by F. C. Yee
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cataloging-in-Publication Data has been applied for and may be obtained from the Library of Congress.
ISBN 978-1-4197-3145-7
Text copyright © 2020 Christian Yee
Jacket illustrations copyright © 2020 Studio Muti
Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura
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IAN
1
Several months ago
“I believe you,” Yunie said.
I ground my knuckles into my eyes. This wasn’t going how I’d imagined.
“I—I don’t think you’re listening,” I said. “I’m trying to tell you that I’m the reincarnation of a legendary weapon once owned by Sun Wukong, the Monkey King.”
“I’ve heard of him, Genie. You don’t have to recap Journey to the West for the umpteenth time. Not all of us suck at being Asian as much as you.”
Yunie and I were having a heart-to-heart in the most secure location I could think of when it came to our friendship: the basement rec room of her house. As kids, we’d ousted her father from his mahogany-walled man cave to hold countless sleepovers here, next to piles of outdated golf clubs and liquor cabinets we had no thought of pilfering. As we got older, we stopped hanging out here, preferring to meet aboveground in the light of day. But I thought I needed the emotional backdrop for a confession as weighty as this one. I wasn’t prepared for her treating it like she’d gotten my favorite color wrong for seven years.
“Quentin is Sun Wukong!” I cried. “The guy in our class! He’s him!”
“I believe you said that multiple times.”
I nearly pulled my hair out with one yank. “Demons, Chinese demons called yaoguai—they’re real! They’re wandering the Bay Area as we speak! You know the Boddhisatva Guanyin? I’ve met her. We saved the lives of everyone in the city!”
Yunie looked up at me with her calm doe eyes, as placid as could be. “That sounds like something you would do.”
I’d reached my breaking point. I didn’t want to have to do this.
Before I cut loose, I looked around for anything fragile nearby. Her basement was spacious and floored in fluffy, sound-muting carpet. As long as I kept away from the giant TV mounted on the wall I’d be okay.
I took a deep breath, feeling oddly naked in front of my best friend. “Grow,” I said to myself.
I had been practicing this with Quentin and had gained some semblance of control over how big I got. So instead of shooting through every single story of Yunie’s house and bursting through the roof like a xenomorph, I “merely” changed to about ten feet in height. Enough to make me hunch forward under the basement ceiling.
Yunie shrieked and scrambled backward until the sofa took her legs out from under her. She clambered over the cushions and fell to the floor behind the back with a bruising thud. For a moment I was scared she’d knocked herself out, but then she peeked over the edge, taking cover from my massiveness.
Her eyes were so wide they were mostly whites. “GENIE, WHAT THE FU—”
“Ha!” I pointed a finger the length of a pencil at her, my voice booming an octave lower. “You didn’t really believe me before! You were lying!”
“I believed that what you were describing was real to YOU!” Yunie screamed. “If you told me you saw gods and demons, then of course I would believe that’s what you were genuinely seeing! Genie, what the hell is this!?”
I could tell that forcing her to look upon my perspective-breaking size for too long would make her panic. I was putting her through an experience like the first time I saw magical shenanigans, when I was attacked by the yaoguai named Hunshimowang.
I shrank down to normal size but did it too quickly. Dizziness like a bout of low blood pressure forced me to sit down on the floor. As soon as she saw me collapse with my head between my knees, Yunie’s switch flipped into protective mode.
She leaped over the couch to my side, grabbed a nearby blanket, and wrapped my shoulders with it like she’d been waiting for me at the finish line of a marathon. I breathed in and out, regaining my senses.
“Don’t push yourself too hard,” she said, sensing how much the effort had taken out of me. She stroked my back, trying to generate as much comforting friction as possible. “I believe you. I’ll always believe you.”
I knew she was telling the truth. Yunie would accept a new reality simply because I was the one laying down how it was. I didn’t deserve a person who trusted me so thoroughly, who was so completely on my side.
It should have been me trying to steady her. I started to tear up.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you from the beginning instead of blowing you off and being distant. I was trying to protect you. I wanted to keep you as far away from this nonsense as possible.”
Yunie sniffled a bit, the closest I had ever heard her come to crying. I knew if I looked her in the eyes right now I’d start to bawl uncontrollably. I kept my face pointed downward to maintain a controlled drip on the floor.
“It’s not your fault,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“For what?”
“I don’t know. Thinking that you were sick of me, maybe? Making you feel so beholden? Of course you’re going to have your own important stuff going on. Your own secrets, too. I can’t be part of every single aspect of your life.”
I wasn’t sure whether I felt absolved or heartbroken to hear her say that. But once again, Yunie was speaking the truth. In the long run, clinging too hard to each other would only end in sadness.
Right now, though, we could hug it out as much as we wanted. I squeezed her to my side, my friend’s slight stature making her easy to embrace with a single, normal arm. “You’re okay with all the . . . you know . . . demons?”
“Oh hell, no. I am completely weirded out by the demons. And the gods, too; I don’t even want to think about that. I mean, ew. Are they watching us? Can a god see straight down into my room? Or my brain? Are they reading my thoughts right now?”
I laughed and a tear went up my nose, the salt burning. I’d never grilled Guanyin over the particulars, mostly because I still needed my rational side to function. Yunie was taking the same approach—only faster and better, as I should have expected from her.
She tapped the side of her head. “Your mumbo-jumbo is going straight into the vault of horrible things that don’t exist, right between my stage fright and Australian spiders. Don’t feel obligated to bring me into Chinese Narnia or whatever.”
That was absolutely fine by me. Perfect even. My original plan of keeping Yunie safe through distance was still a go, only I didn’t have to lie to her anymore.
There was one rem
aining problem, though, a magical, rock-hard lump that would be impossible to dislodge from our normal lives.
“Quentin is going to be around for a while,” I said.
“Eh, he’s allowed to stay.” Yunie leaned against me and sighed, trying to digest what his existence meant. “Sun Wukong, the Monkey King, huh?” she said. “You know what’s funny? I originally thought the reason you didn’t have time to hang out anymore was because you and he were hooking up after school. Guess I was wrong. You didn’t fall for each other.”
Ah, hell.
I didn’t say anything fast enough. Yunie must have detected a subtle temperature change in my body, because she pushed me away so she could stare at my face.
“No!” she said, her grin swelling like the crest of an oncoming wave. “Yes?”
Each additional moment I kept silent was another rev of her engine. She brightened and brightened until finally I nodded ever so slightly.
“YES!” she crowed in triumph. “I knew the two of you were going to become a thing! Called that from day one!”
I couldn’t do anything but turn into a beet.
“Okay, spill. How long has it been official?”
“Not long,” I mumbled.
“I take back everything I said. I hate you, and the only way you can ever earn my forgiveness is by spilling some juicy details.”
I couldn’t believe that this—of all things—was what Yunie wanted to hear about. Not the magic or the size-changing or any of that. I tried to come up with a small slice of information that might appease her, but I couldn’t get any words past the gate of sheer embarrassment.
“Come on, out with it,” she said. “How far have the two of you gone?”
I scratched my head. “Uh, us or our clones?” There was a pretty meaningful difference.
Yunie blinked slowly at the word clones and sat back down, disappointed.
“Okay, now you’ve made it weird,” she huffed.
2
Today
“No!” I screamed. “No! No! No! I hate you!”
“Genie, stop being dramatic,” Jenny Rolston said from where she was sitting on my chest. Weekend morning practice had just ended, and I’d been taken by surprise in the locker room. “You’re team captain next year, and that’s final. Now quit struggling and hold still.”
Despite my best efforts to thrash around on the cold, dirty floor, my volleyball team’s former leader managed to pin me down long enough to clip the enamel badge in our school colors to my shirt. Jenny got off me and blew strands of surfer-blond hair out of her face. The freshmen and sophomores watching us giggled and whispered to themselves about the most undignified transfer of authority they’d ever witnessed.
“It’s official now,” she said, leaving me on the ground instead of helping me get up. “If you take that off, I’m going to iron the C-patch to your jersey while you’re still wearing it. What the hell’s wrong with you anyway? I thought you wanted to be captain. Colleges love that kind of thing.”
“Leadership is not my personal brand! I have to rewrite my essays if I want to make use of this!”
Jenny scrunched her face like I was giving her a nosebleed. Maybe she’d thought she could exploit my need for as much application fodder as possible, but she had no idea how deep that swamp went.
“Look,” I said in an attempt to explain. “It would have been okay if I didn’t have to do anything but the coin toss. But you had to go ruin it by setting standards and being an actual team leader. You’ve made us rely on you, and I can’t handle that level of responsibility. You’ve doomed us all!”
“Genie, you’ll learn. And lesson one on being captain is not screaming about how your team is doomed.”
“See? You haven’t left the room and already you regret your decision.”
▪ ▪ ▪
“I mean, seriously,” I said to Quentin as I ducked under a tree branch. “What does she think is going to happen? If I’m captain I have to do things like watch game film, plan team outings, and tell Jiayi she’s doing great even though she sucks and should quit the sport forever.”
“That’s the point,” Quentin said. His hand flashed out, plucking a bug from its flight path. He examined it with mild curiosity before letting it fly away unharmed, his gentleness and control matching his speed. “Jenny knows you’ll be fantastic at all of those things. She wants the job done right, so she gave it to you. You’re the best choice and everyone knows it.”
Even though that statement was patently false, it made me smile. Quentin knew exactly what to say at times.
“All hail Empress Lo Pei-Yi,” he went on. “May her reign be as long and cruel as she is.”
I flicked my boyfriend in the back of the head.
We trudged through the woods in silence. In between the trees, bright green ferns littered the floor, bobbing and weaving as I tried not to trample them. We were technically on public park grounds, in a mountain popular with Bay Area hikers, but far enough off the beaten path that no one would ever find us. There was no obvious reason for anyone to be in this part of the forest as opposed to the other thousands of acres.
I was the only one making any noise with my footsteps. Quentin pulled a Legolas, stepping lightly over the terrain like he didn’t weigh anything. He could probably springboard off a leaf if he wanted to.
“We’re here,” Quentin said, stopping at a clearing in the forest that looked no different from any of the other dewy green patches we’d passed. He took a few steps forward and rapped the air in front of him with his knuckles.
It made a dense, hollow noise. The length of the echo implied that he’d hit something very, very big.
When nothing else happened, Quentin made an annoyed sound with his teeth and knocked again, this time to the tune of “Shave and a Haircut.”
“You’re late,” said a female voice, completing the beat.
A rippling vertical surface appeared, as if we’d been leaning over the edge of a pond this whole time. Out of it stepped a tall, elegant woman who was completely unaffected by the grossness of the heat and insects around her. Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, had her arms crossed in a way that demanded answers from the lowly mortal in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I was ambushed at school.”
Her annoyance at me vanished, replaced with concern. “By whom?”
“My volleyball captain. She’s making me take over for her once she graduates.”
“Genie, that’s wonderful!” said Guanyin. She rushed forward and gave me a bone-crushing hug. Despite not being known for her physical strength like Quentin, she lifted me into the air with her embrace as easily as a Goddess of the Clean and Jerk.
“I’m so happy for you,” she said after putting me back down. “I know how much you wanted more control over your team.”
“I never said that!”
Guanyin shared a knowing look with Quentin. “Sure, you didn’t say it.”
Before I could protest any further, she dropped her fun-time demeanor. “All right, now get inside, you two. We’re behind enough as it is.”
The three of us stepped through the invisible barrier. I always expected to feel the sensation of crossing over the threshold on my skin, but that never happened. Instead I felt the tug and resistance of the magic deep inside my organs, where my different types of qi supposedly collected and flowed from.
Inside, the landscape of the park grounds was perfectly normal. Except for the fact that it was covered in demons.
Sweating, snarling yaoguai. Fallen Chinese spirits. Animals who’d learned the Way to take partial human forms. Sinners from Diyu, the Chinese Hell with either eighteen or one hundred and eight layers, depending on whom you talked to.
Hackles raised, they all attacked at once.
3
Quentin did a backflip, and when he came down, there were six of him.
“Stay put!” he roared in unison, forming a chain in front of me and Guanyin. “Stay put! You’ll all get you
r turn!”
The tide of yaoguai surged against his multiple bodies. Quentin’s line held, but the demons were still close enough for it to feel like they were shouting their problems in my face.
“Shouhushen!” they screamed, half teenagers at a pop concert and half an orcish horde storming Helm’s Deep. “Shouhushen!”
Back when demons first came to Earth it had been an invasion wave, convicts plucked from Hell by the traitorous god Erlang Shen and let loose in the Bay Area to wreak havoc. Quentin and I had defeated the worst of them and foiled Erlang Shen’s schemes to the point where it would have been an exercise in cruelty to forcefully send the rest back to Diyu.
But the Jade Emperor, the ruler of Heaven, had tasked us with managing the yaoguai we’d shown mercy to, rather than dealing with them himself. I was now responsible for the well-being of the slavering demons, by virtue of being the only one who gave a rat’s ass about the consequences. If I didn’t want ogres and goblins wandering around populated areas into the nearest juice bar, I had to keep them away from civilization and hope for the best.
The best, as it turned out, was some kind of quasi-medieval system where each yaoguai theoretically kept to itself on its own plot of land in a centralized area of wilderness. About once a week, I had to visit them to hear grievances, settle disputes, and make sure they weren’t inching closer to the boundaries of humanity.
I didn’t know how we’d settled into this pattern. Maybe it was what the yaoguai gravitated toward, or maybe I’d watched too many fantasy miniseries and they’d imprinted onto my subconscious. I would have been open to alternate solutions because I really, really did not like holding court.
The yaoguai were impossible to get a read on. They seemed to hate every word that came out of my mouth during these sessions, and yet each week, more and more showed up in this designated meeting place to demand my judgment on this matter or that.
“Ugh, what is this, double the number of demons since last time?” I said.
“It was double,” Guanyin said dryly. “Until I took care of most of them. What you see right now are the ones that refused to deal with me and insisted on addressing the Great Divine Guardian in person.”
