So I strip off my dress, toss it aside, and stand with my back against the wall and my eyes closed.
Yes. It fucking hurts. And even though I don’t want to wince, and hug myself, and cower from the cold water, I do all that.
He makes me turn around and face the wall, and then he sprays my back too. The whole thing takes maybe… five minutes? My body is red and stings all over when he’s done. But I am clean.
Cort walks over to me, his body still smelling of death and filth, still covered in sweat, and blood, and paint, and he hands me the hose. I look at it, and then him, and realize he wants me to hose him down next.
This is the moment when I realize everything I thought I knew about Cort van Breda was wrong.
Maybe I understand the Sick Heart. I get the fighter inside him.
But Cort? The man inside him?
No.
I was wrong.
I could hurt him with this hose.
And he either doesn’t care, or he doesn’t think I will.
I won’t.
CHAPTER EIGHT - CORT
When I first introduced Anya to the jump rope her face was a mixture of sadness, confusion, and many years of lowered expectations.
I’m pretty sure she thinks that no one can read her, but I can read everyone. We might be silent for very different reasons, but the outcome is the same.
Silence lets you hear things that aren’t said.
Silence lets you see things unseen.
Silence gives you space.
And space is a gift if ever there was one.
My first trip out to this Rock was when I was around five. Udulf had just acquired me and I was not in the mood to comply with anything he had in mind for my first night at his estate.
I ran. I hid. And when they found me, I kicked, I screamed, and I bit.
It didn’t stop him. He did with me what he had planned to do with me.
He beat me senseless that first night. He beat me so hard, and for so long, I just passed out. And really, that was a gift as well. Because I have no solid memory of that night. Or anything that came before my first trip out here to the Rock. The only thing I have left of the life that came before Udulf is the Lectra dream.
And that’s not reality.
When Udulf dropped me off on the lowest platform of the Rock that first time, I stayed for three months. Alone.
There was no food, but there was water. And that was so cruel. You can die in three days with no water. It takes months to waste away from starvation. Even a small boy can last many weeks without food.
It was good water, though. Bottled. Sealed. Clean. A hundred cases at least. I had so much fresh water, I bathed in it. The rig had only been decommissioned for a few months when I arrived. It was still clean. And you could walk all the way down the steps to the water without slipping on slick algae and breaking your neck if you weren’t careful.
All the housing containers had been removed but there were still leftover things inside the permanent building on the middle level. Clothes, and blankets, and even a deck of cards. And there was the kitchen, of course. Bathrooms, too. Those were built into the frame of the topside for electrical reasons, and couldn’t be disconnected.
Food, on the other hand, that was hard to come by. There was no leftover food on the rig and it would take me weeks before I successfully caught my first fish down on the lowest platform using a steel beam as a spear and a discarded net that was stuck on the rig’s frame, just above sea level.
But that wasn’t what kept me alive.
The bird kept me alive.
Just one bird back then. One wayward albatross who should’ve been on the other side of the world. His wing was bent in a weird way and he didn’t fly very well. I don’t know how he got here, since the natural habitat of the royal albatross is sub-Antarctic and this rig is equatorial, but he was here. And he could still fly—just not well enough to go home.
I think he knew I was in the same position. So we were in it together.
I gave him water and he brought me food like I was his chick.
Little fishes. Little disgusting fishes that he spit out and I swallowed whole, so I didn’t have to chew. And even though I could’ve talked to the bird, I didn’t. Not at first. He didn’t say anything either. It was like we both knew there was no fucking point. We were stuck here and that was that.
I liked it. I won’t admit that to anyone, but I liked it out here on the Rock. It was my first real taste of freedom. For the very first time I was in charge of my life.