“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.
His feet slammed into the painted iron and stuck without moving an inch, a perfect 10.0 landing. The sudden stop should have liquefied my internal organs. The impact should have sent a bell-like clang throughout the platform. But neither happened.
Localized laws of physics, I told myself.
“We’re here,” said Quentin.
I didn’t get off him. Instead I clapped his chest excitedly.
“Again!” I shouted. “Again! Let’s go to Wine Country!”
He dumped me on my feet. “This isn’t a joyride. We’re here to train.”
“Nerd.” I flicked his ear, making a little clack against what used to be my jewelry.
We were alone high up in the gray sky. I knew they let people go to the top of the bridge on occasion, so the platform wasn’t without the trappings of safety. But I was still heady from the way we’d arrived, making the red tower feel like uncharted alien territory. Olympus Mons.
“Look around and tell me what you see,” he said.
“I see the city. The Bay.”
“Good. Now open your eyes and tell me again.”
I did as told before realizing the incongruity.
The landscape suddenly became a painting, full of bright brushstrokes and swirling pigments. I could see the details of the world in thick outlines of color and black. My sense of scale was limitless, unconfined. The daubed-on windows of the smallest building were as visible to me as the tallest spires of the city.
“Oh wow,” I murmured.
Cars in motion danced across the bridge like flipbook animations. I could see inside to the passengers, their faces zoetroping between emotions. That man was hungry. That woman was bored. That child held a secret.
I felt as if I could touch things on the far side of the Bay. Farther. I was hemmed in only by the Sierra Nevada and the western horizon.
I glanced at Quentin, and then stared. He blazed like a golden bonfire.
Energy poured off him in licking waves, an act of inefficient combustion that leaked so much power into the air I could hear the atmosphere whine and sizzle. There was a scorching heat at his core, and I was immune to it.
Around his shoulders was the faintest palimpsest overlay of another form. Skin as hard as diamonds. Fur as soft as velvet. A face of becalmed savagery. He was magnificent. Godlike. A Buddha victorious in battle.
“Well,” he said in two voices, one his normal classroom baritone and the other a bass that could crack the sky. “Do you have anything to say?”
“Yeah. Did you put something in my coffee?”
Quentin laughed, and I could have sworn they heard him in New York.
“No. The only magic there is that it was expensive. You have true sight now, Genie. Technically you have my true sight. I used to be able to see the world like you can right now, but that’s mostly gone. My guess is that our powers had become so intertwined in the old days that when you became human, you ripped this one from me like dirt clinging to a stump.”
“I am genuinely sorry then,” I said. It would have felt like a tragedy if I had to give this experience up to someone else, and I’d only had it for seconds.
“Try the lie detection,” Quentin said. “It’s pretty neat.”
“Well, you have to tell me a lie then.”
He blanked for a bit, one of those understandable moments where you have too many options to choose from.
“I hate you,” he finally settled on.
As Quentin said it a dark, metallic bubble popped out from his lips, like he’d blown it from mercury. It pulsed in the air, a tiny opaque jellyfish, before floating away and dissipating.
“That’s freaky,” I said. “I don’t think I’d want to know all the time if people were lying to me.”
“It’ll come in handy at some point, trust me.”
I went back to drinking in the view. It was moving artwork, zooming and flattening where I wanted it to for my inspection. I watched a container ship full of almonds and canned tomatoes steam away into the distant Pacific. One of the crew members was bluffing his ass off in a poker game, holding nothing but unsuited low cards.
I turned toward land, drawn by a column of smoke. The wildfires in the scrubby hills north of the city were no closer to being put out than when I’d first heard about them on the news. The black whorls looked more like a series of opaque screens than vapor, blocking out anything behind them.
“You should try looking at yourself,” Quentin said.
My eyes were starting to get tired, but I held my hands up in front of my face. As I wiggled my fingers, rippling lines of pressure played out in the air, almost like a topographical map or an artist’s rendition of sound waves.
“That’s how I recognized you,” Quentin said. “Guanyin and Erlang Shen, too. Out of the billions of humans that have come and gone since the old days, only you have an aura as steady and unshakable as that. Just like the Ruyi Jingu Bang.”
I watched one of the bigger pulses travel from my skin across the distance until it made contact with Quentin’s erratic inner fire. Rather than clashing, the two energy signatures meshed with each other to become brighter. Stronger. On some fundamental level, Quentin and I harmonized.
Then the waves vanished. My vision reverted back to normal.
“Ow,” I said, fighting back the ache in my corneas. “Is there a time limit on this thing?”
“Sort of. It’s extremely difficult to sustain if you’re not used to it. You’ll have to build up your endurance through practice.”