These Sainted Seouls | ongoing

section six: Chae Yi

She was well aware that she was a bitch.

But now, for the first primitive time, she was also a liar.

She could feel the truth of it shaking in her as Morana led her into the mind-city. Chae Yi had seen her brother in this hallway; she had been here before. The memory was slick and fast: a lightening highway that came through her like midnight traffic: she put a thought on it and it slicked away again, leaving only the vaguest of things before her. Part of the problem was her grandmother and the way she had tried to bleed Second Seoul out of her. The cracks in her reality had been clearest when she was younger; after she had gone through the psychiatrists and the herb-women and the secret basement witches, everything was dimmer, almost shakier. But she remembered her brother. They had been standing in that hallway: he was wearing red like a snakeskin, and she was standing before him. She did not know who she was then. But she had an idea that the younger her who could slip into Second Seoul was somehow more golden than the girl who was walking into it now.

"Excuse me," Morana said, and Chae Yi realized she was standing still, her mind moving but not her feet. Her pathetically bare feet.

"I need shoes before we go farther," she said.

Morana shrugged. "You can have mine."

Chae Yi wrinkled her nose: Morana's shoes were something hideous, almost anime but not quite. "I'm fine, actually," she said. She could give herself a certain aesthetic walking into the city like this: her blood thin dress stretched tight over her ribs and her collarbone; the long straight hair; the bare feet. I look otherworldly, she thought, and it's perfect. Because I think I'm walking into hell, anyway.

She did not know why she thought that. It made sense in the perverted parts of her that still accepted realism.

"Aish," Morana said, snapping her fingers, her hair falling farther into her eyes with her irritation. "Get in the lift, will you?"

Chae Yi looked up and realized they were leaving the hallway, and entering an elevator, one that seemed to shake with dead emotion. It was metal, hot but still; she stepped inside and the doors whizzed shut. Morana pressed an invisible button and they were falling downward.

The air seemed orange and sickeningly fast. She was nervous; to hide it, she turned scornfully to Morana and gave her a perfected female-bitch look, one that always made girls shrink away angrily. Morana did not react; she simply stood there, staring at the ground, her hands curled up inside the kawaii sweater.

"So what are you?" Chae Yi said. "You rose from the ground like smoke. Are you one of--what was her name?--Na-kyu--are you one of Na-kyu's evil little minions?"

"I already told you," Morana muttered. "I'm the depression and the self-image."

"What?"

Now Morana raised her head; her eyes were like doll's pupils, infinitely black. "I didn't think you were stupid," she said angrily. "It's not as if we're going into his brain. We're going to Saint Servera--something he built and populated. This isn't what he thinks or how he thinks. It's how he wants to think."

"So what does that make you?"

"Do you know him--in the real world? Do you know what he's like?"

"I know him by reputation," Chae Yi said. For spite, she added, "I almost knew him in bed."

Morana ignored this. "So," she said. "You know how people say he's odd. Like he's something darker and far more twisted than your typical cold chaebol."