by F. C. Yee
Of course the room had to be packed today. Everyone was laughing at us. Even without the boost from our half-assed making up, this was the kind of drama that could power Yunie for weeks. She’d be queen of the school by the end of it.
I, on the other hand, needed to shut this down. I put down my friend, grabbed my whatever-Quentin-was, and hauled ass out the door.
“What the hell was that?” Quentin asked once we were safe from prying eyes. “Did you tell her to do that?”
“No,” I said. “She’s upset about you and Rachel.”
Quentin furrowed his brow. “Why would she be upset about that?”
“I have no idea,” I said. The benefit of time had given me the ability to speak to Quentin in monotone, rather than whatever bird language I was yelping this morning. “I’m certainly fine with it. All I ask is that you not carry on with her right in front of me.”
He frowned again. “Everywhere is right in front of you, you know that?”
Ahem.
I knew Quentin was referring to my true sight. If I ever turned it on at school, I’d be able to see him no matter where he was. Deep down, way deep down, I knew that was what he meant. No question.
But.
There was also the slightest chance that he was either A) making a comment about my height like he’d never done before, in a “yo’ momma sits AROUND the house” sort of joke, or B) accusing me of being clingy and a tagalong, which honestly felt a lot worse.
I didn’t want to play interpreter in my current mood. I shut my eyes and walked past him.
With nothing going the way it was supposed to, I did what I always did. I threw myself under the mountain. Schoolwork.
That afternoon in study hall I was so deep in a paper that it took me a minute to notice the fire alarm ringing.
Someone shook me gently by the shoulders.
“Genie,” Androu said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
I blinked and looked around the classroom. Everyone else had left.
I swatted off his attempt to take me by the hand and ran into the hallway to see what was going on.
The air was hazy, like someone had smeared Vaseline on a camera lens. I got that there was a fire in the building somewhere, but this was too much smoke, too fast. SF Prep wasn’t made out of dried pine needles.
Red Boy, I thought to myself in a panic. We spoke the devil’s name too many times and now he was here. I turned on true sight.
And instantly regretted it. The irritating smoke became full-blown acid. It felt like I’d just scrubbed my pupils with sandpaper. I couldn’t keep the vision going for more than a second before doubling over in tears.
But it was enough to catch a quick glimpse of blue-black light. A yaoguai, in my school.
I started pushing in that direction.
“Genie!” Androu shouted. “You’re going the wrong way!”
I hadn’t made it much closer to the source of the demonic energy when I noticed a teacher slumped over in his classroom, passed out. My first thought was that someone had cast sleep on him, but it could have also been a regular old fainting spell. Mr. Yates wasn’t exactly a spring chicken.
Androu came running up behind me.
“I don’t know how you saw him, but thank god you did.” He scrambled past the student chairs and wrapped his arms around our AP calculus teacher’s sandbagging weight, hoisting him away from his desk.
“He’s still breathing,” Androu grunted. “You should have stuck to that Paleo diet, Mr. Yates.”
I bit my lip. I could help him carry the body out. But in that time the yaoguai . . . there was no way to tell how many people the demon had its hands on right now. I made the same choice as I did when I bailed on Yunie and my family at the auditorium.
“I saw someone else who needs help,” I lied.
“Go,” Androu said. “I’ll be fine.”
I left the classroom and ran down the hallway at a speed that would have made him or any other witnesses do a spit-take. The smoke tore and stripped at my face until I had to slow down.
Right when I thought I’d have to crawl on my hands and knees to get any farther, I heard a violent crash in one of the classrooms. I pressed myself against the wall outside and tilted my head around the door to take a peek.
There were two people fighting in the back, rolling around behind the lab tables. The air in the classroom was soupy with grit. There was no way normal people could have exerted themselves in it.
“Quentin!” I shouted. Just the one word made me want to hack up a lung.
“Genie! Stay back!”
The brawl spilled over the table into view. Quentin had his opponent in a headlock. The struggling figure in his grasp was . . . also Quentin.
There were two Monkey Kings.
“It’s the Six-Eared Macaque!” said the one who was getting his trachea squeezed. “He’s a shape shifter! He copied my form to infiltrate the school!”
“You’re the fake, you bastard!” said the other. “You set this fire so she wouldn’t be able to see through your disguise!”
A wave of anger washed over me. I’d been expecting the king of all monsters and instead I got two clowns playing grab-ass with each other.
I ran into the room, gathering all my frustration into my fist, and punched the one on top in the face. He went sprawling back over the table.
“Thanks,” the other Quentin said. He rubbed his throat. “I knew you could tell the real—”
I kicked that one in the stomach. He curled up and gasped on the floor.
I backed away to block the exit and tried true sight again. Not a good idea. The smoke in the room flat-out blinded me. By the time I recovered so had the two Quentins, and we were now in a three-way standoff.
“He knows everything I know when he copies my form,” said the one on the left. “Secret questions won’t work.”
“Then how did you beat him last time, back in the old days?” I said.
“The Buddha intervened,” said the one on the right.
The Buddha. Oy vey. I dug the heels of my hands into my eyeballs.
Wait a sec, I thought. The Buddha could help me after all. I raised my head and put on my best ultra-pissed-off face, which wasn’t too hard given the circumstances.
“OM MANI PADME!” I shouted, leaving off the last syllable.
The two Quentins were identical down to the last hair. And they were both wearing my earrings. But only one of them involuntarily cringed in fear for a split second like a whipped dog, his body flooding with whatever the monkey god version of cortisol and stress hormones were. Knowing of great pain was not the same thing as having actually suffered great pain.
I turned to the other Quentin. The Six-Eared Macaque, whatever the hell kind of yaoguai that was, realized his mistake in the face of my aborted spell. It threw him off to the point where his disguise briefly slipped, Quentin’s eyes and mouth rippling away into a smooth, featureless surface.
“Psych,” I said to the faceless man.
Quentin and I crawled outside the building and flopped onto the grass. I was bleeding from a gash across my forehead that he promised would seal itself and disappear within minutes, as long as I didn’t die first. With the way I felt, we’d have to wait and see.
Quentin grabbed his own fingers and pulled, relocating his joints. The popping noise made me want to vomit.
“Dear god,” I croaked. “How did . . . why was that . . . so hard?”
“He was an identical copy of me,” Quentin said. He spat a bloody tooth out to the side. “What were you expecting, a pushover?”
I watched his blood sink into the ground and sprout a little daisy with perfect white petals. Whatever. I was beyond surprise when it came to Quentin at this point.
“He seemed so eager to get away from us before that I thought he’d be weaker,” I said. “But he fought like a prison inmate from Krypton. He nearly killed the both of us just now!”
“You know we would have had a bigger edge
if you ever let me use you as a weapon.”
The bad atmosphere between Quentin and me must have also passed if he was bringing up this topic again. Hooray for a return to normalcy. “I told you no already.”
Quentin pouted. “Think of it as a deeper, more intimate form of teamwork,” he said. “There’s no shame in it. If anything, you’re the dominant one when we couple ourselves like that.”
“Okay, so part of why I will never fight with you as a staff is your inability to describe the process without sounding like a total pervert,” I said. “Besides, I can’t imagine a worse opponent than your evil doppelganger. As long as you don’t get your ass copied like a brand-name handbag again, we’ll be fine in the future.”
“I don’t know,” Quentin said. “There’s Red Boy . . .”
“When I saw the fire I thought this was Red Boy.”
He winced. “If it had been Red Boy, there wouldn’t be any school left.”
We lay on the lawn for a good while, gulping the clean air and prodding our bruises for deeper breaks.
“I need to apologize,” I said.
“For what?”
“Making you think I was ever going to say that spell.”
Quentin smiled. “I’m sorry, too. For believing that you actually might.”
I hesitated.
“Where were you after Third Period?” I said. “Before we saw each other at lunch?” I felt pretty stupid asking; there were more important things to talk about.
“In the computer lab with Rutsuo,” he said. “Why?”
That was all the way on the other side of the school from where I saw him playing tonsil hockey. “Really? You weren’t with Rachel?”
Guilt dawned over Quentin’s face. He ran a hand through his hair.
“I’m sorry for what happened earlier,” he said. “I know you don’t like her much but I didn’t realize helping her with her Spanish homework would upset you. I’ll stop.”
I thought about turning on true sight to verify his statements, but decided to simply trust him instead. “That’s all the two of you do together?”
He looked genuinely confused. “Yeah. What else would I be doing with one of your classmates? I have to fit into this school if I want to be near you, and everyone just studies all the time. You’re a bunch of gigantic nerds.”
Well there was my answer. It was the Six-Eared Macaque that had gotten to first base with Rachel. I cringed on her behalf and felt supremely glad that I’d sent the asshole who’d duped her to Hell.
It was going to be pretty awkward for Quentin though, the next time they ran into each other. In a lingering fit of pettiness I declined to warn him, even though the real Quentin had done nothing wrong.
“You can hang out with whoever you want.” I closed my eyes and leaned back against the nearest tree. “It’s not like I own you or anything.”
Once Quentin and I were able to make ourselves presentable enough, we circled around the building to join the rest of our class.
The trail of smoke leading into the sky only made it seem bluer and clearer by contrast. The grass under our feet was as crisp and green as money. Even the plain, redbrick façade of the school looked handsomer than most days. Good old SF Prep! Dinged up a bit by today’s events, but still standing proud.
I could feel my wounds melting away like Quentin said they would. The tingling sensation was mildly euphoric. But even better than the mutant healing factor was the sense of closure. We’d found the faceless man, sewn up the loose thread. We’d corrected our mistake and could close the book on this case.
We ran into Mrs. Nanda coming the other way around the building. She was wearing a bright-orange safety vest over her dress and carrying a walkie-talkie.
“Genie! Quentin! Where were you two?” she cried out, angry and relieved at the same time. “You know our class’s rendezvous point is by the baseball diamond! I was worried sick!”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Nanda,” I said. “The, uh, smoke got too thick and we had to use the opposite exit. We’re fine.”
“Well get over there right now and stay put!” She pressed the button on her handset and it squawked to life. “I found Lo and Sun,” she said. “Repeat. Lo and Sun are with me.”
The walkie-talkie beeped back. “Affirmative. What about Park and Glaros?”
Quentin and I stopped walking at the mention of Yunie’s and Androu’s last names.
Mrs. Nanda’s voice wavered as she spoke. “Still no sign.”
“I don’t understand,” said the person on the other end. “We’ve done a full sweep. A bunch of the kids said they saw them before the alarm went off. Where’d they go?”
“I’ll check back in the East wing again, including the locked areas,” Mrs. Nanda said. “Maybe they got past the doors somehow. Do another head count just to be sure, and call their parents.”
Our teacher hurried off, concern for her missing students quickening her pace.
The siren of a fire engine wailed louder. Approaching. Imminent. My words echoed in my head.
An evil copy of Quentin.
A copy of Quentin.
According to the book, Quentin could make copies of himself.
“What are the signs of spiritual power in a layperson?” I asked, swaying where I stood, a palm tree buffeted by a storm. “How do demons choose their prey?”
“If you’re not a monk like Xuanzang, then the biggest indicators are . . .” Quentin’s eyes widened. “Unyielding moral character. Or exceptional talent.”
I began to tremble.
“Genie.” Quentin gripped me by the arms. “Genie, breathe.”
I couldn’t feel his hands on me. I couldn’t feel anything. I would never feel anything again.
Quentin guided me across the school lawn to a side street where no one would see us. It took a long time. I was deteriorating rapidly.
He set me gently down on the curb. I squeezed my knees to my chest. I wanted to be small, to shrink myself until I died.
“We won’t find her,” I choked out over the tightness in my throat. “If the earrings aren’t going off then they’re not working for some reason. I won’t know where to look.”
“Genie, don’t give up.”
Quentin was doing his best to be resolute, but even he couldn’t keep the act going. I could tell he thought the odds of getting her back were slim to none.
He began walking in a circle. “Think,” he said out loud to himself, rubbing his temples. “Think.”
I had never seen him do this before. He must have been truly desperate.
“We don’t know where he is,” Quentin muttered. “We only defeated a copy of him before. But if he took two humans for whatever purpose, he would have done it himself.”
I choked back a sob. Yunie and Androu didn’t even have names anymore in Quentin’s clinical triage.
“There’s only so far they could have gone,” he said. “The farthest away they could be is . . . as far as I could have taken them.”
He stopped pacing. A glimmer of hope poked through in his voice. “The Macaque’s not an ordinary demon. He’s not setting off the demon alarm . . . because he’s me. He’s me, down to the last hair on my head. He has my looks, my smell, my aura. My aura that reacts to your aura.”
Quentin kneeled down in front of me. “Genie,” he said. “I might be able to find them using you as a signal. But you have to be in a state of complete disconnection for your aura to be strong enough. This is a long shot and I know it’s never worked in the past, but I need you to calm yourself and—and—”
I knew what he was asking. He needed me to meditate.
“You can do it,” he said. “Just empty your mind and think of nothing. Nothing at all.”
I didn’t protest. This would be easy.
I took one last look around. The street was still empty and silent, the din of the emergency vehicles having ended. The firemen were probably making their way through the halls of the school right now, searching for two students who fi
t Mrs. Nanda’s description.
I closed my eyes and found only hollowness inside me. I didn’t want to continue anymore. I wanted to sever myself from the Earth completely.
A deep chime erupted from my core.
It was as if someone had struck a giant iron bell with a sledgehammer. Concentric rings of energy shot out from me in every direction. I could sightlessly feel them carry over the landscape, like I had joined the ranks of whales and bats and other creatures with echolocation.
“Stay here,” I heard Quentin say. “I’ll come back for you once I find them.”
He ran away so fast that a small dust cloud blew into my face. I opened my eyes. They were blurry with tears, so I could have been seeing things, but it looked like there was a geometrically increasing number of Quentins speeding off into the distance, chasing the invisible sonar waves of my aura.
I had no idea how long I had been sitting there in the street when Quentin returned. Even the position of the sun failed to register for me.
He came in hot. I felt the impact of his landing, a small quake in the ground under my feet, and then he was by my side again. Like he’d never left.
“Get on!” he shouted in my ear. “Hurry!”
He wouldn’t have motored like this if the situation were either irrevocably lost or saved. But I couldn’t share in his hope. I was still numb.
I wasn’t moving fast enough, so he swept me onto his back, and we were airborne.
We landed in the middle of a tree grove. We’d traveled all the way to the city in one leap, touching down in the forested park that drivers had to pass before crossing the landmark bridge where Quentin first taught me how to use true sight.
The eucalyptus trees reached to the sky, forming bar codes against the waning daylight. There was no beaten path anywhere near us. The woods were silent, strained free of man-made noise.
This was the site of a showdown. Handpicked for maximum effect. The director of the scene stepped out from behind a thick tree trunk, still wearing Quentin’s face.
