He blinked and shook his head. “I’m not used to the way people dress these days.”
“This is yoga gear,” I said. “And it’s perfectly acceptable for outdoors.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
Quentin might not have been kidding about lacking a sartorial sense. He was still in his school uniform, the only concession being his sleeves rolled up for our “training” session.
Guh. His forearms were like bridge cables. My spine twitched at the sight of them flexing in the breeze.
I blinked and shook my head. “You said you were going to teach me how to manage my limbs so they don’t go wonky again.”
“It would be a crime if that were the only thing I taught you,” he said. “You have abilities that most people couldn’t begin to imagine. Sit.”
I lowered myself down, cringing at the dew on the grass. “I don’t want superpowers,” I said. “I want control.”
“You’ll get it, trust me.” Quentin took the spot in front of me, the guru before his disciple. I had to admit it wasn’t a bad look on him.
“Do you remember when we first laid eyes on each other?” he asked.
I nodded. “You were just about where we are now.”
“And you were all the way over there,” he said, pointing over my shoulder far down the park. “You were more than three hundred feet away from me, Genie. You threw your bag farther than an entire American football field.”
“That’s impossible. I could see you right nearby, plain as day. And there’s no way I’m that strong.”
“Your sight works beyond human limits,” he countered. “Your strength is enough to challenge the gods. And, as you’ve clearly seen, your true reach knows no bounds.”
I looked at my hands and clenched my fingers. That time when I blocked Maxine into next week. Had I accidentally stretched myself without anyone noticing?
“Close your eyes,” Quentin said. He shut his own and rolled his shoulders a few times.
“Are we meditating?”
“Yes. Close your eyes.”
“Is this the single step that the journey of a thousand miles begins with?”
“Close your eyes.”
I did as he told. And then I cheated. I kept one lid open a crack so I could watch Quentin breathe deeply in and out. Watch him settle his mind. I was only doing it so I could crib his technique.
But damn it if he wasn’t beautiful right then.
This was a completely different side to him. I mean, Monkey King or not, most times he acted like the worst kind of bro. But here, I was looking at a master of the universe. He radiated calm and tranquility, becoming so still that the Earth seemed to rotate behind him like a time-lapse video.
“Truth and spells, revealing all,” Quentin chanted, his voice echoing off I’m not sure what.
“They come from vapor, essence, and spirit.
Stored in the body, never to be revealed
A radiant moon shining on a tower of quicksilver
The snake and the tortoise are twisted together
Then life will bear golden lotuses
Turn the Five Elements upside down
And you may become a Buddha or an Immortal.”
Quentin opened his eyes and smiled serenely at me.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Huh?”
“That made no sense. You just zoned out and spouted a bunch of gibberish. What do snakes and turtles have to do with anything?”
He made an expression like I’d hocked a loogie on the Mona Lisa. “Did you not experience the Way of Heaven and Earth ensorcelling you just now?”
I scratched my head. “ . . . Sort of? I think I felt something. The air around us got a little warm and fuzzy.”
Quentin buried his face in his palms. “Those were the first words of true wisdom Master Subodai ever expounded to me, and all you have to say is that they make you warm and fuzzy, sort of?”
“Look,” I said. “I don’t learn well with vague instructions. Can’t you lay out all the steps from start to finish, so I can see what I’m supposed to be working toward?”
“Lay out!? These aren’t differential equations we’re talking about!”
“Well if they were, I’d pick them up faster! That’s how I do things! I arrange my curriculum into manageable chunks and then I destroy them piece by piece. You told me I had abilities far beyond those of mortal men. Now, what are they?”
Quentin jumped to his feet and paced around, swearing up and down. I sat there unyielding as he glanced at me, which set him off into a fresh round of expletives each time. He couldn’t believe me right now.
Finally he threw in the towel and plopped back down, abandoning a proper cross-legged position for a don’t-give-a-crap-anymore slouch. The guru image had popped like a soap bubble.
“You have the ability to keep up with me as I perform my Seventy-Two Earthly Transformations,” he said, staring up at the sky.
“That sounds lame.”
“Says the girl who doesn’t want superpowers. Don’t you realize what that implies? You can split into as many copies as I can. Each one as strong as the original, and capable of acting independently.”
I thought about that for a bit. Having extra mes to go around would be useful in the extreme. One copy for school, one doing extra plyos in the gym, one racking up more volunteer work in the city. Assuming that recombining let you keep all of the good you did.
“Okay, okay.” I was starting to get vaguely excited. “What else?”
“You can grow as tall as a mountain. You can be like a Pillar of Heaven. As I change, you change.”
Yeah, less interested in that one. The view from my current altitude already wasn’t kind. Stomping around downtown like a ’50s sci-fi monster was far from an appealing prospect.
“What else?” I asked. “Something good.”
“You weigh a whole lot,” Quentin said.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re supernaturally heavy,” he explained. “It’s what makes you such a fearsome weapon.”
In his defense, he wasn’t trying to needle me. In his mind he was rattling off a fact. Obliviously.
“Your true weight is seventeen thousand five hundred American pounds,” he said, not noticing that my cheeks were turning red hot. “You can hit like a ten-ton truck because you weigh nearly ten tons. It’s demonic, how much you weigh—OOF!”
I tested out the truth of his claims. On his chest. With my fist.
Just checking to see which one of us was denser.
15
“You need to control your temper,” Quentin said. He winced as he rubbed the spot where I’d clocked him.
We’d hit a roadblock in my training earlier than expected. Meditating wasn’t optional for this project, it was required. And I absolutely sucked at it.
The two of us had spent the entire morning in the park trying to get me to relax and focus. I had no idea why I wasn’t catching on. Discipline, self-governance—those were supposed to be my strong points. Failure got me more and more annoyed until finally Quentin insisted we take a break at a nearby bubble tea shop.
I hate bubble tea. So now I was cranky about two things.