Scythe Faraday visits the Terranova family's home and joins them for an unexpected dinner.

Rowan refuses to release Kohl Whitlock's hand as Faraday attempts to glean him at school.

Faraday takes Citra and Rowan to an art museum and offers them both scythe apprenticeships.

Citra and Rowan accept their apprenticeships and move into Faraday's modest home to begin training.

Scythe Goddard leads his scythes in massacring all passengers aboard a commercial airplane.

Scythe Rand proposes at the Vernal Conclave that the winner of the apprenticeship must glean the loser.

BladeGuard officers arrive to inform Citra and Rowan that Faraday has thrown himself in front of a train.

Citra is assigned as apprentice to Scythe Curie while Rowan is placed with Scythe Goddard.

Goddard's scythes disable Rowan's nanites with a tweaker and beat him severely to teach him the experience of pain.

Rowan kills live human targets during training for the first time and is disturbed to find himself smiling.

BladeGuard officers arrest Citra on the accusation that she murdered Scythe Faraday.

Citra refuses to sign a false confession and leaps from Xenocrates's rooftop to escape custody.

Citra shoots the man at Gerald Van Der Gans's address and discovers it is Faraday, still alive.

Rowan impales Scythe Goddard on a sword, kills Chomsky and Rand, and lets the monastery burn to the ground.

Citra is awarded the Scythehood at the Winter Conclave and declares herself Scythe Anastasia.

Scythe Faraday selects two unlikely teenagers, Citra and Rowan, as his apprentices and trains them together in the art of gleaning. At the Vernal Conclave, their rivals arrange for the competition to end in the winner gleaning the loser, dramatically raising the stakes for both. Faraday fakes his own death to release them from each other, sending Citra to the compassionate Scythe Curie and Rowan to the ruthless Scythe Goddard. While Citra investigates Faraday's disappearance, she is framed for his murder and must flee before discovering he is still alive in hiding. Rowan, increasingly brutalised by Goddard's training, ultimately kills him during a massacre at a Tonist monastery. At the final Winter Conclave, Citra wins the Scythehood but refuses to glean Rowan, instead granting him immunity with a clever use of her ring so he can escape.

The headline events that drive the main story from first gleaning to final ordination.

Classmates falsely accuse Rowan of arranging Kohl's gleaning, turning him into a school outcast.

Faraday tests Citra and Rowan by asking each of them to place a death pill in Mrs. Becker's mouth.

Scythe Goddard massacres everyone in a food court except a fourth-grade girl named Esme, whom he keeps.

Faraday assigns Rowan to search the Thunderhead and select the subject for his next gleaning.

Citra realizes during a Bokator sparring match that she wants to feel Rowan's heartbeat a little longer.

Esme visits the injured Rowan as he recovers and tells him he will be a better scythe than the others.

Citra slips Faraday's ring on while he sleeps and it becomes painfully cold as a built-in security measure.

Scythe Goddard anonymously accuses himself of cruelty at the Vernal Conclave to neutralize his enemies.

Scythe Goddard seizes Maxim Easley's luxury estate and forces the executive to become his pool boy.

Scythe Curie silently stabs Barton Breen from behind on the street, then publicly berates Citra for questioning her.

Citra visits Rhonda Flowers to confess to pushing her as a child; Rhonda casually offers forgiveness.

Citra visits a Tonist monastery to deliver gleaning news and strikes a six-foot bident with a mallet.

Rowan finds Scythe Volta crying alone in his room after the mass gleaning at Magnetic Propulsions Laboratory.

Rowan realizes that Esme must be Xenocrates's illegitimate daughter after observing their tense interaction at the party.

Citra hears rumors of an unordained vigilante burning corrupt scythes with fire and wonders if it is Rowan.

Before Citra and Rowan are even apprentices, the consequences of gleaning ripple through their lives — Rowan is shunned after a classmate blames him for a death he tried to prevent. Their training under Faraday reveals both the complexity of choosing who dies and the quiet cruelty of Goddard's methods, glimpsed through the survivors of his mass gleanings. As each apprentice adjusts to a new mentor after Faraday's apparent death, Citra confronts her own past wrongs while Rowan is drawn into Goddard's corrupt world of parties and manipulation. Key secondary characters like Esme, Volta, and Xenocrates gradually expose the web of blackmail and moral compromise that holds the Scythedom's worst elements in place. By the novel's close, the corruption has been partially dismantled, but the cost is enormous, and rumors of a vigilante scythe suggest the struggle is far from over.

The supporting moments and secondary beats that fill out the world of the scythes.

Faraday sends Citra and Rowan anonymous opera invitations and reveals himself as their host at intermission.

Citra realizes that becoming a scythe would protect her entire family from ever being gleaned.

Faraday secretly spares the family of a man who fought back during his gleaning and orders Citra to say nothing.

Scythe Curie asks Citra what the worst thing she has ever done is; Citra lies and both she and Rowan are punished.

Citra kisses Rowan in their home and insists to him that neither of them has fallen in love with the other.

Curie tells Citra she took her as an apprentice to stop Goddard from having control of both candidates.

Citra confesses to Scythe Curie that she once pushed a classmate named Rhonda in front of a moving truck.

Citra searches the Thunderhead's restricted backbrain and discovers a security camera was vandalized the day Faraday died.

Scythe Volta tells Rowan that Goddard views him as a personal challenge — a Faraday disciple he wants to convert.

Citra shows Rowan her investigation evidence at the Harvest Conclave; Rowan urges her to wait until after ordination.

Rowan deliberately breaks Citra's neck during the Harvest Conclave Bokator test to get himself disqualified.

The Thunderhead speaks to the dead Citra during revival and identifies Gerald Van Der Gans as responsible for Faraday's fate.

Curie reveals that the threatening journal entry used to frame Citra was actually written about Curie herself decades earlier.

Citra stabs her brother Ben with a knife during the mandatory final test before the Winter Conclave.

Citra punches Rowan in the face with her scythe ring instead of gleaning him, granting him one year of immunity.

From the moment Faraday anonymously invites Citra and Rowan to the opera, both teenagers are set on a path shaped by hard choices and hidden truths. Citra's growing understanding of what the Scythehood means — and what it could protect — gradually shifts her from reluctance to conviction, while her mentors reveal buried secrets about their own pasts. Rowan's time with Goddard forces him to confront how far he has drifted from his own values, and a key revelation about Goddard's hold over Xenocrates exposes the depths of the Scythedom's corruption. Each pivotal moment — the Thunderhead naming Faraday's saboteur, Rowan's calculated sacrifice in the Bokator match, and Curie's confession about the forged journal entry — reframes what came before and raises the cost of what comes next. The pool closes with Citra's final act of defiance at the Winter Conclave, which simultaneously fulfills her duty and saves the person she loves.

The revelations and turning points that reshape what Citra and Rowan understand about their world.