The Iron Will of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  I didn’t like it one bit. I owed it to them to mention the alternative I’d passed up. If they thought quitting school for the money was a better idea, maybe I could go crawling back to Ax and beg him for a second chance. I told them about his offer.

  “That sounds like a terrible idea,” Mom said. “College kid nonsense. They think they know everything at that age.”

  “I’m glad you told him no,” Dad said. “It feels like it would have turned you into a different kind of person than you are.”

  “You’re too smart to work for a dumb boy like that,” Mom said. “Go into business for yourself if you want. You’d be good at it.”

  Oh the ever-loving irony, hearing them of all people extoll the virtues of entrepreneurship. I was thankful they weren’t yelling at me for rejecting the easy money. But my father’s words stung a little.

  Becoming a different kind of person than I was was the point. Growth meant change. Adapting to the circumstances of the Universe.

  That certainly had been the point of Guanyin’s lesson to me. I needed to become the kind of strong person who could hold a loss, like her. She wanted me to be a leader who stayed firmly in the present, maximizing the amount of good I could do, rather than dwell on past wrongs or dream about the future. She wanted me to be a leader who could sacrifice.

  I’d learned. After everything that had happened this weekend, I’d absorbed the message.

  Hadn’t I?

  No.

  I bolted upright in my seat and scraped my head against the car roof.

  “Ha! Haven’t seen you do that in a while,” Dad said.

  I pulled out my phone, fingers scrabbling for the onscreen keyboard. I almost locked myself out with wrongly entered passcodes, I was so manic right now.

  Guanyin may have been the ultimate embodiment of all that was good in the cosmos. But that didn’t mean she was right about everything. She could be flat-out wrong sometimes.

  Like about me, for instance. I wasn’t a saint. I wasn’t a worthy follower of her enlightened way of thinking.

  To borrow Kelsey’s term, I was a beast. A rage monster. I was no better than a yaoguai, an iron demon in the shape of a girl. I had to embrace that reality.

  I managed to fit five typos into “are you there?” before sending the message on my phone.

  “Who’re you texting?” Dad asked teasingly.

  The other animal I knew and loved.

  “what’s up? high five cheeseburger guy on bicycle” Quentin texted back.

  Yunie had given him her spoils of war, the phone she’d jacked from that unfortunate bystander. It replaced his old Swedish bricklike model, the one he must have reached a decade into the past to buy. Now Quentin could finally message me like a normal human being.

  I steadied my thumbs and wrote out my plan. The block of words was so long it went past my entire vertical screen. Quentin must have been looking at the “message being composed” ellipses for a good five minutes.

  Once I was finished, I hit send. My thesis statement.

  “r u serious?!?!?! fingernail polish briefcase cat” was his response.

  Okay, so he needed a bit of time to get the hang of emojis. I dove into a furious back-and-forth with him that was intelligible once you stripped out our excesses.

  Your plan, he said. It’s not a plan. It’s speculation. Madness.

  Life belongs to the risk-takers. I asked you if it was possible. Not if you liked it.

  I don’t know. You’ve done that trick exactly once in your entire past life as the Ruyi Jingu Bang. I don’t know if you can anymore. Not only that, there’s the damage it might do to your mind. There’s no precedent for what you’re describing.

  I’ll train so that I can pull it off. With you.

  I don’t know how long it will take to relearn. We may never succeed.

  That’s the gamble, isn’t it? I don’t care how long it takes. We’ll be together while we try. Even if it’s a lifetime.

  Quentin took his time replying to my insinuation that he and I would be together our whole lives. The modern declaration of love, folks. A sideways comment over a text message.

  “we’ll start tomrw,” he wrote back. “peach peach peach kissy face kissy face kissy face.”

  I don’t think he understood what the peach emoji implied. I’d have to explain it to him. Or show it to him. My face flushed at the memory of the night he and I had spent together under a sky beyond Earth.

  “So,” Dad said. “Do you think you might put that school on your list of top choices?” There was a strong note of hope in his voice.

  I relaxed into my seat and stared out the window. The highway carried us into the falling night.

  “I think it’s likely I’ll go back there someday,” I said. “I mean, I left something very important behind.”

  31

  It had been a while since I’d last been in this place. The ground was as white and marbley as I’d remembered. The same electric blue ceiling of sky.

  I took a single long, deep inhalation. My updated preserve ritual, which Coach Jameson had taught me. Over the course of my volleyball career, the relaxation technique had gotten me to somewhere in the middle of the pack in aces, instead of dead last like I normally was.

  I needed that same luck right now. If I screwed this next part up, it would mean the end of the world.

  I ran. My steps caused mini-gales as they pushed the air. The rock vibrated with my impact.

  I hit top speed and left my feet. I went soaring over the ground and delivered a flying knee to the ribs of Xing Tian.

  The titan went skidding across the stone floor, its flesh squeaking with friction against the smooth surface. Its pectoral eyes blinked awake in astonishment. Xing Tian got to a standing position. And looked up at me. I would have been slightly taller than it, even if it had a head on its shoulders.

  It screamed its lungless oath of rage, silently overacting with its torso-face. It reared back to give me a right hook that could kill a god.

  I caught its arm from behind.

  Xing Tian turned to look. It instinctively recoiled in the way an animal without a nervous system might respond to a predator. The monster may not have been capable of true fear, but on some level it knew it had to play defense now.

  “That’s right, buddy,” the second giant me said, my words forming a hurricane. “Behold my final form.”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  I smacked Guanyin on the face repeatedly.

  “Genie, she’s not a passed-out drunk!” Quentin said. “Be careful with her!”

  “Did you give her enough karma?” Yunie said. “Maybe you have to do it a couple of times for it to take.” She mimed rubbing her hands together. “You know, like a defibrillator. Clear.”

  This was the other big risk of the plan. I didn’t need to restore her back to full power; I only needed to wake her up. If I couldn’t do that, then this whole venture was pointless.

  Wait. A defibrillator. I reached into my pocket and rummaged for my chop seals.

  Guanyin choked and arched her back against the marble floor. She started to breathe again.

  Okay. Phew. I was glad she stirred before I ripped her shirt off and slammed my stamps of authority into her heart to jolt her with magic energy. That was a dumb idea.

  The Goddess of Mercy’s eyes fluttered open. “Wha—” she said.

  She bolted upright and nearly smacked me in the nose with her forehead. “No!” She understood that if she was awake, so was Xing Tian.

  “It’s okay,” I said, cradling the back of her skull in case she flopped back down. “We got you covered. Everything is going to be all right.”

  “But Xing Tian!” She pushed me away and staggered to her knees, forcing her way through the gap in our huddle. She gazed up at the events happening in the distance.

  “JESUS CHRIST, GENIE!” she shouted, needing to borrow profanity from me in order to express her shock. “IS THAT TWO OF YOU?”

  Against the backdrop of
the sky, a giant version of me traded blows with Xing Tian, aided by a second giant version of me. It was like a mountain range had come to life and started fighting with itself. Lincoln and Washington ganging up on Jefferson while Roosevelt shrunk down to normal size and rescued the Goddess of Mercy.

  Okay, maybe not the best analogy, but in my defense, it was hard to concentrate when I could see three viewpoints in my mind at once.

  “Two of me plus one more right here,” I said. “The ultimate form of the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”

  Nezha, rest his soul, had keyed me onto the concept. Me and my fellow triplets were more than mere hair-clones. We were split bodies, each one alone stronger than I was by myself.

  “Quentin’s not a three-headed mountain monster though,” I said. “We were planning on holding that in reserve, in case things got super ugly.”

  Guanyin couldn’t process this. “Genie, what—this is—I don’t—”

  “I’ll explain on the way out,” I said.

  “Halabeoji,” Yunie called.

  Ao Guang came trotting over, his hooves clip-clopping elegantly against the stone. Yunie had groomed him to the nines for the honor of transporting the Lady of Mercy to safety. His mane shone like a shampoo model’s, and his armor glittered like magic.

  Quentin helped Guanyin into her mount and took Ao Guang’s reins. We shared a grin. We looked like the pictures of ourselves in my children’s book. The Monkey King and the Ruyi Jingu Bang, leading a holy figure atop a dragon horse.

  “Xing Tian can’t be defeated,” I said as we walked away, cool guys not looking at the titanic donnybrook happening in the background. “But Guan Yu and the Great White Planet helped me do some research, and it can be stalemated. You proved that. All I did was swap myself in for you, and substitute blissful peace for . . . you know. Anger-fightin’. My usual.”

  Guanyin twisted frantically in her saddle, still trying to comprehend the scale of what was happening behind her.

  “Believe it or not, the hard part was learning how to transfer part of my good karma to you to wake you up,” I said.

  “I was surprised she had any to begin with,” Quentin said. I clubbed my life partner in the back of the head.

  “Genie, this is monstrous!” Guanyin cried. “You’re going to leave two-thirds of yourself behind on this plane, holding off Xing Tian!? You’d be struggling for eternity, your mind split into parts, never able to truly focus on a single priority! You’ll never be free of this duty!”

  “Gee, sacrificing myself in a never-ending battle for good? That sort of sounds like someone I know.”

  “This isn’t funny!”

  “Sure, it’s a little awkward,” I said. “I was wondering if the version of me that’s talking to you would have to come back here to swap places with a me over there on a regular basis. You know, take shifts to make things fair. But I think that’s unnecessary. It feels like we’re like the same person at the same time.”

  To prove my point, a big-I gave normal-myself a thumbs-up the size of a grain silo, and then went back to wrenching the ankle lock I had on Xing Tian.

  “So yeah, constant struggle,” I said. “Such is life. If you feel that bad about it, there’s a chance we may come up with a better solution before the end of time. We have a pretty big brain trust now.”

  One of Ao Guang’s crab generals waited for us by the glowing purple portal, its claws extended to serve as a platform that Tiny could stand on. She bowed at Guanyin as we approached, though without zoomed-in vision, the gesture was barely perceptible.

  “Genie, wait,” Guanyin said. She slid off her dragon mount and took me by the shoulders, staring me in the eyes. “Are you . . . taller?”

  “Ugh, yeah,” I admitted. “I kept growing through high school.”

  “Through high school?” Guanyin suddenly looked stricken. “Learning to do this, it had to have taken at least—Genie, how long have you been trying to rescue me?”

  I bit my lip. Guanyin grabbed Yunie and lined us up in front of her. She examined our faces.

  “You’re not girls anymore,” she murmured. “You’ve gotten older. You’re young women now.”

  She hiccupped. And trembled. And began to weep.

  I pulled her close and hugged her hard. “Genie really wanted you to be there for our college graduation, but we weren’t quite ready at the time to pull this off,” Yunie said softly. “We’re sorry we couldn’t come sooner.”

  Guanyin bawled into my shoulder. The Goddess of Mercy, who had seen countless lives come and go over the centuries, weeping over a few lost human years. She had a little bias for individuals in her after all.

  I let her finish crying it out. Tiny had gotten much better at holding rifts open, so there was no rush to jump through.

  “Oh man, we have so much to catch up about,” I said to Guanyin. “The last few years have been absolutely bonkers.”

  “You should see how Genie’s managed the yaoguai on Earth,” Quentin said. “It’ll blow your mind. The situation’s incredibly bizarre right now, but you can’t argue with the results.”

  “We also went on all these spiritual adventures,” Yunie said. “Both across Earth and the other planes of reality.” She turned to Quentin. “We had to have legitimately saved the world like what? Two or three times?”

  Quentin shrugged like he’d lost count.

  I stroked the Goddess of Mercy’s hair. “My parents are doing fine,” I said. “Despite the stress I put them through, they’ve weirdly never been better. Life after college was crazy eventful. I don’t know if the story’s as interesting as the spirit stuff, but it felt about as difficult. It turned out okay, though.”

  “I want to hear about it,” Guanyin said, her voice muffled against my collarbone. “I want to hear about every little detail.”

  I sighed. “If that’s the case, then I’ve also got to tell you about our plans for the mandate.”

  Guanyin jerked away. I’d ruined the moment. “How could you bring that up?” she said, still holding on to me. “That doesn’t matter anymore!”

  “I think it matters,” I said. “Let’s do some math here.”

  I glanced around at my surroundings. “I’m the Shouhushen of the Blessed and Erroneously Named Kingdom of California on Earth, and I’m stronger than I’ve ever been before,” I said. “I have Sun Wukong the Monkey King—who’s also leveled up quite a bit, mind you—at my beck and call.”

  I reached over and slapped Quentin’s ass. He raised an eyebrow, silently promising to pay me back later when we were alone and in private.

  “I’ve earned the respect and trust of two fanatically loyal armies of the supernatural, one demonic and one draconic,” I said. I gestured at Tiny and Ao Guang. The powerful ant yaoguai saluted, and the Guardian of the Eastern Sea did the horse-whinny equivalent of promising me his liver.

  “And I’m literally the only force holding back the end of the world,” I said, pointing at the shifting, tumbling, Genie-shaped horizon. Even though I was sixty-six percent occupied with preventing the apocalypse, I’d never felt so full of energy before. It was a total rush.

  “Also you have me,” Yunie said.

  “I also have Yunie.” An addition of no small consequence. “Taking all of those things together means that if I want to talk about the fact that the goddess who truly won the Mandate Challenge has returned to the living and needs to be fitted for her crown post-haste, and Heaven refuses to listen . . .”

  I cracked the knuckles of one hand by itself, another trick I’d learned. “Well, maybe then we have a little problem that needs addressing.”

  Guanyin was startled by what and whom I was threatening. “Genie,” she begged. “Please don’t overthrow the entire order of the gods just to put me on the Throne of Heaven.”

  I would make no such promise. I simply grinned and let her fret.

  Besides, it wasn’t like I was ready for an undertaking of that size immediately. Or any sort of adventure at all right now.

  A
fter everything we’d been through, we needed a break. We needed to rest, train, prepare, grow. Figure out what parts of ourselves needed to change, and which parts needed to stay the same.

  We had time. Tomorrow was a new day.

  “Let’s go home,” I said to my friends.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Thank you to all my friends and family. Even Karen.

  I’d also like to thank my wonderful editor, Anne Heltzel, and magnificent agent, Stephen Barr.

  And finally, to the fans of The Epic Crush of Genie Lo, the first book I ever published—thank you for sticking with me.

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