Chapter 215: Shocking Them All

Finn laughed at his own expense, the sound genuine and unbothered. “Well, at least I can admit it.”

The old man simply stared at him for a bit, his weathered face unreadable, then looked back at his work and continued in silence.

The other workers who were clearly interested in seeing how Finn would fare kept their focus subtly on him while trying to continue their own work at a pace good enough not to fall behind on their own set targets. The shed had settled into a tense rhythm, everyone aware of the bet but pretending to focus on their tasks.

Finn settled onto a low stool near the old man’s station and pulled a coil of tar-blackened rope toward himself. Someone had already placed a fid beside the workspace. He picked it up, feeling its weight, testing the point against his thumb.

His face still had that calm, almost lazy look as he positioned the rope and began scraping.

The first few strokes were clumsy. The fid slipped off the hardened surface, the angle all wrong. Finn’s movements lacked the efficient economy of motion the experienced workers displayed. He scraped too hard in some places, barely making a dent in others.

Snickers and stifled laughter rippled through the shed from those closest to him.

“Look at him go…”

“Gonna take him all day just to clear one section…”

“And some of y’all thought he was onto something, huh? I know a loudmouth when I see one!”

But Finn didn’t react to the mockery. He simply adjusted his grip, changed his angle, and tried again. His eyes tracked the subtle flaws in the tar-hardened rope’s structure, and very slowly, he began to adapt, began to correct his motions, targeting those flaws.

Within minutes, something shifted. The clumsiness gave way to inexperienced competence. His strokes became more deliberate, following the grain of the rope rather than fighting against it. The fid stopped slipping as much. Black tar began flaking off in more consistent chunks.

Some of the more experienced workers near him stopped laughing. Their keen eyes had spotted the ease with which Finn had moved from complete incompetence to at least grasping the basics. And he’d done it in minutes, not hours or days.

One worker, a grizzled man with sun-damaged skin, frowned deeply and exchanged a glance with his neighbor, who wore a matching expression but said nothing, just watching.

​Finn continued working, his face a mask of casual concentration. Scrape, scrape, turn the rope, scrape again. The sulfuric smell of the tar no longer bothered him, or at least he’d stopped noticing it.

​His hands were already turning black, but unlike the others, the tar that should have seeped into the creases of his palms and under his fingernails simply sat on the surface, almost as if it had forgotten how to behave.

By the time Finn finished his first complete section of rope after more than an hour and a half of steady work, his movements had reached a level that anyone in the oakum shed would call decent. Not expert, not even particularly efficient, but competent. Like someone who’d been doing this for a few months rather than someone on their first day.

Already, even those with less keen eyes had gone silent. The movement of Finn’s hands, his motions, the way he switched seamlessly from fid work to finger work when separating the hemp fibers… everything looked practiced in a way that shouldn’t have been possible.

No one was laughing now.

The old man next to Finn had paused his work entirely. He sat there, watching Finn’s hands as they deftly untangled the last of the hemp fibers from that first section and added them to his pile. He watched assessingly, and slowly his expression even bordered on something like wariness.

A younger worker close to the old man leaned in and whispered, his voice barely audible over the scraping sounds filling the shed. “The guy’s a freak. How can someone improve that fast?” He watched Finn start on his second section with movements already smoother than the first. “Was he born to do this work or something?”

The younger worker’s voice took on a desperate edge, like he was trying to convince himself. “But there’s no way he’ll be able to fill up the sack before the end of the day, right? That’s impossible. No matter how fast he improves with each rope, there’s no way he’d meet the target of the bet.”

He was looking at the old man for confirmation, for reassurance that the natural order of things still held.

The old man watched Finn finish the second section in half the time the first had taken. He sighed heavily, shaking his head, before turning back to his own work.

He whispered so quietly the younger worker had to strain to hear. “Old Dog Mendoza is going to lose a lot of money this week.”

The younger worker’s pupils contracted. He leaned away slowly, his face going pale as he processed what that meant. He stared off into space, clearly thinking about the money he would also lose since he’d bet against Finn among the workers not long ago.

Hearing those words from the old man basically confirmed it. If it were someone else then he could still have hope, but the old man was one of the most experienced — if not the most experienced worker among everyone here. Finn was very likely, with at least eighty percent certainty, to complete the task.

And as time went by, that fact became increasingly apparent to everyone in the shed.

Finn had gotten fast. Frighteningly fast. His blackened hands danced across the tar surface with a grace that seemed impossible for someone who’d started the day never having touched a fid. He expertly removed the hardened coating with precise and efficient strokes. And the way he untangled the soft fibers inside was almost artistic in its deftness.

He was moving with more skill than even the old bones of the trade. Workers who’d been doing this for years found themselves slowing down to watch, their own quotas forgotten.

The shed had gone quiet except for the sounds of work. No one was joking. No one was snickering any longer.

Before evening properly set in, Old Dog Mendoza already knew he’d lost. He sat in the back of the shed, supposedly doing inventory, but really just listening. The heckling and scathing words he’d expected to hear as closing time drew near never came. The silence was deafening.

It was pin-drop quiet in the oakum shed. So quiet that even from the back where he was, without seeing anything directly, Old Dog Mendoza already knew the outcome.

So when the dock bells broke the silence, their deep tolling reaching the shed from the distant center of the docks and signaling the end of the work day, Old Dog Mendoza could only stand tiredly and limp his way forward to face Finn.

The workers had already gathered around Finn’s station, staring down at his output.

One sack completely filled. And almost half of another.

Old Dog Mendoza pushed through the crowd and stared at the sacks himself. Finn stood beside them, that same lazy grin cracking across his sweaty, tar-streaked face.

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