“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.”