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I laughed. Having been blasted with so much spiritual power was only now catching up to me. It made me loopy. Intoxicated. Being out of my mind was better than facing the repercussions of my actions and the damage I’d caused.
I pitched forward and dry heaved. Quentin and Guanyin caught me before I hit the ground. They propped me up on either side. Guan Yu started to help, too, but backed off once he saw they had me. Good guy, that Guan Yu.
“He was gonna kill us,” I said. “Couldn’t let that happen. Not even if—not even if . . .”
Not even if it meant the end of the world. I shut my eyes so I wouldn’t cry at what I’d done. The window that had closed. Whatever ruin waited for me back on Earth was on my shoulders. Yunie. Oh god, Yunie. I’d—I’d—
Guanyin gripped my upper arms. “Genie, I swear to you, everything will be okay on Earth.” She shook me hard, trying to get through. “Your friends will be okay. I give you my word. Genie, listen to me!”
She was lying, of course. This whole business was a lie. Telling ourselves we could do the right thing. There was no such animal as the right thing. It was less real than dragons.
A high-pitched shriek startled us out of our huddle. It came from Guan Yu.
The warrior god looked like he’d seen a ghost. He pointed his weapon, the tip trembling as his hands shook.
The Jade Emperor was sitting upright on the floor.
As a favor to those of us who’d missed it moving, the body lurched again, staggering to its feet. This time we all shrieked.
The Jade Emperor was still headless, but decidedly less so than a few minutes ago. The sawed-off surface of his neck tilted at us, and I got ready to puke, but instead of being filled with gore, it was a blank void, almost digital in its emptiness. And around the edge of his wound, the surfaces were reconstituting themselves, cell by cell, pixel by pixel. The Jade Emperor’s nose, ears, eyes, and the rest of his skull came back from the foundation upward, as if a team of invisible tiny bricklayers was working overtime to restore a giant statue.
I’d come to understand that each god of Heaven had a personal power, a domain of reality that was theirs to command. Erlang Shen’s was water. Guanyin’s was time. The Jade Emperor’s unique ability appeared to be regeneration. Cellular self-dominance. The perfect specialty for a self-concerned god.
His new head was closer to the one I recognized. Jowly and soft, untouched by the sun. The shade of the skin didn’t match the rest of his body. He came to his senses and looked around, taking stock. And then his eyes widened.
“No no NO!” he screamed. “What did you bai chi do? You’ve ruined everything!”
I ran at him and closed my hands around his throat. He must have still been recovering, because he seemed to lack the spiritual force and physical strength to fend me off. Only three different gods and a Monkey King pulling me away kept me from doing to him what he’d done to Erlang Shen. Heck, his powers meant I could kill him again and again, for eternity. Not the worst way I could spend the rest of my useless life.
“The sleep spell!” the Jade Emperor shrieked. “You broke the sleep spell! Did none of you think about what I was casting it on!?”
The ground underneath us began to shake.
? ? ?
I was a girl from the Bay. I knew my quakes, from s-waves to aftershocks. I could tell you the Richter
score of any given tremor down to half a point.
So I immediately knew that this earthquake, even if it was in a different dimension, wasn’t normal geology at work. There was an insistent thrashing to it that felt like someone lacing their fingers through the bars of a gate and yanking back and forth out of rage.
I felt the others losing their balance, but I grabbed the Jade Emperor again to make a stable structure. “What are you talking about?” I shouted.
“I left the court of Heaven and came here in the first place because I had to hold it off! Someone always has to hold it off!”
“Hold what off?”
“Anarchy. Apocalypse. The Anti-Way.”
Saying those words out loud calmed the Jade Emperor. He laughed in resignation. “The secret you learn once you become the ruler of Heaven,” he said as if we had all the time in the world, “is that you have one, and only one, duty. To make sure Heaven survives. Nothing else matters. And today, because of you, I’ve failed.”
From a center point off in the distance, the plateau bulged upward. The stone should have broken into fault lines, but instead it warped, elastic, like fake rock painted on a flat canvas.
The bulge grew bigger and bigger, and reality around it got thinner and thinner, until with a birthing, nuclear hiss, it ripped asunder. The film strip of the movie playing in my eyes tore apart and let the white projection show through the gap.
Something crawled out of it.
An arm the size of a blue whale reached out of the void between the rocks. It crashed down onto the plateau, spreading its giant fingers over the terrain, gripping for purchase like a tentacled alien landing on Earth and deciding Yes, this’ll do. Another arm, the mate to the first, elevated itself from the rift and pushed at the other side. Triceps as big as a subway car flexed and pushed until they pressed their owner upward.
