world saw them both as symbols. Intangible light to guide them in the darkness. She understood now why ancient peoples turned their heroes into constellations.
“You haven’t told me why you wanted an audience with the Toll.”
“Scythe Possuelo thinks you know a safe place where Goddard won’t find us,” Anastasia said.
“Well, if the Thunderhead knows of a place like that, it hasn’t told me. But then there’s a lot of things it doesn’t tell me.”
“It’s all right,” said Anastasia. “Possuelo just wants to protect me, but I don’t want to hide.”
“What do you want?” Greyson asked.
What did she want? Citra Terranova wanted to shed her robe, seek out her family, and argue with her brother about unimportant things. But Scythe Anastasia wouldn’t have any of that.
“I want to bring down Goddard,” she said. “I’ve been able to place him on Mars at the time of the disaster, but being there doesn’t prove he caused it.”
“He survived Mars, and he survived Endura,” said Greyson. “Suspicious but not incriminating.”
“Exactly, which is why there’s someone else I need to find,” Anastasia said. “Have you ever heard of Scythe Alighieri?”
Possuelo had to leave them that afternoon. He was called back to Amazonia by his High Blade.
“Tarsila gives me lots of leeway – especially when my salvage venture brought forth you,” he told Anastasia, “but when word got out that I had brought our artist friend to SubSahara, she demanded my return, lest we be accused of conspiring with Tonists.” He sighed. “We are a very tolerant region, but after the attack on Tenkamenin’s palace, even the most accepting regions are cooling to Tonists – and our High Blade doesn’t want bad publicity.”
Several Tonists passed in the cavern behind them. They bowed, reverently saying “Your Honors,” some of their voices still a little slurred, as it was the first week with their new tongues. It was hard to believe that these were the same violent, crazed Sibilants who had murdered Tenkamenin. Greyson – the Toll, that is – had turned them and brought them back from that awful edge of their own humanity. Anastasia could not forgive them, but she found an ability to coexist with them.
“People are vessels,” Jeri had said to her. “They hold whatever’s poured into them.”
And apparently Greyson had drained them and refilled them with something far more palatable.
Possuelo said his goodbye at the entrance to the cave. “This place is isolated, and if the Toll truly is under the protection of the Thunderhead, you’ll be safe with him,” he told her. “It’s not exactly the sanctuary I was looking for, but who knows if that place even exists. Rumors aren’t worth the air they’re whispered on.”
“I’m hoping the Toll will help me find Alighieri.”
“I doubt he even exists anymore,” Possuelo lamented. “He was ancient when I was an apprentice, and I am, as you say, no spring chicken.”
He laughed and embraced her. If felt comforting. Fatherly. Until she was in his embrace, she hadn’t realized how much she missed that. It made her think of her family once more. She had not tried to contact them since her revival, as Possuelo had advised her against it. They were safe and protected in a friendly region, he had assured her. Perhaps there would come a time for that reunion, or perhaps she’d never see them again. Either way, there was still too much to be done for her to even think about it.
“Say goodbye to Captain Soberanis for me,” Possuelo said. “I take it Jerico is staying on.”
“As you ordered,” Anastasia said.
Possuelo raised an eyebrow. “I never gave such an order,” he said. “Jerico does as Jerico pleases. That the good captain has forsaken the sea, and has chosen to be your protector, says a lot about both of you.” He embraced her one final time. “Take care, meu anjo.” Then he turned and strode toward his transport that waited in a clearing.
Ezra the artist, who Possuelo saw fit to set free, took to painting a mural to fill one of the larger caverns. It tickled him that this could become a pilgrimage destination for future Tonists, if indeed there would be any future Tonists, and that his cave paintings might be endlessly analyzed by scholars of tomorrow. He introduced some odd elements just to confuse them. A dancing bear, a five-eyed boy, and an eleven-hour clock missing the number 4.
“What’s life if you can’t mess with the future?” he said.
He asked the Toll if he remembered him, and Greyson told him that he did. It was a half-truth. Greyson remembered Ezra’s audience with him, because it had been a turning point for Greyson as well. The first time he gave advice rather than just being a mouthpiece for the Thunderhead. But he had no memory at all of Ezra’s face.
“Ah, the wonderful limitations of the biological brain!” the Thunderhead said wistfully. “The remarkable ability to dispense with the unnecessary, rather than filing every little thing into a cumbersome compendium!” The Thunderhead called humanity’s selective memory “the gift of forgetting.”
There were many things Greyson had forgotten that he wished he could remember. Most of his childhood. Any warm moments with his parents. And there were things he remembered that he wished he could forget. Like the look on Purity’s face when Scythe Constantine gleaned her.
He knew the gift of forgetting was now a bane to Anastasia, because the world seems to have forgotten Scythe Alighieri. But the Thunderhead hadn’t. Alighieri was there in its cumbersome compendium of human history. Getting to that information was the problem.
The Thunderhead had been silent for his entire conversation with Anastasia. Then, after she had retired to the cave to join her comrades, it finally spoke up. “I cannot, in any way, help Anastasia find the man she’s looking for.”
“But you do know where he can be found, don’t you?”
“I do. But it would be a violation for me to communicate his location to her.”
“Can you tell me?”
“I could,” said the Thunderhead, “but if you then tell her, I will be forced to mark you unsavory, and then where would we be?”
Greyson sighed. “There must be a work-around…”
“Perhaps,” said the Thunderhead. “But I can’t help you find it.”
Work-arounds. The Thunderhead had used him as one back when he was a naive Nimbus Academy student. And come to think of it, he remembered learning about an official work-around in one of his early classes at the academy, before he got himself expelled. There was a sort of ritualistic practice that allowed a Nimbus agent to speak with a scythe without breaking the law. A trialogue it was called. It involved a professional go-between who was well versed in scythe/state protocols. What could, and could not, be said.