by EJ Koh
Afraid to appear weak, Sera refused to drag her feet and jogged instead towards the training grounds. Training was important for building up the body. Every Spirit had to do it. They palmed the air to make patterns. They drilled their bodies until their feet ran when they walked. They strengthened their form by sparring in pairs and meditating in groups of five. Repeating and cycling. They burned the hard-to-reach structures that the ground fires couldn’t light, and after about a decade of this, an instructor like Quil approved them to begin work on Earth. Once there, Spirits made sure that humans lived without interference. According to the hierarchy, it was their role to guard human lives from Wakes.
Because the system didn’t encourage growth, but rather self-control and containment, only a small portion of their planet was inhabited. From where Sera jogged, she could see the pods and the training grounds full of students nestled between spikes and dips of white mountain ranges. Beyond that, the gaseous earth and rotten-smelling springs burst with boiling water. There was always a haze, steam or smoke. Spirits always sweated the way Sera did now.
What made training horrible was that she couldn’t find a partner. No one would touch Sera or her bogus ideas. They parroted Quil’s behavior. The way he cupped her bruised face in his hand and whispered, “You will go no further than this.” In the eyes of her community, with no partner, she was as useless as the moss along their water pipes or the gas pockets that exploded beneath their feet. With no partner, she could never learn of her potential.
Sera stopped at the weapon’s mantle. She didn’t have sense enough to avoid it.
“How’s Calle doing?” There, beside her: Quil was watching.
Quil’s eyes closed with a seeming sort of pleasure. His stained marble teeth.
“Her right hook is all over my face,” Sera thought without speaking. There was no room in her for another “lesson.”
Quil picked up the rib-shaped spear and held it out. “Go on. Take it.”
The sparring students stopped what they were doing to watch. They picked their noses, picked their ears, their eyes. One boy leaned into his partner and mumbled. Another student, Kale, laughed trillingly, rubbing his breastplate with his absurdly long thumbs. They weren’t even thumbs, more like two extra index fingers.
“Here,” Quil said.
Sera looked down at the spear.
Weapons were for fighters not students, and Sera’s rank was student. She knew the consequences, but her mood made it near impossible not to act. At one point, she had tried very hard to understand the system. The ideals of Spirit came from a place of virtue—the planet’s inhabitants owned no material possessions, none but the weapons they needed. They were not an evil society, she reminded herself, they were magnanimous and selfless.
“No,” she said. “I don’t want the spear.”
Quil righted the whalebone over the mantel and dusted it off, as if allowing her time to change her mind.
Sera didn’t lose her composure.
Quil’s hate was silent on the outside. But inside, she knew he teemed with resentment. No matter how much she tried to give him the benefit of the doubt, he proved his hate time and again.
And he had no reason that Sera could remember.
The other students shuffled closer. Their sandals hardly scuffed the rock, worn down and smudged with char. Quil crossed her and closed his fists. There was a wrinkle, prominent and sharp, across his neck. When she stared at it, he stared at her, but by the time she noticed, he had already turned away.
Ash rose over the grounds. When it reached the horizon the smog took on a new shape—from a single column into countless skinny dark rivers that escaped in all directions.
“Our strength doesn’t come from weapons. It comes from energy,” Quil said to the students. “Nobody knows how we use the energy from our bodies. Nobody knows how to manipulate it. Nobody knows how to fight with it. But it takes a lot more than energy to kill a Wake. A Wakes’ sole purpose is to disrupt us Spirits, disrupt the hierarchy, and reveal our living presence on Earth and turn that planet into a tumultuous battlefield.”
Somehow Sera never got excited about his lectures as the others did. Most of what he said was already known, creed-like things—the energy contained inside their bodies and these blood-hungry Wakes. But Quil always started his lectures this way, and Sera always stood in the back, uninterested, and watched the smoke-covered sky, thinking.
On this day, she heard his name again.
“Azel’s here,” Quil said.
At the shrubless grounds, one squatting student stood.
Another laughed with his mouth closed.
A few rubbed their necks, the others wrapped their arms over their heads, and the rest, like forty of them, did nothing at all. Like a wall made of pale hair and bright faces, they faced Quil.
Quil dug his toe into the dirt. “Now, we have a Wake on the inside. And we’ve had him for a few days.” His forehead creases stacked up to his hairline. Sera thought he must collect dust between those folds.
He paused, met her eyes, and smiled.
“You’ve all only heard of Wakes, but have you ever seen one?”
She shook her head. Stared right back at him.
“We keep it that way until you can fight. Why? There’s no rationale to their thinking. Confronting a Wake too soon, with a weak mind, would drive anyone to believe false truths. Your emotions might get out of control. The system is for your own safety.”
At that moment, Sera decided to meet the Wake for herself. Calle had mentioned him weeks before, and since then, Sera had been thinking about what a Wake could do for her. Wakes were surrounded by decay, the name itself cleaved with destructive overtones. But she tried to separate Quil’s out-and-out lies and the second-hand rumors from the actual fact: Spirits killed Wakes. That’s what they trained for, and Sera knew that seeing this Wake would change her life. Her image of him rocked in and out of focus. Did he have teeth and beast-like yellow pupils and uproarious feet with a bluish fire in his fingernails? Did he get hysterical? Did he feel fear and confusion? If she could understand him, even for the briefest moment, she would know a Wake firsthand, and the others would know that only she was capable of sneaking in to see him, a privilege enough to make her weep with excitement. It seemed reasonable. Calle would—
Never mind what Calle would think.
Sera crouched down behind the wall of students. The tiny grains of desert sand seemed to turn all at once and stare at her.
Smoke was already climbing up over the grounds and changing into yellow clouds. It made everything yellow. The burning had started. She knew it because she could smell the cinder.
Behind her, she overheard Kale and his training partner Nezer. They stood apart from the others while Quil continued to lecture.
“Do you want to go see him?” Kale tried to be casual.
“No. Quil would murder us. It’s against the rules.”
“But this one’s a general. It took all of the Three to get him.”
“Wait. What does he even look like?”
“I don’t know, but I heard he’s killed so many humans—”
“That he actually reforested an entire region of Earth,” Sera finished for Kale.
He and Nezer noticed her for the first time.
Sera continued. “Wakes are opposite from Spirits, they use opposite energy and have opposite goals. Humans call them demons because it’s the closest thing they could think of.” She sat cross-legged and chucked a rock out their way. “Of course no one really knows that but me.”
Kale grinned. Nezer shook his head at him.
“You know a lot, but you don’t know everything,” Kale said, one brow arched. “If you went to see him, well, you’d know a lot more.” He swiped his thumb across his lip. “But we should listen to the sensible part of our minds. We already know what we can and cannot do. Especially you. I mean, I understand. Most Spirits would be scared to look at Azel. But if someone did, that’d be
pretty brave. It might change what a lot of Spirits thought about that someone. They’d be pulled into that person like gravity. Right?”
Surprised, Sera stared into her lap. “Oh—oh. I guess so.”
“Even Quil is scared,” Kale said with haste. “But say you did want to see Azel—all you’d have to do is go through the lower pools. They hold the prison cells just below that. It sounds pretty easy, and maybe they did that on purpose.” He shifted on his feet. “I mean, who in their right mind would go down there?”
Sera watched his face.
Nezer shushed Kale and pointed at Quil who clapped for attention.
“You’re all to go to the valley and start fires without me,” Quil said.
Kale dared to groan as loud as he did.
Quil snapped his head toward Sera. “I heard that.”
“It wasn’t me—” she started. Kale didn’t make a peep.
“You do realize burning is a form of meditation,” Quil said to her. “We have to train our minds as much as our bodies. It helps us enter a state of peace and knowing. It lets us fight the way that we do. With a calm and exacting hand.”
Kale said, “It’s also to practice impermanence.”
“Yes,” Quil said. “We burn structures and hillsides for regrowth. Things that are alive will die and those things will be replaced and the world will keep on going.” He snap-kicked a pebble out of his way and paced forward. “With burning and regrowth hand-in-hand, we see something that exists like it doesn’t exist. That is impermanence.”
For example, Sera’s life didn’t exist. A terrorizing thought if she ever had one.
At the mention of fires, the students slogged back towards the grounds. There was still a dry patch of grass on the hummock that had saved itself from a previous fire. New platforms at the ridge and a greening precipice, the inevitable blaze, the pluck and curl, flicker and ash.
The wind blew. The hem of her robe trembled.
“Go with your training partners this time. Keep each other in sight,” Quil said, standing still where he was.
Kale left first with his disproportionate thumbs. The rest trickled after.
Sera didn’t move. The turned backs of her peers told her that she wouldn’t have a training partner anytime soon. To her surprise, they nodded at her on their way out, as if Quil’s mocking had washed her free of shame and made her closer to pitiable. What a heist.
Sitting down, she focused on the Wake. Imagined him sitting across from her, speaking to her, showing her the part of him that was Earth. Before the question about family ever occurred to her—the same day of the Wake’s imprisonment—she’d gone to the fieldwork mantel and torn out Azel’s index sheet:
Azel, General, IX. XXIII. 83. From Wake. Wars/ Campaign/ Chaos Manipulation. [Ability]: close combat, possession (human world active). White Energy and Black Energy Capable. Ex, area on Earth unknown.
Sera crumpled the piece of paper and tucked it under her shoulder strap. There was no mention of a weapon on Azel. But there was possession, which didn’t trip any wires in her head. Then again, her brain was still whiteout-numbed with exhaustion. You didn’t bounce right back after becoming nearly drained to the bones of energy.
She glanced around and for the third time reviewed the problem with her plan: Confronting a Wake would probably result in Sera being, as Calle had phrased, locked up, beaten, and killed. The others called her an annoyance because they couldn’t believe she would get away with anything she did. They were usually right.
It was a fantasy. Not the easiest sort to have.
To stand in one swift motion, she lay on her back, bent her elbows over her head, rocked her knees up to her chest and flipped upright.
The idea burned more than the salt gathered on the inner cape of her eyelids and more than the grounds licked up by tinder and flame. Sera had to know him because it was personal. Because it was all she had wasn’t as true as why couldn’t she do it? She eyed the ashes greying the waterline at the pools. She didn’t have much and it wasn’t because she didn’t want to. This day, it was possible for her to become what she pretended to be. Alive.
Once Quil was gone and his outline retreated past the grounds, she relaxed. She spit into her hands and wiped them together. Suddenly she caught a light from her periphery. Flinching, she glanced up. Safety did not belong to her, not if it meant having a place in her society. She understood what it meant to be herself was to be ostracized. And everyone knew the truth: she was alone, soothed only by Quil’s disparaging voice, fettered to the inside of her ear, like mold.
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ABOUT EJ KOH
EJ KOH is a poet and an author. Her work has been published in TriQuarterly, Southeast Review, The Journal, La Petite Zine, Susquehanna Review, Gulf Stream, and elsewhere. She was a finalist of the Ina Coolbrith Memorial Prize in Poetry. EJ Koh completed her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University. She blogs at thisisEJKoh.com. Red is her first novel.
Don't forget to like EJ on www.facebook.com/thisisejkoh and tweet her @ThisisEJkoh. She loves to hear from the Red Army--almost as much as she loves eating her chocolate cake.
