A task to which he would bend every fiber of his psyche until completed.
He removed a small notebook from his suit-coat pocket. It was old, with a worn, black-leather cover. Most of its pages were covered in writing. Some had been carefully scotch-taped to preserve their integrity. He flipped toward the back, to the first blank page, and drew a mechanical pencil from the same pocket. He clicked the pencil three times to extend the thin cylinder of lead beyond the tip of its sheath.
He began to write.
He bore down hard. Twice, the pencil lead snapped. Twice, he replaced the leading edge with three sharp reports—click, click, click—of the mechanical pencil. He wrote slowly and with exacting penmanship. When he was finished, he inspected the name he had written.
Dr. Rita Wu.
He stared at it for a moment, then drew an empty box next to her name, as if she were an entry on a to-do list. He closed the notebook and returned both it and the mechanical pencil to his coat pocket.
I’m going to kill her.
And he knew, with absolute certainty, that he would.
But first he would make her suffer.
The way Jenny suffered.
And he would rob her of something precious.
The way I’ve been robbed of something precious.
And balance would return to the universe.
Finney turned and walked back to the car, beside which the thick man waited.
He did not look back.
One Year Later
RITA
There was darkness.
And then there was her name.
“Dr. Wu?”
A voice probed the dark, cleaving it like a searchlight. The darkness was familiar and, in its familiarity, comforting; the voice, intrusive and discordant, was not. Rita drew away from it and embraced the dark, as if she were a little girl pressing herself against her mother’s leg.
But the voice would have none of it.
“Dr. Wu?” It was a woman.
Darkness still, but sensations were resolving themselves, bit by bit, from nothing.
“Do you want me to go get some help?” A second voice, also female. Breathier. Huskier.
“No. She’s breathing. And she’s warm. She’s just asleep. Grab some blankets, though, will you?”
“Okay.” Receding footsteps. A crisp, artificial click, like someone tugging on the latch of a refrigerator. A puff of warm of air.
… sounds like an operating-room blanket warmer …
Approaching footsteps. “Got some.”
“Dr. Wu?”
A hand was on her shoulder, nudging her toward consciousness. There was a thick, coppery taste in her mouth, as if she’d been sucking on pennies, and a pain in her head, enveloping her left temple and snaking toward her left ear. Without opening her eyes, she perceived that she was lying flat on her back, on a padded surface. Her arms were lying at her sides.
“Dr. Wu?” The hand shaking her shoulder applied more pressure.
Rita opened her eyes. The darkness surrendered itself to blinding brightness. The pain in her head blossomed into an agony—an ice pick driving its way through her left eye and punching its way out the back of her skull.
She gasped. God, how it hurt. The light was a rabid dog clawing at her eyes. She squeezed them shut and groaned. Her stomach lurched, as if the light had reached through her eye sockets, down her throat, and given her gut a good, hard tug.
Oh, God.
“Dr. Wu?” The first voice, which a dim recess of her clouded brain now registered as familiar, sounded worried, but also more insistent. “Are you okay?” Pause. “Can I help you?”
The pain made it difficult for her to concentrate. No, not just the pain. Something else, too. Her brain was a jumbled slurry of inputs and outputs, scrambled up in a way that pain alone could not explain, as if all of her trains of thought had been dumped into a blender at high speed.
Why? some part of her mind asked.
Who cares? another replied.
She let herself slide back toward the void.
“Dr. Wu.” Commanding now, and louder. Unconsciousness, inviting as it was, was no longer an option.
Rita opened her eyes and groaned, squinting against the light.
“Wendy,” said the first voice. “Move the spotlight out of her face.”
“Sure,” said the breathy woman.
The light dimmed and, with it, the pain in her head.
Rita blinked and looked at the anxious face peering into hers. In a more alert state, she might have been surprised. Astounded, even. But all she could muster now was a vague sense of puzzlement.
Lisa Rodriguez, one of her operating-room nurses, was the owner of both the first voice and the hand now resting reassuringly on Rita’s shoulder. Lisa wasn’t, of course, hers in the strict sense of the word. But Rita, like many surgeons, used possessive pronouns to describe people and things in the operating rooms she supervised. Her nurses. Her patients. Her surgical instruments.
Lisa was standing next to her. Or, rather, over her, as if Rita were one of her own patients, stretched out on a table in her operating room, over which she and Lisa traded scalpels and gossip most working days.