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Chapter Three
K i s a
Y oo Kisa had once thought she knew suffering.
But that was before her first turn-around day.
Aboard the SRC Flatliner, Kisa hustles down the ship’s “I-95”—a long corridor spanning Deck 0, and the main point of travel for loading supplies and luggage on and off the ship. She grits her teeth as she pushes the luggage cart down the humid hall, where even the white-painted walls drip with sweat. One would think the dead pack lightly, but alas. It seems Jeoseung’s CEO insists the Flatliner ’s esteemed guests board with every trivial item they could possibly want. Clothing from their past lives. Books. Laptops. Entire TVs. Once, Kisa had the pleasure of loading an entire liquor cabinet onto the ship.
She huffs and puffs through her teeth as she reaches the end of the I-95 and passes the luggage cart on to a solemn-faced grim reaper. He’s dressed in a smart black suit and a bowler cap, which he tips slightly in greeting before wheeling the luggage through the ship door leading to a lowered metal plank, which will deposit him—and the suitcases—onto the pavement of Port Jeoseung, where the disembarking guests will have the opportunity to bring their belongings with them to whatever waits past Port Jeoseung’s terminal. Kisa pants, wiping her brow with a wrist as she lingers by the door, letting a cold kiss of underworld air cool her hot skin.
Death isn’t what she thought it’d be. No, not at all. What she’s seen so far of Jeoseung reminds her of any congested city: towering buildings, cramped coffee shops, narrow streets littered with newspaper clippings, and a central park. The only differences are that the office buildings display buzzing neon signs advertising themselves as the Department of Afterlife Reincarnation (the DAR, said to have agonizingly long lines), the Courtrooms of Hell Sentencing, and an amalgamation of other equally terrifying yet fascinating company names. The newspaper clippings don’t have an obituary column: Instead, they’re drowning in announcements of who was reincarnated as what ( Congratulations to Shim Him-chan on his reincarnation into a puppy! ) and gleefully gloomy gossip about who was sentenced to what hell and why. The central park’s trees are twisted and skeletal, some bone white and others pitch black. And, of course, the city’s denizens who visit the coffee shops and wander the streets are very, very dead. Ghosts. Gwisin.
She’s a gwisin, too, now. Part of Kisa is still fascinated with this, even after seven years—and she itches to research, to seek into the why. Why, for example, has she maintained a corporeal form? It’s not her original one, but it might as well be, down to the exact hue of her wine-brown eyes and the heart-shaped birthmark right above her left brow. Is the soul inextricably attached to the flesh? And why does she still breathe? She doesn’t need to, but her body still unconsciously sucks in the underworld air. A heart even beats in her chest, despite Kisa’s status as very much deceased. Her working theory: She exists in the underworld as she remembers herself existing in the living realm. And she remembers her heart beating, her lungs working. Oh, if Kisa had access to a lab, she could run so many tests…
“Kisa!” a voice snaps at her back, and she turns—wrenching her gaze away from the miserable black skyline of Jeoseung and the jeoseung saja working the port—to see the cruise director, Lee Soo-min. Soo-min stands in the middle of the I-95, forcing other crew members to squeeze by her as she props a hand on her hip.
In her life, Soo-min was heiress to a technology company before meeting her untimely end at the hands of her money-hungry fiancé. At least, that’s the rumor around the ship: Soo-min has stubbornly maintained that she died saving a kitten from a fire somewhere in Itaewon.
It’s unlikely. Soo-min is a samjokgu—a three-legged dog-shifter. And samjokgu famously despise cats. Besides, diving into a fire would almost certainly go against Soo-min’s fourteen-step skincare routine, the details of which Kisa has been unfortunate enough to overhear at staff meetings.
Regardless of the circumstances of Soo-min’s death, however, it’s no leap to say that she was probably the most pampered of them all: hence her assignment as cruise director, one of the most taxing occupations on board.
That’s the gist of the ship—guests who worked too hard when they were living board the SRC Flatliner and are waited on hand and foot by crew members who barely worked a day in their lives. Kisa has appealed, over and over, to Jeoseung’s CEO to revoke her sentencing as a crew member to no avail.
“You were idle,” she’d been told by a bored-looking jeoseung saja with a clipboard who’d been sent back to inform her of the CEO’s decision.
“Excuse me?” Kisa had snapped, certain she had misheard. She’d been exhausted every single day of her life, had worn herself to death in that hospital. It simply wasn’t possible that she’d been marked as “idle.”
The jeoseung saja rolled his eyes. “Yoo Kisa. Daughter of Volkov, Natalia, and Yoo, David. Annual income by age twenty-two…” He widened his eyes meaningfully.
“Excuse me!” Kisa drew herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very impressive (a mere five foot three) and placed her hands on her hips. “I worked myself to death for that money. Have you ever met any shaman who simply prancercised through life without a single responsibility? If you’re deciding who was idle in their life, I seriously suggest that you rethink your measuring system. In fact, I might suggest a new metric with a focus on the dimensional attributes of nepotism and—”
“I wasn’t done. It says here,” the reaper drawled, referencing his clipboard, “that you have some built-up karma from your past life. Seems you were—and I quote—‘one of the laziest freeloading women to exist’ and ‘exceptionally skilled at robbing ATMs.’ Due to an anomaly, you got off easy the last time around…But all bills have to be paid eventually. Be glad you weren’t sent to one of the seven hells,” the jeoseung saja had suggested as Kisa’s jaw dropped. “You’ll serve on this ship until the DAR decides you’re ready for reincarnation.”
“Which will be when?” she spluttered.
A nasty smile. “When your karmic punishment is over.”
Kisa is fully aware of past lives, of course, but she simply cannot conceptualize herself as somebody who apparently stole money from ATMs. Rules, thinks Kisa, are the only things that keep society from falling into utter bedlam. She follows them with an almost holy reverence. So the notion that this is karmic retribution for her past life is utter nonsense. How bad, truly, could Kisa have been? It’s complete hokum, really.
As are Soo-min’s next words, urging her to stop “dillydallying” and get back to work. Kisa clenches her jaw but obeys. If she ever wants to retire from the SRC Flatliner, she needs to be on her best behavior.
For the next few hours, Kisa works herself to the bone, as she’s done for years now. Yet there is no satisfaction of a safe delivery, no joy upon hearing the wailing cries of an infant. There’s only a stack of work that keeps piling up, and up, and up…and that perpetually hollow feeling in her chest, that sort of panging ache for something she still can’t quite put her finger on.
Her old life, perhaps? Before the hospital, before it all crumbled to ash in her hands…The misty, rainy mornings at NSUMD, studying in the cavernous library, chewing on the end of her pen and flipping through the thin—nearly translucent—yellow pages of her treasured textbooks. The coffee shop near campus, where creatures clustered and chattered over mugs of macchiato and frappés. Could that be it?
Yet a small voice deep down asks if it’s something else she longs for. Something entirely different from beloved textbooks and campus cafés. It whispers in half-ignored words that if only she sat down and put her brilliant mind to the psychological puzzle, she’d have it solved within no time. Yet time is exactly what Kisa lacks. So this longing…Well, the reason for it is still a mystery, just as it was the day she died. She calls it a longing for what she lost and leaves it at that.
There’s no time for anything else.
After finishing off-loading the rest of the luggage pile, she grudgingly moves on to her next chore of changing the linens in the Deck 6 cabins alongside a few other girls who normally work in waitressing. It doesn’t matter what their usual jobs are: On turn-around day, everybody does everything.
What Kisa wouldn’t give to be on her usual shift in the SRC Flatliner ’s sick bay. Some crew members who die particularly violent deaths (like, for example, falling off a skyscraper) receive treatment the moment they are assigned to the Flatliner, so as to not scare away the guests.
None of them are at risk of dying, obviously—the treatments are really for psychological purposes: When a dead soul sees their wounds being treated just like they would be in the world above, their identity becomes less intertwined with the injuries of their death. Thus, their form can return to how they remember it existing before the gunshot, the car crash, the fall, the disease, et cetera. Restoration, it’s called.
It’s dull, tiring work…But at least it’s interesting, to a degree.
As she stuffs the dirty sheets into the wheeled hamper, Kisa jolts in pain, something between a shriek and a swear escaping her lips.
The red thread forever wrapped around her pinky tautens enough to hurt. Kisa gasps, stumbling back. One of the girls worriedly asks if she’s all right.
“I’m fine,” Kisa murmurs, attempting a smile before hastily wheeling the now-full hamper out into the corridor, heart pounding and finger screaming in agony. As she waits in the corridor for the elevator to take her to Deck 3, where the laundry room is, Kisa does everything in her power not to look at the red floral knot squeezing her throbbing pinky.
In the seven years since her death, Kisa has come to the rather unfortunate conclusion that it is not a stress-induced hallucination at all. She’s considering another hypothesis instead: that she is experiencing an extremely rare part of the mythological canon, a physical manifestation of destiny that is meant—in theory—to lead Kisa to her soulmate. It took her a while to form this hypothesis—the red thread, even to shamans, is viewed as little more than a legend. Yet here it is, tied to her finger.
As she gives in and looks at it, it wriggles slightly. Like it’s an anxious caterpillar trying to say “hello.”
Kisa is quite certain her Red Thread of Fate is faulty. Seeing as she is, one, dead (has anybody ever met their soulmate after they died?) and, two, in seven years, it has become incredibly tangled. Perhaps Gameunjang Aegi, the luck goddess, made a mistake.
What a fascinating mistake, though.
There is no end to the scarlet string, which seems to span on forever and ever as matted lines of messy, snarled knots and lumps, winding around corners, curling through the hallways, tangling in on itself before stretching out across the Seocheongang River to a place far away.
She has attempted to study its material to no avail. Whatever its composites, the string is untouchable, and entirely unbreakable. It is no usual thread: no indications of cotton, nor rayon. Both those materials can be neatly severed by scissors rather than passing through them like a ghost. In addition to that, the red thread isn’t visible to anyone but her.
Why has it tightened? In all its years of existence, the string has never squeezed her finger like that. Still puzzled, Kisa dumps the dirty linens in the laundry room, where a plump-faced dokkaebi with pointy ears promptly sets to queuing them up for the next line of washing. The vast room of machinery smells like the gallons of detergent used every week: birchwood and lavender. She lingers for a moment longer, letting the rhythmic churning of the industrial-sized washing machines wash over her. Her pinky still feels as if it’s about to be sliced off at any moment, but she doesn’t let it show. Kisa has become quite good at hiding her pain, burying it under mental recitations of her favorite books, which range from smutty paperback romances to heavyweight volumes on the dokkaebi cardiovascular system.
Dokkaebi are known to have two hearts, both of which pump blood throughout the body. The right heart is responsible for blood flow to the upper body, while the left heart is responsible for blood flow to the lower body. One might be tempted to compare the number of hearts to some cephalopods. However, the dokkaebi’s are not branchial, consisting of more than one chamber. When performing a maze surgery on a dokkaebi patient, it is imperative to keep in mind that…
As turn-around day reaches its peak and new guests file on board, Kisa grows more and more troubled. The string has begun to vibrate and—to Kisa’s utter shock—begins to untangle itself, straightening into a neat red line. A moment later, it’s shaking ferociously…almost in warning.
As if something is coming.
As if something is coming for her.
How very interesting, Kisa eagerly thinks, before realizing that she should possibly be quite frightened.