Summary
Chapter 30 is a stylized dialogue between Citra’s deadish consciousness and the voice of the Thunderhead. The Thunderhead displays preference, intelligence, and concern—especially for the future of the Scythedom, in which it’s not allowed to interfere. However, its algorithms predict that Citra will play a pivotal role in the Scythedom’s future. At Citra’s request, the Thunderhead finds a loophole in its can’t-tell-scythes-anything programming, revealing a name related to Scythe Faraday’s murder: Gerald Van Der Gans.
Citra is pronounced alive early Thursday morning, transferring from the Thunderhead’s jurisdiction to the Scythedom’s. The Thunderhead has secretly taken her to the Chilargentine Region, and Scythe Curie is waiting for her—now that she’s awake, Xenocrates has been informed, so they need to get out of there fast. Citra isn’t totally healed, so Curie carries her. They hide in a cabin, where Curie cooks her chicken-and-dumpling soup and tells her that Scythe Faraday’s journal entry wasn’t about Citra—it was about her. Scythe Curie was Scythe Faraday’s first apprentice, when he was 22 and she was 17. She was hopelessly in love with him, and he didn’t understand, interpreting her weird behavior as violent intent. Over 50 years later, they became lovers, partially breaking the ninth commandment, and it became an international incident. The World Supreme Blade Prometheus sentenced them to seven deaths—one for each year they were together—and then 70 years of no contact. Curie suspects Xenocrates knows the journal entry isn’t about Citra, and he’s just using it as convenient evidence for his fraudulent charge.
They’re interrupted by the local scythe authority. Curie gives Citra an address and tells her it’s the final part of her training—she’ll know what to do when she gets there. Citra disguises herself as a Tonist monk and runs. From the perspective of a Chilargentine scythe, Scythe San Martín, we see Curie evade the pursuers, blowing up all of the cars and hiding Citra’s plans. San Martín realizes he’s no match for the Marquesa de la Muerte.
Citra follows Scythe Curie’s instructions, changing publicars every hour to stay off the grid, hiding among Tonist pilgrims until her train crosses the border into Amazonia. (Amazonian scythes are intentionally obstructionist to scythes from other jurisdictions, because too many scythes glean while on vacation in Amazonia, which annoys Amazonians.) As Citra splashes water on her face in the train bathroom, an Amazonian named Scythe Possuelo enters and warns her that Chilargentine scythes are also on the train. He, Citra, and a porter use Amazonian law to remove the Chilargentine scythes from the train. Scythe Possuelo invites Citra to return to Amazonia and live among them when she gets her ring. Citra arrives in Caracas, then continues to a small town called Playa Pintada. There, she observes the house at the given address until a man emerges. She shoots him in the knee, preparing to get revenge for Scythe Faraday’s death, but she realizes the man is Scythe Faraday himself. She drops him in surprise, and he’s knocked unconscious. She cradles his head as the blood from his knee turns the sand red.
Scythe Faraday explains that Gerald Van Der Gans was his name before he became a scythe. He’s been completely off-grid—only Curie knows he’s alive, and she can’t contact him without alerting the Scythedom—so he’s surprised and disheartened to learn that Citra and Rowan weren’t freed from their apprentice contract. He tells her to rest—he expects a full recitation of her poisons in the morning. She’s his apprentice, after all.
Winter speeds toward Rowan, who has killed more than 2,000 people (for practice; not gleaning) in the last eight months. Just like Scythe Goddard predicted, he’s grown to enjoy it; just like Scythe Volta, he hates himself for that. Volta is in the doghouse for using painless gas at the last gleaning, stealing fun from the others. Rowan knows a bit about Citra, but not the details, just that she’s missing and Winter Conclave is approaching.
Citra is back in MidMerica, having been cleared of any wrongdoing when Xenocrates’s evidence was proven unrelated to Scythe Faraday’s gleaning. Citra and Curie still keep Faraday’s survival a secret. Citra has spent the last few months training with Faraday in Playa Pintada, with a focus on ethics and contemplation. The “old-guard” scythes fear that quotas on gleaning are about to be abolished. Scythe Curie warns her again to not trust Rowan, saying she must glean him—and it’ll be the second most painful thing she’ll ever do.
Rowan accompanies Scythe Goddard on one final mass gleaning before Winter Conclave. They’re over their quota, but it’s already the Year of the Capybara in PanAsia, so Goddard refuses to be “constrained by a technicality.” Goddard announces that Rowan will do his first gleaning today, acting as Goddard’s proxy. Goddard takes them to a Tonist monastery, and Rowan is left at the gate with instructions to glean anyone escaping, but he only waits five minutes before entering the monastery himself. He encourages a woman with an infant to run, then finds Volta sobbing—he just gleaned an entire classroom of children, and he’s covered in blood. Rowan realizes that it’s Volta’s own blood, and he’s self-gleaned by slitting his wrists. Volta says his real name is Shawn Dobson, makes Rowan promise to be a better scythe than he was, then dies.
Rowan finds Goddard in the chapel, where Goddard has saved the curate for Rowan’s first glean. Rowan says that Scythe Volta is dead, and he refuses to glean the curate. Instead, Rowan stabs Goddard, takes his scythe ring, and beheads him. His decapitated head falls in the primordial ooze. Rand and Chomsky see this, so Rowan cuts Rand, then breaks her spine. He beats Chomsky to death with the toning mallet from the Tonist altar. The curate offers to hide Rowan among the Tonists, but Rowan tells him to run and picks up Chomsky’s flamethrower.
A fire captain approaches the Tonist monastery, which is burning to the ground, but a young man in a royal blue robe studded with diamonds tells him not to interfere—this is scythe business. The fire captain doesn’t believe him. The young man incapacitates the fire captain, holding him down until he realizes that this is a scythe, then grants him immunity. Rowan allows the firefighters to extinguish the surrounding buildings, but he insists that the compound burns all the way to the ground.
Analysis
For the first time in the novel, a full chapter passes in which the protagonist is deadish. Citra speaks to the Thunderhead, which apparently can speak to her any time she's made deadish in the future. The Thunderhead/Citra dialogue is all in italics, with the Thunderhead's dialogue on the left side of the page and Citra's on the right. This departure in formatting from the rest of the novel's prose liberates the dialogue from setting or narration, and any description of what's happening is filtered purely through Citra's words. The Thunderhead expresses displeasure at never being able to make mistakes, which actually limits its learning abilities. The Thunderhead breaks its own rules to talk to Citra; the Thunderhead supporting Citra also supports the old-guard side of compassion and empathy, rather than power and efficiency.
Citra learns a lot in this section—Scythe Faraday is alive; Scythes Curie and Faraday were lovers—and she also journeys to other districts, showing a bit more of how the world works. Outside MidMerica, scythes do things differently. For example, Texan scythes glean only with bowie knives, and Amazonian scythes are happy to thwart scythes from outside their region. The outside world is explored further in the later novels in the series, Thunderhead and The Toll, as Rowan and Citra have enormous influence on the future of humanity, just as the Thunderhead predicted.
This section includes the death of many scythes, including Scythe Volta. Volta, or Shawn, self-gleans. In the first gleaning journal excerpt in Part 5, Scythe Volta writes that he would never even consider self-gleaning. He does it now not only because he killed a lot of children, but because they believed they would be saved by the power of the tuning fork. They truly believed that they would be safe, and instead he gleaned them. Rowan stays with Shawn while he dies, paralleling his compassion for Kohl Whitlock before he became an apprentice, indicating that despite Scythe Goddard's attempts, Rowan's core has not been changed.
Throughout his training, Rowan has been told to stop killing before he gets to the last person. When Scythe Goddard presents the Tonist curate, Rowan understands why he was never allowed to complete the kill: "Today he would finally have that completion, and every day henceforth, when he went out to glean, he would not stay his hand or his blade or his bullet until there was no one left to glean." Rowan recognizes Goddard's device for what it is: a trick to make him more bloodthirsty, more instinctual. Since he's been denied completion for so long, when Rowan finally gets it, he will be ruthless, living for the joy of completion, obsessed with always finishing the job. Rowan lunges with Goddard's sword and achieves that "exquisite completion," using Goddard for his kill instead of the curate. I am the weapon, he tells himself after, following Scythe Goddard's instructions but using them in his own way.
After the Tonist mass gleaning, the point-of-view section is told by a fire chief, then by Rowan. This creates a more dramatic image for the reader: We see Rowan emerge from the flames as an unknown mystery, rather than being given his experience of the flames being hot, the robe being too heavy, et cetera. Shusterman delivers the image from an outsider POV, then provides a glimpse behind the curtain of Rowan's motivation and discomfort. This rhetorical trick contributes to the drama, and it also communicates that Rowan's role has become increasingly performative. He's no longer just Rowan, he's the image of the new order, emerging in diamonds and flames—and the upcoming Winter Conclave will show just how performative his role will be.
