RED

Writer’s Bloq, Inc.175 Varick St., 4th floorNew York, NY 10014

Copyright © 2013 by EJ Koh

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to team@writersbloq.com.

First electronic edition April 2013

Writer’s Bloq can bring our authors to speak or read at your events. For more information or to book an author, please contactteam@writersbloq.com.

Cover design by Cheikh ClarkIllustrations by Kit Mills

CONTENTS

PART

SPIRIT

EARTH

WAKE

SPIRIT

17

67

145

205

6

EJ KOH

7

RED

Attention Red Army,

Throughout RED there are a couple hidden messages and rewards for the cunning few. Look out and give them your best shot. They will give back:

Clue 1: To ask The Mover anything in his AMA look for his gross secret written in one of the illustrations. Pay close attention but don’t get too close to that mouth.

Clue 2: Red War Exclusive: There’s only one way to replace The Mover and take that coveted seat. The Mover lives in the present and fears the past. Pull the trigger of memory with something recognizable to The Mover and you may just cause the fall.

8

EJ KOH

9

RED

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

–protest banner

10

EJ KOH

11

RED

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 twelve times but it must not have 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 unmotherly. The wood dust caught in their throats.

Sera would never piece together everything in that moment: the craters in the ceiling, the flesh-chunks that shivered over the floorboards, their wooden flanks soaked 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 light from the moon outside. Her mother said: “I can’t believe I’ve asked a demon to save us.”

Her eyes were cruel and perfect like an old silver hawk.Azel, 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.” With her mother’s permission, he grabbed Sera and tucked her into his chest.

12

EJ KOH

Leapt backwards and landed on all fours on the opposite end of the room.

Dangling from him, Sera glimpsed at 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 dug-out 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 from somewhere inside the prison 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

13

RED

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.

14

EJ KOH

15

RED

SPIRIT

16

EJ KOH

17

RED

1

When Sera remembered her childhood, she recalled someone telling her: right before you die,

or she imagined, right after you get your heart broken, you will think of a moment that has no profound meaning at all. You, dying, will try to connect memories to an explanation of how you’ve come to this place, but your brain will set up barriers to protect you from any further pain.

On this occasion, it was the same. Three days before her mother died, Sera had a question about family. Family had no profound meaning, but she liked to fantasize about Earth and human traditions to escape the realities of Spirit.

Sera had left the desert pit to meet her instructor at the training grounds. She passed the spring pools, where she didn’t dip her feet because she wasn’t young anymore, and hiked up the stone terraces resting over white sand. That day, the stink of the springs had congealed at the rim of each basin and cooled into a sulfuric jelly that wobbled with the water. The stones were white and the sun was silver—the salt left her teary-eyed through the desert.

Sera had a question but she should’ve kept her mouth shut.Many of the other students had picked up on this rule early. But

Sera never did, which meant she often nursed contusions on her face. Though she’d never made a conscious effort to do so before, Sera

18

EJ KOH

should’ve ordered her feet to walk back to the mantel and return at the start of Quil’s lesson. Early was never a pursuit more polite than late.

Instead, she forgot her manners and said to her instructor:“We’ve got—what’s the word—parents, too. They’re assigned,

assigned by you, but still, they’re like human parents. Except we don’t call them mother or father. We call them keepers.”

Families, or these units in human societies, were the most marvelous things she’d heard of. Each unit was already picked out, and the humans got stuck with whomever. This meant whoever bore them and whoever was born out of them. It was a lottery, a sweepstake person-toss-up. They’d hoped to get a good draw. That they didn’t dislike the people they met, or were lucky enough not to meet.

The practice was straight primate. Quil, her instructor, fondled his chin. Took that ginormous chin

in his hand. Stroked it with fingernails he’d grown out an inch or two, little colorless sheaths that he used to point or beckon. “That’s an interesting point.”

“It is?”“Yes, I mean that’s why we call them keepers,” he said. “So we

can pretend to have families even if there’s no function for them. Even if we’re not bound by history, or tied to creation or sustaining race. Even though we don’t believe in individuality or pretend that someone is unique. Unique in a way that binds them to us. Makes us forget that there’s nothing more than the present. The now. So we don’t have to miss it when it’s gone, when everything will be gone,” and he crossed his arms seriously. “Does any of this sound familiar?”

“Somewhat.” Her tongue felt shriveled in her mouth.He looked over her head for the other students who had yet to

trickle in, then pivoted towards her, toes peeking out from under his robe.

His eyes said, I care for you. I condemn you. She knew never to trust someone kind with wrinkles in the mean

19

RED

areas: down the mouth, under the nose, between the brows, none around the eyes. Age didn’t make you ugly. Age made you readable.

“Go to Calle,” he said. “Go to your keeper and call her mother.”When she looked at him, she thought she saw his mouth pucker,

but his hair, furled by the wind, wound about his face and covered it.

—

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.

Sera climbed the spring pools, stacked like a staircase, 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 see only 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

20

EJ KOH

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

21

RED

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

22

EJ KOH

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

23

RED

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.

—

24

EJ KOH

25

RED

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.”

26

EJ KOH

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.

27

RED

“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

28

EJ KOH

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.”

29

RED

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.”

30

EJ KOH

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

31

RED

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.

32

EJ KOH

Enjoyed this sneak peek into the Red world? This is just the beginning.

Join the Red Army at www.redthenovel.com and receive a complimentary download of Red on its official release date!

Want more Red now?Check out the Red tumblr at www.redthenovel.tumblr.com and find

out if you’re a SPIRIT or a WAKE at bit.ly/wakeorspirit.

33

RED

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 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.