The Delicate War
“When an evil despot jails his opponents and subjects them to mysterious experiments, a rebel girl must infiltrate the enemy’s inner circle to expose a diabolical conspiracy and save her father from prison, and worse, before they are both forced to join the nefarious cause they have sworn to destroy. ”
Synopsis
In the remote archipelago of the Farflung Islands, young Katherine has endured a lifetime of hardship, poverty and struggle. From scavenging in trash heaps as a mudlark child to catching mice for the village church, she's had to take on whatever meager labor she could find just to eke out a living. Her current job of making charcoal, while grueling work that leaves her coated in soot daily, is one of the better opportunities available in the impoverished village.
However, Katherine's hardscrabble existence is shattered the night the soldiers of the nefarious Wonderful Leader come for her father. He is seized from their home and imprisoned without explanation, leaving Katherine alone and terrified. She learns her father has been branded a dissenter against the Wonderful Leader's oppressive regime that rules Farflung with an iron fist.
Desperate to find her father and uncover the truth, Katherine takes a job at Blackhollow Manor, the fortified estate of the Wonderful Leader. She discovers her father and other prisoners are being subjected to mysterious medical experiments by the deranged Dr. Peckinpaw, Katherine's former employer. The mad doctor has been tasked by the Wonderful Leader to finalize the details of a highly-secret project.
Katherine is horrified to learn that the strange glowing rocks, bioluminescent fungi, and even the fireflies she collected over the years were actually ingredients in an alchemistic formula to turn the island’s plentiful fool’s gold into real gold. But there simply isn’t enough of it to get the job done. So the Wonderful Leader's true plan is to subjugate - and bioengineer - the entire population of the islands to produce the ingredients into the ever greater quantities required.
By infiltrating the manor as a lowly servant, Katherine hopes to find her father and help the resistance put a stop to the Wonderful Leader's twisted ambitions. However, she is conflicted when she meets Tom, Dr. Peckinpaw's apprentice, who shows her surprising kindness despite his role in the experiments.
Katherine makes contact with the resistance and learns they have been trying to take down the Wonderful Leader for years. But they need someone on the inside to pull it off. And Katherine needs to save her father, before he is broken and forced to join the very cause he dedicated his life to destroying.
Chapter One
The night they came for her father, Katherine had spent all day making charcoal. The problem with making charcoal was you had to gather the hickory branches from the deepest part of the woods and then tree climb for the coconuts in the grove down by the shore and then stand there for hours plucking the splinters from your hands and feet and stoking the fire while the smoke spilled up all over you. If you did it long enough, and Katherine did, you started to cough up little puffs of black smoke. And for all that, there wasn’t much money in it, even though everybody said Katherine’s charcoal was the best. It burned hot and clean and it left no ash. What it left her was covered head to toe in soot each day, and with only a half a penny a basket from the blacksmiths in the village who used it to forge and from the river fellas down at the waterfront who used it to filter water and from Dr. Peckinpaw who used it in his own brand of medicines for indigestion and bloating and gas.
It was hard work and it wasn’t much fun, but it wasn’t the worst job she’d ever had. When she was six, she joined up with the orphan kids they called the mudlarkers and picked through the trash heaps in the dumps at the waterfront, scavenging for salvage and trinkets. The only thing of any value she ever found was a brass ship’s bell she traded for a dozen chicken eggs, and a bamboo fishing pole she used to pull sixfingers and picklefish from the river. Why someone would throw away a perfectly good fishing pole, she couldn’t figure. At night, more often than not, she came home smelling like two wet skunks. She had to soak herself in a bath of tomato juice for an hour just to get the stink off.
That fall, she worked in the church house catching mice. A penny a mouse the pastor paid her. She caught seventy mice in seventeen weeks. Some of the mudlarkers joined her. They caught twenty-three more. By The Owl’s Hollow Eve, there were still plenty of mice left to catch. But they took the pastor away on the last day of October.
In the winter of her seventh year the nights were so unusually cold they said the words fell like ice cubes right out of your mouth and you couldn’t hear them until they thawed in the spring and all the lost chatter came up from the hedgerows. That year, she sold matchsticks from door to door for a penny apiece, until her fingers turned blue and icicles formed on the lashes of her eyes.
At eight, she tried selling rocks. The yellowish pebbles she found in the low country meadows and down along the banks of the zigzagging river. Strange little rocks. Like so many things on the island, [they glowed in the dark]. Like the foxfire fungus and the moss and the tiny mushrooms that glowed like embers of pale green fire smoldering on the undersides of rotting logs. Like the red algae that bloomed offshore at low tide. Like the fireflies that used to come out in the dusk in July. She thought the rocks might have some value and again she went from door to door in the village, now with a heavy basket of yellow rocks, but no one would buy them. Fool’s gold, they said. Dull and common. And who had money to spend on rocks?
At nine, Doctor Peckinpaw offered her a job plucking porcupines at his apothecary. He raised the porcupines in a pen in the back alley behind the shop and used the quills to administer his medicines and vitamin tonics. Every Saturday, Katherine plucked just as many quills as were needed for the week. By the end of the day, her arms were still covered in little red bumps and her fingers were covered in red-stained bandages that covered the quill pricks - it was delicate business getting the quills out. And the porcupines, of course, were not very happy to part with them.
By Katherine’s tenth year, Peckinpaw began testing new concoctions. Elixirs and tonics. Balms and oils. For twice her plucking wage, she subjected herself to experiments with doses of witch hazel and lyme and the application to her legs and forearms of suckerbugs and freshwater leeches. The leeches were the worst. She had to go to the lowland bogs and scoop them up herself by the jarful. No good medicines ever did come of it, except for one, which seemed to work on plantar warts and lice. Since it worked on an ailment that was found on one’s head, and it worked on an ailment which is found near one’s toes, the Doctor bottled it and sold it as Peter Peckinpaw’s Wonder Tonic, A Cure-All For What Ails You From Head to Toe.
The tonic sold well enough that Peckinpaw’s Apothecary expanded into acupuncture and he hired an apprentice. The apprentice’s was named Anita. She came from the outer islands and used porcupine quills to puncture the skin and she practiced on Katherine to learn just where and where not to place the quills in a patient. When this went well was rather relaxing for Katherine. But when it did not, she shuffled home at night with tears in her eyes, wincing with every step. Still, the pay was better than merely plucking the great porcupines, and better still than mudlarking or catching mice. She did this for most of that year, until one midafternoon in the heat of July when they finally came for Peckinpaw.
The summer after that, the Wonderful Leader posted fliers all over the island that offered ten cents a jar for every jar filled with fireflies. The jar had to have at least ten fireflies in it, and the collectors at the manor gate counted them while you waited. Katherine went out all summer in the early evening when the fireflies came out and by September she’d filled forty jars. By the end of that summer, she’d had to go deeper and deeper into the woods, which was the only place fireflies were left to be found. She filled her forty jars. Some of the mudlarkers filled hundreds of jars. They took the jars to the guards at the collecting station outside Blackhollow Manor. Katherine stood in line and delivered a jar every night and returned home with a ten-cent piece that the collector at the gate withdrew from a big wooden penny chest, after counting them. The guards tried to short you every time. “Only nine in ‘is one!” the guard would say, and go to count nine pennies instead of handing her a ten-cent piece. “No, no, count them again, please!” Katherine would insist in her sternest tone. You had to watch those guards or they’d cheat you. By the end of the summer, it was harder and harder to find a firefly. And then one day at the end of September, someone caught the last one. After that, there weren’t any more fireflies on the island at all. What the leader did with them, no one knew.
After that, Katherine went back to making charcoal. Making charcoal wasn’t so bad, really. In fact, it was one of the better jobs to be had on the island. And it helped pay the bills. And there were always bills. Until they came for her father…