by EJ Koh
Sera climbed the spring pools, stacked like a staircase, one over the other, up to the topmost plateau where it was dry. She sat cross-legged, balled her shaking fists, and waited for her keeper. From a distance, you could only make out Sera’s lips, a pure peach. A bright hue hovered over textureless skin, over whitish hair the same shade as her robes and as the landscape suspended behind her.
Calle, her keeper, was legendary. She was a fighter, mean as fire. She chopped off her sleeves and bared her back to show off milk-skin. When she walked, she scuffed or slouched. She eyeballed and winked at anyone good-looking because she could. Her body count of discernable carcasses passed Quil’s by forty-three thousand, five hundred and fifty-eight, Calle reminded him. Bored, she’d let him, Oh, just catch up already.
Sera wasn’t cut to be Calle’s keep. The other students joked about it. Look at Sera’s eyes, they’re black like she saved stones in them. Not like Calle’s. Not like anyone else’s. No one can fight and carry stones in their eyes. One day she’ll slow Calle down. They laughed with mocking graciousness—gracious that it wasn’t them to be outdone, but envious that Sera was Calle’s keep. Shoulders bouncing, Sera sometimes pretended to laugh a little with them. She knew, as much as they did, and even Calle, that she was not as good a fighter as the rest.
In spite of their ridicule and in spite of herself, she’d fished out a plan. A weapon would improve her chances. She could fight with a weapon; she could win fights with a weapon. If she didn’t have anything, she had her trying. She imagined the moment right before she brutalized a Wake over and over: Quil and the students stunned to their knees, Calle touching her forehead to the ground, then looking on, looking on while seized with knowing that Sera had become someone visible to the world. Sera looped that scene in her mind, from their knees to their looks to the dirt on Calle’s forehead, a source of moronic hope until her stubbornness bloomed like welts on her back. She wouldn’t be a student anymore. She would be like her.
Calle appeared across from Sera, through the mist, and mounted the plateau with an air of mint about her. She stood at the ledge, gnashing her teeth, back half-turned, then plopped down and swung her legs off the edge of the plateau. She must have just gotten back from fieldwork. She always seemed a little antsier and more distracted after Earth. The gravity there dumbed her senses. It was a trip to readjust. Calle pinched her brow skin.
“Mother!”
Calle looked up. Her mouth curled down before it sprang up into a smile. In that instant Sera thought she heard the slice of cutlass through fabric or splinter through flesh.
“What did you call me?” Calle said.
“What?”
“Go on. Say it again.”
“I called you mother—”
Calle laughed and clasped her hands over her chest. Even if it was inappropriate and disgusting, like the hairy ass of swine or the gray pulp of rotten fruit, mother was catchy. It had panache. She bundled Sera into an embrace and chomped her teeth so that her chin padded the top of Sera’s head until she laughed too, and they both forgot the desert was hot, that their nostrils burned from the vapor rising off of the springs. From any perspective, there was a zinging light couched between their single shape.
Not really.
That’s not what happened.
“Go on. Say it again.”
“I called you mother—”
Calle curled her fingers tight into a ball, leapt over the flat, and punched Sera square in the jaw. Sera staggered in pain. The hot flash of cut skin seared up along her jawline, round her cheek, past her eye sockets, and into her brain. Her ears rang and panic surfaced, her face reddening. Then she saw Calle at the ledge again, swinging her crossed legs over the water, like no time had passed.
“You should be locked up, beaten, and killed.” Calle tucked her hair behind her ear. “Don’t say that word again. Playing human’s not funny. Not for someone's who’s been alive for almost two decades."
Sera bent at the waist and held her throbbing cheek against her thigh. “It wasn’t exactly supposed to be funny.”
“Be rational. Did you forget the hierarchy? Spirits don’t pretend to be humans the way humans don’t pretend to be roosters or pigs. We have our place.”
By the hierarchy, Calle meant:
SIMPLE HIERARCHY
(1) Mover
(2) Spirits
(3) Humans
(4) Animals
(5) Plants
The hierarchy fostered a sort of responsibility: Spirits were responsible for humans the same way humans were for animals. Because Spirits occupied the gap between humans and the Mover, they’ve been called angels, a ridiculous name. Sera once saw Quil snap his finger, snickering to himself at the implication of angel. Spirits were alive but they weren’t from heaven. They lived on a desert planet that only had daylight.
There were three worlds of consciousness: Spirit, Earth, and Wake.
“And we don’t have mothers,” Calle said. That’s what the pods of space matter and energy are there for. Pods of atoms. Pods of formula, pods developing gendered Spirits. We don’t have birth. It’s too close to human for anyone to be comfortable with—it’s too close to animals.” She dipped her feet into the spring below them. The bottom of her robe steeped in water. “We’ve been engineered like humans, but we don’t have to produce like them.”
Secretly, Sera imagined that she came from Calle. That she was a part of the one who’d raised her. She admitted it was vulgar. Just a bad case of imagination.
“Keep going like that and you’ll forget who you are.” Calle swept her finger across her neckline. “You’ll forget your inner peace, forget that it comes from impermanence. From knowing that everything will break. And only reason can right you.”
“Impermanence, reason—what does that mean? It doesn’t feel right.”
“Your feelings are irrelevant.” Calle’s eyes zeroed in on her. “You know that kind of talk makes the others uncomfortable. Makes them treat you the way they do. You need to be careful.”
Sera smoothed a hand over her cheek and wondered if Calle had hit her because it was necessary to present the ideals of Spirits, or because Calle believed in those ideals.
“Mother! Mother!” Sera jumped over the plateau.
She tested Calle’s commitment.
And Calle made good work of Sera’s jaw. When her hand got tired, she used her elbow, when it wasn’t her elbow, it was her head, bludgeoning forward.
“Mother!” Sera’s words vomited out of her lungs. She couldn’t stop the stink of what she said. It wasn’t true that Sera didn’t know when to shut up. She chose not to. She disconnected herself from the pain and tumbled into the sand with her legs in the air, inhaling the scent of mint leaves. Sera didn’t know what to call the feeling that kept her tethered there. But that smell was what kept her calm.
“No more.” Calle paused. “That’s enough.”
It wasn’t.
“I’ll tell everyone,” Sera said. “I’ll tell them who you are to me.”
Calle fisted Sera’s collar. Held her up until her feet dangled.
With the field cleared, the full view of the pools shimmered like they held stars. When Sera inhaled her chest shuddered. She stared up at the white sky; the wrinkles of its plain face folded over her. She mouthed the word because she’d lost her voice: mother. It didn’t have the precondition of keeper. That was true until mother began to look like the side of her face. Purpled and bellied, spotted like an animal. She couldn’t visualize stars against a black backdrop. Night was the proper word. It would be otherworldly to witness a changing sky. She wanted to go there and see for herself. Something beautiful. To lie in the earth, of earth, with grasslets bowing above her head. To listen to loudness, hurrah, and thunder; to be alive and unreasonable.
“Go back to training.” Calle dropped her onto the sand.
—