SICK HEART, Huss, JA [novels for students .txt] 📗

It is a beach.

It is a desert.

It is an oasis.

There are almost no words to describe the beauty of this place because it’s all very inexplicable. Deceptive mounds of pure, soft sand dunes hide hundreds, if not thousands, of small freshwater lakes.

But it’s not the dark, dank, dangerous freshwater you normally find in Brazil. It’s not the kind filled with piranhas, or worse, waiting to eat your toes if you just think about taking a dip. It is the kind of lake you find at the tippy-top of mountains.

Because these lakes are the color of a perfect Fijian beach. The seafoamiest green-blue you’ve ever seen in your life.

And it makes no sense. None at all. How do these lakes get here? Rain, I guess. But why doesn’t the water just seep into the sand, the way it does on the shore?

I haven’t looked it up yet so I don’t know.

I might never look it up. I don’t want to spoil the fairy-tale fantasy of it all. I just want to enjoy it.

We are on vacation. The entire camp.

Well, we’re here for two reasons really. One, we’ve saved up enough from the supply ship runs and the legitimate fights that Sergey, Lilith, Ivano, and Kioshi—the four oldest kids in camp—have been taking in the nearby city of São Luís, and we’ve bought a small collection of nearly falling-down houses deep in the jungles north of Rio de Janeiro.

So we’re leaving this part of the continent and we might never sail by Lençóis Maranhenses ever again.

We’ve told ourselves hundreds of times, at least, every time we did sail by, that we would come out here and enjoy it up close. But we never have, until now.

The second reason we’re here is to say a formal goodbye to all the warriors who came before us. And even though I wasn’t a kid in Cort’s training camp, and never really did fight for my life, I still count myself as belonging to this camp and these people.

We belong to each other, really. All of us. And I feel the loss of the fallen warriors as acutely as anyone.

Besides, I do have someone to honor.

Someone I wish could be here, but isn’t.

We bring rocks with us. Backpacks filled with rocks. We have collected them from all up and down the beaches of Brazil. We have collected them from the beaches of Central America, from the Bahamas, and Mexico, and even some from the forbidden land of Cuba. We wrote names on them and painted them up with pictures. And we have spent the entire day erecting small monuments around the lake we’re camped next to, so that now, lying under the light of a full moon, we can see the shadows of the kids who died fighting.

I made Bexxie’s monument myself. It’s a tower of nine flat rocks. Alternating color. Black, white, black, white. I painted something on each one and wrote her name on top. And then I sat next to it and told her everything that happened since we last saw each other. I didn’t leave out a single detail, even though she’s not really old enough to hear the sexy parts, I told her anyway because this was the first time I have ever talked to her. It was the first time she ever heard my voice. And if I stopped talking, I wasn’t sure I’d ever want to speak again.

I wasn’t sure I’d ever get over the sadness.

So I just kept going and finally, the entire camp was listening to my tale. Even Maart was listening when I described the last breakfast I had with Udulf and how I had figured him out.

Irina pointed at me and said, “Mental ninja,” and this made Cort laugh, and Cort’s laugh made everyone laugh even though we had tears in our eyes.

Then… it was over and we were all ready to say goodbye.

Every lost warrior has been accounted for.

Not a single one of them has been forgotten.

And maybe some park ranger comes along in a month and kicks them all down, we don’t care. We did this. And that’s all that matters.

We are all huddled together in a pack. I’m in between Maart and Cort, kinda snuggled in between them, in fact. Maart’s hand is resting lazily on my leg and Cort is absently playing with my wild hair.

I don’t know what we are. A couple? A threesome?

Not sure.

Don’t care.

We just are.

None of us have sleeping mats and we’re not on the platform of the Rock, but the entire camp points up at the moon with a single finger at the same time.

We have locked the past up in the rock shadows of the fallen warriors around us, and that’s where it will stay forever.

Because this is day one.

EPILOGUE - CORT

ONE YEAR LATER

The mood after Paulo’s first professional fight is celebratory.

Sergey paved the way for Lilith. Lilith paved the way for Ivano and Kioshi. And they paved the way for Paulo.

This might be Paulo’s first official win as far as the wider world is concerned, but they don’t care.

They flock to him, just like they flocked to all the others. They are trying to write offers as they hand him drinks. They are begging him for attention.

His eyes find mine from across the room and I hear all the words he’s not saying. Thank you. I owe you. I love you.

And I raise my glass to him and silently say it all back.

He nods, then starts paying attention to reps from the UFC and Jungle Fight as they have a bidding war, complete with lawyers furiously amending contracts on their tablets as the discussion progresses, at the after-party.

Anya slides up and hooks her arm in mine, leaning into me a little.

“Tired?”

She doesn’t say anything, but I feel her shake her head. She’s still not much of a talker, even when we’re at home. But when we’re out, she almost always prefers to speak with her eyes.

“Good. Because