Weight of the Heart (Bruna Husky Book 2) Read Online Free PDF

Bruna’s arm and fell to the ground. Bruna saw and smelled the blood. She also smelled Gabi’s adrenaline, the powerful smell of a frightened animal. Then she smelled something else. Something acidic, sharp. She looked down. The girl had wet herself.
    So now what? Now what? The irregular chirrup of the huge feathers on the trees sounded like the cry of a very small child.
    “Gabi,” whispered Bruna, her throat tight and dry. “Gabi, you have to open your mouth. I promise I’m not going to do anything to you. I’m not going to touch you. I’m not going to take revenge. Open your mouth, let go of me, and we’ll go back to Yiannis.”
    The girl gave no sign of having heard. A few seconds passed, and two more drops of blood fell—in fact, a small trickle.
    “I won’t grab your backpack. I won’t take it away from you. I won’t look at it. Open your mouth. Open it, I said. Listen, my offer ends in one minute. If you don’t let go of me right now, I’ll have to do something. Even you must realize that we can’t go on like this forever.”
    The little Russian sighed and relaxed her jaw. She spat out her prey with the same disdain of a dog spitting out a piece of inedible wood. Bruna moved her arm slowly and painfully. A perfect bite, two arches of blood. Good teeth. Bruna removed a dressing from the emergency kit she always carried in her backpack and covered the wound.
    “Let’s go home,” said Bruna, grabbing the little Russian by the hand.
    A small circle of onlookers had formed around them at the cautious distance that combat reps usually generated. When Bruna looked up, they all looked away and pretended not to be watching. A rep with a shaved head, a tattoo, and a bleeding arm; a girl who had wet herself. What a magnificent show they’d put on.

5

    I t’s actually not so bad knowing when you’re going to die, and from what,” said Yiannis as Bruna was disinfecting and treating the deep bite on her arm. “And I do know that ten years is too short a time, but it’s not so bad to avoid old age. Apart from TTT, you reps have excellent health. You live without fear. While for us humans, getting old means becoming a hostage to your body. You naively think that you and your body are one, but as of a certain age you discover you’re really an alien in your own body, a stranger. Weirder than those aliens we refer to as creeps or bichos , stranger than Maio, our Omaá friend. To make matters worse, it’s your body that kills you. There comes a point when suddenly, without having suspected anything up till then, you realize that you’ve been sleeping with your worst enemy. Life’s like that: one day you look in the mirror and discover not a gray hair or a wrinkle but that part of your cheek has sunk, your nose has acquired a lump you hadn’t seen before, your mouth is starting to twist, your tongue is full of cracks, a little yellow island has appeared in the whites of your eyes, a greasy blob stuck to your eyeball. Or maybe a small asymmetrical bump comes up on your shoulder. You become frightened because, as I said, these revelations are sudden, not progressive; it’s as if they grew over the course of a single night. They’re killers who assault you unexpectedly as you turn the corner. Then you look at yourself, terrified because you’ve just failed to recognize yourself, and you wonder if this could be the symptom of some unknown, horrible illness. The good news is that usually they’re just monstrous mutations caused by age.”
    “If getting old bothers you so much, have an operation like everyone else instead of insisting on wandering around looking like a wretched beggar,” muttered Bruna.
    “You know perfectly well that I hate plastic surgery. I prefer to convert myself into a monster of my own making and not a monster carved out of someone else’s scalpel. I don’t care if not having an operation makes me look like a tramp who can’t have his skin stitched because he doesn’t have a cent