“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.