by F. C. Yee
I could only laugh at his brutal honesty.
“That’s partly why I chose the nearest national park,” I said. “I’ve never been.”
“What else do you want to do?”
“It’d be cool to stop a crime in progress. Like a superhero. It’d have to be a regular, human crime. I don’t know why, but yaoguai wouldn’t count.”
“Of course not. You’d need the change of pace. Anything else?”
“I want to destroy something.”
He was taken aback at how quickly I said it. And perhaps at how much I meant it.
“I want to lose control and utterly wreck something,” I said. “I don’t know what. Probably not anything anyone cares about, like a building. But maybe a boulder. Although some people would be angry if certain landmark boulders were destroyed, so I can’t do it in the park. I’d have to go to a quarry.”
“You’ve . . . given this some thought, haven’t you?”
“Yeah, that’s not a Ruyi Jingu Bang desire. That one’s pure Genie.”
“You know where you could really go nuts with your powers?” he pitched. “Heaven.”
“I’m sure that would go over well with the other gods, seeing as how I wrecked the place the last time I was there.”
“I’m serious,” he said. “There are so many holy mountains that no one uses. The place is infinitely big; it won’t matter if one tiny part gets leveled.”
He sat up and faced me.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you come with me to Heaven for a bit? As my guest? We can check out the Peach Banquet together. With you there, it might be tolerable. And if you don’t like it, we can go break stuff. It’ll be fun.”
“Isn’t there that time difference thing? If I’m in Heaven for a day, I’m gone for a year on Earth.”
“So?” said Erlang Shen. “Maybe you deserve a vacation. A semester abroad. What people never tell you is that a day in Heaven is worth more than a hundred years on Earth. Earth sucks.”
It was awfully tempting, I had to admit. Earth did often suck. Walking away from everything might have been just what I needed.
I sighed. But still.
“Not happening,” I said. “My mother would—”
“To hell with your mother,” Erlang Shen snapped.
It was an uncharacteristic flash of temper. When I looked at him, he withdrew immediately and shrugged.
“Thanks for the offer,” I said. “But I think I’ll pass.”
I got up to leave. It was a long train ride back, and I was already late. Mom would be furious. “I’m gonna do a quick yaoguai check here before going home.”
“Wait, wait,” he said, suddenly alarmed. “You’re just using true sight randomly now? Without Guanyin’s warning?”
“It’s my new paranoia in action,” I said as I pressed my temple.
The park was all clear. Maybe demons preferred to sunbathe in less-trendy spots. I glanced at Erlang Shen, who seemed a little embarrassed at being laid out in all his godly glory.
He needn’t have been. The pulsing waves of energy radiating off him would have knocked me to the ground, but I was used to the effect from Quentin. I gave him a reassuring smile.
“That reminds me,” I said. “Quentin told me it’d be dangerous if I went to Heaven. Did you have a spell or something that would protect me?”
Erlang Shen said nothing.
“Or was he lying about it being dangerous? He said my humanity would be burned away, but he could have been making up an excuse to get out of taking me there.”
Erlang Shen still said nothing. Not even a mumble.
I frowned.
I had only been speaking in a by-the-way manner, but something wasn’t right. I gave Erlang Shen a closer look. There was an odd cold spot on his flank where the spiritual heat was completely missing, like he’d donated a kidney to someone. Given part of his godliness away.
“Hey,” I said, ignoring the blistering sensation on my eyeballs. “I asked a question. How were you planning to bring me to Heaven without killing me? I’m talking about me as in Genie Lo, not the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
Erlang Shen puttered his lips in frustration. “You know it’s really rude to ask someone a question with true sight on. Don’t you want to turn it off before I answer? For the sake of good manners?”
“I don’t.”
“Then I suppose I have no choice but to tell the truth,” said Erlang Shen. “I was planning on you dying.”
No.
It couldn’t have been.
I didn’t want it to be.
“You really should have come with me when I offered,” Erlang Shen said, his voice suddenly laced with venom. “Instead of being such an unpleasant girl. Humans can only be taken to Heaven if they’re willing to go. There was no need for a fuss.”
I tried to put the pieces together in my head as fast as possible. Why. How. Where. As if solving the greater mystery would make the immediate danger in front of me stand still.
But of course it wouldn’t.
I slowly clenched my hands into fists. “Sorry to disappoint,” I said. “Apparently I’m a well-known fuss-maker.”
“You really think you’re going to fight me?”
“I’m guessing I have a fair shot.”
“You misunderstand. There was a reason why I approached you here, in a crowd.”
He waved his arm across the field of sunbathers as if to wipe them all away. “Are you willing to sacrifice these people to deny me my prize?”
I didn’t answer. I hadn’t yet seen a god or demon perform deadly, offensive magic, but now was not the time to test whether Erlang Shen could throw lightning bolts.
I took a deep breath.
“Scream if you want,” he said. “I don’t care about the Jade Emperor’s secrecy anymore. There’s really nothing you can say at this point that will do you any good.”
Sure there was.
“NA MO GUAN SHI YIN PU SA!” I shouted, dropping to my knees. “Salutations to the most compassionate and merciful Bodhisattva!”
Erlang Shen’s eyes went wide.
Only a few people looked our way. This was the city after all; people screaming unintelligibly in public spaces were as common as pigeons.
But even still, there were some witnesses to Erlang Shen fritzing into thin air where he stood, his tail between his legs.
Their shocked expressions became their portraits. Every Frisbee stopped its journey through the air and decided to hover over the lawn like a UFO. A dog was caught mid-bound, a happy smile frozen on its face.
It occurred to me that I’d never seen Guanyin arrive with my naked eyes. A glowing fireball grew out of the air twenty feet up, like the way a child would paint the sun in the corner of the paper. It was like the brightness of a welding torch with none of the discomfort of looking at it. The sphere reached the limits of its containment and burst into a nova ring that spread over the entire field.
Guanyin stepped down onto the Earth as if she’d taken the stairs. She looked at me in my supplicant’s pose, puzzled over why I’d summoned her. Especially after how poorly our last conversation went.
“I know where the remaining yaoguai are!” I shouted at her. “And I know who’s responsible for setting them free! I need to talk to Quentin, right now!”
The goddess frowned, then reached into her back pocket.
“You know you could have just called him yourself,” she said, putting her cell phone to her ear.
35
“I told you he was a prick!” Quentin said. “What did you think, I was saying it for funsies?”
He was shouting partly because he was still mad at me and partly because the wind rushing by this high up in the air made it hard to hear.
“I thought you were jealous or something!” I said. I felt my grip on him loosening as he made the turn on his somersault and clutched his warm body tighter to mine. I’d missed that feeling.
“Why would I be jealous? That’d be like you getting jealous
of Guanyin!”
“Wait, you think I’m in the same league as Guanyin? Quentin! That’s the sweetest thing I’ve ever heard!”
His skin flushed all the way up to his neck. “Focus! What are we doing here?”
“It’ll make more sense once we land. Trust me.”
The demons hadn’t been appearing randomly. They’d been dealt out like cards from a pack. And to do that required a home base nearby, one that could keep them hidden if I swept over it with true sight. There was only one place in the entire Bay where my vision was blocked, ever since that first day on top of the bridge.
The wildfires burning in the remote headlands north of the city. They created shrouds of smoke—the only substance that Sun Wukong’s golden eyes couldn’t penetrate.
Quentin landed us on a hill upwind of the blaze. The scrubby ground, brittle from the drought, crunched beneath our feet. The greenery on the surrounding slopes was fighting a losing battle against the brown.
Pillows of smoke nestled over the peaks, only ascending with great reluctance. I couldn’t use true sight in a place like this, which was exactly what Erlang Shen had been counting on.
Quentin and I rounded a bend and saw the flames. They weren’t sprawling, but more like a patchy film of flickering orange over the landscape. Had they been any bigger the fire department would have attacked them in force.
As they were, it was a controlled burn. And the person in control was the shirtless, bright red man sitting on the ground cross-legged, with his back to us.
We flanked him as quietly as we could, ducking behind shrubs and rocks. The gentle roar and crackling of the flames masked our footfalls.
His skin was the same color as an artificially ripened tomato. I thought he might have been meditating, but it turned out he was engrossed in a handheld video game. Every so often he would inhale deeply and then blow out through his mouth. The entire fire-line glowed brighter when he exhaled, like one giant tinder puff he was keeping stoked with his breath.
He did this absentmindedly, without looking up from his screen. It was a chore he’d been assigned.
Quentin and I hunkered down behind a boulder.
“That’s Red Boy,” he whispered. “How did you know he would be here?”
“Process of elimination,” I said. The way Erlang Shen had clammed up in the park under the influence of true sight made it clear—this was about what I couldn’t see rather than what I could.
“You think there’s more?”
I nodded. “I’m pretty sure the other demons who escaped Hell are hiding somewhere close by, using the smoke as cover.”
“Why would they be doing that?”
“Because I told them to,” Erlang Shen said.
We floundered around looking for him but couldn’t spot him. We needed to look up. He was hovering gently in the air behind us, two stories off the ground.
Quentin lunged deep. I didn’t hold him back. I’d learned my lesson with Tawny Lion to fight first and ask questions later. The Monkey King shot forth like a bullet, his big traveling jump weaponized.
Erlang Shen seemed to have expected this. He banked to the side, Quentin’s wild charge clipping him in the foot. The impact spun him around in the air like a top, but that was it. He came to a halt as purposefully as a figure skater.
Quentin’s arc was much less graceful. He went careening off at an angle, unable to control his motion once he was off the ground. He landed on the hillside, throwing up a puff of dust like a cartoon coyote.
The advantage that Erlang Shen had, being able to truly fly, was embarrassingly obvious. But to drive home the point, he swooped over to Quentin, grabbed him by the ankle, and flew back to me, using his speed to slam Quentin into the boulder. There was an awful cracking sound, a billiards break. It all happened before I could even move.
“Oh don’t look so horrified,” Erlang Shen said. “It takes more than that to put the ape down.”
Quentin staggered to his feet. The wind had been knocked out of him, but hopefully nothing else along with it.
“What are you up to, you hundan?” Quentin spat.
“He wants the Throne of Heaven,” I said. “He’s sick of being under his uncle’s thumb, so he’s going to take it by force. And to do that, he needs the weapon that nearly conquered the gods once before. A full-power Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
“The real version,” Erlang Shen said. He bobbed on the air currents above us as if he were a buoy in a harbor. “The staff, that is. Not this human you’re pretending to be.”
“That’s why you freed the demons from Hell and sent them after us, one by one,” I said. “This was some kind of sick training regimen.”
“Active recall combined with progressive overload,” he replied. “The best way to remember old skills and develop new ones. I even took care to send yaoguai you’d beaten in the past, so that your body would ‘remember.’ Hence why I needed the jailbreak.”
He’d been challenging me, ramping up the difficulty of my opponents bit by bit. I couldn’t have come up with a better study plan myself.
“Granted, I didn’t do a perfect job, since you don’t have all of your abilities back. You seemed particularly determined not to change size or split into copies. But you’ve baked long enough. I’m done waiting.”
“Oh, and speaking of baking,” he said. “Shenyingdawang! Could you spare a moment?”
I didn’t know who he was talking to until a voice rang out. “One sec. I’m almost at a save.”
Quentin’s face took on an expression I’d never seen on him before. Absolute fear. In one swift, fluid motion he threw me over his shoulder and started sprinting away. Fleeing.
Erlang Shen laughed at us instead of giving chase.
“What are you doing?” I shouted at Quentin.
He didn’t even take the time to respond. He zeroed in on a ditch and threw me into it, hard. Then he dove on top of me.
The sky above turned into plasma. It felt as if we were trapped in one of those Tesla globes, blanketed by neon filaments that reached for human contact. Quentin pressed me down, away from the colorful display like my life depended on it.
The heat was so intense that it overloaded my nerves. The scale went all the way around again to cold, a frost-burn numbness that my brain had to take as a joke. There was no fire like this on Earth, ha-ha.
Then it stopped. I could see blue again.
“We have fifty-eight seconds before he can do that again,” Quentin said into my ear. “Fighting a god and Red Boy—we’re not prepared. We should run.”
We should have. We should have fled and come up with a plan. We should have fled to the other side of the world and retired from the demon-fighting business.
But what rooted me in place, of all the random images that had to come to my mind unbidden right now, was that stupid book sitting in my room. The book of Sun Wukong’s tales.
I couldn’t shake the thought of how many unnamed villagers and peasants in those stories had to die just so that Xuanzang’s deeds would look greater for it. Were they like the babbling, happy people in the park, completely oblivious to the end? Or did they see the demons coming for them, their last moments full of terror and pain?
Genie Lo, caring about strangers, bearing the weight of the world? No one was more surprised than me.
“We can’t run,” I said. “Erlang Shen’s willing to blow his cover and start killing anyone he can get his hands on. We have to stop them here and now.”
Quentin smiled at me. “Then we have forty-seven seconds to do it.”
Maybe it was because we were in mortal danger, but he’d never looked more beautiful. I craned my neck upward and gave him a peck on the lips. “Let’s go.”
We sprang out of the ditch and ran straight at the source of the unholy flames. Red Boy greeted our attack with mild interest.
“Forty!” Quentin shouted. “Thirty-five!”
“Zero,” Red Boy said. He inhaled through his nose, opened his mouth, and another vor
tex of color came out.
I wasn’t fast enough to react. Quentin elbowed me to the side. I fell just in time to see the sun itself wash over him. He was completely engulfed in flame.
The pain from the True Samadhi Fire this close was a crisis of faith. It felt like my organs would never speak to each other again. The blood stopped in my veins.
Red Boy closed his mouth and the storm cleared.
“I’ve been training, too,” he said. “I don’t take as long to recharge now. I got a lot stronger on that island without anyone knowing.”
I tried to crawl back to Quentin, my eyes barely working, the gravel stinging my skin. A rock formation with his shape stood where he should have been. I put my hands on it without worrying about the residual heat searing me to the bone.
He’d been tempered. His body didn’t even feel like tissue anymore. This was a gray stone cast of Quentin, a mineral replacement.
And it had a crack running across the body from shoulder to hip.
“No,” I said, trying to figure out how deep it went with my fingernails. “No!”
Quentin didn’t move or speak. The expression that had been frozen on his face wasn’t shock or anger. It was resignation. His eyes were closed, his mouth calm. It was too much of a goodbye, and I screamed.
36
Erlang Shen swooped in and grabbed me by the back of the neck. He flew up, up, and away, taking me into the sky.
I thrashed in his vise grip, but he kept me at arm’s length. I tried to say that I’d kill him, but it came out as an unintelligible shriek of rage.
Quentin should have been invulnerable. Immortal. Always by my side. Maybe I was destined to lose, but I was never supposed to lose Quentin, not even in the most tragic of possible outcomes. I had been cheated down to my very soul. This was an abomination.
I screamed and screamed again, so hard that I tasted blood.
“It upsets me to see you mourn him,” Erlang Shen said. “Wasn’t the whole point of your reincarnation to get away from Sun Wukong and find a better owner? One who wasn’t such a brute? One who treated you with more dignity and respect, like a gentleman?”
“Shut up!” I howled. “Shut up shut up shut up!”
