Summary
H.S. Curie’s gleaning journal explains that she’s never taken an apprentice before, and she doesn’t expect to. Chapter 18 begins with Scythe Curie introducing Citra to her new home, Falling Water (a restored Fallingwater, the house designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), where she lives because a scythe’s presence is the only way it’ll continue to be preserved. Citra, upset and confused, takes a nap. When she wakes up, she finds that Scythe Curie has cooked hasenpfeffer for the both of them—Curie’s guilty pleasure is cooking. The next morning, Scythe Curie shows Citra her method of gleaning (in an antique Porsche, a gift from a grateful son of a man she’d gleaned, for the solace she gave him).
Scythe Curie gleans based on observation—she looks carefully for someone who’s ready for their life to conclude; someone who has stagnated. She finds a man, looks in his eyes, and stabs him in the heart before he even realizes what’s happening. Citra is furious, shouting at Curie that she didn’t give him time to prepare. Curie reprimands her harshly and publicly, making her bow and beg for forgiveness. When they’re alone in the car, Curie tells Citra to find the man’s family and invite them over for dinner tonight—she also explains that she’s not angry, she just needed to uphold her public image.
Citra discovers that the man’s name was Barton Breen, and he’d turned the corner many times. His family arrives for dinner, and Curie grants them immunity, cooks them comfort food, then talks to his wife about Barton, truly listening. When dinner is over, Curie presents the woman with her own knife and invites the woman to take her life (not gleaning, just killing for catharsis). The woman says no. Curie serves chocolate cake as dessert, and the family is clearly comforted.
While washing dishes after, Curie says that scythes all kill differently—she kills with no warning, and publicly, to imitate the way death could come in the Age of Mortality. She also explains that she took Citra on as an apprentice after she’d learned that Goddard had tried to take both Citra and Rowan, trying to spare them the constant competition. Citra knows that the competition is still present.
Citra isn’t sure why, but that same night, she admits to Scythe Curie that she was lying in conclave during her test—she didn’t push a girl down the stairs, she pushed her in front of a truck. Scythe Curie says they’ll need to do something to fix that. They visit the girl, Rhonda Flowers, whose life wasn’t ruined by being pushed in front of a truck, although it was definitely changed by the experience. However, when Citra offers to let Rhonda push her in front of a truck, Rhonda says no—maybe another time. When they discuss it after, Curie explains "murder" to Citra, and mentions that the Thunderhead probably saw Citra's childhood crime and chose not to punish her, which inspires Citra: The Thunderhead must have a record of Scythe Faraday’s final actions.
Rowan, meanwhile, is preparing himself to die—he won’t glean Citra, which means that in eight months, he has to die. He rides to Scythe Goddard’s estate with Scythe Volta, asking him blunt questions about why he’d follow Goddard—Volta, along with Goddard’s other followers, believes he’s a visionary. At Goddard’s estate, an enormous decadent party is underway, and it’s hard not to be sucked in by Goddard’s charisma as he talks about old-guard scythes being outdated relics. Rowan notices Esme, and Goddard says she’s the key to the future. Goddard orders a woman named Ariadne to give Rowan a massage—if she pleases Rowan, she’ll be given immunity for a year. Why not, Rowan thinks? He’s going to die in eight months anyway.
The party continues for another day, and then Rowan’s training begins. Scythe Rand uses a tweaker to remove his pain-killing nanites, and then she, Scythe Volta, Scythe Chomsky, and Scythe Goddard beat him almost to death. It takes days for him to heal naturally, and he’s visited multiple times by Scythe Volta, who asks him to call him Alessandro (his Patron Historic’s first name, not his own). He’s also visited by Esme, who doesn’t know why she’s here. After long, miserable days of healing, Goddard renews Rowan’s healing nanites, but not his painkillers—he’ll feel every part of life from here on, Goddard says. Goddard would rather have a “mind that’s clear” than be “in his right mind.”
Citra’s days are filled with training and gleaning. She learns to see the signs of “stagnation,” as Curie calls it, and she organizes meetings with multiple families of the gleaned. One of these leads her to a Tonist monastery—where they worship the Great Vibration, prioritizing hearing over sight, sometimes even blinding themselves—to find Brother Ferguson, whose sister was gleaned. Brother Ferguson wants nothing to do with his sister’s death, since Tonists find death by scythes unnatural and don’t recognize it. He also doesn’t want immunity. Citra is furious but doesn’t know what to do, so she hits the Tonists’ tuning fork, which produces a sound unlike anything she’s heard before, both jarring and soothing. Brother Ferguson then answers her questions about what Tonists believe, but Citra remains unimpressed.
Citra starts using Scythe Curie’s office to secretly search the Thunderhead for video evidence of Scythe Faraday’s last day. She realizes that searching an endless database will be impossible without a starting point, so she asks for permission to visit her family, where she takes family photos all around their neighborhood, trying to match the angles of the public cameras. Late that night, she sneaks into Scythe Curie’s office and finds that her search has successfully been narrowed to relevant cameras—at least she’s closer to finding the truth.
With Scythe Goddard, Rowan feels himself becoming numb, and he sees the wisdom of Scythe Faraday’s ways. He realizes that when one becomes numb to gleaning, it becomes killing. Scythe Goddard is annoyed that Rowan is so passionless; he wants him to enjoy killing, which he thinks is a natural part of human nature: if he doesn’t take satisfaction in it, he’s just a killing machine. Scythe Goddard often gives long speeches about his philosophy, and his voice begins to replace Rowan’s own internal monologue, passing judgment on all his actions. Rowan writes regularly in his journal, but it’s only what Goddard would want to read. Rowan and Scythe Volta grow closer, and Esme wants to play cards with him. Rowan grows to enjoy using deadly weapons, and one day Scythe Goddard has him kill real people (not glean—they’ll be revived later; they’re being paid for this). At Goddard’s orders, Rowan kills 12, leaving the last alive even though she begs to be killed so she can get paid. As Goddard praises him, Rowan feels torn—he wants to throw up, but he also wants to howl at the moon like a wolf.
At Magnetic Propulsion Laboratory, an engineer does experiments into (probably space-related) propulsion at the direction of the Thunderhead…until an elegy of scythes lays siege to his research facility. Rowan is awoken that morning and put on a helicopter, and as he realizes they’re headed to a gleaning, he silently hopes the helicopter will crash. From a security guard’s POV, we see the helicopter land; he’s threatened by a woman in glittering emerald robes, and as the elegy of scythes enters the building, a young apprentice tells him to get out and not look back.
Scythe Rand tells Rowan to break things, since he can’t glean with them. As the four others begin killing everyone in the building with blades, bullets, and flames, Rowan secretly warns employees to escape using the back stairs. The massacre takes around 15 minutes, and once they exit through the front, there’s a crowd of fire trucks, ambudrones, and escapees. Scythe Goddard explains that the fire trucks won’t interfere with a scythe action. As the building burns to the ground behind him, Goddard grants all the survivors immunity, but he grows bored of waiting while they kiss his ring. He gives his scythe ring to Rowan, and as the survivors rush to kiss the ring, Scythe Volta says to him, “Welcome to life as a god.”
Analysis
This section, fittingly called "The Old Guard and the New Order," is characterized by the stark difference between Citra and Rowan's new lives with different scythes. Scythe Curie's methods of gleaning seem cruel to Citra at first, and Scythe Curie publicly berates her—the only time a character speaks full sentences in all capital letters ("YOU DARE PRESUME TO TELL ME HOW TO ACCOMPLISH MY TASK?"). However, Citra soon sees the compassion that underlies Scythe Curie's methods, as well as her logic. Like Scythe Faraday, Scythe Curie draws her gleaning method from the Age of Mortality, but she uses death's randomness and suddenness as a guide rather than statistics. Scythe Curie's post-gleaning ritual includes offering the family the chance to stab her using her own knife, but most people don't take the chance, just like Rhonda Flowers doesn't take the chance to exact vengeance on Citra. Citra's experiences with Scythe Curie seem to indicate that most people don't choose retributive justice, even when they have been objectively wronged.
Both Citra and Rowan now live in extravagant places. Scythe Curie lives in a fantastic, opulent home, but she does so for altruistic reasons, hoping to maintain Falling Water's beauty. Scythe Goddard, on the other hand, has seized a large estate, where Rowan is forced to party and to train. Where there's an emphasis on philosophical/emotional development with Scythe Curie, Scythe Goddard's focus is largely on the physical. He places importance on retribution, and he believes that knowing pain will enliven a person, waking them up to the experience of life. Scythe Goddard's preoccupation with Rowan's physical training is interspersed with long tirades, including one that resonates with Rowan: With no satisfaction from killing, someone is just a killing machine. This might actually align with Scythe Faraday's belief, since he thinks scythes should be tools—machines—in the hands of humanity. A killing machine is exactly what a scythe should be, while maintaining one's human soul.
Though Rowan tries to live with the mindset that he's going to die, Scythe Goddard's training makes deadening himself difficult. After killing for the first time, Rowan wants to howl like a wolf, one of many animal comparisons in the novel as Rowan's nature struggles against Scythe Goddard's validation. Scythe Goddard believes that killing is part of human nature—completely natural—but Rowan doesn't want to kill; he wants to glean. Or at least he thinks so. Every aspect of his life at Scythe Goddard's estate is confounding, including Esme's presence. She seems remarkably out of place, but Scythe Goddard maintains that she's the most important person there.
Citra is confused, too, in her time apart from Rowan. She encounters the Tonists, who annoy and enrage her, from their strange stained glass to their denial of death by scythes. Perhaps she's annoyed as a result of her personality, since Tonism is all about embracing the unknown, which she hates. Perhaps her annoyance at Tonism is a subtle indicator that she's been sucked into scythehood, now truly embracing her potential future as a scythe—Tonists are anti-scythe, and she is now on the side of scythes. Around the same time, she begins to investigate Scythe Faraday's final actions, inspired by her trip to see Rhonda Flowers. Scythe Curie explains murder, and she mentions the Thunderhead in the same conversation—that alone is enough to spark Citra's suspicions, so she must have been pondering Scythe Faraday's demise to begin with.
This section, like Shusterman's writing throughout the novel, features multiple literary devices and allusions (like H.S. Curie's journal entry alluding to Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner) that often contribute to a sense of slightly comedic dread (like how that allusion culminates with Curie musing, "Immortality has turned us all into cartoons"). One of the most important facts introduced here is that fire trucks can't interfere with scythe actions, even to stop buildings from burning. When he explains this to Rowan, Scythe Goddard is elated, full of post-mass-gleaning joy; he uses the burning building behind him as a public relations opportunity, not realizing that Rowan will use this knowledge, and all of Scythe Goddard's training, against him.
