We Capture A Banner With My Face On It

You know how in movies, the hero's first big tournament has a training montage that ends with triumph? Mine had a training montage. It ended with me being assigned to walk a southern corridor, hold a polearm, and wait to be attacked. The only song playing was the HALO chime, which was stuck in my head because the universe does not have a sense of irony so much as a sense of humor about your personal suffering.

*Chime-chime, soft pulse.*

Even underground.

Even with my mortal phone three feet under my mattress upstairs.

Even with no signal anywhere within twelve floors of San Francisco bedrock.

The chime was in my head.

I had become, against my best efforts, a user.

---

Field Day briefing, six AM, the dining hall reorganized into eight house huddles plus my houseless table-of-one. Wei sat across from me eating a mooncake. He had, since last night, begun referring to me as Nezha. He was not sarcastic about it. He had simply, somewhere between the dragon and breakfast, decided that I was real.

Ms. Bai stood at the high table reading from a clipboard.

"Field Day rules. The arena is the entire facility, plus the Garden, plus the Lower Tunnels, plus the Roof. Each house starts with one banner. Banners may be defended in groups of no more than four. Captured banners go on the central altar. Last cabin with their own banner still in their possession at sunset wins."

Wei muttered, "Sunset down here is when?"

"Seven hours from now," Ms. Bai answered without looking up. "Wei. I heard that. You are not getting an exemption."

"Magical items permitted. Maiming not permitted. Lethal force not permitted. Death not permitted. Inconvenient mid-air relocation by the Celestial Bear is permitted — the Bear is on field today, please mind the south corridor. Crying permitted. Wetting the floor permitted. Any questions."

Cao Bin, at the Cao Guojiu table, raised his hand.

"Yes, Cao Bin."

"What about the new student."

Ms. Bai turned a page.

"The new student is on Cao Bin's team. He will be on border patrol. Southern flank. He will not be moved. He will not be reassigned. He will not be permitted to attempt offensive maneuvers. Cao Bin?"

Cao Bin smiled.

The smile was the smile of a kid who had been handed exactly the bait he wanted.

"Yes, ma'am."

Across the hall, Lucy looked at me. The shoulders were up.

She mouthed: *I will get you out.*

I nodded.

---

Lucy, packing my belt with practice darts in the salle ten minutes later, was furious.

"Border patrol on the southern flank," she muttered. "The southern flank is open territory. He's going to put you out there as a honeypot. He's going to draw every other house into hitting you so he can attack while they're focused on the bait. You are going to get killed."

"Ms. Bai said no death."

"Ms. Bai said no *intentional* death."

"Reassuring."

She slapped a small bronze whistle into my palm.

"If anything goes truly wrong — truly wrong, not 'I am bored' wrong — blow this. The Bear comes when whistled for."

"You said the Bear *rearranges* people."

"He'll rearrange you somewhere safe."

"Define somewhere safe."

"A different corridor. Sometimes a different floor. Once, a different time period. Mostly safe."

"Mostly?"

"Once."

"Lucy."

"Yes."

"Are we friends now."

She stopped packing my belt.

"Don't push it," she said.

But she was smiling.

---

The horn sounded at seven.

Cao Bin marched our team to the southern corridor. Six kids in royal blue tunics, all of them looking competent, all of them carrying real-but-blunted weapons, plus me at the back wearing a tunic that was obviously borrowed and a belt of practice darts that Lucy had packed.

He pointed at me.

"There. Walk a hundred yards south. Stay there. Hold a stick. Look frightened. Try not to die."

"Is the part about looking frightened important to the strategy."

"Yes. The other houses will think we are using a weak boy as bait. They will come for you. They will run into Wei and his trap."

He pointed up the corridor where Wei — my dorm-mate Wei, apparently both houseless and a Cao Guojiu auxiliary — was setting up a length of nearly-invisible silk thread at ankle height, with two large nets piled behind it.

"This is your plan."

"This is the plan."

"It is a good plan, Cao Bin, but I notice that I am the bait."

"Yes. The bait does not get a vote."

He stuck a six-foot polearm in my hands.

It had a hook on one end and a blade on the other and weighed approximately as much as my entire body.

He left.

I stood in the southern corridor.

Rufus, pocket-sized on my shoulder, made a small displeased sound.

"I hate this plan," he said.

"It's not even my plan."

"Yeah, but it is a plan that involves you, and I hate it, and that is enough."

The corridor was dim. Lanterns glowed at long intervals. The walls were rough-hewn stone, like a dynasty had carved this hallway out of San Francisco bedrock and forgotten to finish it.

I waited.

Twenty minutes.

In the distance: yelps, clack of practice weapons, the occasional whoop. Somebody screamed for the Bear. Somebody else laughed. Somebody else screamed again.

For a beautiful twenty minutes, nothing happened.

Then the wall on my left dissolved.

---

The wall dissolved. It did not break. It did not open. It did not move. The stones simply, in a way that did not care about physics, unraveled.

A figure stepped through.

The size of a tiger. The body of a tiger. Four legs, a tail, stripes the color of dried blood. But its face was wrong — a long smooth paper face, like a kabuki mask drawn in too few lines. Eyes red. Mouth a single drawn-on slit.

A jiangshi-tiger. Mei had mentioned them in a textbook chapter I had skimmed. Extinct. Story.

Apparently not.

"Hi," I croaked.

The tiger tilted its head.

The wall behind it had reformed.

I blew the whistle.

It made no sound.

I blew it harder.

Silent.

Either broken or, worse, something in the corridor was eating the noise. Eating the request.

The tiger took a step forward.

Rufus pulsed. Pocket to Medium to Oh-No in less than a second, leapt off my shoulder, landed between me and the tiger, fur on end, ears flat.

"Run," he snarled. The voice was a giant's voice. "Get to Wei. Run."

I ran.

Three steps later the tiger was on my back. I had not heard him cover the distance.

The polearm flew out of my hands. I hit the corridor stones hard. The paper face hovered an inch from mine, and the mouth-slit moved, and a single word came out, not in any language I knew, but I understood it anyway:

*Yours.*

It was claiming me. The way you claim a dog at the pound.

"JACKIE."

I rolled.

The claws scraped stone where my head had been. The sound was a chalkboard being ripped in half.

I scrambled backward. Hit a wall. Hands shaking. Throat closing. The particular feeling of a body doing the math and not liking the answer.

The tiger crouched.

I closed my eyes.

I thought of Anna.

Anna in the back of the limo, holding the lacquered HALO device in both hands, nine floors underground in a room she had not chosen. I had heard Mei's briefing now. Jess's steady hands. The drawings taken and filed. She was in that room right now, this exact minute, and she had been holding things in her pocket since Saturday and she had not stopped.

The heat came back.

I thought of Mom in front of the running sink at four AM with her mouth open.

I thought of Megan at the kitchen table at midnight, in the pool of the desk lamp, with the notebook, the tight cursive that did not slope. Building something from the outside that I was beginning to understand I was the inside of.

I thought of Grandpa, at Castle Gardens, telling me to run.

The carbonated-lava feeling.

The red glow.

I opened my eyes.

The tiger was leaping.

I held up my hands.

The polearm, ten feet down the corridor, flew into my hands, the hook end slotting into my grip the way a key slots into a lock that has been waiting for it.

The polearm bloomed.

I cannot describe it any other way. The wood of the haft turned red and gold. The hook turned into a flame. The blade lengthened. The whole weapon was, for a half-second, the same Fire-Tipped Spear I had held in the dining hall last night.

I drove it up through the tiger's chest as it landed on me.

The tiger went still.

The paper face hung an inch above my own. The red eyes filmed over. The mouth-slit folded shut, like an envelope closing.

The tiger turned to paper.

Not water, this time. Paper.

The body collapsed into a soft flutter of parchment that scattered across the corridor, ash-light, the color of dried blood.

I lay underneath the parchment for a long time.

Then I opened my eyes.

Above me, hanging in the dim corridor air, was a hologram I had not summoned.

It was a lotus.

The size of a basketball. Soft, diffuse, peach-colored light. Hovering three feet above my chest, rotating very slowly, like a model on a museum stand.

The petals opened.

A second lotus appeared inside the first, and opened. A third inside the second. They went on like that, concentric, recursive, peeling outward like a flower-shaped fractal, until the corridor was full of soft peach light.

I could see the soft red glow in my own chest, running down both arms, out of both hands. The same red in the scarf. In the spear. Very faintly, in the brush in my belt.

I was glowing.

I was the same color as the lotus.

I sat up.

The polearm in my hands shrank back into a polearm. The fire dimmed. The lotus, however, stayed.

The wall on my left re-dissolved.

Through it I saw the entire Council watching.

All eight Immortals. Ms. Bai. Mei. Lucy. Cao Bin two paces behind, sweating. Wei beside Cao Bin, with the face of a person who has just been invited to witness something that has been scheduled for eight thousand years and is now actually happening. The Celestial Bear at the back, the size of a small SUV, with eyes like a Saint Bernard's, watching with a small approving *whuff.*

The Council had been watching the whole time.

The Bear had been waiting in case I had needed him.

The Bear had not been needed.

Floating Person drifted forward over the parchment. The small black opening in their face oriented at me.

*"One question before we name you, Lotus Prince. The brush amplifies. The wheels amplify. The spear amplifies. The scarf amplifies. Every cosmic instrument in this room is, technically, just an amplifier. They make the signal of the kid holding them louder. They do not make a kid louder if the kid has nothing to say. Before we hand them to you — before the lotus over your head opens, and an entire pantheon kneels to a thirteen-year-old who failed his last math test — I am going to ask you the only question the Council asks of every Lotus Prince. You do not have to answer out loud. You do have to answer."*

The hall held its breath.

The Bear sat down.

Floating Person said:

*"Are you worth amplifying?"*

I did not have an answer.

Lucy, across the hall, was watching me with the same unblinking expression she had worn at the salle. She had been in a briefing room this morning with this same question already underway in her chest. Three years and a dao and a lily-fire, asking herself a version of it since she arrived. She was watching to see if I knew the size of it yet.

I thought of Anna in the back of the limo with the lacquered HALO.

I thought of Anna's doubled lotus, folded inside itself, warm from being kept in a pocket in a room built to see everything.

I thought of Mom standing in front of the running sink at four AM with her mouth open.

I thought of Megan at the kitchen table with the notebook, somewhere between a Cayman filing and a name she was not ready to see.

I thought of Grandpa, at Castle Gardens, telling me to run.

I did not, internally, have a yes.

I had a *try.*

The brush in my belt, somehow, heard me.

The brush warmed.

The lotus opened.

"Hail Nezha," Floating Person said, softly this time. "Cosmic confirmation. The Lotus Prince has returned. Of the line of the Kitchen God. In the time of the great rebalancing. The question is yours to keep answering."

This time the Council knelt.

All eight of them. Even Floating Person, who didn't have knees but managed.

Ms. Bai bowed her head.

Lucy was, very quietly, crying. She had held the dao through everything. The lanterns going out. The ceiling breaking. The dragon and the spatula and the three-AM salle session and the question she had been carrying for three years of her own. That hand had been on the weapon, correct and disciplined, and now it wasn't. It had moved to cover her mouth and she had not decided that. Her body had decided, without consulting her. I did not understand yet what it costs to kneel to someone you have spent three years training to stand beside. For now I only saw her face, and the look she had of a person who has been carrying the right question for a very long time and has finally found the person it was for.

The Bear made another small *whuff.*

The lotus over my head spun once more and dissolved into the air like incense.

Across the SAT, in every corridor, every dorm, every classroom, every tunnel, the lanterns turned the color of fresh peaches.

The lanterns stayed that color.

For the next nine days.

This was, Mei would later tell me, the longest peach run since 1837. The school had been governed by white lantern light. White was bureaucratic. Peach was celebratory.

Even the lanterns had a position on me.

Nine floors below Mountain View, my eight-year-old sister was looking at a lotus-shaped light on the floor. She would not know, until much later, that the light had just changed color to match it.

---

In the dining hall an hour later, the entire school had filed in.

Mei wheeled out a five-feet-wide lotus-shaped cake with floating-lantern candles. The cake was peach-frosted. The candles drifted up out of the cake one by one as Mei wheeled it forward.

Floating Person raised a hand.

"To the Third Lotus Prince. Long may he protect."

"Long may he protect," the hall repeated.

I did not know what to say.

I said, "Thank you for the cake."

The hall laughed.

It was a real laugh. Not polite. Three hundred kids who had been unsure whether I was a god or a fraud, and now found me funny instead.

Lucy leaned over: "Good first speech."

"Thanks."

"Don't peak too early, doofus."

The cake was the best cake I had ever had in my life.

I would, two hours later, be handed an actual quest.

For now, cake.

In my pocket, somewhere through a wall, my mortal phone (locked, drained, three thousand miles of bedrock from any signal) vibrated.

It was, somehow, a text from Megan.

I stared at the screen for a full second. I had been four days underground with my phone face-down under a mattress in a building whose coordinates do not appear on any city plan. There was no signal in the southern corridor. There was no signal in the dining hall. There was no signal anywhere in this building except, apparently, Megan's general direction.

The text said: *The IRS filing was real. Bradley confirmed. Bradley says you have the Council's full attention. Bradley says don't blow this. I am writing a non-disclosure agreement of my own. I will see you in the fall — M*

I looked at Mei.

She was already looking at me with the patient expression of a person who has been forwarding messages across bedrock since before the concept of bedrock was invented.

I did not ask.

I ate my cake.

The lanterns were the color of peaches.

Somewhere underground in Mountain View, Anna was folding a second drawing inside the first, before anyone could see it.

Somewhere in a briefing room with an org chart on the wall, Lucy was writing down every word Floating Person had ever said, because writing was the drilling, and she was already packing for the road.

I was eating cake.

This is what it looks like when four rooms that cannot see each other are all doing the same work. You are in one of them. You eat the cake. The other rooms go on.

The question is yours to keep answering.

I needed more cake.

I got more cake.