Five Down Dead (Sneak peek of Red)

FIVE DOWN DEAD

EJ Koh

After Lili awakened, the Spirits rounded her up with five others and dropped them on an island in the eastern hemisphere. The ground there was wet from the passing rain, and eggshells rimmed the hedges of newly farmed soil. The line of the ocean was as thin as Lili's blued lips. The sky was gray and empty like the pupilless eyes that watched her skin turn with bruises.

The Spirits shackled her to a pike in the ground. The other four captives were dragged past her - their ash-colored ankles scraping the rock - and staked down on either side of her, a foot apart.

"Do you think you have rights?" Baru, the Spirit head, crouched over the ground next to her, brought his knees up to his chin and sat on his skeleton. Surprised everyone by dirtying his white robes. He smelled of salt.

"Humans have rights as citizens. I have rights as a Spirit."

Lili grinned and spit out the gap between her front teeth. One of her blood-molars landed somewhere by her feet. "I have rights because I'm alive."

"Just because you breathe? The universe doesn't owe you anything." He pointed at her torso, where black smoke began to crawl up and shroud her, lick out, twist in netted shocks. "You're not the same as us. Not anymore."

Her black hair stuck to the sweat on her forehead.

A dozen foot soldiers in masks painted with thick brows and open mouths stood behind Baru. He tucked his silver shoulder-length strands behind his ear and turned to them.

"Mercy," he ordered.

The soldiers marched to the first of the five pikes. They raised their staffs and speared the skull of the captive that wore the same robe and mask as them. The sound of it was unnatural. As if the soldiers speared through a crop stalk, not a body. The captive stiffened at the spine, blackness leaving his pale skin.

The soldiers marched to the second pike. Two down. Three down.

"Let me fight." Lili's voice trembled. The ocean foamed white puss as soft as the boils breaking open on her feet. "This isn't Justice." She looked at the expanse of Baru's back between her lashes. His back was the mountain in her life. The first time she felt his back was during fieldwork, in this same hemisphere. It was their first mission on Earth in a small town on the southeast continent. Baru had said, Death is my companion. He meant, our.

Spirits were not angels but they protected humans from Wakes, or creatures with dark energy that curled like black smoke out their bones. Lili had fisted the back of a Wake's head, thrown him into a moist pit, and collapsed on top of the corpse, panting. He was the forty-seventh kill that morning. Standing, she watched the humans move about their days in the nearby town. The humans moved like short breaths, sucked in and out of tiled buildings. Lili straightened her spine. She touched Baru's back with her red hand. He looked at her. Then he looked again at the purple mountains.

Not a week later, during a mission in the deep autumn flux, Lili derailed orders and killed a human. The human had slugged a propeller at Baru when he was spotted trespassing in an abandoned field off the artic strait. Lili dove into the water with the human in her grip and held him until he drowned. She thought: this human is a convict, better his life than Baru's. But Baru thought differently. He chased Lili down cold sewages and frozen pipes as if seeking revenge for the convict, gone. Lili awakened beside a sewage tank, up to her head in feces and her own bile, Baru not a block behind her. She closed her eyes and imagined his back rupturing into an asylum of black ironed prongs. She thought Earth was like her-as suicidal as the water climbing up shore to hold onto something before being pulled away. She realized Baru was wrong about humans. They didn't need saving.