by F. C. Yee
“Ow!” I yelped. “Let go!”
She squeezed harder and reached behind her with her free hand, finding a bottle of hand sanitizer. It loomed over my face like water torture.
“Don’t get that in my eyes!” I shrieked. They were perhaps the only vulnerable part of me.
To my surprise she listened and opted for shoving the nozzle down my collar. I screamed at the cold gel flooding my shirt as she vindictively pumped the handle. I pushed away at her face, getting my thumb tip inside her nostril, but she wouldn’t relent.
That was when it hit me.
Yunie and I’d had a ton of arguments growing up. An inevitable consequence of being so close. But we’d never laid a hand on each other. I was always so much bigger that the lightest rough-housing would immediately lose its innocent edge. So as an only child, I never really knew what all-out fighting with a sibling felt like.
I did now. That was the strange new feeling. I was sister-fighting.
And losing badly. Guanyin was as lengthy as I was and possessed the massive strength that every god seemed to have, regardless of their magical specialization. And she was attacking me like someone who held the moral high ground. I couldn’t hit her back very hard in that situation.
No, I had to sit there and take it. Even though I was new to this, somehow I understood the unspoken rule of sister-fighting. The aggrieved party gets to be more vicious.
It took emptying the entire bottle of sanitizer on me to sate Guanyin’s rage. She threw the empty plastic container against my forehead, and it bounced away. Then she slumped back against the nearest cubicle wall and caught her breath. I stayed where I was, looking at the ceiling, and grinned uncontrollably.
“I believe the phrase you’re looking for is ‘Thank you,’” I said.
“You smarmy little know-it-all,” she said, her voice hoarse. “You just had to act out in front of the assembly of Heaven, didn’t you? You don’t understand what you’ve done.”
“On the contrary.” I struggled to my elbows. “I know exactly what I did.”
“Oh really?” Guanyin sneered. “You think because you talk to me you know what gods are like? You think you’re privy to the inner machinations of the celestial pantheon because you sat in on one meeting? There are institutional forces at work here, and you just blew your nose all over them!”
“Okay, let’s say you’re right,” I said. “The Jade Emperor and the other gods—I can’t comprehend what goes on in their heads. They don’t operate by human standards. I don’t know what they’re like. But I know you.”
I sat up and faced her. “You’re perfect for the job. You’re competent. Strong. And most importantly, you give a damn. Why would I not want a ruler of Heaven I can understand?”
Guanyin closed her eyes and thumped her head back against the cubicle wall.
“They don’t want me,” she muttered. “Why do you think I spend so much time on Earth? They don’t want me up there. You heard how they reacted.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Well screw them. What do you want?”
She tensed up so hard I thought she was going to explode like a grenade. But then she relaxed and glared at me. I smirked, knowing I had her.
“Okay, I’m sorry for not checking with you first,” I said. “That was very uncool of me. But if you truly don’t want to be in charge, if you don’t even want to try, then withdraw. Call the other gods again right now and tell them you don’t want to be part of the Mandate Challenge.”
Guanyin snorted and looked to the side. “You know if I’m stuck in Heaven, I won’t be able to babysit your dumb ass on Earth.”
My grin spread even wider. The seed of possibility had been planted in her mind.
“I didn’t do it to make my life easier,” I said. “Or yours. If you’re waiting for me to regret it, you might as well stop time right now, because it’s never going to happen. Ever. There is no one in this world or the next who should be in charge more than you.”
Guanyin sighed. The fight had gone out of her. “Shut the hell up,” she said. “And answer your stupid phone. That buzzing is driving me nuts.”
Yunie, I thought. I pulled out my phone only to find I was wrong. I had no call. And the buzzing got louder and louder.
Someone’s shoes entered my view. They were Quentin’s nondescript black oxfords, which met our school’s dress code. He’d never bothered to swap them out for another pair.
Quentin looked askance at the destruction that Guanyin and I had wrought in the office. Ten minutes were up. And on his ears, my enchanted demon-alarm earrings were vibrating so violently that it looked like he might take off and fly at any moment.
“Hey, so if you’re done with whatever you’re doing, someone’s about to get eaten,” he said.
14
It had been a long time since we’d done one of these. An old-fashioned hunt. Quentin’s earrings went off whenever a demon got really close to a human, which usually meant impending dinnertime for the yaoguai. We were on a clock.
And what made it even worse was the direction we needed to head was right back toward the college campus. I cursed up and down at my negligence. Yunie.
One of the things I’d learned about my friend was that she had an unbelievable amount of spiritual energy for a human being, rivaling Xuanzang from the days of yore. Which meant she stood out among a crowd as the absolute tastiest person to eat for a yaoguai bent on consuming power. For the sake of speed, Quentin and I left Guanyin behind with the mutual understanding that we could handle a basic hunt on our own.
Muscle memory took over hard. Acquire target. Get on Quentin’s back. Jump. Land. Start punching. It was so ingrained that Quentin and I found ourselves right back at Ji-Hyun’s apartment without thinking.
But the demon that had set off the earring alarm wasn’t a vicious beast about to devour my friend. It was a little iridescent blob that floated in the air, pulsating over the doorframe of the building like a party balloon. And the human it was drifting too close to was that Axton kid who’d walked into the pool and interrupted my talk with Ao Guang.
Quentin and I approached on foot cautiously. Appearances could be deceiving, so we didn’t let our guards down. We must have looked like a pair of doofs, stalking along the concrete sidewalk in plain view. A stiff breeze ruffled the grass and we paused like savannah cats.
“Oh hey,” said Axton, waving. He didn’t seem any worse for wear after the brain-scrubbing that Guanyin had given him, though he was oblivious to the creature hovering over his head. It rippled between hues of pink and purple and blue like a mood light. I focused my true sight until I saw the aura of concealment around it.
Best to pretend nothing was wrong until we could separate them. Spooking the human might set off the yaoguai. “Hiiiii,” I said. “Did you forget something from the party?”
“Yes,” Axton said. “You.”
Uh-oh. Bad start.
“I shouldn’t have left things like that,” Axton said. “Not with someone as special as you. I had a feeling after we met, so I asked around the people who were at the party and came looking for you.”
Just what I needed. Another asshole like the one in the cafe. Only more persistent.
Even better, I had with me my hot-tempered, preternaturally strong boyfriend who possessed a murder record hundreds of demons long. I glanced at Quentin to see how badly he was reacting to Axton’s statements, to see how much damage control I’d have to do.
Not much, apparently. The shapeless demon blob had meandered off to the side and descended closer to the ground. Quentin was busy trying to approach it like it was an escaped chicken. He cooed at it with his palms out, trying to beckon as non-threateningly as possible. It made a bizarre scene given that anyone watching us wouldn’t have known what he was looking at.
He could at least be a little jealous, my brain leaked out before I grabbed the thought and stuffed it back inside my skull. “Look, Axton, is it?”
“Ax,” he corrected.
Whatever. “Ax, I’m not interested.” If I had been hit on more in my life maybe I would have softened the rejection. Or maybe not, because why the hell did I need to?
He gave a smooth chuckle. “You misunderstand. Are you Eugenia Lo, creator of Monkey King Jumps to Heaven?”
Ax pulled out his phone, not to get digits, but to show me the app store. My little nothing game was on his screen. Under the icon was a subtitle saying Built by Eugenia Lo. When Rutsuo helped me fill out the developer submission form, I was too lazy to come up with a video gamey business name like Playwonk or Gamenamyte like the rest of the apps, and simply put my real name out of standardized test habits.
A mistake, if it let weirdos like Ax track me down. “What of it?” I said. “Last I checked I was between two solitaire rip-offs and a carpeting simulator.”
Ax tapped his phone and showed it to me again. “Maybe last week. Right now, you’re being featured in the ‘Best Timewasters’ category.”
I hadn’t known there were category filters you could change. Under Ax’s settings I was number sixty-eight. Huh. Sixty-eight was starting to get into the same territory as legitimate games I saw my classmates playing.
I kept the conversation going mostly because it had caused Ax to move toward me and away from the yaoguai. Quentin had sidled around and sat down on the stoop next to the demon blob, the cool teacher going Hey, I’m just here chilling in the same spot as you, no need to talk about your troubles unless you want to. Want to have a jam sesh?
“Okay, again, so what?” I said. “What does my app have to do with you?”
“Eugenia, have you ever heard of the Nexus Partnership?”
I had indeed. It was one of many word-jumble brand names that was incomprehensible to Bay Area outsiders but familiar to anyone living in Silicon Valley. Hollywood had actors, DC had politicians, and we in the Bay had billionaire venture capitalists.
The local news ran breathless headlines every time one of them dumped giant wads of money into some stupid company or other. When people shook their heads at a startup with a misspelled word for a name wasting millions of dollars on free beer and Ping-Pong tables, they were overlooking the VCs who invested in dozens of such cash incinerators as part of a normal working Tuesday.
For every pair of grad student buddies striking it rich from a company they founded in their garage, there was a VC behind the curtain, taking their cut. On occasion, an especially powerful venture capitalist would buy a children’s hospital or pick a disease to eradicate. You know. To be nice.
The Nexus Partnership was run by Wynn Ketteridge, a VC rich enough to make his name appear on a building overnight. I’d seen pictures of the guy in some blog article or another. He looked like a normal middle-aged schlub with thinning hair and a puffy vest, only with a thick aura of gives-no-Fs surrounding him. When you had that many zeroes in your net worth, you could look however you wanted.
“Aren’t you a little young to be working for Wynn Ketteridge?” I asked.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Ax said with a big grin. “The Nexus has a . . . junior arm, so to speak. Entrepreneurs of college age or younger. I’m one of them.”
Now I remembered what I’d been reading about Wynn and his company. This guy, this VC, had made a big splash by embarking on a crusade against college. I mean he really, really hated college.
A college degree, he reasoned in the many editorials he’d bought across every Bay Area newspaper possible, was a waste of time and money. You spent four years learning nothing that could be applied in the workplace. A better education could be had in the school of hard knocks, surviving in the free market by working or founding your own company.
Look at all the successful businesspeople who never used their major, Ketteridge pointed out. The world ran on software and hardware built by people who rejected higher education. How many geniuses had been stifled out of existence by professors made lazy by tenure, or squandered their lives by, god forbid, specializing in the humanities? Entrepreneurship was the only true education to be had.
It was such a Silicon Valley–style opinion that talking heads in forty-nine other states united for a brief time to laugh at him. But I happened to live in the one part of the country where certain folks drank up his message like water in a hundred-year drought.
And one of them was right in front of me.
“I have a proposition for you,” Ax said. “Come work for the company I’m founding. I have a pile of Wynn’s cash burning a hole in my bank account and a mandate to hire whomever I want.”
Oh sure, not suspicious at all. Maybe he had a white van I could get into where I could meet a deposed overseas prince who needed my social security number. “What’s your company called?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet. It’s my first time doing this, and I want my brand name to be special.”
“Who else has joined?”
“No one. You’d be employee number one.”
“What does this company do?”
Ax grinned. “I don’t know. But it doesn’t matter. Wynn invests in people, not concepts.”
Hoo-boy. “So you’ve got no idea, no experience, and no one else on board,” I said. “That sounds like a recipe for disaster.”
His feelings were immune to my bluntness. “Maybe,” Ax said. “But that’s okay. Wynn’s number one motto is that failure is the best teacher. There’s no real consequences for taking risks other than learning valuable lessons.”
Another Silicon Valley–slash–Bay Area attitude I’d heard a lot. Fail fast! Fail over and over again! Fail like there’s no tomorrow!
“Take me as an example,” Ax said with a faint smile that indicated he absolutely loved it when people took him as an example. “Before I met Wynn I was trying to build an audience for my online video channel. So I crashed one of his parties and handed out business cards that looked like raffle tickets for a Lamborghini. I got the emails of a lot of rich and famous people that way. The guests were pissed off when they found out there was no car, but Wynn liked my style, so instead of calling the cops he brought me into the program. Had I been afraid of failing, I never would have come this far.”
The entitlement on this one was as thick as the Earth’s mantle. Though maybe he and I were more similar than we appeared. I mean, I’d tried to upend the entire celestial pantheon this very morning. The stunt I’d pulled even shocked Quentin, the king of outrageous stunts and—oh god, I’d completely forgotten about Quentin and the yaoguai.
I glanced around and they were gone. “Ax, we gotta wrap this up,” I said, shifting my weight side to side impatiently. I must have looked like I needed to go to the bathroom.
“All right then, here’s the bottom line,” he said. “I’ll pay you a salary of a hundred thousand dollars a year if you drop out of school and come work for me.”
I stopped dancing in place and clenched my jaw to keep it from hitting the pavement. I took a deep nose breath, blinked slowly, and stayed silent for a while, long enough to make Ax laugh.
He probably thought that as a poor person, I couldn’t comprehend the sheer amount of money he was waving in front of my nose, like a medieval peasant witnessing a match being lit by a time-traveler for the first time. Golly gee mister, I didn’t know numbers went up that high!
In truth it was the opposite. I was taken aback because I knew exactly how much money one hundred thousand dollars was. When I was younger I’d heard snippets of frantic conversations, late-night arguments, screamed obscenities between my father and mother that were about sums of money roughly in that range. A hundred racks was the size of a common small business loan, the kind that had wrecked my family.
And more recently to the point, it was enough to cover an ambulance ride, a few ER visits of varying severity, ongoing courses of heart medication, and general health costs for a non-smoking man and woman of my parents’ ages. There was no particular reason why I’d looked that information up several times over this long weekend on
my phone. No reason at all.
“Why would I have to drop out?” I asked. I’d thought the entrepreneurship for young people that Wynn Ketteridge blathered on about meant a side gig you did as an extracurricular, instead of debate team or chess club.
“Wynn wants to make sure that his protégés are completely committed to his philosophy,” Ax said. “So you’d have to burn your bridges and publicly declare you’re rejecting the concept of higher education. I dropped out of this very school myself. I sneak back on campus regularly to recruit for the program. As you might have guessed from last night, the message is lost on a lot of people.”
Ending my academic career before it truly started? “I—I don’t even go here,” I murmured. “I haven’t begun applications yet.”
“Even better,” Ax said, unfazed that he’d been talking to a high schooler this entire time. “We could call a few local reporters after you complete your apps and get into a few good schools. Make a big story about you saying no to every single one. It would be great publicity for the foundation.”
Like Trish and Kelsey, Ax had no problem warping me into the future where I already got in to a school as exclusive as this one. And the trip was making me nauseous. Either they knew something about me I didn’t, or maybe you lost your memory of what the struggle was like once it was over.
“I can see you’re on the fence,” Ax said. “I’ve never met a better candidate for the program than you, so how about this? You have until the end of the long weekend to decide. After that, the offer’s gone forever. You’d be blacklisted from working with any member of the Nexus Partnership ever again.”
I frowned at him. “You’re going to give me less time to make an important decision because you like me?”
“It’s a negotiating tactic that Wynn teaches us. We use it when we really want something. You’re a unicorn, Genie. A pretty girl like you, who can code? And a minority to boot? You could be the next face of the program.”