David Baldacci: The Finisher

Being fourteen and female was frowned on here in Wormwood, the village where we both lived. It’s never been clear to me why. But I liked being young. And I liked being female.

I was apparently in the minority on that.

Wormwood was a village full of Wugmorts — Wugs for short. The term village suggested a communal spirit that just wasn’t present here. I tried to lend a helping hand from time to time, but I picked my causes carefully. Some Wugs had neither trust nor compassion. I tried to avoid them. Sometimes it was hard, because they had a tendency to get in my face.

Delph’s head poked over the boards. He was much taller than me, and I was tall for a female, over five feet nine inches. I was still growing, because all the Janes were late bloomers. My grandfather Virgil, it was said, grew four inches more when he was twenty. And forty sessions later came his Event and his height became meaningless because there was nothing left of him.

Delph was about six and a half feet tall with shoulders that spread like the leafy cap of my poplar. He was sixteen sessions old with a long mane of black hair that appeared mostly yellowish white because of the dust he did not bother to wash away. He worked at the Mill, lifting huge sacks of flour, so more dust would just take its place. He had a wide, shallow forehead, full lips, and eyes that were as dark as his hair without the dust. They looked like twin holes in his head. I think it would be fascinating to see what went on in Delph’s mind. And, I had to admit, his eyes were beautiful. I sometimes went all willy when he looked at me.

He did not qualify to work at Stacks, where some creativity was required. I have never seen Delph create anything except confusion. His mind came and went like rain bursts. It had done so ever since he was six sessions old. No one knew what had happened to him, or if they did, they never shared it with me. I believed that Delph remembered it. And it had done something to his head. It obviously wasn’t an Event, because there would be nothing left of him. But it might be a near peer. And yet sometimes Delph said things that made me believe there was far more going on in his mind than most Wugs thought.

If things were a bit off with Delph inside his head, there was nothing wrong with the outside of him. He was handsome, to be sure. Though he never seemed to notice, I had seen many a female giving him the “look” as he passed by. A snog is what they wanted, I’m sure. But Delph always kept moving. And his broad shoulders and long muscled arms and legs gave him a strength that virtually no other Wug could match.

Delph settled next to me, his legs crossed at bony ankles and dangling over the edge of the splintered boards. There was barely enough space for the two of us here. But Delph liked to come up my tree. He didn’t have many other places to go.

I pushed my long, dark straggly hair out of my eyes and focused on a dirt spot on my thin arm. I didn’t rub it away because I had lots of dirt spots. And like Delph’s Mill dust, what would be the point? My life was full of dirt.

“Delph, did you hear all that?”

He looked at me. “H-hear wh-what?”

“The attack canines and the screaming?”

He looked at me like I was wonky. “Y-you o-okay, Ve-Vega Jane?”

I tried again. “Council was out with attack canines chasing something.” I wanted to say chasing someone , but I decided to keep that to myself. “They were down near the Quag.”

He shivered at the name, as I knew he would.

“Qu-Qu-Qu —” He took a shuddering breath and said simply, “Bad.”

I decided to change the subject. “Have you eaten?” I asked Delph. Hunger was like a painful, festering wound. When you had it, you could think of nothing else.

Delph shook his head no.

I pulled out a small tin box constituting my portable larder that I carried with me. Inside was a wedge of goat’s cheese and two boiled eggs, a chunk of fried bread and some salt and pepper I kept in small pewter thumbs of my own making. We used lots of pepper in Wormwood, especially in our broths. Pepper cured lots of ills, like the taste of bad meat and spoiled vegetables. There had also been a sweet pickle, but I had eaten it already.

I handed him the box. It was intended for my first meal, but I was not so big as Delph. He needed lots of wood in his fire, as they said around here. I would eat at some point. I was good at pacing myself. Delph did not pace. Delph just did. I considered it one of his most endearing qualities.

He sprinkled salt and pepper on the eggs, cheese and bread, and then wolfed them down in one elongated swallow. I heard his belly rumble as the foodstuffs dropped into what had been an empty cavern.

“Better?” I asked.

“B-better,” he mumbled contentedly. “Thanks, Ve-Vega Jane.”

I rubbed sleep from my eyes. I had been told that my eyes were the color of the sky. But other times, when the clouds covered the heavens, they could look quite silver, as though I were absorbing the colors from above. It was the only change that was ever likely to happen to me.

“Go-going t-t-to see your mum and dad this light?” asked Delph.

I shot him a glance. “Yes.”

“Ca-can I c-come t-too?”

“Of course, Delph. We can meet you there after Stacks.”

He nodded, mumbled the word Mill , rose and scrambled down the short boards to the ground.

I followed him, heading on to Stacks, where I worked making pretty things. In Wormwood, it was a good idea to keep moving.

And so I did.

But I did so in a different way this light. I did so with the image of someone running into the Quag, when that was impossible because it meant death. And so I convinced myself that I had not seen what I thought I had.

Yet not many slivers would pass before I realized that my eyesight had been perfect. And my life in Wormwood, to the extent I had one, would never be the same.

AS I WALKEDalong the now quiet forest path, I calmed and certain things I had been told long ago entered my head. I don’t know why exactly; the timing was a bit strange, but I have found that these sorts of thoughts come to me at the oddest slivers.

The first one was the most indelible for me.

The most bitterly awful place of all is one that Wugmorts don’t know is as wrong as wrong can possibly be.

That’s what my grandfather told me before he suffered his Event and was gone forever. I believed I was the only one my grandfather told that to. I never mentioned it to anyone.

I was not, by nature, a very trusting Wugmort. One really couldn’t be here.

I was a very young when my grandfather said those words, and he suffered his Event shortly afterward. I had to admit I wasn’t sure what he was talking about then. I’m not exactly sure about it now. I agreed that a place could be bitterly awful, but what could be as wrong as wrong can possibly be? That was the conundrum I had never been able to sort out, often though I had tried.

My grandfather had also talked to me about shooting stars.

He said, Every time you glimpse one making its blazingly haphazard way across the sky, a change is coming for some Wugmort.

It was an interesting idea for a place that never changed — like Wormwood.

And then these twin thoughts left me like wisps of smoke floating away and I refocused on what lay ahead — another light of toil for me.

As I grew close to my destination, I drew a breath and the smell gobsmacked me. The odor was already in my pores, never to be washed away no matter how many times I stood under the rain bucket or the pipes. I turned the corner on the path and there it was: Stacks. We called it that because it had so many chimney stacks to carry the soot and grime away. Brick piled on top of brick so far into the sky. I had no idea what its original use was, or if it was ever used for anything other than to make pretty things. It was unfathomably large and extremely ugly, which made its current purpose quite ironic.