by F. C. Yee
Ao Guang’s attention was elsewhere. He spoke to the deep end of the water. “Emerge! Crab generals! Shrimp lieutenants! Fish soldiers!”
The surface of the pool began roiling. As if the area under the diving board had transformed into stairs, the vanguard of an army marched upward onto the deck, rippling into existence while water spilled from their shoulders. Soldiers dressed in less fancy versions of Ao Guang’s armor tromped in unison, filing to the left and right and forming into ranks over the lounging areas.
“Hey!” I yelled over the din. “I didn’t mean you could bring everyone right this instant! Stop!”
No one heard me. The soldiers were concerned only with maintaining tighter coordination than the Wicked Witch’s guards. They had faces much more reminiscent of common yaoguai, with googly eyes, scaly skin, or crustacean mandibles.
And despite their marching discipline, they were in bad shape. The lucky ones nursed bandaged wounds, layers of cloth soaked through with dark blood. There were lost fins and claws left and right. Toward the middle of the pack, the weakest needed to hang on to their comrades to stay upright. It was like watching the aftermath of a re-enacted Civil War battle. All that was missing was the somber humming of “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
“Eel messengers!” Ao Guang said. “Snail bannermen! Squid quartermasters! Seahorse stable boys!”
They were going to burst through the fence at this rate. Forget that, they were going to spill over the boundaries of the conceal spell.
“Excuse me,” a voice said from behind me.
Oh no. I turned around to see that guy who’d run into me earlier, returning to the scene of the accident. “I wanted to ask you something.”
As long as he’d stayed in the courtyard area, he would have only seen me, perhaps heard me babbling to myself like a theater kid doing a warmup. Ao Guang and his supernatural army would have remained invisible. But the boy had pushed through the gate I’d broken and collided with the edge of the cloaked zone. The magic stretched over his face like plastic wrap and then gave way, causing him to stumble through the thin air. He blinked rapidly. And then he saw the pool. With the full arrangement of sea creatures.
“Motherfuuuuu—”
His hand dipped into his pocket for his phone. I went for mine at the same time, a quick-draw match at high noon.
I won, hitting my panic button before the kid could record anything. Sometimes it was useful to have a goddess on speed-dial.
▪ ▪ ▪
Guanyin cast her baleful gaze upon me, withering my life points from the outside in.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said.
The pool around us was empty. Ao Guang’s legion of fishpeople had been teleported away. It was one of the biggest feats I’d ever seen the goddess pull off. So much magic had been fired off in the last ten seconds that her fingertips were smoking like the barrels of a machine gun. They cooled under her crossed arms.
The human witness had his mind wiped of a few seconds, which was just as taboo and last-resort as it sounded. We didn’t mess with people’s memories if we could avoid it. Though we’d sent him stumbling away down the well-lit street to regain his wherewithal safely away from the apartment complex, he’d have the equivalent of a massive caffeine headache in the morning.
“I didn’t have a choice!” I said to Guanyin. “Ao Guang was going to hurt himself, and his soldiers were barely holding it together!”
The goddess said nothing. She didn’t need to. I knew what her answer would be.
The critical choice to make had been days ago. We’d ignored the signs that something big was about to go down. Had I stayed at home, we could have handled Ao Guang’s arrival better than him blundering his way into Earth in a crowded location. And the fact that a Dragon General of Heaven got wrecked so badly meant the demonic threat the Great White Planet mentioned was existential. Guanyin, Quentin, and I, the supposed demon-fighting experts, failed to act on a white-hot tip, and now Earth was in peril.
All because I had to go to a party.
Hot damn. Guanyin had silent-treatmented me into giving myself my own scolding. What a pro.
I could have tried to explain to her that this trip was about other things than getting drunk. But it would have been a tough sell when the two of us could hear the music and shrieking from the windows where we stood. Enough time had passed that the attendees were a lot louder and more wasted by now.
Just as importantly, I wanted to explain how sorry I was that I’d made her bail me out yet again. I wanted to let her know that I didn’t see her as a Get Out of Jail Free card with unlimited uses. I hated disappointing her like this.
But if I said any of that, I knew she’d snap at me that apologies were pointless because her feelings were irrelevant. Which would hurt my feelings. A lot.
I abandoned trying to find the magic words. “Did you let Quentin know what happened?” I asked instead.
Finally Guanyin deigned to speak. “He came along.”
“Then where is he?”
I got my answer in the form of an uproarious cheer from the floor of the building where the party was taking place.
Uh-oh.
▪ ▪ ▪
I could hear the rhythmic chanting from down the hallway.
“QUEN-TIN! QUEN-TIN! QUEN-TIN!”
Everyone was trying to get a look. I shoved and jostled past the gawkers hopping on their tiptoes, phones raised to take videos, until I reached the suite where the party was originally supposed to be contained to.
There, in a spacious kitchen, Quentin was doing a one-handed keg stand while the crowd drunkenly cheered him on. For what I guess was the extra challenge, he’d tilted the barrel on its corner edge and rocked back and forth like a unicyclist standing still.
It was a feat of inhuman balance, and child’s play for the Monkey King. His legs kicked the air to the beat of the music as he chugged, and he didn’t stop until the entire contents were gone.
Then he did something really stupid.
Upon finding he’d tapped the keg single-handedly, he hopped back to his feet. He picked up the empty steel barrel like it weighed nothing and slammed it against his forehead the way a bro might do to a normal beer can. The metal squeaked and groaned as it flattened into a disc under his might. Once he’d compressed the keg into a hubcap, he tossed it aside. It spun around and around on its perimeter, making wobbly noises, until it agonizingly came to a stop on the floor.
The entire party fell silent. People gaped at him above the screens of their phones, the nearest of which had still caught the whole impossible display.
Quentin pumped his fists into the air. “Haters gonna say it’s fake!” he whooped.
The crowd screamed in delight. They resumed raging twice as hard after the shot of adrenaline he’d given them.
I reached out, snatched him by the collar, and dragged him away.
▪ ▪ ▪
Getting Quentin back into Ji-Hyun’s room required swatting away the adoring college girls who were getting unilaterally handsy with him as we scraped by. To his credit, he paid them little attention, his eyes never straying from me. To his detriment was absolutely everything else about him.
I slammed him against the closed door, prompting a “woo” from the people just outside who thought we were sneaking off for privacy. I mean, we were, but not that way.
“Are you trying to set new records for being stupid?” I said, still gripping his shirt in my fist. I’d snapped a couple of buttons off it already.
“I’ve gotten blitzed off Heavenly Elixirs of Immortality,” he said. “I’m not going to get drunk from a few sips of human beer.”
“That’s not the issue here! Right now there’s dozens of people outside who now know you’re stronger than a hydraulic press!”
He looked off to the side. “Who cares? They’re never going to see me again. You’ll be fine attending your classes here. I won’t be around to cause trouble.”
Ow. I mean, really,
ow.
I was breathing, my lungs caving in and out, but it didn’t feel like oxygen was reaching my brain. My throat was a solid lump. This was a continuation of our fight, only with me on the sharp end of the stick this time. And it hurt. A lot. Enough to make me let go of him and take a couple of steps back.
The root problem was that Quentin and I had never discussed how he would fit into my normal, human life. If he would. That uncertainty played a part in me losing my temper and implying he wasn’t welcome in my family, and him now implying he’d ghost me once I entered college. I had to address this issue now, before it gestated inside both him and me into a creature neither of us could defeat.
Instead I came up spectacularly short. “They. Have. Cameras!” I screamed.
Quentin’s eyes flickered, as if he was just as relieved as me to argue about a less important problem. “So there’s a video shot by drunk people in a poorly lit room. If it gets uploaded to the internet it’ll look like a viral ad for a beer company. Stop worrying about it.”
He was pitching me softballs. Quentin sloppy, Genie uptight. I could have kissed him.
“We’ve got a meeting with Guanyin tomorrow morning,” he said. “You might as well make the most of tonight. Otherwise your trip will be wasted.”
“I was never here to party in the first place!” I said, indignant that he thought I needed the pointless ruckus outside. “Yunie and I are not even having fun right now!”
Right then, Ji-Hyun burst into the room with Yunie slung over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry. The din of music leaked in through the airlock before Ji-Hyun kicked it shut again.
“WOOO!” Yunie shouted, swimming a crawl stroke in the air. “College rules!”
She was Asian-blushing so hard, she resembled an overcooked lobster. “Who wants to arm wrestle?” my drunken friend hollered. “Fight me!”
Quentin glanced at Yunie. I prepared to get blasted in turn by a judgmental frown, but instead he gave me a saintly smile, which was worse.
“Regardless of the circumstances, this is still your night out, and I’m being unfair by impinging on it,” he said. “I’m gonna go.”
“Where?” I scoffed.
“I’ve been invited to some more get-togethers. Fraternities and sororities, that sort of thing.” He paused, oblivious to how popular he was and why. “Kind of a lot of sororities now that I think about it? Eh, whatever.”
He went over to the nearest window and opened it. “Ladies,” he said, nodding to us before rolling gracefully over the side like a scuba diver off a boat.
“Bye Quentiiiiin,” Yunie sang, still draped over her cousin’s shoulders.
“So that’s your boyfriend?” Ji-Hyun said once he was gone. “He seemed nice. And hot. Like, damn, girl, there isn’t a high-five big enough for you.”
“You don’t seem concerned that he jumped out your window.”
“Nah, everyone does that in this building. Lets them avoid the walk of shame.”
Ji-Hyun tilted Yunie onto the beanbag. “What’s with this graveyard?” Yunie said. “We need some tunes going!”
“How much did she have?” I said.
“Just the one sip from before,” Ji-Hyun said. “I guess tolerance doesn’t run on that side of the family.”
I watched Yunie head bang, supine, to some heavy metal song that only she could hear. I didn’t know she was a closet air guitarist, because she was miming chords and arpeggios and everything. Transferable genius, I guess.
This had been one of the most frustrating nights of my life, and that included all the times I was in mortal danger. I’d been exposed as a big fraud. I didn’t know what I was doing when it came to college, Divine Guardianing, or my boyfriend, whom I was supposed to have an actual spiritual connection to.
I snatched the last cup of liquid red grossness from the nearby kitchen counter and slumped onto a pile of laundry. Why I was able to do that without taking any steps in between the counter and the laundry was a mystery known only to my host and her equally slovenly roommates, but for the moment I didn’t care. I took a big gulp from my cup and waited to feel buzzed.
After a few seconds, something became clear to me.
“I can’t get drunk,” I said out loud.
“Sure?” Ji-Hyun said as she plied Yunie with water in a manner that would not have made it past the Geneva Conventions. “No one’s going to judge if you want to be a teetotaler.”
That wasn’t what I meant. I meant I literally could not get drunk.
The invulnerability and healing power of the Ruyi Jingu Bang had become a lot stronger in me these days, ever since my fight with Red Boy and Erlang Shen. Apparently it also applied to chemical attack now. I could feel my insides identifying and nullifying the alcohol like a toxic agent, which I guess technically it was, leaving behind nothing but painful lucidity.
Great.
I was now the entire world’s designated driver. Woo indeed.
12
“Not Hungover?” Guanyin said to me.
If the next World War were to be fought with passive-aggression, Guanyin would be left standing alone in the crumbling ruins of civilization.
“I’m fine,” I said, not bothering with an explanation of my newfound alcohol immunity. I’d snuck out of Ji-Hyun’s apartment in the early morning, performing my own walk of shame of sorts. I left Yunie an email explaining that I was running a supernatural errand, and that she should stay away from the pool at all costs.
Guanyin had brought Quentin and me to an office park near the college. It wasn’t a branded bank-like tower of glass and metal like the ones off the highway. Nor was it a swoopy modern campus designed by big-name architects around the latest principles of human behavioral science. This building, like the many others that made up the unobserved dark matter of Silicon Valley, was a single-story plop of concrete allowed to spread over the ground without being wiped up. It shared the same aesthetics as a drive-thru restaurant.
It was day two of the already ill-fated long weekend, so no one was there as Guanyin, Quentin, and I walked up to the front door. I could tell because a number of the walls were made out of glass, exposing meeting rooms to the outside in what seemed like an unwise privacy move.
Quentin and I occupied ourselves with not looking at each other while Guanyin jiggled the door handle. It was locked.
“What are we doing here?” I said.
“Conference call,” she said.
“Couldn’t we have done that on campus? Colleges have good Ethernet speeds.”
“We’re using a different network.” She flexed her hand over the edge of the door. I thought she was going to cast some kind of unlock spell, but instead she gave it a short, crisp, one-inch punch that snapped the deadbolt. Previously I would have sworn that Guanyin was purely a leave-no-trace style of camper, but I guess we all had our lax moments. She led us inside.
The interior of the building was in worse shape than the outside let on. Half of it was undergoing renovation, concrete floors stripped bare of any carpet, exposed wires pathing along the walls, held up with industrial staples. The habitable portions were packed with twice as many desks as would be reasonable. Hopefully for the occupants’ sake, they’d be allowed to move back once the construction was done. I could easily see the arrangement being made permanent given how expensive space was in this town.
Guanyin ushered us into one of the still-functional meeting rooms. In the center of a long table surrounded by knockoff mesh chairs was a conference bridge-style phone in the shape of a flattened pyramid. We took seats near it and she pressed a button for the dial tone.
“Come on. You’re not going to tell me who we’re calling?” I said.
Guanyin answered without looking at me, instead focusing on rapidly tapping out an interminable number that, if I had to guess due to the repetitions and high pitches, consisted solely of eights and nines.
“Heaven,” she said. “We’re calling Heaven.”
▪ ▪ ▪
&nb
sp; Quentin decided that whatever was going on between us in our personal lives, we still needed to talk business. “The armies of Heaven have been defeated,” he said. “These are circumstances so dire that a conclave of the gods is necessary. The last one was a millennium ago. We are on high alert here.”
He didn’t look like he was on high alert. In fact, he looked nostalgic for days gone by. I remembered he used to be a rebel. Sun Wukong, who’d invaded Heaven and trashed the place.
“You should be flattered,” I said. “There hasn’t been a threat as bad as you in more than a thousand years.”
The fact that we could put our emotions aside was either an excellent or disastrous sign for our relationship; I couldn’t remember what the magazines in the hospital waiting room had said. “It wasn’t me that caused the last emergency,” Quentin said. He pointed his chin at Guanyin. “It was her.”
I looked at the goddess with confusion. Among the three of us she was like the babysitter keeping her two bratty children in check. The head of the spy agency and also its best agent. Why would she be a problem for Heaven?
Quentin caught the expression of puzzlement on my face. “You don’t remember the story of her traveling to Hell and vomiting out free good karma to make it less of an awful place?” he said. “That was the most disruptive act in the history of the cosmos. The Jade Emperor considers it worse than the time you and I laid siege to his palace. It upended what he sees as the natural order of the Universe. He won’t admit it, but in his eyes, she’s public menace number one.”
“I can hear you two,” Guanyin said. She was still focused intently on the conference phone and banged it a couple of times with her fist. Telecommunications seemed as frustrating for her as it was for humans.
“So yeah,” Quentin said. “One of the primary laws of Heaven is no traveling between planes willy-nilly. Ao Guang is one of the greatest sticklers you can imagine for the rules. And yet he tore a bleeding hole in reality to escape this menace. He wasn’t this scared when I walked into his house and demanded the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”