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I resumed climbing. Erlang Shen kept pace beside me. We both kept our eyes on the mountain.
“When I was younger, there was this plush toy that came out one year,” I said. I tested my next foothold and stepped higher. “Everyone at school had one. It was like a bear . . . deer . . . cat thing. I wasn’t sure what animal it was supposed to be.”
“Sounds like a yaoguai,” Erlang Shen said.
“Ha! Maybe. I asked my parents for one, for my birthday. It was overpriced but they didn’t say no. It was right after the two of them had opened the store they’d been working on, so they must have been feeling flush and confident. They must have been so sure they were going to succeed.”
I’d never told Erlang Shen my personal family history, but you didn’t need a third eye to see it wasn’t perfectly happy. He was content not to interrupt my fairly trivial story and keep quiet for once.
“I was so excited when I tore off the wrapping paper,” I said, still climbing. “Only to find it wasn’t the right toy. My guess is that the shop wanted to hang on to as much stock as they could to see if the price would rise, so when my dad asked for one, they pawned off something similar on him or convinced him a different toy was better than the original.”
I could imagine how my dad would have looked like an easy mark. “Sometimes parents do that, you know? They’re not content to give you what you ask for and feel like they have to go the extra mile or think of something super special and different for you. When all you want is the basics.”
“What did you do?” Erlang Shen asked.
“I just kind of froze. It was obvious from my reaction that I wasn’t happy. My mother started yelling at my dad for screwing up, and my dad was yelling that he’d make it right. But he couldn’t. They couldn’t get a new one because both toys were expensive, and that was the moment where it dawned on me how strapped for cash my family really was. I was a child, and I didn’t understand the concept of being poor. Until right then and there.”
We reached a little flat terrace with enough room for both of us to stand. It seemed like a good place to take a break. Erlang Shen and I stood on the level terrain and wrung out our fingers. I wasn’t done talking.
“It was also the first fight they had after opening their store,” I said. “So for a very long time I assumed all the bad luck that happened afterward was my fault. I’d cursed their business with misfortune. Which meant their eventual split was my fault, too. Because the tiniest chains of events matter.”
Erlang Shen shook his head at the ground, taking this anecdote about luck and fate and money very seriously. God or not, he was still Chinese, after all. “Family is the worst.”
“No,” I said. “You don’t understand. I love my family more than anything. My mother took it out on my father because she wanted me to have my heart’s desire. My father withdrew into a shell because he couldn’t handle disappointing me. I am their whole world, and they are mine.”
Erlang Shen looked up to see my index finger, doubled in length, pressing dangerously close to his eyeball. He jerked his head away in surprise, but my finger extended to follow him, threatening to pierce his brain.
“You put my mother in danger,” I snarled. “And you tried to kill my father. So don’t you ever get chummy with me, or I will make a corpse out of you and hang it on my wall, right above the spot where I’ve kept that wrong stuffed animal all these years.”
Erlang Shen had done me a favor. The exhaustion, the sense of surrender that threatened to drag me down to the bottom of the sea lost its grip. Bringing up family had caused the shackles to break, allowing me to rocket back to the surface, buoyed by the one emotion that would always be there to provide me high-octane fuel.
The color drained out of Erlang Shen’s face, replaced by a killer’s pale calm. A glaze fell over his eyes, like a reptile’s second lid closing itself before the attack. He cricked his neck, beckoning me to look downward.
In his hand was a small blade made of water he’d hidden somewhere on his person. The point of it was aimed right at my kidney. The encounter with Princess Iron Fan had illustrated to us the advantages of using our powers in smaller, subtler, more lethal ways.
For perhaps the first time ever, Erlang Shen and I stared at each other with something akin to mutual understanding. There was a measure of respect in his gaze. He was looking at someone as awful and hate-filled as him. Rage was our common ground, a lack of forgiveness our shared little plot.
He raised his hands, and the shank of water disappeared into his sleeve. I retracted my finger. We went back to climbing. If we ever ran out of mountain, there would be a whole lot of feelings and bloody guts strewn over the rocks.
“You would have done well as my weapon,” Erlang Shen said.
His comment made me remember those wild, overwhelming days when Quentin and I first unlocked my Ruyi Jingu Bang powers together. After the first couple of critical missteps, Sun Wukong stopped referring to me as “his weapon.” We became partners. A duo. I shuddered to think of the tutelage I would have received from the god next to me, a doubling of my worst traits instead of Quentin’s warm affection.
“No,” I said with absolute certainty. “I wouldn’t have.”
25
We reached the top of the mountain right around nightfall on this plane. It hurt to think of how much time we’d lost. By my rough calculations, the third day of my long weekend was over.
I couldn’t check how long I’d been gone. I’d intentionally left my phone back on Earth, afraid it wouldn’t survive a supernatural adventure. Maybe if I joined Ax, I could start affording replacements. I wanted to both laugh and cry, remembering my Earthly problems.
The peak, which had looked like a point from down below, was now a long-edged plateau that implied the very size of the rock formation had changed in the second we weren’t thinking about it. I had the feeling that physics was getting looser with our altitude. I refused to look down the slope behind me, fearing that instead of clouds I’d see an unrendered, placeholding void.
I was still ahead of Erlang Shen and didn’t want to wait, so I peeped over the side like a badger. There, I spotted the first good news I’d had all day. Quentin, Guanyin, Guan Yu, and the Great White Planet were sitting close to the mountain’s edge, circled around a small fire.
I shouted incoherently like a shipwreck survivor. Vaulting over the top, I ran at them, waving my arms. Quentin was the first to his feet, but instead of coming to greet me, he stayed where he was like a statue, frigid and unyielding.
Way to ruin the moment, I thought. I collided with Guanyin instead and hugged her into the air.
