Chapter twenty seven

"That crazy woman doesn't even know what she's talking about."

Luz sticks to one of the metal walls surrounding the area for the championship, as her brother and a little friend a come straight towards her. The good thing is that they are so immersed in their conversation that they don't notice her presence.

"Are you sure about what you're going to do?"

Bastian is asked by his friend, a chubby boy with a smaller forehead than Luz. I would say that that is already something unnatural but there is no need to highlight qualities that are not relevant, or so the demon told me... well I just did.

"Do you think it's fair that because of the fault of a crazy woman, the old men think I'm an idiot, the boys think I'm a scion because she escaped in front of half the world and the girls who only notice me, for the same reason their mothers approve of me, because they think I'm dumb enough not to touch them?"

The boy shakes his head and starts "pulling rabbits" out of the fingers of his hand. However, Bastian throws a fist in his hand to make him stop.

"Somehow I must release my tension and I don't have a doughnut.

What kind of camp is this?"

Bastian touches his forehead like a man with a thousand worries on his mind.

"You're missing my enlightenment."

"And you too because I don't think this is a good idea."

"This mortal body hinders my reason, it's not my fault. I know you've never come across a guy with so much intelligence, but not everything can be so perfect about me. There are many things in which I resemble you or those sick women."

"I really feel lucky that in my house we are all men. My dad's friends always say that the three of us look alike so we don't have those problems."

"You mean the friends who always want your dad to buy parts for their car?"

They both stop their pace and Bastian looks at him with disappointment and crosses his arms.

"So I don't look like my dad?"

"You say that besides being military he's a scientist, he's big even on your stomach. You need to let me light up your tummy or you're not going to make it."

The little boy's forehead is pearly with sweat as Bastian walks as if he were running. Not to mention Luz who is following them along the cobblestone path that is flanked by countless stones in the shape of animals and historical characters.

"What can I do if I like to eat? Lucky for you that you have a fast metabolism... like certain characters in my favorite science fiction book, you really don't know if you're an alien?"

"I've already told you that we live a different life when we sleep and can't remember who we are there. Our souls, pure light, come out of these decadent bodies to live adventures you couldn't even imagine."

Bastian's friend starts biting his nails and Bastian does too but, according to him, only so that his friend sees that he accepts with much humility his human part.

"Is it necessary..."

Both boys were startled when they heard the sound of an engine. They, like Luz, hid behind the statues of animals made of leaves.

"It's all ready for the championship and I hope there's no one hiding over there."

The discipline coordinator is wearing an astronaut suit just like the driver of the flying van.

If it weren't for the fact that the coordinator uses her suit's amplifier to speak no one would be able to recognize her voice.

"If there is only one little boy, the stones on this road will come for you and there will be serious consequences. But since only one day has passed since you arrived here, the institution gives you a deadline to go to the maximum championship area until this vehicle arrives to start the event.

It may seem impossible but that is the idea".

A smile like Cruela Devil's echoes through the amplifier of his suit. Simultaneously, after the van's shadow passes over the rocky road, the stones that make up the road begin to roll in different directions.

"If you want to get away with this, you have to answer the following question: wolf, what are you doing?

Have a nice day students"

Luz does not understand if her brother wants to take revenge on the three women in his house. Maybe it is only two or one, there is just one that would be quite predictable and, for Luz, quite justified.

But none of that matters to her anymore, she just wants to literally drag her brother with her straight to the championship.

"Chicken ... Bastian"

Luz is so used to calling him by his nickname that she almost forgets. This is typical for her and annoying for her brother. Luz knows it but her memory does not help her. Although Bastián grows up, she always sees him with his little round face full of innocence. It reminded her of the chicks raised by her maternal grandfather.

"Do you see what it's like to live with almost all women?"

His friend agrees with him and feels really lucky, even if his dad is strict with him. At least all the dirty laundry stayed at home because his brother was already at a university abroad.

Luz doesn't stop for him to give him explanations about the conversation he just overheard. She passes by her brother and the three of them start running parallel to the rocky path, the direct way to the championship area.

They all have to pick up their pace, as more rocks break loose and undo the cobblestone path. However, Bastian's friend stops for a moment and opens his eyes wide. In them Luz sees terror and agony, a tiredness not befitting a young boy full of vitality.

Simultaneously, Flavia screams and Luz turns and sees her fainting at the same time as Bastian's friend. The three of them run straight to her. No matter how much Luz shouts her name, Flavia does not react and much less Bastian's friend.

"They couldn't have had a heart attack, could they?"

Luz could not answer as she realizes that her sister has badly cut hair and that is inadmissible for her. Flavia knows very well how to cut and style her hair. Her brother and she look at each other and know that this has been the work of the "All without love" group.

The stones surround them like a snake waiting for the order to attack.

Luz sees a twitch in her brother's right eye and she can't help but wheeze as she tries to think coherently.

"What do we do Luz?"

"I don't know yet."

"Like you don't know Luz, no one is going to wait for you, this is not the house and you are not washing your mouth to take half an hour to think. Talk already or it will be your fault, you're the big sister."

"I hate being the big sister!"

"Well, you put up with it because I hate being the youngest even more".

Luz closes her eyes and tries to think but Bastian gives her a slap on the wrist.

"Stop that stuff, there's no time, think!"

Luz looks at the trees and the sky begging for an answer, but nothing comes to her mind or at least nothing useful. Only scenes of how her mother is going to disown her and her father is going to slap her.

As if nature had taken pity on the children, a cold wind ruffles Luz's skin and reminds her that her mother would die of cold for the three of them.

The stones on the grass begin to vibrate like an engine that tells the chronicle of a death foretold.

Luz looks at one of the statues with animal shapes because it reminds her of the coordinator's question: "Wolf, what are you doing?

"Damn, I have to be the enlightened one for everything. You depend on daddy's money and now you also want to depend on my brain".

Luz turns a deaf ear and runs in the middle of the vibrating rocks to get to the wolf statue.

These same vibrations represent an obstacle. They emit sound waves that resonate as if someone invisible is playing giant cymbals.

Nausea and dizziness make her lose her way. Her vision wants to blur and a certain weakness in her legs makes her kneel down begging for mercy to a being that may be nonexistent.

Whenever she feels desolate, awkward or fearful; her only way to cope with all her discomfort is to change her focus.

She squints her eyes and something in her reveals itself. Her field of vision discolors, the living becomes dead and the dead becomes alive; everything turns out to be what it is not and what it is not can be.

Her whole world consists of a contradictory paraphernalia, an antithesis of her heart.

In this world the heart is a muscle capable of transporting us through sensations that crackle like firewood in a fire. A muscle that makes us susceptible to the ambrosia of the senses.

In Luz's world, her heart renounces this susceptibility and transforms it into a kind of rigidity that is as compassionate as it is just. Compassionate in a meaning related to renouncing fateful thoughts in order to move on to just lucubrations. All with the faith that she will have the courage to release her dreams.

This last line in her reasoning is repeated as she tries to stand up. It spurs Luz on like so many other trials in her head; if only she wouldn't forget so easily and have nowhere to point.

In the heart of a girl like her, fantasy serves her to look beyond, but doomed to just wish or not?

In her world, Luz feels nothing at all. Evil and goodness are exempt in her but Luz can handle them. She manages both forces with respect to her interrelation with the other coexisting beings... as a writer does.

Instead of a trunk with branches, she sees skeletons of wands fused into one. A single one as thick as a trunk.

The nerves of the leaves remind her of the lines that draw some edges of the smile of someone invisible. For her, the leaves possess a magnet that retains these lines on every leaf that exists on this planet.

Grass, sand or earth is something she has never been able to see in any other way. There is no metaphor with which Luz can compare any kind of relief. It is precisely for this reason that she understands that she is about to become delirious, if she is not already delirious.

Once she is on her feet, she walks, staring at the earth. The agitation, the stupor and the imagination are like a sunami inside her. The air becomes ground and the ground becomes air. He cannot replace the ground, but he can make it invisible like the wind.

It is too tempting every bend that can be painted in a thousand and one deep colors. Her rainbow-fogged vision fills her with a paroxysm that she has to let go or it will not let go of her.

Only the earth and her pride can pin her to reality like a plant trying to survive on artificial light.

Her pride digs over the earth that has buried her best memories.

"Why else would I continue to resist my reason here?"

Then her memory drives her to run without fear or fatigue. It takes her through the park where a shopping mall now exists.

Among flowers like lilies or tulips, bushes, trees and a river that has eaten garbage; Luz played with other children and Alexis just lay on the yellow grass at that time.

When Luz got tired she would lie down on the grass and next to little Alexis.

"Someday I will know that no one will be able to betray me because that word will not exist".

At that very moment she did not understand very well what he really meant. Or maybe it was that his comment sounded too adult for such a small heart.

"You know my heart is smaller than yours."

Alexis shook her head, she thought that either she was making fun of him or she was a spoiled child.

Either way talking to someone was fine with him and his mom.

"We're both 10 years old, plus I'm shorter than you, why is your heart smaller than mine?"

Luz didn't answer him, she just showed him a doll with straggly hair.

"Again? What am I buying you for if you're going to leave them in pieces?"

Luz's mother had brought them to the park in the hope that the shy Alexis would make friends.

"What's wrong with her hair if she's not going to show it off for anyone?"

"You always forget, you forget everything and everyone. God give me patience."

Luz's mother looked at Alexis and flashed a pleased smile.

"See, he learns, he instead of eating the two mangoes he has saved one for his mom. Luz I hope that when you grow up you will do the same for me. Your father doesn't want ungrateful daughters."

When the mother turns around, Luz makes a grimace and says without voice for him to read her lips: Did you just see him?

Now Luz understands all that perfectly and wonders if Alexis has been part of the team that created this technology that tries to control a herd of adolescent spirits.

"It's always your fault because in my best memories you are. It's your fault that my reason still torments me."

And as an alluscation, I seem to notice her presence behind the giant wolf made of grass.

"Wolf what are you feeling?

Will your honesty ever answer that question to yourself?"