SICK HEART

by Huss, JA

  Then Anya is walking up to us and, once again, there is no time to process all the words that are being dropped at my feet today. After decades of time that has flowed too slow—that has dragged on like torture—it is suddenly going all too fast.

  Anya stops at Maart first and bows to him. Not the pathetic slave bow from months ago, but a proper, reverent, solemn bow with praying hands and thumbs at her eyebrows. She holds that position, but she’s looking straight at him. “Ajarn Maart,” she says. “Thank you.”

  He nods to her. Bows back. Then she moves on to Rainer and repeats her gestures of gratitude.

  Then she is standing in front of me. And this is the moment when the full meaning of Anya hits me.

  Maart was right.

  She is a warrior.

  But we didn’t make her that way.

  She was always a warrior.

  A silent ninja.

  A master of mental assaults.

  A champion in the ring of survival.

  We just taught her more.

  We made her better.

  But for what? To be Udulf’s prize? His possession? His property?

  Her eyes pierce mine and her silence is loud. Don’t you dare feel sorry for me. Don’t you dare reduce me.

  So I don’t.

  I bow to her before she can bow to me.

  The four of us enter the thick, jungle understory via a smooth dirt path. Our world becomes something made of shadows. The blazing sun is on the other side of the canopy leaves above our head. Monkeys swing through the trees and birds chatter and scream at us as we pass through their domain. We are walking single file because the path is narrow. So I am the first to walk out into the large, open clearing we call the base camp.

  This place is home, but it is also a prison.

  And it’s weird. Because there are no walls around us. There are no guards here. I am not in cuffs. No one wears a collar.

  But we are all in a cage.

  It’s an invisible cage but that’s not why most people can’t see it.

  They can’t see it because they don’t understand what it means to be owned in this day and age.

  There is no escape from these people.

  There is no walking away.

  There is no way out and that’s not the brainwashing talking.

  It’s just the truth.

  These men who own us, they are a global network. You can run. Lots of slaves and fighters have tried. But you can’t hide. They find you in the end. Even if it’s only to kill you and turn you into an example.

  So no walls or guards are necessary.

  All they need is that threat.

  And I bought into it.

  We all bought in to it.

  The temperature difference when we leave the jungle is immediate. The still, humid air of the trees is replaced with the searing afternoon sun.

  The path widens so Anya, Maart, and Rainer all come up next to me as we walk forward.

  The first clue that this day is not going to go the way we planned is the silence.

  The second clue is the stillness.

  All our warriors are here. On my left I can see Cintia in the first of three large, covered training rings. She is bending down, whispering to Ainsey as we walk by. There are a few other kids with them, sitting on the mats in the background.

  Sissy is in the second ring with our four older fighters—two sixteen-year-old boys, a sixteen-year-old girl, and a seventeen-year old boy who will be going to the Ring of Fire in the next couple months. They are what’s left of my older kids. The ones who no longer go out to the Rock with us because they are past that.

  The only ones to survive into adulthood.

  No one is in the third ring, but when I look to my right, I see Ling leaning up against the porch of the small house she shares with Cintia and Sissy. The rest of the little kids—the ones not with Cintia—are sitting on the steps of the huts lining that side of the camp. Just watching us.

  Rainer is the one who finally speaks as we make our way up the path towards the main house. “What the fuck?”

  None of us answer him. It’s pretty obvious what’s happening because even from a distance of a hundred yards, I can count three of Udulf’s mercenary bodyguards standing on the large front porch of our house.

  “He’s here,” I say, more to myself than my friends.

  “Yep,” Anya breathes. “He’s here all right.”

  “What are we gonna do?” Rainer asks.

  “What do you mean what are we gonna do?” I answer.

  “I mean, what the fuck are we gonna do? We’re not going through with this. Tell me we’re not going through with this.”

  “Shut up, Rainer,” Maart growls. “Just… shut the fuck up.”

  It’s a weird response from Maart. He doesn’t normally talk to Rainer that way, but today is not any ordinary day. We are free men. I think. And we’re about to walk away from this camp with a brand-new life.

  It’s stressful. Even cold-hearted Maart feels stress. So I let it go.

  We walk the rest of the way in silence. We climb the porch steps in silence. We enter the house in silence.

  Udulf turns from the spread of food and drink laid out on the dining room table, a look of happy surprise on his face when he sees us. “Ah. There they are!”

  Yeah. There is definitely something going on here. And we’re in the dark about all of it.

  “Cort! My son!” He walks over to me and claps me on the shoulder. “You look… fabulous. Fabulous,” he repeats. “You always did thrive in solitude.”

  I’d like to point out that I wasn’t alone on the Rock, not for one fucking second, but his words are just dressing. Just frosting. Just… fluffy air to fill the empty space in this room.

  “And Anya.” He moves on to her, taking her hand in his, even though she doesn’t offer it, and bringing the tips of her fingers to his lips. He kisses them. Licks them. She tries to pull her hand back, but he doesn’t let go. So she gives in.

  It’s a lewd gesture. One of disrespect. One that pretty much calls Anya a whore, in my opinion. He leers at her, looking her up and down like she is a sexual thing.

  This is a tell with Udulf. We are playing some sort of game. Because Udulf only has sex with children. In his perverted, sick, twisted version of the world, Anya is much too old to sexually excite him.

  He lets go of her hand, bypasses Rainer completely, and his gaze lands on Maart. Udulf laughs. “Well. Here you are. Are you still in?”

  I look over at Maart as well. “In? In what? What the hell is he talking about?”

  Maart ignores me. “You bet I’m in.”

  “What the fuck are we talking about?” I ask again.

  “We”—Udulf turns to face me—“we,” he stresses the repeated word, “aren’t talking about anything. Yet. But Maart and I, we had a deal.”

  “What deal?” I look over at Maart. “What fucking deal?”

  Maart draws in a deep breath. He glances at Rainer for a moment, but decides to skip whatever thought first comes to mind and concentrate on me. “You and I both know how we got here, Cort.”

  “Maart—”

  “He got you here,” Udulf interrupts. He walks over to Maart and stands next to him. “Isn’t that what you’re trying to say, Maart? Hmm? You’re the… what do they call it?” He flips his hand in the air. “The wind beneath the wings, so to speak?”

  “Maart—”

  “You were never strong enough,” Maart says.

  “Strong enough for what? Because the way I see it, you’re a free man today because I was strong enough in all the ways it counts.”

  “Exactly!” Udulf beams. “He is a free man. You are all three free men. And Maart has decided—”

  “No.” I shake my head. “Fuck that. You’re not staying here. You’re not staying behind.”

  “Behind?” Udulf guffaws. “He is out in front, my boy!”

  “Maart. I’m not gonna say this again. What the fuck is he talking about?
”

  “The next fight, of course,” Udulf says.

  I ignore Udulf and lock eyes with Maart. “What. Fight?”

  Finally, Maart speaks. “The final fight. The only fight that has ever mattered. The one fight you were too weak to even think about, let alone accept. The one fight that can free them all.”

  “No.” I’m shaking my head. “You cannot be serious.”

  “The ultimate fight,” Udulf says. “Listen to me, Cort.” Udulf grabs my shoulder and squeezes. And he is very fucking lucky I have spent all of my twenty-seven years practicing restraint. Because I want to kill this man. I want to rip his head off and feed it to the fish below the rock. “You have no vision, Cort. Sick Heart. Whatever you call yourself these days. You have never had vision. Not like Maart. He has always known how to get what he wants.”

  “And what is that, Maart?” I ask. “What do you want that you don’t have?”

  Maart is silent for a moment. Thinking, I guess. His expression is one I don’t exactly recognize, so I can’t be sure how to interpret it. But finally, he says, “One life, right? We get this one chance to go through life. And this”—he pans his hands wide—“this shithole training camp is what you settled for? That forty-year-old platform ship? A fucking crumbling-down decommissioned oil rig? That’s the best you could do, Cort? Really?”

  Udulf laughs again. But I ignore him. “It took me twenty-two years to get this shithole training camp, that forty-year-old platform ship, and you just said yourself, right back there on the cliff, that the Rock was how we raised—”

  Maart guffaws so loud, I stop talking. “For a man who prides himself on keeping silent so he can practice the art of reading others, you sure do miss a lot, Cort.”

  “What the fuck does that even mean?”

  Maart nods his head to Rainer, who has been silent this whole time. “Everyone in the camp knew he was never going to leave.”

  “Even I knew that.” Udulf laughs. He walks over to Rainer, claps him on the back, and says, “Rainer is a man who knows his place. He knows where he belongs. And that place is here. Well”—Udulf pauses to look over at Maart and smirk—“not here. Tell him, Maart. Tell him where Rainer belongs.”

  “What is he talking about?” I growl these words out at Maart.

  But it’s not Maart who speaks up. It’s Rainer. He steps in front of me, blocking my view of Maart, and sighs. “We don’t want to work on a supply ship, Cort. We don’t want to drift for the rest of our lives.”

  I push Rainer aside so I can look at Maart again. “What did you do?”

  “You say those words like they’re a bad thing, Cort. But all I did was elevate us.”

  “Not true,” Udulf says. “Not all of you. That’s the price. There is always a price. And while you were never willing to splurge on the finer things, Cort, Maart and Rainer here have a different perspective on the meaning of a life well-lived.”

  I have a lot to say about that, but Maart speaks before I can. “You would leave them behind. You would never fight for them the way I would.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” I ask this question like I don’t already know what he’s talking about. But I do know.

  “The kids,” Maart says.

  “You love them so much?” I say. “You love them so fucking much you will make a deal with this devil and take them to hell with you?”

  “That’s your problem, Cort. You think you’re better than us. You think you’ve got some superior moral code going on here. But you don’t.” He nods his chin to Udulf. “You’re not any better than him. How many people have died at your hands? Forty? Fifty? More?” He puts up a hand before I can defend myself. “Don’t fucking tell me he made you do it. You could’ve bought yourself out a decade ago. But you stayed.”

  “I stayed to fight for you!”

  “Thank you for that.” Maart feigns a bow. “But now that I’m free, I can fight for myself. And I choose you.”

  I laugh. Like… a real laugh. “You want to fight me?”

  “The ultimate fight,” Udulf says. “The only one where no one—not me, not you, not them—none of us has any idea of how it will end. But we do know one thing, Sick. Heart.” He signs the words as he says them. “You will both die either way. Either your lover here kills you, or you kill him. This little bit of treason, this moment of backstabbing…” He shakes his head. “It won’t be enough to erase the decades you two shared. If he dies, and you have to live on without the other… that’s another kind of death altogether, isn’t it? A slow one. An agonizing one. Like…” His eyes dart to Anya. “Like a knife to the gut.”

  “Why?” It’s a question I’ve had my whole life but never had the guts to ask. “Why are you like this? Why do you want to hurt people? Why are you so fucking evil?”

  Udulf smiles at me, his steel-gray eyes so familiar. “There is no such thing as evil, my son.” I feel sick. Because it’s in this moment when I truly accept that he is my real father. I come from this man’s seed. “There is no judgment on the last day of your life. There is no Heaven. There is no Hell. There is only the game called life. You either play it, or you don’t.”

  I scoff. “And this is the best you can do?”

  He looks around, still smiling. “No. This is the best you could do. But I’m giving you another chance, Cort. Don’t you see? Don’t you get it? Maart does. Hell, even Rainer does and he’s pretty stupid. Because he’s a free man, thanks to you, and he chooses…” Udulf shrugs. “Nothing.” He laughs. “He chooses nothing. He wants nothing more than to stay the same. He wants his camp, he wants his kids, he wants his pathetic title of trainer. He wants to wake up every day and know that it will be predictable. And if that means walking away from you and sticking it out with Maart here, that’s what he’s going to do. But don’t feel bad. Even if your big dream of freedom was more than just some worthless supply ship, he wouldn’t go. He wouldn’t. He doesn’t have it in him. Freedom, my son, is highly overrated for most of the pathetic people of this planet. They say they hate the games we play, but what else would they do with their lives if we weren’t pushing them in one direction or another?”

  “Wow.” I can only shake my head at him. “You, Udulf, you are the pathetic one. Not the people you control. They don’t have choices, and you do. And you had better hope there is no Hell, because if there is, there’s a fire pit with your name on it.”

  “Do you want the fight or don’t you?” Udulf asks. I open my mouth to say no. I will not play this game with him or anyone else ever again. But he continues before I can answer. “Choose carefully, Sick Heart. Because if you say no, you walk out of here with no one. Just yourself.”

  “Evard—”

  “Evard is staying,” Rainer says. “He was trying to tell you that when he got off the ship. But you told him to shut the fuck up.”

  I step away from Maart, Rainer, and Udulf, trying to put distance between myself and them. Anya is standing off to the side as well, the expression on her face one of stunned shock.

  I look Rainer in the eyes. “What the hell is wrong with you? He’s free. You’re free. We’re all free. Why would you want to stay in this hell?”

  “Because,” Udulf says, “this hell is their home. It’s all they know.”

  “I’m not gonna do it,” I blurt. “Fuck this shit. You people can all fucking rot here. I didn’t fight for my life for twenty-two years to just walk away with nothing.”

  “That’s the whole point of the fight,” Maart says, his eyes narrowed down into slits. “If I win, we’re all free. I told you that, remember? Out on the Rock. I fucking told you, either we are all free, or none of us are.”

  “Oh, that’s a nice touch,” Udulf says, pointing his finger at Maart. “Freedom to choose. Everyone gets to choose to stay! I love it!”

  He’s fucking sick. I don’t even look at him. I’m only looking at Maart. “If you win, I’m dead, you dumbass! Only one of us gets out alive!”

  “That’s right.” Ma
art says this without feeling. If my heart is sick, his heart is cold. And that’s exactly what he wants me to think.

  I take a deep breath and calm myself down. “So you want to be the hero?”

  “You never did.”

  “You’re free to make this decision because of me, asshole.”

  “And you only got here because of me. You know that’s true, Cort. So that argument doesn’t work. You’re too weak to think big. You’ve been in too many fights to see past your own survival instinct. You got me out for the same reason you got Rainer and Evard out. You can’t live without us.”

  “And that’s how we know you’re going to say yes,” Udulf says. “The fight of the century. The Sick Heart against the one man who can beat him.”

  “Will beat him,” Maart adds.

  I huff out a laugh. “You people are all a bunch of deranged lunatics if you think I’ll fall for this bullshit. I’m done. There will be no fight. I’m packing my shit, I’m getting on that ship, and I’m never looking back.”

  I start walking towards the door, but it opens before I get there.

  I stop in my tracks, my heart suddenly beating so fast I can’t breathe.

  Because Lazar walks in holding Ainsey.

  He smiles at me.

  Like we’re old friends.

  Then he looks past me, at Udulf, and says, “I found one I like. This one will do just fine.”

  And then he kisses my daughter on the cheek.

  CHAPTER THIRTY ONE - ANYA

  Seeing Udulf again triggers something inside me.

  Not some killer instinct, unfortunately, but memories. I’m trying to tuck them all down as this conversation happens between Maart, Cort, and Udulf—but when Lazar enters the house holding Ainsey, I lose control and things begin to… slip.

  I am seven years old again. Everything on my body hurts and Udulf is the one responsible for all that pain. But I am a trooper. I am a survivor. I am a warrior. This man will not be the one to kill me. My death will not happen here.

  We are in an unkept castle in the mountains of Romania. With its peeling plaster, uneven floorboards, and broken windows—this property has seen better days.