Quentin and I approached on foot cautiously. Appearances could be deceiving, so we didn’t let our guards down. We must have looked like a pair of doofs, stalking along the concrete sidewalk in plain view. A stiff breeze ruffled the grass and we paused like savannah cats.
“Oh hey,” said Axton, waving. He didn’t seem any worse for wear after the brain-scrubbing that Guanyin had given him, though he was oblivious to the creature hovering over his head. It rippled between hues of pink and purple and blue like a mood light. I focused my true sight until I saw the aura of concealment around it.
Best to pretend nothing was wrong until we could separate them. Spooking the human might set off the yaoguai. “Hiiiii,” I said. “Did you forget something from the party?”
“Yes,” Axton said. “You.”
Uh-oh. Bad start.
“I shouldn’t have left things like that,” Axton said. “Not with someone as special as you. I had a feeling after we met, so I asked around the people who were at the party and came looking for you.”
Just what I needed. Another asshole like the one in the cafe. Only more persistent.
Even better, I had with me my hot-tempered, preternaturally strong boyfriend who possessed a murder record hundreds of demons long. I glanced at Quentin to see how badly he was reacting to Axton’s statements, to see how much damage control I’d have to do.
Not much, apparently. The shapeless demon blob had meandered off to the side and descended closer to the ground. Quentin was busy trying to approach it like it was an escaped chicken. He cooed at it with his palms out, trying to beckon as non-threateningly as possible. It made a bizarre scene given that anyone watching us wouldn’t have known what he was looking at.
He could at least be a little jealous, my brain leaked out before I grabbed the thought and stuffed it back inside my skull. “Look, Axton, is it?”
“Ax,” he corrected.
Whatever. “Ax, I’m not interested.” If I had been hit on more in my life maybe I would have softened the rejection. Or maybe not, because why the hell did I need to?
He gave a smooth chuckle. “You misunderstand. Are you Eugenia Lo, creator of Monkey King Jumps to Heaven?”
Ax pulled out his phone, not to get digits, but to show me the app store. My little nothing game was on his screen. Under the icon was a subtitle saying Built by Eugenia Lo. When Rutsuo helped me fill out the developer submission form, I was too lazy to come up with a video gamey business name like Playwonk or Gamenamyte like the rest of the apps, and simply put my real name out of standardized test habits.
A mistake, if it let weirdos like Ax track me down. “What of it?” I said. “Last I checked I was between two solitaire rip-offs and a carpeting simulator.”
Ax tapped his phone and showed it to me again. “Maybe last week. Right now, you’re being featured in the ‘Best Timewasters’ category.”
I hadn’t known there were category filters you could change. Under Ax’s settings I was number sixty-eight. Huh. Sixty-eight was starting to get into the same territory as legitimate games I saw my classmates playing.
I kept the conversation going mostly because it had caused Ax to move toward me and away from the yaoguai. Quentin had sidled around and sat down on the stoop next to the demon blob, the cool teacher going Hey, I’m just here chilling in the same spot as you, no need to talk about your troubles unless you want to. Want to have a jam sesh?
“Okay, again, so what?” I said. “What does my app have to do with you?”
“Eugenia, have you ever heard of the Nexus Partnership?”
I had indeed. It was one of many word-jumble brand names that was incomprehensible to Bay Area outsiders but familiar to anyone living in Silicon Valley. Hollywood had actors, DC had politicians, and we in the Bay had billionaire venture capitalists.
The local news ran breathless headlines every time one of them dumped giant wads of money into some stupid company or other. When people shook their heads at a startup with a misspelled word for a name wasting millions of dollars on free beer and Ping-Pong tables, they were overlooking the VCs who invested in dozens of such cash incinerators as part of a normal working Tuesday.
For every pair of grad student buddies striking it rich from a company they founded in their garage, there was a VC behind the curtain, taking their cut. On occasion, an especially powerful venture capitalist would buy a children’s hospital or pick a disease to eradicate. You know. To be nice.
The Nexus Partnership was run by Wynn Ketteridge, a VC rich enough to make his name appear on a building overnight. I’d seen pictures of the guy in some blog article or another. He looked like a normal middle-aged schlub with thinning hair and a puffy vest, only with a thick aura of gives-no-Fs surrounding him. When you had that many zeroes in your net worth, you could look however you wanted.
“Aren’t you a little young to be working for Wynn Ketteridge?” I asked.
“That’s where you’re wrong,” Ax said with a big grin. “The Nexus has a . . . junior arm, so to speak. Entrepreneurs of college age or younger. I’m one of them.”
Now I remembered what I’d been reading about Wynn and his company. This guy, this VC, had made a big splash by embarking on a crusade against college. I mean he really, really hated college.
A college degree, he reasoned in the many editorials he’d bought across every Bay Area newspaper possible, was a waste of time and money. You spent four years learning nothing that could be applied in the workplace. A better education could be had in the school of hard knocks, surviving in the free market by working or founding your own company.
Look at all the successful businesspeople who never used their major, Ketteridge pointed out. The world ran on software and hardware built by people who rejected higher education. How many geniuses had been stifled out of existence by professors made lazy by tenure, or squandered their lives by, god forbid, specializing in the humanities? Entrepreneurship was the only true education to be had.
It was such a Silicon Valley–style opinion that talking heads in forty-nine other states united for a brief time to laugh at him. But I happened to live in the one part of the country where certain folks drank up his message like water in a hundred-year drought.