The Iron Will of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  In our booth the old man sipped his boba’ed, jellied, foamed abomination through an extra-wide straw with satisfaction.

  “I think there’s been an issue with communication,” the Great White Planet said as he wiped milk froth off his mustache. “No one ever gave you the inside track on what having the mandate of the Jade Emperor means.”

  Guanyin got a little defensive upon hearing him suggest she’d failed at bringing me up to speed, though she hid it much better than me. “We explained to Genie that the source of her authority on Earth comes from the fact that the Jade Emperor granted her his official approval. The exact same way that early human kings were dependent on Heaven’s favor to rule their lands.”

  Quentin and Guanyin had indeed explained it to me. And I’d expressed my distaste for the lesson vehemently. In my opinion, the reason the demons did what I told them was because they didn’t want me punching them straight into the bowels of Hell.

  Plus I hated what the whole concept of a mandate implied. The idea that you could only hold power because a higher-up gave you permission was utterly terrible. That meant your personal merit counted for nothing. The well-being and opinions of the people you were supposed to be leading counted for nothing.

  “Yes, but what can be given can be taken away,” the Great White Planet said. “When a king of old lost favor with Heaven by making one too many mistakes, the gods withdrew their mandate and visited disaster upon him until he was overthrown. The mandate passed on to the new leader, who was able to overcome said disaster and right the course of governance.”

  “I know my actual Chinese history, thanks,” I said. I was better versed in Things That Had Really Happened than legend and folklore. “The Zhou Dynasty supplanted the Shang Dynasty, the Qin took over from the Zhou, and so on and so on. The conquerors always used the idea of a mandate to justify and legitimize their conquests. Which to me smacks of post-hoc rationalization, survivorship bias, and a whole bunch of other logical fallacies. Someone takes advantage of a flood or a famine to create a violent rebellion, beheads the ruler, and then screams ‘Look at me, I have the mandate now.’”

  The Great White Planet poked at the slush gathered at the bottom of his drink. “You have a point. To an ordinary human being, the concept of a mandate can be opaque. But it’s a little harder to argue when the god who personally judged those rulers over several millennia is sitting right in front of you.” He stared at me while making a slurp of great import.

  Even though he seemed to be more concerned with getting his pearl-to-liquid ratio right, the Great White Planet’s words carried a load of warning. That big red pen of his had caused the fall of empires. I had been right to fear it.

  “The big lesson here is that everyone can be replaced if they’re not doing their job well enough,” he said. “You can be replaced. I can be replaced. Hell, the Jade Emperor can be replaced.”

  The atmosphere went rigid. I certainly had my opinions about the King of Heaven, given how many problems he’d dropped in my lap. But the one time I’d brought up the scenario of him not being in charge, Guanyin had nearly drawn and quartered me. The hierarchy was to be respected. Insubordination was not tolerated.

  Maybe that rule didn’t apply to the person doing the judging. I tried dipping a toe in the water, carefully. “I’m a little confused. I thought the Jade Emperor passed out mandates, not held them. Are you saying he’s subject to the same laws as the rest of us?”

  “King of Heaven is an office,” the Great White Planet said. “And the Jade Emperor didn’t always hold it. So while deference is certainly due, the answer is yes. He is playing the same game. And right now he’s not scoring as high as he used to.”

  Oh my god. God gossip. About one of my least favorite gods. I fought to prevent a massive grin from spreading over my face.

  “Oh nooo,” I said in a register of polite concern. “How so?”

  “Well, to begin with, there was the whole embarrassment with his nephew.”

  “Embarrassment” was a funny way of boiling down my efforts to stop the rogue god Erlang Shen from destroying the Bay Area and usurping the throne of Heaven to a family squabble. A tiff really. I was barely even there when it happened.

  Still, I was glad that the King of Heaven hadn’t gotten away unscathed. It was immensely gratifying to know his negligence had caused him to lose face. “To begin with?” I said as demurely as I could, ravenous for the next course. “You mean there’s more?”

  “Yes. So far he’s done nothing about the massive demonic energy that’s been gathering in the cosmos.” My nascent smile vanished. That wasn’t funny at all. I wanted tea spilled, not blood.

  “Back that up a bit,” I said. “What exactly is gathering where?”

  The Great White Planet brushed a bit of candied debris off his mustache. “Not long ago, a very, very hefty source of demon qi was detected in the Blissful Planes.”

  Guanyin preempted my next question. “A Blissful Plane is like another layer of existence in the Universe,” she explained in a hurry. She looked as concerned as I felt and didn’t want to waste time. “Imagine reality as a book. You know, a real one with paper. Heaven, Hell, and Earth would only be three of the pages. There are many other realms, each one physically separate from the other, full of lesser spirits and yaoguai who aren’t evil enough to be consigned to Diyu.”

  “I used to live in one,” Quentin said. “The Mountain of Flowers and Fruit.”

  “Okay, so alternate dimensions,” I said. The concept was easy enough to grasp after the mystical wackiness I’d been through last year. “I want to hear about this demon energy. What’s causing it?”

  “We don’t know yet,” the Great White Planet said. “Only that it’s growing stronger by the hour.”

  Fantastic. “Is Earth in danger?”

  “Earth is many layers of reality removed from this menace,” he answered. “And the boundaries between realms are nigh inviolable to any but the most powerful gods.”

  I noticed he didn’t explicitly say no. “Red Boy and Erlang Shen managed to break through them. If I should be worried, I’d like to know now.”

  “You need not,” the Great White Planet said. “The mighty dragon Ao Guang has been dispatched by Heaven to contain the demonic threat. He commands a vast army of warrior spirits who will be more than enough to combat any enemy he encounters.”

  Ao Guang. I dredged up the familiar name from the stories of the Monkey King. Ao Guang was the Guardian of the Eastern Sea, and if the stories were to be believed, he and I went way back. Sun Wukong first encountered the Ruyi Jingu Bang, i.e. me, in the treasure hoard of the great underwater dragon while a guest in his palace. If not for that chance encounter, the legendary staff would have sat collecting dust in a sunken gallery for who knew how many millennia.

  The Great White Planet took my silence for skepticism. “Might I remind you, Shouhushen, these problems aren’t taking place on Earth. They’re not your jurisdiction. They’re the Jade Emperor’s.”

  Odd. For once someone was telling me I didn’t have to take responsibility for a brewing crisis. And that the guy who was in charge would have to step up in accordance with his title. I didn’t know what to do with my hands.

  “Okay,” I said cautiously. “And what happens if the King of Heaven flubs this? Whose mandate is he losing? By the rules you’ve laid out, there has to be a greater authority above him.”

  The Great White Planet lifted his plastic cup and peered at the chaotic melted slurry inside. “Things start getting a little . . . primordial once you follow the chain too high,” he said. “It is my sincere hope that you never behold any of the entities, ideas, or conceptual forces that comprise the level above Heaven. Take it from me; it’s unhealthy even for a god.”

  My curiosity got the best of me. “You’ve seen what’s beyond Heaven?”

  “I did, once, and let me put it this way.” He gave me a thousand-yard frown. “My hair used to be black.”

  The Great White
Planet shook his head clear of the unpleasant memory and slapped his notebook on the table. He pulled out the normal pen and twirled it like a mathlete before going to town. I heard the distinct down-up swishes of check marks, instead of the down-down separate strokes of Xs. He went through the rows of his ledger with the swiftness that only a teacher dedicated to handing out nothing but B grades could do.

  “I advise you to keep your eyes on your own paper, Ms. Lo,” he said, startling me with the use of my actual name. “So far you’re doing . . .” He tilted his head side to side. “. . . well, it could go either way in the end.”

  Before I could protest his choice of words, he clamped his notebook shut around his pen and tucked it back into his robe. “My job here is done for the day.” He cleared his throat of the sugar buildup. “I’ll pop in from time to time. You might see me or you might not. Which is more warning than I gave the King of Shang before the Battle of Muye. Ha!”

  With that he vanished. Disappeared into the ether like a popped soap bubble in the moment the few other patrons were distracted by an order being called. I’d never seen a god make an exit like that, and I waved my hand around the space he’d been in to make sure he was truly gone. Quentin and Guanyin took a similar approach. There was a solid minute of silence among us until they broke it at the exact same time.

  “That wasn’t so bad,” Quentin said.

  “This is not good,” Guanyin said.

  They glanced at each other. Quentin made a shrug of deferral for Guanyin to go first.

  “I think the Great White Planet is understating the problem,” the goddess said. “For the Dragon King of the Eastern Sea to get involved means this potential foe is incredibly powerful.”

  I took it that since deep-sea sonar hadn’t revealed any draconic armies in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of China, the “Eastern Sea” had to be a Blissful Plane outside of my own reality, like the Mountain of Flowers and Fruit. “But that means he’s handling it, right?” I said.

  “It’s his job as a spirit general of Heaven,” Quentin said to me. “That’s why there’s nothing to worry about. Ao Guang is a tough old bastard who absolutely lives for battling the forces of evil. I mean, during the whole deal with Red Boy and Erlang Shen, you and I wanted nothing more than for someone else to step in and help with demon troubles.”

  “Yes, and that ‘someone else’ ended up being me,” Guanyin said curtly. “I’m not comfortable with happily distancing ourselves from a potential catastrophe.”

  “You heard the Great White Planet,” I said. “What are we supposed to do? What are we allowed to do?”

  “Gather information?” Guanyin said. “Train, rest, prepare? Be vigilant and available?”

  Uh-oh. I had a sense where this conversation was leading. My fingers tightened around the spoon I’d been toying nervously with after the Great White Planet left.

  “Genie, I know you have your big trip with Yunie coming up soon, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to step away from Shouhushen duties for so long,” Guanyin said. “You should reconsider going.”

  I snapped the cheap disposable utensil, and the head went skittering across the table. I knew it would come to this. I had told Guanyin and Quentin months ago that I had this excursion planned. Guanyin hadn’t said anything back then, only smiled and nodded in a way that said she didn’t approve of it at all.

  “I can’t bail on that,” I said. “It’s important to the two of us.”

  “And so is maintaining planar harmony,” Guanyin said. “Or so I assume.”

  The Goddess of Mercy was correct, technically. But she was conflating my wants with her wants. I had no overwhelming desire to be a champion of the cosmological order, only to see Earth and the people I cared about safe. I’d kept at the role of the Shouhushen because it seemed like the best way to ensure that.

  “I’m with Genie on this one,” Quentin said. “She’ll be off-duty for four days. A long weekend. The multiverse isn’t going to collapse the moment we take our eyes off it.”

  Guanyin had too much experience cleaning up the messes of gods and humanity alike to look convinced by that claim. She wrinkled her nose.

  “Look, these still work, right?” Quentin tugged on his earlobes, where the demon-detecting earrings permanently sat. They were mine but infused with Guanyin’s magic. If a yaoguai ever got too close to a normal human, they’d start buzzing like angry flies. “If there’s trouble on Earth, Genie and I drop what we’re doing and take care of it. Like we always do.”

  I wasn’t one hundred percent certain that I was making the right decision. It was usually easiest to do whatever Guanyin said. But in this case, I had to navigate the big gray area of whether she was my boss or my adviser.

  “I’m going on my trip,” I said. “And that’s that. If we want to help Heaven with this problem, then we’ll figure out how after I get back.”

  And hope it doesn’t bite us in the ass before then.

  5

  “Thanks for backing me up,” I yelled into quentin’s ear.

  We were in our standard mode of transportation, him using his Cloud-Leaping Somersault to cross mighty distances in a single bound with me perched on his back for the ride. It was cheaper than paying for train fare.

  “Hey, I know what it’s like arguing with Guanyin,” he said. “It’s impossible to have the moral high ground. Plus we’re talking about what could be your last high school trip with your best friend. Some things are sacrosanct.”

  That he understood the situation and supported me made me want to wrap my arms around him tighter and bury my nose in his hair. A conscientious Quentin was like Superman without the kryptonite. Sun Wukong could shapeshift into nearly any form, and so far a decent boyfriend was among them.

  He and I sailed toward an empty patch of highway. I hung on as his feet slammed into the gravel shoulder. I could hear the muscles of his quads and calves threatening to burst through the seams of his clothes from the effort of absorbing the shock while shooting us skyward again in a single touch. I blinked away the dryness from my eyes. Maybe we needed to invest in old-timey pilot goggles. There were a few kids at school into steampunk I could ask.

  My town came into view. From up here, lit by a purple and pink sunset, Santa Firenza didn’t look quite as claustrophobic as it felt at ground level. Sure, it was mostly patchy lawns and vacant office parks, but there were no borders to be seen from this altitude. Santa Firenza dissolved into its surroundings, setting the precedent that one day I could drift far away myself.

  There was something wrong with our descent, though.

  “Quentin,” I said. “We seem to be heading straight at my house instead of a clear landing zone.”

  “I’m going to touch down inside your room. I left the windows open.”

  I nearly choked in outrage. “You moron!” I shouted. “Even if you can land without making noise, we’re never going to fit through the window!”

  Quentin pondered the situation with a handful of our precious remaining seconds before impact. “Ummm . . . you’re beautiful?”

  “Goddammit, Quentin!”

  With a skydiving instructor’s precision, he flipped his orientation to me in midair and embraced me with my head cradled over his shoulder.

  “Shrink,” he whispered into my ear.

  The front-row view of our impending crash into my house loomed large. And then larger. And larger. Instead of flying through the air, which strangely enough I’d become accustomed to, it suddenly felt like were falling down a hole. A gaping abyss where the bottom layer was the interior of my bedroom, stretched to infinity.

  We landed on carpet strands the size of Saguaro cactuses. Quentin chose not to roll with the impact and took the brunt of it all by himself, acting as a sledge underneath me. The friction tore his shirt from his shoulders; had he not been Sun Wukong, he would have lost the flesh from his bones as well.

  The chivalrous gesture only pissed me off more. As the reincarnated Ruyi Jingu Bang, I was at l
east as invulnerable as him. If not more so.

  The world shrank quickly as we ground to a stop. What looked like a burnout skid the length of a drag strip turned into mere inches in my bedroom. Quentin and I were full-size before I could even get nauseous at the perspective change.

  Underneath me, his glorious torso was laid bare, the cover of a romance novel brought to life. He glanced at my hands braced against his chest and looked up at me hopefully, like this might lead to something.

  I slapped his body as hard as I could, leaving two bright red handprints on his skin.

  “You asshole!” I shouted. “I can’t believe how stupid that was!”

  “Ow! I’m sorry! I only wanted to see if you could learn to shrink under pressure!”

  That got me even angrier. “You can’t trick me into learning new powers anymore!”

  “But that’s the way we used to do it!”

  His words gave me pause. Yes, back when Quentin and I were still feeling each other out, a lot of my former Ruyi Jingu Bang powers required an unpleasant jolt to kickstart them back into action.

  But that was then and this was now. I felt like I had the right to demand more honesty from Quentin these days, and that included how we trained together.

  I tried to smack him across the chest again, but he caught my wrists and sat up, knocking me off balance. To keep me from tumbling backward he threw my arms over his shoulders like he knew I wanted them there and gripped me tightly by the waist.

  He looked up at me, his apologetic puppy-dog eyes driving me nuts half in a bad way and half in the really bad way.

  My heart was pounding. From the mishap, of course. “Don’t do it again,” I muttered.

  He craned his neck up, filling my vision, and brushed his lips against mine. “I won’t,” he said, the vibrations of his voice tickling me where my skin was most sensitive. “We’ll train the right way. Maybe on the top of a mountain. We haven’t done that in a long time, have we?”