Cutlerine
Gone. Not coming back.
0B: TO THE MARROW
In the morning, Artemis feels marginally better. This isn't saying much, given how she started off, but she's been dealing with her brain long enough to be able to take small victories when they come. She's suddenly become privy to yet more horrible secrets, yes, and she isn't sure what she's supposed to do with any of them – but it's a bright, sunny morning and Brauron is poking her forehead repeatedly in an attempt to get her to feed her. Right now, Artemis doesn't need to know what to do next about breach. She just needs to get up and get on with having a trainer journey.
“Okay, Brauron,” she mutters, pushing her gently out of the way and slithering out of bed. “You can knock it off now, I'm coming.”
She sorts Brauron out, and then herself, and when Cass gets up she finds both of them downstairs, looking through lists of things to do in Cinnabar online.
“Is there anything you particularly want to do today?” Artemis asks her, glancing up from her phone. “Dunno about Ringo, but I think Brauron deserves a break, so I thought maybe I should go see some things, go back to the Gym this evening.”
“Ringo doesn't deserve anything at all, ever,” says Cass. “Ow! Okay, kidding, birdbrain. But yeah, might be nice to do the tourist thing.”
And it is nice, as it turns out. They climb the old clock tower and learn all about its carvings, which tell the story of the Summer and Winter Kings who ruled Cinnabar in turn until Summer King Javel and his moltres drove Winter King Hierat and his articuno away to make the island warm all year round; they go on a boat trip out for a couple of hours to see the mantine breaching and gliding like strange alien seaplanes. Artemis stands there gripping the railing and as the huge rays surge up out of the water around the boat even she can forget the vast and terrifying space yawning back at her on every side.
“Man!” cries Cass, over the crashing of a mantine slamming back down into the waves. “I gotta catch one of these sometime!”
“Yeah!” replies Artemis enthusiastically, although neither of them actually try to do so, and both know that they probably never will. These pokémon will partner with no one whose life is not lived at sea.
The mantine rise and glide and whirl, trailing remoraid suckered beneath their wing-fins like the engines of aeroplanes, and splash heavily back down again in explosions of brine. Elsewhere on the boat, cameras click and tourists point and shout. It's chaos, loud and messy and everything that puts Artemis on edge; still, somehow, with the giant pokémon flying around her, none of it seems to matter. She watches, rapt, and holds Brauron inside her jacket away from the spray, and when the boat turns and makes its way back towards the island it seems to bring a certain kind of peace with it.
Then it's back up to the Gym for training – although today Blaine is accepting challenges, and so they end up spending at least half the afternoon in the cavernous central hall of the old fort, where in an arena marked out in scorched tiles a series of impressive battles play out. Artemis watches carefully, listening to the old ritual announcements and trying to work out what's going on behind the commands and the tussling pokémon. Blaine seems to send out as many pokémon as the challenger registers, but never less than two, and if she's gauging this right he's somehow working out which pokémon and strategy will be right on the limits of his opponent's ability, so that everyone gets an equal challenge. That rapidash and arcanine, huge and fast, are meant to test that girl's dugtrio's speed; that magmar and its status moves are intended to stop that guy's poliwhirl just rushing in and tanking hits while it punches.
So what, Artemis asks herself, would Blaine do against Brauron? Something fast but not too tough, something that likes to get in close where Brauron is more vulnerable. Ponyta, maybe, or charmeleon or growlithe. She starts to think about ways to counter them, talking to Merle and the other Gym trainers about their strengths and weaknesses, and Merle gives her a wink.
“Figured it out, eh?” he says. “You're a sharp one. Blaine's going to love that.”
There are no specific lessons in today's training practice; Artemis has a goal, and that's to find a strategy that will work against Blaine. Merle pairs her up in practice matches against trainers partnered with the pokémon she's looking to beat, and though she doesn't win them all she and Brauron mostly give as good as they get. Growlithe are tenacious, but they're more enthusiastic than accurate and Brauron can usually outpace them; ponyta kick hard, but they get skittish and uncomfortable when Brauron gets right between their legs. Charmeleon are more of a problem: they're as comfortable up close with their claws as they are at a distance with their fire breath. Artemis figures her best bet is to poison them, but they're fast enough that lining up the poison gas is a tricky proposition.
Nonetheless, it's a good day, fun and productive and pleasantly devoid of cosmic horror, and then on the way back down the volcano to the Centre Cass mentions that tomorrow she'd like to visit the Fuji Resequencing Laboratories and Artemis' heart seems to drop out of the bottom of her chest.
“The what?” she asks.
“Y'know, the Fuji Labs?” replies Cass, cheerfully oblivious. “I just remembered the name earlier. It's that place where they clone the dinosaurs.”
“Oh,” says Artemis. “Uh. Right.”
“So, wanna go? Maybe they give out free samples. Or okay, probably not, but it'd still be cool to see a baby dinosaur.”
“Yeah, it would.” She tries to sound enthusiastic, but it's hard, and Cass seems to pick up on it.
“You know, we don't have to,” she says. “Or – you could do something else and I could―”
“No, it's fine.” Artemis forces a smile. “I'd like to see a baby dinosaur too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It's true, she would. She'd just prefer it if it didn't have Fuji's name attached. It can't be a coincidence, can it? Unless she's being paranoid again, drawing parallels that aren't there. No, it's the same person, it has to be. How many geneticists named Fuji can there be on Cinnabar Island?
“Okay, then, if you're sure,” says Cass. She's offering Artemis one more chance to back out, which is kind of her, and Artemis wishes she could acknowledge that kindness in some way but honestly she isn't even sure where she would start, so she just nods and smiles instead.
“Sure I'm sure,” she says. “Baby dinosaurs are cool.”
“On that we can agree,” says Cass. “There was this girl at school who had an amaura. I swear to god, I have never been so envious in my life.”
“What, you were allowed pokémon there?”
Cass shrugs.
“Most people had been on a journey already,” she says. “And you know, most people keep one partner at least for life, right? So a bunch of kids had partners and they weren't gonna separate them.”
Artemis supposes that makes sense. Pokémon weren't allowed at her school, but then, everyone went back home to them in the evening, so there wasn't an issue. If going home was no longer an option, she isn't sure it would even be legal to stop people bringing their pokémon with them. Even if they tried, nobody would actually enforce it. It's just not done.
“Makes sense,” she says. “Where'd she get an amaura?”
“Same way most people do. Rich parents.”
“Ah. Right, you said.”
“Yep.”
It is unusually curt for Cass. Artemis can feel the edges of her bitterness, just underneath her enthusiasm.
“Sorry,” she says. “Probably you didn't wanna talk about it.”
Cass glances at her, surprised.
“Huh? Oh, no. No, it's fine. She wasn't a jerk about it, just … oblivious.”
Artemis nods slowly.
“Ah,” she says. “Yeah, I completely get that.”
Cass sighs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess you would.”
They walk for a while. From up here on the mountain trail, they can see far beyond the town, right out to the west where the sun is descending into the waves in a riot of colour and light.
“Man,” says Cass. “It almost doesn't feel like you're in Kanto, does it? Like some tropical Hoenn kinda deal.”
Hoenn. Hot white beaches and verdant rainforests, far far away from Fuji, or breach, or wayward geneticists or the goddamn Indigo League. If only, thinks Artemis. If only.
“Yeah,” she says, aching for obscurity. “Some Hoenn kinda deal.”
That evening, lying in bed, she Googles the Fuji Labs on her phone. Founded by one Dr Makoto Fuji, it seems, a brilliant geneticist who, after selling his share in the company, went on to work “for various corporate concerns”, according to the least helpful Wikipedia page Artemis has ever seen. The account of his life loses coherence and trails off somewhere in the mid 2000s, and afterwards there's just a vague statement about him living in Lavender that someone has marked as in need of a citation.
She scowls at the screen and lowers her phone onto her chest. M. Fuji. Working with genetics. And didn't the diary say something about the League post taking him back to somewhere he'd worked before? Yes: it'll be nice to revisit my old stomping grounds. Definitely the same man, then. But – it's just a coincidence, right? The Lab was founded in the eighties, and according to the diary the League project took place ten years ago. Which means the Fuji Labs can't have anything to do with this, no matter how insistently Artemis feels they must do.
“You're sighing a bunch,” notes Cass, from the other bed, where she is herself doing the bedtime phone thing. “Something up?”
“Huh? No, nothing. Just … parents,” she invents.
“Ah, I gotcha,” replies Cass. “Mine used to call me up a whole bunch too.”
But not now? Artemis wonders for a moment about that, about what kind of terms Cass and her family parted on. She gets those calls from her aunt, sure, but she hasn't said a thing about her parents since that first night in the Viridian Pokémon Centre. In her mind's eye, Artemis sees an argument, a hastily packed bag, a storming out, and then she tells herself no. You can't just get up and leave on a trainer journey like that. There's paperwork to fill out and a licence to get. So probably nothing so dramatic, in the end: just slow-burning resentment and curdled hopes. The kind of ordinary pain that's too familiar and quiet to make a good story.
She sighs again.
“They're just worried, I guess,” she says. “I've never really been away from home before.”
“No?”
“Nope. And I don't have any brothers or sisters who coulda gone on a journey before, so. They worry.”
“Right.” Cass hesitates. Out of the corner of her eye, Artemis sees her lower her phone. “Mine … don't, I think. 'Cause I spent so much time away at boarding school and all. And, uh, well, I guess 'cause we didn't see so much of each other we kinda got … apart, a bit.”
“Oh,” says Artemis. “Um, we don't have to talk about it if you―”
“No, it's cool. We just don't get on that well, is I guess all it is.” Cass' voice is very light, so much so that it cannot be genuine. “I mean, whaddya expect, they saddled me with the name Cassandra, which, I feel like that's just a recipe for daughterly resentment, y'know?”
Artemis wants to laugh – feels like she's meant to laugh – but can't quite make herself follow through.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
“And then there was the exam thing, and the hair, and the thing with … uh, anyway.” Cass stops, a little too abruptly. It's all right. Artemis is curious, but more than she's curious she doesn't want to upset the first friend she's made in about five years, so she says nothing and waits for Cass to decide which way the conversation goes from here. “Doesn't matter, I guess,” she says in the end. “They're not here.”
The two of them lie there for a while, not talking, each unable for the moment to look at the other. Into the lack of conversation pour little night-time noises: the rustle of Ringo's feathers as he twitches in his sleep, the call of a nightjar, the distant roar of a nocturnal driver elsewhere on the island.
“I think I might challenge Blaine tomorrow,” says Artemis, eventually.
“Really? Wait, no, I don't mean it like that, you're really good so like you should definitely do that, but … uh, yeah, I was just surprised.”
“Me too, actually,” says Artemis. “But I'm gonna have to try at some point, so.”
“Guess so,” agrees Cass. “Well, I guess we'd better get up early, then. Gotta get to the Gym and get you a timeslot.”
“And go see some baby dinosaurs,” adds Artemis, trying to emulate Cass' lightness of tone, and though she doesn't think she quite manages it Cass chuckles all the same.
“Yeah,” she says. “And that. Gonna be a good one, I think. Night, Artemis.”
“Night, Cass.”
They switch off the lights and settle down into the dark. Artemis asks herself if she did okay just now, and to her surprise finds herself answering yes. Maybe she's got a shot at passing as a real person after all.
Lorelei's office is on the third floor, in the west wing of the Indigo Palace. It's quite a walk; the place was put up as a show of power, and the builders clearly knew that big was the way to go. Emilia walks down long, vaulted corridors and up colossal stairways, and does not think anything of any of it. Money and class still intimidate her a little, even now that she herself has some of both, but in this state of mind she sees straight past them to the power they mask and is unimpressed.
The Palace is busier than usual. This year's challenge season is starting soon, and there are preparations to be made – rooms to be swept, tapestries to be hung, old rites to be performed. Emilia passes ladders, buckets of paint, flasks of lustral water, all being carried to and fro. The further in she goes, the less activity she sees, until at last she climbs the final staircase up to Lorelei's department alone except for Nadia.
And then she's there, walking through the office space towards the room at the back where Lorelei spends her time when not training. She knocks, and without waiting for an answer goes straight in.
“―so if you could run those papers down to,” Lorelei says, to a man Emilia doesn't recognise, and then stops. “Oh. Um – what are you doing here, Em?”
Emilia looks at her for a moment without responding. Lorelei: five or six years her junior, pale as one of her ice-types, vivid red hair. Professional bearing. Cold around the edges, but not unwelcoming.
Time to put an end to that, Emilia thinks grimly.
“We have to talk,” she says. “Right now, Lorelei.”
The man looks at each of them in turn uncertainly.
“Uh – I can go,” he says. “If this is―”
“No, hang on,” says Lorelei, silencing him with an outstretched hand. “What is this, Em? I'm in the middle of something―”
“We need to talk about something very classified. If you want to have this conversation in front of someone else, that's your call, but I wouldn't recommend it.”
A long pause. Lorelei glares through her glasses, but it doesn't work on Emilia the way it does on junior League members and she just looks back at her, unmoved.
“Okay,” she says. “Fine. Simeon, we'll talk later. Just take the papers for now.”
The man picks up an envelope and nods at her.
“All right. I'll just – uh – I'll just leave you to it, then.”
He walks out at a speed that leaves no doubt that he'd be running if he thought he could get away with it. In the silence left by his absence, Emilia sits down in front of Lorelei.
Nadia, she thinks, wishing she didn't have to do this. Be ready.
“I'm going to ask you a question that you're going to try to avoid,” she says aloud. “What was ROCKETS?”
To her credit, Lorelei does not visibly react.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she says, but even before she's finished speaking Nadia has come out with a resounding LYING.
“Yes, you do. Giovanni was running it, I think, and now he's creeping around in the woods at night running tests on trainers like Ms Apanchomene who've come into contact with breach events.” That gets a response: just a flicker, a tiny spark of unease in the pit of Lorelei's eye, but it's enough for Emilia to notice. “I asked if the League did breach research,” she continues. “You said no, and you were right, weren't you? We don't. But we did, once, and then you put a stop to it earlier this year and deleted all trace of it from the records. And that would have been fine, except that I have an email between Giovanni and someone on his team that suggests they didn't want to quit, and now we have multiple breach events all over the west side of Kanto.”
Lorelei regards her for a long moment. Emilia holds her eye without reacting.
“We don't,” begins Lorelei, and then Emilia cannot hold back any longer.
“I have a damn natu, Lori, you're not fooling anyone!” she snaps. “You ignore this much longer, it'll happen again and who's to say we're going to get as lucky as we did before? It's a miracle that Oak didn't kill anyone, you know that. Haven't you been saying you want to stop this? I'm giving you a solution here, Lorelei. Take it.”
Lorelei recovers fast. She only looks startled for a second, and then it's gone.
“Emilia, this is both nonsense and incredibly unprofessional,” she says. “How did you even get hold of Giovanni's emails? I've told you before, we've never―”
“Nadia,” says Emilia. “What do you think? Cast it so we can both hear.”
LYING, confirms Nadia, with satisfaction, and Lorelei sighs.
“What do you want me to say? Yes, we have a secret breach research wing? I'm not that irresponsible―”
“I don't care.” Emilia leans forward. “I really don't. I don't care about that in the slightest. I just want us to do our damn jobs, Lori, and I want this – this rogue black ops thing to be put down before it gets anyone else hurt.”
“Don't be so melodramatic―”
“I'm not. That's exactly what it is, Lori, and those are exactly what the stakes are. You accept this, now, or we're looking at more and more breach events, and then it's only a matter of time before someone dies.”
Slowly, Lorelei takes off her glasses and begins to polish them. Emilia sits and watches without speaking, letting the silence grow.
Seconds. A minute. Two.
Lorelei puts her glasses back on, and turns back to Emilia with a face as neutral and empty as a blank sheet of paper.
“You were never meant to know,” she says, in a voice completely devoid of inflection. “It was too much of a risk. I thought I could just forget it when I shut it down, but I suppose not.”
Emilia waits. She has time. This is all on Lorelei, now.
“It's called the Research Office for the Consolidation of Kantan Economic and Technological Superiority. ROCKETS. My predecessor set it up. Giovanni, he'd been heading it since the beginning. I never liked it very much. You have to believe that … I guess you don't have to believe anything.” There is a near-imperceptible crack in Lorelei's icy mask: a tiny tremble of the lip, an uncertain movement of the eyelids. Emilia keeps her own face utterly blank. “They were the ones behind the M entity. Giovanni tried to sell me on the project's utility, but I was never entirely convinced. It took me a long time to make up my mind. Too long, I know, but I did. In the end.”
This is exceptional, for Lorelei. Emilia has known her to ask for advice, albeit grudgingly, but to admit so openly that she was wrong, without any probing at all … that is something else altogether. Still, she doesn't react. Let it come out first, before she responds.
“I did think, when that first event happened near Pewter … but then it seemed like it was over. Except that it wasn't.” Lorelei actually lowers her eyes then, apparently not able to meet Emilia's own. “I spoke to Giovanni, but he was quite convincingly surprised.”
Of course he was, the smug bastard. Emilia can just imagine him, standing there with a look of shock and concern on his face at the terrible, terrible news.
“And that's it,” finishes Lorelei. “You're right. I didn't want to believe I hadn't fixed it.”
For the first time since Emilia's prompt, Nadia takes her eyes off Lorelei and turns towards her partner instead.
Emilia shakes her head.
“I wish I could say I'm surprised,” she says. “Damn it, Lori.”
There is just the faintest spark of anger in Lorelei's eyes, but she at least has the grace not to let it grow. All she does, in the end, is nod.
“Yes.”
Pause. The noise of the office seeps in under the door, a muted hubbub of low conversation and rattling keyboards.
“Right,” says Emilia. “Okay. You've admitted it. Now what are you going to do?”
There's only one right answer, and both of them know it. Lorelei waits as long as she can before she gives it. Pride, maybe, or shame. Or both. Emilia has never seen why that's an either/or situation, especially with someone like Lorelei.
“I'll call him in,” she says, her reluctance showing again. “I'll call him in and start an investigation. Send in the internal review team.”
Emilia sighs, relieved. For a second, she thought she wasn't going to say it.
“Good,” she says. “Keep me up to date.”
“Yes. Fine.”
The pause this time is so long it almost hurts. Long enough for the cold of Emilia's anger to fade, and for the reality of what she has just done to begin sinking in.
“Well,” she says, getting up. “I need to get back home.”
“Yes,” says Lorelei, not looking at her. “You do.”
Emilia almost says goodbye, but something tells her not to speak, that even this small politeness might be too much, and so she turns away and walks out in silence.
Things probably aren't as badly broken as they seem, she tells herself, but they're sure as hell never going to be the same again.
Effie is growing fast.
Really, Emilia ought to have expected it. Pokémon have that bit of extra life in them, after all, that weird energy that comes out in fire or ice or fractures in the spacetime continuum; they do things differently to regular animals – and, for that matter, to regular plants. When a vileplume reproduces, it doesn't have to wait around for months while the fruit slowly swells. There's energy deep inside it, the same stuff that used to come out in petal dances and sludge bombs, and now that Effie has nothing left to fight she can redirect all that power upwards, into the lump at the top of her stem.
Emilia sits and stares at it, Lorelei and Artemis forgotten. The fruit is smooth and green and already as big as her fist. Taut. Swollen. Like a tumour, she catches herself thinking, and then corrects herself: no. Like a pregnant belly. Because this isn't the end, not really, because there will be seeds and Emilia will plant every last one and if she ends up filling her entire bloody apartment with oddish then that's what she'll do, she'll just be the oddish lady from now on.
So it's not the end. Except that, of course, it is.
Emilia stares. Elsewhere in the apartment, a clock ticks.
She can feel Nadia watching from the doorway, uncertain of what to do.
“I'm okay,” she says. “You … you can do whatever. I'm just going to sit with Effie for a bit.”
For a moment, there is silence, and then Emilia hears Nadia's claws scratching the floor as she hops towards her. A second later, there's that familiar pressure on her shoulder, so light she's almost not there at all, and the warm buzz of her partner's mind pressed up against her own.
She sighs and leans back against the wall, drawing her legs up close to her chest. She doesn't look at Nadia. She doesn't look at anything except Effie.
“Thanks,” she says.
YES, Nadia says.
It had to end. Everything does, doesn't it? Trainer journeys come to a close and you have to go back to the home you're so afraid of; university finishes and you have to go out into the vastness of the world. Eventually, people end too, and pokémon. Emilia does not really have any friends at the moment and mostly does not really care to, but she did have some when she was younger, and several of those friends are dead now: Matt, car; Niamh, AIDS; Sam, lightning. It happens. She knows this. It wasn't meant to happen to any of them, but it happened, and it wasn't meant to happen to Effie either but it's happening.
So. It had to end. Everything does.
This does not make it any easier to swallow.
Sam stung in particular, and not just because it was her. It was like a bad joke. She was right there, kissed Emilia goodbye that afternoon in the east end, and then she drove away and two weeks later when she didn't come back Emilia got up the courage to call her family and was as angry as she was upset by what they told her. Who gets struck by lightning, for god's sake? What kind of a way to die is that? And what kind of a way to die is this, grotesque and protracted, composting your brain and exploding your skull into a bloated zit of an apple?
Emilia knows the answer, really. It's just a way to die like any other. It's just one of those things. Life is like that. Full of things.
Full of things she cannot quite make go right.
She rests a hand on Effie's stem for a few moments, then stands up. She can't sit here and brood all day. That would be unhealthy, and more to the point selfish, when there's so much work to be done.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, you stay here, sweetie, and … and do your thing. I have to work now.”
Effie is as still and unresponsive as a gravestone. Emilia shuts her eyes for a moment, listening hard in case she creaks or whispers or makes any of the other tiny noises that she used to make, and then of course she does not and Emilia opens her eyes again and walks away.
?, asks Nadia.
“It's fine,” says Emilia. “Come on. We need to go over the diary and see what we have to catch up on.”
They get to work, sending emails and rescheduling missed meetings, and Emilia is right, it is fine, because it always is, in the end. Nothing has happened to her, after all; it's not like she's on fire or missing a limb, she can keep on working. So it's fine. It's always fine. Obviously.
So Emilia works, eats, sleeps, and though she dreams the old bad dream about her father (as she has not done in years) she is okay, really. She says as much when she wakes up: “I feel better for a good night's sleep.” It doesn't sound very convincing even to her, but the point is to aggressively believe it whether it's true or not, and so Emilia believes it and gets up and goes about her business like everything is normal.
She isn't sure how long this can last, but at the rate Effie's going, she isn't going to need to pretend for much longer.
Technically it's possible to just call up the Gym and book a challenge, but there's something to be said for doing it the old-fashioned way. It feels more weighty, somehow, and while Artemis doesn't always care for weighty, she feels like it's what she wants for her first Gym challenge. History is huge and cruel and full of questionable choices, and often it lies all too heavily on Artemis' back; today, though, it's with her in its other guise, a connection that binds her to all those who have in the past stood where she stands now. Countless trainers have made this climb up the mountain to challenge countless Cinnabar Gym Leaders. Artemis imagines them walking with her as she follows in their footsteps.
In the Gym, she registers Brauron at reception and answers some questions about her skill level. It occurs to her that some people must lie to try and throw Blaine off, and then it occurs to her that the receptionist might think she's lying right now, and then she stumbles over her words and nearly trips over despite actually standing still. She gets through the miniature interview without lying or being accused of it, however, and in the end she and Cass leave with a time: 2.10. And that's it: come ten past two, she will actually be facing Blaine, a master fire-type trainer with more experience as Gym Leader than anyone else on the Kanto circuit.
Scary. But a lot less scary than, say, the spire, or the blurred man, or the scyther, or even Giovanni, so Artemis thinks she'll be okay. Besides, it's her first time, and everyone knows they don't really get serious with you till your third or fourth badge. Most of their challengers are kids, after all, and it's kind of expected that you go home from your trainer journey with at least one or two badges.
In the meantime, there are the Fuji Labs to investigate. They're in a part of town that neither Artemis nor Cass have visited yet, beyond the more touristy areas in a district of modern-looking buildings populated by busy-looking people with a professional air about them. Apparently Cinnabar isn't all old houses and twee souvenir shops.
“Huh,” says Cass, looking around. “Y'know, I kinda almost forgot that people must actually, like, live here.”
Artemis can't think of a response, and so doesn't make one. She just shrugs and keeps walking.
The Labs themselves are housed in a low, pale building right by the waterfront, with a huge fibreglass aerodactyl soaring over the entrance. As she gets closer, Artemis sees odd shapes in the walls: spiral shells, patterned circles, strange dark lobes of stone.
“Look,” she says. “Fossils.”
“What? Oh hey, neat!” Cass peers at the wall, fascinated. “Is that – are they carved on there or something?”
No, it's limestone, a sedimentary rock that often contains fossilised sea life, quotes Artemis in her head.
“I don't think so,” she says aloud. “I think they just picked stone with fossils in it.”
“Neat,” repeats Cass. “See that, Ringo? A hundred million years ago, this wall was a bunch of dudes you coulda beat up.” On her shoulder, he glares and chirps viciously, suddenly animated at the prospect of violence. “Jeez, you gotta learn to chill, buster. You're gonna give yourself an ulcer with all that anger.” She turns back to Artemis. “Okay, let's head in, I guess. See us some dinosaurs.”
“Yep,” says Artemis, and in they go.
White walls, framed photographs of smiling lab-coated people with cloned fossil pokémon, a big portrait on the far wall of a startlingly young Blaine and a broad-shouldered Japanese man who Artemis assumes must be Fuji. (He also looks young. Definitely wouldn't yet have had time to become a world leader in his field and be headhunted by the League at that age.) A few people – adults, some of them, but a lot of kids of all ages – hanging around near the entrance, waiting for something. Cass goes up to the receptionist and asks when the tour starts, and is told that there's one setting off in about ten minutes.
A few minutes of phone-poking and absent-minded petting of pokémon. Brauron slithers around on Artemis' shoulders, taking in the air and all its strange new smells. Ringo eyes up a poochyena sitting at some guy's heels and gets a warning no from Cass. And then up pops an enthusiastic young man in a Fuji Labs shirt, and the tour begins.
It's kind of baffling, honestly. Artemis expected rows and rows of artificial eggs, maybe some big glass tubes with unidentifiable creatures gestating inside, but she's reminded more than anything of some kind of artisanal bakery. Once they get through the rooms of historical paraphernalia in which they are told about how visionary Dr Fuji was in looking at breakthroughs in genetics and realising he could make a lot of money by applying them to dinosaurs, the labs themselves are small and neat and never seem to contain as much as she thought they would. There are some big, impressive machines, there are centrifuges and huge computer towers, but in terms of scientists and dinosaur eggs, there's actually very little, and it's always arranged for maximum visual impact on the roped-off point where the tour stops to watch.
Probably this isn't a very trenchant observation; probably it's all staged, so that the Fuji Labs people can sell the idea of Fuji Labs as hard as they sell their dinosaurs. Still, what the tour guide says about their work practices does suggest a weirdly personal process: each animal hand-crafted with its own individual DNA, so that every omanyte is not just a clone of all the rest but unique right down to the genetic level. Something about this hybrid of corporate marketing and hipster concern with authenticity makes Artemis' skin crawl, but then the labs give way to the part that everybody really came for, the little unextincted zoo, and all her nascent misgivings fly away from her in the face of baby dinosaurs.
This part is outside, round the back of the building where a large plot of land has been fenced off and furnished with pools, trees and sandpits. There are amaura, dog-sized little sauropods that gambol up to the fence to stick their long necks through the bars and bleat at their visitors; there are kabuto that trundle in and out of the water like elaborate toys, legs moving like clockwork; there are even, in a little secure enclosure off to one side, some tyrunt that are steadily working their way through a small mountain of extra-sturdy chew toys.
It's pretty great. Cass and Artemis join in with making delighted noises and taking pictures; they even get to pet one of the amaura, which are all both very tame and very thick-skinned, so that even the shyest or clumsiest kids get to put their hands on them and know they're touching something that was last alive dozens of millions of years ago. It's enough to make Artemis forget for a few minutes about the dubious ethics of copyrighting a pokémon, and the baby-dino glow remains in her as they all troop back inside into the little museum/gift shop combo at the tour's end.
Artemis can't afford a fossil pokémon of her own, obviously, and though the plush amaura is incredibly tempting she can't really afford that either, so she leaves the rest of the group to poke around in the shop and crosses over to the rows of vitrines and reassembled skeletons that make up the museum. Here is a case full of delicate stone fronds that were in life part of some intricate deep-sea creature; over there is a cast of a Suchodontosaurus skeleton, the smaller Kantan answer to America's T. rex. There have been attempts to clone those, too, Artemis reads on the plaque, but like most things that aren't pokémon, even those specimens that were viable ended up not living long. The atmosphere is wrong for them or something, and regular animals aren't tough enough to cope.
She moves on, stroking Brauron so she isn't startled by her reflection in the glass of the cases. This is apparently a kabutops skeleton, huge slabs of shell all hunched and hooked like a goblin in its case. The recurved blades on its forelegs are as long as Artemis' thigh, and suddenly she is reminded of the scyther and its jagged, broken claw.
“Maybe we look at a different one,” she says to Brauron, and moves on in a hurry.
At the back of the room, an aerodactyl skeleton has been set up perched atop a high shelf, looking down at the room from between the dramatic curves of its folded wings. It's much bigger than Artemis expected, so big it doesn't even look like it can fly, but she's seen one on TV before and she knows they move like quicksilver in the air.
Artemis stands there and looks up at the aerodactyl, and with a brisk grinding noise like a knife being sharpened, the aerodactyl turns its skull to look back down at her.
It's like a kick in the chest, only she doesn't move, can't move, frozen there in blind panic, and then the aerodactyl fails to move again and she catches herself just before she turns to run, tells herself to breathe, breathe, it's nothing, you're imagining things.
A minute passes, then two. Artemis sighs, long and shaky, and clenches her trembling hands into fists. The aerodactyl is motionless up there on its shelf. Probably it's always been in this position, Artie, and you just thought it moved. A hallucination. Or maybe not even that, it's kinda shadowy up there and maybe the light just shifted on it strangely and it looked like it moved.
“Yeah,” she says, wrenching her voice back out of its hiding place. “Yeah, that's it.”
She stands there staring for a long time, but the aerodactyl does not move, and eventually she finds the courage to turn her back on it and retreat down the lines of cases and skeletons back to the reassuring bustle of the gift shop. Then she hears someone yell Ringo! and reality seems to reassert itself as she sees the flash of a pokémon being recalled and Cass straightening up, running her fingers exasperatedly through her hair.
“Great,” she's saying, glaring at a badly scratched plastic kabuto. “Now I'm gonna have to buy it, I guess.” She looks up. “Oh, hey Artemis. Anything cool over there?”
“Nope,” says Artemis, without looking back. “Just bones.”
“Okay. Well, wanna get lunch now? I have to go pay for this thing Ringo ruined, but after that I think I'm done here.”
“Okay,” says Artemis. “Okay.”
A couple of minutes later, they walk out and leave the kids poking at toys behind them. Artemis feels the hollow eyes of the skeletons on her back every step of the way.
They're not moving, she tells herself, as they head back out through the lobby into the street. They're not.
Cass lets Ringo out of his ball again once they're out and tosses him the kabuto toy.
“Here,” she says, as he snatches it out of the air. “Since you broke it, I guess it's yours now.”
He squawks indistinctly through the kabuto in his beak and starts waving it around, chirping happily at the way its articulated legs wiggle. Cass sighs and shakes her head.
“At least you're happy, birdbrain,” she says. “Try not to destroy it before we even get back to the Centre, okay? That cost me sixteen florins.” She turns to Artemis and raises her eyebrows, then lowers them into a frown when this gets no response. “Hey, you okay?”
“Oh. Um. Yeah, I'm – I'm fine,” says Artemis. “Just, uh, a bit nervous.”
“About Blaine? That makes sense, I guess. You'll do great, though. You and Brauron work like super well together.”
Artemis tries to smile and more or less succeeds.
“Thanks,” she says. “I appreciate it.”
“No problemo.” Cass grins. She's good at it, in a way that makes Artemis a little frustrated – both at Cass, for having a grace and beauty that she does not, and at herself, for envying her this. “Let's go, then.”
“Sure.”
They start walking, and deep in the caverns of Artemis' mind the fear begins to fade in the face of bright sunlight and ocean winds. She just imagined it. Skeletons don't move.
Cass sniffs.
“Hey,” she says. “Can you smell burning?”
In the morning, Artemis feels marginally better. This isn't saying much, given how she started off, but she's been dealing with her brain long enough to be able to take small victories when they come. She's suddenly become privy to yet more horrible secrets, yes, and she isn't sure what she's supposed to do with any of them – but it's a bright, sunny morning and Brauron is poking her forehead repeatedly in an attempt to get her to feed her. Right now, Artemis doesn't need to know what to do next about breach. She just needs to get up and get on with having a trainer journey.
“Okay, Brauron,” she mutters, pushing her gently out of the way and slithering out of bed. “You can knock it off now, I'm coming.”
She sorts Brauron out, and then herself, and when Cass gets up she finds both of them downstairs, looking through lists of things to do in Cinnabar online.
“Is there anything you particularly want to do today?” Artemis asks her, glancing up from her phone. “Dunno about Ringo, but I think Brauron deserves a break, so I thought maybe I should go see some things, go back to the Gym this evening.”
“Ringo doesn't deserve anything at all, ever,” says Cass. “Ow! Okay, kidding, birdbrain. But yeah, might be nice to do the tourist thing.”
And it is nice, as it turns out. They climb the old clock tower and learn all about its carvings, which tell the story of the Summer and Winter Kings who ruled Cinnabar in turn until Summer King Javel and his moltres drove Winter King Hierat and his articuno away to make the island warm all year round; they go on a boat trip out for a couple of hours to see the mantine breaching and gliding like strange alien seaplanes. Artemis stands there gripping the railing and as the huge rays surge up out of the water around the boat even she can forget the vast and terrifying space yawning back at her on every side.
“Man!” cries Cass, over the crashing of a mantine slamming back down into the waves. “I gotta catch one of these sometime!”
“Yeah!” replies Artemis enthusiastically, although neither of them actually try to do so, and both know that they probably never will. These pokémon will partner with no one whose life is not lived at sea.
The mantine rise and glide and whirl, trailing remoraid suckered beneath their wing-fins like the engines of aeroplanes, and splash heavily back down again in explosions of brine. Elsewhere on the boat, cameras click and tourists point and shout. It's chaos, loud and messy and everything that puts Artemis on edge; still, somehow, with the giant pokémon flying around her, none of it seems to matter. She watches, rapt, and holds Brauron inside her jacket away from the spray, and when the boat turns and makes its way back towards the island it seems to bring a certain kind of peace with it.
Then it's back up to the Gym for training – although today Blaine is accepting challenges, and so they end up spending at least half the afternoon in the cavernous central hall of the old fort, where in an arena marked out in scorched tiles a series of impressive battles play out. Artemis watches carefully, listening to the old ritual announcements and trying to work out what's going on behind the commands and the tussling pokémon. Blaine seems to send out as many pokémon as the challenger registers, but never less than two, and if she's gauging this right he's somehow working out which pokémon and strategy will be right on the limits of his opponent's ability, so that everyone gets an equal challenge. That rapidash and arcanine, huge and fast, are meant to test that girl's dugtrio's speed; that magmar and its status moves are intended to stop that guy's poliwhirl just rushing in and tanking hits while it punches.
So what, Artemis asks herself, would Blaine do against Brauron? Something fast but not too tough, something that likes to get in close where Brauron is more vulnerable. Ponyta, maybe, or charmeleon or growlithe. She starts to think about ways to counter them, talking to Merle and the other Gym trainers about their strengths and weaknesses, and Merle gives her a wink.
“Figured it out, eh?” he says. “You're a sharp one. Blaine's going to love that.”
There are no specific lessons in today's training practice; Artemis has a goal, and that's to find a strategy that will work against Blaine. Merle pairs her up in practice matches against trainers partnered with the pokémon she's looking to beat, and though she doesn't win them all she and Brauron mostly give as good as they get. Growlithe are tenacious, but they're more enthusiastic than accurate and Brauron can usually outpace them; ponyta kick hard, but they get skittish and uncomfortable when Brauron gets right between their legs. Charmeleon are more of a problem: they're as comfortable up close with their claws as they are at a distance with their fire breath. Artemis figures her best bet is to poison them, but they're fast enough that lining up the poison gas is a tricky proposition.
Nonetheless, it's a good day, fun and productive and pleasantly devoid of cosmic horror, and then on the way back down the volcano to the Centre Cass mentions that tomorrow she'd like to visit the Fuji Resequencing Laboratories and Artemis' heart seems to drop out of the bottom of her chest.
“The what?” she asks.
“Y'know, the Fuji Labs?” replies Cass, cheerfully oblivious. “I just remembered the name earlier. It's that place where they clone the dinosaurs.”
“Oh,” says Artemis. “Uh. Right.”
“So, wanna go? Maybe they give out free samples. Or okay, probably not, but it'd still be cool to see a baby dinosaur.”
“Yeah, it would.” She tries to sound enthusiastic, but it's hard, and Cass seems to pick up on it.
“You know, we don't have to,” she says. “Or – you could do something else and I could―”
“No, it's fine.” Artemis forces a smile. “I'd like to see a baby dinosaur too.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
It's true, she would. She'd just prefer it if it didn't have Fuji's name attached. It can't be a coincidence, can it? Unless she's being paranoid again, drawing parallels that aren't there. No, it's the same person, it has to be. How many geneticists named Fuji can there be on Cinnabar Island?
“Okay, then, if you're sure,” says Cass. She's offering Artemis one more chance to back out, which is kind of her, and Artemis wishes she could acknowledge that kindness in some way but honestly she isn't even sure where she would start, so she just nods and smiles instead.
“Sure I'm sure,” she says. “Baby dinosaurs are cool.”
“On that we can agree,” says Cass. “There was this girl at school who had an amaura. I swear to god, I have never been so envious in my life.”
“What, you were allowed pokémon there?”
Cass shrugs.
“Most people had been on a journey already,” she says. “And you know, most people keep one partner at least for life, right? So a bunch of kids had partners and they weren't gonna separate them.”
Artemis supposes that makes sense. Pokémon weren't allowed at her school, but then, everyone went back home to them in the evening, so there wasn't an issue. If going home was no longer an option, she isn't sure it would even be legal to stop people bringing their pokémon with them. Even if they tried, nobody would actually enforce it. It's just not done.
“Makes sense,” she says. “Where'd she get an amaura?”
“Same way most people do. Rich parents.”
“Ah. Right, you said.”
“Yep.”
It is unusually curt for Cass. Artemis can feel the edges of her bitterness, just underneath her enthusiasm.
“Sorry,” she says. “Probably you didn't wanna talk about it.”
Cass glances at her, surprised.
“Huh? Oh, no. No, it's fine. She wasn't a jerk about it, just … oblivious.”
Artemis nods slowly.
“Ah,” she says. “Yeah, I completely get that.”
Cass sighs.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess you would.”
They walk for a while. From up here on the mountain trail, they can see far beyond the town, right out to the west where the sun is descending into the waves in a riot of colour and light.
“Man,” says Cass. “It almost doesn't feel like you're in Kanto, does it? Like some tropical Hoenn kinda deal.”
Hoenn. Hot white beaches and verdant rainforests, far far away from Fuji, or breach, or wayward geneticists or the goddamn Indigo League. If only, thinks Artemis. If only.
“Yeah,” she says, aching for obscurity. “Some Hoenn kinda deal.”
That evening, lying in bed, she Googles the Fuji Labs on her phone. Founded by one Dr Makoto Fuji, it seems, a brilliant geneticist who, after selling his share in the company, went on to work “for various corporate concerns”, according to the least helpful Wikipedia page Artemis has ever seen. The account of his life loses coherence and trails off somewhere in the mid 2000s, and afterwards there's just a vague statement about him living in Lavender that someone has marked as in need of a citation.
She scowls at the screen and lowers her phone onto her chest. M. Fuji. Working with genetics. And didn't the diary say something about the League post taking him back to somewhere he'd worked before? Yes: it'll be nice to revisit my old stomping grounds. Definitely the same man, then. But – it's just a coincidence, right? The Lab was founded in the eighties, and according to the diary the League project took place ten years ago. Which means the Fuji Labs can't have anything to do with this, no matter how insistently Artemis feels they must do.
“You're sighing a bunch,” notes Cass, from the other bed, where she is herself doing the bedtime phone thing. “Something up?”
“Huh? No, nothing. Just … parents,” she invents.
“Ah, I gotcha,” replies Cass. “Mine used to call me up a whole bunch too.”
But not now? Artemis wonders for a moment about that, about what kind of terms Cass and her family parted on. She gets those calls from her aunt, sure, but she hasn't said a thing about her parents since that first night in the Viridian Pokémon Centre. In her mind's eye, Artemis sees an argument, a hastily packed bag, a storming out, and then she tells herself no. You can't just get up and leave on a trainer journey like that. There's paperwork to fill out and a licence to get. So probably nothing so dramatic, in the end: just slow-burning resentment and curdled hopes. The kind of ordinary pain that's too familiar and quiet to make a good story.
She sighs again.
“They're just worried, I guess,” she says. “I've never really been away from home before.”
“No?”
“Nope. And I don't have any brothers or sisters who coulda gone on a journey before, so. They worry.”
“Right.” Cass hesitates. Out of the corner of her eye, Artemis sees her lower her phone. “Mine … don't, I think. 'Cause I spent so much time away at boarding school and all. And, uh, well, I guess 'cause we didn't see so much of each other we kinda got … apart, a bit.”
“Oh,” says Artemis. “Um, we don't have to talk about it if you―”
“No, it's cool. We just don't get on that well, is I guess all it is.” Cass' voice is very light, so much so that it cannot be genuine. “I mean, whaddya expect, they saddled me with the name Cassandra, which, I feel like that's just a recipe for daughterly resentment, y'know?”
Artemis wants to laugh – feels like she's meant to laugh – but can't quite make herself follow through.
“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”
“And then there was the exam thing, and the hair, and the thing with … uh, anyway.” Cass stops, a little too abruptly. It's all right. Artemis is curious, but more than she's curious she doesn't want to upset the first friend she's made in about five years, so she says nothing and waits for Cass to decide which way the conversation goes from here. “Doesn't matter, I guess,” she says in the end. “They're not here.”
The two of them lie there for a while, not talking, each unable for the moment to look at the other. Into the lack of conversation pour little night-time noises: the rustle of Ringo's feathers as he twitches in his sleep, the call of a nightjar, the distant roar of a nocturnal driver elsewhere on the island.
“I think I might challenge Blaine tomorrow,” says Artemis, eventually.
“Really? Wait, no, I don't mean it like that, you're really good so like you should definitely do that, but … uh, yeah, I was just surprised.”
“Me too, actually,” says Artemis. “But I'm gonna have to try at some point, so.”
“Guess so,” agrees Cass. “Well, I guess we'd better get up early, then. Gotta get to the Gym and get you a timeslot.”
“And go see some baby dinosaurs,” adds Artemis, trying to emulate Cass' lightness of tone, and though she doesn't think she quite manages it Cass chuckles all the same.
“Yeah,” she says. “And that. Gonna be a good one, I think. Night, Artemis.”
“Night, Cass.”
They switch off the lights and settle down into the dark. Artemis asks herself if she did okay just now, and to her surprise finds herself answering yes. Maybe she's got a shot at passing as a real person after all.
*
Lorelei's office is on the third floor, in the west wing of the Indigo Palace. It's quite a walk; the place was put up as a show of power, and the builders clearly knew that big was the way to go. Emilia walks down long, vaulted corridors and up colossal stairways, and does not think anything of any of it. Money and class still intimidate her a little, even now that she herself has some of both, but in this state of mind she sees straight past them to the power they mask and is unimpressed.
The Palace is busier than usual. This year's challenge season is starting soon, and there are preparations to be made – rooms to be swept, tapestries to be hung, old rites to be performed. Emilia passes ladders, buckets of paint, flasks of lustral water, all being carried to and fro. The further in she goes, the less activity she sees, until at last she climbs the final staircase up to Lorelei's department alone except for Nadia.
And then she's there, walking through the office space towards the room at the back where Lorelei spends her time when not training. She knocks, and without waiting for an answer goes straight in.
“―so if you could run those papers down to,” Lorelei says, to a man Emilia doesn't recognise, and then stops. “Oh. Um – what are you doing here, Em?”
Emilia looks at her for a moment without responding. Lorelei: five or six years her junior, pale as one of her ice-types, vivid red hair. Professional bearing. Cold around the edges, but not unwelcoming.
Time to put an end to that, Emilia thinks grimly.
“We have to talk,” she says. “Right now, Lorelei.”
The man looks at each of them in turn uncertainly.
“Uh – I can go,” he says. “If this is―”
“No, hang on,” says Lorelei, silencing him with an outstretched hand. “What is this, Em? I'm in the middle of something―”
“We need to talk about something very classified. If you want to have this conversation in front of someone else, that's your call, but I wouldn't recommend it.”
A long pause. Lorelei glares through her glasses, but it doesn't work on Emilia the way it does on junior League members and she just looks back at her, unmoved.
“Okay,” she says. “Fine. Simeon, we'll talk later. Just take the papers for now.”
The man picks up an envelope and nods at her.
“All right. I'll just – uh – I'll just leave you to it, then.”
He walks out at a speed that leaves no doubt that he'd be running if he thought he could get away with it. In the silence left by his absence, Emilia sits down in front of Lorelei.
Nadia, she thinks, wishing she didn't have to do this. Be ready.
“I'm going to ask you a question that you're going to try to avoid,” she says aloud. “What was ROCKETS?”
To her credit, Lorelei does not visibly react.
“I don't know what you're talking about,” she says, but even before she's finished speaking Nadia has come out with a resounding LYING.
“Yes, you do. Giovanni was running it, I think, and now he's creeping around in the woods at night running tests on trainers like Ms Apanchomene who've come into contact with breach events.” That gets a response: just a flicker, a tiny spark of unease in the pit of Lorelei's eye, but it's enough for Emilia to notice. “I asked if the League did breach research,” she continues. “You said no, and you were right, weren't you? We don't. But we did, once, and then you put a stop to it earlier this year and deleted all trace of it from the records. And that would have been fine, except that I have an email between Giovanni and someone on his team that suggests they didn't want to quit, and now we have multiple breach events all over the west side of Kanto.”
Lorelei regards her for a long moment. Emilia holds her eye without reacting.
“We don't,” begins Lorelei, and then Emilia cannot hold back any longer.
“I have a damn natu, Lori, you're not fooling anyone!” she snaps. “You ignore this much longer, it'll happen again and who's to say we're going to get as lucky as we did before? It's a miracle that Oak didn't kill anyone, you know that. Haven't you been saying you want to stop this? I'm giving you a solution here, Lorelei. Take it.”
Lorelei recovers fast. She only looks startled for a second, and then it's gone.
“Emilia, this is both nonsense and incredibly unprofessional,” she says. “How did you even get hold of Giovanni's emails? I've told you before, we've never―”
“Nadia,” says Emilia. “What do you think? Cast it so we can both hear.”
LYING, confirms Nadia, with satisfaction, and Lorelei sighs.
“What do you want me to say? Yes, we have a secret breach research wing? I'm not that irresponsible―”
“I don't care.” Emilia leans forward. “I really don't. I don't care about that in the slightest. I just want us to do our damn jobs, Lori, and I want this – this rogue black ops thing to be put down before it gets anyone else hurt.”
“Don't be so melodramatic―”
“I'm not. That's exactly what it is, Lori, and those are exactly what the stakes are. You accept this, now, or we're looking at more and more breach events, and then it's only a matter of time before someone dies.”
Slowly, Lorelei takes off her glasses and begins to polish them. Emilia sits and watches without speaking, letting the silence grow.
Seconds. A minute. Two.
Lorelei puts her glasses back on, and turns back to Emilia with a face as neutral and empty as a blank sheet of paper.
“You were never meant to know,” she says, in a voice completely devoid of inflection. “It was too much of a risk. I thought I could just forget it when I shut it down, but I suppose not.”
Emilia waits. She has time. This is all on Lorelei, now.
“It's called the Research Office for the Consolidation of Kantan Economic and Technological Superiority. ROCKETS. My predecessor set it up. Giovanni, he'd been heading it since the beginning. I never liked it very much. You have to believe that … I guess you don't have to believe anything.” There is a near-imperceptible crack in Lorelei's icy mask: a tiny tremble of the lip, an uncertain movement of the eyelids. Emilia keeps her own face utterly blank. “They were the ones behind the M entity. Giovanni tried to sell me on the project's utility, but I was never entirely convinced. It took me a long time to make up my mind. Too long, I know, but I did. In the end.”
This is exceptional, for Lorelei. Emilia has known her to ask for advice, albeit grudgingly, but to admit so openly that she was wrong, without any probing at all … that is something else altogether. Still, she doesn't react. Let it come out first, before she responds.
“I did think, when that first event happened near Pewter … but then it seemed like it was over. Except that it wasn't.” Lorelei actually lowers her eyes then, apparently not able to meet Emilia's own. “I spoke to Giovanni, but he was quite convincingly surprised.”
Of course he was, the smug bastard. Emilia can just imagine him, standing there with a look of shock and concern on his face at the terrible, terrible news.
“And that's it,” finishes Lorelei. “You're right. I didn't want to believe I hadn't fixed it.”
For the first time since Emilia's prompt, Nadia takes her eyes off Lorelei and turns towards her partner instead.
Emilia shakes her head.
“I wish I could say I'm surprised,” she says. “Damn it, Lori.”
There is just the faintest spark of anger in Lorelei's eyes, but she at least has the grace not to let it grow. All she does, in the end, is nod.
“Yes.”
Pause. The noise of the office seeps in under the door, a muted hubbub of low conversation and rattling keyboards.
“Right,” says Emilia. “Okay. You've admitted it. Now what are you going to do?”
There's only one right answer, and both of them know it. Lorelei waits as long as she can before she gives it. Pride, maybe, or shame. Or both. Emilia has never seen why that's an either/or situation, especially with someone like Lorelei.
“I'll call him in,” she says, her reluctance showing again. “I'll call him in and start an investigation. Send in the internal review team.”
Emilia sighs, relieved. For a second, she thought she wasn't going to say it.
“Good,” she says. “Keep me up to date.”
“Yes. Fine.”
The pause this time is so long it almost hurts. Long enough for the cold of Emilia's anger to fade, and for the reality of what she has just done to begin sinking in.
“Well,” she says, getting up. “I need to get back home.”
“Yes,” says Lorelei, not looking at her. “You do.”
Emilia almost says goodbye, but something tells her not to speak, that even this small politeness might be too much, and so she turns away and walks out in silence.
Things probably aren't as badly broken as they seem, she tells herself, but they're sure as hell never going to be the same again.
*
Effie is growing fast.
Really, Emilia ought to have expected it. Pokémon have that bit of extra life in them, after all, that weird energy that comes out in fire or ice or fractures in the spacetime continuum; they do things differently to regular animals – and, for that matter, to regular plants. When a vileplume reproduces, it doesn't have to wait around for months while the fruit slowly swells. There's energy deep inside it, the same stuff that used to come out in petal dances and sludge bombs, and now that Effie has nothing left to fight she can redirect all that power upwards, into the lump at the top of her stem.
Emilia sits and stares at it, Lorelei and Artemis forgotten. The fruit is smooth and green and already as big as her fist. Taut. Swollen. Like a tumour, she catches herself thinking, and then corrects herself: no. Like a pregnant belly. Because this isn't the end, not really, because there will be seeds and Emilia will plant every last one and if she ends up filling her entire bloody apartment with oddish then that's what she'll do, she'll just be the oddish lady from now on.
So it's not the end. Except that, of course, it is.
Emilia stares. Elsewhere in the apartment, a clock ticks.
She can feel Nadia watching from the doorway, uncertain of what to do.
“I'm okay,” she says. “You … you can do whatever. I'm just going to sit with Effie for a bit.”
For a moment, there is silence, and then Emilia hears Nadia's claws scratching the floor as she hops towards her. A second later, there's that familiar pressure on her shoulder, so light she's almost not there at all, and the warm buzz of her partner's mind pressed up against her own.
She sighs and leans back against the wall, drawing her legs up close to her chest. She doesn't look at Nadia. She doesn't look at anything except Effie.
“Thanks,” she says.
YES, Nadia says.
It had to end. Everything does, doesn't it? Trainer journeys come to a close and you have to go back to the home you're so afraid of; university finishes and you have to go out into the vastness of the world. Eventually, people end too, and pokémon. Emilia does not really have any friends at the moment and mostly does not really care to, but she did have some when she was younger, and several of those friends are dead now: Matt, car; Niamh, AIDS; Sam, lightning. It happens. She knows this. It wasn't meant to happen to any of them, but it happened, and it wasn't meant to happen to Effie either but it's happening.
So. It had to end. Everything does.
This does not make it any easier to swallow.
Sam stung in particular, and not just because it was her. It was like a bad joke. She was right there, kissed Emilia goodbye that afternoon in the east end, and then she drove away and two weeks later when she didn't come back Emilia got up the courage to call her family and was as angry as she was upset by what they told her. Who gets struck by lightning, for god's sake? What kind of a way to die is that? And what kind of a way to die is this, grotesque and protracted, composting your brain and exploding your skull into a bloated zit of an apple?
Emilia knows the answer, really. It's just a way to die like any other. It's just one of those things. Life is like that. Full of things.
Full of things she cannot quite make go right.
She rests a hand on Effie's stem for a few moments, then stands up. She can't sit here and brood all day. That would be unhealthy, and more to the point selfish, when there's so much work to be done.
“Okay,” she says. “Okay, you stay here, sweetie, and … and do your thing. I have to work now.”
Effie is as still and unresponsive as a gravestone. Emilia shuts her eyes for a moment, listening hard in case she creaks or whispers or makes any of the other tiny noises that she used to make, and then of course she does not and Emilia opens her eyes again and walks away.
?, asks Nadia.
“It's fine,” says Emilia. “Come on. We need to go over the diary and see what we have to catch up on.”
They get to work, sending emails and rescheduling missed meetings, and Emilia is right, it is fine, because it always is, in the end. Nothing has happened to her, after all; it's not like she's on fire or missing a limb, she can keep on working. So it's fine. It's always fine. Obviously.
So Emilia works, eats, sleeps, and though she dreams the old bad dream about her father (as she has not done in years) she is okay, really. She says as much when she wakes up: “I feel better for a good night's sleep.” It doesn't sound very convincing even to her, but the point is to aggressively believe it whether it's true or not, and so Emilia believes it and gets up and goes about her business like everything is normal.
She isn't sure how long this can last, but at the rate Effie's going, she isn't going to need to pretend for much longer.
*
Technically it's possible to just call up the Gym and book a challenge, but there's something to be said for doing it the old-fashioned way. It feels more weighty, somehow, and while Artemis doesn't always care for weighty, she feels like it's what she wants for her first Gym challenge. History is huge and cruel and full of questionable choices, and often it lies all too heavily on Artemis' back; today, though, it's with her in its other guise, a connection that binds her to all those who have in the past stood where she stands now. Countless trainers have made this climb up the mountain to challenge countless Cinnabar Gym Leaders. Artemis imagines them walking with her as she follows in their footsteps.
In the Gym, she registers Brauron at reception and answers some questions about her skill level. It occurs to her that some people must lie to try and throw Blaine off, and then it occurs to her that the receptionist might think she's lying right now, and then she stumbles over her words and nearly trips over despite actually standing still. She gets through the miniature interview without lying or being accused of it, however, and in the end she and Cass leave with a time: 2.10. And that's it: come ten past two, she will actually be facing Blaine, a master fire-type trainer with more experience as Gym Leader than anyone else on the Kanto circuit.
Scary. But a lot less scary than, say, the spire, or the blurred man, or the scyther, or even Giovanni, so Artemis thinks she'll be okay. Besides, it's her first time, and everyone knows they don't really get serious with you till your third or fourth badge. Most of their challengers are kids, after all, and it's kind of expected that you go home from your trainer journey with at least one or two badges.
In the meantime, there are the Fuji Labs to investigate. They're in a part of town that neither Artemis nor Cass have visited yet, beyond the more touristy areas in a district of modern-looking buildings populated by busy-looking people with a professional air about them. Apparently Cinnabar isn't all old houses and twee souvenir shops.
“Huh,” says Cass, looking around. “Y'know, I kinda almost forgot that people must actually, like, live here.”
Artemis can't think of a response, and so doesn't make one. She just shrugs and keeps walking.
The Labs themselves are housed in a low, pale building right by the waterfront, with a huge fibreglass aerodactyl soaring over the entrance. As she gets closer, Artemis sees odd shapes in the walls: spiral shells, patterned circles, strange dark lobes of stone.
“Look,” she says. “Fossils.”
“What? Oh hey, neat!” Cass peers at the wall, fascinated. “Is that – are they carved on there or something?”
No, it's limestone, a sedimentary rock that often contains fossilised sea life, quotes Artemis in her head.
“I don't think so,” she says aloud. “I think they just picked stone with fossils in it.”
“Neat,” repeats Cass. “See that, Ringo? A hundred million years ago, this wall was a bunch of dudes you coulda beat up.” On her shoulder, he glares and chirps viciously, suddenly animated at the prospect of violence. “Jeez, you gotta learn to chill, buster. You're gonna give yourself an ulcer with all that anger.” She turns back to Artemis. “Okay, let's head in, I guess. See us some dinosaurs.”
“Yep,” says Artemis, and in they go.
White walls, framed photographs of smiling lab-coated people with cloned fossil pokémon, a big portrait on the far wall of a startlingly young Blaine and a broad-shouldered Japanese man who Artemis assumes must be Fuji. (He also looks young. Definitely wouldn't yet have had time to become a world leader in his field and be headhunted by the League at that age.) A few people – adults, some of them, but a lot of kids of all ages – hanging around near the entrance, waiting for something. Cass goes up to the receptionist and asks when the tour starts, and is told that there's one setting off in about ten minutes.
A few minutes of phone-poking and absent-minded petting of pokémon. Brauron slithers around on Artemis' shoulders, taking in the air and all its strange new smells. Ringo eyes up a poochyena sitting at some guy's heels and gets a warning no from Cass. And then up pops an enthusiastic young man in a Fuji Labs shirt, and the tour begins.
It's kind of baffling, honestly. Artemis expected rows and rows of artificial eggs, maybe some big glass tubes with unidentifiable creatures gestating inside, but she's reminded more than anything of some kind of artisanal bakery. Once they get through the rooms of historical paraphernalia in which they are told about how visionary Dr Fuji was in looking at breakthroughs in genetics and realising he could make a lot of money by applying them to dinosaurs, the labs themselves are small and neat and never seem to contain as much as she thought they would. There are some big, impressive machines, there are centrifuges and huge computer towers, but in terms of scientists and dinosaur eggs, there's actually very little, and it's always arranged for maximum visual impact on the roped-off point where the tour stops to watch.
Probably this isn't a very trenchant observation; probably it's all staged, so that the Fuji Labs people can sell the idea of Fuji Labs as hard as they sell their dinosaurs. Still, what the tour guide says about their work practices does suggest a weirdly personal process: each animal hand-crafted with its own individual DNA, so that every omanyte is not just a clone of all the rest but unique right down to the genetic level. Something about this hybrid of corporate marketing and hipster concern with authenticity makes Artemis' skin crawl, but then the labs give way to the part that everybody really came for, the little unextincted zoo, and all her nascent misgivings fly away from her in the face of baby dinosaurs.
This part is outside, round the back of the building where a large plot of land has been fenced off and furnished with pools, trees and sandpits. There are amaura, dog-sized little sauropods that gambol up to the fence to stick their long necks through the bars and bleat at their visitors; there are kabuto that trundle in and out of the water like elaborate toys, legs moving like clockwork; there are even, in a little secure enclosure off to one side, some tyrunt that are steadily working their way through a small mountain of extra-sturdy chew toys.
It's pretty great. Cass and Artemis join in with making delighted noises and taking pictures; they even get to pet one of the amaura, which are all both very tame and very thick-skinned, so that even the shyest or clumsiest kids get to put their hands on them and know they're touching something that was last alive dozens of millions of years ago. It's enough to make Artemis forget for a few minutes about the dubious ethics of copyrighting a pokémon, and the baby-dino glow remains in her as they all troop back inside into the little museum/gift shop combo at the tour's end.
Artemis can't afford a fossil pokémon of her own, obviously, and though the plush amaura is incredibly tempting she can't really afford that either, so she leaves the rest of the group to poke around in the shop and crosses over to the rows of vitrines and reassembled skeletons that make up the museum. Here is a case full of delicate stone fronds that were in life part of some intricate deep-sea creature; over there is a cast of a Suchodontosaurus skeleton, the smaller Kantan answer to America's T. rex. There have been attempts to clone those, too, Artemis reads on the plaque, but like most things that aren't pokémon, even those specimens that were viable ended up not living long. The atmosphere is wrong for them or something, and regular animals aren't tough enough to cope.
She moves on, stroking Brauron so she isn't startled by her reflection in the glass of the cases. This is apparently a kabutops skeleton, huge slabs of shell all hunched and hooked like a goblin in its case. The recurved blades on its forelegs are as long as Artemis' thigh, and suddenly she is reminded of the scyther and its jagged, broken claw.
“Maybe we look at a different one,” she says to Brauron, and moves on in a hurry.
At the back of the room, an aerodactyl skeleton has been set up perched atop a high shelf, looking down at the room from between the dramatic curves of its folded wings. It's much bigger than Artemis expected, so big it doesn't even look like it can fly, but she's seen one on TV before and she knows they move like quicksilver in the air.
Artemis stands there and looks up at the aerodactyl, and with a brisk grinding noise like a knife being sharpened, the aerodactyl turns its skull to look back down at her.
It's like a kick in the chest, only she doesn't move, can't move, frozen there in blind panic, and then the aerodactyl fails to move again and she catches herself just before she turns to run, tells herself to breathe, breathe, it's nothing, you're imagining things.
A minute passes, then two. Artemis sighs, long and shaky, and clenches her trembling hands into fists. The aerodactyl is motionless up there on its shelf. Probably it's always been in this position, Artie, and you just thought it moved. A hallucination. Or maybe not even that, it's kinda shadowy up there and maybe the light just shifted on it strangely and it looked like it moved.
“Yeah,” she says, wrenching her voice back out of its hiding place. “Yeah, that's it.”
She stands there staring for a long time, but the aerodactyl does not move, and eventually she finds the courage to turn her back on it and retreat down the lines of cases and skeletons back to the reassuring bustle of the gift shop. Then she hears someone yell Ringo! and reality seems to reassert itself as she sees the flash of a pokémon being recalled and Cass straightening up, running her fingers exasperatedly through her hair.
“Great,” she's saying, glaring at a badly scratched plastic kabuto. “Now I'm gonna have to buy it, I guess.” She looks up. “Oh, hey Artemis. Anything cool over there?”
“Nope,” says Artemis, without looking back. “Just bones.”
“Okay. Well, wanna get lunch now? I have to go pay for this thing Ringo ruined, but after that I think I'm done here.”
“Okay,” says Artemis. “Okay.”
A couple of minutes later, they walk out and leave the kids poking at toys behind them. Artemis feels the hollow eyes of the skeletons on her back every step of the way.
They're not moving, she tells herself, as they head back out through the lobby into the street. They're not.
Cass lets Ringo out of his ball again once they're out and tosses him the kabuto toy.
“Here,” she says, as he snatches it out of the air. “Since you broke it, I guess it's yours now.”
He squawks indistinctly through the kabuto in his beak and starts waving it around, chirping happily at the way its articulated legs wiggle. Cass sighs and shakes her head.
“At least you're happy, birdbrain,” she says. “Try not to destroy it before we even get back to the Centre, okay? That cost me sixteen florins.” She turns to Artemis and raises her eyebrows, then lowers them into a frown when this gets no response. “Hey, you okay?”
“Oh. Um. Yeah, I'm – I'm fine,” says Artemis. “Just, uh, a bit nervous.”
“About Blaine? That makes sense, I guess. You'll do great, though. You and Brauron work like super well together.”
Artemis tries to smile and more or less succeeds.
“Thanks,” she says. “I appreciate it.”
“No problemo.” Cass grins. She's good at it, in a way that makes Artemis a little frustrated – both at Cass, for having a grace and beauty that she does not, and at herself, for envying her this. “Let's go, then.”
“Sure.”
They start walking, and deep in the caverns of Artemis' mind the fear begins to fade in the face of bright sunlight and ocean winds. She just imagined it. Skeletons don't move.
Cass sniffs.
“Hey,” she says. “Can you smell burning?”
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Been looking forward to it for some time, let me tell you. Let's get right into it!