The Iron Will of Genie Lo

by F. C. Yee

  “So yeah,” I said. “Welcome to the party.”

  Guan Yu chuckled. “Aye, the child is full of wisdom. What a paradise the Protectorate of California must be, under her reign.”

  I didn’t tell him that California was jacked up beyond my control. “Are we forging on, then?”

  “It would be prudent to rest and regain our strength first,” Guan Yu said. “A good tactician knows when to exercise caution.”

  “I’m with the general,” Erlang Shen said. “If you’re putting me through the crap of having to win the Mandate Challenge twice, then I’m doing it at a hundred percent and nothing less.”

  I glanced at Guanyin. She made a shrug saying she didn’t disagree.

  “Okay,” I said. “How do gods recharge?” I knew Guanyin sometimes mentioned needing to do so, but she’d never revealed the details. “Do you sleep? Meditate? Power down like robots?”

  My curiosity earned me a round of annoyed stares, including Guanyin’s. “I’ll . . . give you your privacy and go take a nap over there,” I said, pointing over my shoulder.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  As I made my way to the far edge of the campfire’s radius, Quentin blocked my path.

  “We need to talk,” he said.

  I felt a surge of guilt rushing up my throat for how relatively little I’d been thinking about him since the Mandate Challenge started. During the mundane portion of the long weekend our only contact had been fighting, but at least it was contact.

  I’d missed him on a visceral level. We hadn’t touched in so long. Our usual method of traveling from place to place literally required squeezing each other’s bodies. I could have that again, right now. The cost was simply opening up.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Don’t you think what happened with Princess Iron Fan was weird?”

  Guh. I was such an idiot.

  Somewhere between now and our moment at the pool, Quentin had learned to hide his crushing disappointment with me. “How so?” he asked calmly.

  His forbearance was disturbing, a bad sign. Quentin was supposed to be my equal in temper, not an emotionless statue. “What was she trying to do exactly?” I said, wincing internally. “If you think about her actions, it’s like she was picking a fight for no discernible reason.”

  “You said it yourself. We defeated Red Boy. Maybe she wanted revenge for her son.”

  “That can’t be it. You and me being there seemed like a surprise to her. She wasn’t interested in us. If anything, she was overly interested in Guanyin.”

  Quentin shrugged. “She said she was looking for the strongest among us. And Guanyin’s incredibly strong. Especially when you consider the reserves of good karma she’s stored up over the millennia. I wouldn’t be surprised if she represents the greatest total amount of spiritual power in one god.”

  He wasn’t using this as an opportunity to bicker about the mandate and the merits of Guan Yu. Quentin not wanting to bicker? A huge red flashing light was going off. The seawater was rising around my ankles.

  And yet I was still ignoring it, fiddling away on the sinking deck. “It doesn’t add up,” I said. “Especially when you consider all of us getting sent to this mountain-plane as a group. What are the odds of that happening? There’s a piece missing here.”

  His arms rose and fell with a slap against his sides. “I don’t know what to tell you. I really don’t.”

  That came out with too many layers of meaning. I floundered for more things to say to keep him talking to me but left too big a gap. “You should get some sleep,” he said, before he turned and slipped into the woods, disappearing behind the trees.

  “Hey!” I said. “That’s not safe! Quentin!”

  He left me alone, gnashing my teeth in the fading light.

  I thought about heading back to the others to lie down by the fire they’d made, but that wouldn’t have settled the roiling in my throat. I wasn’t going to give up like this. If it took me a million years of standing awkwardly in front of Quentin to result in a productive conversation, then that was what it would have to take. The two of us could fossilize together, our sulking faces preserved in amber for eternity.

  But first I had to find him. It was growing darker fast, and the woods were a labyrinth of choices, trees obscuring the view past a few yards. Using true sight would have blinded me. I felt like a puck dropped down on a board embedded with nails in a carnival game. Random bounces would take me anywhere but to the prize.

  In an act that was mostly fueled by spite, I half closed my eyes until I could barely see the ground under my lids and stepped forward slowly and surely, taking lefts and rights with complete confidence. If Quentin could find me by my aura, then I could find him by his. I refused to let him win that contest.

  I knew it had something to do with how our energies interacted and amplified each other. Mine was like sound waves generated by an iron bell; his was a roaring golden torch. I’d learned this back when we spent most of our time training together. When it felt right, I opened my eyes again.

  In a little clearing nestled in the roots of a large tree, the perfect spot for someone to meditate in the embrace of nature, was . . . nothing.

  Quentin wasn’t here. I’d struck out.

  That I couldn’t make our connection work the same way he could nearly broke my heart, until I remembered a crucial component: I wasn’t the greatest expert in mystical auras, but I knew my boyfriend’s habits.

  I ran forward and kicked the tree. It vibrated from the impact. I heard a yelp come from above, and an object plummeted from the top of its branches. I caught Quentin in my arms, bridal style. He was still the heaviest thing I’d ever carried, but the strain was worth it.

  “You jerk!” he shouted, his face adorably grumpy. I’d never held him like this before, but I was going to do it a lot more from now on. Whenever we were fighting, I’d just scoop him into my arms. I put a stop to his wriggling escape attempts by leaning forward and pressing my lips gently to his forehead. If I couldn’t put words to my feelings, then I could act, and hope the translation was good enough.

  “Put me down for a sec, will you?” he said. I relented and set him on his feet. He surprised me by turning me around and hugging me tightly from behind, pressing his face into my back.

  It was like today was hold-each-other-weirdly day. “What are you doing?”

  “Shut up,” he said, his voice shaking so hard I could feel it through my skin. “I’m about to cry and I don’t want you to see it.”

  I sputtered unintelligibly. This was new.

  “Genie, I thought you were dead,” Quentin said. “The last thing I saw was Princess Iron Fan about to murder you.”

  He took deep shivering breaths, and the back of my shirt grew damp. “After the explosion, it took me hours to pick up on your aura again. That was hours of me thinking you were gone forever. I nearly went berserk. Guan Yu and Guanyin and the Great White Planet had to restrain me from tearing down the mountain.”

  That seemed disproportionate. Not to humblebrag, but I hadn’t been that scared for myself during the encounter with Princess Iron Fan because everything had happened so quickly. It wasn’t the slow-motion horror of watching Quentin fall under the flames of Red Boy or seeing him suddenly bleed from Princess Iron Fan’s assault. Those were the worst experiences of my—

  Oh.

  That was the terror I’d put him through. That gut-wrenching, would-rather-the-world-end kind of pain. Normally Quentin was the one who tanked more hits from our enemies, so seeing Princess Iron Fan nearly kill me must have been a fresh kind of hell for him. If he’d felt for my safety what I felt for his . . .

  I shook my head. I didn’t want to think about him hurting inside that much. I reached behind me until I found his shoulders and squeezed him further into me.

  “I thought I’d lost you,” he said. “I thought I lost you again. And that the last memory we’d have of each other was being angry.”

  He spun me around so fast that it made me woozy.
I lost my balance, and he caught me like a romantic pirate holding his swooning betrothed.

  “Genie,” he said, looking more desperate and vulnerable than I’d seen in any yaoguai fight. “Genie, I’m so sorry. I’ve been acting like a jerk. I got needlessly upset because you’ve been surprising me so much lately. When you named Guanyin for the mandate. When you talked about not going to college.”

  Each time he sniffled he sent a gigantic yank on my heartstrings. “Of course you’re not obligated to only do what I expect, and I’m sorry for implying it,” Quentin said. “It’s just that all of these surprises sent me back to a really bad place, to when you first threw me for a loop by disappearing from my side as the Ruyi Jingu Bang. That was the first time I thought I’d lost you forever.”

  The confession came pouring out of him with ease. He’d beat me to Ji-Hyun’s advice about self-examination. I shouldn’t have been surprised. Sun Wukong had the power to learn fast, and I had the power to be an emotionally stunted doof.

  I couldn’t fall so far behind. “The only reason I’m surprising you is because I’m surprising myself because I don’t know myself as much as I thought and that terrifies me!” I yawped.

  It took my competitive unwillingness to let Quentin “win” at honesty to force the words out of me. Not healthy at all, but effective for now. The blockage had been loosened.

  “Back when we first met, I had one goal,” I said. “One. And now it’s like life is getting way more complicated. The future’s not a single checkbox anymore. And it’s overwhelming me. I feel like I’m drowning sometimes.”

  I gripped him tighter—my personal flotation device. “I’m sorry. I’ve—I was such an asshole to you. Saying you’re not family. But Quentin, you know what happened to my mom and dad. They are all I’ve ever witnessed when it comes to relationships and family, and I’d do anything not to follow their example.”

  He looked troubled. “Should I give you space? Should we not be a thing for a while?”

  “No!” I said with certainty. “I want you close by. I—I need you close by. But we don’t always have to be perfect together.”

  I pulled myself out of his arms and sat down in the clearing. He plopped down next to me. The two of us, not staring into each other’s eyes, but facing the same direction, like a team. This was easier.

  Ji-Hyun’s advice was working. Quentin and I had finally gone down the path she’d told us to take. She was like a . . . drunk Jedi or something. I needed to thank her once we got home.

  I threw my arm over Quentin’s shoulder and rested my frame on his. It wasn’t the most comfortable, given how dense and hard he was. Embracing him was always a little bit like trying to cuddle with a V8 engine block.

  “What I mean is, I’ve learned there’s going to be times where ‘you-and-I’ have to take a backseat to more important business,” I said. “Like with the Mandate Challenge, for instance. There were plenty of moments this weekend where I forgot about you entirely.”

  “Gee, thanks,” he muttered.

  I smacked him on the shoulder. “And that should be allowed. We’ll drive ourselves nuts if we try and live inside each other’s heads. I get enough of that with my mother as it is.”

  He leaned on me. We sat there, enjoying the comfortable silence.

  “I’m also sorry for how I treated you when we first met,” he said after a while.

  I looked at him, interested. It was true—he did owe me an apology for messing with me the first few days we’d known each other. “What brought this on?”

  “I went to the wrong campus party and saw some stuff.” Quentin shuddered. “Stuff too reminiscent of how I acted back then. I should thank Heaven every day that you still let me into your life.”

  He rubbed his thumb over his knuckles, making me believe he’d dealt with any issues he’d seen in the same manner I would have. I liked apologetic, worshipful Quentin. I couldn’t resist teasing him while I held the upper hand.

  “Sooo,” I said, nuzzling his temple. “You don’t like it when I surprise you, huh? That’s very possessive and controlling. Maybe you haven’t changed as much as you think.”

  I could feel him scowling through my skin and delighted in the way it tickled. “I assumed we were supposed to be completely in sync after we started dating,” he grumbled. “I was told the best couples understand each other’s thoughts and finish each other’s sentences.”

  “Ha! Where’d you get that advice, an internet quiz?”

  “Well excuse me for wanting to be romantic!” he said, his voice rising in pitch.

  Oh, sweet banter. How I missed it.

  “Quentin, I love you, but I don’t want to merge with you,” I said, tugging on his sideburns. He needed a haircut soon. “You’re going to have to accept a surprise every now and then.”

  He paused. Then he looked up at me. His face had a wild, Cheshire grin smeared all over it. “Do you know what you just said?”

  “That you’re going to have to deal with surprises?”

  “No. The other thing.” I backtracked, puzzling over what he meant, until it hit me.

  Oh god no.

  “You said it!” Quentin crowed. “You said it first!”

  I could feel the blood rushing upward through my neck and into my cheeks. “That doesn’t count!” It wasn’t supposed to be a contest between us—who said the three words of doom first. Except of course it was. It had been our unspoken battle to the death for a long time now.

  “You will never live this down,” Quentin said. “My victory stands for all time!” He shimmied along the ground in a butt-wiggling, taunting dance.

  I tried to get my hands around his neck, but he grabbed my wrists and fended me off. “Yunie owes me ten dollars!” he shouted as we struggled.

  “Quentin, I will kill you!”

  “But how can you kill what you looooove!”

  I wanted to shut him up, so I did, the best way I knew how. I attacked his lips with mine, smothering the four-letter L-word right out of him. He let go of my arms, freeing me to run my fingers through his hair in what was possibly and without exaggeration my favorite thing to do in the world.

  Without breaking our kiss, he gripped me under my knees and hoisted me into the air. I thought he wanted to keep me there, suspended in time and space, until he took a step to the side and pinned me against the tree, hard enough to send a shower of leaves down around us. I gasped in the thrill of his body crushing even deeper into mine.

  I kicked off the trunk and toppled forward onto him, folding myself in half to stay in contact with his mouth. My hands dove for the skin under his shirt and ran into his tail wrapped around his waist, a boundary that would have been unfamiliar to anyone but me.

  “Wa—” he said, his words muffled by our never-ending kiss. Lying on his back like that, he couldn’t draw his head far away enough to speak clearly, so he resorted to grabbing my ponytail and yanking on it sharply. “Wait!” he said again, clearer this time.

  I scowled at him as angrily as I ever had. Quentin looked up at me like it wasn’t his fault we’d stopped. “Nineteen, remember?” he said. “Your words, not mine.”

  Ugh. I remembered. Past-Genie could be a real drag. Now-Genie wanted to cut ties to every inhibition she’d ever had, to feast, to howl at the moon with glee. If I could have chosen to be two different people at that moment, I would have.

  But he was right. And in the spirit of taking him seriously, I slowed the roaming of my hands to a crawl, and then finally to a rest. Under the fabric of his shirt I drummed my fingers against the rock-hard resistance of his abs, conquered territory that I wasn’t ready to give up yet. They would have to redraw the map as far as I was concerned.

  “Fiiiiiiiiiine,” I grumbled. “We won’t break my rule. My stupid, stupid rule.”

  Quentin nodded sagely. Right before he grabbed my hips, arched his spine, and flipped me over so that he was on top.

  “We won’t,” Quentin said, his expression of prudence replaced with
the most wicked smirk I’d ever seen. “But we can skirt it pretty close.”

  I grinned and pulled him back in for more.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  I woke up to the sound of my alarm clock vibrating. I reached over to hit the snooze button but ended up slapping Quentin in the face.

  “Huh?” he said in a daze from where he was lying beside me. He’d been asleep as well, the first time I’d ever seen it happen.

  “Turn the alarm off,” I groaned, my eyes shut against the morning light. “You’re closer.”

  His body rustled and twisted over the grass. “Ow,” he muttered. “I think you broke me. I haven’t been this sore since I was trapped under the mountain.”

  Maybe I’d only dreamed of last night. The whole thing could have been a mirage to an overwhelmingly thirsty traveler. A manifestation of my pent-up desires.

  But the twigs burrowing into my hip and the chill in the air told me yes, I had slept outdoors in a forest. Quentin and I had indeed made up with a vengeance, and now there were a whole new bunch of items to keep secret from Yunie. At least until she dragged them out of me by force.

  Wait.

  That meant we weren’t in my bed. Or my house. Or Earth. Which meant that alarm noise was coming from—

  Quentin and I both bolted upright. We were able to catch the last remnants of grayish dawn making their escape, daylight returning even faster than it had left. I stared at Quentin, my eyes wide with dismay.

  His earrings were buzzing.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  Quentin and I burst back onto the scene with the others. We were in such a hurry that I hip-checked more than one tree into splinters on the way over.

  I missed the chance to see what gods did at night. Maybe they kept operating twenty-four seven. When we arrived they looked at us like we’d only been gone a few minutes. I couldn’t tell if they’d moved.

  “Ears!” I yelled at everyone. “Ears!”

  Even though the jewelry he wore was trying to fly away from his head like trapped insects, Quentin was able to stay much more on point. “How good is the signal on these?” he said to Guanyin. “Are they still working?”