RED (Sneak Peek)

Morality is doing what's right regardless of what you're told. Obedience is doing what you're told regardless of what's right.  - protest banner

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PROLOGUE

Sera would never have a relationship with her mother.

By this, she meant her mother was dying. Her mother folded her arms around her. Opened them and folded them again. She did this ten times but it must've not been enough. She wiped Sera's face with the underside of her robe. Sera's forehead and nose and chin were streaked with her mother's blood. The smell of it was sour and un-motherly. The wood dust caught in their throats.

Sera would never piece together all the things that occurred in that moment: the craters in the ceiling, the flesh-chunks that shivered over the floorboards, the wooden flanks soaked from wash to red. She hadn't known a body held so much until it was cut open. Her mother made an awful sound, a thunder of hacks and moans. Her arms grew slack and her shoulders stiffened as if a current had passed through them. They stood in the doorway of the prison room. Her mother folded her arms again.

There was no wind behind the windowless walls.

There was no silver light from the sun outside.

Her mother said: "I can't believe I've asked a demon to save us." Her pupil-less eyes were cruel and perfect like an old silver hawk.

Azel, unharmed and standing against the right wall, blew air out of his nose. "Me neither. Didn't think I'd be let out so soon. Not for this." He was impressed or was he uncertain? With her mother's permission, he grabbed Sera and tucked her into his chest. Leapt backwards and landed low over the paneled floors at the back of the rust-colored room.

Dangling from him, Sera glimpsed at the tops of her knees missing skin-caps. His hand touched the top of her head. "You don't belong here anymore," he said.

She was an orphan, he meant.

Sera looked at the ceiling. She held her breath.

The truth was that there were no angels or demons. There was no god.

No one was watching. No one was there to hear the echo of the dying. But nothingness was still humiliating - that thingness of absence, like space. What was death but shifting space? How space folded the way her mother folded her arms, the entire universe bent and captive like a heart stopped inside a torso. How could a child relate to death except by looking at her own body and thinking, she was alive. She was something instead of nothing. These thoughts looped until silver dots filled Sera's vision.

Azel jumped through the drop in the floor, together with Sera, knowing as well as she did that her mother was going to die. He slid down the crystal pipes beneath the prison room and escaped into the desert air. The stars shuddered like bright white capsules and Sera remembered that her mother had been beautiful.

Quil's voice boomed somewhere behind them.

Her mother's feet bounded towards it.

Sera was consumed by the sound of severed robes and ripped skin. She couldn't raise her bone-split arms to cover her ears. There was no Justice where Justice called its home, not in this world. Someone was screaming now. It must be her, blind and panicked, or awake and furious.

Her mother had never been kind or known how to forgive but Sera would spend the rest of this life hallucinating the sweet mint that hung about her. She would remember the way her mother's scythe curved into itself, not unlike discomfort, or when she watched something amazing, like a body falling into water.