by F. C. Yee
“Which is?”
“Scientists say once it becomes possible to create computer simulations of reality, simulated universes will vastly outnumber real ones,” I said. “Heaven and Earth are both virtual realities. Beings like you and Guanyin use different number values for things like gravity and light, so when you’re inserted into the Earth simulation, you bring your own laws of physics into localized surroundings. That’s how you do magic.”
Quentin raised an eyebrow.
“It explains everything,” I argued. “Earth time passes faster because our clock speed is faster. Reincarnation is when the source code for a person is pasted into a different era.”
“That is the nerdiest thing I have ever heard,” Quentin said. “Even coming from you.”
I shrugged. He wasn’t wrong.
“I have a theory about you, too.” He brought his hands out from behind his back. In one he held a cup of bubble tea he’d already finished drinking, and in the other was a coffee.
“Thanks, but I’ve already had some.”
“Have more. I want your heart racing.”
I took the still-hot cup from him and sniffed it gingerly. It smelled divine. “This is for your theory?”
“Yes. I may have taken the wrong approach with your training by asking you to attain stillness.”
The coffee tasted like rainy mountains and toasted honey. I’d have to ask him where he got it.
“Yours is a power born of battle,” Quentin said as I drank. “Rage. Bloodlust.”
“Way to make me sound like a monster.”
“You’re as much of a monster as I am. The only times your power has manifested so far have been when you were absolutely furious. We shouldn’t run away from that. We should embrace it.”
“That is the complete opposite of everything you’ve told me, and everything I’ve read about gongfu.”
“That’s because most teachers and disciples are focused on the aspects of soft power. Wavy, flowing soft power that redirects instead of confronts. There’s hard power, too. The kind that moves in straight lines and overcomes instead of giving way. It’s just as valid and just as essential.
“In my hands you were the living embodiment of hard power,” Quentin continued. He looked nostalgic. “We’ll double down on that instead of trying to suppress it.”
“Won’t that throw my yin and yang energies off balance? I thought balance was an important concept.”
“Screw balance,” he said. “What are you, old?”
I grinned and banked our empty cups into a nearby recycling can. No I was not.
Quentin motioned me into the alleyway where no one could see us. He held out his arms.
“Hop on.”
“What?”
“I’m going to hold you for a moment, as an exercise. Carry you.”
I shook my head. He was acting like he wanted me draped across his arms bridal-style but wasn’t considering our relative proportions. I would have dangled all the way down past his knees.
“Will you stop fighting me on every single little thing and get in my arms?” he hissed. “I have to lift you up completely for this to work! Just trust me for once!”
Well fine, if he was going to be pouty about it. I spun him around, ignoring his protests, and made him lean over so I could get on top of him piggyback.
This wasn’t much better. I had to straighten my legs out to the side and hold them there or else my soles would’ve touched the ground. I felt like I was riding a child’s tricycle downhill.
Quentin shifted me around for a better grip as easily as if I were a sack of feathers. Unfortunately his hands landed where they weren’t supposed to.
“Hey!” I yelped. “You’re grabbing my aaaaAAAAAAAAAHHHH!”
Then we disappeared into the sky.
24
“Aaaaaaaaahahahaha!”
The ground shot away from Quentin’s feet. It looked like that footage from NASA launches where the camera’s mounted at the top, pointed downward, and you can see the coils of fire and thrust pushing you higher and higher. Only this was a million times faster, and there was no smoke to obscure the view of the rapidly shrinking Earth.
Street, block, district, peninsula. I screamed as each gave way to the next. The wind stung the tears right out of my eyes. I probably should have died of fright right there on his back. It would have served him right if I voided myself on top of him.
But somewhere, probably right around the time I recognized we were passing over Fisherman’s Wharf, the terror turned to joy. The first plunge of the roller coaster wasn’t going to kill me, and I was free to whoop and holler to my heart’s content.
We were doing a slow turn as we traveled. The world gradually flipped upside down and then right side up in an astronaut’s sunrise. Quentin was doing one big somersault.
That meant we were going to descend now. I clutched him tighter as a thrill went through my body. Maybe we would die after all, smashed against the Earth so hard there wouldn’t be anything left. We were about to find out.
I thought Quentin was going for some kind of water landing before the rusty red towers of the bridge came into view. I braced for impact, but he did not.
His feet slammed into the painted iron and stuck without moving an inch, a perfect 10.0 landing. The sudden stop should have liquefied my internal organs. The impact should have sent a bell-like clang throughout the platform. But neither happened.
Localized laws of physics, I told myself.
“We’re here,” said Quentin.
I didn’t get off him. Instead I clapped his chest excitedly.
“Again!” I shouted. “Again! Let’s go to Wine Country!”
He dumped me on my feet. “This isn’t a joyride. We’re here to train.”
“Nerd.” I flicked his ear, making a little clack against what used to be my jewelry.
We were alone high up in the gray sky. I knew they let people go to the top of the bridge on occasion, so the platform wasn’t without the trappings of safety. But I was still heady from the way we’d arrived, making the red tower feel like uncharted alien territory. Olympus Mons.
“Look around and tell me what you see,” he said.
“I see the city. The Bay.”
“Good. Now open your eyes and tell me again.”
I did as told before realizing the incongruity.
The landscape suddenly became a painting, full of bright brushstrokes and swirling pigments. I could see the details of the world in thick outlines of color and black. My sense of scale was limitless, unconfined. The daubed-on windows of the smallest building were as visible to me as the tallest spires of the city.
“Oh wow,” I murmured.
Cars in motion danced across the bridge like flipbook animations. I could see inside to the passengers, their faces zoetroping between emotions. That man was hungry. That woman was bored. That child held a secret.
I felt as if I could touch things on the far side of the Bay. Farther. I was hemmed in only by the Sierra Nevada and the western horizon.
I glanced at Quentin, and then stared. He blazed like a golden bonfire.
Energy poured off him in licking waves, an act of inefficient combustion that leaked so much power into the air I could hear the atmosphere whine and sizzle. There was a scorching heat at his core, and I was immune to it.
Around his shoulders was the faintest palimpsest overlay of another form. Skin as hard as diamonds. Fur as soft as velvet. A face of becalmed savagery. He was magnificent. Godlike. A Buddha victorious in battle.
“Well,” he said in two voices, one his normal classroom baritone and the other a bass that could crack the sky. “Do you have anything to say?”
“Yeah. Did you put something in my coffee?”
Quentin laughed, and I could have sworn they heard him in New York.
“No. The only magic there is that it was expensive. You have true sight now, Genie. Technically you have my true sight. I used to be able to see the world like y
ou can right now, but that’s mostly gone. My guess is that our powers had become so intertwined in the old days that when you became human, you ripped this one from me like dirt clinging to a stump.”
“I am genuinely sorry then,” I said. It would have felt like a tragedy if I had to give this experience up to someone else, and I’d only had it for seconds.
“Try the lie detection,” Quentin said. “It’s pretty neat.”
“Well, you have to tell me a lie then.”
He blanked for a bit, one of those understandable moments where you have too many options to choose from.
“I hate you,” he finally settled on.
As Quentin said it a dark, metallic bubble popped out from his lips, like he’d blown it from mercury. It pulsed in the air, a tiny opaque jellyfish, before floating away and dissipating.
“That’s freaky,” I said. “I don’t think I’d want to know all the time if people were lying to me.”
“It’ll come in handy at some point, trust me.”
I went back to drinking in the view. It was moving artwork, zooming and flattening where I wanted it to for my inspection. I watched a container ship full of almonds and canned tomatoes steam away into the distant Pacific. One of the crew members was bluffing his ass off in a poker game, holding nothing but unsuited low cards.
I turned toward land, drawn by a column of smoke. The wildfires in the scrubby hills north of the city were no closer to being put out than when I’d first heard about them on the news. The black whorls looked more like a series of opaque screens than vapor, blocking out anything behind them.
“You should try looking at yourself,” Quentin said.
My eyes were starting to get tired, but I held my hands up in front of my face. As I wiggled my fingers, rippling lines of pressure played out in the air, almost like a topographical map or an artist’s rendition of sound waves.
“That’s how I recognized you,” Quentin said. “Guanyin and Erlang Shen, too. Out of the billions of humans that have come and gone since the old days, only you have an aura as steady and unshakable as that. Just like the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
I watched one of the bigger pulses travel from my skin across the distance until it made contact with Quentin’s erratic inner fire. Rather than clashing, the two energy signatures meshed with each other to become brighter. Stronger. On some fundamental level, Quentin and I harmonized.
Then the waves vanished. My vision reverted back to normal.
“Ow,” I said, fighting back the ache in my corneas. “Is there a time limit on this thing?”
“Sort of. It’s extremely difficult to sustain if you’re not used to it. You’ll have to build up your endurance through practice.”
“Oh my god, everything is always practice, practice, practice with you Asians.”
Quentin laughed, and then suddenly hiccuped. His whole body began shaking like a phone on vibrate. He dropped to one knee and clamped his hands to the platform we were standing on in order to steady himself.
“Jeez, it wasn’t that funny,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”
Quentin wriggled his shoulders back and forth to clear the spasms. “The magic in the earrings is going off. There must be a yaoguai within striking distance of a human.”
“Where?”
He pointed to the south. “Somewhere over there. The feeling is stronger on that side of my body.”
“That’s as much resolution as you get from those things? That’s barely better than a grandpa saying it’ll rain because his trick knee’s gone all a-tingly.”
“Well, Guanyin said they’re meant to be an early warning signal, not a map with GPS.”
I leaned on top of Quentin, using him like a tripod over his protests. Turning true sight back on was surprisingly easy, merely a matter of knowing there was an extra level of vision available to me and then concentrating until I got there. I didn’t know how I was supposed to pick out a demon from the rest of the visual noise, but once I started looking in the direction Quentin was pointing, the answer made itself pretty clear.
A blip appeared that was both brighter and darker than anything else around it—a smear of white ash on top of black soot. I was able to zoom in farther by instinctively squinting.
The flare was coming from inside an industrial building. What industry I didn’t know; something that involved large gray tanks and a jungle of pipes next to a broad warehouse. Judging from its state of disrepair and the long weeds growing around the entrance, the facility should have been completely abandoned. But the eerie, colorless light moved from room to room in the pattern of something alive.
I realized why I was having such a hard time making out the source’s silhouette. It didn’t have one. It was a translucent skeleton, completely fleshless. My eyes kept passing through the spaces between its ribs.
“Quentin,” I said, thoroughly weirded out by the apparition. “Do you have any friends who are skeletons?”
“Skeletons? Is that what you’re seeing?”
“I see one skeleton,” I said. “Kind of floating around, pacing back and forth. It’s giving off light like you do, except without any color or brightness. Am I even making sense?”
Quentin’s grim expression alone told me yes, unfortunately I was. “Baigujing. The White Bone Demon. Don’t let her out of your sight.”
Watching the yaoguai waltz to and fro unnerved me beyond the fact that its appearance was firmly lodged at the bottom of the uncanny valley. I felt like a vulnerable Peeping Tom. In horror movies, the person trying to watch the monster through a telescope is usually moments away from biting it.
“What do we do now?” I asked. “Do we . . . do we go get her?”
“Hell no. We sit our asses down and think of a plan.”
I was so surprised at his tone, I nearly looked away from Baigujing, but he reached up and propped my chin back into place.
“I’m serious,” he said. “She’s bad news—extremely bad. I don’t think we’re ready for her yet. Find whatever human she’s lurking too close to and then we can make sure their paths don’t cross.”
I looked around the edges of the factory for a night watchman or a delinquent tagger sneaking onto the property. Nothing. The demon didn’t look like she was hunting down any intruders.
Wait.
She wasn’t pacing back and forth. She was walking around in a circle, her eyeless gaze fixed on a small shape on the center of the floor.
A little girl of five, looking too scared to cry.
“Damn it!” I screamed. “Damn it damn it damn it! There’s a kid with her! Like with her!”
“What?” Quentin sprang to his feet and nearly clocked me in the jaw with his skull. “How did she get her hands on a human so fast?”
“I don’t know, but we have to get there now!”
“I don’t know where ‘there’ is!” You’re the only one who can see her from this distance!”
I grabbed Quentin’s shoulders and pointed him toward the derelict building. “I’ll guide you! Just start jumping!”
Quentin made a handhold for me to climb on his back. “You have to give me some indication of where I’m trying to land!”
“About half the distance to my house, but in this direction! Go, damn it!”
Quentin and I took to the sky. The natural curve of his leap made it easy to fixate on our target while we sped through the air. The skeleton had stopped wandering and was now crouching directly in front of the catatonic child, contemplating. Any number of thoughts bounced inside its empty, polished skull.
“Hurry up!” I shouted into Quentin’s ear.
“We’re not flying! I can’t change direction or speed in midair!”
I cursed, and then cursed again even louder as we overshot. “That factory we just passed!” I yelled. “Second floor, the biggest room!”
“I saw it,” Quentin grunted. “Hold on.”
We came down in an empty municipal baseball diamond that might have been in the same town as th
e factory. Quentin took the landing much harder than on the bridge. We slammed into the ground, gouging up fountains of dirt and grass. Before the debris even settled, Quentin had us back in the air, on a smaller arc in the opposite direction.
This leg of our journey took much less time. As the building loomed near, Quentin stuck out an arm to act as a battering ram. I buried my face in his shoulder as we made impact with one of the huge glass windows.
I heard us burst through and land on the other side as easily as if it were a pane of sugar. Quentin held my head down while shards tinkled around us, to make sure I didn’t catch an eyeful.
Once it was safe he patted my knee. I got up and took a measure of our surroundings.
The hall we were in had been stripped of equipment a long time ago. Exposed I-beams buttressed walls of cinderblock that had never been painted. The dust under our feet was thick enough to pass for light snowfall.
I found the child in the center of the open space. She looked scared out of her wits, but whole.
Standing over her in a flowing evening gown was a beautiful, shapely woman. With no lips. They were simply missing. Her teeth, otherwise perfect, lay bare to the world, giving her the same insouciant smirk as a poison bottle.
She reached out and brushed a nail down the little girl’s cheek. A razor line of blood followed it, and the girl cried out in pain.
“Get away from her!” I shrieked.
“Or what?” said the demon. “I’m not afraid of either of you.”
Her voice was like nothing so much as a pepper grinder. She compensated for her liplessness by rolling her tongue to make certain sounds, the same way a ventriloquist did.
“Now or never,” Quentin said to me.
“Now.”
I ran straight at Baigujing. Whatever magical toughness had protected me from being cut to ribbons by a plate-glass window would have to do. Quentin got clever and flickered off to the side, rounding the demon to hit her in the flank.
Unfortunately for us, I got there first. My wild, untrained punch met Baigujing right in the center of her chest, but she went limp and weightless the split second before, offering no resistance. She and I tumbled together a few steps before disentangling.