Word gets out that there is someone who still has this power of communication, one person who is not marked unsavory. They can access information online and the Thunderhead could send them tasks to do, but intimate personal communication with the Thunderhead is over and the world is grieving. After the events of book two, all people in the world became “unsavories,” meaning they were no longer allowed to have that direct spoken and immediate communication with the Thunderhead. Greyson/The Toll is the only person in the world with direct access to the Thunderhead, a godlike information system that sees all and knows all, and up until recently, would speak directly to anyone who asked (except for scythes). Jeri is also relatively young and becomes a good and trustworthy friend to Anastasia and later to Greyson Tolliver, aka The Toll.

Jeri has chosen to be both male and female, her form changing with the weather. Jeri is from Madagascar, a place where gender is fluid for all inhabitants, and only when you are grown do you make a decision about your sexuality. An interesting new character is introduced in this storyline: Jerico, aka Jeri, the captain of the salvaging ship. Scythe diamonds and Rowan are also found in the safe, but the South American scythe who oversees the recovery is careful to keep the existence of these two people a secret from the rest of the world for as long as he can.

Scythe Anastasia’s story begins with her being rescued from the undersea wreckage of Endura and revived three years after her death. Faraday’s inability to access that bunker and his devastation at the news of what happened to Scythes Curie and Anastasia, bring him so low that he essentially becomes a hermit even when ships and construction crews begin to arrive unexpectedly on the atolls. Faraday, with the help of a researcher named Munira has discovered a blind spot in the Thunderhead’s knowledge, an unplotted point on the map where a series of atolls and an underground bunker exist. There is the story of Scythe Faraday and his search for the “holy grail,” the rumored fail safe or reset button that the original scythes are said to have developed in case the new world order that they created, with responsible scythes and the Thunderhead working in parallel, failed.

The Toll brings together four storylines. But this is not a series about religion so much as about human nature, politics and belief. My review of Thunderhead indicated that there was a biblical tone to that book, and that tone is even more obvious in The Toll. This final book hit all the right notes and brought its several storylines together in a coherent, exciting and generally satisfying way.

Arc of a scythe the toll