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“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.”
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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.”
I winced. The last threat level more frightening than Quentin had been Red Boy, the demon with enough firepower to raze an entire city. Red Boy had nearly smelted Quentin and me into stone and iron. Only a lot of luck and an alley-oop from the Goddess of Mercy had seen us through.
By now Guanyin’s numerical entry on the phone had reached robotic speeds. Her fingers were a blur. The hardware itself glowed incandescently, the plastic staying solid through temperatures that could have fried an egg. I could tell that powerful magics were being wrought through this mundane device.
Suddenly, she stopped.
Guanyin withdrew her hand carefully, like she’d put the final touch on a house of cards. Our connection was tenuous, almost explosive.
“Wai?” she said.
An airburst of static knocked the wax out of my ears. “KSHHHHHHHHai? Wai? Miaoshan?”
It was a woman’s voice on the other end. She sounded older than Guanyin. Rounder and less melodic.
“Mama,” Guanyin said. “Shi wo. Ta ren zai nali?”
Noticing my confusion, she pressed the mute button. “The Queen Mother of the West,” Guanyin explained. “Not my actual mother.”
I had done some basic god research since becoming the Shouhushen. Not a lot, but some. The person we were speaking to was the highest-ranking female member of the celestial pantheon. The Hera to us all.
“Miaoshan!” the queen said, using what must have been a pet name for Guanyin. “I don’t hear your voice for so long and you don’t ask how I’m doing? Just ‘where are the others?’ What happened to you on Earth? Did you lose your manners down a pit? One of those recycling cans I’ve heard about? Did you recycle your manners?”
Guanyin’s eyes rolled up like drapes. “Mama, I’m sorry but I can’t talk right now. You have to put me on with the others. It’s important.”
