by F. C. Yee
“I found your new human form first, you know. By all rights you’re mine, not the monkey’s. The only reason I didn’t reveal myself was because I needed his unwitting assistance to draw out your powers. Talent as big as yours can require multiple coaches, you know.”
He kept flying higher, but he turned us around to face the city.
“I have the feeling you didn’t take my threat in the park seriously,” he said. “So I’m going to take as many lives as the Great Fire of 1906 did, and make you watch. We’ll see how willing you are to come with me to Heaven after that.”
“Shenyingdawang!” He had to shout to be heard over my screaming. “I’d like a couple of blocks removed from the city.”
“Which ones?” the demon asked, a contractor sizing up his quote.
“Any. Just make sure you get—”
Erlang Shen glanced at me and made a coy little face of trying to remember something.
“Make sure you include New Viscount Street and Second,” he said.
My father.
Guanyin had put my town under her protection. But it didn’t extend to the city, and I hadn’t remembered to ask. I’d neglected my father. I’d shelved him outside my conception of “home.”
I’d killed him.
“You know what?” Red Boy shouted back from the ground. “I think I’m just gonna level all of downtown entirely. I don’t feel like going through the effort to be picky.”
Erlang Shen laughed his consent.
Red Boy made two fists and began rubbing his knuckles together. His bright color became incandescent, the heat inside him forcing its way through his skin into the surrounding air.
“It’s really quite fascinating, what you’re about to see,” Erlang Shen said to me. “The best way to describe it would be a human missile. A demon missile, rather.”
Red Boy drew his legs up into the air, encased in a thick layer of energy, his pose a mockery of an abbot in meditation. He began skimming silently over the ground toward the heart of the city in a straight line, slowly at first but accelerating, doubling and redoubling in speed. He wasn’t a missile; he was the bullet in a railgun.
The demon reached the velocity where I knew there was no stopping him. The trigger had been pulled—the button had been pressed on my father and thousands of other innocent people.
I couldn’t bring myself to look. I shut my eyes, shut my true sight down, shut everything down except for the tears streaming over my face.
“What are you doing?” Erlang Shen asked.
I didn’t answer him. Then I realized he wasn’t talking to me. I came back to the world of the living, steadied my sobs, and looked around.
Red Boy was no longer moving toward the city. He hovered where he was, the nucleus in a hot streak of light. A snapshot of a shooting star.
“Red Boy!” said Erlang Shen.
“He can’t hear you,” I said, sniffling. “He’s trapped in a time bubble.”
Erlang Shen had forgotten about the other divine being in my corner and smashed his head into a great big ceiling of impenetrable nothing. I could see the giant barrier spell hovering over us only because the wildfire smoke had stopped rising at that point. He dropped me, and I fell.
The air whistled past my ears. Erlang Shen shook off his daze and flew straight down to catch me, but he only made it a dozen yards before he hit another wall. He was caught in a smaller barrier, forced to play an angry mime in a real invisible box. The Goddess of Mercy had the aim of a cold-blooded sniper.
I plunged toward the ground. The wind stung my eyes, but the Earth taking over my view filled me with a sudden calm.
It’s okay, I said to myself, a moment before impact. I’m made of iron.
The noise was greater than any Quentin and I had ever made upon landing. It was meteoric. Cataclysmic. But I’d absorbed none of the shock. The shock was heaped upon the rest of the world, and the planet would have to deal with it.
I stood up in the middle of a smoking crater. I was untouched. My lack of injury made perfect sense.
I saw Guanyin kneeling over Quentin’s body, and I clambered out of the depression to their side. She was checking him with her hands, much as I’d done, but this time it meant something.
Guanyin looked up at Erlang Shen and then gave me a bitter smile.
“I sure can pick ’em, huh?” she said wryly.
“He had us all fooled. Can you heal Quentin?”
“I can try to restore Quentin, or I can help you end this,” she answered. “But not both. It’s taking most of what I’ve got to hold the two of them back, and I don’t have enough karmic juice to go around. I’m already bewitching too many people right now to keep this fight a secret.”
That she didn’t talk about Quentin like he was dead gave me a thump of hope in my chest. “Fix him,” I said. “Please.”
“The two of you will be on your own afterward. You’re asking me to put my faith in you.”
“We can do it.” I was ready to lie to her to get Quentin back, but this felt like the truth.
“Very well.” She cleared a space around him and put her hands on the sides of his face.
A sphere of energy encircled them both. Quentin and Guanyin began twitching. Their movements weren’t voluntary, especially not his. The little settlings of his stony form and her breathing were being played at higher than normal speed. And, I soon noticed, in reverse.
Dust around them that had risen sank back down to the ground. Errant stalks of dry grass cartwheeled backward, cleaning up their tracks as they went. A tiny beetle caught in the bubble moonwalked away.
A rocky splitting noise sent fear through my spine, but it was only the seam on Quentin’s body sealing up. The gray pallor of his skin dissolved, and it became warm and touchable once more.
Guanyin was winding back causality itself. Undoing the passage of time.
She was so powerful. I had to fight the urge to fall to my knees and clasp my hands together in awe.
Quentin awoke with a gasp. He scrambled back from Guanyin in surprise. She staggered to her feet, breathing heavily.
“Well,” she said, “that’s everything I’ve got left in the tank.”
“Are you okay?” I asked. The goddess looked pale and bloodless, as if she’d traded her very life for Quentin’s.
“I’ll recover once I’m back in Heaven, but I won’t be doing that particular trick again for another century or three,” she said, her voice already wavering like a ghost’s. “Which means it’s all on you to clean up properly. I don’t even have the energy to maintain my grip on Earth right now.”
She sounded like we were about to lose connection for who knew how long. I had to choose my remaining words to her carefully.
“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you!”
“You can thank me by winning,” she answered. “I’m not supposed to condone physical violence, but when it comes to those two laan zai . . .”
I raised my palms upward and then clenched my fists. “I promise to serve as your mortal intermediary.”
Guanyin smiled. She fritzed once, twice. And then she was gone.
I couldn’t escape the feeling that I’d been dropped off at the world’s coolest party by the world’s coolest older cousin.
“What just happened?” Quentin asked.
“You died and came back to life,” I said. “Get with the program.”
Even after all that, Guanyin had given us one last gift. Her spells were wearing off gradually instead of blinking out with her. In the sky, Erlang Shen pounded on the barrier, which looked to be on the verge of shattering, and Red Boy was only now picking up speed again.
I pointed Quentin upward. “Body block him,” I said. “Don’t let him near me for a minute.”
Quentin glanced at Red Boy, his eyes full of worry for me. But he nodded.
The barrier above us broke. Quentin jumped straight up and met Erlang Shen halfway. This time he got a good grip. I could hear him whoop with glee at finally being
able to lay his hands on that bastard. The two of them tussled in the sky, zigzagging over the hills.
I ran in front of Red Boy, placing myself right in his path. Even through the time bubble I could detect the spark of recognition in his eyes. He knew that in seconds I’d be taking the full impact of his speed.
I slammed my right foot down, embedding it six inches deep into the solid ground.
The smug air around Red Boy’s face disappeared. Now he saw, like I did, that the next few seconds also meant that he was a sitting duck. A nice fat pitch hovering over the plate, and me with plenty of time to tee up.
It was time for drastic measures. Something I’d never done before.
Scratch that. I’d done it once before.
I thrust my arm at Red Boy, reaching out five feet, ten feet, twenty feet. Just like in the library with Quentin. I could feel my limb rubber banding, but it was merely reaching states that were perfectly natural to it. My arm was remembering.
I kept stretching it out, picking up more and more speed to the point where my hand was now a projectile. My palm strike smashed into Red Boy’s torso, knocking the wind out of his lungs, and my long fingers wrapped around his body, hog-tying him.
The time bubble popped. I screamed from the pain of the True Samadhi Fires surrounding my prey, but I held my grip, and I kept flinging my arm forward. There were no brakes on this train.
Red Boy’s aura hit critical mass and flared outward. Only it didn’t reach me. I was carrying him away far enough and fast enough that I was safe. My arm was a pair of tongs, and the faster I stretched the less it hurt. My growing limb distributed the heat over a wider area.
Localized laws of physics are still laws of physics, I thought as I clenched my teeth. Dickhead.
I slammed his back into the hillside, squashing the remaining air out of him. But I wasn’t done, not by a mile.
My arm went on, diagonally down, plowing Red Boy deeper and deeper into the base of the hill. Bedrock and boulders gave way to me as easily as the crumbling foundations of a sand castle. If he’d said anything or done anything before he disappeared under the rubble, I’d missed it completely.
Once it felt like I’d gone deep enough, I unclenched my hand and withdrew it. The impromptu mineshaft I left behind glowed orange, then red, then white. I threw myself to the side just in time to dodge a knot of flame so concentrated it looked like a giant worm escaping the molten core of the Earth. Fire in the hole.
Once Red Boy’s detonation subsided, the mineshaft collapsed, bringing the surrounding earth down with a mighty whump. Some seismologist was going to have a confusing time working out what had happened.
As far as I was concerned, it was okay to leave Red Boy where he was. If he wasn’t dead, he couldn’t be sent to Hell where he might escape. And with an entire mountain crushing him, he wouldn’t have any air to power his fire breath. If this kind of prison was good enough for the Monkey King, it was good enough for him.
My dust-covered arm slurped back into my body like a strand of extra-long linguini. The sight was nauseating. I should have kept my eyes closed like back when I was on the school roof.
Quentin slammed into the ground beside me, landing on his back. He scrambled to his feet.
“Son of a bitch keeps running away from me,” he grumbled.
I looked up, visoring my eyes from the sun. Erlang Shen was conjuring up something big, gesturing at us with his hands, and I finally remembered that he was a rain god.
“I, uh, think he only wanted a clear shot,” I said.
Two manhole-diameter jets of water stomped us flat like elephant’s feet. The Hoover Dam had opened a valve above our heads.
I knew how dangerous high-pressure water was. It was how they cut titanium. But still, I was surprised how hard the impact was. On a scale of one to Baigujing, this was like eating a dozen of her haymakers all over my body at once.
Quentin might have shouted after me but his words were lost amid the roar of the water. He was a flat blur. Neither of us could lift ourselves off the ground.
The downpour continued unabated. If we didn’t do something fast, we were going to drown eight hundred feet above sea level.
My body screamed at me as I ran out of oxygen. It was screaming a message I’d been doing my best to ignore since I was young, if not little.
Grow.
I finally gave in to it.
37
The only sensation was that of the water stream getting smaller. My head was freed of the river, and I could breathe again. I put my hand up as a shield; it wasn’t a completely ineffective gesture.
The view was like Quentin’s skyward jump, slowed down to the extreme. Trees became smaller and smaller. The ground got farther and farther away. If we were in the city I might have been able to use the ascending floors of a nearby skyscraper like backdrop markers on a police lineup. As it was, I could only guess how big I was getting.
I got to my feet, unhindered by the square-cube law. I grew taller. And taller. Erlang Shen tried to shoot me down, and he even let up on Quentin to concentrate his efforts, but it was pointless. We were operating at different scales now.
I knew how big I needed to be. There was no need to go overboard. I just needed to grow to the size where the god hovering in midair was a little larger than the palm of my hand, relatively speaking.
Roughly the size of a volleyball.
I recognized the look on Erlang Shen’s face. I’d seen it on my opponents so many times, up close, masked only by the loose weave of a net. The look that said, Oh god, she can’t be that tall. Who paired me against her?
He turned to flee but caught a mouthful of Quentin’s shoulder. His collision with the Monkey King kept him spinning in the air. Quentin had given me the perfect set.
“MINE!” I screamed out of habit. My voice thundered over the mountain, warning anyone and everyone not to take my kill.
I spiked Erlang Shen into the ground with so much heat that I could have made the dinosaurs go extinct all over again. I highlight-reeled him. It made me sad that scouts for the national team weren’t watching.
And gods bounced, apparently. Who knew?
Erlang Shen dribbled away from my feet like a ball without enough air in it. Before he even came to a stop, he imploded around an infinitesimal point, some kind of gravity sucking his body inward into nothing, like a black hole. It happened without a sound.
Maybe when you were giant, everything seemed anticlimactic.
“Is he dead?” I asked. I winced after I spoke. I hated how loud I was.
“No,” answered Quentin, who managed not to come across as tinny. “Gods get a sweeter deal when their physical body is busted. It’s straight back to Heaven for him.”
“That’s BS.”
“Not this time. He’s committed blood treason against the Jade Emperor. There will be a quick hearing before he’s punished. There’s literally a special place in Hell for that crime.”
Of course—the only thing the Jade Emperor would act quickly upon was a threat to his rule. If it meant Erlang Shen getting what he deserved, though, I wouldn’t complain.
“Are you going to stay up there all day?” Quentin asked.
Shrinking down was easier and much less disturbing than drawing back an extended limb. Quentin and the ground came closer as if I were on a helicopter touching down. My body stopped naturally where it was supposed to. I could have tried to keep going and see what life would have been like as a size small, but there was no way I was ready to unpack all of that baggage right now. Regular, tall-ass Genie would suffice.
We were both still soaking wet. I figured watching Quentin shake the water from his hair like he’d emerged from the pool in a cologne ad was my reward for a job well done. His now-transparent shirt lapped at the muscles on his torso.
His eyes caught mine before doing a double take. “Holy crap,” he said. “Look at your arm.”
I yelped. The limb that Red Boy burned had been washed clean of rock dust.
Now it was shiny black from my fingers up to my elbow. The color of polished iron.
My nails were as golden as my true sight eyes. They glittered expensively in the sun, like unburied treasure.
I wiggled my fingers. There was no loss of motion or sensation. The transition between the iron and flesh was a fine ombré.
Hoo boy.
Rather than process this like I needed to, I let my mind slip away. It might return to me later. Right now my thoughts were as free as a bird.
“Hey, tell me something,” I said. “I never made it to the end of your book. What did your traveling group get for completing their quest?”
Quentin rubbed his chin. “Xuanzang was given Buddhahood. Sandy became an arhat. Pigsy got to be a shrine cleaner, which meant he could eat all the offerings of food people left for the gods. He couldn’t have been happier. Why?”
Xuanzang might have gone all the way to the West and back purely out of noble intentions, with no expectation of a reward. But it sounded like everyone still got what they wanted at the end.
That settled it then. I happened to want this.
I grabbed Quentin by the collar, leaned down, and kissed him.
He was a little startled at first, but then he kissed me back, hard. Like real hard. Like he’d been waiting for this moment since the day we met.
I felt his strong arms circle my waist and cinch tight, lifting me off the ground. I grabbed fistfuls of his hair, which I’d always secretly dreamed about doing, and crushed his lips to mine. Kissing Quentin was as rough and as confrontational as any of our other interactions, and I loved it.
“This is so wrong,” he said, his words slightly muffled as I bit him in the mouth. “It’s like King Arthur having feelings for Excalibur.”
Eh. From my perspective it was more like Jane Goodall hooking up with King Kong. You know, if King Kong were hot and infuriating and oddly supportive of Jane’s feelings over time.
Quentin went for my neck in a way I was highly looking forward to, but then he suddenly stopped.
“Uh, Genie,” he said, pulling away. He peered over my shoulder at something.
