The Iron Will of Genie Lo Read online

  She looked horrified that she couldn’t refute the charges. Guanyin’s good craftsmanship spanned planes. Which meant that somewhere back home in the Bay Area, a human being and a yaoguai were about to run smack dab into each other.

  Why? I screamed at myself. Why had I not learned my lesson? Don’t stop, don’t rest, don’t forgive yourself until the problem was solved. The yaoguai who’d managed to get through the portal before Princess Iron Fan attacked. The only thing keeping them away from humans was a flimsy promise made to the Shouhushen, who they’d obviously figured out wasn’t around to watch them. Christ, the entire campus could be swarming with demons right now.

  “They won’t stop!” Quentin shouted, clutching his head.

  Guanyin passed her hands over his ears and undid whatever magic she’d used to bind them there. They buzzed and lurched in her hands so violently that she cried out and dropped them on the ground. In one last spasm, they flared with energy and burst into melted drops of pewter. The gold color was fake, after all.

  The fact that I’d lost a gift from my father hurt. But losing the earrings themselves didn’t hurt as much as seeing Quentin without them on. It felt like every moment we’d shared while he’d worn them had been stripped away.

  And in the place of those memories, I now had a disaster of my own making. It wasn’t difficult to make the mental connection. The harder the demon alarm buzzed, the more humans in peril. So many that the system had overloaded.

  This is your lot, the voice inside my head whispered. It was the same one that spoke to me as a child while I stared at an opened birthday gift, my parents’ voices screaming in the background. Destined to fail. A girl who breaks what she touches.

  I turned to the gods, whom I wanted to collectively throttle. In my frantic state their hesitance last night seemed more like cowardice. “How far away is this energy that’s trapping us here? As the crow flies?”

  The Great White Planet raised a finger toward a part of the gnarled forest that appeared identical and arbitrary to me. “At your speed? Probably an hour, if the way were clear. But making our way through that growth could take us a day or more.”

  “We’d want to approach carefully,” Erlang Shen said. “Announcing our presence could be the last mistake we make.”

  Uh-uh. Not good enough. I wasn’t going to waste more time having a friggin’ woodland adventure.

  I snapped my fingers at Guan Yu. “Big man. Can you clear a path? I don’t care how messy or loud you are.”

  The red-faced warrior’s eyes lit up with glee. “Ha!” he bellowed. “I like the way you think, Shouhushen!”

  Guan Yu unslung his massive polearm and wound up with a two-handed grip like a batter at a home run derby. Above him, the keen edge of the blade caught the light before it suddenly disappeared from the speed of his swing.

  Nothing happened.

  Erlang Shen was about to make a smartass comment but Guan Yu pre-empted it, holding up his hand. “Wait for it.”

  The forest in front of us shifted to the right. It was as if someone had raked a scalpel across the backdrop of an old movie set and pulled apart the canvas. The trees slid off their stumps and crashed over on their sides. The crescendo of snapping branches accompanied the big reveal of a deforested path the length of a soccer pitch.

  Quentin let out a low appreciative whistle.

  “That’s pretty good,” I said to Guan Yu. “But can you do it on the run?”

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  “I’m not asking you to slow down,” the Great White Planet said in my ear, his teeth clacking together as he spoke. “But maybe you could give these old bones some consideration.”

  “Cram it,” I said. I didn’t care how rough a ride I was, hopping from stump to stump. I never heard Yoda complain about piggybacking on Luke while he was somersaulting through the swamp.

  I’d made it clear that dignity was no longer a priority to our group. That was why the Great White Planet was clutching to my back for dear life. I trusted Guanyin could keep up with a fast pace.

  Ahead of us, Quentin and Guan Yu were having the time of their lives. The Green Dragon Crescent Blade danced in its wielder’s hands as it shredded through the forest, and sometimes not even in Guan Yu’s hands. I was pretty sure the warrior god could control the polearm without touching it. On more than one occasion it spun with a mind of its own, zooming in arcs to the left and right before returning to him.

  The trees that took too long to fall out of our way were pounced on and obliterated by a squad of Quentin clones. He made up a single-handed offensive line that blocked for the rest of us, only instead of padded dummies, the obstacles were multiton piles of lumber.

  Even Erlang Shen got into the act, whipping splinters out of the air with lashes of water. “You know that whatever is generating this qi will hear us coming,” he shouted.

  “Don’t care,” I shouted back.

  “I’m just saying, powerful beings tend to have good hearing,” he went on. “For example, gods can pick up on the sounds of distant, uh, vigorously combative romance, shall we say?”

  My cheeks started to burn.

  “At first I thought the two of you were locked in mortal struggle,” he said. “I almost went to check on you. For your safety.”

  “Screw you!” I yelled.

  “I don’t think I would survive the encounter!” he said gleefully. “I mean, I never heard the monkey make such a noise, even when I fought him to the . . . aaagh!”

  A weird-looking spiky fruit the size of a pineapple smashed into Erlang Shen’s face from above. I looked up to see a Quentin, perhaps the real one, giving me a wink from a tree branch.

  I blew a kiss at him. Dunking on people we both hated, together. The truest sign of coupledom there ever was.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  The Great White Planet’s estimation was about right. Without my phone I had no way to time our exact progress. But I guessed roughly an hour had passed, once we ran out of trees.

  I let the old god off my back and jumped down from the last stump. With the forest behind me, I gazed into infinity.

  The next level of this game was an endless marble floor that housed absolutely nothing. The yawning expanse ahead of us could have been the size of a true continent. Polished flatness every which way you looked.

  It was almost oppressive, how smooth and even the white stone plain was. The soothing effect of the campus’ flatness back on Earth was magnified here into the nerve-wracking thought that I was about to be pressed down and griddled.

  The campus, I thought bitterly. “We have to go.”

  “Genie,” Guanyin said. “I have a bad feeling about this. Something’s not right.”

  I wheeled on her, suddenly furious. She’d been the one to say that we had to finish the Mandate Challenge in order to go home, and the thought of slowing down now caused me to lose it.

  “What, do you want to quit again?” I snapped. “I have to get back to Earth, now! We don’t have eternity for you to piss away, figuring out what you want to do!”

  There was a time I would have severely hurt someone for making Guanyin flinch the way she did now. I couldn’t stomach my own handiwork, so I turned my back on her and marched onward to the end.

  I watched my feet the first few steps. They crossed over the boundary between forestland and stone plain. So far, so good. No barriers, death traps, or illusions.

  We set out in a row, spaced apart from each other. The Magnificent Seven but down one. You could have scored our meaningful walk to a cowboy’s harmonica.

  But any musical accompaniment would have been tainted quickly. There was a droning in the air that started not too far into the plain. I thought I was hearing things, but the gods frowned along with me each time it increased in volume.

  The noise was atmospheric, as if every single molecule of gas around us was contributing to the soundwaves. Perhaps Princess Iron Fan had become the sky itself. I shuddered at the thought.

  I knew that taking a
peek with true sight would blind me, perhaps permanently. The waves of magical power were so thick that they were nearly tangible, like the arms of a kelp forest parting to let us closer before they swallowed us whole.

  The infernal droning became more and more intense. We must have been walking toward its source. It scrambled my neurons to the point where I no longer had any idea how long we’d been traversing this empty floor. The ground seemed to suck at my ankles. Only sheer bullheadedness kept me wading through the quicksand.

  Suddenly, a lucid thought flickered through my head. I’d heard a sound like this before. When Quentin had summoned Guanyin to Earth the first time, he’d chanted in a way that made it seem like there were hundreds of him packed into the room, a monkish overtone concert.

  This was like that, times a million. This was someone’s voice, amplified to the nth degree. The amount of power needed to turn a vast outdoor expanse into an echo chamber made me queasy.

  And yet we kept going. Understanding that I was listening to a person, to language, let me identify syllables like droplets making up the ocean.

  Shui le shui le shui le shuile shuileshuileshuile . . .

  Sleep. The imperative form. Someone was casting a sleep spell, the most basic of basics, but with the energy of a thousand birthing suns behind it. I saw a dot on the horizon, the singularity at the source.

  We kept going. We kept going until that dot on the plain turned into a shape, and the shape turned into a man.

  It was the Jade Emperor.

  26

  The King of Heaven looked much different from the last time I’d seen him on Earth. The puffy, sweaty, middle-aged bureaucrat was gone, switched out for a gaunt, starved hermit who hadn’t seen the underside of a roof in a long time.

  His face was burned and hardened by exposure, like fired clay. Fraying, unadorned robes hung loosely off his shoulders. His eyes were closed in meditation, and he sat cross-legged on the white marble floor.

  Erlang Shen began to shake with laughter. Silently at first, and then with growing force. He doubled over. Dropped to his knees.

  “I can’t believe this!” he shrieked, wiping the tears from his eyes. “This is too much! Really!”

  He collapsed and rolled over onto his back, clutching his ribs, kicking into the air, pedaling an imaginary bicycle. He’d lost it completely. Everyone else was like me, straitjacketed with fear.

  “Don’t you get it?” Erlang Shen cried with joy. “He’s the threat! He’s the cause of all of this! He brought us to this plane and trapped us here! You don’t know him like I do! Everything that happened to us was because he willed it so!”

  None of that made any sense. Erlang Shen was seeing what he wanted to see, drawing conclusions that aligned with his hatred.

  I couldn’t tell him so. My throat wouldn’t work. Neither would my arms and legs. The sense of wrongness shooting through me was paralyzing. If the Jade Emperor was casting sleep like this, a single bullet with enough powder behind it to level a city, then the command should have devastated us. But we were still awake. Which meant something else was the target.

  Erlang Shen sat up suddenly, like a revenant. “Come on!” he yelled at us. “None of you see the irony in this? The Jade Emperor’s the person whom we had to kill this entire time! After everything we’ve been through, this is a gift from the Way!”

  He singled me out. “Nothing to say? No little quip about how I went to Hell for wanting to kill him and now I get permission, signed and stamped by the Universe? No mockery? Nothing at all?”

  I couldn’t respond even if I wanted to. None of us could. In his mania, Erlang Shen had missed his uncle opening his eyes, just a crack.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  The pyroclastic flow of energy that washed forth from the Jade Emperor wasn’t magic. Magic altered reality. This was our new reality. Oblivion, at his behest. He was less of a god and more of an eldritch horror.

  My eyelids were taped open, immobilized. I could feel my atoms being shaken apart. The solid light that represented the King of Heaven’s power was visible to my naked eye. It washed over Quentin, Guan Yu, Guanyin, and the Great White Planet like it did me, rendering us into photo negatives, robbing us of color, freezing us like backdrop paintings.

  But not Erlang Shen. The thundering sea parted around him. Deigned to let him through. He didn’t even seem to notice what was happening to us in comparison to himself.

  In frustration at our silence he screamed incoherently and flung his fist in our direction. Then Erlang Shen turned back to his uncle with murder in his eyes.

  With the water he’d held on to he formed a long, slender blade. He stalked toward the Jade Emperor, who still sat unmoving in repose.

  “None of you have any idea how long I’ve waited to do this!” Erlang Shen roared. “A year passes on Earth for every day in Heaven? Well, a decade passes in Hell for every day on Earth! A decade of torment for EACH! DAY!”

  Erlang Shen was far away. Tinny. Ringed by darkness. I was having an out-of-body experience watching him. Despite everything that had transpired between us, I was overcome with only one desire: to scream at him to run away. To save himself.

  He stood before the Jade Emperor and gripped his uncle by the shoulder with one hand, raising his weapon high with the other.

  “Here’s to a better Universe,” Erlang Shen said. He plunged the weapon down.

  The Jade Emperor caught the tip of the blade with his fingers. The water evaporated.

  Erlang Shen lost his balance and stumbled forward. The Jade Emperor reached up with his other hand and gripped his nephew by the throat.

  Making a slow, deliberate show of it, the King of Heaven finally, fully opened his eyes, sending a fresh wave of annihilating power over us. He looked at the group in turn, the Great White Planet, Guanyin, me, Quentin, and Guan Yu, pointedly ignoring the strangled cries of Erlang Shen.

  He got to his knees, and then to his feet, never taking his hand off his nephew. The motion caused his robes to slip from his shoulders, revealing a body that had been flensed of its former softness. He was covered in thick knots of tendons and ligaments like a braided bullwhip, and each twitch of his muscles caused Erlang Shen to gag in pain.

  “Children,” he spat at us. He made the word sound like the most vile kind of creature imaginable. “You complete and utter children.”

  Erlang Shen hammered at the Jade Emperor’s wrist, but his attempts to free himself were no more effective than a schoolyard bully back home trying to escape Quentin’s wrath. The difference in strength was that big.

  “You ingrates have no idea what I do for you! You mock me when you think I’m not looking! You spit on my commands! And the first chance you get, you try to replace me, just like I knew you would! I counted on your treachery! You’re nothing but children! Grasping, overweening children!”

  He shook Erlang Shen like a rag doll. “And why are you here?” the Jade Emperor screamed in his nephew’s face. “How did you manage to worm your way out of Hell and into the Mandate Challenge?”

  The missing piece that I’d mentioned to Quentin. It was being unveiled, inch by inch. But I still didn’t know where it fit yet. The Jade Emperor had planned for a Mandate Challenge to occur in his absence, but why? Why disappear in the first place?

  “My flesh and blood,” the King of Heaven said, summoning a fresh reserve of contempt. “How pathetic you look. Do you miss your eye? Is that what this is about? Here!”

  He viciously smashed his own forehead into his nephew’s. The blow tore a gash in Erlang Shen’s skin like an old scar had been reopened. The blood that flowed down the rain god’s face made a pattern, a crying wound where a third eye could have been once.

  “Do you know why I never listened to you?” the Jade Emperor said. “Why I kept you in your place?”

  Tears streamed down Erlang Shen’s face, mixing with his blood. He couldn’t get a sound out around his tongue blocking his throat.

  “The reason I treated you like garbage i
s because you were garbage,” the Jade Emperor said to him. “I bet not once while you were brooding in the shadows, plotting your revenge, did you ever realize that you were useless trash. You assumed I was afraid of your power? No. I was never afraid of you, boy. I rejected you because you were too weak to help me rule. You always were.”

  With a final sob, Erlang Shen gave up. Stopped resisting. The most defiant person I had ever met closed his eyes and accepted his fate.

  The Jade Emperor crushed his neck.

  ▪ ▪ ▪

  It was the lightness. The utter lack of weight the Jade Emperor gave to any of us. I had known how little he cared about humans, but to see him cast aside his own family was more than I could stand.

  I screamed, and to my surprise, the Jade Emperor heard me. He looked at me and tossed the corpse of Erlang Shen to the ground, where it lay still and bent. His nephew already forgotten, not worth wiping his hand over.

  The Jade Emperor stuck his tongue out and wagged his head in sarcastic, undignified mockery of my incomprehension. “You look confused,” he said. “Since there’s nothing more disgusting than a face of an idiot human who doesn’t know what’s going on, I’ll tell you what this is about.”

  He extended his finger. Not to point at me. But at Guanyin.

  “I needed her,” he said. “The Goddess of Mercy.” He gestured at Guan Yu, the Great White Planet, and Quentin, all of whom were still locked up by his raw power. “The rest of you are chaff. I don’t know how Princess Iron Fan managed to let so many of you survive, but no matter. The witch sent me what I asked for.”

  The Jade Emperor left me reeling as he closed in on Guanyin. There was no end to how much I’d ruined everything, no bottom to the pit I’d dragged us into. She wouldn’t have been here if not for me. I was a living, walking mistake, and my friend was going to suffer for it.

  Guanyin made eye contact with me, her gaze full of desperation. I saw one of her arms twisted behind her back, her fingers working over a spell. She was using her body to hide the motions from the Jade Emperor. I couldn’t tell what she was casting until a warm glow appeared to the side of me.