The Iron Will of Genie Lo (The Epic Crush of Genie Lo 2)

r deepest personal terror in order to get to outer space.”

My jaw dropped. “That’s what’s required to cross into another plane?”

“It’s either that or voluntarily give up a portion of your soul,” he said, scratching the back of his head. “The Screaming Hand forces you to choose.”

I stared at him. He maintained a solemn expression for as long as he could before he cracked and burst into a chuckle. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I was messing with you. That was mean.”

I was both pissed off and secretly delighted that he wasn’t stonewalling me. Why couldn’t it stay like this forever, us messing with each other? Why did we have to trade in a perfectly good compact relationship for a larger model with more baggage? In hindsight, I would have taken a million Quentins dive-bombing my bedroom window if it meant property destruction was our biggest problem.

“But in all seriousness,” he said. “Blissful Planes are weird. They’re like certain spots on Earth, only exaggerated and simplified at the same time. Things go from geographic to conceptual as you travel through them. Your head could go a little fuzzy.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” I said. I meant it without sarcasm. Mind trips seemed to be the theme of this weekend.

Quentin wasn’t done though. “Genie, we should talk,” he said. “I’m afraid of what’ll happen if we don’t.”

So was I. I knew exactly what would happen if we couldn’t figure ourselves out. I’d witnessed the slow-motion crash that was my parents, and Quentin and I were falling into the exact same pattern. Starting out angry and finding new reasons to stay angry. Waiting for things to get better instead of making them better. Letting an outside event become a wedge between us.

I’d had the ultimate “What Not to Do in a Relationship” guide in front of me for years, and I still couldn’t figure a way out of this trap. For all I condescended toward my parents, I was no better at opening up to the boy I—

I shook my head. “We’ve lingered too long,” I said. “Let’s go. The others are waiting.”

Quentin’s disappointment was palpable. I felt the leaden weight of it on my shoulders as I escaped through the portal to another dimension.

18

Traveling to another plane of existence tasted like cyan. It smelled like a stubbed toe. I detected notes of lighthouse, iambic pentameter, and general relativity.

I stumbled forward as if I’d stepped off a moving walkway too quickly. The first part of me to regain consciousness was my skin. It itched and burned all over.

A heavy object collided with my back and threw me to the ground. My hands found fistfuls of dirt. I crawled around in circles and blinked furiously.

Someone grabbed me by the armpits and hoisted me to my feet. It was Guanyin. “What happened?” I yelled, dizzy from the journey. If we had even made a journey. “Are we in the right place?”

“We’re in the right realm of existence,” Guanyin said, pointing me by the shoulders. “A dimension that’s neither Heaven, Hell, nor Earth.”

As my vision came back, I saw we were standing in the middle of a scrubby desert that stretched all the way to the horizon. The pool was nowhere to be found, and my clothes were dry.

“Welcome to the Blissful Planes,” Quentin said as he dusted himself off. I assumed he was what knocked into me from behind when I didn’t get out of the way fast enough.

The Blissful Planes looked like Utah. The hard-packed sand around us was littered with striated orange monoliths of stone. The nearest ones looked like Earthly buttes and karsts, but farther in the distance they took strange, loopy, cursive forms, like the terrain had been designed by Dr. Seuss. I did not want to walk too far in that direction. It was likely going to screw my mind up with non-Euclidean geometry. I’d read enough cosmic horror fiction to guess.

Looking upward confirmed the weirdness. I could see like it was daytime, but there was no light source to be found. And the sky was pink. Not pink as in sunrise watercolors, but pink as in solid salmon across the board.

“I think this is a touch too whimsical for me,” I said, feeling queasy. I glanced back in the direction it felt like we’d come and saw an irregular patch of warm yellow glow hovering at eye level in the air, like a lens flare. I assumed it marked the terminus of the portal we’d taken.

“It’s not easy for human brains to process unearthly surroundings,” Guanyin said, echoing Quentin from earlier. “Do you want to go back?”

I shook my head. Not this soon into the challenge. I looked for the rest of the traveling party. They stood scattered in a loose group, groaning from the rough ride.

“Well, that was certainly uncategorizable,” the Great White Planet muttered. He took deep breaths as he leaned heavily on his staff. “I hadn’t realized that Ao Guang had torn such a crude rift to Earth.”

“If this realm is where he fought the Yin Mo, he would have been at a severe disadvantage,” Erlang Shen said. He sniffed the air. “His forces are aquatic in nature. This place is as dry as a bone.”

The traitor god jangled his chains. “Speaking of which, can I have some water? I haven’t had a drink since Hell.”

“Make it yourself,” I snapped.

“I can’t make it,” he said, annoyed. “On Earth I was drawing on the abundance of liquid in my surroundings. I’m only asking for a mouthful.”