Go Home

[Cutlerine]

*​

Access to the Relic Passage is apparently via the sewers. Part of the storm drain system, Saadiyyah assures her, so it doesn't smell too bad, but Gwyneth supposes it doesn't matter. She has to get to Humilau. She already walked through poison; whatever she has to walk through in the sewer can't be worse.

Saadiyyah tells her all about the passage as they cross the city, heading to wherever it is that will let them access the drains. They found it during the excavations the other year in the wasteland around Route 4, back when they were going to build a housing development out there. It served as an escape route out of the citadel in Hilaan, with exits on the coast at Driftveil and Castelia, the same places that archaeologists found evidence of the ancient Henuun docks.

Gwyneth listens and feels a sudden affection for her. She didn't call it the Relic Castle. Okay, she didn't get the name quite right, but she made an effort, and that's more than most people do.

“It's called Hil'Zorah,” says Gwyneth, as they stop on Westway and wait for the lights to change. “The, uh, the citadel, I mean. The city's Hilaan, the fortress is Hil'Zorah.” She pauses. “Not that I'm trying to correct you or anything, I just … I'm just saying.”

Saadiyyah smiles. She gets it. How could she not? She spends her life weathering the unfriendly looks, telling people how to spell her name. She knows enough to know that Relic is not a word Gwyneth likes to hear applied to herself.

“Okay,” she says. “Thanks, I didn't know that.”

“Yeah, not many people seem to.” Gwyneth hesitates, wondering if that was too bitter, and then decides it's probably okay. “They still call it the Relic Castle.”

People are encouraged to say indigenes these days, but it's still You People, still the Relics. Everyone still calls the ruins of Hil'Zorah the Relic Castle, and all those old artifacts in the museums the Relic Crown, Relic Band, Relic this and Relic that. As if the only thing that matters about the Henuun is that there's somehow still a few left over.

“Yeah,” says Saadiyyah uncomfortably. “It's pretty bad.”

Red light: WALK. The two of them cross the street with a group of other pedestrians, car engines rumbling either side with barely-suppressed impatience. They're off again the second the pedestrians hit the sidewalk, and Gwyneth breathes in the stink of diesel. On her backpack, the venipede rattles aggressively at the departing cars, and for once Gwyneth agrees with it. Goddamn Castelia. Now she remembers why they only really came back here the once. The whole city has that general atmosphere of jerkishness.

“Anyway,” says Gwyneth. “You were telling me about the … the passage.”

“There's not that much else to tell,” replies Saadiyyah. “They opened it up for trainers a year or so ago, and that's about it.”

“Full of wild pokémon?”

“Yeah. I don't think it actually has much archaeological value. I mean, there are no like statues or carvings or anything. Not that it – you know what I mean.”

Gwyneth nods, trying to set her at her ease.

“Sure,” she says. “I know what you mean. Sometimes an escape tunnel's just an escape tunnel, right?”

“Right.”

They reach the corner where earlier that morning Gwyneth saw the two drunk girls making their way home. Home by now, she thinks, and briefly imagines a crappy apartment on Conning Street, waking up on a Sunday afternoon with a hangover and a lover, sun streaming in through the curtains you were too wasted to draw last night.

“Where exactly are we going?” she asks, to distract herself.

“It's by the docks,” replies Saadiyyah. “There's like an office you have to check in with? And there's a path down through the sewers to the point where they hit the tunnel.”

“Right.”

Now they're walking along the very edge of the city, where it slopes in lines of concrete and steel down into the ocean. Docks, ships, cranes, stevedore throh whose cracked red skin glows like hot rock in the sun. Noisy as hell, too. Gwyneth is almost thankful she ended up getting the late ferry. At least it's quieter at night.

“D'you live here in Castelia?” she asks.

“Yeah, technically,” replies Saadiyyah. “Up in Halleybrook. Not that I've been home much the last couple years.” She smiles self-consciously with her supposed grown-up-ness, and Gwyneth's chest aches with a dull burn that is more than the residue of the venipede's poison. Bumming around Unova with some pokémon and no fear of the future, imagining yourself a sophisticated traveller. People say the journey's better in Kanto, that they let kids go as young as ten and they get even more out of it, but Gwyneth doesn't believe it. Nothing can ever even come close to Unova in the summer.

She doesn't say any of this. She would sound like another adult trying too hard. This would not be an inaccurate impression, but it is not the one she wants to give.

“Guess you're pretty busy,” she says instead, and leaves it at that.

The city rolls by on one side, the ships on the other: liner, freighter, yacht, even an old-fashioned galleon at one point, the wood and canvas standing out in a pop of warmth from the cold metal all around. Saadiyyah points it out as they pass, isn't that like a pirate ship?, and Gwyneth agrees that yes, it is. She wishes she had more to say than that, something like yeah, there are these historical ship re-enactment societies, but she's got nothing. She never was the kind of person who knew interesting things about the world. She was just the person to whom that kind of person dispenses their trivia.

But the thought fades with the ship out of view, and the venipede patrols back and forth on her pack, occasionally clicking loudly in her ear for no reason she can see other than to annoy her, and Castelia keeps on getting louder, even on a Sunday, as if the cars and the docks are competing for who can make the most noise; and they walk on, silent now and graceless, and eventually Saadiyyah says that it's just up ahead on the right.

It's not the most impressive building, just a little brick hut squatting under a corrugated-iron roof by the entrance to one of the jetties. Gwyneth isn't even entirely convinced that it's actually open, but Saadiyyah walks straight in regardless and she follows into an underlit room that seems, if anything, smaller than it appeared from outside. Uninspiring, but instantly familiar: walls papered in ageing flyers for local tourmanents, lost pokémon posters dating all the way back to the Plasma days, adverts for imported poffins and poké puffs. Chipped Formica counter with a bored twenty-something chewing gum behind it. Yes, this is Unovan pokémon training, just like Gwyneth remembers. The smell of cheap adventure pervades the room as if ground into the woodwork.

“Hi,” says Saadiyyah. “Two for the Relic Passage, please?”

She glances apologetically at Gwyneth as she says it. Gwyneth nods her acknowledgement and hopes her meaning is clear. Saadiyyah didn't pick the name; it's not her fault she has to say it here.

“Okay,” says the guy behind the counter. “Trainer cards?”

Saadiyyah hands over hers, and the guy inspects the photo for a moment before running a handheld scanner over it. Fancier tech than back in her day, thinks Gwyneth. It used to be that the card was just a sheet of laminated plastic. In some indefinable way that she tells herself has to do with her dislike of state surveillance, she thinks this was better.

“Right. Next?” asks the guy, and Gwyneth half-laughs, shakes her head.

“Ah, no, dude, I'm not a trainer. I'm just trying to get to Driftveil.”

“I'm escorting her,” says Saadiyyah, to clarify, and the guy nods, clearly uninterested.

“Okay, whatever. You got to sign a waiver, then, so you don't sue if you get squished by a boldore.”

“If only,” mutters Gwyneth. And then, louder: “You got a pen?”

“Sure, right here.”

Gwyneth scrawls her name in the usual series of spiky lines along the bottom and hands it back.

“There,” she says. “That all?”

“Just gotta go through the regulations,” replies the guy. “No fires, no pokémon large enough to block the way, no graffiti, no removal of archaeological material, no entry to the Relic Castle, no acidic or other pokémon moves liable to cause damage to the passage, no digging, no moving the boulders, no battles in the main passageways. There are emergency phones at either end and in the designated campsites. If you do meet someone and want to battle there are various open caves along the route clearly signposted as permitted battle locations.” He pauses to breathe. He has not mentioned, perhaps has not even noticed, the venipede. “Okay, have a nice day, and enjoy your trip!”

“Thanks,” says Saadiyyah brightly. Gwyneth nods, less enthusiastically, and the guy presses a button under the counter that unlocks a door to his right with a mechanical click.

“See you,” says the guy, and Gwyneth follows Saadiyyah through the doorway onto a narrow concrete staircase that turns at a sharp angle and plunges down into the earth. It's steep, very steep, and with the residual stiffness from the poison Gwyneth has some difficulty getting down it. She wonders if there's a lift. There was a girl she met back on her trainer journey, Delarivier (she always remembered the name, because who the hell is called Delarivier?), who was going round Unova in her wheelchair, and Gwyneth has never forgotten the precision of her disdain for the man who told her that Lostlorn Forest wasn't wheelchair accessible. I got through Twist Mountain, she said, witheringly condescending. I think I'll manage, buddy.

“You okay?” asks Saadiyyah, from the bottom of the stairs, and Gwyneth realises she's been grimacing. She lets go of the handrail and straightens up, sheepish.

“I just got out of the hospital yesterday,” she says. “Kinda sore still.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

“Don't be. You didn't put me there.” She limps down the stairs to join Saadiyyah. “It was this a*shole,” she says, pointing at the venipede on her shoulder. “Hit me with the nastiest poison sting I've ever seen. Like, if it was a battle, it would've been disqualified for excessive force.”

Saadiyyah's eyes widen.

“And you're … you're okay with it sitting on your shoulder?”

“If it's gonna hang around with me, I want it where I can see it,” says Gwyneth pragmatically. “Anyway. Which way from here?”

She's standing on concrete, and under concrete, too, and between even more of it. An inadequate fluorescent light illuminates a rusting iron railing separating her and Saadiyyah from a deep channel with a thin trickle of brown water running along the bottom and through a grate further up the tunnel. It is as dull as Gwyneth had expected a sewer to be, if less foul-smelling.

“We follow the white line,” says Saadiyyah, pointing to a mark painted along the wall. “I don't think we stay in the sewers very long, it's just that this was like easier than digging a new shaft to get down into the passage itself.”

“Okay,” says Gwyneth. “Lead the way.”

She does, and Gwyneth follows along the concrete shelf, listening to the water flow in the channel below. The city noise is muted down here, a low buzz that emanates from the ceiling like an almost-too-loud party on the floor above your apartment. If Gwyneth listens to the sound of the water running, she can half forget it's there at all. She guesses some people find it eerie, but for her this place is surprisingly peaceful, like a forest in autumn when everyone has gone home to escape the growing chill in the air. The cool damp of the concrete. The distant gurgle of water flowing. Gwyneth remembers Wellspring Cave again, how after Nika came back for her it changed from a labyrinth into a cathedral, cold and quiet and restful. She remembers sitting by the water on a ledge and talking to her, really talking to her for the first time while the woobat whispered and cooed overhead.

“It's okay,” says Nika, in her memory. “It's not really what I thought it would be, either. But it's a lot better than staying home. Right?”

And Gwyneth finds she cannot disagree; in fact, at fifteen, this seems to her like a deep and penetrating insight, and she finds herself telling Nika that she's really wanted this for years, that yes, it's the journey and the pokémon, of course, she loves that, but really it was the going away that appealed to her, the chance to meet people who know nothing about her and to whom she will always and only be Gwyneth. She barely knows Nika, and she has no idea why she's saying it, but still she tells her about running away from Blake (though she doesn't say his name; she will never say it aloud ever again, and Nika will never ask), and how Hilbert has become something huge and weird and alien, and how she wants just to have a chance to be herself, just herself, without a history or a brother hanging round her neck.

Nika listens to it all and the smile of understanding on her face gleams in the dark like a candle flame. Because she knows all about running away, of course. She's been Nika to everyone she met since leaving Humilau but at home she's still Veronika, the model student and obedient daughter, even to the point of agreeing with her parents to wait an extra year before going on her journey because (in their words) they are concerned for her safety, and because (in hers) they are concerned she will pick up bad influences. And now she's free of them, of sanctimonious conservatism, of the accusatory eyes of painted saints on the walls, free of papal disapproval and the weight of a crucifix, and she is determined to pick up as many bad influences as she possibly can.

She doesn't say all of it just then: there will be weeks, months, even years for her and Gwyneth to finish telling each other the stories of themselves. She tells her that her name is Veronika, though – the first person she's told since Humilau, Gwyneth will learn in time, and feel the special pleasure that comes with being entrusted with a secret. She tells her that she was looking for an escape from home. She tells her that she only asked about Hilbert to make conversation, because she wanted to get to know Gwyneth herself and couldn't find a better way to do it.

This is the turning point. Gwyneth is doubly ashamed of herself now – for getting upset, still, but also for misjudging Nika. She apologises, asks Nika if she will forgive her, and Nika, sensing in the way that empathetic people do that though this seems ridiculous it is in fact deadly serious, tells her gravely that she does.

They catch up with Tomás and Ashley later on, on their way out of the cave, and as they emerge blinking into the rose-coloured shafts of sunset light emerging through the branches of the trees, Gwyneth feels her heart soar. Unova! It's all so beautiful, and it's all right there, all this gorgeous, magical country laid out for her to roam through. How could she have felt so bad earlier, when this was right here? She has friends, and a minccino who rides around on top of a munna like a silky little knight on a flying horse, and most of all she has the land: the old stomping grounds of her ancestors going back five thousand years and more, now all hers for the wandering.

Around the campfire that night she's herself again, talking and laughing as if the last few days had never happened; and her cheerfulness is such that it intrudes into Tomás and Ashley's bubble and draws them out of it again, and they sit all four together by the fire, their pokémon caught up in the mood, rolling in the grass and flicking weak play-versions of battle moves at each other for fun. As if this was the cue they had been waiting for, the fireflies come out again that night, thickening the air with transient constellations, and long after Ashley has retired to her tent and Tomás wandered off with Rafa for a late-night walk Gwyneth and Nika lean back against the slope of the hill, watching Corbin floating among the glowing insects and the occasional leather whisper of a bat.

Summer is coming, says Nika.

Yeah, says Gwyneth. It is.

When they reach Nacrene a few days later, the group splits up a little. Ashley's heard a rumour that there are wild yanma in Pinwheel Forest, and Tomás wants to go there with her – to prove her wrong, he says, because there aren't any yanma there. It's all very plausible, and neither Gwyneth nor Nika feel the need to make things awkward by telling him that it's also an obvious lie. They also think it would probably be best if that was a trip the two of them made alone, so Nika excuses herself, saying she wants to challenge the Gym, and Gwyneth says she'll come with her too. She doesn't know if she actually wants to challenge the Gym at all – she feels vaguely queasy about the thought of a creature as small and soft and fragile as Blossom going head to head with a seasoned herdier – but she figures she can make a decision once she gets there.

On the way, they're stopped by a man in his thirties who passes on an elixir and some advice about the Gym Leader's strategy: she has a small pool of partner pokémon she trains, he tells them, and the bonds between them are strong, so that when one is defeated the other one jumps in with vengeful enthusiasm. The trick, then, is to dodge or block that first attack from the second pokémon, to let it waste its energy, and then take it on once its desire for revenge has dimmed.

Nika thanks him and turns to Gwyneth: isn't that amazing? She'd never even thought of a strategy like that. And Gwyneth agrees it's pretty amazing, yeah, but privately she's worried that it might also be manipulative and unethical. Does Lenora mean to do it, or does it just kind of happen? She feels that there is an important distinction to be made there. Her question is never answered, but a few years later when Lenora announces she is retiring to focus on her museum work, Gwyneth finds she is not sorry to see her go.

At the Gym, Gwyneth discovers that Nika is very, very good. She's not Hilbert, and maybe she isn't even Cheren, but she's much better than the boy who goes before them and whose challenge lasts for less than ten minutes. She's better than Lenora is expecting, too; she leads with a lillipup that Nika's pawniard, Britomartis, sends fleeing back to her in just two hits. Lenora stares, taken aback, then laughs and claps her hands while Gwyneth and the other kids watching cheer like crazy.

“This is going to be one of those matches, huh?” says Lenora, grinning, and sends in a watchog whose first attack Britomartis is not quite fast enough to dodge; she does not manage to recover, but she stays up and keeps throwing punches, and by the time she sinks to her iron knees the watchog is moving slowly, hissing in frustration at having taken so long to beat down a relatively untutored opponent. Nika is unfazed, and sends out her vullaby, Hekate; she's usually too slow to do much dodging, and she can't fly very well, but the watchog is so tired now that even she can flutter around and stay out of range of its attacks, striking back with gusts and feint attacks that wear it down until it's so exhausted Lenora recalls it out of compassion.

And that's it: Nika has three pokémon but only registered two for the competition, the other being her starter, a lillipup named Ajax that her parents bought her (because he was non-threatening, she says, with the full force of wounded teenage pride) and which, bred as a pet, does not actually like battling. He will eventually return to Humilau and become a permanent fixture at her parents' house; for now, however, he stays in his poké ball, and Nika steps forward with the biggest grin to accept her badge and TM.

That was good, Lenora tells her. She got two excellent hits in on the lillipup, which Lenora might have put down to fluke except for the way she handled the watchog, having Britomartis hang on to wear it down so that Hekate could finish it off. Is this her first Gym challenge? Her second, admits Nika, and even so, Lenora looks impressed. Well, now. She'll be waiting to hear about the rest of her victories from the other Leaders, then.

Nika glows, and on the sidelines Gwyneth feels like she might burst with pride that she knows her. How could she ever have thought badly of Nika? She's so cool, and not only that but so kind, and so good a trainer. And when she rejoins her, flushed with excitement, Gwyneth can hardly even find the words to tell her how amazing that all was. Instead she says they should celebrate, and so while they're waiting for Nika's pokémon to be healed at the Centre they eat ice cream in the park under an electric-blue sky, and decide to stick around Nacrene a while longer. Challenging Gyms is only one part of a trainer journey, after all. There's sights to see and people to meet, other trainers to battle and nature trails to walk. And summer is coming. Gwyneth can feel it approaching her like the heat from a wildfire.

Oh yes, summer is coming, and she's a pokémon trainer, and she has the first real friend she's had in years. She wishes she could hold onto this moment forever, the cold ice cream and warm sun and Nika's metallic smile and the twitch of Blossom's nose. But only for a second, because the next moment is better still, and the next, and the next.

Summer is coming, she says again, and Nika nods, understanding at once.

Yeah, she says. It really, really is.

*​

That was when summer meant vacations, though, before Gwyneth ever had to worry about earning a living. Now, it doesn't mean a damn thing. Even so, summer's ending now, and some part of her still registers its retreat as a disappointment.

“This is it.”

Gwyneth blinks. The gloom of the sewer seems more pronounced after the bright light of the memory. A little way ahead, Saadiyyah has stopped at a corner; when she catches up, Gwyneth can see around it, to where concrete gives way to raw stone. At the other end is a single arc light and a metal box that presumably houses the emergency phone, either side of a doorway framed with three huge, sand-smooth slabs of stone.

“I guess so,” she says.

The two of them approach the doorway. This close, Gwyneth can see the writing on the lintel, rows of square, deeply-cut pictograms that remind her as always of her father's books, the ones that her mother still keeps on the shelf even though neither she nor her children can read them. Heniil is one of the oldest continually-spoken languages in the world, Gwyneth has heard. You can trace it from the modern Henuun right back to the people who built Hilaan, three thousand years ago.

“What does it say?” asks Saadiyyah, noticing her looking and making all the wrong assumptions.

“Oh.” Gwyneth tears her eyes away, swallowing. The millstone is grinding at her gut again. “I, uh … I can't read it.”

“Oh.” Saadiyyah pauses. “Sorry.”

“No, it's like – I mean, my dad was Henuun, but he died when I was a baby. So I never … yeah. Never learned.”

Who are you, that do not know your history? Gwyneth has only a few halting words of Heniil, and she refuses to allow herself the heritage without the culture. Mostly she doesn't think about it, believes herself white; sometimes, in the dead of night, she is overcome with guilt at her betrayal and rushes frantically to Wikipedia, reading everything she can about her people and their history. She makes vows to learn the language and for a few days tests herself furiously over and over, trying desperately to form the alien sounds with Unovanized lips: zalaan, ìkbi lo, kêra'ti Gwyneth. And then it passes and she's too tired or there are more important things she needs to do and the sense of her unworthiness fades as the guilt returns to background levels.

Gwyneth wonders if Saadiyyah has this problem, too. She hopes not. She seems like a nice kid, and Gwyneth doesn't doubt that she has enough problems without this one as well.

“Anyway,” she says. “Doesn't matter.” She forces a smile and turns back to the doorway and the dark beyond it. “We'd better get going,” she says. “Sounds like a long walk.”

“Right,” agrees Saadiyyah, who does not speak Arabic, and they enter.

 

[diamondpearl876]

“Right,” she says, and puts her phone away.

Lol, she acts so nonchalant here, but I suspect only chaos awaits her in the future with this venipede.

Gwyneth likes the west side better, especially Thaneway, with its ageing brownstones and population of starving artists. It's cheaper and dirtier, and therefore less threatening.

You'd think it'd be the other way around... but it's really telling of Gwyneth's character that she thinks this way, anyway.

Or maybe she'll never come back again. That would suit her just fine, as well. It is not lost on her that Martin used to live around here, before he was shot.

The venipede shuffles off her shoulder onto her backpack, clicking irritably to itself.

“Yeah,” says Gwyneth, staring down the street, trying not to see Martin's ghost. “I feel you, dude.”

I really like the tension depicted here and thought it was a fitting way to end the scene.

It's always best to walk into a stranger's apartment visibly bleeding. That sort of thing never fails to leave a fantastic first impression.

Sarcasm at its finest. That means she could play the victim card easily enough, though, if things went awry.

“Okay, you didn't come here for me to grill you,” she says, so lightly that Gwyneth knows that it has to be deliberate.

I think it's fairly obvious that Gwyneth's decision to do this is nonsensical and impulsive. Gwnyeth not listening to reason, I suspect, which will probably only get her into trouble down the road, but I can appreciate that people are at least willing to tell her they don't agree with her decision while at the same time not pressing the issue because it's ultimately not their business what she does in the end.

The experience is only slightly marred by the fact that she has to wrap her left hand in clingfilm and hold it out of the way to keep the bandages dry, and that the water stings like hell as it passes over the puncture wounds on her right arm.

I asked over VM if I should point out non-Americanized things and you didn't answer yet, but I didn't quite know what "clingfilm" was at all. We'd just say plastic wrap here. XD (I won't bother with comments like these in the future if you don't want me to!)

Gwyneth wonders if perhaps it was only acting out because it was hungry, but then it starts clicking and rattling at passers-by and she decides that it's probably just a jerk. It's okay. She can understand that.

Lmao. Maybe they'll get along just fine after all?

“So you're a trainer,” she says. She means it as a question, but gets a little stuck with the inflection.

“Yes,” says Saadiyyah. “Rock-types, mostly.”

(Nailed it.)

There's a lot of places this chapter where I've just kind of stopped and thought about the desperate situation Gwyneth had to be on if she thought this journey was worth doing. Little parts like this remind me of her past trainer days, which obviously did not set her up for success. I thought I'd point that out since, well, that just means I care about Gwyneth's character quite a bit.

People say the journey's better in Kanto, that they let kids go as young as ten and they get even more out of it, but Gwyneth doesn't believe it. Nothing can ever even come close to Unova in the summer.

I didn't really think about it before now, but yeah, the age limit did raise a little bit in the later gens, didn't it? I like that little detail being added here.

“Just gotta go through the regulations,” replies the guy. “No fires, no pokémon large enough to block the way, no graffiti, no removal of archaeological material, no entry to the Relic Castle, no acidic or other pokémon moves liable to cause damage to the passage, no digging, no moving the boulders, no battles in the main passageways. There are emergency phones at either end and in the designated campsites. If you do meet someone and want to battle there are various open caves along the route clearly signposted as permitted battle locations.” He pauses to breathe. He has not mentioned, perhaps has not even noticed, the venipede. “Okay, have a nice day, and enjoy your trip!”

I wonder how many times a day this guy has to go through this spiel... At any rate, I like the worldbuilding here. It's just a list of regulations, but not ones you'd really see implemented in fics often.

Gwyneth remembers Wellspring Cave again, how after Nika came back for her it changed from a labyrinth into a cathedral, cold and quiet and restful.

This is a really sweet line. I really get a sense of the kind of effect Nika had on Gwyneth here.

And now she's free of them, of sanctimonious conservatism, of the accusatory eyes of painted saints on the walls, free of papal disapproval and the weight of a crucifix, and she is determined to pick up as many bad influences as she possibly can.

Heh... This, to me, sounds like someone Gwyneth might like a lot, yeah.

She'll be waiting to hear about the rest of her victories from the other Leaders, then.

This is completely irrelevant, but I had an amusing image of a group of gym leaders hanging out and gossiping about their challengers after reading this.

“This is it.”

I thought it was pretty effective to have the flashback during the sewer traveling scene. Saadiyyah seems like the type of person who's okay with silences, and you had them interact prior to them entering the sewers, so it didn't feel like you missed out on an opportunity to involve her character a bit.

 

[Cutlerine]

Hey! Sorry it took me so long to respond to this, it's been a busy week.

Lol, she acts so nonchalant here, but I suspect only chaos awaits her in the future with this venipede.

Chaos, emotional growth, poison-related pain. Sometimes I think there's nothing a venipede can't enable.

You'd think it'd be the other way around... but it's really telling of Gwyneth's character that she thinks this way, anyway.

Yeah, Gwyneth is ... that kind of person, I guess. I don't actually know any way to say it other than the indirect way that you quoted. Her inability to get around that is probably part of her trouble, in the same way that pretty much everything about her is part of her trouble.

I really like the tension depicted here and thought it was a fitting way to end the scene.

Thanks! We'll learn more about Martin later, although he's someone that Gwyneth actively tries not to think of, in contrast to Nika. It'll be a bit of a wait, though; he's part of her life in between the end of her trainer journey and the start of her current journey, and since this part of the story only deals with those two areas that won't come up for a while. Still, I wanted to introduce him nice and early on, so that when we do get there it doesn't feel like it comes out of nowhere.

Sarcasm at its finest. That means she could play the victim card easily enough, though, if things went awry.

She could! Although admittedly I can't think of anyone less likely to claim victimhood than Gwyneth. I get the feeling that she'd refuse ever to admit to being a victim, even if she really was one.

I think it's fairly obvious that Gwyneth's decision to do this is nonsensical and impulsive. Gwnyeth not listening to reason, I suspect, which will probably only get her into trouble down the road, but I can appreciate that people are at least willing to tell her they don't agree with her decision while at the same time not pressing the issue because it's ultimately not their business what she does in the end.

Yep. She is ... not sensible, and people can tell. Part of it's the depression and the generally not so good state of her mental health, as will become clearer in the Driftveil chapters in particular, but part of it does seem to be part of who she is, as the flashbacks might be starting to indicate. She really wants to be a capable person, and she probably has it in her to be one, too, but her methods of getting herself to that place are dubious at best. Anyway, I guess the point is that all this shows more than she wants to believe it does, and writing her interactions with other people is particularly interesting as a result.

I asked over VM if I should point out non-Americanized things and you didn't answer yet, but I didn't quite know what "clingfilm" was at all. We'd just say plastic wrap here. XD (I won't bother with comments like these in the future if you don't want me to!)

Argh, that was one I knew as well! I just wrote it without thinking and then failed to catch it in the edit. I've actually already used the American term in the next chapter without noticing I'd got it wrong in this one, so yeah, that's especially irritating. Anyway, thanks for pointing it out! And while we're on the subject, yes, it would be very helpful if you or anyone else wanted to point out things like that; I think I do okay for someone who visited America once, briefly, a decade and a half ago, but I am the kind of person who gets described by friends as "painfully English", so I obviously do make a bunch of mistakes.

Lmao. Maybe they'll get along just fine after all?

Maybe! I mean, what Gwyneth hasn't realised yet is that she's basically going on another pokémon journey, and there's a reason that people do that in the pokémon world: to grow and mature. I would definitely expect things to start changing between them over the course of the next ten or however many days it is.

There's a lot of places this chapter where I've just kind of stopped and thought about the desperate situation Gwyneth had to be on if she thought this journey was worth doing. Little parts like this remind me of her past trainer days, which obviously did not set her up for success. I thought I'd point that out since, well, that just means I care about Gwyneth's character quite a bit.

Thanks, that's really great to hear! The problem with having protagonists who are basically not very likeable people is that there's a real chance that the reader won't like them, either, and it takes some work to circumvent that. I'm glad that I've managed to do that with Gwyneth, especially since for me she is simultaneously one of the most endearing and the most exasperating protagonists I've ever written, and I really wanted to get at least some of that across in Go Home.

I didn't really think about it before now, but yeah, the age limit did raise a little bit in the later gens, didn't it? I like that little detail being added here.

Yeah, it did; the main characters have tended to get older as the games' original audiences have done the same. Canonically, the Unovan protagonists are 12-15, although that broad an age range seems to be a bit of a stretch, and I pushed it just a little further to make Go Home work, by making the gap between BW and BW2 into about ten years instead of two. I figured that given I made Unova much bigger than it is in-game, and extended trainer journeys to potentially cover several years, it was more or less justified.

I wonder how many times a day this guy has to go through this spiel... At any rate, I like the worldbuilding here. It's just a list of regulations, but not ones you'd really see implemented in fics often.

That's me remembering to make my world make sense the way I forgot with the hospital and the venipede, I guess. Since I'd made the Relic Passage into a site of archaeological significance, I figured I needed to do something to show that that meant something, to make it real.

This is a really sweet line. I really get a sense of the kind of effect Nika had on Gwyneth here.

Good to know! That's pretty much what I'm going for with lines like that.

Heh... This, to me, sounds like someone Gwyneth might like a lot, yeah.

The flipside of Nika seeking out bad influences is that Gwyneth found a good influence in her. Except, of course, that Gwyneth is the kind of person who refuses to take good influences.

This is completely irrelevant, but I had an amusing image of a group of gym leaders hanging out and gossiping about their challengers after reading this.

I'm sure they do! I mean, I wanted to make the League feel like an actual body of people and regulations, rather than a bunch of disconnected figures with some nebulous relationship to the Elite Four, so including bits like this and the scene in the hut leading into the tunnels seemed like a good idea.

I thought it was pretty effective to have the flashback during the sewer traveling scene. Saadiyyah seems like the type of person who's okay with silences, and you had them interact prior to them entering the sewers, so it didn't feel like you missed out on an opportunity to involve her character a bit.

Yeah, I figured no one talks constantly while they're on a long walk, so trainers are probably used to part of the journey being undertaken in silence. She'll be around for a chapter or two more, as well, so there'll be plenty of opportunity to see more of her.

Thank you, as ever, for responding! Next time, a tunnel! That just keeps on going! It's thrilling!

 

[Cutlerine]

FIVE: HELEN THE DESTROYER

Sunday, 11th September

The Relic Passage (Gwyneth can't seem to avoid calling it that) is not very interesting. It's long, and meandering, and badly lit by a few chargestones placed here by the Henuun builders millennia ago, or maybe by the League when they set it up as a trainer trail the other year. Saadiyyah has a wind-up flashlight that the two of them take turns at keeping charged, and between its light and that of the stones they can just about see where they're going.

The venipede is quiet – has been since they went underground, actually, but Gwyneth really notices it now, as the minutes turn slowly into hours. It's barely even moving. She turns her head to make sure it hasn't died, and sees it staring into the dark, antennae moving in long, sweeping circles. Sensing air currents maybe, or sniffing out strange new subterranean odours. Whatever it's doing, the venipede seems intimidated.

Gwyneth tells herself she doesn't care, and for fifteen minutes or so believes it. Then she sighs and swears and plucks the venipede off her pack.

“C'mere,” she says, settling it in the crook of her good arm. “I don't like you standing and staring like that. Stay where I can see you.”

The venipede clicks at her, but without malice, and Gwyneth thinks: we're in rock-type territory, aren't we? And she sighs again and runs her bandaged fingers over the venipede's hump.

“Okay,” she mutters, low enough that Saadiyyah won't hear. “You're gonna be fine, dude. Any rock-types come for you they've got to get through that first.”

She jerks her head at Steggers, Saadiyyah's gigalith, who is keeping pace alongside them with surprising grace and silence. He raises and lowers each colossal limb with a gentleness that probably comes of long experience of human buildings and their fragile floorboards. It's the only thing about him that seems alive to Gwyneth. The orange things in his face where another animal would have its eyes are just geode-like cavities that terminate in small, dark holes. She has no idea what they're for, but they creep her the hell out.

The venipede does not appear noticeably comforted by the reminder that a rock-type is actually right there. For her part, Gwyneth doesn't press the issue. She tried, didn't she? She doesn't owe it any more than that, if she even owes it anything at all.

The walk continues. Sometimes they travel down a single corridor; other times, their route takes them down forks and around corners, into places where the tunnel widens out and complicates itself with rockfalls and slopes. Gwyneth begins to see the rhythm of it, how the ancient miners cut their tunnels with unerring accuracy from one cave network to another, tracing the veins of the earth as they spiderwebbed their way from Hil'Zorah to the coast. She feels that fierce, angry love kindling in her at the thought. Unova. Her Unova, her country, her stupid, broken, beautiful country. That's one bit of Heniil she does know: Aân Hen, our land. The Henuun never called it anything else.

She clenches her teeth against the thought. None of this is anything she wants to think about.

Time is plastic here. Gwyneth has turned her phone off to save power – it's not like there's any signal down here anyway – and without it she has no way of telling the time. She hasn't worn a watch in years, and of course there's no sunlight here, just the blue glow of the chargestones. So she walks through the passing minutes without knowing if they really are minutes or if they are in fact hours, or seconds or (as it sometimes seems) days. The only constants are the pain and the dark, and the soft sound of Saadiyyah's hiking boots on the stone.

“What time is it?” she asks eventually, unable to stand it any longer.

“Uh, let me see.” The flashlight's beam swings around wildly as Saadiyyah aims it at her wrist. “Oh, wow, it's like half two.” She drops the beam back to the floor ahead of them and turns to face Gwyneth. “You want to stop for a bit? I guess we're probably overdue for lunch.”

“Okay,” agrees Gwyneth. “Here, or …?”

“I think there's a cave up ahead,” says Saadiyyah, motioning ahead with the flashlight, at a place where the walls of the passage give way to another cavern. “Seems like a good place to me.”

“Okay.”

It's further away than it looks, or maybe Gwyneth's just tired. Or no, no, she is tired, she realises. One night's sleep and a hot shower might have refreshed her, but the aftereffects of the poison are still burning away inside her, knotting up her muscles and making her eyelids heavy. Even the venipede feels heavy, and it's all shell and claw, virtually weightless. The doctor was right. She needs rest. Better, a week of sleep and probably a healthy dose of painkillers.

Well. People don't always get what they want, she tells herself, and ignores the fact that she has just transformed a necessity into a luxury.

Somehow, she does make it to the cave, dragging herself off the path and half collapsing down onto her shed pack. The impact almost jolts the venipede out of her weakening grip, and it hisses at her, bouncing around under her arm.

“Yeah, yeah,” she mutters, releasing it onto the rock floor. “Save it, dude.”

In front of her, Saadiyyah gives the flashlight a few extra winds and sets it on the floor between them like a plastic campfire. She shucks her own pack and sits down, Steggers settling into restful immobility behind her. Gwyneth isn't sure his legs actually bend enough for him to sit. She supposes it probably doesn't bother him.

“I think,” says Saadiyyah, rummaging in her backpack, “that we've actually done pretty well so far.” She pulls out a map and runs a finger across what look to Gwyneth like lines drawn more or less at random across the page. “This is the cave we're in now,” she says, tapping the paper. Gwyneth has no idea how she knows this. “Which, okay, it doesn't look that far, but the passage is pretty long. So it's good for just like two hours.”

“Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth politely. “Guess so.”

Saadiyyah folds up her map and puts it away, exchanging it for a plastic-wrapped package of sandwiches.

“Mom insisted,” she says, with that vague embarrassment that kids feel for the evidence of their parents' love. “D'you want some? There are … eight, I think. Which is more than double what I can manage.”

Gwyneth is about to suggest she save some, but catches herself before the words come out. Who does she think she is, to tell Saadiyyah what to do? Like anyone who gets herself into the kind of place Gwyneth has got herself into ought to be giving out life advice. Besides, she thinks, Saadiyyah has probably got more than enough food to see her through to Driftveil. She wasn't stupid enough to start this trip without enough supplies to get to the other end.

“Um …” says Saadiyyah awkwardly, and Gwyneth realises she still hasn't replied.

“Sure,” she says. “Thanks.”

She takes two. She wants about ten. She would have taken just one, but when she took the first one Saadiyyah kept holding out the packet and so she felt she had to take another.

“It's tuna, I think,” says Saadiyyah. “Sorry, should've said.”

“It's okay.” Gwyneth does not particularly like tuna, but she's more hungry than she is picky. Besides, she's more or less out of cash. What food she has, she needs to make last.

In the circle of light, the venipede moves back and forth between them, antennae waving as they pick up the scent of food. Gwyneth watches it for a long moment, then glances surreptitiously at Saadiyyah, who is trying hard not to look like she is watching Gwyneth.

She sighs.

“Hey,” she says, tearing a sandwich in half and tossing one part to the floor. “Here. Probably better for you than Virbank garbage.”

The venipede darts over to it faster than Gwyneth has seen it move since it first appeared in the alley. It pauses, eyes first her and then Saadiyyah and Steggers, then seizes it in its mandibles and drags it out of the light, into the shadow of the rock formation at Gwyneth's back.

“She really is pretty wild still, huh,” says Saadiyyah, watching it go.

“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “It is.”

She regrets it immediately, even before she sees the vague hurt on Saadiyyah's face. She wants to say something else, something that will make things better again, but Gwyneth has always found it easier to hurt than to heal and when she looks for helpful words she finds she doesn't have any.

She sighs, and eats the sandwich in silence.

*​

Later that afternoon, they run into their first wild pokémon. It comes out of a crevice between the rocks, a great black shambling mass of granite that lunges into view like a piece of the darkness made solid. Gwyneth swears and starts, making the beam of her flashlight sway wildly, the huge animal a mess of unintelligible geometry in its fitful light. Boldore, she thinks. Nothing else looks so little like a living animal.

The venipede screeches in her ear and she jumps again, just as she manages to get the light back on target. Electric orange crystals flash in the beam.

“Cut it out!” she yells, at the same time as Saadiyyah cries for her to keep the light steady. “I'm trying!” she snaps, shoving the venipede back off her shoulder onto her pack. “This bastard―”

But Saadiyyah isn't listening; she's intent on the boldore, giving orders and pointing Steggers forward. The boldore's charge takes it straight into his chest, rock clashing against rock with a godawful sound like a house falling down, and the two of them gnash out some harsh, guttural noises that set Gwyneth's teeth on edge.

“Don't panic!” cries Saadiyyah, except that Gwyneth barely hears her through the frantic clicking and shrieking of the venipede, so that when all at once the flashlight goes out and so do all the chargestones she swears and winds the handle frantically―

And then the light comes back, Steggers' jewel-like spines flaring with an intensity that briefly lights the whole cave as a scarlet beam pours from the central crystal into the boldore, blasting it away from him as if hit by a freight train. Gwyneth's eyes shut out of self-preservation but she hears the stony growl, the brutal impact of the boldore against the ground, and then a quick limping scrape as it drags itself away.

Then it's over, and she comes back to herself. The flashlight is on. She tried to wind it with her bad hand in her panic and now her wrist feels like someone just stamped on it. She blinks, gasps, stares at the light fading from Steggers' crystals.

There is a noise in her ear. She listens to it for several seconds before realising the venipede is still screeching.

“Are you okay?” Saadiyyah asks, looking worried. “Sorry – I didn't have time to say. That was, um, a move that absorbs light and―”

“Yeah, I know what solar beam is,” snaps Gwyneth, before she can help herself. “Uh. Sorry. I didn't mean …” She blinks again. She tries to move her hand to touch the venipede, to calm it down, but she finds she cannot. The pain has the whole arm paralysed. “Sorry,” she repeats. “It startled me, is all.”

“No, that's – that's okay.” Saadiyyah looks at her more closely. The venipede is still screaming. “Is your veni―”

“I can't move my goddamn arm,” says Gwyneth, in a tight, short burst. “Sorry. Can you. Can you grab it?”

“Oh.” Saadiyyah glances helplessly at Steggers, who does not react. The venipede is still screaming. Gwyneth imagines what it would be like to burst an eardrum: a pop and a spreading wetness and then at last no more noises. “Uh, yeah.”

She reaches up to her shoulder and lifts the little bug-type away, and finally, finally, it stops. Gwyneth lets out a breath.

“I tried to wind the flashlight with my – with the wrong hand,” she says, forcing herself to breathe. “Didn't take.” She puts down the flashlight and touches her left hand gingerly. The bandages feel wet. “Think I'm bleeding.”

“Oh. Oh, god, right. Um, hang on, I have a first aid thing …”

She isn't bleeding. The back of her hand is a grotesque rainbow of colours, and the wound itself is a horrible sickly yellow, but she isn't bleeding: her hand is just oozing some thin, clear liquid that Gwyneth doesn't know the name of. Saadiyyah gasps when she sees it, but she's not squeamish, and she helps Gwyneth clean it up and put fresh bandages on it without flinching. Once again Gwyneth is reminded of Bianca, of her unswerving kindness, and the thought eats at her nerves like acid.

All the while, the venipede just squats there on the stones, staring. Gwyneth stares right back.

“That from when you caught the venipede?” asks Saadiyyah, after a while.

“Yeah,” replies Gwyneth, without looking away. “I woke up in the hospital.”

“Oh.” Saadiyyah looks from her to it and back again. “How's it feeling now?”

Gwyneth tries to move her fingers. The pain is still there, but the muscles are working, if only weakly.

“Better,” she says, which is not entirely a lie and which helps restore the mood a little. “Um. D'you think we could … stop a minute?”

“Sure.” Saadiyyah picks up the flashlight and shines it around them. No one is coming. “I don't think we're in the way here.”

Gwyneth grunts and eases herself down against a rock, holding her hand close to her belly. God. What is she doing? How did she get here? Why? Humilau, she thinks, but there is no Humilau, not really; there's nothing at all out there except the dark and the boldore and there sure as hell isn't anything in here except for the pain. Even that doesn't feel real. It's too much, too theatrical, too staged. It feels the way it looks when someone gets shot in a movie. Fake blood and fake grimacing. Nothing actually feels like this. Like her arm is coming apart, fibre by bloody fibre.

“You know,” says Saadiyyah, leaning back against Steggers and unscrewing her water bottle, “that was actually a pretty rare boldore.”

“Yeah,” replies Gwyneth without thinking. “Igneous black. We must be deeper than I thought.”

Saadiyyah pauses, bottle halfway to her lips.

“You know your boldore,” she says, surprised. “How'd you know that?”

Gwyneth shakes her head. She is still thinking about pain, and Humilau.

“Uh. Right, well, you know what they say. Trainer journey's a year and it stays with you a lifetime.”

“Right,” says Saadiyyah. “But like, not a lot of people know all the species of boldore.”

Gwyneth does. Or she did; she's forgotten some now, but she remembers most. She remembers all the woobat, too, and the three species of patrat, the eleven of sewaddle. She was never one of those walking encyclopedia kids, never had Cheren's memory for all the trivia of training or Nika's internal dictionary of classical literature, but she knew a lot. Up there on the pinboard, all around the map of Unova, there were the photoguides to rare pokémon that came with every issue of her magazine. Lesser spotted minccino. Whitetail ducklett. Igneous black roggenrola.

The names come to her like lifeboats out of the past, and Gwyneth feels herself slipping back out of herself and into the world. Why is she here? Humilau. And Humilau is out there, somewhere, even if it seems like nothing can be. Hot sand and warm water, gently baking in the last of the summer sun. There's a world beyond the dark. There are women named Nika who are getting married.

Gwyneth picks up the venipede without a word and puts it on her shoulder.

“Okay,” she says, getting stiffly back up onto her feet. “Let's keep moving.”

*​

Wild pokémon attack a couple more times that afternoon, but neither event is anywhere near as dramatic as the first. A few pale timburr, bug-eyed and white from cave living, slouch out of the dark, brandishing snapped-off stalagmites, but once the first one smashes its weapon without effect on Stegger's chest both run off, cowed. There's a swoobat too, spiralling down from the ceiling like the flap of an intricate umbrella; that one startles even Saadiyyah, but it panics and flees as soon as it gets a good look at Steggers, too good a judge of its opponent to think it stands a chance.

None of them startle Gwyneth like the boldore, although the venipede fires a vindictive poison sting after the fleeing swoobat. But Saadiyyah carries the flashlight and doesn't give it back to Gwyneth, just the same.

Neither of them comment on this. They are beginning to come to an understanding of each other.

The cave moves, or they do. Time passes, possibly. Gwyneth feels herself coming unstuck from the world, observes her body limping along after Saadiyyah as if down the wrong end of a telescope. Part of her informs the rest quietly that it is in pain. Nothing inside her seems capable of responding. She no longer thinks about the beauty of the way this place was built.

Eventually, she and Saadiyyah reach a sign that points off to the left of the main path that reads CAMPSITE 2, and this, Saadiyyah says, is where they're stopping for the night.

“Where's Campsite 1?” asks Gwyneth distantly, following Saadiyyah down the slope into the side passage.

“I don't know,” she replies. “I'll look on the map when we get there.”

Campsite 2 is not much: a small cave, cleanse tags stuck around the entrance to keep the wild pokémon out, floor pounded flat by some ground- or fighting-type. Saadiyyah shines the flashlight in and the metal fittings of a chargestone generator glint in the beam.

“Okay,” she says, stepping over to it and hitting the switch. “Let there be light.”

There is a clunk, and a whirr as the chunk of charged rock inside the generator starts spinning, and then the lights come on overhead, revealing a tiny hot plate, a metal box containing the emergency phone, and a few shelves cut into the rock to sit or sleep on. Gwyneth blinks. Her eyes are watering in the sudden brightness, but her vision is getting clearer. She stares dumbly at the stone walls, brain wandering back towards the usual spot between her ears, and then all at once she becomes aware of the ache in her legs and arm, and the weight of her pack.

“Hey,” she says. “We're here.”

“Yep,” agrees Saadiyyah. “We are.” She glances back towards the cave mouth. Outside, Steggers has locked his legs, motionless as a statue; he is too big to fit inside. “You okay out there, big guy?” One crystal pulses red for a moment. “Okay, then.” Saadiyyah shoves her backpack into a corner and sits down with a sigh, already reaching for her boots to unlace them. “God. I forgot how hard those stones are on your feet.”

“You've been here before?” Stiffly, Gwyneth shrugs off her own pack and levers herself down onto one of the shelves. The venipede scuttles onto her arm, and she lifts it away and to the ground before it can put any more holes in her.

“Yeah. Well, kinda. I did some exploring near the entrance back when it first opened, just to see what sort of pokémon were down here.” Saadiyyah pulls her feet up and crosses her legs with the kind of ease and flexibility that Gwyneth wishes she still had. “Didn't camp out down here, though.”

“Right.”

The venipede makes a slow circuit of the cave, brushing its antennae over the walls. Checking to see if it's safe, maybe. With an effort, Gwyneth looks away from it and undoes the straps around her sleeping bag and blanket instead, unrolling them from the top of the pack and spreading them out on the shelf. It's only marginally more comfortable, but she'll take what she can get. At least it isn't cold down here.

“Okay, so Campsite 1 is … nonexistent, I guess,” says Saadiyyah, now studying her map. “Seriously, I can't see it anywhere. Weird.” She holds it out. “Can you?”

Honestly, Gwyneth isn't sure she'll be able to do any better, not when she barely has the energy to get her blanket out, but she doesn't want to say so and make things awkward, so she takes the map and looks at it for a few seconds. Her eyes won't focus, the labels sliding back and forth through themselves on the paper, and she hands it back again, shaking her head.

“Beats me.”

“Weird,” repeats Saadiyyah, and starts going through her bag. Gwyneth watches her for a moment, then goes through her own. Food and water, that's what she needs. It won't fix this, but it's all the remedy she's got.

For a few minutes, the only sound is that of two very hungry people eating, and the occasional crunch as the venipede shears pieces off an apple with its mouthparts. When it passes, Gwyneth is slightly more alert – enough to feel the weight of the silence, anyway. She looks out of the cave at the shadows beyond, at the gleam of reflected lamplight on Steggers' crystals, and then back at Saadiyyah.

Right. Come on, Gwyneth. She's taking you to Driftveil. The least you can do is be polite.

“What other pokémon do you have?” she asks. It's always a safe question. Saadiyyah's eyes light up.

“An onix, Noor, and a carracosta, Jems,” she answers. “But Noor's too big for the passage and Jems is not so good at hiking, so both of them are in their balls right now. Then I've got a nosepass I'm training at the moment, but he's nowhere near ready for a tournament and he's also like the slowest thing in the entire world, so I've sent him on ahead using the box network.”

When she was little, Gwyneth was afraid of the box network. She remembers a vivid nightmare from when she was ten or so about being trapped inside it, every molecule of her disassembled and frozen in stasis, paralysed on an atomic level. She knows that's not how it works, really, but even so. The old unease lingers.

“Cool,” says Gwyneth, unable to think of anything else to say. “I … I didn't know there were onix in Unova.”

Saadiyyah smirks.

“There aren't,” she says. “I traded with a friend I have in Kalos. She was kinda nervous about catching it, but she really wanted an oshawott. Like nobody over there has ever even heard of them.”

Gwyneth frowns.

“And where did you get an oshawott?”

“They breed on some like … well, they're not really islands, more like rocks off the south coast,” says Saadiyyah. “One of Professor Juniper's assistants was doing a population count and was advertising for a trainer to escort her.” She shrugs. “There were a few that really obviously wanted trainers. I wouldn't have caught one if Chana hadn't been after it.”

Gwyneth nods. She's too tired now. She just has no more words left in her.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.” A yawn. “God.” She rubs her eye with the heel of one hand. “Sorry,” she says. “I got to sleep before I fall asleep just sitting here.”

“Oh. Yeah, no problem. The poison?”

“Yeah. The poison.” Both of them find themselves looking at the venipede, still methodically taking tiny bites out of its apple. Gwyneth doesn't even know if it should be eating that. They're carnivores, aren't they? “Anyway, it's all right now,” she adds, with an effort. “Not gonna poison us in the night.”

A little later, when the lights are out and the world has narrowed down to the finger of warmth inside her sleeping bag, Gwyneth has a few minutes to hope that that's true before she gives in to her exhaustion and falls asleep.

*​

The thing about that dream, the thing that makes it so difficult to talk about, is that it's not just the girl thing. She's standing there under the lights, staring at Juniper as she fires off her questions like rubber bullets, and she knows that Hilbert's there, even before he steps into view. She feels him hanging over her like the shadow of a condor. “What's your name?” asks Juniper, and she wants to answer, sometimes even thinks she knows the answer, but Hilbert's there, a choking mist, a pressure on her chest, the first trembling intimations of a panic attack; “Are you a boy or a girl?” asks Juniper, and Gwyneth knows as she always has known that there is only one answer, that whether she gives it or not is dependent only on when she is, but Hilbert's there, a noose around her neck, a night terror, the distant rumbling sound of Reshiram raising its flames.

“What's your name?” asks Juniper. And Gwyneth tries over and over to answer, but Hilbert defeats her every single time. He does not say anything. He does not do anything. He is there even when he's not, and long before he steps out into the light to give his answer, “Boy. Hilbert,” he has crushed her back into the dark and the fear with nothing more than the memory of his enigmatic smile.

*​

Monday, 12th September

Gwyneth wakes with something almost but not quite like a hangover, a bad taste and a warm fuzz hovering in her mouth and a pressure on her temples. She sits up slowly, joints protesting with every movement, and sees Saadiyyah making instant coffee on the hot plate. It smells indescribably awful.

She thinks about saying good morning but does not, because she isn't sure it is morning, or even that mornings are a thing that still exists. She pulls a hand slowly out of her sleeping bag and rubs the lower half of her face.

Okay.

“Hey,” says Gwyneth, reaching for her jacket. Saadiyyah looks up and smiles.

“Morning,” she says. “I hope I didn't wake you. You seemed exhausted.”

“It's okay, you didn't.” Gwyneth finds her pocket, extracts tweezers and mirror. “And I was. Only got a couple of hours' sleep Saturday night.”

She opens the mirror and begins to attack her face with the tweezers, hair by painful hair. It would be better if she were alone for this, but right now she finds she's past caring. If anything, Saadiyyah is more embarrassed than she is; all of a sudden, her coffee seems to have become incredibly interesting to her.

Click-click. Gwyneth glances away from the mirror to see the venipede looking up at her from the floor.

“Hey, a*shole,” she says, turning back again. “Think I heard you crunching that apple in my dreams.”

It rattles, though not particularly aggressively, and trundles off like a toy train across the stone.

Gwyneth finishes taking things off her face and putting other things on it, inspects the result – unideal, but passable under the circumstances – and slowly worms her way out of her sleeping bag. The stone feels cold against her hands, too cold, like she has a fever. Maybe she does. She takes a long, careful look at her left hand, wiggling each finger in turn, but it doesn't seem swollen.

Well. She isn't in imminent danger of dying. That will have to do.

“Coffee?” asks Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth shakes her head. She probably needs the caffeine, but a long walk in a damp cave will wake her up just as well, and at the moment she isn't sure her stomach can take whatever ungodly concoction Saadiyyah's brewing over there.

“No, thanks.”

She shoves her legs off the edge of the stone shelf and feels them fall like lead weights. She bends after them, and with some effort manages to get both of her feet laced back into their respective boots.

Christ. What is she, seventy? Some deep-down part of Gwyneth still has all its energy, still has nothing but explosive impatience for the fatigue that has taken over the rest of her. She feels it vibrating at the root of her skull like a wasps' nest, full of latent malice.

“Sleep well?” she asks, more to work the croak out of her voice than out of curiosity, and Saadiyyah nods.

“Yeah. Surprisingly. I thought it would be less comfortable.”

“Mm.” No. More than that, Gwyneth. You're a guest. Come on. “I bet you've slept in way worse places. Travelling.”

It's not perfectly coherent, but Saadiyyah gets the gist of it.

“Yeah.” She chuckles and drinks deeply from the stinking blackness in her cup. “Slept in a tree once. That was pretty bad.”

Gwyneth blinks in surprise. Her eyelids stick slightly as they close.

“A tree?”

“Yeah. God, it was dumb, we got off the trail somehow and ended up in the real woods, like really deep in there, and by the time we figured out which way back to civilisation it was getting dark. You know the kind of dark in like movies with the big cartoon glowing eyes in it? That kinda dark. So we're all paranoid and decide to sleep in a tree so we don't get eaten by druddigon.” Saadiyyah smiles at the memory. Gwyneth thinks it's like a sunbeam has suddenly broken through the earth and struck her face. Kids are unfairly beautiful like that, graceful without effort. She used to be pretty when she was that age, kind of, before bad diet and worse sleep ruined her skin. “This was when I was just starting out. None of our pokémon were tough enough to be that much protection.”

“You … didn't think you might fall out in your sleep?”

Saadiyyah considers this for a moment.

“It was pretty nasty up there,” she says. “I don't think any of us were actually asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. We didn't really have much of a chance to fall out.”

“Oh. Right.”

“What about you?”

“Huh?”

“You were a trainer, right?” (Yes. Was.) “You must've had some bad nights too.”

Oh, sure, thinks Gwyneth. There was the alleyway between the laundromat and the old apartment building, that was pretty bad. It was out of the wind and the rain, and in the end no one came down there, but she heard those drunk kids go past in the street a couple of times, and then the cops, and every time she was just waiting for them to take a right and find her, say something, do something, and she held her breath and her switchblade deep inside her sleeping bag and prayed to Nika's God for them to leave her alone.

This is not what Saadiyyah means, however. So Gwyneth smiles blandly and says:

“Sure I have. One time I woke up with a beartic in my tent.”

“What! Really?”

“Well, just the head.” She shrugs. “Didn't find what it was looking for, I guess. I just kinda lay there and it breathed frost all over me and then it went away. Waited till I couldn't hear it any more and then we all got up in complete silence, packed up our tents and like sprinted back to Icirrus.”

“Oh my god,” says Saadiyyah. “Seriously? That's messed up.”

Gwyneth shrugs.

“They don't usually eat people. Too bony.”

“Usually! Emphasis on usually!” Saadiyyah shakes her head. “Oh my god,” she repeats. “I'm never going to be able to sleep near Twist Mountain again.”

Gwyneth smiles. It's only slightly crooked.

“You're welcome.”

Something hangs in the air between them, warm and inviting. It takes her a moment to recognise it as trainerly camaraderie, that force that keeps you up late around a campfire swapping stories, or pulls you into the practice rooms at the Pokémon Centre to see two strangers getting to know each other through a good stirring fight. It tugs at her insides like the Nuvema skyline, like the rolling Unovan hills, like the memory of Nika.

The hard thing inside her unclenches again, and settles down into her bones. Gwyneth pauses, straightens her back a little.

“Actually,” she says, “can I change my mind about the coffee?”

*​

This morning when she walks, Gwyneth thinks about Bianca Valentino.

The suggestion was there yesterday, in Saadiyyah's unthinking kindness, the way she automatically saw the venipede as a person and not a murderbug, but it's today that the realisation crystallises. Saadiyyah reaches casually up to Steggers' head as she leaves Campsite 2, runs her fingers affectionately across the heavy lines of his face, and he presses his neck against her hand, infinitely careful of her fragile human bones. And Gwyneth thinks of a musharna coiling smoke around an outstretched hand, of a girl in a Pokémon Centre saying hello to the minccino as well as the trainer, of an assistant to Professor Juniper with an interest in the oshawott population, and memory opens up and Gwyneth says to herself, okay.

Bianca's not the kind of person who ends up in the headlines, not even when her friends are making news every day. There's endless speculation about the legendary dragon, about that kid N Harmonia who seems to be at the heart of Team Plasma in some way no one can quite identify, about Cheren and Hilbert and their relation to him and to the dragon, but nothing about her. A few days into her stay in Nacrene, Gwyneth is reading the news about her brother, as she always does for reasons she does not fully understand, and she comes across the first reference to her she's ever seen: We spoke to a friend of Cheren's, who told us he's always been this way. No name. But it can't be Hilbert, because Hilbert doesn't offer details. And so it must be Bianca, talentless, enthusiastic, forgotten Bianca, visible as usual only when you read between the lines.

Gwyneth tells Nika about this later that day when they're in the park, listening to another kid's stereo and having practice battles against other trainers. She tells her about how Bianca's father tracked her down in Nimbasa and said she'd gone far enough, that it was time she came home, and how Bianca stood her ground and told him he was going back without her.

“It was incredible,” she says, her fingers twined in the long fur of Blossom's tail. “No one ever knew she could be like that.”

But that's Bianca for you. No one ever knows, with Bianca. She has no skill at pokémon battling, no head for strategy, nothing beyond empathy and enthusiasm. But her empathy is bottomless, and her enthusiasm inexhaustible, and no matter how many Gym battles she loses she keeps on travelling Unova, following her best friends across the country.

In a way, fifteen-year-old Gwyneth loves Bianca more than anyone else in the world. She knows that she herself is clever, like Cheren only not so much, and she is afraid her cleverness crowds out her kindness, like Cheren only not so much, and she is in awe of the way Bianca is so brilliantly not like this. Some people get chosen and some do not. Bianca was not chosen. And she thrives.

Nika listens to Gwyneth and tries not to feel jealous. She doesn't know, yet, that Gwyneth and Bianca don't even really speak, that the one's love for the other is teenage hero-worship and nothing else.

“She sounds pretty cool,” she says, and though Gwyneth doesn't agree, thinks rather that part of what makes Bianca Bianca is her determined uncoolness, she senses that Nika is trying to end the conversation and she nods, and puts her thoughts about Bianca away for another day.

It was just a passing reference in someone else's news story, after all. Only Gwyneth's imagination makes it anything more.

Eventually, they move on. Neither of them ever bring up the question of Gwyneth challenging the Gym, in the end. Her diffidence about it belongs to the category of things that are tacitly understood by everyone present. Gwyneth will take no badges home with her, and both she and Nika know this now without ever having to say it.

So, with nothing to keep them in Nacrene, they move on, teaming up with Ashley and Tomás one last time, to make the trip to Castelia. It does not take long. There's no wilderness trail to the capital. It's possible to hike through Pinwheel Forest, but after that there's just the Skyarrow Bridge, layers of road and rail and footpath stacked atop one another all across the bay. You can walk it, and Gwyneth has, once, many years ago when she climbed on the railing and her mother shrieked and snatched her back down again, but they don't. They take a train, and after a couple hours of Unova rolling by outside the window, green hill dark forest glittering blue water, the rail plunges all at once into the hot chrome belly of the capital.

Castelia in the summer. Gwyneth and Nika, from drowsy Nuvema and isolated Humilau, really aren't ready for it. They spend two days there, nervous of the city and its vast, bustling carelessness, and mutually decide to move on. They can always come back later. And Nika isn't ready for a third Gym challenge yet, anyway. Now she has two badges to her name, the Leaders will start getting serious with her. No one stays a rookie forever.

The wilderness trail to Nimbasa is hard. It cuts through the wasteland, what in Heniil is called Aksa, the Scar: the desert burnt into the heart of Unova from when the twin heroes fought and Reshiram and Zekrom fought with them. One duel, three hours, fire and lightning on a thermonuclear scale, and when it was over there was no more Hilaan. There was no more anything for miles and miles all around. Just the dragons and their trainers, tiny flecks in the uncompromising emptiness.

Gwyneth thinks of this as they hike across the sandy wastes. She feels nothing, although she tells herself she ought to feel something, some sadness or horror at the violence that was done here. All those people, vanishing in a cloud of smoke, ash and regret. And two men afterwards who realised that they weren't heroes any more.

Nothing will grow here except maractus, plodding stolidly across the ash-coloured plains after dark. There are silent, hungry dwebble hiding under boulders. Darmanitan that sun themselves on dunes. This is your heritage too, Gwyneth tells herself, making an effort to take it all in. This is your land as much as the hills and forests. Aân Hen, in sickness and in health.

At night, they find no wood to make campfires. It's cold without the sun, and the two of them share a tent, huddle close, their pokémon pressed in around them. Gwyneth whispers to Nika that she's part Henuun. (Part, because all she has is a throat-choking surname and dark oily hair, because she is only a jackal picking the bones of her father's culture. The shame is scored into her heart even then.) Nika says that she knows.

The two of them say nothing for a while. Somewhere very far away, a sigilyph pauses on its patrol of the city that no longer exists and lets out a long, ululating wail. In the silence after, their breath resonates like the chimes of a bell.

The next day, Nika catches a sandile and names him Astyanax, because, she says, he's the last guy left to be king of the city. Gwyneth doesn't understand – she has never even heard of Troy – and Nika, delighted, retells the Iliad from memory as they pick their way across the sand. Gwyneth listens, rapt, although her wonder is less at the strivings of gods and men than at Nika for carrying this whole vast world with her in her head; and then Nika comes to the part where Troy burns, and some irresistible force makes Gwyneth look up, out across the level wastes to the north, and the low mound of the Hilaan ruins against the sky. Now at last she feels, as Nika describes the heat, the slaughter. Now the savagery of the twin heroes comes to life in her head, in the brutal scheming of Odysseus and the butchery of Pyrrhus. As long as you kill the right people, she learns, you can still be a hero after all. Even if the wound you make cuts so deep it scars the world forever. Aân Hen. Until we burn it to the ground.

They never do go to the ruins, which Nika studiously avoids calling the Relic Castle. This is a place with a long memory, and the weight of it on their imaginations is too much. Troy and Hilaan, blood-blackened Pyrrhus and smoke-white Reshiram; it's all important, all something that must not ever be forgotten, but there is a time and a place for the atrocities of the past, and a trainer journey is not it. Gwyneth and Nika train their pokémon in mock-battles and keep on walking, day after day, and then at last they reach the bus terminal on the outskirts of Nimbasa and thirty minutes later the world has come to life again.

It's then that they run into Bianca, in the Pokémon Centre. She's just on her way out, and when she sees Gwyneth hanging around in the lobby waiting for Nika, she stops and calls out: hi, Gwyneth! And Gwyneth sees her and says hi too, and Bianca smiles and looks at Blossom and Corbin, the one perched atop the other, and she says hi, you guys, and a moment later Gwyneth says hi to Bianca's musharna and dewott but it seems too late, too forced, and there's an awkward pause before Bianca asks if she's here for the Gym.

She sure is, says Gwyneth cheerfully, like she means it, and Bianca smiles again, happy to see someone on her trainer journey. She's finally beaten Elesa herself, having come back here for a third attempt. She's on her way north now, to catch up with Hilbert and Cheren. Has Gwyneth heard from her brother at all? No, admits Gwyneth, she hasn't, and Bianca sighs, rolls her eyes. She told him the strong-silent thing isn't always appropriate, that his family might like to get a phone call every now and then. But does he listen? Nope. Anyway, she goes on, she'd better get going. Cheren called her and said that things are starting to look serious with Team Plasma. She looks side to side like a shifty cartoon character, and in a lowered voice she says it's true what they're saying, that N of Team Plasma has been chosen by Zekrom. She was there at Dragonspiral Tower. And you mustn't say, but you should know, that Hilbert's gone to Opelucid to find out how to awaken Reshiram.

Oh, says Gwyneth. She feels cold all the way through. She doesn't know why. Oh, she says again, and Bianca tells her not to worry. Hilbert's really strong, she says. He'll be okay. It's just that Team Plasma really has to be stopped.

Yeah, Gwyneth says. They do. (She's thinking of Harmonia and his electric eye, of keeping Blossom in her ball, of her failure to challenge even a single Gym.)

Bianca has to go. They say their goodbyes and then Gwyneth is left there alone with a shivery sick feeling in her stomach. Hilbert against Team Plasma. Reshiram against Zekrom. Troy and Hilaan. She thinks of Harmonia's TV interview, of Cheren's response. She's only fifteen. She has no idea whose side she's on. She is afraid she might be on Harmonia's.

Nika comes downstairs, hair still damp from washing out the desert dust.

Hey, Gwyn, she chirps. So what do you wanna do first?

And Gwyneth stands there and trembles and has no words with which to answer.

*​

 

[Cutlerine]

But Bianca was right, thinks Gwyneth. Team Plasma did have to be stopped. Only by the time everyone knew that – when the footage went out of Harmonia raving in defeat, screaming that N was broken and that if he hadn't been so weak then Plasma would by then have been the only people in Unova who still commanded pokémon – by then it was much too late. The damage had been done and Gwyneth was broken inside.

Not that she blames Plasma. The seeds were there long before what happened in Nimbasa made them sprout their poison flowers. She destroyed everything all by herself, no help necessary. Nimbasa and Team Plasma were just the excuse.

It's the only part of her heritage she really has any claim to. Hilbert got Reshiram and she got Aksa. Some people get chosen. And some do not.

It occurs to her that she's probably directly underneath Aksa right about now. All those miles and miles of wasteland, testament to the fact that You People just can't be trusted.

What hurts Gwyneth most of all is that she doesn't know how to say it isn't true.

The venipede steps carefully off her backpack onto her shoulder, the pressure of knifelike legs pulling her back into the world. Her left arm reaches automatically to brush against it (expecting: soft minccino fur, warm munna fuzz) but then a blunt needle of pain digs into her wrist and makes Gwyneth aware of what she's doing. She grinds her teeth and lowers her arm again. There's no going back, she reminds herself. Never. Not for anything.

But why is she going to Nika's wedding, then?

Around her, the cave begins to slope. Almost imperceptibly at first; then more and more, until Gwyneth finally has to admit it's too steep for her battered, aching body and Saadiyyah helps her up onto Steggers' back, where she sits feeling angry at her own weakness as the gigalith follows his partner down into the dark. He is warmer than he looks, and somehow contrives to move his legs so that his body remains perfectly level despite the uneven terrain. Gwyneth is comfortable, and furious about it.

The venipede, by now accustomed to Steggers' presence, climbs down off her and scuttles freely around on the big pokémon's back, even clambering up some of his spines with a blasé disregard for the burning energy crystallised inside them. Steggers, as far as Gwyneth can see, doesn't mind. Somehow this makes it worse.

Several hours later, long after her rage has burnt itself out and left only indignant cinders, the path levels out again.

“Guess we must be below the bay now,” says Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth slithers roughly down off Steggers' back without asking him to stop.

“Yeah,” she says, stumbling and not falling mostly out of sheer stubbornness. “Guess so.”

The venipede, currently clinging to Steggers' neck, watches her with its evil orange eye. Gwyneth glares right back until it turns away to make another circuit of its new mobile fortress.

*​

There are other people out here, if not many. They pass some of them later that day, three kids whose chatter echoes down the passage towards them a long time before they actually come into view. Gwyneth listens, catches a name or two, and analyses. Teenage boys, loud voices and brash laughs, with that certain tone to their speech that makes some warning instinct deep in Gwyneth's mind light up in apprehension.

Gwyneth thinks of school, and of the police station. She thinks of hands, and eyes. Of ordinary pain that belongs to everyone and so is not worth talking about.

She looks at Saadiyyah and raises her eyebrows. Saadiyyah, half-smiling, raises them back. Together, they keep on walking.

Up ahead, a flashlight beam begins to show around the corner, and the babble starts to solidify into voices. Someone's telling a story, Gwyneth thinks, but his friends aren't listening. They're talking about something else, a game maybe, though she can't work out what sport; even so, he's persisting, with a kind of baffling determination. She'd wonder how any of them can stand it if she wasn't so aware of being a terrible conversationalist herself.

After a few minutes more, the kids appear, along with a ragtag collection of pokémon, and finally seem to notice Saadiyyah and Gwyneth. They stop, and one of them raises his flashlight.

“Hey!” he calls, and Saadiyyah calls back.

“Hey.”

The two groups come closer, blinking in the beams of each other's flashlights. Squinting through it – the boys haven't lowered theirs properly, are shining the light on her and Saadiyyah to better see them – Gwyneth makes out three kids, fifteen or sixteen, with a herdier, a gurdurr and a krokorok trailing along behind them. The krokorok has a shiny brass coin on a chain around its neck, and Gwyneth finds herself softening momentarily in the face of this unexpected tenderness. It's okay. It doesn't last.

“Going to Driftveil?” asks one of the boys. Gwyneth thinks his name is James, although the echoes made it hard to tell.

“Yeah,” says Saadiyyah. “Could you maybe not blind us with the flashlight?”

“Oh. Right.”

Three torches move suddenly, leaving blue ghosts floating in Gwyneth's vision.

“We're going to Castelia,” says the boy.

“Yeah, I kinda guessed,” replies Saadiyyah, and there is some laughter, part nervous and part something worse, from the other two kids. The lead one makes a show of not caring about it.

“Well,” he says, “our eyes met and all. You wanna battle?”

Saadiyyah smiles thinly. Gwyneth can see all her previous meetings with incarnations of this boy behind it.

“I don't think so.”

“Aw, c'mon―”

“No, really,” says Saadiyyah, motioning into the darkness behind her. “I don't think you'd get much out of it.”

And Steggers steps forward into the light, all one and a half tonnes of him, and Gwyneth watches the boy reassess the situation.

“Go on, James,” says one of his friends, insidiously encouraging. “You've totally got this.”

“Uh, well, we still got a long way to go,” says James. “And she said no so―”

“So?”

“So I guess not.” James attempts a debonair smile. It's less than successful. “Anyway. Good to, uh, talk to you.”

“Likewise,” says Saadiyyah. “Have a safe trip to Castelia. It gets kind of steep back there.”

“Um. Thanks.”

Saadiyyah starts walking and Gwyneth follows silently, aware as she has been throughout of the eyes on her, taking an inventory of her aberrations. (Telling her: you exist because we allow it.) Then Steggers gets moving, the venipede crouched motionless on his back, and the boys all turn and move on south in the direction of the slope up to Campsite 2.

“Nice,” says Gwyneth, after she's sure they're out of earshot.

“Well, they were assholes,” says Saadiyyah, defensively, and Gwyneth surprises both of them by laughing.

“Yeah, I know,” she says. “I meant it as a compliment.”

Saadiyyah laughs too.

“Okay.”

“You travel by yourself a lot?”

“I try not to. But I'm okay with Steggers.”

Gwyneth nods. She's seen it before, with Nika and Britomartis. Although of course Nika never went anywhere without Gwyneth, by that point.

“Guess you are,” she says, faintly admiring. “My, uh, my friend, the one whose wedding I'm going to, she had a bisharp. She was okay going anywhere too.”

“Huh. Really? Those are meant to be really hard to train.”

“They are,” says Gwyneth. “It was vicious as hell. I was kinda glad when she released it.”

Saadiyyah glances at her.

“Why'd she do that?”

Gwyneth shifts uncomfortably. She hadn't meant to say this. Saadiyyah probably doesn't want to hear it, and she is starting to realise that she actually does care a little about what Saadiyyah wants.

“Uh. You know. She finished her trainer journey? And you can't keep a bisharp if you're not gonna battle with it. They need to fight or they end up starting trouble. Which is … well, they're covered in blades, you know?”

“Oh,” says Saadiyyah, subdued. “Yeah, I guess.”

A brief and awkward pause. Gwyneth stumbles on a rock. Chargestones gleam in the distance like airport lights.

“Still,” says Gwyneth, after a while. “A mean pokémon is good for scaring off creeps.”

A smile.

“Yeah,” agrees Saadiyyah. “Wish I didn't need Steggers to do it as much as I do, though.”

Gwyneth nods.

“I feel you,” she says. “Some things never change.”

A man in a police uniform. Hands and eyes. The dead boy still lingering in her mind's eye.

Gwyneth rubs her forehead as if to push the memories back in, and carries on walking.

It's the kind of walk that seems to drag on far longer than the distance it covers. The day stretches out, broad and quiet. A few more wild pokémon come out to test their mettle – among them a kind of shaggy white woobat that Gwyneth has never seen before; they are very deep now, and the wildlife is getting weird – but nothing that Steggers can't handle. The venipede, used to his presence by now, takes pleasure in firing poison stings after the fleeing pokémon from his back as if it was the one who beat them. It's kind of funny, although Gwyneth can't find it in her to laugh.

They finish Saadiyyah's mother's sandwiches. Gwyneth aches. Under the bandages, her muscles move in pained twitches, like dying fish. She wonders if she'll be able to see a doctor any time soon.

She keeps walking.

After a while, the venipede stands on Steggers' shoulder and hisses at her, wanting to go back to its usual perch. She ignores it until it stops, and goes to sulk in the shadow of one of his spines. Saadiyyah watches the whole thing without comment, and Gwyneth feels the shame slip in through the back door of her mind like an old friend.

The passage narrows. There are very few caves in this area, down here under the ocean. Gwyneth guesses this was all dug out by the Henuun. One long, ruler-straight line, right under the bay. It's amazing, when you think about it. She says this to herself, as if the words were a substitute for the emotion. “It's amazing, when you think about it.”

Saadiyyah asks what was that, and Gwyneth shakes her head. Nothing.

A long time later, when Saadiyyah has slowed, and Gwyneth is visibly limping, they stop to check the map again.

“Shouldn't be far now,” says Saadiyyah. “I think there's a rest stop somewhere … oh, hey, look! Campsite 1.”

“Guess it's here after all,” says Gwyneth. “How much further?”

“Um, let's see, the scale says … uh … okay, I'm not sure exactly, I'm not great at maps, but I don't think far.”

“Okay.”

She's right, it isn't far. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, a pair of chargestones comes into view casting a blue light over a sign, CAMPSITE 1, and Saadiyyah and Gwyneth turn off down the side passage, heartened. It's not long before they're dumping their backpacks (with twin sighs of relief) and sitting themselves down on the stone slabs, one lightly, one stiffly. Gwyneth has just started to appreciate the weight taken off her feet when the venipede comes scurrying in, rattling aggrievedly.

“Hey, dude,” she says, tired. “What d'you want? Food?” She rummages in her bag, tears off a piece of bread. “There.” She tosses it on the floor and the venipede pounces as if it might sprout wings and fly away. It's a real hunter's pounce, venom and all. Gwyneth can tell because of the sizzle of acid on the floor. One more rule broken, she guesses. Whatever.

She has a drink, although not too much; she's almost out of water. She chews some of the bread herself, although she doesn't have much of an appetite and it's getting stale. She watches Saadiyyah go out and give Steggers some gravel to chew on – just for something to do; rock-types can go weeks or even months between meals, and he probably won't even be hungry till after his big fights at the tournament. Still, Saadiyyah's toting around a literal bag of rocks for the sake of his comfort. It's so nice of her it makes Gwyneth vaguely angry.

“We should get there tomorrow,” Saadiyyah tells Gwyneth, as she comes back in. “Just in time. Registration closes Wednesday.”

“Right.”

“Are you on track for getting to your wedding?”

Gwyneth thinks about it. She would be, assuming she had transport figured out. As it happens, who knows?

“Yeah, I think so,” she says. “I got like a week and a half yet.” She makes an effort to smile. “Thanks for this, Saadiyyah.”

It may be the first time she's actually said her name. She's almost surprised by the sound of it in her mouth.

“Oh, it's okay.” Saadiyyah looks embarrassed, busies herself looking for nothing in her bag. “I was going this way anyway. And it's lonely down here. I love Steggers, but gigalith aren't big on conversation.”

“Yeah, I had him down as more the strong silent type,” says Gwyneth, and Saadiyyah smiles a little, though it isn't really very funny. “Anyway, I hope I haven't been too bad company. I know I'm … kinda grumpy.”

Now Saadiyyah smiles in earnest. God knows why.

“You're not that bad,” she says. “I've had worse company. Really.”

“Yeah?”

“I once went through Reversal Mountain with an expert on moths, a gun nut and a girl who thought the Middle East was a single country.”

Gwyneth nods, impressed.

“Yeah,” she says. “That's so bad, it sounds like the start of a joke.”

Saadiyyah laughs.

“Oh my god, I hadn't thought of that,” she says. “That's amazing. I gotta use that one next time I tell the story.”

“You're welcome,” replies Gwyneth. She doesn't know if she feels amused or awed by Saadiyyah's unforced happiness. It's been a while. She's forgotten what kids are like.

“What about you? Got any stories like that?” asks Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth shakes her head.

“Not exactly,” she admits. “My friend Nika and me, we did the whole thing together, so we were kinda insulated. There was one time we were staying in a lodge in the forest off of Route 6, though, that was us, an ex-Rocket and a clown.”

“I don't even know which one to ask about first,” says Saadiyyah. “What was a clown doing out there?”

“On his way to a clowning convention. I guess they have those.” Gwyneth shrugs. “He was taking the scenic route. Wanted to be reminded of his trainer journey, I guess.”

“And the Rocket?”

“Just doing a trainer journey. Trying to start over, I guess.”

A pause. The sound of the venipede chewing, like nail scissors opening and closing, fills the silence.

“You heard about Team Rocket disbanding the other month?” asked Saadiyyah.

“Yeah. That Red kid, right? The new Indigo League Champion.”

“Yeah.”

Another pause. Gwyneth almost thinks she can hear the sea, miles and miles above them.

“There's something I wanted to tell you,” says Saadiyyah. “I don't know if you knew already, but … there's this place in Driftveil where some ex-Plasma people look after pokémon that got stolen way back when? And they try to track down their owners, too.”

Gwyneth says nothing. She can't find her voice.

“So I just thought I'd say,” persists Saadiyyah. “'Cause like … I guess it's a long shot, but maybe they still have yours.”

She looks at Gwyneth. Gwyneth tries to breathe, through a choked, narrow throat. She feels like she might cry.

“Oh,” she manages. “I … didn't know that. Thanks, I'll … I'll check it out.” She fiddles with the bandages on the back of her hand. “That's … that's real good of you to say, Saadiyyah. Really appreciate it.”

It sounds hollow to her, but she means it more than anything else she's said so far on this stupid, stupid trip. God. Her pokémon won't be there, of course, but Saadiyyah doesn't know that; she only knows what it's like to love pokémon, and she reached out with that knowledge to try and touch the horror of losing them, and she offered Gwyneth all the help she could.

Trainer journeys. She's always said she still believes in them, despite everything. Here's why. There's nowhere else in Unova where you find this kind of love.

“Oh, it's okay,” says Saadiyyah awkwardly. “I mean, it's just a thought …”

And she plays it down, and Gwyneth can't explain to her why it's as big a deal as it is, but she can hold the knowledge close to her while she settles down in her sleeping bag, as warm and soft as a minccino snuggled close against her breast.

And she can sleep, for once, without dreams.

 

[Cutlerine]

Content warning: in this chapter, Gwyneth dissociates even more than usual.

SIX: THE BREAK

Tuesday, 13th September

The next morning the tunnel starts sloping upwards again. It's hard to notice at first in the dark, but when she does see it Saadiyyah stops and looks at Gwyneth, a question in her eyes. This time, Gwyneth doesn't hesitate.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, and Saadiyyah comes back to help her climb onto Steggers' back. “Thanks, Saadiyyah.”

He marches on, legs eating up the distance at a steady, mechanical pace. Gwyneth slumps and tries not to scratch her hand, which has started to itch. She hopes it's just hot under the bandages. All the other possible explanations are not very pleasant to think about.

There aren't very many wild pokémon now: the odd boldore or roggenrola, almost all of the sandy brown sedimentary species, with toffee-coloured geodes where their igneous cousins have glittering orange. Steggers stamps and flares his crystals bright red, and most flee before things get any more serious. On the two occasions that they do, he is conscientious of his passenger, holds his head erect so that she can crouch behind it, shielded from stray chips of flying stone. Somewhere underneath all that rock is a living heart after all. Reluctantly, and much to her surprise, Gwyneth feels herself starting to warm to him.

The passage continues straight up, sloping quite sharply now; even if she'd been healthy – hell, even back when she was on her own trainer journey and so the fittest she's ever been – Gwyneth doesn't think she'd have done half as well here as Steggers and Saadiyyah. Now there's no comparison at all. She takes no exercise, eats badly, often feels like she's rotting from the inside out: poison or not, this is not a slope Gwyneth would be able to climb.

She doesn't mention any of this. Despite the lack of evidence, she likes to imagine she has some dignity left to protect.

“Oh thank god,” says Saadiyyah, after a while. “I think it's flattening out.” She flashes a self-deprecating smile up at Gwyneth. “Kinda rough going.”

Gwyneth hesitates.

“Yeah,” she says, after a moment. “Yeah, it looks it.”

Saadiyyah is right. The slope becomes shallower and shallower, and then nearly flat again. Gwyneth slides off her perch wedged against one of Steggers' crystals and lands awkwardly behind him.

“You know, you don't have to,” begins Saadiyyah, but Gwyneth shakes her head.

“Nah,” she says. “I want to walk.”

Saadiyyah looks like she might want to say but you're not well; if she does, however, she's sensible enough not to follow through. She just shrugs and starts winding up the flashlight again.

“Okay,” she says. “Up to you. Option's there.”

“Thanks.”

Gwyneth glances back at Steggers. He keeps moving, undeterred by her absence. On his back, the venipede glares orangely at her.

“Quit it,” she hisses, too quietly for Saadiyyah to hear, but the venipede is not in an obedient kind of mood. If venipede ever are.

She turns away again and concentrates on following Saadiyyah's flashlight. It's fine. This will be over soon. It has to be, if they've come up again. And then … well, then she isn't sure, then she'll be on her own in Driftveil with three dollars, seventy-five cents and a stale heel of bread. And two apples, she reminds herself. Not that they make much difference, but when you start from almost nothing even a couple of apples count.

So. What happens when she leaves this tunnel? What happens when she's suddenly back in the real world, where there is a place called Humilau she somehow has to get to within the next ten days?

Gwyneth does think about it, and she tries to come up with a solution. She really does. But there's only so long you can think about something like that before you have to stop or start hurting real bad, so five minutes later she puts it out of her mind again and thinks only of the tunnel and the perfect straight-line beauty of its construction.

We did this, she thinks to herself, with a tinge of pride. And then, immediately afterwards: no, they did it. She had nothing to do with it.

As distractions go, this leaves something to be desired.

*​

Eventually, it ends. Everything always does. A brighter light than the chargestones becomes visible up ahead, and as they draw closer Gwyneth and Saadiyyah see another of those metal emergency phone boxes, glinting dully in the beam of a construction light. There's another of those big, blocky doorways just beyond – and past that, concrete stairs. Daylight is only a few minutes away.

“Yay,” says Saadiyyah, only slightly ironically. “We made it.”

“We sure did,” agrees Gwyneth. She feels slightly sick. She tells herself it's just the poison.

“Better recall Steggers,” says Saadiyyah. “Grab your venipede, would you?”

“Sure, dude.”

Gwyneth picks it up and puts it back on her shoulder, the familiar trash-smell settling back into her nostrils. It rattles loudly in her ear, which she figures she probably deserves, and then marches off to ride on her backpack.

The flash of Steggers' return to his ball is blinding in the dim light; they have to wait a few seconds before either of them can see where they are supposed to be walking. And then – well. Then it's time to go. Through the doorway. Up the stairs. And through a metal door out into another little cabin like the one in Castelia. Sunlight pours in through the window and Gwyneth stares with watering eyes out at the beach beyond. She should have brought her sunglasses, she thinks, before remembering that she lost them.

“Hey,” says Saadiyyah brightly to the woman behind the desk.

“Hi,” she replies. “Come all the way from Castelia?”

“Yep. Looong walk.”

“Definitely. Can I scan your cards? Gotta log you as having left, so we know you didn't die down there.”

“Just mine,” says Saadiyyah, handing it over. “Uh, my friend's not a trainer, I was just escorting her.”

Gwyneth looks away from the window sharply. Friend, huh? Something in her recoils violently from the thought, but a moment passes, she watches Saadiyyah chatting to the clerk, and then the thing inside her calms.

Okay, she thinks, with a certain sadness and a certain satisfaction. Friend.

Saadiyyah finishes at the desk and turns back to her with a smile.

“Okay,” she says. “Let's get some fresh air, huh?”

“I've been counting the seconds,” says Gwyneth, which sounded funnier in her head but what the hell, she's trying, isn't she, and out they go.

Crisp salt air. Brilliant September light. Waves breaking on the stony beach. And to their right, across the water, Driftveil rising up like the Sierra Castaña, a mountain range of factories and dockyards.

Unova, thinks Gwyneth, and feels for a brief moment that old fierce love flare with the taste of brine in her mouth.

“God, that air tastes good,” says Saaddiyah, stretching out her arms. “I spend a lot of time in caves, obviously, but I never get used to coming back out again.”

She feels it too, Gwyneth can hear it in her voice: that love that only trainers and wanderers know. Once you've walked this country, it never leaves you. Unova. Unfeasible, insane, marvellous.

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah.”

The cabin they have just come out of is set into the western side of Veil Island, a tiny spit of rock south of the city which, the last time Gwyneth was here, was mostly warehouses and docks; now, as they climb the path leading up from the beach to the island proper, she sees that it's been redeveloped. Gardens and plazas, little stalls and gazebos, are all arranged around a single huge building that can only be a tournament stadium.

As she watches, a dragonite descends from the sky and flares its wings, coming to an abrupt halt in the centre of a nearby plaza. A rider drops neatly off its back, pats its flank; the big dragon snorts a plume of smoke, pleased. Lots of trainers here, thinks Gwyneth. At the stalls, walking the gardens, flying in.

“Is this where you're going?” she asks Saadiyyah.

“Yeah.” Saadiyyah's watching the dragonite and its rider with an appraising trainer's eye. “It's called the Pokémon World Tournament. Clay Morton built it – you know, the Gym Leader and mining guy?”

Gwyneth remembers an excadrill ripping apart the ground, shaking Britomartis off her feet. Clay's a strong Leader, one of the ones Nika didn't beat. He also wears a cowboy hat, which both she and Nika agree is suspicious behaviour for anyone who isn't actually a cowboy.

“Yeah,” she says. “Mining guy.”

“There's gonna be this grand opening,” Saadiyyah tells her. “He's been after a bunch of tough trainers for the first tournament. I hear the new Gym Leader – you know, Cheren Boyadzhiev? – he's going to be here.” She sounds excited. “Kinda hoping I get to go up against him. He's meant to be super good at strategy.”

“He is,” says Gwyneth shortly.

The path takes them up to plaza around which various stallholders are hawking vitamins and supplements for various species of pokémon – ZINC GRANULES, getcher ZINC GRANULES for TOUGHER STEEL-TYPES; come on come on we got FEATHERPRO for category B FLYING-TYPES – and here they come to a halt. North is the bridge to the mainland. East is the way over to the World Tournament, the stadium and the hotels.

Gwyneth and Saadiyyah look at each other for a little while.

“Well,” says Gwyneth, after a moment or two of awkward silence. “Thanks for getting me here. No way could I have got here on time without you.”

“Oh, that's okay,” says Saadiyyah, smiling, embarrassed. “I was glad of the company.”

“Yeah?” asks Gwyneth. It's been a long time since anyone said that to her.

“Yeah,” she replies. “Nice meeting you, Gwyneth.”

“Likewise, Saadiyyah.” Gwyneth smiles. It isn't even forced. The kid likes her. How weird is that? “Maybe I'll see you if you ever do come down to Aspertia to take on Cheren.”

“Pokémon Centre, right?”

“Yep. In the store.”

“I'll make sure to grab a few potions, then.”

“You do that.” Gwyneth glances north, at the bulk of Driftveil, at cargo ships moving ponderously across the water. “Well, I better let you go register. See you around, Saadiyyah.”

“Bye!”

And that's it. Gwyneth turns and walks away towards the bridge. She does not look back. She does not want to know if Saadiyyah does.

They won't meet again, she's sure of that. Saadiyyah shouldn't be wasting her time on people like her. She's seen how that road ends.

Besides, she probably doesn't have a job at the Centre any more.

Crossing the bridge – pedestrianised now, she sees; it used to be that the trucks drove over – Gwyneth switches on her phone and brings up a map to find somewhere to refill her water bottle. This is not really a solution to her biggest problem, she is aware, but whatever she does do next, she's going to need water. So she finds a mall within walking distance, turns off her phone again to save the battery, and starts.

Driftveil is brown. There's spots of colour here and there, sure, but nothing like Virbank's neon ghosts or Castelia's glass-and-chrome elegance. This is a city where money comes out of the ground, from clay pits and steel mines, and where those people who aren't digging stuff up or smelting it down are probably shipping it out. Where Gwyneth is by the south seafront is more commercial than industrial, but she can see the smoke rising up over the rooftops from the north; there's nowhere in town where you can't. She wonders if the World Tournament is supposed to make people think of something other than raw industry when they think of Driftveil. It doesn't seem likely to have much of a result.

Still. Don't look up, and this part of town might be any big city in Unova: chain stores and shopping malls, phone lines, pedestrians, heavy traffic. The only distinctive thing is the scars in the road where the streetcar tracks used to be, and even then you wouldn't recognise it if you didn't already know. Gwyneth does already know; Nika has a vaguely embarrassing and very endearing habit of entering enthusiastically into touristhood, of reading every bit of information she can find about a place, and then regurgitating it into her companions' ears as they walk along. She doesn't remember all of it, but there are little bits, here and there. Streetcars in Driftveil, historic Pard Square in Castelia. Little bits of trivia. Little fragments of Nika.

Gwyneth finds the mall, finds the toilets, refills her bottle. She looks at herself in the mirror in the flat yellow light. What she sees is deep, dark circles under her eyes, missed hairs on her chin, the pale face of sickness. What she sees is more or less how she feels.

On her shoulder, the venipede starts rattling, antennae bristling at the sight of its own reflection.

“Chill, dude,” says Gwyneth, too tired to argue. “It's just a mirror.”

It doesn't get it, so she puts it down on the floor where it starts running around frantically, searching for the other venipede. She watches it for a moment, wondering how you explain reflections to a centipede, then shakes her head, defeated, and turns back to the mirror to pull out a few more hairs. The result is not great, but it's better than what she managed in the dim light of the caves.

Gwyneth looks into the mirror again. She cannot read her reflection's expression.

“All right, then,” she says, stooping to pick up the venipede. “Time to go, dude.”

She walks out, of the toilets, of the mall, of the street, and then she takes off her backpack and sits down on a bench. She counts the coins in her pockets again, in case she missed any before. (She didn't.)

Gwyneth closes her eyes, and thinks of home.

*​

Here is what Gwyneth knows about money: it takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are.

That's how she explains it to Nika, when it comes to it. She doesn't do such a good job of it, but Nika gets the gist of the thing. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, Gwyneth says. It takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are. Just to plug the leaks and put out the fires. If you want to get ahead, you have to go much faster still.

What she means is this: when she was little, hers was an ordinary family in an ordinary house. All it took was for one unexpected thing to happen (one dead husband, one smashed car, one funeral, one colossal expense) and then suddenly the ordinary people in the ordinary house were also people who stayed up late at night at the kitchen table, swearing softly at their bills. It was okay, even though it wasn't. There were savings to fall back on, and that covered some of it; her ordinary mother carried on in her ordinary house, thinking that if she got another job, if she saved, she might claw her way back to where they were before, give her children some semblance of normality. So she worked and she saved, except that her kids needed food and clothes, and then her car broke down and that was what she'd saved gone again, and the kids still needed food and clothes, and her shoes were so worn out they had to be replaced because at this point they were letting her down in interviews, and a pipe burst under the sink, and then Gwyneth came out and needed new clothes and couldn't take Hilbert's cast-offs any more, and it kept on going and going, and as hard and fast as she ran she never once got more than a step or two forwards.

Still an ordinary family in an ordinary house. No Dickensian squalor, no ostentatious poverty. Just debt loping after them like a midnight lycanroc, and the race to stay one step ahead of its long white jaws.

And then things changed. They never do, for ordinary families in ordinary houses with ordinary lycanroc on their tail, but sometimes ordinary families spawn extraordinary people, and Hilbert brought home tournament money, the Championship prize, and then, later on, sponsorship deals and advertising revenue. (Gwyneth's mother will never stop being grateful for the League official who approved their request for his training grant, or for Aurea Juniper who gave him his starter free of charge and provided the family with all those copies of the trainer magazines that he and Gwyneth loved so much.)

So Hilbert saved everything. Again. But once the lycanroc has your scent, it's always there inside you, deep down. And Gwyneth, who never remembered a time before it started following them, kept right on running. So she tells Nika about the Red Queen, and Nika, who is wealthy enough for this never to have occurred to her and empathetic enough that she wants to understand, listens, and knows better than to say that the Red Queen is from Through the Looking-Glass and not Alice in Wonderland.

She hugs Gwyneth, though, and won't let her go. And Gwyneth feels the hot breath of the lycanroc on her neck a little less keenly for her grip.

But it's still there, deep inside her; she knows this instinctively, and when she and Nika split she is not surprised to find it there again, lurking in the corners of the shabby apartment she moves into. It's an old foe by this point, she tells herself. She knows how to deal with it. But the truth is that she is not her mother or her brother, and without Nika she is barely even Gwyneth, and her head is a mess and she fails to run fast enough and she has to leave the apartment; and this brings her back to where she is now, sitting out in the cold and waiting on the kindness of strangers.

Back then, it was Shane who stepped in. She hardly knew him before then, but he remembered her and he found her, brought her back to his place. He lent her a couch to sleep on, a computer to search for jobs on, and the difference between what money she had left and what she needed for a new apartment. An awful apartment, one that the previous occupant never cleaned or repaired and which Gwyneth never does either, but an apartment.

And then she left town for Humilau, to go and watch Nika marry Hilbert. Then she got herself poisoned. Then she threw away the last thing she had left in the hope of seeing something terrible.

It's as if she just needed to prove it, one more time. That there really is no good thing so small she will not destroy it.

Gwyneth hunches on the bench, over her bad arm. She can't stop shaking.

Whoever it was that called the ambulance for her back in Virbank, she wishes they were dead.

*​

Nika would say, you don't mean that. But that's the thing about Gwyneth that Nika never seemed to understand: she really does mean it. She really is that bad. And she refuses to let herself forget it. So: sorry, Nika, no therapy, and no doctors. As if Gwyneth could ever allow anyone to tell her that any of this is not her fault.

Some people get chosen and some do not. Gwyneth is not chosen. Gwyneth is Aksa.

She opens her eyes again and stares at the traffic, unseeing. Cars. Pedestrians. There's a pidove among the regular pigeons on the sidewalk across the street, shoving them out of the way with the bullying confidence of a pokémon amongst animals. It's hard to look at any of it. The air is blurry, or her eyes are unfocused, she isn't sure. She feels her body like a series of heavy pieces of meat, hung loosely together from jointed bone. Her head is full of the emotional equivalent of a modem dialling up, loudly, forever.

It's okay. Gwyneth has been here before and all she has to do is stay alive until it's over. This is easy. The trick to staying alive is not dying, and that happens by itself.

For an indeterminate period of time, she sits there, not dying.

Then she gets up and walks away.

*​

It's been a while. Gwyneth isn't sure how long, but it's been a while. She tries to remember when she sat down on the bench, but she doesn't really know. The sun has moved. The shadows sit differently on the street. This much she's sure of. She supposes she could check the time, measure it against whatever time her phone said it was when she searched for directions to the mall, but she doesn't really see the point. Some of whatever that was back on the bench is still with her, clouding her head like a charged fog of static electricity, and she cannot quite make herself believe in time right now.

She wanders without thinking of where she's going, taking corners as they come, crossing streets without waiting for red lights. A couple of cars nearly hit her. A lot more honk their horns at her. She is aware of this, conceptually; she knows that what she is doing is a bad idea. But the information is hovering at a level too distant for her to access.

The venipede spits insectoid curses back at the drivers, fearlessly vicious. Its saliva smells sweet, sickly, like old roses or blood or a munna's pain. Gwyneth feels the odour drifting inside her, mixing with the decay inside.

She keeps walking.

Eventually, she stops.

It's over now.

The strangeness falls away and her vision seems to clear, even though it wasn't clouded to begin with. She feels the wind in her hair and the fading sunlight on her face; she sees a police car rocket down the street, siren blaring. She sees shopfronts, shutters coming down, people hurrying home.

Has it been that long? Where even is she? Suddenly alert, Gwyneth checks her phone again, finds her location. Acker Street, wherever that is. Somewhere in southeast Driftveil. There's probably a name for the area but she doesn't know it.

“Any ideas?” she asks the venipede. It doesn't answer. “Yeah, thought so.” She sighs. “C'mon, dude, let's get out of here.”

She doesn't actually have anywhere to get out to, so she just starts walking. It's slightly less random than before, although not by much; the main difference is that she's conscious now, properly conscious: she sees people looking at her, waits for the roads to clear before crossing them, holds her arm close against her chest to stop it hurting as it moves. All the time, with every step, she asks herself what now, and every time she has to admit she doesn't have any answers.

For some reason, she finds herself thinking about what Saadiyyah said, about the ex-Plasma pokémon shelter in the north end of the city. They won't have Blossom or Corbin there, obviously, but still, she thinks of them. It's hard to say why. Does she want to tell them, after all these years? And what good would that do, exactly? Gwyneth can't see the logic in it. Okay, she might make some old Plasma grunts feel guilty. But clearly they feel that way already, or they wouldn't be running the shelter in the first place.

It doesn't matter, anyway. It's after five now; they're probably closed, and if they aren't then they will be by the time Gwyneth makes her way over there. So that answers that question. But the other one still remains, the what now that haunts her every move, and Gwyneth, standing there on the street cradling her aching hand as the air slowly grows colder with the deepening evening, is no closer to answering that than she is to Humilau.

*​

 

[Cutlerine]

Gwyneth scouts the area.

This part of town feels a little too nice to her. When people say an area is nice, that's usually code for there being money there, and where there's money there are people around to guard it. Gwyneth sees four cops on patrol around here, and she knows that they see her too. Or no, not quite; they don't see her, they see a suspicious individual, and they watch that individual until it retreats out of their view. Fortunately, none of them decide to follow her any further than that.

Still. This part of town won't suit her purposes. She moves on, the venipede clinging half-asleep to her backpack, and makes her way back to an area she passed through earlier. It's not east Aspertia, not dangerous-looking by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel emptier than some of the rest of Driftveil. This is not always a good thing; tonight, however, Gwyneth wants isolation. She doesn't remember much of her last time on the streets, spent most of it in the same haze that gripped her earlier today, but she remembers feeling safest when there was no one else around.

At least she has the venipede, she tells herself, and nearly smiles when she catches herself thinking it. Okay, it's annoying and aggressive and it keeps wanting food that she doesn't have, but if it wants to do for her what it did to her in the alley in Virbank, she's willing to concede that maybe it has its uses after all.

After all, she reminds herself, she doesn't really know how to use the knife. And a weapon you don't know how to use …

She finds herself a dark, dry corner, down a sidestreet where the buildings have those old-fashioned indented shopfronts and there are plenty of recesses and blind alleys in between them. Out of the wind. Out of the rain too, should that become an issue. It doesn't look like it will.

Gwyneth looks at the spot for a long moment. She feels the blurriness pressing at the edges of her vision, the modem dialling up somewhere in the back of her head.

She takes a long, unsteady breath.

“Done it before, dude,” she tells herself. “Done it before. And lived, right? And …”

Gwyneth hates herself for this, for what she thinks of as her inability to be practical, to just get the hell on with it. She should be trying to get what sleep she can so she can figure this out in the morning. And yet here she is now, worrying about the mere fact of her being here. Grow up, Gwyneth. Aren't you used to it yet? Were you expecting the goddamn Ritz? Where d'you think you've been all this time?

Gritting her teeth, she clenches her left hand into a fist, slow and unflinching. She feels her arm catch fire in protest, so sharp and bright a pain she can barely even feel her fingers.

“Feeling better yet?” she growls, and takes off her backpack.

Sometime very late, hunched against the wall, she takes the photograph out of her wallet and unfolds it with painful fingers. She looks at the two kids in the picture, laughing against the white background of the photo booth.

She turns it over and reads the words on the back: the sparkling glance of Anaktoria.

It's almost laughable, really. Who else but a child would say something like that? Quote classical literature to lend her love maturity? Yes, it's ridiculous, as kids are, but then Gwyneth was a kid too and she had never had anyone throw poetry at her before. Her heart fluttered every time she looked at it, in that time after their journeys ended and they each went back home, so far away from one another. And even now it has some power to it. Anaktoria. Nobody but Gwyneth knows why Nika calls her Annie. A little bit of their childhood, preserved in a pet name.

Little fragments of Nika.

Little people by the wayside.

Little fires to huddle around in the shadow of the temples.

There's no Shane out there this time, no one to pick her up off the street and lend her a couch. This time she really is alone.

The venipede crawls towards her, a moving darkness in the dying light. Gwyneth stretches out her hand and feels its shell, warm beneath her fingertips.

“Hey,” she whispers. “Hey.”

The venipede clicks curiously. Gwyneth takes her hand away again. It's stupid. She's stupid. She should have listened to Shane. She should have stayed home.

The night passes. It is long and cold and very nearly as unpleasant as those nights in Aspertia, all those months ago.

Gwyneth does not get much sleep. She doesn't get much of anything.

*​

Wednesday, 14th September

She gets lucky, and not. Nobody disturbs her, but when she wakes up to the early morning sunlight she finds she's acquired shooting pains up and down her arm. She tries to sit up and feels her arm lock up, breath catch, fingers tingle.

“Oh hell,” she whispers, too breathless with the feeling of it to raise her voice any louder. “Goddamn it.”

With some difficulty, she drags herself to the wall with her right hand and levers herself up into a sitting position. After what seems like an age, she manages to disentangle her other hand from the sleeping bag, and finds the courage to look at it. The bandages are stained yellow, with a few spots of red. Her fingers look much too flushed where they stick out at the end.

Gwyneth swallows. She tries to remember what she did last night, how she managed to mess up her hand like this – hell, even how she got to this alley. None of it comes easily to her, and for several long minutes, none of it comes at all. Yesterday's haze lies around it like a shroud over a corpse.

She lets her head fall back against the wall and her eyes slip closed. She is if anything more tired than she was last night, the kind of tired that you feel almost as a physical ache, deep down in the marrow of your bones. But she made it, she reminds herself. Her head is clear. Her hand is screwed and she's going to have to spend her last three dollars on something to eat if she doesn't want to risk fainting from hunger later on today, but she's here, in the clear light of day, ready to do … whatever it is that she thinks she's doing.

Gwyneth sighs. Even before she ran out of words, she wasn't doing a very good job of convincing herself.

She hears a low rattle and looks up to see the venipede trundling along towards her down the alley, some oddly-shaped lump clutched in its jaws.

“Whatcha got there, a*shole?” she asks. The venipede transfers the lump from its jaws to its forelegs, hisses at her, and then reapplies itself to eating. A few seconds later, Gwyneth realises that what it's got is a chicken nugget.

“Hey,” she says, leaning towards it slightly. “Where'd you get that?”

The venipede hunches over its prize and rattles warningly, glaring.

“Look, I'm not gonna take it off you, you've probably dribbled poison all over it. Just where'd you find it?”

It flicks its antennae around, agitated, and Gwyneth sinks back against the wall with a sigh.

“Whatever,” she says. “At least I don't have to feed you for a while.”

She unzips her sleeping bag and kicks her way out, slowly and stiffly. She packs up her stuff again, although it's hard to tightly roll a sleeping bag with one hand and painful to do it with two. It takes her three-quarters of an hour to get everything back the way it was, and when she's done she sits down heavily on her backpack, exhausted by the effort of pushing through the pain in her hand.

For the first time, she seriously considers how long she thinks she can keep doing this. Not that long, she thinks, with surprising honesty. But she doesn't have to do it that long. If she can just make it to Humilau, then … what, exactly? Nika will break off the wedding, welcome her back with open arms and pay a doctor to fix her hand? Sure, Gwyneth, if that's what you want to think.

She sighs. Forget about that. Get to Humilau. Focus on that. If she gets there, it will be okay. It will. It can't be worse, anyway.

And how will she get there? She can't answer this, and she's still worrying the thought like a loose tooth when she hears a scratching by her feet and looks down.

The venipede is back, dragging a torn cardboard carton. There are three and a half chicken nuggets inside it, and also an eye-watering amount of bird crap.

Gwyneth stares.

“Dude,” she says.

The venipede clicks to itself and swivels its big orange eye to face her.

She bends down and picks it up, pats its hump gently. She has to use her injured hand, but she figures it's worth it.

“You tried,” she says. “'S more than I ever managed.”

The venipede hisses. It's probably Gwyneth's imagination, but it sounds marginally less hostile than usual.

Well. She'll take what she can get.

*​

Gwyneth eats everything she has left on her, does a quick and haphazard job of making her face palatable to the general public and sets off, the venipede perched on her shoulder like a chitinous parrot. She has a plan, kind of, and a direction, kind of. The direction is north, and the plan is to go to the shelter run by the ex-Plasma activists.

She isn't sure what she expects to find there, or indeed what she'll even do when she gets there. But she has to do something, has to convince herself that she's still moving. Once she saw on TV that sharks can't stop swimming because if the water stops running through their gills they'll suffocate. This is something like that, she thinks. Yesterday she stopped, and she suffocated, and now she's up again she has to keep moving or she might not recover the next time around. And going to the Plasma shelter is the only plan she can come up with.

It's in the north of the city, she knows that, and her phone – 68% battery, it tells her, and she fights away the worry about what to do when it runs out – helps her narrow it down: 97 Great Drummond Street, way out in the foothills. A hell of a walk, but then, she made it all the way to Moorview in Virbank, and that couldn't have been much shorter. Even if she was in better condition back then, she thinks she can manage.

Around her, Driftveil starts to come to life, cars nosing their way out onto the streets like rabbits venturing out of their burrows, engines drowning out the distant noise from the docks to the southeast. Metal shutters go up, shop lights turn on; five unfezant fly by overhead in spectacular formation; a burnt-smelling man with hair standing on end leads a nervy zebstrika down the street, making soothing noises and occasionally receiving minor electric shocks. Tiny metropolitan dramas, that's what Nika calls stuff like that. All those baffling little stories happening constantly in every major city. People living and loving and fighting and dying. Pokémon … well, pokémon doing pokémon things. They're weird enough already.

The sun climbs. It's surprisingly warm today, or maybe she's a little feverish. She hopes the former. Either way, she stops to take off her jacket and tie it to her backpack, and walks on with the warm light and cool air mingling deliciously on her bare arms. Gwyneth has always liked this kind of early-morning weather, where the sun is blazing and you know it will be hot later but for now the air hasn't warmed up. She hasn't really ever slept well, or she's been sleeping badly for so long now that she doesn't remember a time when she didn't, and it's not uncommon for her to wake before dawn. Back in Aspertia, when she and Nika had that apartment with the balcony, she would often get up and sit out there, watching the light swell over the city, and this weather reminds her of that. Pre-dawn air. Post-dawn warmth. Hekate on the roof, doing the same thing: watching, waiting for her partner to wake.

Gwyneth moves on.

She slows. It's not that she's tiring, although she is, but that Driftveil's streets seem to get clogged up faster than their counterparts elsewhere. Maybe she's just in a busy part of town, maybe this is just how things are here; either way, by nine Gwyneth finds she's moving at a snail's pace, trying to squeeze through the gaps between other pedestrians and the traffic.

“What the hell?” she snaps, at everybody and nobody. “What gives?”

What indeed. She really doesn't know. She can't think of a way she might find out, either. Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps on walking.

The shops begin to change, sliding from a mishmash of franchises to independent bookstores and cafés. The pedestrians skew towards the young and eccentric. This all seems familiar to Gwyneth; she recalls vaguely that there's a university here in Driftveil, and guesses she must be close. Kids. Dyed hair and strident opinions. Music, politics, art. She never went to college, but Nika did, and for some of that time they lived together. Not that they meant to, exactly. Gwyneth moved to Nacrene when she left home so that the two of them would at least be in the same city, and then when the other people she was sharing an apartment with left Nika said one of her roommates had left too and she had space for Gwyneth to stay with her for a while. So she moved into what had been Keisha's room, and then after a few weeks Nika moved into that room as well, and in the end 'for a while' turned out to be forever.

Or six years, anyway. But this is old news, even if she does keep endlessly rehashing it, so Gwyneth shakes it off and does her best not to envy the passing students their freedom.

She passes buildings with plaques outside that say things like NATURAL SCIENCES SITE B or LINCOLN HARKNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY. There are kids lounging on the steps of the library, smoking, laughing. Looking at them, Gwyneth feels very strongly that she wants a cigarette, like an itch that can't be scratched. Wonderful. Something else to keep bothering her as she makes her way through this overpopulated hellscape of a city.

Sometime around mid-morning, three swanna fly by overhead, and half the street stops to watch. Gwyneth isn't sure she's ever seen one in flight before. They look even bigger than they do on the ground like this, their broad white wings stretching out wider than Gwyneth is tall. Pausing, she watches them until they disappear behind the buildings, and then for a little while longer in her mind's eye, tracing their path east. She imagines them settling down into warm Humilau water, massive wings folding back up into their flanks like a magic trick.

“Bastards,” she says, although she is really only angry at her own lack of speed, and keeps heading north.

A few streets later, she's out of the college part of town. Now she could be anywhere, Virbank or Aspertia or Castelia; now Gwyneth's spirits lift a little. Chain stores and coffee shops, apartment blocks and offices: it's all kind of depressing, but it's hers, in the same way that university is Nika's. One thing people don't understand about Aân Hen is that it's not the land part that matters, it's the our. The Henuun are engineers, not mystics; they're talking about culture, not geography. Hell, that's what the word means: hen uûn, Us People. In a way, You People is more accurate than white Unovans know. (So Gwyneth says to herself, painfully aware that she learned this from the internet.) And this place, this middling Unovan blandness, this is part of Gwyneth's culture, her Us-ness, and it's okay. Its inhabitants are wary of her, stare at her injured arms and ambiguous face, but it's okay.

The venipede interrupts her thoughts by crawling off her backpack and onto her shoulder, its claws much more obvious now that she has removed her jacket. The pressure of them on her bare skin makes Gwyneth uneasy.

“Get off there, dude,” she says, pushing it back onto her pack. “I don't like you that much.”

It rattles angrily, tries to return. Gwyneth pushes it back again.

“Not gonna tell you again,” she says, trying not to be cross and not doing very well. “Stay. Okay?”

She can't see it back there, but she can't hear it moving, either. It will do, she thinks. It will have to.

It's getting hot. This isn't a good day to be dragging a bag the size of Gwyneth's around, or to have one hand wrapped up in bandages. She thinks again about not taking Three Nights in Opelucid back to the library when she had the chance. When did she think she was going to read it, exactly? She must have known she didn't have the money to do the whole journey by bus. And she did know really, if she's honest. It's just that she refused to think about it. And now here she is, limping through a city she doesn't know to a place she's never been for reasons she isn't sure of.

There is a lesson here about the value of organisation, but Gwyneth isn't in the mood for learning.

She passes the Pokémon Centre and sees fire licking up at the sky from one of the practice courts around the back. Lots of kids around here, and lots of pokémon, too, a riot of colour and noise and unusual smells: the usual suspects, of course, the krokorok and boldore and watchog, but Clay's Gym is popular enough and September close enough to peak trainer journey time that Gwyneth sees a few more uncommon species too: an eelektrik that swims through the air above its master's head, wreathed in sparks; a heatmor licking its flanks with tongues of flame; even a druddigon, casting evil looks around from the centre of an awed ring of onlookers, a beaming girl bursting with pride on its back. Even Gwyneth stares at that. People don't generally train druddigon; they're dangerous, even by dragon standards. She figures the League probably has an eye on her, as it does with people whose pokémon pose a particular risk to public safety, but even so, she moves on in a hurry. Druddigon were killing dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They haven't had to change much since: humans aren't much trouble by comparison.

After this, the traffic starts to thin out and the buildings to shrink: she's made it. The suburbs stretch away and up over the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, humps of housing rising palely before the distant backdrop of brown stone and pine trees. If she wasn't at street level, Gwyneth thinks she might be able to see Twist Mountain from here, a faint ghost of a shape behind the other peaks. She can't remember whether she ever did see it before; there was an observation tower somewhere that she and Nika went up on, she recalls, but that might not have been here in Driftveil.

There's not much to see out here, not much to keep her mind off the ache and the tedium. There are a lot of nice-looking houses, among which Gwyneth feels dirty and out of place. (She is dirty and out of place, but she doesn't appreciate the reminder.) The roads start sloping uphill too, and this last leg of the trip is one hard slog right up to the little commercial block where Gwyneth at last finds Great Drummond Street. It's not as great as the name makes out; in fact, it looks like anywhere else to her. But that's not important. What she came here for is the big barn-like building at number 97. The one with the sign that reads TEAM PLASMA POKÉMON SHELTER.

Gwyneth stares for a moment. She knew what the place was called, of course; she saw when she searched for it on her phone. But still, she's not prepared to see the words up there like that. TEAM PLASMA, in big white type, as if the name doesn't mean a thing. How this place hasn't been vandalised by an angry mob she has no idea. Do people really forget that quickly?

She shakes her head. Maybe they didn't make as big an impression as she thought. No, they did, she knows they did; that was the whole reason Plasma worked, the spectacular magnetism of Harmonia and N. One of the few things she and Cheren agree on is that this is what made Plasma so dangerous: give an expert propagandist like Harmonia someone as naturally charismatic as N, and he'll build himself a cult leader. Some people get chosen and some do not, and Harmonia chose N in all the worst ways. If Hilbert hadn't been there to expose the lie, people really would have followed N right into Harmonia's trap.

Her lip curls. If Hilbert hadn't been there. Okay, Gwyneth.

She sighs. She's been standing out here for several minutes now. If she's going to go in, it's probably about time.

Gwyneth wipes the sweat off her forehead and makes a half-hearted attempt at smoothing her hair. She looks in her mirror, winces, and puts it away again.

She pushes open the door and goes inside.

*​

It's dark in here after the bright sun outside, and Gwyneth stands there blinking for a moment while her eyes adjust. After a little while, she sees a desk along one wall, and a door on the other side of the room from behind which she hears the sound of various animals all attempting to be noisier than the rest.

“Can I help you?” asks the woman behind the desk. She looks twenty-nine, thirty, and she has spectacularly long blonde hair. Something about this seems familiar to Gwyneth, but she can't immediately place her.

“Can I help you?” she asks again. The silence is growing strained. Gwyneth has no idea what to say: can she help her? She isn't sure. She wasn't sure before, but now, standing here with the musky smell of watchog rising from the carpet and an earnest woman asking her questions she is less sure than ever. The lack of certainty is in her bones, in her blood, washing around her body with every beat of her heart. She feels it in her like a paralysing drug.

“Um, hello?” asks the woman, now slightly desperate. “Can I help you?”

Gwyneth stands and stares, mute as a swan. She tries to say something about her pokémon but her throat is raw and dry, her lips two strips of wood.

“Hello, Concordia,” says someone else, coming in through the back door and letting in for an instant before it closes a cacophony of barks and whines. “Could you put in another order for those cattle bones? They're going down rather well with the herdier.”

“Oh. Um, yes, Rood, I can certainly do that. I …”

The someone – Rood, thinks Gwyneth, through the fuzz of indecision: Sage Rood of Team Plasma – stops and looks. He is tall and stooped and grey-moustached, dressed in faded overalls that are worlds away from his cultic Plasma robes. Gwyneth sees his past overlaid on him, the TV reports, Hilbert running him down out on Route 18 with that International Police agent. He hunted them all down, in the end. Mechanically. Silently. Like cleaning house.

“Hello,” says Rood. He has an accent that Gwyneth doesn't recognise. Something European. The Sages came from all over the world. “Can I help you?”

Concordia raises her eyebrows to herself, but says nothing. Neither does Gwyneth.

“Is this about adopting?” persists Rood. “Or are you looking for a specific pokémon that was taken from you in the past?”

So careful, the way he says it. No mention of stealing or even the name, Plasma. It doesn't occur to Gwyneth that perhaps he does this to minimise the pain of visitors and not to soothe his guilt. Slivers of anger creep in, and the lock on her voice breaks.

“It's my pokémon,” she says, croaks really, fidgeting nervously. Rood nods understandingly, gives Concordia an I'll take it from here glance, steps forward. His face arranges itself into an expression of calm, soothing concern. How many times has he done this, Gwyneth wonders. How much human pain has this man seen and tried to redress?

“Of course,” he says, ushering her deeper into the room, round a corner to a door she hadn't seen before. “Please, come into my office, sit down―”

“You don't understand,” she says, pulling away from his arm. “It's not – you don't have them. They're not here.”

Rood pauses, a faint frown of confusion hovering on his brow.

“I'm sorry?”

“They're not here,” Gwyneth repeats. “You – you didn't steal them, exactly, but I mean …” She takes a deep breath. It tastes of dog. “I was just a kid,” she says, hearing the pleading tone in her voice and hating herself for it. “I was just a kid and I – I believed you, and I … liberated them.”

*​

Gwyneth does not really remember the event itself, although it comes back to her often, as smells and sounds and emotions that well up through the cracks in her head and frighten her with their undirected intensity. Nika says this is a characteristic of trauma. Gwyneth knows that she is wrong, that trauma is something that happens to you when real bad things happen, and that whatever has happened to Gwyneth, it is nowhere near bad enough for that. She looks at the awful broken majesty of her country, at its violence and madness, and she smiles harshly and shakes her head. No, nothing of hers is bad enough. Gwyneth's are ordinary misfortunes in an ordinary life. She and her pain are not chosen.

Sometimes she tries to fit it into a series of life-altering events: one, coming out (the first time, the one that started her transition); two, misguided pokémon liberation; three, Martin getting shot; four, the end of her and Nika. This system never seems convincing, somehow. Gwyneth supposes that history never does.

Here are the facts, as far as she can reconstruct them: after she and Bianca had their chat in the pokémon centre, Gwyneth pleaded fatigue and illness and stayed in the Centre while Nika went exploring. Nika believed her, of course. Gwyneth has always been a good liar, and after her conversation with Bianca she looked ill, too. So Nika said okay and asked if Gwyneth wanted her to stay (she didn't) and then went off to do her thing, and Gwyneth went back up to their room and looked at every single Harmonia interview and statement the internet had to show her.

This is one of the things that haunts her across the years: the glint of his electric eye staring into the camera, visible even now in the flash of light on someone's spectacles or the glitter of a ruby ring.

After she did this, Gwyneth knows she must have gone out to the north edge of town, although she does not remember, and she knows she must have let her pokémon out of their balls, although she does not remember this, either. She does not know what she said to them, how she made them understand that their time with her was over. She remembers hurt and confusion, vaguely, on all sides. She remembers the sickly smell of munna smoke charged with fear and anxiety. Like old roses, or blood.

She knows that when Nika found her again her throat was hoarse and her voice was husky, so she imagines she must have screamed at them. They would not have understood; she is aware of this. All they knew is that they were partnered to a human who loved them and whom they loved. They could not know that Gwyneth only ever needed the slightest bit of encouragement to be convinced of her monstrosity – that she was easy prey for Harmonia and his slick, plausible rhetoric.

She does not blame Harmonia, or she does, but she tries not to. One thing Gwyneth does know now is that it's all on her. She was weak and she paid the price. If she had really believed, the way Hilbert believes or Cheren or Bianca, she would never have been taken in. She has been told that this is not a fault, that she was just kind and trusting and these are strengths as much as weaknesses – even that this is exactly how Harmonia manipulated N – but she remains unconvinced. She was weak. Years of persuasion from Nika brought her round, in the end, to the idea that maybe she wasn't such a bad trainer as she thought she was, but she still fell into the trap, didn't she? And that ruins everything. If she was weak enough to be driven to liberate her pokémon, then she was never worthy of them at all.

Nika says she found Gwyneth back at the Pokémon Centre, wandering and staring. She says she thought for a while that maybe Gwyneth was really ill; she wouldn't or couldn't say what had happened, just stared with eyes whose pupils had grown huge and dark. She thought about taking her to the Centre doctors, but she always did have good instincts and her instincts told her that Gwyneth didn't like doctors, so she decided to try just a little more before she caved and took her there, and then that was that: a few more questions and the spell broke.

This is usually where Nika stops. She does not like to talk about that evening, and Gwyneth does not really want to hear, either. She has never been certain why repression is supposed to be a bad thing. There are plenty of things you're better off not knowing.

*​

Rood looks shocked. He is the kind of man who keeps control of his face, Gwyneth can tell, but he can't hide this. He reaches for the frame of the door with one hand as if to steady himself.

Neither of them speak. Gwyneth can almost hear Concordia's stare.

“I'm so very sorry,” says Rood eventually. “Forgive my surprise, I … I am not sure I have ever actually met anyone who did that.”

No, most people weren't that stupid. But that's Gwyneth all over, isn't it?

She forces a smile. She can tell it looks wrong the second she starts, but she guesses she's committed now.

“Yeah,” she says. “Neither have I.”

Rood gathers himself visibly. Now he looks at her properly for the first time, and Gwyneth feels the familiar discomfort: the light in here is dim and forgiving, but still, there's no way he doesn't see the bags under her eyes, the punctures, bruises, bandages, the haphazard shave job. No hiding here; she looks exactly like what she is, a beat-up trans girl who spent last night in an alley.

“We should discuss this in private,” he says, reaching for his composure and grasping at least a little of it. “Come in and sit down.”

Gwyneth follows him into a cramped office that might be neat if there was more space to tidy things away. A big pot plant drapes rubbery leaves over an unstable-looking clutch of filing cabinets; an unfezant coos to itself on a perch by the window. The left side of its head is featherless, the skin tight and pink with burn scars.

“You can put your bag down anywhere,” says Rood, installing himself behind his desk, and Gwyneth drops it by the chair, transferring the venipede to her lap. It twitches restlessly at the unfezant's presence, but soon settles down. “Can I offer you a drink or anything?”

Gwyneth shakes her head.

“No,” she says. “Thanks.”

“Okay then.” Rood leans on his desk, papers crinkling under his arms. “I'm going to have to admit that this is unprecedented for me, um, Miss …?”

Gwyneth knows what that um means. It means Rood is very professional but that he is no different to anyone else, underneath it. This doesn't hurt her. She has had twenty-four years to learn that she is an abomination and now it is in her bones and there is nothing left to hurt.

“Gwyneth,” she says, in a level voice. It's the kind of voice that says everything and nothing.

“Gwyneth.” Rood nods, masking his awkwardness with a businesslike demeanour. “I am Rood Smits. I started the shelter here with a number of other members of Team Plasma, with the authorities' permission of course. Technically this is part of our sentence. A dispensation in acknowledgement of good behaviour.” He smiles briefly. Gwyneth has the feeling he tells this story a lot. “There was a schism after the events at the Pokémon League, you understand. Some of us sided with N and some with Ghetsis. Not everyone was in on Ghetsis' scheme, you know. Please understand, I am not excusing our actions,” he adds quickly. “This is after all an attempt to limit the damage we did and bring Plasma back in line with N's own dreams for the organisation. Mostly our work involves reuniting as many of the stolen pokémon as we still possess with their owners, although of course some remain with Ghetsis' Plasma cell, and also the care and rehoming of abandoned or otherwise abused pokémon.”

Gwyneth finds her eye drawn to the burnt unfezant. Someone did that to it, she thinks. She does not notice, but the fingers of her right hand close defensively around the hump of the venipede.

“But I am aware that we did more and worse than just that,” says Rood. “Which brings me to this. We … offer what we can to those we have hurt.” He spreads his hands. “We cannot undo the damage. We can apologise for and control it.”

Gwyneth is tempted to mutter something sarcastic like big of you, but she holds her tongue. Rood is a good man. She can see that, and that, more than anything, is what makes her angry about this. What use are enemies if they're better people than you are?

“I see,” she says.

“So.” Rood folds his hands. “On behalf of Team Plasma, I would like to offer you a formal and sincere apology, Gwyneth. Our actions were inexcusable, and we do not ask you forgive, only that you allow us to continue working as far as we can towards mending the communities and relationships that we damaged.”

There's a long silence. Gwyneth doesn't know what to say.

“Uh, thanks.” She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. “Yeah. Thanks, I guess, I … I was a dumb kid, naïve―”

“And we should not have abused that,” says Rood smoothly. “I am truly sorry. I … it's strange, I've thought about this quite a lot. What I would say if someone in your position ever came here, that is. Until today I never really knew.” A small, awkward smile, breaking through the administrative composure. “I suppose I had hoped that our message had gone unheeded.”

Gwyneth nods. She is now entirely out of words. It's all right; Rood still seems to have a few more.

“Now, as to more concrete redress,” he says, “you should of course be compensated, but I am afraid we lack the financial backing we had in our … ten years ago. There was a compensation fund for Plasma victims, but I do not know if it is still exists. I can try to get in contact with the relevant authorities, if you wish.”

Compensation fund? Even if it does exist, it wouldn't pay out in time to help get her to Humilau. Still, Gwyneth supposes it's worth a shot. They must have run out of worthier people to reimburse by this point, so she wouldn't feel too bad about taking their money.

“That'd be good of you,” she says. “Thanks.”

Rood inclines his head, all calming solemnity.

“Not at all. Can I take down your contact details? I will get in touch when I know more.”

“Hm? Oh, sure, I guess.” She writes down her phone number and email address on a scrap of paper he offers her and hands it back to him. “Here.”

“Thank you so much.” Rood inspects it for a moment, then puts it in his desk drawer. “If there is anything else we can do, Gwyneth, then do please let us know.”

Gwyneth is about to say no, is about to just get up and leave. And then she remembers who and where she is, and she thinks: sharks have to keep moving or they suffocate.

Hell, she might as well try.

“There is something,” she says, slowly, fighting the urge to swallow her words and run. “Kind of weird, but … I desperately need to get to my brother's wedding and – can any of you give me a lift to Nimbasa?”

 

[diamondpearl876]

Saadiyyah reaches casually up to Steggers' head as she leaves Campsite 2, runs her fingers affectionately across the heavy lines of his face, and he presses his neck against her hand, infinitely careful of her fragile human bones.

This is a super cute image, I have to say. XD

The venipede is back, dragging a torn cardboard carton. There are three and a half chicken nuggets inside it, and also an eye-watering amount of bird crap.

Gwyneth stares.

“Dude,” she says.

The venipede clicks to itself and swivels its big orange eye to face her.

She bends down and picks it up, pats its hump gently. She has to use her injured hand, but she figures it's worth it.

“You tried,” she says. “'S more than I ever managed.”

The venipede hisses. It's probably Gwyneth's imagination, but it sounds marginally less hostile than usual.

Well. She'll take what she can get.

Huh, I guess venipede can be something besides hostile sometimes after all! But yeah, this was one of my favorite scenes in the two chapters I read. I'm a huge fan of both venipede and chicken nuggets, so I may be biased.

But yeah, I'm not following my usual review formatting. I found myself highlighting sections while reading but not really knowing what to put down for notes. And, while typing something that's actually post-able now, I'm still struggling how to articulate anything that isn't "I love this" or "beautifully written". I think I write comments to that effect quite a bit for your writing, but yeah. XD

There were so many different ideas explored in the last two chapters - Gwyneth's heritage, more details of her relationship with Nika, Team Plasma then and now, money concerns, Gywneth's old journey, her new journey through the caves, her dissociation, etc etc - and it easily could've all become overwhelming, but the writing flowed very naturally and at a perfect pace. Nothing felt out of place or awkward with the time skips. I did find Gwyneth's dissociation particularly interesting to read. I've never seen a more accurate account of how it feels to dissociate, so I do want to thank you for putting to words that awful, hard to explain feeling. I'm sure it wasn't easy.

I'm not sure if I've touched on the depth of Gwyneth's character before, but I did want to commend you, too, for portraying a very flawed, negative character like this so well. Her negativity doesn't become overwhelming and she's not so flawed that she has no redeeming qualities. I also feel that a lot of her actions and parts of her personality are... hard to understand the reasoning behind, for lack of a better term? As in, most people would expect someone to be grateful when shown kindness, but the fact that Gwyneth feels a spark of anger instinctively instead speaks volumes about her. But what she's experienced in the past, and what she's going through now in the present completely explains why she reacts to everything the way she does. Basically, Gwyneth's character feels like a puzzle to me, but one whose pieces all fit perfectly together to make one flawed but realistic human who wants to be better but doesn't know how without betraying herself.

I don't generally do my reviews like this because I ramble, but I guess the stuff I highlighted while reading made me speechless and that's why I don't have anything constructive to say, heh.

My only criticisms are related to Americanized stuff: I didn't recognize the word "lorries," which Google told me is British, and "paralysed" should be "paralyzed." Those aren't even criticisms, are they? Nope, I've got nothin' bad to say. Keep it up. XD

 

[Cutlerine]

But yeah, this was one of my favorite scenes in the two chapters I read. I'm a huge fan of both venipede and chicken nuggets, so I may be biased.

They're both pretty good, it must be said! I'm glad you liked the scene, anyway. It's about time that Gwyneth's opinion of the venipede started to change, although obviously not that much.

But yeah, I'm not following my usual review formatting. I found myself highlighting sections while reading but not really knowing what to put down for notes. And, while typing something that's actually post-able now, I'm still struggling how to articulate anything that isn't "I love this" or "beautifully written". I think I write comments to that effect quite a bit for your writing, but yeah. XD

There were so many different ideas explored in the last two chapters - Gwyneth's heritage, more details of her relationship with Nika, Team Plasma then and now, money concerns, Gywneth's old journey, her new journey through the caves, her dissociation, etc etc - and it easily could've all become overwhelming, but the writing flowed very naturally and at a perfect pace. Nothing felt out of place or awkward with the time skips. I did find Gwyneth's dissociation particularly interesting to read. I've never seen a more accurate account of how it feels to dissociate, so I do want to thank you for putting to words that awful, hard to explain feeling. I'm sure it wasn't easy.

Well, thanks! That's ... a hell of a compliment, seriously. I guess I'm mostly just really glad it all came out okay. I wasn't totally sure that much of it made sense, which I guess is an occupational hazard of trying to write about things that feel like they don't make sense when they're happening to you, so it's good to know that in the final event that wasn't an issue.

I'm not sure if I've touched on the depth of Gwyneth's character before, but I did want to commend you, too, for portraying a very flawed, negative character like this so well. Her negativity doesn't become overwhelming and she's not so flawed that she has no redeeming qualities. I also feel that a lot of her actions and parts of her personality are... hard to understand the reasoning behind, for lack of a better term? As in, most people would expect someone to be grateful when shown kindness, but the fact that Gwyneth feels a spark of anger instinctively instead speaks volumes about her. But what she's experienced in the past, and what she's going through now in the present completely explains why she reacts to everything the way she does. Basically, Gwyneth's character feels like a puzzle to me, but one whose pieces all fit perfectly together to make one flawed but realistic human who wants to be better but doesn't know how without betraying herself.

And thanks again, really. I mean, all of this is really nice to hear; you've made my week right there. That's what I wanted to do with Gwyneth, and I'm delighted that apparently I managed it. She's meant to be a jerk, but you know, a relatable one, I guess. Not someone whose problems can be solved with a road trip, but someone who might learn something from it, if she'll only tighten her grip on all the things she thinks make her herself for long enough to let them move and change.

My only criticisms are related to Americanized stuff: I didn't recognize the word "lorries," which Google told me is British, and "paralysed" should be "paralyzed." Those aren't even criticisms, are they? Nope, I've got nothin' bad to say. Keep it up. XD

Darn, I thought I'd excised all the lorries. (They just sort of ... creep in when I'm not paying attention, like a lot of regional words, and clearly I'm not as good at hunting them down and cutting them out as I thought I was.) As for the s/z thing, I know there are a bunch of places where I've used S where I should have used Z, so yeah, I'll have to go back and sort all those out at some point. Thanks for catching that! And for all the other stuff you said; it's always encouraging to know that, you know, someone's reading and enjoying a thing you're producing, especially if you're not sure whether the thing in question is actually entertaining or just kinda depressing. Which is a question that has occurred to me multiple times when writing Go Home, I have to admit.

Also, apropos of nothing, it's just occurred to me that Black and White 2 actually add onix to Unova -- and in the Relic Passage itself, of all places -- so this makes the whole point about Saadiyyah having one of very few onix in Unova somewhat non-canonical, but let's just say that nobody's discovered the onix yet.

 

[Cutlerine]

Content warning: in this chapter, there is some reference to past self-harm.

SEVEN: OLD SCARS

Wednesday, 14th September

Ask, and ye shall receive. That's from the Bible, Gwyneth thinks. She's not sure. Bits of Catholicism rubbed off on her from Nika, but not much. Gwyneth is more interested in this world than the next.

Anyway, Rood agrees. He's surprised, of course, although after a moment it fades; he looks at her again and puts the pieces together. This is someone who has spent all her resources, he thinks. This is Gwyneth's breaking point. If he was standing where she is, he might be desperate enough to ask strangers for rides too.

Gwyneth can see this, or thinks she can. (She cannot see that Rood is recalling his own breaking point, nearly a decade ago, when Plasma came crashing down around his ears and his friend Ghetsis turned out to be a monster, and Rood himself ran blindly until he reached Route 18 and bumped into an enigmatic smile and an International Police badge.) It's pity, she's sure of it, and it makes her stomach turn, but she does not say anything. She can't afford her stupid damn pride now.

“One of our people needs to go into Nimbasa anyway,” Rood tells her. “Returning a liepard to his partner. I can arrange for them to take you along.” He clicks around on his computer. “It's … Jackie, all right. I'll let him know.”

“Thanks,” says Gwyneth, trying to sound heartfelt. “Thanks so much, dude, I really needed this.”

Some of the intensity in her voice must be genuine. Rood looks up and smiles briefly.

“It's all right,” he replies. “As I say, he'll be going there anyway. And we do owe you. Quite considerably, in fact.”

Gwyneth shifts uncomfortably. In her lap, the venipede hisses disconsolately at the disturbance.

“Uh, yeah,” she says. “Guess so.”

“I believe he'll be in at around two,” Rood informs her. “Come back then, would you? Tell Concordia you're here and she'll be able to point you in the right direction.”

“Right. Thanks.” Gwyneth stands up, nearly dropping the venipede. Rood watches with obvious unease as she fumbles to catch it, left hand stiff and awkward. “Uh – yeah, so thanks again,” she repeats, grabbing her bag. She just wants out of here now, as fast as possible. “I'll, uh, I'll come back at two.”

Rood stands to get the door for her and she staggers out, trying to juggle bag, jacket and venipede and almost dropping all three. In the lobby she forces herself to stop and sort everything out, and then, venipede on bag on back, she leaves.

Well. Could have gone a lot worse.

Gwyneth sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. She's found a way forward. Isn't that the main thing? It has to be. Forget closure, forget history: she has a ride out of Driftveil. It's more than she had this morning. More than she had any right to have at all, she knows. And yet she has it anyway.

“We're doing all right,” she tells the venipede, to make it sound more real. She is not convinced. It's okay. She doesn't have to be.

She wanders down the street, unsure of what to do now. There are a couple of hours to go until she needs to be back at the shelter, and she's tired as hell after walking all the way here. What she'd like is somewhere to rest, maybe get a drink and something to eat, but it's fairly clear that this is not on the cards. She could afford a meal, just. Some junk food or something, cheap and filling. But she'd rather wait until this evening. If she's going to burn the last of her money, she has to make it count.

So: aimless wandering again. There's nowhere to sit here, really. In places there isn't even any sidewalk. These suburbs weren't built with pedestrians in mind. Gwyneth walks, takes rationed sips of her water, feels the heat of the sun ratcheting up as morning gives way to afternoon. The venipede clicks on her bag and tries to climb down her arm, but Gwyneth is ready for it this time and catches it before it does any damage, lifting it down to the ground where it can scuttle between patches of shade, avoiding what light it can.

“Sun's not your thing, huh,” says Gwyneth, watching it. “You're gonna have fun in Humilau then, dude.”

This is not very funny, but it makes her smile, at least until she realises that she's just predicted a future in which it is still with her by the time she gets there. Then she stops. Abruptly.

“C'mon,” she says, harshly. “Can't hang around in the shade all day. We're moving.”

So she moves, and the venipede with her. She thinks that maybe she could walk up to the edge of the city – she can't be that far off it now – and do some liberation all over again, but she knows she can't. It isn't a question of whether or not she likes it, or it her; it's a question of what is possible and what isn't. And it's not possible for Gwyneth to do that again. She's amazed that she managed to do it the first time. It messed her up for weeks afterwards.

These are strange weeks in her recollection, with Nika hauling her by inches and raw willpower out of her fugue back into life. She remembers being dragged around Nimbasa, Nika determinedly chattering on and on about the rioting in the 1850s and the historic fashion houses; she remembers the theme park and the Musical Theatre, sitting with Nika in the dark and seeing a different sort of trainer coach their pokémon to a different sort of mastery. It's like that first journey together from Striaton west to Wellspring Cave. Then and now, Nika responds to the pain of others with feverish activity, burning herself up to make their lives just a little better. It's an instinct she will never learn to suppress, and which Gwyneth will come to be both thankful for and afraid of: what will happen to Nika if she pours all her energy into maintaining Gwyneth? Because by then Gwyneth will be a black hole, capable of taking everything you give her and still sucking in more, and she will know with cast-iron certainty that you don't throw people like Nika into black holes like that.

Still. Nika is sixteen and Gwyneth is fifteen, and at that age you are fumbling your way through a whole host of new types of interaction you have not yet learned to deal with. They do okay, for their inexperience. And little by little, Gwyneth comes back to herself. She's not the same. She never will be. But she's back.

She realises that it's happened one afternoon in the Pokémon Centre, in the practice court round the back of the building. Word has got around that Nika's pretty good, and there are three or four hotheaded kids who want to beat her; Gwyneth is sitting on the bench at the back, ostensibly watching Astyanax battle a watchog but really watching Nika, the height and grace of her, the way she puts her weight on one leg and her hand on her hip, a perfect image of casual power – and then she realises all at once that she hasn't thought about Blossom or Corbin even once today. And more than that, she realises that she is okay with this.

That evening Nika says she thinks she's tough enough to take on the Gym now, speaking diffidently in case organised pokémon training is still something that might upset her, and Gwyneth agrees enthusiastically. Let's go tomorrow, she says, and Nika stares, then smiles.

Okay, she says. Sure thing.

The next day, they go back to the theme park in the East Bank, where Elesa's Gym is built up around one of the rollercoasters. It's possible to get to her without riding the coaster, of course, but after registering Nika and Gwyneth ride it anyway, for the full experience and for fun, and they get off at the end where the arena is, lit by shafts of coloured light and ringed by trainers and fans here to see the battles – or, although they might not admit it, to see Elesa. She is one of Unova's most famous models, and surfs through life on a wave of her own glamour. Nika and Gwyneth are by no means immune: though they watch the three battles that are due to take place before Nika's, neither of them can actually remember anything about them afterwards.

When Nika's turn comes, it's a close thing. Elesa faces a lot of sandile and krokorok, and she has ways of dealing with their immunity to her electric-types' moves; her emolga only ever land for a split second, keeping themselves well out of range of Astyanax's ground-type moves, and shuffle in and out of combat with U-turn, striking repeatedly at his weaknesses much too fast for him to counter. Nika recalls him before they beat him unconscious and sends out Britomartis, against whom the emolga struggle to make much impression. The pawniard waits, tanks hits, and when the emolga get close smacks them out of the air, one by one.

“Oh hey, now I remember Lenora saying something about you,” says Elesa, smiling so beautifully that Nika very nearly loses her concentration and throws the match then and there. (She doesn't admit to this, but Gwyneth can tell, because it has more or less the same effect on her.) “You're the smart one with the dark-types, aren't you?”

Nika admits, stumblingly, that she is, and Elesa looks pleased.

“Looking forward to how you deal with this, then,” she says, and sends out a zebstrika that snorts sparks and sets itself aflame with static discharge, crashing into Britomartis and sending her flying with one perfectly-executed flame charge. She gets up again, just, but Nika knows when to back down and recalls her, sending out Hekate instead. By this point, Gwyneth's heart is sinking – one pokémon left, and a flying-type? Nika has as good as lost – and at first it does look like everything is over. Hekate isn't even attacking, just tottering around on her little legs, rolling between the zebstrika's hooves as it tries to pin her down with bolts of lightning. It's having a hard time of it, with her being so small and its equine eyes not suited for this, but Elesa's voice keeps it steady and Gwyneth knows it must only be a matter of time before one of its blows finds its mark.

But Nika isn't done yet. She keeps this up for a little while, just long enough for Elesa to raise a quizzical eyebrow and the zebstrika to start whinnying and lashing out wildly in discontent, and then out of nowhere she has Hekate whip up a whirlwind, right between the zebstrika's legs. Its hooves fly out from under it in four different directions and, scrabbling around like a spider on rollerskates, the big horse staggers away, back towards Elesa; snorting furiously, it gathers lightning around itself, and though Elesa shouts for it to stop the command comes too late: the zebstrika launches itself at Hekate in a thunderous wild charge that completely misses, taking it out of the arena and into the back wall with a crash and a strong smell of burning paint. It's not badly hurt – pokémon are tough, and frankly the wall looks like it came off worse – but it's confused, and it takes long enough getting back to the arena that the match is forfeit.

It's an object lesson in the inadvisability of trying to charge something as small and bouncy as a soccer ball. Elesa stares at Hekate, preening calmly like she does this every day, and bursts out laughing. Okay, she says, she'll allow it. Why the hell not. Well done, Nika. She asked how she'd deal with a zebstrika and she got herself an answer.

Outside, after Nika's got her badge and TM, Gwyneth tells her she was amazing, that she didn't think it was possible to win, and Nika smiles, ecstatic. She wasn't really expecting to win herself. The idea of pissing the zebstrika off enough that it ignored its training was not something she actually thought would work. But she doesn't say any of this; she's light-headed with the elation of unexpected victory and the delight of seeing Gwyneth laughing and smiling like nothing is wrong, and in her head wheels are spinning without, for once, any of her fears and anxieties to weigh them down, and she suggests that they should do something to celebrate. And the two of them look around and see, rising above the park like an electric giant, the Ferris wheel.

This is where it happens. Up there, with blue sky on all sides. Summer is coming, they said, and now it's here, now it's all around them, light and heat and joy that blanks out even the pain of what happened three weeks ago, hiding the bleeding stump of Gwyneth's trainer career beneath a cloak of bright summer magic.

So, Gwyn, says Nika nervously. (All this seemed like a much better idea when she was high on victory.) Pretty cool view, huh?

Yeah, agrees Gwyneth, although she isn't looking out, not really. Her whole being is focused in this spot, inside this gondola with this girl.

There is the longest pause, as they reach the top of the wheel and then start to come down again, and then Nika realises that they'll soon be back down on the ground and starts gabbling uh, so Gwyn listen I wanted to say but Gwyneth already knows, is starting to think that maybe she's known since Wellspring Cave, even, and she turns to Nika and smiles and smiles and when they walk out of the gondola back into the crowds thronging the park, the two of them are holding hands. It's tentative. It's awkward. It's perfect.

We should go take your pokémon to the Centre, says Gwyneth.

Yeah, agrees Nika.

And they go, together.

In a way, nothing has changed. Gwyneth will still have guilty nightmares. She still can't see Harmonia on TV without shaking and coming close to tears. She is still punching herself over and over, on the inside where nobody can see. But now she has Nika, even more than she had her before.

Summer is coming, they said. And now summer is here.

*​

And after summer comes autumn. Nika's favourite day: the autumn solstice. Enough sun left for the old magic to linger; enough cool coming for the new to edge in. The day she chose for her wedding.

It's a fact, and Nika doesn't know that Gwyneth knows this, but it's a fact that Nika would have asked Gwyneth to marry her. She'd been planning it for weeks, and the only reason she didn't follow through is because she was waiting for the unpleasantness to blow over. This was not an unreasonable assumption to make; it always blew over before. But though it didn't that time, if it had and she had got her chance, she would have set the same date.

The impending offer was another reason why they split up. This is another thing that Nika doesn't know about.

If she does make it to Humilau, thinks Gwyneth, she has a lot of explaining to do.

First, though, she actually has to get there. Right now, she's sitting on a low wall bounding the parking lot of a grocery store, taking measured sips of water and wallowing in the past. It's not attractive, she knows that, but what the hell, it stops her going crazy. Assuming she hasn't already. She has always remained wilfully ignorant of anything to do with mental illness, but she doesn't need to know much to know that whatever state of mind she was in yesterday is not something typically associated with good health.

It's okay. She's not dead. She sees this as enough for now.

“Think it's time we headed out, dude,” she says to the venipede, in the vague hope that talking might snap her out of this. “C'mon. We got twenty minutes.”

She gets up and it follows, clicking irritably at the hot tarmac beneath its feet. This side of midday, the heat that was building earlier has soaked into Driftveil like red wine into a white shirt, indelible and impossible to ignore. Heat haze shimmers above the roads to the west. The sky is so violently blue it's almost painful to look at.

Well. There are still six days of summer to go, after all. Maybe Unova's just trying to fit a little more sun in before autumn officially begins.

Inside the Team Plasma shelter, an electric fan is whirring back and forth, making Concordia's hair and the pages of her book shift and rustle. A purrloin has appeared from somewhere and is lying splayed out across the floor directly in front of the fan's breeze. It looks up, heat-sluggish, as Gwyneth enters.

“Hey,” she says, as Concordia transfers her attention from the book to her. (Seeing – what, exactly? Her gaze is as opaque as lead.) “I'm here to see Jackie? Rood said you'd be expecting me.”

“Gwyneth, right?” Concordia's voice is soft and careful, from a lifetime of Harmonia. That's where Gwyneth recognises her from, she remembers: she was one of the two girls he adopted alongside N. Was she arrested with the rest of the team? It seems harsh. Gwyneth doesn't think being roped into something by your abusive a*shole of a father ought to be a crime. “Yes, he mentioned. Follow me.”

She gets up, notices the purrloin and sighs.

“You got out again? Oh, never mind. I'll deal with you later, Sam.” She smiles shyly at Gwyneth, who is unprepared to be smiled at by someone as pretty as Concordia and so is momentarily stunned. “Sorry. This way, please.”

“Uh. Okay, sure.”

Concordia leads her through the door at the back and down a noisy corridor that smells strongly of animals, to an exit into the parking lot behind the building. Someone that Gwyneth assumes is Jackie is leaning against a red car that looks like it's in slightly better shape than Shane's.

“I'm sorry, by the way,” says Concordia, as they cross the lot.

“Huh?”

“For what we did to you.” She looks genuinely apologetic. Even Gwyneth can't find it in herself to take that as condescension.

“Oh,” she says, unsure of what to feel if not anger. “Um. Thanks, I guess. It's … it's been a while. Water under the bridge.”

She isn't sure if Concordia believes her, but if she doesn't, she doesn't say so. Instead, she calls out to the man by the car.

“Hey, Jackie! This is Gwyneth.”

He raises a hand in an elliptical kind of greeting. Gwyneth nods. She can deal with laconic. She's no good at talking to people anyway.

“Hey,” she says, and Jackie nods back.

“Hey,” he replies.

“Rood tell you what you need to know?” asks Concordia, and Jackie nods. He's tall and young and dark, in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that shows the little burn scars on his arms. When he looks at Gwyneth, she knows, he sees the matching scars on her arms, sees a person who knows more than one use for a cigarette. It's okay. She's over it now. It's just that even if you are, you have to carry the marks around for the rest of your life.

She supposes that this applies to everything else in her life, too.

“So, I'm taking you to Nimbasa,” says Jackie. He's careful. He keeps his eyes on her face, same as Gwyneth keeps hers on his. Neither of them knows whether the other is sensitive about these things, or how much. Gwyneth doesn't like people looking at her face, either, but she's long since accepted that she doesn't get a choice about that.

“Yep,” says Gwyneth. “And, uh, my venipede, I guess. I hope that's okay.”

Jackie grins. One of his teeth is quite obviously fake.

“We're Team Plasma,” he says. “We love all pokémon. Although if you've got a druddigon, I'd appreciate it if it stays in its ball.”

It's not the best attempt at breaking the ice Gwyneth has ever come across, but it gets the job done. She smiles and so does Concordia, relieved.

“Okay, well, I'd better get back to the desk,” she says. “Do you have the address, Jackie?”

“Yeah.”

“Good.” She smiles at Gwyneth again. “Goodbye, Gwyneth. Good luck!”

“Thanks,” says Gwyneth, and really means it. (She was ready for the smile this time, but it still packed a hell of a punch.) She and Jackie watch Concordia go for a moment, and then look back at each other, faintly awkward.

“So,” says Jackie, after a second. “You ready?”

“Sure, dude,” says Gwyneth.

“You can put your bag in the trunk,” he says. “Stevie's on the back seat.”

Gwyneth looks in through the open window and sees an elderly liepard yawning in the sun. She always forgets how big those things look when you get this close to them.

“Okay,” she says, and goes to dump her bag.

A few minutes later, Gwyneth is installed on the passenger seat with the venipede and Jackie is pulling the car out onto the road, the wind starting to pick up as they get moving. Gwyneth had almost forgotten what this was like, driving along with the windows open on a hot day. The memory of summers past comes back to her with a sudden surprising force.

“I figure you've probably had apologies already,” says Jackie, “but I can't not, so. I am sorry, for what we did.”

“Thanks,” says Gwyneth. The venipede shuffles on her lap. It's listening to Stevie, she thinks, with the wariness of a small predator sharing space with a big one. “It was a while ago.”

“Stays with you, though.” Jackie takes them round the corner and down another line of interchangeable houses. “Stayed with me.” He shakes his head. “Hell of a shock to find out that more than half the team were there for Ghetsis and not for the pokémon.”

Another long pause. In this bright light, and with time to reflect, Gwyneth is becoming aware of how dusty her clothes are after coming through the tunnels. She probably should have changed before coming back to the shelter.

“Still,” says Jackie. “It was a while ago, like you said. Hope Rood and Concordia showed you Plasma's different now.”

Gwyneth thinks of the unfezant with the burns. She thinks very strongly that she would like a blunt object and the name of the person responsible – but that doesn't help the bird, does it? And that's the difference between her and people like Rood and Concordia. Her instinct is always to fight or to run. Theirs is to help the wounded.

There are various conclusions you could draw from this. Gwyneth's, as usual, is vehement and not very flattering.

“Yeah,” she says. “They did.” She hesitates. “Gotta say, I'm surprised you kept the name. Don't people mind?”

“At first. Not so much these days.” Jackie shrugs. “We figure it's up to us to make Plasma mean what it was supposed to. Though I guess we got competition now.”

Gwyneth freezes. Her heart starts to pound like it wants out of her chest.

“Competition? Plasma's still going?”

“Huh? Yeah. You didn't see the news? Roxie and some kid trainers ran into a cell near Virbank. Harmonia's people. Bad stuff.” He sighs. “Former friends of mine, some of 'em. They called me up and asked me to sign back on. Don't know what they're planning, but none of us at the shelter want anything to do with it.”

Again. It could happen again. Oh, it won't be the same plan, Gwyneth knows that; not even Harmonia could make it work twice. You only get one shot at something like that. After the first time, everyone knows you're not just a pokémon rights activist. But that's not enough to stop someone like him, is it? Harmonia is only human, and Gwyneth knows better than most what that really means.

“Goddamn.” She doesn't know what else to say, so she says it again. “Goddamn.”

“Yeah.” Jackie laughs humourlessly. “Some people just won't quit.”

“Guess they don't know when they're beaten,” says Gwyneth, feeling hypocritical but not quite good enough at irony to know why.

“Guess not,” agrees Jackie. And they drive on.

The suburbs of Driftveil go on for a long time, longer than seems reasonable or sane. Gwyneth wonders how anyone who lives here gets to wherever it is they work on time. She hasn't seen so much as a convenience store for at least half an hour; it's all just houses, row after row after goddamn row.

“Dull part of town, huh,” she says.

“Yup,” Jackie says. “Rent's low at least.”

“That why you're based out here?”

“Yup.”

After a while, Jackie clicks the radio on, tunes around. News, soft rock, pop, period drama with exaggeratedly English accents. He tunes back to the rock and leaves it there, which suits Gwyneth just fine. If you're riding in a car with the windows down on a sunny day, you should probably be listening to rock music, she thinks.

In the back, Stevie yawns and rolls over to curl up the other way. The venipede, which had just started to relax, tenses again at the sudden movement.

“Chill, dude,” Gwyneth tells it, not caring if Jackie hears. “He's not gonna eat you.”

“He doesn't have the jaws for it any more,” says Jackie. “Or the energy. He's sixteen and doesn't hunt anything more lively than cat food.”

“Pretty old for a liepard.”

“Yeah. Took us a while to track down his previous partner, unfortunately. Normally people come to us, but in this case she's bedbound. Hence the house delivery.”

“Right.” Gwyneth looks down at the venipede. “You hear that? He's harmless.”

It rattles at her and she sighs.

“Fine, then, be that way.”

Jackie takes them east, back towards the real Driftveil. It's a city of two coasts, really; the square of land in between is just a wilderness of housing estates, places where the factories and commercial hubs store their workers at night. From the drawbridge down to the docks, the metalworks and foundries stand shoulder to shoulder, belching out smoke that stands out blackly against the electric sky. In amongst them Gwyneth sees huge, dark buildings like enormous barns, giant yellow hazard signs plastered on every wall. They have industrial garbodor in there, massive things with bodies of slag and radioactive waste, capable of eating anything from charcoal to depleted uranium. On their second visit to Driftveil, when they were eighteen, Nika insisted they take the tour, and Gwyneth stared from behind a protective psychic barrier as a garbodor the size of a bull elephant shovelled cinders from the factories into its mouth with fingers like railway sleepers. She remembers imagining dozens of them eating the building, eating Driftveil, eating the world down to a nub of molten metal like a time-lapse of worms collapsing an apple to the core.

“Been to Driftveil before?” asks Jackie, almost as if he's read her mind, and Gwyneth nods.

“On my trainer journey,” she says. “And then again as a normal tourist.”

“Not a lot of those around here.”

Gwyneth shrugs.

“We went everywhere.”

Jackie doesn't ask who 'we' means. Gwyneth appreciates that. She appreciates everything that makes these things go even a little bit smoother.

“What's in Nimbasa for you?” he asks. “Rood said you had to get there urgently.”

“Nothing, really. I just have to get to my brother's wedding in Humilau, and Nimbasa's the next town.”

Jackie gives her a long sideways look, appraising and calculating. It's subtle, but you don't look at Gwyneth without her noticing. He sees more now, sees someone desperate enough that she has to resort to this to get where she needs to go. Sees Gwyneth for what she is.

“That's a helluva trip,” he says. “You two must be close.”

Gwyneth almost laughs.

“Hell, no,” she replies. “I can't stand him. But I like his … I like his fiancée.” She smiles, and possibly the pain shows and possibly it does not. “We got history.”

“Right,” says Jackie. If he sees anything he doesn't show it. He has a face as motionless as a piece of lead. “The good kind, I hope?”

“The best.” Gwyneth pauses, aware she's said more than she meant to. The pause lengthens into a silence, and Jackie drives on through it, bringing the car to rest at the back of a queue at some traffic lights. It's getting busier now that they're out of the suburbs. They got here from the shelter in maybe half an hour, but it'll take twice that just to get from here to the bridge, Gwyneth can tell.

Without the wind of movement to cool it, the car gets hot fast. Stevie lolls and makes grumbling feline noises. The venipede crawls down into the shadows in the footwell. Gwyneth rests her arm in the open window and feels the sun turn her bandages into an oven.

“Here we go,” says Jackie, with a sigh. “They keep saying they're working on fixing the traffic round here but they never manage it. Open a dozen new roads and they fill up just as fast.”

“Driftveil seems like that all over,” ventures Gwyneth, thinking of the congested streets she fought down earlier, and Jackie nods.

“Yeah, it's a mess. Streets ain't big enough for all the crap that's in them.”

They move forward, foot by foot. Car horns blare. Someone walks by with a seismitoad and a plant mister, occasionally spraying the one with the other to stop its sensitive skin cracking in the heat. Every time, the seismitoad croaks a heartfelt thanks and rubs its oversized hands all over its warty body.

“That should be in its ball,” says Jackie, scowling. “Cruel to make it walk around town on a day like this.”

Gwyneth doesn't say anything. She thinks of suggesting that maybe the seismitoad likes to walk, or has a problem with poké balls, but she believes she has no right to talk about what's good for pokémon or not. Leave that to the real activists. Leave it to Jackie.

Her guess about how long it would take to get to the bridge is more or less perfect: an hour or so after hitting the traffic, they drive up onto an overpass and come around a corner to see the orange bulk of the Driftveil Drawbridge shining like a dawn stone in the afternoon sun. Gwyneth can see all the way across the bay to the other side and the forests either side of the highway leading east towards Nimbasa. She sees the cargo ships and ferries, the gulls wheeling high above, the city sprawling along the coast like a concrete lion lounging in the sun. She sees the water and realises with a wonder that just about touches her even through her cynicism and dissociation that she was walking underneath that only yesterday.

“I came to Driftveil through the … well, they call it the Relic Passage,” she tells Jackie, and the name only slightly spoils the magic of it. “The tunnel that goes under the bay to Castelia?”

“What? You're kidding me. How's that even possible?”

“Nah, dude, it's real. Old Henuun thing. There's all these caves down there and they just cut corridors in between them.”

Jackie whistles. It's a good whistle, sharp and clear. The kind you could cut paper with.

“Incredible,” he says. “Right under the bay?”

“Yeah. An escape tunnel from Hil'Zorah. One end at―”

“Hilzawhat now?”

Gwyneth refuses to take the bait. She doesn't know if Jackie's fishing, but she refuses anyway, on principle.

“Hil'Zorah,” she repeats. “Big fortress in the middle of Hilaan.”

“Oh. The Relic Castle.” He says it like someone satisfied to have got to the answer, like someone who doesn't know what he's saying. Okay.

“Yeah,” says Gwyneth. “That.” She takes a breath. They're coming up on the bridge now, the highway full of massive trucks standing shoulder to shoulder and grumbling like bouffalant protecting their calves. It's still hot even in their shadow. “The tunnel's an escape route. One end comes out in Castelia, one in Driftveil.”

“I had no idea.” Jackie drums his fingers absently on the steering wheel. Stevie looks up sharply in the back, hissing, and he stops. “Those Relics sure were good at building stuff,” he says blithely. “Makes you wonder why they didn't put it all back up again after the dragons blew it up.”

Not even indigenes. Gwyneth briefly imagines herself having that conversation, possibly that argument, if it came to it, and then because she knows that even if she wins she will lose in all the ways that matter she decides to let it go.

“Mm,” she says. “Maybe they figured there wasn't any point after all the farmland got turned into a desert.”

Jackie nods, eyebrows raised, a perfect portrait of oh, I never thought of that before.

“Yeah,” he agrees. “That tracks.”

Gwyneth asks herself what Jackie sees when he looks at her. She's forced to admit she can't tell. His is not the kind of face that gives much away, or possibly it's just that there is nothing behind it to be given away. It might be that he never even looked past the burn scars to see the colour of her skin or the nauseating geometry of her face.

She supposes that's okay. She probably gets more of his sympathy this way.

The pace picks up once they're actually on the approach to the bridge; this part was built with the demands of heavy industry in mind, and the highway is so broad in either direction that Gwyneth gets only glimpses of the sides in between the passing trucks. She wonders how many lanes. Then she decides she doesn't care.

She leans back in her seat, completely out of conversation ideas, and they drive wordlessly out over the gleaming waves to an all-Unovan fanfare of radio music and snarling motors.

*​

Jackie is good at silences, clearly, but every so often he'll ask a question. What's with the venipede? (She bumped into it last week and now they're stuck with each other.) Where's home for you? (Hesitation – Nuvema? Nacrene? – then: Aspertia.) Sometimes Gwyneth asks him something in return. He lives and works in Driftveil, obviously, but he's from Opelucid originally. He hasn't been home in a long time. His parents, sister, old friends, all prefer to keep him at arm's length, after what he's done. He understands, but Gwyneth sees that it cuts him up inside. Maybe it even burns his arms. It's not her place to guess.

Traffic thins out after the big junction after the drawbridge: most of these trucks aren't going dead east to Nimbasa, along the Route 5 highway; it's narrow and densely intermeshed with the trainers' trail, and there are strict limits on what's allowed to go up and down it. Some arcane agreement brokered between the League and the Unova Transportation Authority. Gwyneth watches the trees lining up on either side of the road, catches glimpses of kids walking the paths beyond, and aches for the past.

She digs her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Don't be stupid, Gwyneth. You got things to do.

Ahead, the outskirts of Nimbasa come into view: satellite towns and commuter villages, tennis courts and squares of parkland. This area is nicer than its equivalent across the bay in Driftveil. Nika's Aunt Natalya lives here. It's why she avoided coming here on the first leg of her trainer journey – she wanted to get away from her family, not walk into another branch of it. It was an unnecessary precaution. She turned out to be far more open to the idea of Nika having a girlfriend (and Gwyneth in particular) than Nika's parents were.

Gwyneth wonders if Aunt Natalya (it is impossible to separate her from her auntness; she bears it like a title) would be willing to put her up for a night. Probably not, she decides. That's okay. Gwyneth will survive. All you have to do is not die, right?

Jackie asks where he should drop her off. Gwyneth takes a very, very long time to answer.

*​

They stop at the west side bus depot. Jackie probably doesn't believe that Gwyneth has the money for a ticket, but she's got her pride, useless though it might be, and she won't admit to being stuck. Besides, she's halfway there now, isn't she? She's been lucky, she's nearly died and has no more money, but she's halfway there. She's going to make it the rest of the way too.

“Well, this is my stop,” she says, as Jackie pulls over. “Thanks, dude. It's real good of you to do this.”

“Ah, no problem,” he replies. “Gotta make up for that misspent youth somehow, huh?”

She smiles politely and gets out, the venipede surging up over the lip of the doorway and down onto the sidewalk.

“Thanks anyway,” she says, and goes to retrieve her bag. She hoists it and the venipede back onto her shoulders, then raises a hand in response to Jackie's wave as he pulls out and away down the street.

Gwyneth takes a big breath of car exhaust fumes and lets it out again. She looks at the depot across the road, the buses coming in and out between the concrete pillars.

The heat is starting to fade. She should put her jacket back on but it's too much effort to take her backpack off. She feels like a lot of things are too much effort right now. She feels like static.

“Sharks gotta keep moving,” she says, and starts walking.

 

[Cutlerine]

EIGHT: NOCTURNE

Wednesday, 14th September

It's starting to get dark. Sooner than Gwyneth was expecting, too. Summer's nearly over. Eight days and it's official.

Eight days. And she's still the wrong side of White Forest. That's at least a two-day hike, if you're going through it, and Gwyneth doesn't see that she has any other options. Although if she's honest, she's not sure that the hike's an option, either. Not without supplies she doesn't have. And some way to get over the river.

She sighs and kicks a pebble down the street. What are you gonna do, right? She just has to keep going, somehow. One foot in front of the other, and don't die. It sounds so easy when you put it like that, she thinks, and sighs again.

To give herself something to do, she stops and takes off her backpack so she can put her jacket back on. Then she puts it back on her shoulders again, and lifts the venipede back into place, and finally gives in to the cold emptiness in her belly and goes off in search of something to eat.

A couple of streets away she finds a fast food restaurant – this is one of the benefits of Gwyneth's particular Aân Hen, her middling Unovan blandness: there's always junk food somewhere nearby – and she throws the last of her money at something that will, if not exactly nourish her, at least keep her going through the night. She eats too fast, sitting at a chipped Formica table under a glaring light, and then when her stomach starts to cramp she eats slower again.

The venipede scratches around the tabletop, running its antennae over the plastic to soak up whatever oily smells linger in a place like this. Sometimes Gwyneth offers it a fry and it takes it from her fingers with surprising delicacy, holding it between its forelegs and pushing it slowly into its mouth. Something about it reminds Gwyneth of a watch she once had where the back was transparent and you could see the clockwork moving. Bugs are like that, she thinks. Like intricate little machines.

She lingers over the last of her food until it's cold and unappetising, trying to put off having to go back outside. Beyond the glass, the sky is the deep blue of twilight, punctuated by a half-moon and the bright dot of Venus. The other stars are all invisible because of the light pollution. It's okay. Think what Nika's Romans would say: an omen, right? Diana for not marrying. Venus for love.

Gwyneth laughs at herself for thinking it, but it's an honest laugh; the hot food has put her in a good mood for once. Romans, huh? Okay, Gwyneth. Romans it is.

“You know about Romans, a*shole?” she asks the venipede, giving it the last cold fry. “Basically they were these dudes who liked civic engineering and masculinity.” She wrinkles her nose. “Not sure why Nika was so into them.”

The venipede's jaws make a little scrunching noise like paper crinkling. Gwyneth thinks it might be looking at her, but it might just be staring into space while it eats.

“I guess she liked the stories,” she says absently. “I guess I did too.”

She sits there for a little while, in her uncomfortable fast-food-restaurant chair, and then she runs her greasy fingers through her greasy hair and sighs.

“Okay, dude,” she says. “Hope you enjoyed that, 'cause that's the last food either of us are seeing for a while.” She picks the venipede up and then has to put it down again, the fingers of her left hand going weak with pain. She counts to three, slowly, ignoring the interesting colours staining the bandages, and then awkwardly scoops the venipede up into her right hand. “Help me out here, dude,” she says, trying to put it on her shoulder. “Just get on there, all right?” It gets the message and hops up onto her backpack. “There you go.”

It clicks at her, and Gwyneth nods.

“Okay, then,” she says. “Let's go.”

She goes out into the deepening night, leaving the noise and the smell of hot fat behind, and looks up and down the street. It's virtually empty. Everyone has gone home.

Her good mood does not seem to be lasting.

*​

Gwyneth goes for a walk. She's doing the thing again, with the modem and the blurred vision and the sense of being meat, but not so much. It's okay. She only has opinions about this state of mind after it's over. Right now, in the thick of it, she doesn't care about anything at all.

Nimbasa is sort of pretty at night. Not so much this part of town, but she can see the lights of the fairground over the rooftops to the southeast. She registers this as she registers the sidewalk beneath her feet, as a mere fact of physical geography. If she sees the Ferris wheel, shining like a frozen firework in the night, it is only as an object and not as the place where she and her girlfriend of nearly nine years first became an item. The world is empty of meaning: everything is itself and nothing more, coming to her free of all history and intent. On other nights these streets might move past her like black ribbons, the lights of houses like fireflies, but tonight the road travels beneath her like a length of asphalt and the houses on either side like rectangles of brick. And Gwyneth walks through it all like a thing with legs, irresistibly singular.

She doesn't have a destination, but she doesn't need one. This isn't that kind of walk. Gwyneth crosses empty streets and strides down deserted boulevards, takes corners as decisively as if she knows where she's going, and somehow she feels she knows this place, these offices and parks. She's in the city's northern quarter now. The place where she made her catastrophic decision can't be far away.

She remembers, distantly, her idea earlier that day that she might liberate the venipede. Her decision that it was impossible. She grins, sharklike, mirthless.

Gwyneth heads north.

The streets grow twisted and narrow. The city shows its age here, in houses that sag like old meat. Litter. Graffiti. A hump, half-glimpsed down an alley, that Gwyneth knows is someone sleeping. She notes without rancour that this is what she can expect from this night for herself.

The sky thickens into the washed-out dark of a city night: black, but not so black the stars show. Gwyneth sees other people. They keep their heads down and move quickly, although in secret they are watching her as they watch everyone else they pass. Just to be safe.

It's getting late, after all, and this isn't Coldside. There are no sports stadiums or theatres here. This is the Old Town. Gwyneth doesn't know this, but she has an inkling. A year and a bit in Aspertia's east side has taught her to recognise these things.

She is aware, on some level, that she shouldn't be wandering around here after dark; that she is small and people feel able to harm her in a way they don't with other (white, cis) people; that she doesn't know how to use her switchblade properly. It isn't that she is ignorant of this. It's that it doesn't matter.

Gwyneth keeps walking, keeps heading north, and somewhere in the tangled maze of narrow streets she stops.

“Hey, dude,” she says, as the man approaches her. She does not quite recognise the situation as one which warrants fear. Not yet. “What's …”

She trails off. He is taller than her, and broader, and almost certainly stronger. A big, simian thing whose flanks steam gently in the cool air walks on its knuckles alongside him. It has no neck and barely any head, face stretched grotesquely across its chest.

There is a conversation. It is brief and unsatisfying. The man swears at her and calls her a word that Gwyneth in her present state of mind has some difficulty registering: six letters, begins with T. She blinks and tells him she has no money. He swears at her again and his darmanitan bares its teeth. It has a lot of them, and the biggest are longer than Gwyneth's hands.

She tells him again that she has no money and the man asks for her wallet and phone, although ask is perhaps too polite a word. He calls her another six-letter word, this time ending in T rather than beginning with it. He grabs Gwyneth by the front of her top and says it all over again, slurs and all. He seems afraid, young, desperate. Gwyneth has been mugged before, does not think he really knows what he is doing, although she thinks he is probably fool enough to really hurt her in an attempt to convince her that he does.

The static fuzz in Gwyneth's head stands between her and fear, but she is aware it is the right reaction now. She takes her switchblade from her pocket and flicks it open, and the man, the boy really, smashes his arm into hers with a blunt panicky force that sends jolts all the way up to her shoulder and knocks the knife into the gutter.

The boy swears at her again. His vocabulary is limited. Gwyneth does not judge: so is hers. She tells him she doesn't have anything and his darmanitan whoops and he says he will not ask again and he leans in close as he says it and the venipede, silent until now and unnoticed, leaps out from behind her head, screaming that awful scream it screamed before in the tunnel, and he swears and lets her go as he recoils and the poison sting flies overhead and the darmanitan tears fire from its eyebrow with one hand and lobs it with perfect accuracy over Gwyneth's shoulder to cover their retreat as it follows the running boy still swearing and spitting out slurs and the venipede falls from her with flames licking at its shell and hits the sidewalk without a sound.

Gwyneth stares, but only for a second. Quickly, without thinking, she throws off her backpack, ignoring the wrenching pain in her wrist; she takes off her jacket and throws it over the venipede. She picks it up still swaddled, still hot, and as she learns what burning chitin smells like she runs.

*​

No one stops her. They stare and swear as she shoves them out of the way, but they do not stop her, not here in the Old Town and not south in Coldside, where she barges through the queues outside the theatres. Not in the town centre, where she trips going over the bridge and twists as she falls so she lands on her shoulder and not the bug cradled in her arms. Not in the South Bank where she nearly knocks some kid and her watchog into the river.

No one stops her, and Gwyneth crashes through the sliding glass doors into the bright lights of the Pokémon Centre unchallenged.

*​

She sits waiting in the hallway and drinks black coffee that someone gave her. She doesn't remember who or when. It's very sweet but almost completely cold.

For the first time in years, Gwyneth cries.

*​

Thursday, 15th September

The prognosis is not good. A little after midnight, a nurse takes her aside and asks her how long ago she caught the venipede, and Gwyneth says just a few days. The nurse nods understandingly, and tells her as gently as he can that the venipede is not healthy.

“We think she's maybe two years old,” he says. “But it's not been a good two years, I'm afraid. Whatever she's been eating, she hasn't got the minerals she needs to maintain her shell properly. Her lung is inflamed – we think bronchitis, probably from air pollution – and the shell that's grown over her missing eye has gone too deep and is putting pressure on her brain.”

Gwyneth listens without answering, almost without comprehending. She wills herself to remain present, to not let this information flow past her ears without entering. She needs to know.

“All this means she's not like a trained pokémon,” the nurse says. He has a name badge. Gwyneth cannot at this moment in time make out what it says. “She can't just rest and be fine a day later, especially not after a fire attack – that's not just physical damage, it hurts her essence too.” He hesitates. Gwyneth can see he's thrown by her lack of response, but she cannot speak. “Dr. Marsden is a bug-type specialist, and he's doing all he can, but I'm afraid we can't be sure she'll make it.”

Gwyneth stands and watches him. He watches her back, and she sees doubled in his eyes something tear-stained and grey. Something broken.

A long moment passes, and the little line of worry between the nurse's brows grows more pronounced.

“What's her name?” he asks, trying to make a connection, any connection, and Gwyneth drops her eyes to the floor.

He waits until the silence is uncomfortable for both of them, and offers her another cup of coffee. She nods her acceptance, because if she does he will go away, and then as he leaves to get it she sinks back into her seat and wishes fervently that she had something sharp.

*​

After a while, a severe-looking Henuun woman comes out of one of the doors. Gwyneth recognises her as one of the doctors she saw earlier, on her journey through the inner corridors of the Centre to this place in the infirmary.

“Ms. ze'Haraan?” she asks. The word is flawless in her mouth, the pit-of-the-throat aa and soft z pronounced perfectly. Here is a woman who knows her history.

Gwyneth nods. The doctor continues, introducing herself.

“Dr. ze'Naarat. I'd like to take a look at your hand.”

Gwyneth blinks slowly. From somewhere beneath her feet, words move sluggishly towards her mouth.

“I … I can't pay,” she says, and ze'Naarat shakes her head irritably.

“I don't care about that. Your hand looks infected.”

“It's fine,” insists Gwyneth, and ze'Naarat glares. She has no patience for this kind of patient, the kind who brush off their illness in the hope that it will get better, only to come back when it's harder to treat and a real risk to their health.

“Really,” she says. “When was it last looked at?”

“Uh … Saturday, I―”

“And what have you been doing to it since?”

“Nothing, I – look, I've been travelling―”

“Do you want sepsis?” asks ze'Naarat bluntly. “Come with me, Ms. ze'Haraan.”

And Gwyneth can feel herself slipping, collapsing into that state of mind where she can't really think and can only do as she is told; but not yet, not while the venipede is still hurt, so she shakes her head and stands her ground.

“I'm waiting for my venipede,” she begins, and ze'Naarat sighs irritably.

“Your venipede is being taken care of,” she says shortly. “It won't benefit from you losing a hand to infection here in the hallway. Now. Come with me.”

Gwyneth just doesn't have the energy to resist any more. She gets up and follows the doctor back into her office.

“Finally,” mutters ze'Naarat, not quite quietly enough for Gwyneth to not hear. “Now, sit down here, please, and let me take a look.”

She unwraps Gwyneth's hand with quick, professional movements, uncovering something swollen purple and yellow with bruising and fluids that Gwyneth cannot name but which she knows are never meant to see the outside of her body. There's blood too, and a faint smell. Gwyneth looks at it for a moment, unable to comprehend that this bloated broken thing is her hand, is part of her body, and then looks away again as ze'Naarat clicks her tongue in dissatisfaction and reaches for a bottle of something.

“All right,” she says. “This needs cleaning. And I want to run some blood tests, too.” She shoots Gwyneth a dark look. She does not have what Gwyneth's mother would call a good bedside manner. “You haven't taken good care of this.”

“Haven't been able to,” mumbles Gwyneth, too tired to be ashamed. “Slept in an alley.”

And ze'Naarat pauses for a second, looks at Gwyneth again; she sees now not just an irresponsible patient but all the other things too, the scarred arms and bad skin and unwashed hair and everything else as well, and she sighs. She sounds irritated, but perhaps at herself as well as Gwyneth.

“Right,” she says, with the curtness of someone too belligerent to admit to embarrassment. “Hold on. This is probably going to hurt.”

She's right, it does. When she touches Gwyneth's hand, her whole arm goes weak with the pain of it. But she sits and bears it, partly because there is no choice and partly because she needs pain now, to remind her that yet again she has failed as a person, and she does not so much as flinch.

Ze'Naarat cleans the wound, thoroughly and without emotion, then dresses it and binds a splint to her wrist with bandages, so that she does not accidentally flex it and stretch the wounded skin on her hand.

“It hurts when you move your arm, yes?” she asks, and when Gwyneth nods she ties a sling around her neck so that she can avoid that too. “There,” she says, viewing her work with an acid sort of satisfaction. “I'm going to put you on some antibiotics, too, and then once the bloods are done I'll review.”

Gwyneth says nothing. She thinks about how much that might cost, and then her thoughts go right back to the venipede. It's actually quite small, when it's lying still like that. It only seemed bigger because of all that movement, all that anger.

A few moments later she becomes aware that the doctor is talking to her.

“… tonight?”

“Huh?”

Ze'Naarat sighs again. It's a sharp sigh, the kind that someone makes at half past midnight if they have been working since eight in the morning with minimal breaks.

“Do you have a place to stay tonight?” she asks. “I'll need to see you again tomorrow when the results of the blood test come back. And your venipede isn't going anywhere for a while, either.”

“Oh.” Gwyneth shakes her head slowly. “No. I thought … I thought I'd just wait.”

Ze'Naarat visibly bites back her irritation.

“You need rest, Ms. ze'Haraan,” she says. “Real rest, just as your venipede does.” She starts typing rapidly on her computer, index fingers stabbing like the beaks of hunting herons. “I'll sign you in as a trainer. There should be a room available somewhere, and that will cover your venipede's treatment as well.”

Gwyneth stares. She isn't sure she heard what she just heard. It doesn't seem possible.

“Here?” she asks, stupid with shock and fatigue, and ze'Naarat raises one eyebrow without looking away from her screen.

“Yes, here. Another night out there isn't going to do your arm any favours. Neither of us wants to―”

“Thank you,” says Gwyneth fervently, suddenly waking up, lurching forward with earnest gratitude. “Oh my god, thank you―”

“Yes, yes,” says ze'Naarat. She has darker skin than Gwyneth, but Gwyneth can see the blood rising in her cheeks all the same. She makes eye contact briefly and then breaks it again, embarrassed. “It's – I'm a doctor. I have a duty of care.”

“And you mean it,” says Gwyneth, which is as close as she can come to saying I've met a lot of doctors, and I know that they're people as well as professionals, and they are capable of all the same malice and hatred as any other person, and you are not like them.

And ze'Naarat hesitates, for once, and her mouth twitches at the corner in an awkward almost-smile.

“It's nothing,” she says. “Really.”

But it's not, it never is, and Gwyneth will carry this not-nothing with her forever.

*​

Gwyneth does not sleep so much as she passes out, on the narrow Pokémon Centre bed between deliciously fresh sheets, and as consciousness flees her she feels as if her body is melting into the dark.

*​

Gwyneth wakes very late, especially late for her, to a riot of the sort of aches and pains you feel after a return to comfort from a hard few days. She lies there for a few minutes, trying to work out where she is and why, and then she remembers and makes a brief attempt at getting up before she realises she isn't quite up to that yet.

“Ugh,” she says, slumping back down again. “Fine.”

It's just noise. She isn't angry really. She's worried, and in a little pain, but she's comfortable, which she hasn't been since she left – and perhaps not then, either; her own bed isn't as nice as this one.

Gwyneth rests her eyes and allows her muscles to untense. She feels weak, which she supposes she probably is, after everything, but there's a kind of pleasure in it. There's the sort of helplessness that someone forces on you and the kind that you relax into, and this is the second kind. Right now, Gwyneth isn't sure she can actually sit up, and she's also not sure that this isn't okay.

She thinks about the venipede – her venipede, somewhere three floors below in the infirmary, connected to tubes and wires and the detritus of modern medicine. She remembers telling herself it's just a bug back on the ferry, and almost laughs at the idea of all that time and effort being put into saving the life of just a bug.

Almost, but not quite. It isn't really very funny, under the circumstances.

She makes a silent promise to stop calling the venipede 'it'.

After some time, she edges her way out of bed and over to the window. It's raining outside, hard. From her vantage point on the third floor, she can see the water splashing in the gutters of the roof across the street.

Gwyneth imagines sleeping out there and shivers.

Turning her attention back to the room, she fumbles open her bag, one-handed. She inspects the clothes she has been wearing for the past few days and decides that that particular tank top is not so much white any more as it is grey. She dresses in fresh clothes, inelegantly, then grabs her key card and shuffles down the hall to the bathroom.

Pokémon Centre showers are not particularly good, but this one, after the last few days, feels like heaven. Even having to constantly manoeuvre to keep her hand dry doesn't spoil it, and Gwyneth comes out feeling vaguely human, which for her is no small achievement. She shaves, plucks, conceals, and takes the elevator down to the lobby.

There are kids in there with her, who stare and try without success to hide it, but Gwyneth closes her eyes and leans against the wall and feels them melt away into nothingness all around her. It's okay. More or less, anyway.

“Hey,” she says to the receptionist on duty. “I brought my venipede in last night and i― she was hurt real bad, and I was wondering if she's okay?”

“Right,” says the receptionist. “What's your name, please?”

“Gwyneth ze'Haraan.”

She tries to say it the way Dr. ze'Naarat did, the way a Henuun woman would, but the botched sounds ring loud in her ears. She sounds like a white girl reaching for someone else's ancestors. Like what she is.

“Okay,” says the receptionist, not noticing anything wrong. “Venipede, venipede … it seems she's stable.”

Gwyneth lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding.

“Can I see her?”

“Sorry, I don't think so, yet,” says the receptionist, and then adds, at the look on Gwyneth's face: “I can call the doctor and ask―”

“Nah, it's okay,” says Gwyneth, shaking her head. “I'll wait.”

She's about to turn and go when the receptionist calls her back.

“Oh – one other thing, Dr. ze'Naarat left a message for you. Apparently you have an appointment with her at four o'clock.”

“Four o'clock,” repeats Gwyneth.

“Yeah. That okay?”

“That's fine,” says Gwyneth, as if she had any other plans for today. “That's just fine.”

She goes to the canteen and pauses in the doorway, struck for a moment by the tables full of kids, eating and laughing and slipping their pokémon morsels of food. Nobody here is over eighteen. Gwyneth stares and feels – not old, because she knows she is not old, that she in fact has a depressingly large number of years left to get through, but sad, and tired. She remembers all of this so vividly, and what comes after. Summer is ending. Most of these kids will be home again before October's over. And that will be it: no one will ever be as kind to them again as they are now, and no one will give them presents and advice. In some ways, Gwyneth decides, the trainer journey is a cruel idea. What's the point of showing kids the woman with the ultra ball, if you're only going to take her away again afterwards?

She joins the queue for breakfast, her slight build and height helping to disguise her age, and shows her key card in exchange for food. It works, thankfully – Gwyneth was half-expecting them to demand she show a trainer card she doesn't have – and she takes her breakfast to a quiet corner where she can eat and watch the kids enjoying the morning. Oh, they won't all be happy, she's aware of that: trainer journeys don't solve everything, and they have all the usual teenage nonsense to deal with, on top of whatever's going on at home. But they're travelling Unova, with the League providing food, board and medical care, and they've all got pokémon. Some of those pokémon will stick with them for life, and so will some of the people they meet.

Gwyneth remembers what Jackie said about Team Plasma coming back, and a coldness settles around her heart. It will happen again. This thing, this impractical, colossal, fantastic thing, that costs the country millions of dollars to run and pays out in nothing but the happiness of children – this thing that redeems Unova will be poisoned again. There will be thefts and abuses. There will be thugs with uniforms and slogans. She looks at these kids, these trainers, and she is furious that even just a few of them may have it taken from them.

She still hates that they have this and she does not, of course. But she hates anyone who would spoil it for them even more.

On her way out, she steals a couple of bread rolls and some fruit. She's got to move on from here at some point, after all, and she needs to start stocking up.

There's no word on her venipede at the desk, and even if it wasn't raining Gwyneth wouldn't be able to face going outside today when the alternative is a warm lounge and complimentary coffee; she gets the wifi password from the receptionist, finds herself an armchair out of the way of the kids watching TV on the other side of the room and starts going through news websites on her phone. Hilbert ze'Haraan: Is he Getting Married? asks one headline, and Gwyneth rolls her eyes. She should call up the tabloids and offer them the story, she thinks sarcastically. Might be a couple dollars in it for her. Unusual Weather Phenomenon Spreading Across Hoenn, announces another article. Gwyneth watches four seconds of heavy rain falling on white stone buildings before scrolling away, unable to see any difference between that rain and the stuff falling outside.

There's the usual political horror stories, although they all seem to be referring to something that happened while Gwyneth was underground and so not paying attention; there's a report saying that some third-party researcher has cleared up the crustle swarm on Route 4, opening up the highway and trainers' trail again; and then at last she finds it: Reports of Plasma Activity in Virbank City. She reads the article and is irritated by the constant use of the word 'allegedly'; apparently not even the word of a Gym Leader is enough for this to be taken as fact. Gwyneth guesses no one wants to believe that Plasma could be back.

There aren't many details given. Gwyneth gives up and goes back to the front desk to ask about her venipede again. The receptionist tells her that there's still no word, and offers hesitantly to send her a message as soon as there is any. Gwyneth is touched, although also annoyed that she comes across as that desperate, and accepts.

Gwyneth goes back to her corner in the lounge and sits, listening to the rain hammering at the window and watching whatever the kids have set the TV to over the back of the sofa. It's noisy in here, with four or five different conversations going on at any one time – no one wants to go out and train on a day like this, except perhaps for a few water-type trainers who can't pass up this opportunity to keep their pokémon in shape – but that's all right; it's a good kind of noisy, even a peaceful kind, if that makes sense. She feels out of place and yet at home. She feels clean and tired and calm.

She worries about the venipede, but she's used to worrying and this specific fear joins the other nebulous ones at the back of her head, half drowned out by the white noise she carries with her wherever she goes.

Gwyneth remembers sitting in this chair before, a little over nine years ago. Sharing it with Nika, the two of them perching on it at angles that her older self can no longer see any comfort in. Sitting and waiting for Nika's pokémon to be healed, Gwyneth's right arm twined loosely around Nika's left, fingers just about touching in a way that might plausibly be claimed to be an accident.

They're both very nervous. This is new territory for both of them, and despite the fact that this is, in part, why Nika went on her trainer journey (much later she will admit, laughing a little at her past self but also nostalgic, that she did have a romantic notion that she might travel Unova and fall in love with a cute girl), even she isn't sure what to do now that it's actually happened.

They talk around the subject. They talk about the Gym battle and what they might do next. They even talk about pokémon liberation, a subject that Gwyneth brings up and which Nika, surprised, carries on with. Both of them agree that Gwyneth is doing better now.

Neither say that Gwyneth's journey is over. The thought that she might go home is unbearable, and they both know without having to discuss it that they have to hide what she did, because if anyone finds out then her card will be revoked, making her a child again instead of a trainer, and she will cease to be able to wander the country as she pleases and have to return to Nuvema and explain herself to her mother.

(It's not quite as bad as this: they make it scarier by worrying about it, and forget that the League would be sympathetic, would want to use Gwyneth's story as ammunition against Team Plasma. It's understandable. They're only kids, after all.)

So they don't talk about that, and they don't talk about the Us they have become, either. Nika suggests they go to Lostlorn Forest tomorrow – there are buses that take trainers out in groups a couple of days a week – and Gwyneth says okay. It can be like, Nika begins, and then breaks off, embarrassed. It's all right. Gwyneth knows what she means.

Lostlorn Forest is a good day out. On the bus they meet Delarivier, whom Gwyneth will forever remember for the withering sarcasm she picked up as a result of being stuck with the name Delarivier, and they make friends. They will never see each other again after today, but when the sourness that has been growing in Gwyneth over the past few weeks starts to become visible, Delarivier's acid disposition will provide it with a template for its development.

In the forest itself, Nika and Gwyneth go off alone, and Delarivier leaves them to it; she's no fool and she has seen the brief contact between their hands for what it is. They go deep into the woods, Nika's pokémon fluttering stomping crawling all around them, and they find what seems to be a lost child and which, when Nika calls out, flickers out of existence and is revealed to be an illusion cloaking a zorua that dives into the undergrowth and escapes beyond their ability to track.

It's magical. There's a lot of did you see? and oh my god and their shock is a convenient excuse to cling to one another. Nothing happens, of course – they are still too shy even to think of going any further than hand-holding – but it cements what was built yesterday, wears away some of the newness of it, and when they come back late that afternoon, out from the dark eaves of the forest into the rosy evening light, this thing called Us is starting to seem believable to them.

By now they have been in Nimbasa for nearly a month. Gwyneth seems to be doing okay, all things considered. (She keeps her shame locked away deep inside, using her growing infatuation with Nika as a jailer.) It is time, they both agree, to leave.

Route 5 is beautiful at this time of year. The later flowers are in full bloom and the trees are so brightly green as to make your eyes ache when the sun shines through them. Each of them feels giddy to be here with the other; they stay up long into the warm nights, lying on their backs and learning constellations from a booklet Nika bought in Nimbasa. Even the pokémon feel the change in the air. Astyanax gets more and more energetic as the days get hotter, and starts under Nika's direction to rear on his hind legs every now and then as his bones begin to change shape beneath his skin. Hekate's wings start lengthening and she learns to flap-jump her way up onto Nika's shoulder, crowing triumphantly. Only Britomartis does not seem to take to either the change in Nika or the deepening summer; she boils inside her heavy steel armour, hisses when touched, refuses to leave the cool interior of her poké ball except if there is a pond or stream she can lie down in. Nika lets her have her way. She is too happy to fight.

And if Gwyneth envies her this (which she does), she says nothing. When Astyanax sheds his skin and comes out with longer legs and clever grasping foreclaws, she congratulates Nika and shares in her delight; when Hekate manages to stay airborne for a full thirty seconds before crashing back down onto her armoured rump, she applauds along with her. And when they see wild minccino, scurrying through the long grass with their tails held out like pennants, she says nothing at all.

Nika tries to offer her a poké ball, once. She could try to catch something, she says.

Gwyneth does not answer, and Nika understands that she should not offer again. She puts her arms around her instead and rests her head on Gwyneth's shoulder. The gesture surprises both of them, but neither move to end it. They sit there for a long time, taking stock of this new pleasure, until at last Gwyneth has to move to put more wood on the fire.

Later that night, Nika looks from her booklet to the sky and points. That's Cassiopeia, she says, her classicist's brain clicking into gear. She was beautiful and she knew it, which pissed off Poseidon enough that he tried to feed her daughter Andromeda to the sea monster Cetus (which is actually a constellation itself, over there she thinks). But Perseus, you know, the gorgon guy, he rescued her on his way home from killing Medusa, so Poseidon went for Cassiopeia instead and chained her to the sky. The constellation's right next to the North Star, so Cassiopeia gets hoisted up and suspended upside-down half the year.

Gwyneth stares, tracing lines with her eyes.

“Poseidon's a dick,” she says.

“Yeah,” agrees Nika. “They all are, actually. Everyone was very unhappy about it.”

They are one day's walk from the bus stop at the end of Route 5 that ferries trainers across the Driftveil Drawbridge. They are at a campsite where nobody else has stopped. The world is huge and dark and incredibly quiet, a place made just for the two of them.

They kiss, once, hesitantly, and in the morning they move on to Driftveil.

*​

Yes: Nimbasa is a town full of memories. This Pokémon Centre especially. Gwyneth thinks that the time she spent here was the weirdest of her life. She still isn't sure how she managed to negotiate both her first relationship and the aftermath of the liberation at the same time. Probably she shouldn't have done it. It's got to be more healthy to take these things one by one, right? But then, that isn't how life works. Everything happens, all the time, so unreasonably.

She thinks about going to ask the receptionist for news of her venipede again, but holds herself back. She'll wait for the call. The receptionist has definitely got better things to do than answer the same questions over and over. And besides, getting up from this chair seems like far more work than Gwyneth is ready for right now. She took the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her, but obviously they're not really doing anything yet; her arm still hurts like hell, a brittle pain that fractures when you feel it so that splinters cascade throughout your body. The doctor was right. There is something bad going on there.

She's lucky. Just the bill from the hospital in Virbank alone is probably going to be crippling. What the cost of dealing with these complications would be Gwyneth doesn't want to think about. It's a good thing ze'Naarat has ethics. Or no, really it's a bad thing that Unova itself as a country doesn't, but this is a pointless way to think about it. Unova is Unova, huge and careless, and Gwyneth could waste her whole life screaming at it without it so much as blinking.

At about midday, the receptionist's voice chimes over the PA system asking for Gwyneth ze'Haraan to come to the front desk, and she levers herself up out of her chair with as much speed as she can muster, heedless of the kids that stare. When she gets to the desk, she gets directions to the infirmary that she barely acknowledges before she's off again, frantic.

Dr. Marsden is tall and black and younger than Gwyneth expected. He looks at her and Gwyneth detects none of the usual recognition in his eyes, no minute shock of revulsion. She is surprised, and a little flattered, and a lot irritated that she is flattered by what should be common courtesy.

“She's stable now, and improving,” he explains, walking down the ward with her. Gwyneth tries to keep her eyes ahead, to not see the pokémon and their pain on either side of her. She isn't completely successful. “It wasn't just that it was a fire attack, it's that it hit her with a lot of force – like being punched, if you like. Some surgery was required to address the internal trauma. But she pulled through, and I have hopes that we might be able to wake her in a day or so.”

The venipede is lying on a padded table, a tiny dark hummock in an ocean of white and mint-green. Her shell is black and flaky all down the left-hand side, and under the antiseptic smell Gwyneth can still make out that awful burning-chitin stink from last night. One part has been cut cleanly away and replaced with a pale fibreglass panel.

She was wrong about the wires. There are only four: two cables attached somewhere on her underbelly that lead to a machine whose screen is thick with unintelligible meaning, and two tubes that terminate in what look something like oxygen masks, strapped to the venipede on either side.

“What are those?” asks Gwyneth, because she feels she has to say something and she doesn't dare ask the more important questions.

“Venipede breathe through holes in their carapaces,” says Marsden. “Spiracles. Here and here. These machines are helping her to breathe.”

“Oh.” Gwyneth stares. “Is that like … fake shell?”

“We had to remove some to do the surgery. It will grow back, eventually.” Marsden pauses, watching her. His is the careful face of someone used to having difficult conversations. “I know it looks bad,” he says, “but she's doing well, believe me. It was a darmanitan that hit her, right?”

“Yeah. Flame burst, I think.” In the bathroom mirror, Gwyneth saw the singed ends of hairs, and light burns on her cheek and neck: the evidence of a tiny explosion. It hurts, a little, but the louder pain in her arm drowns it out.

Marsden nods.

“That's what I mean. Urban venipede, isn't she? And fresh caught? Most of them wouldn't have survived that, but she's as tough as they come.”

Gwyneth feels the ghost of a smile touch her face, even here, even looking at her venipede half carbonised like a cookie left too long in the oven.

“She's a vicious little,” she begins, and then decides not to swear. “She's a vicious little monster,” she says. “Put me in the hospital when I caught her.” She indicates her arm, without looking away from the venipede. “She's tough enough to … I mean I hope …”

She can't go on. She looks at her boots, all worn and scuffed with flavours of dirt from Aspertian to Nimbasan. She senses rather than sees Marsden rearrange his face into something soothing.

“It's looking good,” he says gently. “She's got a long way to go, but it's looking good.”

Gwyneth doesn't say anything. She is astonished at how upset she is. She wants to be angry about it, too, but she finds she cannot.

She supposes she should have expected this. What has she learned from her history with pokémon, if not that she is not chosen? No, she thinks, she should never have let herself forget. Some people get chosen and some do not.

Gwyneth drags her eyes up to meet those of Marsden. She opens her mouth and absolutely no words come out.

*​

After lunch, which she goes to only in order to steal more food – she has no appetite after her visit to the ward – Gwyneth's phone goes off and she stares at it for a moment, confused. A call. Really? Apparently so.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Gwyn, it's Shane.” (It's … Shane?) “How's things?”

“Oh. Uh, hey dude.” Gwyneth gets up from her armchair and goes over to the window, where the noise from the kids is less overpowering. The rain is still coming down hard, splashing on the asphalt of the practice court where a bedraggled kid is chasing an incredibly excited oshawott around in circles. “Things are … things are weird.”

“Yeah? Maxine called, said her niece Sadie―”

“Saadiyyah.”

“Huh? Okay, Saadiyyah, she called to let her know she got to Driftveil safe, so I figured you probably had signal again for me to check in. So how you doin', Gwyn?”

Gwyneth is silent for a moment, considering her response. The kid still hasn't caught the oshawott. Both of them are getting wetter by the second.

“I'm okay, Shane,” she says in the end. “I'm in Nimbasa.”

“Nimbasa? Hey, that's not bad, Gwyn, not bad at all. Halfway there, huh?”

“Sure,” she says. “Halfway there.”

(In the alley behind the video game store, standing on a carpet of ageing cigarette butts, Shane frowns slightly, blows out smoke like a breaching wailord.)

“What am I not gettin' here, Gwyn?” he asks. “Somethin' up?”

It's hard to speak. Gwyneth holds her breath for a long time before she lets the words out.

“I caught a venipede,” she says. “Accident. In Virbank. Stupid thing attacked me and I threw the ball at i― at her without thinking. Now she's hurt real bad and I'm in the Pokémon Centre, waiting.”

Pause. Breathless anticipation.

A sigh down the line, crackly with proximity to the mouthpiece.

“Oh man,” says Shane. “Sounds rough, Gwyn. Sorry.”

She can hear how adrift he is. It's barely been a week, if that, and there's already so much in the way between them. A journey will do that, Gwyneth thinks. Especially on foot, through Unova, with pokémon.

“Thanks, dude,” she says, trying to feel her way back towards the place she was in when the two of them last spoke. Before the venipede, before her injury, before Saadiyyah. It seems much longer ago than it was. “I'm okay though.”

“Yeah?” He sounds unconvinced. Gwyneth can't blame him. She doesn't believe it either. “You, uh, you sound kinda―”

“I'm just worried about the venipede,” she interrupts, before he can get all kind and awkward at her. “Like, I … she's awful, she scratches and spits and she tried to kill me, but I like her. I think. I'm just worried, Shane.”

Silence. (Shane shifts uncomfortably. This does not sound like Gwyneth: something is wrong here beyond his capacity to diagnose, let alone address.)

“Yeah, I can hear it,” he says in the end. “You … doing okay? Like in terms of gettin' where you need to be?”

(No.)

“I'll get there, dude,” she says, pushing hard at her anger, knowing it is inappropriate. “I got this far. I'll get there.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The rain comes down like white noise on a TV screen. The kid outside makes a grab for the oshawott, and it slithers through his hands and between his legs. Gwyneth hears him curse, the sound muffled by weather and glass. She reads his lips: c'mon, buddy, please.

“Hang in there,” says Shane, in a tone of voice Gwyneth has never heard him use before. If asked, she could not say what it means, but it makes her skin crawl. “'S a crazy damn plan, Gwyn, you know as well as me, and yeah, man, hang in there.”

A soft thud: Gwyneth's forehead against the glass. The noise comes at her before she realises she has moved and surprises her.

“Okay,” she says, exhausted. “Thanks, Shane. I will.”

He lets her go. Gwyneth stands there and watches the kid until he catches his oshawott and trudges off in the direction of the door.

“If you die I'm gonna kill you, a*shole,” she mutters, aware of how stupid she sounds, and goes back to her armchair, to sit and wait and hang, as Shane suggests, in there.

 

[diamondpearl876]

Welp, this quickly is becoming a fic that I make sure to set aside time not just to read, but to just sit there after reading and contemplate life. I'm sure you know I'm very into emotional, character driven stories, so that's part of it, but then there's also the dissociation, which keeps getting worse for Gwyneth and I've never seen that explored in any story ever, so reading this is... overwhelming, but in the very best kind of way.

Anyway. Some more specific things: Gwyneth's recollection of Nika's battle with Elesa was amusing, Gwyneth and Nika making their relationship was adorable, and Gwyneth and Nika discovering the ins and outs of their relationship at the beginning was adorable. Nika's penchant for taking care of others who desperately need help shined through, too, now that Gwyneth's not a trainer anymore in the flashbacks. She doesn't seem like the type of person who goes overboard trying to please others at the expense of herself, but... part of me can't help but wonder if the reason they split up in the end was because of a unhealthy dynamic that evolved from Gwyenth depending on her for too much emotional support.

And, well, now I see what you mean with Gwyneth meeting people who are awful. I'm... surprised she isn't beating herself up more over this yet, since she knew she was veering into dangerous territory but didn't care. I don't blame her for not caring or for what happened, and the venipede's ill health is a distraction, like she points out, so I guess her reaction to all this will become more evident once the venipede heals (or doesn't heal - but I'm in the "if you die, I'll kill you *******" boat with Gwyneth on that one because I totally want them to be a happy team by the end of all this).

 

[Cutlerine]

Welp, this quickly is becoming a fic that I make sure to set aside time not just to read, but to just sit there after reading and contemplate life. I'm sure you know I'm very into emotional, character driven stories, so that's part of it, but then there's also the dissociation, which keeps getting worse for Gwyneth and I've never seen that explored in any story ever, so reading this is... overwhelming, but in the very best kind of way.

Well, that's certainly a pretty amazing thing to hear from your readers. Thank you, really. It's probably obvious that Go Home means a lot to me and I'm glad it's finding its mark.

Anyway. Some more specific things: Gwyneth's recollection of Nika's battle with Elesa was amusing, Gwyneth and Nika making their relationship was adorable, and Gwyneth and Nika discovering the ins and outs of their relationship at the beginning was adorable. Nika's penchant for taking care of others who desperately need help shined through, too, now that Gwyneth's not a trainer anymore in the flashbacks. She doesn't seem like the type of person who goes overboard trying to please others at the expense of herself, but... part of me can't help but wonder if the reason they split up in the end was because of a unhealthy dynamic that evolved from Gwyenth depending on her for too much emotional support.

I'm glad that it came across as both adorable and with the potential to go wrong. The point where Gwyneth's career as a trainer ends is, as is probably fairly clear by now, supposed to be the point (as she sees it) where real life started to impinge upon the golden world of the trainer journey, so while the end of her relationship with Nika is more complicated than your hypothesis, the fact that it feels like a possibility is definitely very much intended. Hopefully over the next few chapters that'll start to become more explicit. One reason why I went right for the upper limit of the BW protagonists' canon age range is that I needed to have Gwyneth and Nika be just, just old and experienced enough to plausibly start something that had the potential to be serious and enduring but also unhealthy and damaging. Exactly how good or bad it turned out to be is something that you'll have to wait and see about. Also something that I need to write. It's so annoying how that's a requirement if you want to read a story that doesn't exist, that you have to write it.

And, well, now I see what you mean with Gwyneth meeting people who are awful. I'm... surprised she isn't beating herself up more over this yet, since she knew she was veering into dangerous territory but didn't care. I don't blame her for not caring or for what happened, and the venipede's ill health is a distraction, like she points out, so I guess her reaction to all this will become more evident once the venipede heals (or doesn't heal - but I'm in the "if you die, I'll kill you *******" boat with Gwyneth on that one because I totally want them to be a happy team by the end of all this).

There is definitely some self-loathing to come! That much at least has already been written. I've tried to keep it understated, since self-loathing is inherently not a very interesting thing to read about and anyway if you're as deep into the habit of self-loathing as Gwyneth is you find after a while that even if you find new things to be guilty about you are physically incapable of beating yourself up about it any more than you already are, but you can be sure it's there. As a reader, I am also in the everyone needs to get together and be happy darn it camp, but as a writer, I'm in the you know, in many ways abject failure would be a technically and thematically satisfying conclusion camp, so we'll have to see which of those impulses wins out when I come to write future chapters, or if maybe I reach some kind of compromise.

As ever, thank you so much for responding, and thank you also to everyone reading. Like I said, Go Home means a lot to me, and so does the response it's got.

 

[Cutlerine]

NINE: WOUNDS

Thursday, 15th September

Gwyneth falls asleep for a little while. She wakes up embarrassed and self-critical, feeling herself an ageing intruder in this place, and is glad to find it's nearly four o'clock. Hoping no one watches, and knowing that they do, she levers herself out of her chair and goes off in search of Dr. ze'Naarat's office.

“Good,” says the doctor, when she arrives. “You're here.”

“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “I am.”

Ze'Naarat tells her that the blood tests have been run, and she was right, Gwyneth's hand is infected. Not badly (although she implies with her tone and her viciously mobile eyebrows that this is nothing short of a miracle) but still, infected. She needs to rest, and to keep taking those antibiotics for a while.

Gwyneth listens calmly. None of this is really news to her; she's known for a long time now that her hand was much worse than she pretended.

“Okay,” she says. “I have to be in Humilau by the twenty-second.”

Ze'Naarat looks at her with an expression that says she was waiting for Gwyneth to say something this ridiculous. For once, Gwyneth can't find it in her to be angry. She's right. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.

“And I guess you're walking there, aren't you,” she says. It is not a question.

“Yeah,” replies Gwyneth anyway. “I am.”

Ze'Naarat takes off her glasses and polishes them with a small cloth and quick, deliberate motions. They soften her face; she looks meaner without them. Gwyneth finds this obscurely comforting. She knows all about unfortunate appearances.

“Not that it's any of my business,” she says, “but what is there in Humilau that's so staggeringly important?”

“I have a wedding to go to.”

Ze'Naarat blinks in surprise. It's hard to imagine Gwyneth having friends, family, the kind of people who drag you to weddings. Gwyneth has seen this reaction before. She understands. Sometimes, she's surprised herself.

“I see,” says the doctor, slowly. “Yours, or …?”

“No. My brother's. And my … a close friend.” Gwyneth could kick herself for the hesitation. When is she going to learn to figure out what to say before she starts speaking? “I can't miss it,” she says, to cover her awkwardness. “That's not an option.”

“I have to advise against it anyway,” says ze'Naarat, returning her glasses to her nose. “Even if you do go, your venipede is in no condition to travel, as I understand it.”

“I'll go when she is.”

“That might not be any time soon.”

“You can't change my mind,” says Gwyneth simply, tired of this game. “I'm going to Humilau.”

Ze'Naarat gives her a long, searching look. She looks like she is starting to have misgivings, or like she had some already and is now allowing them to come to light.

“It's a long way,” she says. “You aren't well.”

“I'll make it.” Gwyneth hears how hollow it sounds even as she says it. She'll make it, will she? What possible evidence does she have to support that claim?

“Will you now.”

It is not a question. Gwyneth doesn't answer.

“All right,” says ze'Naarat. The words seem off to Gwyneth. Something about the way she says them. Maybe the tone isn't right. “I'll mark you down as taking that under advisement.”

“No,” insists Gwyneth, and she knows she's being childish but she comes out with it anyway. “Don't.”

Ze'Naarat raises her eyebrows.

“I see,” she says again, although neither she nor Gwyneth is entirely convinced that she does. “Well then, Ms. ze'Haraan. I think that covers everything.”

“Okay. Thanks, then.”

Gwyneth is about to get up and go when the doctor speaks again.

“You can stay here until you leave, of course,” she says, without looking up from her computer. “Try to act young. And when Heaney's on duty at the desk, stay out of his way. He doesn't like us and I don't think he'll take kindly to you being here fraudulently.”

There it is again: that grudging, graceless kindness, spat out almost as an afterthought. Gwyneth thinks that this is how she herself would offer help if their positions were reversed. She thinks she gets it. She is wrong, but still, the thought is calming.

“Thanks,” she says.

Ze'Naarat waves her words aside with professional coldness.

“Someone has to think about your health,” she says acidly. “It's just my job, Ms. ze'Haraan.”

Gwyneth isn't sure she believes that, but it doesn't matter. If she thinks about it too much she'll only feel guilty that it was her who ended up in the Pokémon Centre and not whoever it was that she saw sleeping in the alley last night.

*​

She spends some time up in her room, feeling drained. No reason, particularly; she hasn't done anything more strenuous than sit and watch the rain. Ordinarily she would be irritated at what she sees as this weakness, but today she can't be bothered. She is, she knows, a very angry person, but only sometimes. Other times, she's barely even a person. Today is one of the other times.

There's a clock on the wall whose hands go round and round. Gwyneth watches it from underneath heavy eyelids, and falls asleep again around half five. She wakes crumpled on her bed, starts to drag herself upright and then decides it isn't worth the effort. Her eyes close again, and the next time they open the room is dark and cold.

She shuts them again, but she can tell right away that sleep has fallen away from her entirely. It's okay. This is nothing new. She's amazed she's slept as much as she has done. Normally she's up half the night, staring at her window and wishing she had curtains. It isn't that she's not tired, it's just that she is awake anyway. She's been like this for years, although it like everything else has got worse since the break-up.

Gwyneth sighs and gets up. She closes the curtains, like she always wants to back in her apartment, then draws them again when the hanging folds of fabric start to unnerve her. There's her face in the lamplit glass, hovering in front of the rain. Hello, Gwyneth, she says silently, and watches Gwyneth say it back.

She doesn't want to be here right now. She gets her key card and goes downstairs, prowling around aimlessly like a street cat. Someone that Gwyneth suspects is Heaney is at the desk, so she avoids the lobby, creeps into the lounge like the world's crappiest ghost. Some kids are still up, although she was expecting that, really; she stayed up too late herself as a trainer, like everyone else, just because her mom wasn't there to make her go to bed.

Gwyneth stands there for a few minutes, watching them talking and playing with sleepy pokémon. A watchog tugging at the sleeve of a girl who's fallen asleep. Two boys playing rummy, a krokorok trying to imitate them by holding a fan of cards in its claws. A couple hidden away in a corner, whispering with the quiet intensity of teen lovers.

Aân Hen. Except it's not any more, is it? That's over. And none of this is hers any more, and it never will be again, because she proved that she can't be trusted with it. She's still proving it now. Still getting innocent creatures hurt.

She cannot stay here. She tries to turn and go back to her room but she finds she cannot go there, either.

She hangs there in the doorway for a long time, and then, defeated, goes back upstairs to her reflection and a fruitless attempt at sleep.

*​

Friday, 16th September

In the early morning, when the dawn light is just beginning to show over the rooftops of the East Bank and the rain has slowed to a vague drizzle, the lounge is emptier. Gwyneth has slept a little and stared at her window a lot, the way she does when she can't sleep back in Aspertia, and she is more than ready to change her surroundings for something else. And now she can: most teenagers don't get up all that early, and Gwyneth has the lounge all to herself.

She makes her way over to her armchair and sits down, opens Three Nights in Opelucid. It looks like she's going to get a chance to read it after all. She isn't enjoying it as much as she was before: she liked the mystery and the magic, but now a vacuously heterosexual romantic subplot is rearing its ugly head and taking up more space on the page than Gwyneth believes is necessary. It was already a very cis novel. It didn't have to be so damn straight as well.

She supposes Shauntal Grimes is only writing what she and her readers want of their fiction. There must be someone out there writing something that allows, even if only fleetingly, for Gwyneth to exist. But who?

Gwyneth continues reading anyway, page after slow page, to see if the protagonist will put her damn man aside for a second and get on with finding the killer. After a while, she becomes aware that she is not alone. She looks up, and sees a face watching her over the back of the sofa.

There are options here. Gwyneth's initial impulse is to ignore the kid, as she does with most of the many people who watch her, but something makes her hesitate. An angle. An expression. A sudden understanding.

She puts the bit of paper she's using as a bookmark in between its pages and rests Three Nights in Opelucid on her knees.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hi,” says the kid.

Neither of them move.

“I'm Gwyneth.”

“Tor.”

“Cool name,” she ventures, offering Tor an opening for that one joke, and to her relief Tor takes it.

“Thanks, I chose it myself.”

“Same.” It's a little early in the morning for it, but Gwyneth tries to smile. Tor smiles back, showing shyness and much better teeth than hers.

“What are your pronouns?” asks Tor, which is a question nobody has asked Gwyneth since she hung out with some of Nika's university friends and which she hopes Tor knows better than to ask of most people, for both Tor's sake and that of the other person. She could take it badly, and she nearly does, but Tor is young and so she does not. Besides, it is not the question it sounds like. It is a request that Gwyneth ask the question back.

“She,” answers Gwyneth. “You?”

“They.” Tor unfolds. They are taller than Gwyneth, which she feels is frankly embarrassing, and just as bonily shapeless. There are coral colours in their hair, big glasses on their nose and an expression of vague disbelief on their face. Gwyneth doesn't even need to think about what Tor sees when they look at her. They see an adult trans woman in a Pokémon Centre; they see a trainer. They see a future that they did not know was open to them.

Gwyneth thinks back to the kid at the bus stop in Floccesy. She can do this, right? She can be the woman with the ultra ball. She has to be, this time. There's no margin for error here. She thinks briefly about just getting up and leaving, to escape the pressure, and immediately knows she cannot. Tor's here, and whatever the hate says to her, whatever the envy, Gwyneth can't walk away from that fact. It's the duty of the adult to the kid on a trainer journey, and it's another, deeper and more compelling even than that.

“You a trainer?” she asks, as Tor perches on the edge of the sofa. They feel awkward, Gwyneth can see it in them, but they aren't. They are so much better at this than she was. She loves them for it, and resents them. “Stupid question, I guess,” she adds, and Tor smiles again.

“Yeah,” they say. “I am. Are you?”

“Kinda,” says Gwyneth, carefully careless. “I'm travelling across Unova with a pokémon. Going to a wedding and I figured I'd walk.” Smile, goddamn it, Gwyneth, smile. “I'm kinda rusty but I'm getting there.”

“That's so cool,” says Tor, eyes wide. “Are you like doing Gyms on the way, or …?”

She shakes her head. Keep smiling.

“Nah, I got a deadline. Got to be there by the twenty-second, so not a lot of time for sightseeing. Besides, I wasn't very good at that stuff. My” (and she hesitates, because she never describes her this way to strangers, but with Tor she thinks she wants to) “girlfriend was better. She got four badges, I got none.”

“Yeah?” Tor looks amazed. Gwyneth is moved, partly to sadness and partly to affection. “I'm not so good either …”

Gwyneth makes a dismissive gesture with her good hand.

“Ah, I wouldn't worry about it,” she says. “'S not about winning. Or okay, it kinda is, but the journey's the really important thing.” She knows that will sound convincing: it has the force of all her faith in trainer journeys in it. “That's why I'm doing this again,” she says. “It was the journeying bit I missed.”

“Yeah! I mean, I started in Striaton and it's been so cool just getting here. Even if I haven't managed to beat Elesa yet.” Tor looks sheepish. “I thought my sandile would be enough, but, uh, I guess you don't get to be a Gym Leader without figuring out how to cover your weaknesses.”

“Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth. “My girlfriend, Nika, she led with her sandile in that fight and he lost right away. In the end she had to try to take down a zebstrika with a vullaby.” Inspiring. Encouraging. Make them believe.

“And did she?”

“Huh?”

“Take down a zebstrika with a vullaby.”

“Oh, hell no, she's good but she's not that good. She won on a technicality. Got it so annoyed it ignored Elesa's commands and charged out the arena.”

“Wow. It's like … thirty seconds out of the arena, right?”

“Ten. They changed it in the fifties, after Liat Morgenstern and that weavile.”

Gwyneth is not sure if that's right, but she wants to seem like she knows. Not for her own sake, though. For Tor's.

“What pokémon do you have?” she asks, and Tor's eyes light up like Saadiyyah's when she asked her the same question.

“Well my sandile Belle, like I said,” they reply. “And a sigilyph from the – the desert.”

They look suddenly nervous, and Gwyneth does her best to reassure them.

“Neat,” she says. “Takes a lot to distract them from their patrols.”

No one is sure if the Henuun made the sigilyph or not, the way they made the golett and golurk; too many records were destroyed when the library at Hilaan burned. What's clear is that there is nowhere else in the world where you find them, and they patrol the streets of the dead city without apparently realising that it has fallen. Sometimes if they see a trainer, usually a Henuun one but not always, they try to report to them; sometimes they even agree to work with them like any other pokémon. One reason Gwyneth never went to Hilaan is that she was afraid that the sigilyph would not recognise her, and also afraid that they would.

But one recognised Tor, clearly. She makes a conscious effort not to be bitter about it, about this white kid who is chosen, and she almost succeeds.

“Yeah, I heard that,” they say, clearly brimming with pride. “I'm trying to see if I can use her barriers like directionally, to deflect attacks? 'Cause you know, if you just put up the barrier someone can break it, but if you try to like bounce them off it, that's – well, you know.”

“That's cool,” replies Gwyneth encouragingly. “Sounds like you got a way to beat Elesa then, if you can make it work.”

“Yeah.”

A pause. Enough? Enough: she doesn't want to make things weird. Gwyneth gets up.

“I'm gonna be here a couple more days while my pokémon gets healed,” she says. “Say hi sometime.”

“Yeah, I will!” says Tor eagerly. “See ya, Gwyneth.”

“See you, Tor.”

Gwyneth leaves. She has not asked why Tor is lurking around in the lounge before dawn. Probably the same reason she is.

She smiles to herself, bittersweet. This is what it's all about. Tor must know by their age what things are like. What Gwyneth can offer them, all she can offer them, is the hope that they might survive anyway.

*​

Thursday, 8th September

Gwyneth does not sleep well, the night before she gets the news about the wedding. This is not unusual for her. Very often, she will wake in the small hours, for no reason she can name. For a while she will lie there, trying to get back to sleep, and sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn't. Mostly she gets up, in the end, and walks across the room to get a glass of water and stand by the window, looking out. In the electric light, she sees almost nothing except her reflection, and the impression of darkness all around it, and she cannot help but realise how perfectly she is framed there in the square of light, for her shadow-self out there in the mirrored room.

It watches her as others do. It makes her. It teaches her the same old lesson, the one carved into her bones from twenty-four years of being shown her place.

Other children did not like Gwyneth. They didn't know what was wrong with her, but they knew that something was. (It is best, in matters of education, to get to kids young.) They avoided, mocked, bullied. Ordinary hardships in an ordinary life; nothing for which Gwyneth lets herself feel pity. Later on it got worse. When she was twelve she got beaten up by some boys a year or two older. They were not clear about their reasons. Some slurs were thrown around, some homophobic nonsense, but then, that kind of thing always is. Probably they didn't know why they did it themselves, but Gwyneth could now, twelve years on, go back and tell them: she's Henuun (even if she isn't), and she's a trans girl. Never one or the other, but always and damningly both.

It's like a chemical reaction. These things come together and make something new, something singular. Its name is Gwyneth and it is poison.

Gwyneth tried to be a person, she really did, but even back then nobody believed her.

The light isn't good enough for her to see the eyes of her reflection, for which she is always grateful. In the clear light of day, when their gaze is unavoidable, she sees how nauseous she makes herself, just as she does everyone else. She's lost jobs over this. (She's too aggressive, they say, uncomfortably, although she is careful to be as polite and deferential as she can force herself to be.) She was nearly expelled after being beaten up that time, and she wasn't even out then. When people hurt her, it's her fault. Just by existing she is provocative, unnerving; how could you blame someone for reacting? Just look at her. Just look.

Gwyneth looks. From outside, in the ghost-room beyond the glass, Gwyneth looks back.

Her mother wasn't okay with it. She pretended to be but Gwyneth overheard her crying. She doesn't know if she ever came to terms with it; she never asked.

Hilbert never said a goddamn thing.

Tonight, as so many other nights, Gwyneth looks from the window to the glass of water in her hand and imagines hurling it to the floor, imagines the broken shards scattering across her bare feet. She imagines bloodstains on the carpet.

She drinks her water and puts the glass in the sink and goes to watch TV until she falls asleep.

*​

Friday, 16th September

After breakfast (where from her corner she sees Tor, eating on the periphery of someone else's group of friends), Gwyneth returns to her venipede. She looks much the same, although the nurse tells her she is doing well. Gwyneth nods and stares. She thinks she sees the venipede wave one of her antennae, but she might be imagining it.

The machines beep; the ventilator hisses. Gwyneth stands there until she feels like her head might burst with guilt and the thousand tiny noises of the ward, and then she leaves again.

For a while she reads some more of Three Nights in Opelucid, but it's starting to depress her, so she leaves it alone after twenty minutes or so and goes outside instead for some air.

The drizzle is the very fine kind that makes the air clammy and seems to get under your skin. It's colder here in Nimbasa than it was in Driftveil or Castelia; not as bad as Aspertia, but still, Gwyneth shivers a little in her thin jacket and clumsily zips it up one-handed. It wasn't a particularly warm jacket to begin with. Now, after losing a substantial amount of its lining to the fire, it's even worse.

She walks down the street, concentrating hard on the sensation of her feet on the ground. It might stop her drifting and it might not. Given how unreal this all feels still – the bed, the medical care, the cripplingly injured venipede – she has her doubts. But she tries anyway.

Huddled under a dripping rooftop, pigeons and unfezant alike fluff out their feathers and stare sullenly into the grey air. Two seagulls tear at trash and take off suddenly, mad-eyed and shrieking: the trash bag has stirred, opened anaemic eyes and rustled softly away down an alley.

Trash bunny, thinks Gwyneth, with a sentimentality that surprises her. She was going to catch a trubbish, back when … well. Back when. Something about their cutesy ugliness appealed to her, although she doesn't know what she would have made of the smell. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. She's fine with the venipede, after all.

There aren't a lot of people out, although the streets aren't deserted, either; what pedestrians there are walk with purpose, shoulders hunched and heads down: people who have somewhere to go and are braving the rain to get there. Gwyneth is the only one idling. It's kind of nice, actually. In weather like this, everyone withdraws into their own little world, and no one has even a glance to spare for her.

She walks the block or so north to the river, then makes her way east along the South Bank, watching the water. Today it looks black and writhing, surface stirred up by the impact of a million tiny raindrops. At her approach, a group of ducks drift towards her, hopeful, and then when it becomes clear she has no interest in feeding them they disperse across the river.

It's pretty wide, really, reflects Gwyneth. If you'd asked her a week ago how big the Calnorna was, she would have underestimated its size by a long way. It cuts a swathe through Nimbasa, creates a corridor of clear space down which she can look and see the theme park, dull and dark behind a mist of raindrops, and on the northern bank a couple of the Coldside theatres. She thinks that if she went out onto the bridge and looked east, she might even be able to see the forest.

Not today, though. Visibility is awful.

She stands there for a while, feeling the weight of the rain in her hair and her jeans, and then decides she's had enough. Fresh air is overrated anyway. All the good things in life are indoors.

*​

In the Pokémon Centre lounge, Gwyneth makes some tea to warm herself up and feels stupid for going out at all. You're not well, Gwyneth. You get lucky and someone lets you in here and then you go right back outside again? Yeah, okay. Sit down, stay warm, rest. Idiot.

Her armchair is occupied by a kid and the fluffiest growlithe Gwyneth has ever seen, and there are no other free seats except for a few on the sofas; since going there would involve actually sitting next to some kids, Gwyneth avoids them all and takes her tea up to her room instead, where she lies on her bed and tries to read her book. When this effort fails, she plays a game on her phone where there's a coral reef and you slowly populate it with fish and water-types. There isn't actually any gameplay as such, it's just soothing. The slow movement of vibrant tropical wooper back and forth across the screen is almost hypnotic.

Gwyneth used to be a video games kind of person, but not for a long time now; she doesn't know where her computer is any more. She thinks she probably sold it, or maybe it broke, or maybe it just got left behind with the stuff that never made it out of the apartment when she got evicted. It's difficult to say: she wasn't really in the right frame of mind to keep records. Much of that time she barely remembers. Besides, that was always Nika's job. She organised things, and Gwyneth muddled along in her wake, feeling guilty about not being able to corral her life the way Nika did hers.

In retrospect, Nika was unusually good at that kind of thing, Gwyneth thinks. She kept a diary – actually wrote in it almost every day, week after week, for as long as they knew each other. Who does that? Gwyneth likes sometimes to think she could keep a diary, but she knows she can't, really. What would she say? Dear diary, today I went to work and was more of an a*shole to people than I should have been. No, she has nothing to say. But Nika always does.

She remembers her filling the pages in her round, looping writing in Pokémon Centres and on buses, moments when there was time to sit and reflect. That is in fact her memory of the bus ride to Driftveil: Gwyneth sitting by the window, watching the bay go pass with wide eyes, and Nika scribbling all her teenage secrets next to her. She'll cringe, rereading it a few years later – dear diary, let me tell you about the coolest girl in the world, Gwyneth ze'Haraan – but she'll reread it all the same. And Gwyneth will reread it with her and laugh and call her a dork, which Nika will agree is, based on all the available evidence, very true.

But on that bus ride Nika writes all her clichés down with the fervour of real belief, only looking up when Gwyneth points out particular points of interest: a pelipper tipping its head back, a fish flashing silver as it struggles in its beak; a dark shadow high up in the sky that might be a hydreigon (and wouldn't it be cool if it was?); the view of the Sierra Castaña to the northwest. Only some time after the bus has crossed the bridge and the views have faded to the asphalt wasteland of the multi-lane highway does she click her pen closed and put her diary away in her bag, and Gwyneth is silently impressed by how much writing she has managed to squeeze out of the last couple of days. She isn't sure she could make a whole page out of it, not even in her big, scratchy handwriting.

It's okay. Gwyneth is starting to see a pattern in all this, in her persistent failure and Nika's effortless success. She is starting to think that maybe it's okay if she gets it all wrong, because she could help Nika get things right, instead. Some people are chosen and some are not, but there's nothing to stop those not chosen from being sidekicks, even if they can't be heroes.

She says nothing about this. She is afraid that people will think it's sad, and she doesn't think she could bear to be so misunderstood: this isn't a tragedy, it's a relief. Rather than chosen, she can be free. And while later she will come to the conclusion that freedom is not uncomplicatedly positive, that if anything is possible then awful things can happen just the same as good ones – while all of that looms in her future, here and now, on this bus moving slowly through the suburbs of Driftveil, she is conscious only of a weight lifting from her shoulders.

It doesn't last. Some shadows are too long to escape from so easily, and Hilbert's is longer than most. At the Pokémon Centre, while Nika is busy fussing over Britomartis whose irritation, it turns out, is partly down to having picked up a kind of parasitic rust that infests steel-types, Gwyneth overhears someone talking about something happening at the Pokémon League. For a moment, she stands there, unsure she wants to know, and then, because even if she doesn't want to she has no choice, she has to know, she goes to the computer room and brings up the Pan-Unova News website.

And there it is. Live updates: Unova League Under Siege. The Gym Leaders are being called in right now; some kind of structure has been photographed rising out of the ground around the League building; N has been seen, along with a huge black pokémon not known in Unova for three thousand years. There's a photo right there of him landing at the League entrance, dismounting, looking back towards the person taking his picture, guilelessly photogenic. He looks grave; he looks like a king. And that there, hunched so that he can slip from its massive shoulders to the ground, its swollen tail crackling with arcs of blue lightning, is a thing out of legend.

He has been chosen. The country is gripped by indecision: Gwyneth sees it playing out in the comments. What do we do? This is Unova, right there. The legendary dragon that stands, in an iconography inherited (or stolen) from the Henuun of three millennia past, for all the ideals of Unova itself. It has selected a champion. What do we do? What can we even do?

The military is mobilising, along with the Gym Leaders, but there is opposition, hesitation. This is only one dragon, but it is still half of the pair that created Aksa. It is not something to be engaged lightly. And more than that, how can we be sure whose side is right?

It could go one way or the other. Gwyneth abandons the computer and sprints to the lounge, where what feels like half the trainers in Driftveil are clustered around the TV. There's helicopter footage of the League, and the strange building clamped like a parasite onto its flank. Nobody can see N; the commentators are repeating the same meaningless facts over and over, trying to understand what it is they're looking at. Everyone knows that what they're really waiting for is for someone to win. Alder or N? Hardly anyone has even seen Alder for the past few years. Didn't his main partner die? What kind of a trainer is he, compared to N, to someone chosen?

There are muttered arguments and no conclusions. Everyone is waiting, in the Centre, in Driftveil, all across Unova, and in this tense, strange in-between time, the nation does not know any more what is right or wrong. All it would take is a victory, one way or the other, and the world might turn upside-down. If Zekrom chooses Plasma, how can anyone deny their right?

Gwyneth feels sick and exhilarated and shivery, all at once. The thought comes to her, watching the news, that she might have been right – and at the same time, she feels equally strongly that nothing as horrible as what she did in Nimbasa could ever be right. She looks at her hands and sees them trembling violently, chipped orange nails jumping like crickets across her field of view, and she wishes Nika was here to hold them.

When the Gym Leaders arrive, the cameras go inside. All the famous pokémon are there: Clay's excadrill, Stanton; Brycen's beartic, Saskia; even Lenora's ancient stoutland Rex, mostly retired from battling now but evidently the only one she trusts for a mission this important. And there too (Gwyneth realises with a shock of what feels like terror) are Hilbert and Cheren, their serperior and emboar waiting by their sides with the wary patience of old soldiers. Drayden of Opelucid speaks to them – something Gwyneth cannot hear – and signals for the news crew to back off. Before they stop filming, Gwyneth sees Hilbert taking something from his bag that gleams white as hot metal in his hands.

She does not yet know about the light and dark stones. Nobody does; the information won't be released for some time to come. But she doesn't need to know that to get the significance of it. N and Hilbert; black and white; Zekrom – and Reshiram.

In the interim, while everyone is watching and waiting and listening to the people who are on computers shouting out the live updates as they come, Nika arrives, reading the instructions on a bottle of unguent for Britomartis, and Gwyneth latches onto her immediately.

“Oh, okay,” she says, sensing her desperation and hugging back. “What's going on?”

“It's my brother,” says Gwyneth, shaking in her grip. “And Team Plasma. They're at the League.”

The wait is awful, but it's easier now. Nika does not – perhaps cannot – know exactly what is going on in Gwyneth's head, but she can tell that this is even bigger for her than it is for everyone else. She stays close and holds her hand without caring what people will think. As it happens, nobody even notices: everyone's attention is on the news, and what will come next.

It takes an hour and a half, and then the presenter visibly starts, pressing his finger to his earpiece. There are reports coming in. They are going live to the inside of the Plasma building.

And then there they are and there he is, Hilbert, his serperior slumped with awful stillness on the tiles of some great hall but his hand on Reshiram's side, Zekrom sprawled before them with its eyes closed. N is clinging to it, eyes low and wounded, and Ghetsis Harmonia, earnest, avuncular Ghetsis Harmonia, rages and screams beside him like a captive demon. He shoves N out of the way and the boy falls without a word; he throws a poké ball and releases a hydreigon, an actual goddamn hydreigon, and the camera jumps as the news crew tries to back out. But Hilbert smiles and points and Reshiram flicks its head forward like a snake, unsettlingly fast, and the next thing anyone knows the hydreigon is on the floor, raising a cloud of soot laid down by the battle between the dragons. It whines piteously, heads flailing. It does not look or sound like Unova's apex predator.

Harmonia does not give in. He never gives in. He rants and rails and glares in different directions with his mismatched eyes, and he releases more pokémon, bouffalant and bisharp and more, and perhaps they are more afraid of him than they are of Reshiram because they obey his command to swarm it; and though the great dragon dispatches them all in seconds the distraction works. When the smoke clears, he is gone.

There is a long, terrible moment where nothing happens and nobody knows what to do. And then Hilbert steps forward and offers N his hand.

The camera does not show his face but Gwyneth knows he is smiling his f*cking enigmatic smile.

Someone says something and the video feed cuts back to the presenter outside. He looks as stupefied as everyone watching at home.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he says, in a slow, wondering voice, “it would appear that we have a new Champion.”

It's over. Plasma is shattered. Nika touches Gwyneth's face and Gwyneth realises for the first time that she has been crying.

“It's okay,” she promises her, holding her hands tightly so they cannot shake. “Hey, Gwyn, it's okay. I'm here, okay? I'm here.”

Gwyneth lets herself fall into her arms, and together they leave the room and this strange, awful day for somewhere and somewhen else.

*​

Well.

Gwyneth sits up and sighs. She rubs her forehead. (Feeling: a spot, a scar, the ring in her eyebrow.) She glares out of the window at the rain as if it is responsible for everything that she just thought of.

“It's lunchtime,” she tells herself, to break the silence, and goes back downstairs.

She eats a little and steals a little more, then goes back to check on her venipede. There isn't much change, but Gwyneth thinks her shell looks maybe the slightest bit more solid, although she has to admit that it might just be that all the flakes have come away now. The nurse – the same one from the first night she arrived – tells her that she's the toughest venipede he's ever seen, and they're planning to try to wake her soon.

“When?” asks Gwyneth.

“We'll let you know,” he replies.

“She's going to be okay, right?”

He hesitates. The answer, when it comes, is honest.

“If we can wake her up, she'll make it,” he says. “If not … I don't know. I'm sorry.”

Gwyneth thinks of saying something like I can't lose her, except that's a cliché and anyway she doesn't know if it is true. She hopes it is, but despite what Shane thinks of her she has always been sceptical of her own capacity for loyalty.

She thinks, this is my fault, and feels the hard knot coil a little tighter inside her.

“Okay,” she says instead, a reply as monstrously inadequate as she is, and she leaves.

Back in the lounge, Gwyneth evicts a trio of cottonee from her favoured armchair and applies herself to Three Nights in Opelucid again. She likes stories, but this has never seemed to her to be the best way to tell them. She didn't know what that way might be, until Nika told her about Troy. And then she knew: she wanted to hear them told. Not just read out; Gwyneth finds it as hard to concentrate on audiobooks as she does on their paper counterparts. Told, half remembered and half improvised. Told, like Nika tells her myths.

Gwyneth knows that these are unrealistic expectations. It's okay. Most of the time, she makes do with memories: late nights, flashlight beams, the shadow on the wall of Nika's big, expansive storytelling gestures. Romans and Greeks. The light of passion in her eye.

The rest of the time, she reads books and feels bad for being dissatisfied with them. She's twenty-four, after all. She should have figured out how to enjoy reading by now.

She pushes through Three Nights in Opelucid, sentence by sentence, and does not think of Nika or Team Plasma or the venipede, and with a vast effort of will she forces time to pass.

*​

That evening, she eats with Tor. She doesn't mean to, but she sees them sitting alone at a table in the otherwise bustling canteen, and though she tells herself that this is none of her business something in her refuses to let it go. So she sits opposite them, hi kid what's up, and they smile in such obvious relief that Gwyneth feels terrible for even considering sitting anywhere else.

“I'm okay,” says Tor, and probably they think she is fooled, so she decides not to disillusion them. “I was working on that barrier thing with Vega, and I think she figured out what I wanted. She popped a reflect open in between Belle's teeth right as she was biting and bounced her across the room.”

“That sounds neat,” replies Gwyneth. “Belle okay?”

“Yeah, she was just startled.” Tor looks excited. “I think maybe I'm gonna go challenge Elesa tomorrow. We can do the same thing with light screen, so I oughta be able to flick off the lightning.”

Gwyneth considers. It could work. She's never seen anyone do this before, and she has watched a lot of IBN over the years, seen hundreds of trainers with hundreds of pokémon, but she doesn't see why it wouldn't work. She tries to force her brain back into old habits: think, Gwyneth, what are the weak spots? Why might this fail?

“I think that might work,” she says slowly, the trainer's part of her mind creaking from long disuse. “But you got to think about two things. One, can Vega react fast enough to raise the barrier against an electric-type? And also I guess does she have the stamina to keep putting them up and taking them down again. And two, that might let her shrug off the electric attacks but how's she actually gonna take the other pokémon down?”

Tor chews thoughtfully for a little while, then swallows.

“Uh,” they say. “I guess I wasn't as prepared as I thought … um, hang on, lemme think …”

“'S okay,” says Gwyneth, clumsily chopping a sausage in half one-handed. “No rush.”

“I mean her psychic powers are pretty strong,” says Tor. “She put barriers up and took them down again all day today while we were practising.”

“Yeah?” Gwyneth wonders, privately, how powerful Vega is. How long do sigilyph live? How long has she been out there in the desert, protecting the city? Sigilyph are known for their iron discipline and dedication, but it's still always a risk when a rookie trainer ends up with something too strong for them. People tend to get hurt that way.

“Yeah.” Tor ponders the matter a little while longer. People pass behind them, taking trays to and from tables, and Gwyneth senses eyes on the two of them. It bothers her, much more than if they were only staring at her. “There is this one thing,” they say eventually. “Do you know a move called stored power?”

“That's … the one that gets stronger the more your pokémon's powered up?”

“Yeah. It like detonates the energy you've built up. So you think I could have her use it on the barriers?”

Gwyneth blinks. She feels hopelessly un-trainer-like. What was she thinking, trying to coach Tor? They must know so much more than her, just through doing the damn thing.

“I don't follow,” she says. “Sorry.”

“Blow the barriers up,” clarifies Tor. “Like parrying with a stick of dynamite.”

“Oh. Uh … well, I dunno. Never used that move myself. Guess it's worth a shot.”

“Great!” Tor beams. “I'll give that a go after this, I guess. If it doesn't work I still got her regular psychic attacks. Those are pretty strong too.”

Gwyneth takes a sip of her water and smiles.

“Sounds like a plan,” she says. “Good luck, kid.”

A short silence, made up of the clatter of cutlery and the babble of teenage voices. Gwyneth eats, as slowly as she can. She has a bad habit of bolting food that she's been trying to kick for years.

“What pokémon do you have?” asks Tor, after a while.

“Venipede,” she says, swallowing. “Haven't had her very long. I … let my old partners go at the end of my journey. Had to. They were too used to battles to want to hang around while I went to school and work.”

It's uncomfortable, for all sorts of reasons: the improvised lie, the reminder that the trainer journey doesn't last forever. Again, that sense of shame returns, again like a millstone grinding at her gut. Couldn't she think of anything better to say?

“She took a bad hit from a darmanitan the other night, though,” she says, trying to cover her awkwardness with more words. “'S why I'm hanging around here. She'll be okay, she just can't travel yet.”

The confidence in her voice surprises even her with its plausibility. She sounds like she has it all together. She kind of wants to laugh, but not in a good way, and she has to hold it back to avoid startling Tor.

“Right,” they say, a little nervously. (Thinking, perhaps, that maybe this will have to end after all, someday.) “What did you have when you went on your first journey?”

Gwyneth does laugh then, but only a little, and as lightly as she can.

“A minccino and a munna,” she says. “Blossom and Corbin. Never evolved. Like I told you, I wasn't all that good at training. I didn't get any badges.”

“This will be my first,” admits Tor. “If I can get it.”

“Did you try in Striaton or Castelia?”

“No way. You know like eighty per cent of trainers fail their first challenge? I mean, so did I, but like I wasn't gonna go for the first Gym I got to.”

“Yeah, they said that back when I was your age too.” Gwyneth scratches her head. “I think you'll be okay. They're not too hard on you if it's your first Gym. And you've done your homework. You'll do fine.”

“Yeah?” Tor looks hopeful, excited. Gwyneth has the impression of someone who is not used to receiving encouragement. She wonders, briefly, about their parents, and grits her teeth. There are ways in which even a supportive family can choke you.

“Yeah,” she says. “Elesa's probably only ever faced a couple of sigilyph before. She won't know what hit her.”

“You really think so?”

Gwyneth smiles. She feels faintly sick with the knowledge that Tor really believes in everything she tells them. But how can she take it away?

“Yeah,” she says. “I really think so.”

Tor smiles back, and then above their heads the PA system chimes.

“Gwyneth ze'Haraan to ward 2,” it says. “That's ward 2 calling Gwyneth ze'Haraan.”

She's dead, thinks Gwyneth for one heart-stopping moment; and then she curses herself for being so jumpy. The venipede's not dead. Didn't they say she was doing well? She's fine. She's the toughest venipede they've ever seen.

Gwyneth takes a deep, slow breath. Okay.

“I better get over there,” she says, getting up. “See you around, Tor.”

They wish her luck. She thinks about that as she walks away, pockets full of bread rolls, and repeats the words to herself. “Good luck, Gwyneth.” It doesn't sound as good when she says it.

In the ward, Dr. Marsden is waiting. He greets her by name and tells her he'll get right to the point: he wants her permission to try to wake the venipede up.

“Done,” says Gwyneth, before he's even finished speaking. “Do it.”

“Just a minute, Ms. ze'Haraan, I need to make sure you're making an informed decision here―”

“The nurse said if you could wake her she'd be okay,” she says stubbornly. And, silently: if you can wake her I haven't killed her.

“Yes, it's very likely she will, but it's a risk, and as her partner we need your permission before we can attempt it. Which I can't ask for until you know enough to make the decision.”

“Okay,” says Gwyneth, resisting the urge to snap at him. “So tell me what you need to tell me.”

He speaks, and she waits, and she does listen, even though it doesn't really matter to her what he says, and when he's done Gwyneth speaks again.

“Okay,” she says. “Wake her up.”

Marsden hesitates for a moment, and nods briskly in response.

“All right,” he says. “We'll begin preparations. I can have someone let you know when we're done, or―”

“I'll wait,” says Gwyneth. “I'll just go outside.”

He does not argue with her. Probably he has worked out by now that Gwyneth is an irritating person with whom to argue. He nods, and says okay, and Gwyneth goes. She sits on the chair out in the corridor that she sat on the night before last when she drank cold coffee and cried, and she chews her thumbnail with short, savage movements of her jaw.

“C'mon,” she mutters. “We got a wedding to go to, a*shole.”

 

[Cutlerine]

TEN: VULTURE

Friday, 16th September

Late that night Gwyneth is called back to the ward by an exhausted-looking Dr. Marsden. He is smiling, though, and even before she gets there Gwyneth feels her face start to crack into a grin as well.

On its table, the venipede stirs and glares and is most definitely awake.

“Hey, a*shole,” says Gwyneth, sitting down next to her. “Shoulda known you were too stubborn to die that easy.”

Her warning rattle is weak, and she does not seem to have the energy to move, but she fixes her single eye on Gwyneth with all the usual malice.

“Feeling's mutual, believe me.” Gwyneth reaches out and the venipede throws her remaining stamina into weakly headbutting her knuckle. She can't tell whether this is hatred or affection. She's okay with that. She has the same difficulty herself, sometimes. “I got something for you, but the doctor says no food yet. Speaking of which, you've been scamming me, haven't you, dude? He says you can go weeks between meals, and you've had me feeding you every day.” She shakes her head. “A*shole.”

The venipede clicks in what is possibly insectoid self-satisfaction. Gwyneth tries her best, but she can't stop herself from smiling. She's happy to see her up again. So dumb, isn't it? This is a bug, a literal pest, a venomous little monster that eats trash and tries to kill people in back alleys. And she is the misguided pokémon liberator, someone who promised herself she'd never inflict her dubious partnership on another pokémon ever again, never expose anything to that kind of harm. But she can't deny it. She's angry about it, sure, but still, she's happier than she has been since the break-up. And it's only partly because it turns out that she hasn't gotten the venipede killed after all.

Gwyneth knows this isn't saying much, but it's an improvement, and she's in no position to turn that down.

“Thanks,” she says, turning to Marsden, who is hovering in the background with that expression on his face that people make when they see unforced affection. “I … yeah. Seriously. Thanks.”

“It's my job,” he says. “Don't mention it.”

“Will she be able to travel any time soon?” Gwyneth asks. “I dunno if you heard, I'm kind of on a deadline …”

“Yeah, Lee – uh, Dr. ze'Naarat – she mentioned.” Marsden pauses for a second, and Gwyneth wonders if he's in on the fraud. He definitely suspects, even if he isn't. She hopes he isn't planning to do anything with this information. “I think,” he says carefully, “that we can expect her to start recovering much faster from here on out. Venipede metabolise fast, and her shell is already starting to harden from the supplements we've been giving her. She won't be battling for weeks, but it's not impossible that she might be able to leave in a day or two, as long as she's well looked after.”

“She will be,” promises Gwyneth, with mixed shame and pride at the fact that she seems to really mean it.

“There is the matter of her eye surgery,” Marsden goes on. “I don't know if anyone's told you, but the shell that's grown over her lost eye is malformed. There's a lobe of chitin pressing on her brain. She's definitely not strong enough for surgery now, but I recommend you get that seen to within a few weeks. There's not enough research been done into the function of venipede brains for me to say exactly how that's been affecting her, but I know enough to tell you that it needs sorting out sooner rather than later.”

“Okay,” says Gwyneth, nodding. “Okay, I will.”

The venipede hisses to herself, and Gwyneth finds her eye drawn back to her. She seems bigger now that she's awake.

“I'll leave you to it,” says Marsden understandingly, and then it's just the two of them again. Just like Gwyneth was starting to get used to.

She sighs, and reaches out to run her finger along the contours of the venipede's forehead. She feels antennae run delicately over her skin, tasting its oils.

“Dude,” she says. She doesn't have anything else left to say.

*​

Gwyneth sleeps pretty well, for once, and sure, she dreams that one dream again, but it's okay. Her venipede's back, and she's okay.

*​

Saturday, 17th September

In the morning, Gwyneth counts up her bread rolls, apples and bananas, and figures she's on track to make it through White Forest. She's only got the one water bottle, but the rivers and streams there are supposed to be very pure. She could refill it from them when she needs to. There's probably a risk of some awful disease, cholera or whatever it is you get from bad water, but whatever, she'll run it. Can't be much worse for her than the crap she usually eats.

She spends the morning with her venipede, not really doing anything in particular, just sitting there, sometimes talking and sometimes not. She watches the venipede slowly grow more and more lively, and is reminded of watching Nika's pokémon recover after a battle, the way you could almost see them healing, their energy coming back with supernatural speed. Gwyneth has heard the urban legends like everyone else – the blissey that got eaten down to a skeleton and regenerated its entire body, the quagsire that grew not just a new limb but a new head – but there's a little bit of truth to them. Look after them, make sure they get the right food and care, and most pokémon will shrug off wounds that would cripple or kill anything else. Fighters, every one.

Gwyneth looks into the venipede's eye, at the flat, brute cunning gleaming at the back of it, and wonders. She struggles to imagine what it must be like to cling onto life with that kind of ferocity. The venipede probably only survived because she was too stubborn to die. If their positions were reversed, Gwyneth doesn't know if she would have made it.

By lunchtime, the venipede has started chewing the padding on her table, adamant that if she isn't getting any food she can at least destroy something, and Gwyneth feels okay with leaving her to get herself some lunch. She looks around the canteen, but doesn't see Tor, and wonders if they're at the Gym right now. She hopes, with a sudden fierce emotion she didn't know she had, that Elesa is good to them. Gwyneth doesn't know the positions of the Gym Leaders on people like her and Tor. She never had to face them and find out.

After she's done eating and putting stolen food away in her backpack, she checks on her venipede, which is still trying and failing to destroy the padding specifically designed to be proof against that kind of thing, and heads out for some air. She doesn't like hospitals, or doctors, or anything medical whatsoever, and recently she's spent more time around all of these things than she is comfortable with.

Nimbasa today is grey and damp, a diffuse cold spreading out through the city like a fog, but it isn't raining. Wet leaves carpet the sidewalks underneath the trees, torn loose by wind and rain and the approaching autumn, and Gwyneth goes slow, aware that she has only one arm with which to adjust her balance.

She moves through the rhythm of the city's weekend, observes the South Bank crawling all around her with wholesome, middle-class life. She sees dogs and herdier being walked, kid trainers scuttling around like insects, children in brightly-coloured coats being taken to the playground. (Their mother shepherds them away from Gwyneth, as if her wrongness is catching. She closes her eyes momentarily and does not respond.) Dozens of ordinary lives being led. Gwyneth misses that. Adventure is painful and expensive and exhausting. Her old job in Nacrene was tedious, but at least it wasn't difficult. And she had a proper home to come back to in the evenings.

Stopping on the riverbank to lean on the railing and watch the water moving, Gwyneth glimpses a shape moving across the sky out of the corner of her eye, and looks up to see broad wings and a lozenge-shaped tail: the distinctive silhouette of a mandibuzz. She's never really been into birds, but everyone in Unova can recognise a mandibuzz or a braviary. And Hekate gave her plenty of practice.

Gwyneth remembers when Hekate came back. Nika released her in the end, as she did all of her partners, but Hekate turned up again after a couple of months with another mandibuzz, sitting on the roof of her parents' house. Some days they were gone and some days they were there, but they followed Nika through every change of address she ever made.

Nika said, this is an omen, Annie.

Gwyneth said, why?

Nika said, you know mandibuzz are all female, right?

They stood there for a moment in the warm Humilau sun and watched the two birds thrusting nesting material into the lee of the chimney.

Gwyneth said, giant lesbian vultures?

And Nika laughed and said, yes, Annie. Giant lesbian vultures.

Hekate's probably back in Humilau now, Gwyneth thinks; Nika's almost certainly gone home by this point, and she and her nameless mate will have followed, to perch on the roof of her parents' house and live off fish for a little while. Then when she leaves for her honeymoon they'll disappear into the wilderness again, like they always do when Nika goes abroad, and, tracking her by some sixth sense known only to pokémon, return a few days after she comes back.

She sinks a little further onto the railing and closes her eyes. Nika on her honeymoon with Hilbert. Why would you even think about that, Gwyneth. Why the hell.

With an effort, she pushes herself upright and trudges on. It's best not to think about why she's doing what she's doing, or what she'll find when she gets there. Better just to do it, and consider the consequences later.

She's no fool. She knows this is bad advice. But she also knows she'll never get to Humilau if she doesn't think this way, so. Delusive hope it is.

The last time Nika went abroad, at least as far as Gwyneth knows, was with her. They went to Kanto, on the savings they'd built up over the first two years of Nika's job. Nika had been abroad before, of course, to visit family in Mexico and Russia – she is a woman who knows her history, who is (if stumblingly) trilingual – but it was Gwyneth's first time on a plane, let alone out of the country. She felt so stupid and naïve, fumbling her way through the intricate ceremonies of the airport, staring out of the window at the clouds.

She sighs. She has to stop doing this. She knows perfectly well that this is no way to live her life. It's just that she doesn't know how to change it.

Suddenly Nimbasa seems oppressive, the grey bulk of it, the gleam of lights from the distant theme park. She can't wait to get out of here, to some place that has no history for her. White Forest will be a relief: she's never been there before. No old ghosts lying in wait among the trees.

She turns and starts heading back towards the Centre. Over the river, the mandibuzz calls out, long and mournful, and begins to fly west towards the sun.

*​

Dr. Marsden has good news for her.

“I'm really happy with how she's improving,” he says later that afternoon, as the two of them stand and watch the venipede crawl slowly around her table. “You have good instincts, Ms. ze'Haraan. You must've caught the toughest venipede in Virbank.”

Gwyneth smiles briefly.

“So when can she leave?” she asks.

“I'm not in on Sunday mornings, but I'll have someone check on her early tomorrow,” he says. “And if she's good then, well. As long as you keep her on the supplements and meds like we discussed, I see no reason why she shouldn't travel.”

The venipede hisses. She's been allowed food now, on the grounds that withholding it was making her unduly destructive. Gwyneth thinks the joke is on the Centre staff: they fed her, and she's still trying her best to shred the table cover. The thought gives her a small, vicious satisfaction, which is probably not a good thing but whatever, it's fine.

“Thanks,” she says. “I appreciate that.”

“Not at all,” replies Marsden. “Good luck to the both of you.” He leaves – there are probably other more pleasant pokémon that require his attention – and Gwyneth sits back down in the chair by the venipede's side.

“You hear that, dude?” she asks, as she trundles past, displaying her panel of plastic shell like a flag. “We're getting out of here.”

Does she understand? Gwyneth isn't sure. It doesn't really matter. What does is that this reprieve is almost over. She's been lucky so far, with Shane and Saadiyyah and Rood and Dr. ze'Naarat; she's bought and begged and guilt-tripped her way halfway across the country. But this is where it gets harder. White Forest – okay, she'll hike that, but she has to get there first, down Routes 15 and 16 and across the Marvellous Bridge. Then there's White Forest to Undella, miles and miles of tangled rivers that make the ground soft and marshy. She might be able to hike that, too, but she's not sure she can make it through fast enough. And then, of course, there's Humilau itself, and god only knows how she's going to manage that leg of the journey.

Gwyneth says to herself that she needs a plan. This is not a substitute for coming with one, but it's all she's got right now.

*​

As she leaves the ward, Gwyneth is accosted by ze'Naarat. She is dressed casually, although still somewhat austerely. Gwyneth guesses that maybe she has Saturdays off. In which case, why is she here at all?

“Dr. Marsden tells me you plan on leaving tomorrow,” she says, and Gwyneth knows then that she was right: Marsden is in on this. It's a relief, in a way. It means she doesn't have to worry about it. “I'd like to advise against it.”

“Didn't we have this conversation already?” asks Gwyneth, a little more acidly than she intended. “Thanks for everything, seriously. But I'm going.”

She starts walking, and ze'Naarat moves too, keeping pace with her.

“Is there no other way for you to get there?” she asks. “Your body is under a lot of stress and a long hike is more or less exactly what it doesn't need―”

“No. No other way.”

“No family or―?”

“Haven't spoken to them in nearly two years.”

“Then why are you going to your brother's wedding?”

“Why do you care?” snaps Gwyneth, stopping in the middle of the corridor. “I got my reasons. What's it to you?”

“I'm a doctor,” retorts ze'Naarat, finally snapping herself. “It's my job. Or do you really think you can make it all the way across Unova on foot and come out in one piece at the other end?”

Gwyneth curses silently. She should have known there was something behind her interest in her. Nobody gives you anything for nothing.

“Yes,” she says stubbornly, although she knows her hesitation has given her away. Ze'Naarat must notice, but she displays none of the triumph Gwyneth was expecting. She does not react at all, in fact.

“You came in because someone attacked you,” she says, without any trace of emotion in her voice. “Would you have come if they had hurt you, not your venipede?”

(No.)

“What, to a Pokémon Centre? Obviously not.”

Ze'Naarat looks away. Gwyneth realises suddenly that she is not as old as she thought she was. Late twenties. Thirty at most.

“Gwyneth,” she says, and there is a note of kindness in her voice now, so warm and natural that it seems almost strange to think she was snapping at her earlier. “What are you really trying to do here?”

There is a long, long pause. Someone edges awkwardly past them, trying hard to pretend that they haven't seen any of this.

Gwyneth shuts her eyes.

“Hell if I know,” she says, with a sour bravado that even she cannot definitely identify as real or fake. “I'm just going to Humilau.”

Ze'Naarat's expression does not waver.

“Why?” she asks.

“F*ck you,” says Gwyneth quietly, and leaves.

*​

Later, while she is eating slowly in the canteen and thinking about ways to get out of town before Dr. ze'Naarat tries to speak to her again, Tor comes up to her, looking excited. Over their head is something that looks like a geometric suggestion of a bird, beating spindly wing-analogues too slowly to sustain the illusion that they are what keep it in the air and staring with an eye that looks like it's been painted on.

“Hey!” they say, sitting opposite her. (They have brought no friends but their sigilyph, Gwyneth notes. She is unsurprised, and depressed.) “I did it!”

She forces her thoughts of travel and ze'Naarat away and summons a smile from somewhere.

“Yeah? That's great, kid. Your deflection thing work out?”

“Yeah, it did!” They look delighted that she asked. “All the lightning attacks kinda dissipated when they got bounced off, so Elesa tried to get her emolga in close with U-turns but like it was going really fast. So when Vega pushed it out of the way it kept bouncing right out the arena.”

“Neat.” Gwyneth considers what to say next. Above Tor's head, Vega holds position, motionless but for the beating of her fake wings. Gwyneth does not think she has ever seen anything so emphatically not a bird. “Elesa would've brought two pokémon for you, right? Emolga, and …?”

“Eelektrik. But like there was nothing it could do. Vega deflected its lightning and then it tried to wrap round her but she wouldn't let it get close enough. It went on so long Elesa had to concede. Said she hadn't brought the right pokémon for the job and didn't even know what they would be, anyway.”

What a battle it must have been. Gwyneth is half sorry she didn't see it, although she guesses it might end up on IBN: if trainers are okay with it, their challenges get filmed for training purposes, and sometimes really spectacular ones get televised. By the sound of it, Tor's battle meets the criteria. It's not every day a Gym Leader has to admit that they simply don't know how to win.

She's jealous, she realises, but not the way she expects. She wishes she was Tor, sure, but more than that, she wishes she was their age and travelling with them. They're going to do well, just like Nika did, and Gwyneth loved watching her win more than she ever did winning herself.

“That's pretty incredible,” she says in the end. “You don't see that every day.”

Tor grins shyly.

“Oh, it was okay,” they begin to say, and Gwyneth, determined to make them feel their victory for what it is, interrupts:

“Nah, kid, I mean it, it's incredible.” Big smile. Come on, Gwyneth. You can manage that. “You know how often a Gym Leader says they're so outclassed they don't even know what to do? Like never. And she's been doing this, what, fourteen years? Since she was fifteen. It's not like you beat that new guy, Cheren.” (She allows herself a small, vicious satisfaction in casting him as the hapless rookie.) “You did real good. You should be proud of that.”

Tor is looking at her in a way that makes her deeply unhappy. No one has said anything like this to them, ever. She can see their hesitance, their unwillingness to believe that anyone might actually want to praise them like this, balancing against their desperate desire to take her words at face value.

She tells herself that this is okay. This is what trainer journeys are for, right? This is why they matter. This is her job, as the one not chosen.

“I don't know what to say,” says Tor, after a while. “I mean … thanks, I guess. Yeah. Thanks.”

Gwyneth smiles. Tor is too young to see how brittle it is.

“No problem,” she says. “You earned it.”

Here's to you, kid. Here's to the fifteen-year-old who hangs out with Gwyneth because she of all people is the friendliest face in town.

Sometimes Gwyneth is surprised that nobody else seems to realise why she is as full of hate as she is.

*​

That night she is less okay than the last; that night, she dreams the dream again, only this time Tor has sharpened that other part of it, the one that dwells on her own failure. Because isn't that the way with dreams? So much meaning, so much pointless, mundane, personal-to-the-point-of-boredom significance, that you can dream them over and over and keep finding new angles in them from which to attack yourself. Tonight, Gwyneth struggles to answer Juniper for a different reason altogether: she knows what will happen. This question is the prelude to her being given a partner and sent off to become a trainer. But this has all already happened, and Gwyneth already knows that she will hurt her partner, cast her out and destroy her ball. She knows that she will betray the trust that Juniper is placing in her, and overturn every expectation that she will share in even the smallest way in her brother's success.

So when Juniper starts talking, asks her name, if she's a boy or a girl, Gwyneth hangs her head in shame and cannot speak. How can she? She is the most gullible person in Unova, the one who fell for Team Plasma's spiel, the one who liberated her pokémon from the one human they really loved. She isn't worthy of this, not like other kids, the Tors and Cherens and Biancas and Saadiyyahs and yes, the Nikas, all those who believe. She is not them. She is not chosen.

Yes, it's the girl thing, and yes, it's the Hilbert thing. But it's this as well, and so when Hilbert steps out of the shadows to take her place, when he arrives to be chosen, Gwynethis so relieved that she could cry. Until she remembers that she hasn't avoided anything. Until she remembers that it has all already taken place, and it can never be undone.

*​

Sunday, 18th September

In the morning she gets ready to go. She's been here long enough; she's still got half the country ahead of her, and only four days to cross it in. It's been nice to have a bed, and food and hot showers, but it can't last. This isn't her place any more. She's no trainer, and it's time to move on.

She takes everything out of her bag, tips out crumbs and lint, then refolds clothes, wraps food and puts everything back. It takes a while, with her hand, but she manages. As she sees it, she doesn't have a choice.

After breakfast, which she eats quickly to avoid bumping into Tor again, she heads down to the ward, where she sits down by the venipede and waits for the nurse to come.

“Hey, dude,” she says. “I forgot yesterday – you can have food now, right? Here you go. Courtesy of the Pokémon Centre canteen.”

She holds out her hand and opens her fingers to reveal a chicken nugget she saved earlier. The venipede looks at it, then at her, then takes it delicately between her forelegs and begins to nibble.

“Yeah, you're welcome,” says Gwyneth, with a vague aggression that might be real or might be fake. “Just hurry it up. I could do without the doctors chewing me out for feeding you junk food.”

Her worries are unfounded. The venipede demolishes the nugget long before the nurse arrives to examine her. When he does, he pronounces the venipede fit to travel, as long as Gwyneth takes good care of her, and Gwyneth nods seriously.

“Yeah,” she says. “Don't worry, I will.” She owes her that, if nothing else.

And that's it: time to check out. Gwyneth hoists the venipede gently up onto her shoulder, trying not to touch the burnt part of her shell, and hands her key card in at the front desk. It's a wrench to see it go, and to know that with it goes access to all the creature comforts she'd just started to get used to, but it's okay. She has Humilau in her future. That's got to be worth giving this up.

It's getting harder to believe that, after her last conversation with ze'Naarat. But Gwyneth might as well be the patron saint of lost causes, and she knows she won't stop. No matter what anyone says, it's all just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, right? Just like living is a matter of not dying.

Gwyneth puts one foot in front of the other, and she does not die, and she walks out of the Pokémon Centre into the grey light of day.

*​

She is not entirely without resources. She has a plan, and although it isn't a very good one it does at least exist.

Here is the thing about this stretch of the journey: you can't walk it. Route 16 has no trainers' trail, just a stretch of highway linking Nimbasa to the Marvellous Bridge. Why would it? There's nothing there. Well, there's Lostlorn Forest, but that's in the middle of nowhere, and if you want to get there you drive or take one of two buses, the regular one for the Unovan public or the League-subsidised one that takes trainers free of charge.

This is the bus that Gwyneth rode on nine years ago with Nika and Delarivier. It has four stops: Nimbasa Pokémon Centre, Lostlorn Forest, the start of the Route 15 trainers' trail, and White Forest.

This is the bus she is planning on catching.

There are a couple of problems with this idea, but if Gwyneth gets it right, she thinks, none of them should be insurmountable. One: she isn't a trainer. Okay, but she kind of looks like one, right? With the backpack and all. And anyway, doesn't everyone keep saying that only a trainer would have a venipede? But then there's two: she doesn't have a trainer card. She doesn't even have her old one any more; she lost it years ago. Lost, as in deliberately forgot where it was, so that she could be rid of it without having to go through the act of throwing it away.

This is a more difficult one, and she's going to to have to rely on luck to get around it more than anything else. There are a lot of trainers taking the subsidised buses in the summer, and from what Gwyneth remembers the drivers often get lax about checking cards. Oh sure, they're meant to check them all individually, but when there's three dozen squawking kids and half a zoo of pokémon clamouring to get on, you find your patience gets thin fast. There were plenty of times when the driver just waved them through, eager to get going and keep the bus as close to on time as was possible. It's not like there was any oversight, really. Nobody intending trouble gets on a bus with a bunch of kids and pokémon who've spent the last few months learning how to fight, not if they want to get off again with all their limbs still attached. (Some people might get on that bus and ride it out somewhere remote, follow a child till they were alone, but then, Gwyneth guesses they could just as easily do that by taking the regular bus.)

But some people probably got free rides that way. People who were short, and had a pokémon, and looked like they'd been walking around in the wilderness. Well, Gwyneth checks all the boxes.

It will work, or it won't. She'll have to pick her time carefully, find a crowd to lose herself in. It's fine. She'll save enough time travelling by bus that she can afford to spend a few hours staking out the bus stop, picking her moment. If she manages to get on. If the driver doesn't look at her too closely. There are trainers Gwyneth's age, and they are entitled to ride the buses, but they're not common, and if a bus driver sees one they'll always check their card, just in case.

She takes a breath. She slouches down the road and takes a seat in the bus shelter.

The venipede rattles uneasily in her ear, and she lifts her carefully down onto her lap. She seems okay: a little slow, a little unsteady, but okay.

“Here we go, dude,” says Gwyneth, stroking her shell and wondering if she can even feel it through the layers of chitinous armour. “White Forest or bust, I guess.”

*​

The morning passes. Ordinarily Gwyneth would listen to some music, but she doesn't want to waste the phone battery. So she sits in silence and watches as the buses and their passengers come and go.

They leave at ten after the hour, every hour. The first two have a handful of passengers, but after that, as the clouds begin to clear a little and the teenagers in the Centre start to wake up properly, the line at the bus stop thickens and swells into a crowd. Gwyneth keeps her head down in the corner, letting her hair mask her face, and listens to the chatter: so like I tried out that rapid spin thing against Courtney the other day―and he said it should be okay if she rests it―did you see that guy's sigilyph? Yeah, I know, how the hell did he get one of those anyway―so what's the deal with this Lostlorn Forest place? Like is there anything there or is it just woods?

When she hears the reference to Tor, she feels her muscles tense. It's not right. When you do that to her, that's just life, but when you do it to someone else it's wrong. Maybe they never spoke to Tor, maybe they just assumed, but that's what it always is, isn't it? Just an assumption. A perfectly reasonable assumption, and never mind that someone ended up hurt.

Gwyneth scratches moodily at her bandaged arm. Let it go, she tells herself. She does not, and it goes off to join the pile of other things that fester deep inside her.

The next bus has just come round the corner. She stands up and gets her backpack ready.

“This is it,” she mutters to the venipede. “Try to look trainery, okay dude?”

The bus pulls up to the stop, and Gwyneth inserts herself carefully into the crowd, halfway along its length. It's not so hard. She's spent enough of her life in cities to know how to queue aggressively, and she's able to get to where she wants to be without too much effort. Now she just moves forwards with the rest of them towards the open doors, trying to look young.

Nearly there. She doesn't hear the driver asking for cards. She risks a quick glance up from the sidewalk, and sees kids pouring on steadily, without stopping. Okay, she thinks. Okay, this might just work. She's third in line now. Second. And then …

And then she's stepping up through the doors, face turned away, walking as fast as the crowd will let her―

“Hey,” the driver says. “You.”

The world seems to stop for a moment, the whole earth dying on its axis; the kids' chatter fades and the sun disappears, and Gwyneth, heart in her mouth, turns through air that seems to drag at her like molasses towards the driver.

“Yeah,” he says, looking straight past her at someone about to get in. “Put that in its ball, would ya? We ain't got room for anything that big.”

“Oh, sure,” says the girl. “Sorry. Ryszard? Back to your ball.”

And the sawk disappears and Gwyneth lets out a long, shaky breath. Goddamn it. She was this close to a heart attack.

She hurries away down the bus before anyone notices her lingering.

*​

Gwyneth sits somewhere in the middle, by the window. A forgettable kind of place, she hopes. She's not the only person over the age of eighteen on this bus – there's a guy with a wingull over there who must be around her own age – but she still stands out, and she'd prefer not to. She thrusts her bag down by her feet, settles the venipede on her lap, and waits for the footsteps to stop and the bus to get moving.

The girl with the sawk sits next to her. This is a good thing, because a few seconds later Gwyneth sees Tor get on board the bus, and the girl provides some measure of cover. Gwyneth shifts the venipede out of the way and bends down as if to get something from her bag, watching the aisle out of the corner of her eye, and only when Tor is past does she straighten up again. They're heading for the upper deck. Good. They won't see her there.

Gwyneth wonders briefly why she bothered. Tor isn't going to rat her out, after all. And they would have liked to sit with her, she thinks, as unlikely as it seems. Maybe she would have liked to sit with them as well. It's not like they're bad company. Although Gwyneth usually is, if she isn't putting in the effort to be nice, and this is a long bus ride: she's not going to be putting in the effort.

It was probably for the best, she decides, and tries to relax into her seat.

Nimbasa is grey today, with occasional spots of brightness where shafts of sun break through the clouds. There is definitely an autumnal feel to the air now. Camping in White Forest is going to be cold, and possibly wet. And Gwyneth doesn't even have a tent. It's okay, she tells herself. There are lodges, aren't there? Like the one she and Nika stayed in just off Route 6. If she moves fast, and gets the route right, she won't have to sleep outdoors.

If. Gwyneth half-smiles. If.

The bus chugs along slowly, unremarkable houses giving way to unremarkable offices that in their turn fade into suburbia. The kids chatter, inexhaustibly energetic. Next to Gwyneth, the girl has turned around and is talking to her friend over the back of her seat. Gwyneth listens for a moment, learns that she is called Daisy and her friend is Louisa, that they're super excited, that they heard there are zorua in Lostlorn Forest and how cool is that, and then tunes them out again, tired just from listening to them. How do they have this much energy? Something about it almost seems obscene.

Gwyneth turns her attention to the window instead, but the view is uninspiring. This is an empty land, a nowhere country that offers nothing to the spectator. Down here in the basin of the river valley, there is no prospect of seeing beyond the buildings, and in the suburbs the buildings are not worth seeing. Gwyneth thinks that even the first time she looked at a scene like this, she must have felt she'd seen it all before. Housing on an industrial scale. Lawn flamingos and cars. Middle Unova, ad infinitum. The scale of it all is exhausting. Gwyneth closes her eyes on it, and returns as always to the past.

Driftveil she remembers as being a good time, at least after the weirdness of Hilbert's great victory. It takes her a little while to get over it all; there are calls from her mother, excited-slash-terrified outpourings of emotion (because Hilbert never tells them anything, because the first her mother learns of all this is from the news and since she cannot get through to his phone she calls Gwyneth instead), and there is the electric excitement that pervades the country in general and the training industry in particular. It's tiring. Gwyneth spends a lot of time just sitting around, trying to figure out what the hell is even happening to the world. It's all right, she doesn't miss out: the whole of Unova is doing the same.

But it passes. The updates from the League stop being extraordinary soon enough, and people rediscover other topics of conversation. Nika ceases to have to block conniving journalists who have figured out who Gwyneth is and want to speak to her. (This kindness will go unrevealed until much later, when Gwyneth is in a position to be pathetically, furiously grateful, and when it will find a place among the dark thoughts that tell her Nika is more than she deserves.) And Gwyneth thinks to herself, okay it's over now, it's time to forget it and move on, and she is able to get back to something much more important: being young and infatuated, with absolutely no adult oversight.

This is much more fun than being Hilbert ze'Haraan's sister. She and Nika are over their initial awkwardness now and sliding back into their previous familiarity, except that this time it is a familiarity that comes with hands and eyes and lips and absurdly melodramatic teenage seriousness. One afternoon, while eating victory ice cream after Nika has thrashed several trainers who thought they could take the dorky fat kid with the braces, the poetry comes out for the first time: with a solemnity that only a child could manage, Nika quotes Sappho's Fragment 16 at Gwyneth and reduces her to a squirming, delighted-embarrassed bundle of nerves.

It will be agreed, later, that Nika is such a nerd. But that summer in Driftveil, it seems not nerdy but profound, as if the two of them were the first people ever in all the thousands of years since Sappho died to really understand what she was talking about. Because what do classicists know, or poets, or literary critics? What do boring old people really know about the important things? About Love, and Joy, and other capital-letter emotions? They promise each other that they will be different, that they will stay this way forever. They will never be old. They'll just burn out spectacularly in their twenties. It'll be great, you'll see.

In between their obsession (because it is one, because they are children and are still learning how to love), there is of course Nika's trainer career to get on with. Driftveil has a Gym, and it is known as a tough one. Gwyneth knows all the statistics by heart, and she could tell you that the Quake Badge is one of the least-frequently-attained badges in the Unova League. She says as much to Nika, and Nika shrugs.

“I'm here,” she says. “And Clay's back from the whole thing at the League now. Might as well try.”

So they go to the Gym, and Nika tries, and Nika fails. She gives it her all, and her pokémon, unused to losing, cling on so desperately to the fight that she has to recall them before they battle themselves to the point of collapse, but really Clay has the upper hand from the start. Down in the dim light of his subterranean chamber, he sends out an excadrill whose speed her team struggles to match. Her lead, Astyanax, does outpace it, just; when the excadrill launches its first attack, tearing across the arena in a whirl of edged steel, he gets out of the way and rips the ground apart beneath it with a bulldoze, knocking it out of its drill formation and forcing it to engage him on foot. But it's a close thing, and he doesn't have the staying power to make his initial victory stick. The excadrill knocks him down, again and again, and once he's out the match is as good as over. Britomartis is too slow, and Hekate cannot stand up to a single rock slide. Nika refuses even to send her out: there is no point getting her hurt over nothing.

Clay assures Nika she did well. Gwyneth, watching from the sidelines, decides she doesn't like him. What kind of a fight was that, anyway? The excadrill was clearly way too tough for Nika's team! (It wasn't, but Gwyneth is more loyal than she is sensible.) Clay practically cheated, using something like that. And the way he keeps calling Nika 'squirt' is so irritating. Doesn't he hear how condescending he sounds? (He doesn't, although Gwyneth is not the first person to have pointed this out.) And who even wears a cowboy hat? Does he know what century he's in? (He does, although his hat is the subject of several long-standing jokes among members of the Unova League.)

Nika herself is not fazed. She knows she isn't unstoppable, even if Gwyneth doesn't. But she lets Gwyneth fuss over her indignantly anyway. She thinks, and she is aware that she probably shouldn't say this to her face, that it's kind of cute.

Besides, the winning isn't the point, is it? Her pokémon are with her because they want to grow, and they are growing, Quake Badge or not. Astyanax is by now a full-fledged krokorok, and Hekate's wings are coming in fast; she is clearly not far off adulthood. Even Britomartis, her rust dealt with, is starting to grow heavy and slow, and Nika suspects the day is coming when she will shed her baby armour and emerge an adult bisharp.

Gwyneth sees all this and knows that Nika is a good trainer, and a good person. She's looked after her team, given them the care and training they wanted. Even Ajax the lillipup: she knew he didn't want to fight, and so she sent him home again, over the box network, to become the pet he is more comfortable being. Gwyneth knows that when she looks at Nika she looks at someone who could never have liberated her pokémon, and though in some obscure sense she hates and fears this she also loves her for it, for being what she cannot.

It's not perfect. It's okay. Nothing ever is.

They hang around Driftveil for a while longer, Nika and her team winning more matches than they lose and getting better with every one. They visit parks and museums, although there are relatively few of either in this city, where culture sometimes seems to be an afterthought. They go to the historic marketplace, and Nika buys souvenirs while Gwyneth watches, aware of the finite amount of money her League grant gets her. (Nika offers to buy her a ring she keeps coming back to, and it isn't even that expensive really but Gwyneth is too embarrassed, shakes her head no.)

Summer waxes. Nika's skin darkens, and Gwyneth's hovers indecisively between tanning and burning. Driftveil gets hot and sticky. It's time to move on.

Route 6 is special: the wilderness trail here snakes north through the woods, crossing and recrossing the river as it winds down through the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, and the summer heat is muted in the dappled shade of the trees. They bump into a couple of other trainers, Kit and Nova, and they travel together for a time in the cool shadow cast by Nova's massive, lumbering beartic. Kit is uninteresting, and Nova is both several intimidating years older than them and unwilling to speak, but the weather remains beautiful and somehow, between the trees and flowers and occasional startled deerling running across the track in full summer regalia, everyone gets along.

Except that they don't, not for long. Gwyneth is very young still, and she passes as cis more of the time than she thinks, more certainly than she will when she is older, but after a few hours of walking and talking Kit works out what she is. He takes it as a personal insult, the way that people do; she sees it in his eyes and in an instant she goes cold and dead inside, the memory of a fist driving into her ribs hanging crystalline before her mind's eye. He does not say anything, not yet, because Nika is so obviously both her ally and partnered with stronger pokémon than he is, but Gwyneth stops talking anyway and walks on in silence, waiting to be hurt.

When they stop that night, Nika goes off to exercise Britomartis, who is growing heavier as her evolution draws nearer and so has been too slow to walk with them, and Nova retreats into her tent in silence. Kit looks at Gwyneth across the fire and she looks back. He speaks to her and uses a word that has six letters. She does not reply. She feels her misshapenness like a knife wound.

It could go further. It would not be the first time, and it would not be the last. (Hands. Eyes. A man in a police uniform and the memory of Martin.) It does not.

Kit does not need to make it go further. He doesn't even need to say anything else; that would only risk a confrontation with Nika, and anyway he knows with the brutal adult cunning that they are all beginning to grow into that Gwyneth will say nothing to her about this.

She comes back, and laughs and jokes with Kit, and Gwyneth sits there and tries to smile with them and wishes she could take hold of Nika's hand. But she knows the score. Kit has just reminded her, after all. She is the kind of thing that nobody touches, and if Nika's hand ever makes contact with hers it has to be choreographed, has to be plausibly deniable. You only touch her by accident, or to harm her.

Summer is here, she thinks desperately. Summer is here and everything is fine. But when she looks at Kit, devil-red in the firelight, she knows with an awful certainty that one day, autumn will come.

*​

Nothing changes. It's okay. It hasn't killed her yet.

Gwyneth sighs and opens her eyes to trees, moving past on either side of the highway. Nimbasa's gone, then. Good. Too many ghosts in that town.

“Time for your medicine, dude,” she tells the venipede, and reaches into her bag for the bottles. There are two: one of vitamin and mineral supplements that she's supposed to give the venipede twice weekly, when she feeds her (more often if she's battling); another of something to promote healing and shell regrowth, to be taken twice daily for the next three weeks. Venipede are incapable of taking tablets, or perhaps it's just so hard to get them to do it that nobody bothers, so the bottles contain not pills but what look unsettlingly like insect larvae. Gwyneth takes one out and the venipede twitches in her lap, instantly alert. She doesn't see the appeal herself – it's a big, soft chewy thing made of some kind of foam or gum that feels gross to the touch – but she supposes this is the kind of thing venipede are meant to eat, rather than chicken nuggets and overripe fruit.

“Here,” she says, holding it out. The venipede is about to pounce, but she doesn't have the strength; she wiggles a little and then settles for seizing the fake larva in her jaws, first decapitating it in case it thinks of escaping and then chewing her way slowly down its length. “Don't get too used to it,” Gwyneth warns her. “You don't get them forever.”

The venipede keeps chewing, occasionally taking a short break to chitter quietly to herself. Gwyneth watches the intricate movement of her jaws and forelegs. It's strange how delicate she is. So vicious when she's hunting, and so precise and fastidious after the kill.

“Glad you like it,” she says, and turns her attention back to the window.

Route 16 stretches out, long and dismal. The sun still hasn't managed to break through the clouds properly, and the forest either side of the highway looks dark and brooding in the subdued light. Occasionally, a raindrop bursts against the window. Gwyneth really doesn't envy the kids who are planning on going zorua-hunting. She very deliberately does not remind herself that she is also planning a walk in the woods.

After what feels like forever, the bus turns left off the highway and briefly climbs a hill before stopping at a wooden sign advertising Lostlorn Forest. Most of the kids get off here, including the girl sitting next to Gwyneth; in the crush of bodies pushing down the aisle, she doesn't see if Tor is among them. Without the chatter, the bus seems twice the size all of a sudden, and the few trainers who get on to replace them don't make much impression in the new emptiness. As the bus begins to move, Gwyneth sighs and untenses her shoulders. She didn't know how much she wanted the quiet till it came.

“Here, dude,” she says, helping the venipede down onto the seat next to her. “Carried you long enough. Let me read my book now.”

With her out of the way, Gwyneth can spread Three Nights in Opelucid across her knees and hold it in place with her good hand while she reads. Her other hand stays in the sling, itching and aching. The pain has got better – whatever Dr. ze'Naarat gave her is working – and it's mostly confined to her arm now, but it's still not something you can ignore. Gwyneth remembers breaking a tooth (she has never been good about dental hygiene) and going around with the pain for a day and a half, suppressing a wince with every breath and lying awake at night in agony, until finally Nika saw through her pretence and told her to go to the damn dentist, Gwyneth, what were you even thinking. This is not so sharply focused, but it's the same kind of persistent. Every time you think you might be about to forget about it, it comes right back with a cheery wave and a malicious smile.

The book helps distract her a little. The plot has picked up again, kind of, although it's still only halfway through the second of the three nights. Gwyneth wonders if anyone can really get this much done in a single night. She supposes it's possible, if you're organised. Pencil it into your diary: 8.18 pm, revisit crime scene, 9.07 pm, chase suspect, 9.44 pm, receive anonymous tip-off, 10.13 pm, send your natu off on a spying mission, 11.30 pm, decipher cryptic clue left by killer. Detective work by numbers. Kind of silly, really.

She keeps reading anyway. She figures she could use a little silly. That's why she picked the book up in the first place.

The forest glides by, impassive in the weak sunlight. Drizzle begins to spot the windows; stops; starts again. Some trainers talk quietly a few rows behind her. Gwyneth hears an I love you too, raises her eyebrows and concentrates on not listening any more.

She evaluates her progress. It's the eighteenth, and she should reach White Forest by the early afternoon. Two days, if she's fast, to get to the other side. She'll need to get a lift to Undella somehow; maybe she'll meet some friendly hikers. And then a boat, or a bus, or another kindly stranger with a car, to get her up to Humilau.

It's a long way, she knows. And it's country she's never travelled before, either on her journey or later, with Nika. She can say Aân Hen all she likes; she's not part of that Us People, not really. She has no culture and no tie to this land. She doesn't have the first idea about how to find her way through it fast enough.

It's okay, she decides. She'll just have to do it anyway.

 

[diamondpearl876]

“Good,” says the doctor, when she arrives. “You're here.”

“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “I am.”

Not sure if you intentionally wrote this bit of dialogue in reference to Gwyneth's dissociation, but I found it pretty powerful for how subtle it was. Considering how Gwyneth has trouble accepting the current situation she's in, her just saying, "Yeah, I'm here," is important.

She's been like this for years, although it like everything else has got worse since the break-up.

As someone who thinks of things in black and white, and as someone who finds it easy to leave behind most people (if I sound like a terrible person there, oops), I've never really understood the effect or the reasoning behind dwelling on ex-lovers. Needless to say, this fic's given me a bit more insight into that. I have a lot more sympathy for Gwyneth after these two chapters.

“Wow. It's like … thirty seconds out of the arena, right?”

“Ten. They changed it in the fifties, after Liat Morgenstern and that weavile.”

I like this compared to being automatically disqualified if you're out the ring for even a moment.

Its name is Gwyneth and it is poison.

Is that a comparison to venipede I spot? Nice.

Hilbert never said a goddamn thing.

Of course he didn't. Pokemon game chosen ones never say a goddamn thing. 8)

“Dude,” she says. She doesn't have anything else left to say.

Adorable. XD It's okay to care about the venipede and say you're super glad it's okay, Gwyneth, really.

She watches the venipede slowly grow more and more lively, and is reminded of watching Nika's pokémon recover after a battle, the way you could almost see them healing, their energy coming back with supernatural speed. Gwyneth has heard the urban legends like everyone else – the blissey that got eaten down to a skeleton and regenerated its entire body, the quagsire that grew not just a new limb but a new head – but there's a little bit of truth to them.

Heh, those injuries sound pretty gruesome, but it really does help to accentuate what pokemon can endure.

Some days they were gone and some days they were there, but they followed Nika through every change of address she ever made.

Nika said, this is an omen, Annie.

Gwyneth said, why?

Nika said, you know mandibuzz are all female, right?

They stood there for a moment in the warm Humilau sun and watched the two birds thrusting nesting material into the lee of the chimney.

Gwyneth said, giant lesbian vultures?

And Nika laughed and said, yes, Annie. Giant lesbian vultures.

Putting aside the fact that I always kind of laugh at Gwyneth's Annie nickname, but the mandibuzz following Nika even after being released is the sweetest thing I've ever heard.

He takes it as a personal insult,

Yep, because Gwyneth's gender is really his business. Blah.

Venipede are incapable of taking tablets, or perhaps it's just so hard to get them to do it that nobody bothers, so the bottles contain not pills but what look unsettlingly like insect larvae.

Well, that's gross, but interesting in the worldbuilding sense. 0_0

She very deliberately does not remind herself that she is also planning a walk in the woods.

This particular quote and others like it make me wonder how this fic would've been different if portrayed in first person. I have a feeling we probably wouldn't have been able to get into Gwyneth's head as much. Even though first person should help with that, she tries to put too much of her thoughts to the side, especially the more rational ones. Still, the thought occurred to me so I thought I'd point it out. Who knows? Maybe you did consider first person.

 

[Cutlerine]

Not sure if you intentionally wrote this bit of dialogue in reference to Gwyneth's dissociation, but I found it pretty powerful for how subtle it was. Considering how Gwyneth has trouble accepting the current situation she's in, her just saying, "Yeah, I'm here," is important.

Yeah! Like, a lot of Gwyneth's problems boil down to her being unable to deal with her present situation, and obviously the whole point of a trainer journey -- even a weird, broken one like the road trip she's currently on -- is to grow as a person. So yes, she's supposed to be getting a little better at stuff as she goes along, although of course I doubt we'll see her turn her life around completely in just the space of two weeks.

As someone who thinks of things in black and white, and as someone who finds it easy to leave behind most people (if I sound like a terrible person there, oops), I've never really understood the effect or the reasoning behind dwelling on ex-lovers. Needless to say, this fic's given me a bit more insight into that. I have a lot more sympathy for Gwyneth after these two chapters.

That's ... good, I think. I am not a relationships kinda person -- you might call me aggressively solitary -- but I also write about them quite a lot, and because I'm aro/ace and don't go in for that kinda thing myself I'm always uncertain whether or not I've actually done them any justice when I do so. I have this massive blind spot for romantic subtext when reading or viewing any kind of media -- I just do not notice and then other people point it out and I feel so unobservant -- and I always feel kind of a fraud when I try to write any myself. So if I'm making this seem that real to you, then that's a hugely comforting thing to know as far as my confidence in writing this sort of thing goes.

I like this compared to being automatically disqualified if you're out the ring for even a moment.

I figure that in a sport that frequently generates explosions, you kinda have to allow a combatant to get knocked out of the arena for a couple of seconds. It only really becomes a problem if someone makes a strategy to abuse that rule, which is what I was imagining with Liat and the weavile -- something fast that stays out of the arena where the other pokémon can't get to it and zooms back in to attack before retreating. Just one of those details I end up imagining when I get really into a setting.

Is that a comparison to venipede I spot? Nice.

Yep! Also more than that, of course; Gwyneth is poison in a lot of ways -- she can be a toxic person to be around, and as a trans woman of colour she's kinda treated as poisonous by society. But it is part of the patterning, too.

Of course he didn't. Pokemon game chosen ones never say a goddamn thing. 8)

That's basically half the inspiration for Go Home, honestly. Gwyneth is the one not chosen; she could have been Hilda, if someone hadn't clicked the d-pad over to the side and picked Hilbert instead. But she's not, so she's not the chosen one, and so she's in a position I've always found interesting: an NPC forced to confront the existence of a player character, who is terribly, unnaturally skillful and tenacious and unstoppable. Having someone like that as a brother would be super rough, I think.

Heh, those injuries sound pretty gruesome, but it really does help to accentuate what pokemon can endure.

Yeah, I really like imagining what kinds of urban legends might circulate among pokémon trainers -- some of them would be the same kind of nonsense you used to see when you were a kid and everyone was spreading rumours about super secret ultra-powerful pokémon in RBY, sure, but some would just be blatantly ridiculous claims about the healing powers of blissey or absurd stories like I heard that when they moved city hall in the fifties it was gonna be too expensive to remodel a new building so they just had the Champion pick up the whole building with her machamp and carry it over there. Pokémon are ridiculous, and I bet they give rise to ridiculous stories.

Putting aside the fact that I always kind of laugh at Gwyneth's Annie nickname, but the mandibuzz following Nika even after being released is the sweetest thing I've ever heard.

It's fine! You're meant to laugh at it, really; like Gwyneth said, it's pretty silly. It's just that, like so many things, it's not just silly but also really important to her and Nika. Life is pretty absurd like that.

As for Hekate, yes, she is the cutest. I really like mandibuzz, mostly because I really like vultures and also flying-types that aren't just fast, fragile sweepers, and since it's one half of the big Unovan pair of flying-types, I felt this was the time to give one some time in the spotlight. We'll see more of her later, of course, but I guess her appearance here is really mostly to make the difference between the ends of Gwyneth's and Nika's trainer careers more stark. Gwyneth destroyed hers; Nika's came to a natural and healthy conclusion.

Yep, because Gwyneth's gender is really his business. Blah.

Yeah, regrettably, this is how it tends to go down. Gwyneth hasn't seen the last of people like Kit yet, nor has seen the worst of them, either.

Well, that's gross, but interesting in the worldbuilding sense. 0_0

I'm glad it's interesting! It was born of me sitting up late at night and going wait, crap, I don't think centipedes are physically capable of taking tablets and then trying to work out what veterinary science would have done in a world where giant bugs are a thing that frequently require medical attention. I don't know how realistic this is.

This particular quote and others like it make me wonder how this fic would've been different if portrayed in first person. I have a feeling we probably wouldn't have been able to get into Gwyneth's head as much. Even though first person should help with that, she tries to put too much of her thoughts to the side, especially the more rational ones. Still, the thought occurred to me so I thought I'd point it out. Who knows? Maybe you did consider first person.

I did, a little! I'd just finished with Time and Tide, and I'd started another novel that was being written in the first person, and I really wanted a change, so I decided to go back to third basically on a whim -- something that I probably would have changed if it hadn't worked out, but I pretty early on realised that this had the advantage that third person (a) let me be a better writer than Gwyneth and (b) let me get around Gwyneth's refusal to see certain obvious truths.

Anyway! Thank you for reading and responding! <3 Next time: Gwyneth goes on an ill-advised hiking trip.

 

[Cutlerine]

ELEVEN: DOGGED

Sunday, 18th September

A little before noon, the forest falls away on either side and the bus pulls out into the sudden emptiness of the Marvellous Bridge. Below, the Arat empties out into the bay, millions of gallons of water rippling greyly in the dull light; above, the footbridge is deserted, dripping at its edges. On the right, just visible through the opposite windows, is the flat ocean horizon, further away than even seems possible. On the left, right outside Gwyneth's window, the Arat slowly carves out its canyon, a huge gleaming slash dividing the forest on the west shore from the hills on the east. Far off, some pale dots that might be swanna bob up and down on the water. Just as far beyond them, something big is moving across the sky, a light plane or braviary or visiting dragonite.

Gwyneth feels something lift inside her. She glances at the venipede, but she has fallen asleep on the seat, so she says nothing.

Okay. It's not all Aân Hen. But it's Unova, and it's beautiful, and from up here you can't even see all the people who make it into something worse.

It's a good thought, and she needs it right now. She holds onto it for the full ten minutes it takes to cross the bridge, and then, as the bus descends onto the plain and the view slips away behind her, she surprises herself by letting go with only the slightest touch of regret.

The land is different here. This side of the river, the soil is poor: no trees here, or almost none, just clumps of pampas and other grasses. Shrubs. Mostly just space, and the huge pale bluffs that rise out of it like ruined temples. Gwyneth has seen pictures before, has in fact been shown pictures by Nika, who has always meant to visit this place but never done it; still, it's something else to see it in person. The highway bends south, to go around the national park, and that puts the plain on her left, right outside her window. There's a thin mist here today, and the bluffs are monumental shadows in its depths. Gwyneth stares, and tries to remember what she knows about this place. Fossil-bearing clay. She has the phrase 'fossil-bearing clay' in her head. She doesn't know if that's what she's looking at here or if she's thinking of something else.

What she does know is the route taken by the trainers' trail. It hugs the north end of the plain, even winds up and down some of the bluffs. Gwyneth has seen the pictures online and in the magazines. She imagines walking it in the mist, a huge wall of something that might be fossil-bearing clay at her side, cold and grainy to the touch. And on the other side – what? Empty space. The plain, the shrubs. Spikes of pampas piercing the mist.

This is Unova too. There are the cities, the sprawl and the high-rise, and there is the space. A country wider than it is old. Millions of square miles and only a couple centuries of history.

There were people here before then, of course. But it wasn't Unova for them. That was someone else's history.

Gwyneth feels this is significant somehow, the relative size and youth of her country, but she has never been able to explain why. She always has had trouble putting big thoughts into words.

She closes her eyes, shutting out the vastness, and leans back in her seat. She's got a lot of walking to do. Probably rest will be more useful to her than philosophy.

*​

The bluffs don't go on forever. On the other side, a few more hours away, is the slope down into White Forest, where the scale of the country is hidden behind an endless sea of gorgeously autumnal trees. Gwyneth actually starts when the bus gets close enough for her to see. Even on a grey day like this, the light picks out a million and one colours among the leaves, shifting and changing with every gust of wind. She hears a few gasps and some breathless muttering from the kids. It is beautiful, she concedes, and then, irritated at catching herself thinking it, she tells herself to see how beautiful it looks when it's midnight and she's shivering under a dripping tree.

“See that, dude?” she asks. The venipede is awake again now, sitting in her lap for the warmth. She might be looking out of the window, or she might not. Gwyneth isn't really sure how good insect eyes are. “'S our stop.”

The venipede rattles quietly. She decides to take it as a response.

*​

Eventually, they arrive. It's later than Gwyneth was expecting; four o'clock has come and gone by the time the bus finally turns off the highway and comes slowly to a halt in a grove of ash trees. She feels she ought to be ready to go by now, but even with her legs numb from sitting all day she can barely find it in her to get up. Apparently it takes more than a couple of square meals and some sleep to fix everything that's wrong with her.

Still, there's no choice, so she gathers her stuff and disembarks, keeping her face turned away from the driver. The air is cool, but not unpleasantly so, and it feels damp on her skin. She stands there and breathes it in, slowly, and then when she hears the trainers from the upper deck coming down she walks away behind a stand of trees. It's a good decision: from her hiding place she sees Tor among the kids getting off, silent and withdrawn. She watches until they and the others have disappeared down the trail, flashes of blue light popping in their wake as they release their partners, and then counts to thirty, just to be safe.

When she's certain she'll be travelling alone, she emerges and stands there for a moment in the empty road. It's so quiet: there's no wind, and almost no birdsong. The rumble of the bus has long since faded away.

Gwyneth exhales into the silence, and feels it settle on her like snow across the shoulders of a statue.

“Neat,” she says, or breathes really, not wanting to spoil the calm, and starts walking.

At first it's good going. This was always her favourite part of the trainer journey: the woods, in the autumn when everyone else had gone home and nature was winding down towards winter. Silence like you don't get in cities. Sometimes Gwyneth thought she could hear Nika's heartbeat, but she's sure she was just imagining things.

And it's good, even now, to be here, moving forward beneath a canopy of fire-coloured leaves in the stillness of a dying season. For a few minutes, Gwyneth almost forgets why she's here, even where she's going. She walks, and listens to her footsteps and the tiny hiss of the venipede's breath, and the knot inside her, for a little while, unclenches.

But she can't walk away from the pain. It nags at her, gnawing on her hand and spreading with each repeated movement, grating in all her joints, and soon the spell breaks. She's tired, she realises. All she did was sit on a bus but it's true all the same. She's tired, and she still has so far to go.

She thinks about singing, but she can't remember the words to anything. Not even that Mountain Goats song that Nika played on repeat for three goddamn months that one time, until Gwyneth finally snapped and threatened to throw her speakers out of the window.

Probably it's for the best. She doesn't like her singing voice anyway. Too many cigarettes and not enough practice.

Gwyneth keeps on walking. The light fades faster than she thought it would; when she looks up between the branches overhead, she sees the clouds are thickening and growing dark. Rain, she predicts, and tries to hurry up for a while before her aches grow unbearable and she has to slow down again.

She supposes it doesn't matter. She's going to get wet either way.

Half an hour later, she reaches a fork in the path, and a big, cast-bronze map on a wooden stand that holds it up at an angle. It's pretty cool, really. More like a model than any kind of map Gwyneth's seen before. She can reach out and run her fingers over bronze treetops, imagining that the shadow overhead is being cast by her hand doubled into the sky by cartographic sorcery. She does not do this, but she does think it, which is close enough for her.

The map shows several ways she could go from here. Trails snake north and east, travelling in a broad loop through the middle of the forest. If she takes a left here, there's another trail a little further on that winds away at a weird angle and continues off the edge of the map; she guesses that's how you get here if you're a trainer walking all the way across the Route 15 plains, or a really dedicated hiker. There are a few others, but the one she's interested in is on the other side of the loop: the path going northeast towards Route 14.

Gwyneth looks at the scale at the bottom of the map. She measures it with her fingers, then moves them to the path, gauging the distances involved. She does some math, and winces.

The one saving grace is that there are designated places to stop. White Forest is a nature reserve, and you can't just go where you like, not least because a huge number of wild animals rear their young here, including grizzly bears and staraptor, and that means that there are also fiercely protective mothers. So there are rangers and lookout towers, and more importantly, campsites and lodges placed so as to limit people's wandering. Gwyneth can see several of them marked on the map around the edges of the loop, and a couple on the other trails, too.

“'S where we need to get to,” she says over her shoulder, at the venipede. “Unless you feel like sleeping in the rain tonight.”

The venipede doesn't respond. Gwyneth can't see her, but she thinks she might be asleep again. The thought makes her vaguely envious.

“All right,” she says, shifting the weight of the pack on her shoulders. “Let's go, dude.”

She takes the east path. It looks slightly shorter, although there probably isn't much in it. Less than twenty minutes after she starts down it, the wind starts gusting, tearing leaves from the branches by the handful, and then the rain begins. Not heavy, but persistent: the kind you almost don't feel landing on you, but which after a few minutes leaves you soaked right through.

Gwyneth swears, and then again, with feeling. She stops, disentangles her arm from her sling and takes the venipede off her pack, ignoring the blunt teeth of the pain in her hand.

“You probably shouldn't be getting all wet, in your condition,” she says, tucking her inside her jacket. “Try not to stab me in the lung with your stupid pointy feet, okay?”

Click, replies the venipede. Gwyneth grunts and zips up her jacket as best she can. It's not really very waterproof, but it's the best she's got.

She keeps going. The birds have shut up and gone home now; there's no sound but the wind in the branches and the relentless patter of raindrops. When she breathes she inhales the rich, earthy smell of moist soil. It's a good smell, but you really need to have some shelter to appreciate it. Gwyneth remembers a rainstorm in Kanto that caught her and Nika by surprise; they stood beneath the canopy outside the restaurant, holding hands and cocktails, and watched Viridian Forest melting into sheets of water. In that twenty minutes, the smell was perfect. Today, in the fading light of an evening shower, it's just irritating.

Gwyneth remembers there was a bird that landed on the table, sheltering from the rain. Nika said look! and she looked, and it just pecked at someone's crumbs without even caring they were there.

Her hair starts hanging into her eyes, limp and rain-heavy. She tries to flick it away, but it just falls back again. Her good arm is busy holding the venipede; she thinks for a minute about taking her arm out of the sling to push it back, but somehow she can't face making the movement, so in the end she just leaves it.

She keeps going. It's cold in her wet clothes, especially now the sun is setting. Cold and soon to be dark, too. Why didn't she pack a flashlight? Because she didn't have one, she reminds herself. She didn't have one and she didn't think to buy one, either. Great planning, Gwyneth. You're doing a real good job.

The shadows lengthen. She's very wet now, jeans heavy and jacket ruined, and the venipede is starting to shuffle uncomfortably under her arm, her legs jabbing Gwyneth's ribs. Her bandages are soaked and her fingers feel like icicles jammed point-first into her knuckles. None of this is helping the pain at all.

But she knew this was going to happen, and she still came here, and whatever she does from here she's not getting any drier by stopping, so she carries on, even when she starts to limp. Between the mist of rain and the dying light she can barely see a yard ahead of her, and slowly the world shrinks, grows small and cold and dead. There's nothing out there, no forest, no campsite. There's a tiny bubble of cool air and water and she is stuck at its centre, limping and swearing and apparently unaware that the land beneath her is simply rolling like a treadmill, trapping her in place.

Gwyneth thinks of Humilau, of hot sand and a sky as blue as an untuned TV screen, and briefly finds herself laughing. It isn't the kind of laugh you enjoy.

In the dark she misses the turning. God knows what instinct makes her stop and turn back, questioning, but it does, and Gwyneth thanks it vehemently as she drags herself into a clear area of flat ground where you could, in better weather, pitch tents. At the back are two tin trailers with low, broad steps and ramps, intended for the physically impaired but tonight dark and abandoned, and Gwyneth almost falls into the unlit fire pit in her haste to reach them.

She half-falls against the door and finally, finally she is inside. It's still dark, still cold, but the rain is out there now, and she shuts the door on it with gratitude.

“Okay,” she mutters, through stiff lips. “Okay, dude, we made it.”

She fumbles across the wall, finds a light switch and flips it, to no effect. Right. There'll be a chargestone generator or something, somewhere outside. She swears again, loudly and passionately, and then sighs and starts the process of getting the venipede out of her jacket.

“Stay here,” she tells her, trying to hold her by the undamaged parts of her shell. “I gotta go back out there, because apparently I have a goddamn death wish.”

Leaving the venipede on the floor – she can't find a table in the dark – Gwyneth turns and limps back outside. After what feels like forever, she manages to trace the trailer's cables back to a metal box around the back; somehow, she prises open the cover and turns the switch, and suddenly light shines out over her head from the trailer windows. She doesn't know if she's ever seen anything more inviting.

Back inside, she drops her pack, leans against the door and breathes out.

“Goddamn it all to hell,” she says, conversationally, and starts trying to get out of her wet clothes.

The trailer contains one electric heater, one chair, two beds, and a counter along one wall. Gwyneth turns the first item on, hangs her clothes across the second and fourth, and collapses onto the third, breathing hard. Everything is numb, and at the same time everything hurts, and she is so tired that neither thing seems to matter. But she can't sleep yet, so she forces herself back up onto her feet and begins to sort out her pack. The blanket and sleeping bag, strapped to the top, are soaked through; she drapes them over whatever she can find, and hopes they'll be dry by morning. The rest of her stuff is okay. It's a good backpack, tough and waterproof: she's had it since her trainer journey and it's still in decent shape.

She didn't bring a towel, so she sits there and waits for the slowly increasing heat to dry her off. While she waits, she picks at the sodden bandages on her left hand and sighs. Probably this is terrible for her injury. But there doesn't seem to be anything she can do about it.

That reminds her to take the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her. She does this, eats some stale bread, and sits back, leaning against the cold wall and listening to the whisper of the rain. What irritates her most is that it's not even coming down hard. It didn't put in the effort and come down heavy, it just got through her clothes anyway, by persistence. This strikes her as somehow unfair.

The venipede shuffles around, sniffing the room with sweeps of her antennae. Gwyneth watches her, wondering what she thinks of all this. She's a city creature, like Gwyneth herself. Is the forest a paradise she never dreamed of, or some alien hell?

Gwyneth makes a face. The question annoys her, although she can't quite say why.

She feels her hair. Still wet. She could fall asleep right now, easily, but she refuses to until her hair is dry: this isn't her pillow to ruin. So she sits there, watching the venipede and listening to the weather, and thinks about another cabin, many years ago. She thinks about a forest at the other end of the country, about getting up the morning after Kit drew a diagram of her life with a six-letter word, about packing up the tents and washing the pans at the pump, and walking through the Route 6 woods in the direction of Chargestone Cave.

It is a beautiful morning. Nika in particular is feeling good; in a quiet moment when Nova is off somewhere and Kit has not yet emerged from his tent, she spontaneously kisses Gwyneth and smiles at her embarrassment, delighted to be alive and have lips on a day as wonderful as today. Her enthusiasm is catching, and right until Kit gets up Gwyneth feels fluttery and devoted. Years later, she will wonder if Nika knew what she was doing, and judge her innocent. Nika will not come to realise how little Gwyneth thinks of herself, how easy she is in her self-loathing naïveté to buy with any casual sign of affection, for many years. By then it will be too late. She will have already made Gwyneth love her more than anything else in the world.

It's okay. It isn't entirely ethical, but neither of them know yet how vulnerable Gwyneth really is, and neither know what's going on. And while Gwyneth will, when she is eighteen, work it all out, Nika will not until the very end; and so she, not knowing how much power she has over her, never abuses it.

It's a dangerous balance. They are both very lucky that nobody gets hurt.

When everyone is ready, they get going. Even this early in the morning, it's hot; Nova's beartic pauses what feels like every couple of minutes to puff out more ice and refresh its beard. Nova stops with it, silent and unapologetic. Kit asks if it really needs to keep doing that.

“Yes,” says Nova curtly, and even he has nothing to say in response to that. Later Gwyneth will look beartic up online and learn that their beards are important to them, that the size and shape of the masses of ice crystals identifies each beartic to others in complex ways that nobody yet understands and that without them they get nervous and irritable; right now, she is simply cowed into silence by the force of Nova's statement.

But it's okay. She doesn't mind stopping; every stop makes the journey a little longer, and she never wants this to end, especially after last night's realisation. Okay, it would be a better journey if Kit wasn't here, and if maybe Nova would say something without intending every utterance to be the end of the conversation, but still, she's got Nika, and anyway she's lucky to be here at all, after what she did in Nimbasa. She should be grateful.

So Gwyneth keeps going, looking at flowers made strange by the greenish lenses of her plastic sunglasses, and concentrates on being grateful. Most of the time, she even manages it.

In a couple of days' time, the group splits up. Kit, eager and restless, wants to press on to Chargestone Cave; Nova wants to wander. Gwyneth suggests to Nika that wandering might be nice, because the woods are so pretty, and (she does not say) because she cannot wait to be free of Kit. Nika, who has herself come to sense that Kit is maybe not such a nice person, agrees, and that's that: Kit goes one way, west past the research lab, and the girls go another, meandering vaguely eastwards into the forest.

Ten minutes after the split, Nova smiles for the first time since she joined up with them.

“Been waiting for that for a long time now,” she remarks, in her accented Unovan. “God save us all from teenage boys.”

Gwyneth agrees, rather quickly, and Nova raises her eyebrows in a way that means she suspects but will say nothing. Nika just looks awkward. She feels like she has missed something, and she is right.

It transpires that Kit has been following Nova around for a while, and grating harder on her nerves every day. This is one reason why she has been so guarded. The other, as they find out later in the hikers' lodge that they come to in the evening of the third day, is that she is ex-Team Rocket.

She tells them this after discovering a bottle of bourbon someone left behind in one of the cupboards and drinking slightly more of it than she intended. (She offers them some, forgetting their age or not caring, but they are too nervous and anyway it smells terrible.) Her life story is less a narrative than a series of bad decisions: dropping out of high school, a stint dealing drugs in south Goldenrod, getting in with the Rockets and thinking the money and organisational rigour was a way of sorting her life out, realising she was wrong after a botched robbery saw her skull fractured by an angry pupitar, discovering too late that Rockets don't accept letters of resignation. Fleeing Johto. New name, dyed hair, an application to become a trainer. And here she is. Wandering around on a League grant with a cubchoo she stole too young for it to remember she isn't its original partner.

Nika and Gwyneth sit and listen in silence, a little afraid and a lot ignorant of what to say in response, and Nova pours herself more bourbon.

She gets these headaches, she says, although she peppers her speech with a few more expletives. Like someone's squeezing her head in a nutcracker. She's going to have them forever. Forf*ckingever.

Nika mumbles some kind of a response that Nova doesn't acknowledge, and Gwyneth shrinks in her chair, unable to speak. She feels like she might explode.

Fortunately, someone else arrives to take the pressure off: a clown, apparently, although he just looks like an ordinary guy. He is as jolly as Nova is morose; at first Gwyneth thinks he doesn't see her despondence, and then she thinks that maybe he does and simply knows, through the years he has had to practice his art, how to keep on laughing in the darkness. When Nika asks if he's really a clown he does a routine with a couple of bottles and Gwyneth as an assistant that has even Nova laughing. Modern clowning has apparently come a long way since the pratfalls and custard pies that the kids know from old movies.

He smiles, as casually as anything taking Nova's bottle away from her, here give me that would you I need another one, and he juggles so very badly with it and a few others that Gwyneth can tell he must actually be very good. He is somehow forever on the verge of dropping everything and never actually doing it, and then he starts losing the bottles in midair, looking increasingly distressed as they cease to fall back into his hands but soldiering on with four three two and finally one, tossing it disconsolately from hand to hand before slowly and sadly putting it down on the table. It is very, very funny, and nobody even notices that the bourbon bottle is among the ones that have got lost.

In the middle of the night, Gwyneth wakes to strange noises, and in the morning Nova is gone. On the table are five glass bottles, one half empty, and a baltoy spinning on its axis like a top. Sometimes it spins a little faster and one of the bottle blurs out of existence for a moment.

The clown, whose name is Pat, comes in just then and smiles to see her up.

“She said she was in a hurry,” he says, in response to the question visible in her face. “Also to say thank you for the company.”

Something about the way he says it makes Gwyneth aware that what Nova was trying to do was apologise. She nods, and decides to accept it.

Pat can't stay. He and his baltoy have to be in Driftveil by the end of the week for a clowning convention. Gwyneth imagines a whole conference centre full of people like him, people for whom ordinary objects cease to function as they do for everyone else and instead maliciously fall over or trip them up or disappear only to reappear behind their backs, and shivers. It's part excitement, part fear. All those clowns in one place seems like a recipe for slapstick disaster.

Only a while after he has gone does Nika sit up sleepily in her bed, yawning and stretching like a cartoon of someone waking up. Hey, she says, blinking. Where is everyone?

Gwyneth thinks about how to answer this for a while. In the end, she just tells her the truth.

They're gone, she says. It's just us.

Oh.

They are silent for a moment, the quiet and loneliness of the empty space around them settling on their skin, and then Nika smiles shyly.

Just us is okay, she says.

Gwyneth smiles back, and offers to make her coffee. And she stays smiling while she goes and makes it, but underneath it she is still thinking about Nova.

*​

Monday, 19th September

Gwyneth wakes slowly and stares at the ceiling above her. The light's still on. She fell asleep sitting against the wall, and now she is twisted uncomfortably across the bed. This is a bad position; her back and neck hurt like hell.

She doesn't move. She keeps staring at the ceiling, at the burning white lightbulb that stings her eyes, and doesn't blink.

This goes on for some time.

In the end, it isn't the pain that forces her to move: that is too distant, and it cannot really reach her where she is right now. Nor is it the venipede, which has sensed her wakefulness and started rattling loudly from the floor, demanding to be moved. She is only even dimly aware of the noise. Instead, what makes her move is Nova, getting up and leaving before dawn with a hangover pounding her temples and inelegant sutures in her skull.

Gwyneth blinks at last, eyes watering, and eases herself stiffly back into a sitting position. She looks blearily out of the window whose curtains she never bothered to draw, sees no light out there. The thought occurs to her that she could check what time it is, but somehow she can't make herself care enough to do it. It's not morning. That's all she needs to know.

She bends down, her body protesting like that of a much older woman, and picks up the venipede, which seems annoyed.

“What is it?” she croaks. She is reminded of talking to Shane a week ago in Aspertia, how she was so many miles away from her voice. It's the same here. She's on the verge of going somewhere bad, she can feel it, but it's okay. She's not okay, but it's okay. “What do you want?”

The venipede clicks and rattles at her, legs wriggling in midair. Gwyneth stares at her and sees a bug, a little machine, something alien and inscrutable. She sees the shapes that make her up, the interlocking segments of her shell and legs. Planes, angles. Geometry, not life.

“What do you,” Gwyneth begins, but this time she can't finish. The venipede hisses; she puts her on the other bed, drops her face into her open hand and rubs furiously at her forehead. “Stop it,” she whispers, but the venipede keeps hissing and rattling. “Stop it. Stop it. Stop it.”

She wants to shout. It doesn't take. In the end she reaches for the light switch, trembling now for some reason she cannot quite identify, and climbs back into bed in the dark, where she closes her eyes and tries not to hear the venipede's insistent anger until, hours later, she falls back to sleep.

*​

In the morning she is a little more level. Not much, but Gwyneth takes what she can get, and right now what she can get is a vague grasp of reality. It will have to do.

The venipede is asleep, antennae twitching restlessly as she dreams of prey or violence or whatever it is that venipede dream of, and Gwyneth leaves her that way while she drains her water bottle and forces down a banana. She is still a little afraid of her, or more accurately how Gwyneth saw her last night. It has happened before, this dissolution of living things into meaningless shapes, and the results were not good. She doesn't want it to ever happen again.

She sighs and climbs back into mostly-dry clothes, keeping her eyes off the venipede. There will be time to think about this later. Right now, she needs to fix her face and get more water.

Outside, the rain has stopped and the sky is mostly clear. Gwyneth breathes in the air, cold and incredibly fresh, and tries to summon up that fierce love that sometimes buoys her up, but it's not the kind of feeling you can force. She shakes her head and goes instead to look for a stream or something.

Fortunately, she doesn't have to go far. There's a sign by the campsite entrance that she missed in the dark that tells her the water in the stream slightly to the north of here is of excellent quality and safe to drink, but advises boiling it first to be safe. Gwyneth looks from the sign to the wet, dripping fire pit, and wonders if there was a hot plate in the trailer that she missed.

There is, and a battered saucepan in a cupboard under the counter, too, although the chargestone in the generator is depleted from having the lights on half the night, and Gwyneth has to switch it off and wait nearly an hour before she can get the hot plate to work. She's losing time here, she knows, but what the hell. She's already going way too slowly. An extra hour isn't going to make much difference now.

But she gets it done in the end, and eventually she's ready to pack her bottle of fresh and unpleasantly warm water in her bag and get going. Her sleeping bag and most of her clothes are dry; her blanket and jeans aren't, quite. It's going to have to do. Gwyneth puts everything away, gently tucks the sleeping venipede into the crook of her arm, and leaves.

It's a long walk, and it feels that way before even the first twenty minutes are past. Gwyneth might have started feeling better at the Pokémon Centre, but Dr. ze'Naarat was right; she really wasn't ready for this. The pack is so damn heavy, and her arm hurts so damn much, and she is so damn tired she could fall over right now and not find it in her to get up again.

She doesn't fall over. She doesn't stop. She may not have strength or health but she has raw, stubborn-as-hell willpower, the kind that gets you to twenty-four without dying, the kind that makes and then also breaks relationships, and it has got her more than halfway across Unova on the stupidest road trip anyone has ever made. It's going to get her through this, too.

When she hears herself think this, Gwyneth almost smiles. Really now, Gwyneth? You must be getting desperate.

Around her, White Forest drips and squelches and emits staccato bird calls from far away among the branches. Once, she hears something that might be a wolf, or it might just be her imagination. Another time, she hears what is definitely a magmar: low, mournful honking, too big and too deep to be a goose.

Gwyneth thinks briefly about being incinerated. It's probably kind of unpleasant, she decides, but it would dry her clothes out at least.

After a while, the venipede wakes up, and looks at her with a sleepy kind of malice. Whatever was wrong with her last night, she doesn't seem to have forgiven Gwyneth; she wriggles and pokes with her legs, and Gwyneth, biting back irritation, stops and gets out her gross medicinal gummy worms. It's about time anyway, and she could use some peace about now.

“Here,” she says, tossing one into the leaf litter and watching the venipede attempt a limping kind of lunge at it. “Dunno what your problem is, dude, but get off my back, okay? I don't have to carry you, you know.”

Whether it's the treat or the attitude, the venipede seems to quieten down. She lets Gwyneth pick her up and put her in her usual spot on the backpack without anything more than token hissing, and the two of them continue in a silence that is, if not exactly companionable, at least free of active hostility.

Her feet ache. She has crappy boots, she knows, worn down at the heel and shedding flakes of lining inside, but it's not like she can do anything about it. Right now she has literally no money at all. She did get three cents' change from her meal in Nimbasa but she lost it. Probably it fell out of her pocket when she tossed her jacket around trying to extinguish the venipede.

Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps moving. One foot in front of the other. Simple, right? Right. Except that it's not, except that she can almost hear her sinews creaking, every little movement an agony of exertion, but still. Simple. Right.

She doesn't know when she stops. Her phone has been off since she left Nimbasa, to save the battery; the campsites might have power, but the tiny chargestone generators have limits, and there's nowhere to plug anything in. So when Gwyneth finally gives in to the pain and fatigue and stops, all she can say is that the sun is high and it feels like it's been forever since she left the campsite. She sits on a nine-tenths dry log, drinks some water and eats ageing food, and tries not to think about how much more of this there is to go.

It used to be fun. It really did. But that was when there were no stakes: back then, a walk in the woods was just that, a walk in the woods, and if she went slow it didn't matter because it was fun and she had all the time in the world. Now she's sitting on the other side of the table with the bottle of bourbon; now, she's Nova, travelling not for pleasure but because she has no other options except running. Now everything is riding on this. Everything, meaning – what, exactly? Gwyneth doesn't know, but she knows that it is riding on this, even if she isn't sure what it might be. There had to be some reason she gave up everything she had to get here.

She tosses the core of her apple away into the bushes for the ants to pick over and stands up.

“Less thinking, more walking,” she tells herself, and gets on with it.

*​

Sometime in the afternoon she sees a deer. Four of them, even, or three and a sawsbuck. They're standing there on the trail ahead of her, cropping the leaves from everything they can reach. Two white-tailed does, a big sawsbuck stag whose antler-leaves are browning with approaching autumn, and a hybrid fawn, dun coat flecked with green leafy hairs like a deerling.

Gwyneth stares. She remembers reading in her magazine, years ago, that pokémon are weirdly good at making hybrids, at interbreeding especially with each other but also with regular animals. Something something labile DNA or whatever. She is conceptually aware that this is something that happens, but she's never seen it before in real life.

The deer stare back at her for a while. The does tense as if to run, but they know the sawsbuck is a pokémon and won't flee if it stands to defend them. It sniffs and eyes Gwyneth warily, and then turns and walks away, dull fur and leafy antlers merging into the surrounding forest. Its companions follow, with substantially less composure.

Looking at the empty path, Gwyneth feels the spell break. She blinks, and finds she's holding her switched-off phone in her hand, as if she was going to take a photo.

“Huh,” she says, because she feels she should say something and yet also has nothing to say, and shoves it back into her pocket.

Behind her head, the venipede clicks quietly to herself.

“Yeah, okay,” says Gwyneth, and moves on.

*​

She sees some more animals. A couple of birds she can't name, and one she can: northern cardinal, a cheerful splash of red against the browns and fading greens. It flies off when she gets close, which seems reasonable enough to her.

There are a few other clues that animal life is around. As the day wears on, the clouds break up and the wind dies down, and when the bushes rustle now Gwyneth can tell there must be something moving around in there; she never sees what it is, though. Patrat. Voles, maybe. What is a vole, anyway? She thinks it's like a rat, but she isn't sure what she's basing that on.

“You probably eat voles, huh,” she says to the venipede, although she doesn't get any answer.

The trail goes on and on and on. She becomes half convinced that it's somehow connected up to itself in a loop, that she's going past the same twenty trees over and over, and then suddenly she sees a sign saying CAMPSITE 10 MILES and feels relieved to know that the laws of physics still apply.

It gets easier after seeing the sign. Not for very long, fifteen minutes maybe or however long it takes for the pain to eat through her optimism, but for a little while at least. Gwyneth feels grateful to whoever put the sign up, and then obscurely resentful.

“Nearly there, dude,” she tells the venipede. Still no answer. She may have fallen asleep, or maybe Gwyneth is just imagining the sound of her own voice and she didn't actually say anything. Either option seems equally plausible at this point.

Somewhere between the sign and the campsite, she starts to drift again, the pain and the fatigue floating off to some strange place where they can tangle her limbs and make her stumble but not quite reach her mind, because she no longer has one. She has instead – is, instead – a series of tubes and cuts of meat that operate in uncertain unison to propel themselves forward. Gwyneth holds up her hand in front of her and wonders without any sense of wonder at the strangeness of it, at its baffling shape and inexplicable motion.

If she feels anything at all, it's that she's okay with this. The alternative is pain, and she is sick to death of that.

The forest grows dark around her. The birdsong changes, then goes silent. Once or twice something does call, but Gwyneth does not think it is a bird.

She keeps walking, and keeps walking, and somehow keeps walking, and then she sees a light through the trees that seeps through her dissociative haze and tells her that civilisation in some form or another is ahead. She keeps walking, past bushes that seem intent on reaching out to poke her, past the pools of moonlight and spreading patches of darkness, past puddles and rocks and at last around a corner and into the warm light of a cheerful campfire.

“Hey, someone's here,” she hears, and blinks until the kids around the fire come into focus. Three or four. Between sixteen and eighteen. Experienced ones, then. “Hey, man, how's it going?”

Gwyneth sways a little and counts again. One two three four. A watchog on the periphery, standing guard over a cooler; a honchkrow doing what honchkrow do best: skulking in the shadows, but somehow stylishly.

“I'm okay, dude,” she says, voice cracking slightly with fatigue. “Had a long walk.”

“Well, time to sit down then,” says the guy who greeted her. “C'mon. Fire's great and we got beer.”

They are obviously, even spectacularly, underage, but okay. Gwyneth doesn't really care. She stands there, looking, and the kids start to get restless and uneasy.

“Are you sure you're okay?” asks a different one, a girl whose arms are thick with woven bracelets. “You seem, um … kinda out of it.”

“Rough day,” croaks Gwyneth. “Week. Whatever.” She manages to unstick her feet from the ground and take a step forward. “Uh, I might join you in a minute. I think I need to lie down a while first.”

“Oh sure.” The girl nods at the trailers behind her. “They're both empty.”

“Cool. Thanks.”

Gwyneth gives herself an internal shove and staggers forward, past the staring eyes that are beginning to parse her, to read the marks of injury and gender on her body and come to certain conclusions. She does not let herself look back at them. It's just as well; even watching where she's going, she nearly trips over the guy ropes of the kids' tents, and makes the honchkrow hop away with an air of disdainful majesty, making a noise that sounds uncannily like disapproving tutting.

On the low step up to the trailer she stumbles and catches herself noisily against the thin metal wall. The kids, who have just started talking amongst themselves again, stop, and Gwyneth feels their eyes boring into the back of her head; she grits her teeth and forces herself upright, draws back the door with a vicious jerk of her hand and stumbles in.

The lights won't come on, but she's damned if she's going back out there to flip the switch on the generator. She suppresses her anger long enough to get the venipede off her shoulder without hurting her, then lets her pack fall to the floor with a savage thud and climbs onto the bed.

“Ugh,” she grunts, dragging off her boots. “Damn kids.”

She lies down, or maybe she just stops holding herself upright and lets gravity do the work. She doesn't know if she's ever been this tired before in her life. It's worse than last night by a long way. And it's only going to keep getting worse.

She should eat something. She even says it aloud, to try and get it into her head: “I should eat something.” But the words seem to get jumbled in her throat, coming out of her mouth all soft and barely audible, and almost before she's finished speaking them she can feel herself drifting off to sleep.

It's probably okay. Nothing much right now seems worth staying awake for.

 

[Cutlerine]

Content warning: in this chapter, there is substantially more violence and swearing than in previous chapters, and gendered and transmisogynistic slurs without the coyness that has so far been standard.

TWELVE: LESSONS LEARNED

Tuesday, 20th September

Some time later, Gwyneth wakes. It's the same old thing: tired, but sleep is suddenly not an option. Apparently it can happen even when she's as exhausted as she is now. She lies there for a while, trying to slump out of wakefulness and back into sleep, but it doesn't happen. She almost cries in frustration. Not now. Not tonight of all nights. After all that walking, and with so much more to go, can she not just sleep, for once?

No, comes the answer from her body. She can't.

Gwyneth lies there for what feels like forever, like a corpse in a tin tomb. Her eyes adjust to the darkness and she sees a very faint red light at the edge of the window. The campfire, she supposes. She could stand at the window and look out at that instead of her reflection. If she could move. Which she can't.

When she shifts her gaze away from the window again she thinks she sees someone standing in the opposite corner and her chest seizes up in terror but a moment's reflection tells her it's probably not real. Even when she sees it move.

Time passes. The shadow person in the corner does not seem interested in moving any more, or in leaving.

Gwyneth lies there, staring, and wishes she could sleep till morning.

*​

Dawn finds her in exactly the same position. She did get a little sleep; not nearly as much as she needs, but at least the shadow person has gone. Gwyneth forces herself out of bed, more angry at the effort it takes than hurt by the pain it causes, and tells herself she's being silly for checking. It was the middle of the night. Everything looks like a shadow person in the middle of the night.

Still, she can't help looking again. Just to be sure.

“Hey, a*shole,” she says, trying to banish the silence. “How you doing?”

The venipede looks up at her from underneath the opposite bed and rattles, raising her forelegs and waving them back and forth.

“I don't speak bug,” says Gwyneth. “Don't suppose you can do Unovan?”

Click click click.

“Yeah, I figured as much.” She rubs some of the stiffness out of her neck and reaches for her bag. She's after food, but while she's looking for it she finds her tablets and realises she never took them yesterday. Any of them: the ones ze'Naarat gave her, and the ones she already takes. Do better today, she commands herself, and digs out some bread.

When she sees it, the venipede's rattling and waving gets more intense, and Gwyneth finally understands.

“You're hungry? Okay, sure. Not what you got in the Centre, but it's all there is.”

She gives her a banana and one of the vitamin gummy worm things, at least one of which is the sort of thing a venipede is supposed to eat, and watches her carefully murder each of them while she chews her roll.

“That's a banana, dude,” says Gwyneth, as the venipede bites through its stalk in lieu of a throat. “It's not gonna run away.”

The venipede is less certain. Only when she's sure that it isn't getting back up again does she take her eye off it to deal with the vitamin worm.

“Okay, whatever.” Gwyneth washes down the bread with the remains of yesterday's water and pulls on her jacket. “Back in a minute.”

Outside, it's cold and damp. The fire in the pit has burnt down to embers, and the only sign of movement is that watchog, standing guard outside one of the kids' tents. When it sees her, it stands up straighter and hisses.

“You and me both, dude,” she tells it, and goes looking for water.

It's not a long quest. This campsite has a water pump, which Gwyneth in her current state barely has the strength to work but which, in the end, gives her a modicum of clear water that she takes inside to boil on the hot plate. It doesn't come on, and she remembers that she never activated the generator. So it's back outside, and round the back to flip the switch and get the chargestone spinning.

When she gets back in she turns the hot plate on and sits down heavily in the chair, breathing hard. This isn't good. Two short trips that didn't even take her out of the campsite, and she's already exhausted. How much time did she give herself to get through White Forest? Two days if she's fast? Good estimate there, Gwyneth. Great job. Not only is this place much bigger than she thought, the whole idea of going fast is very quickly starting to seem like a distant dream. She doesn't even know if she can make it to the next campsite before the day is out.

She closes her eyes and hunches her back, holding her bad hand close to her chest. Her pulse oozes sluggishly through the inflamed flesh, thick and slow as molasses.

Is this it, she asks herself. Is this as far as you get?

It's not too late. She can go back to the bus stop, fake her way aboard or hell, just pass out in the middle of the road so they have to take her; go back to Nimbasa, ask Dr. ze'Naarat to help her before she ends up dead. It won't be easy. It's a long walk, and maybe even worse than that, she'd have to swallow her pride; still, it would probably work. Even if she can't do that she could get the kids camping here to signal for a ranger. When they came they'd give her hell, sure, for coming out here alone and sick and unprepared, but they'd have to get her out all the same.

Gwyneth remembers what ze'Naarat asked her, the day before she left the Pokémon Centre: do you really think you can come out in one piece at the other end?

She answers again. This time she's honest.

*​

Half an hour later, Gwyneth is on the move. She's decided. No going back. Not for anything, ever. She's always said that, hasn't she? Or whatever, she said it one time at least. You can never go back. And she's sticking to it.

What is there to go back to, anyway? Some people get chosen and some do not, and if you're one of the ones who are not then to hell with it, there's nothing left for you to lose.

So. She grits her teeth and tries not to limp and walks the trail through the forest.

Her footsteps are loud and awkward, a cacophony of breaking sticks and crumpling leaves trailing in her wake. Her head starts to ache, a dull pounding like the first ominous signs of illness.

Not the first sign, she corrects. She's already ill. Her hand is infected and her nerves are messed up from the poison. (At least, she thinks they are. She wasn't listening very hard when Tasnim explained, a lifetime ago in Virbank.) Really, it's surprising she hasn't got a headache already.

There's nothing to be done. Gwyneth drinks water until the bottle is empty and her stomach uncomfortably full and still her head keeps on hurting.

She would be angry, but even anger seems like too much effort now. She imagines collapsing here and being eaten by wolves or oddish. That's a thing that happens, isn't it? She's sure she saw a TV documentary where some species of oddish found a corpse and planted itself inside it to wait out the day, sucking in blood and rot-liquefied flesh through its roots.

Maybe you don't get oddish like that here. She doesn't remember where it was filmed, but she thinks it was some kind of desert.

Her thoughts get circuitous. She feels light-headed and has to pause when the forest wobbles momentarily around her.

Eventually, she stops.

There's nothing special about this patch of woodland: it has trees, bushes, piles of wet leaves, not even an interesting fallen log or rock formation that might set it apart from the rest of the forest. It's just the place where she ran out of momentum and had to sit down. Gwyneth puts her back against a tree and eases herself onto the ground, desperate and sweating.

“Dude,” she whispers, with cracked lips and not-quite-coping lungs. “How you doing?”

The venipede clicks, uncomprehending, and crawls slowly around in the dirt beside her, favouring her wounded side. Her antennae move back and forth, sometimes fast, sometimes slow. Like she's conducting a symphony only she can hear.

“Okay,” says Gwyneth, wiping her forehead on her sleeve. “That's okay too.”

She stays there a little while, watching the venipede explore the leaf litter. She is tempted to stay longer, to stay forever, to close her eyes and lean back and wait for the centuries it will take for the earth to swallow her body and feed its fading remnants to the worms and the questing roots of trees, but she doesn't. She gets her breath back, and she gets to her feet, and she starts to walk again.

Now she moves very slowly, and she knows it. She thinks about finding a branch or something to use as a walking stick, but even now she can't bring herself to admit to that much weakness. The landscape shuffles by at a snail's pace, and the sun slips down towards the horizon, and somehow it's dark again and Gwyneth still hasn't even seen so much as a sign for the next campsite.

But she doesn't stop. Once was enough, she tells herself. A few more yards, and she'll see the sign, and then it's only going to be another few minutes till the cabin itself …

Gwyneth comes close, but she doesn't fall over. She can't. There's a venipede on her shoulder, and she is hurt. So she can't fall over, so she doesn't fall over, so she keeps walking, keeps cajoling and bribing and bullying, somehow dragging just one more step out of her failing body over and over again, and against everyone's advice, against all sense, she keeps on walking.

Even the past won't go right. She tries to unstick her mind from the pain, to cast herself backwards into memory, but her concentration is shot to hell. It's all she can do to stay upright. Complex thought would seem to be off the cards.

By the light of the moon, she fumbles her wallet from her pocket and takes out the photograph to look at, hoping for she doesn't know what, for energy maybe, for love, for just a little hope. She stares at it and sees nothing more than ink on paper, forming soft-edged shapes in red and brown and green and white. Blinking, she tries again, but she can't see her face there, or Nika's.

She puts the photo away, slowly, mechanically, and walks.

It's strange how she never noticed it before, she thinks, but there really isn't very much to a forest. Lines of light and dark, shapes, planes, angles. It's just geometry. Just a way of arranging space.

Up ahead there is a square of yellow light, and Gwyneth walks into an area of cleared woodland with a big log cabin at its centre.

For a while she stands there, uncomprehending. The yellow square and dark bulk of the cabin do not seem to make sense after all the forest shapes she has come through. But slowly, as the minutes pass, she realises what she is looking at, and then something in her screams its relief and she is suddenly and disorientingly back.

She lets out a long breath. She might have been holding it; hard to be sure.

“Okay, dude,” she says, trudging towards the door. “Guess the oddish are going hungry tonight.”

*​

The instant Gwyneth walks in, she knows there's going to be trouble.

She sees the room: table and chairs on the right, couch facing the fire in the middle, five beds on the left. A couple of prints on the walls. Old curtains, not drawn. Wood, tiles. Clean and homely.

The real issue: she also sees five people here, sitting around the table. Three of them are adult men, late twenties or early thirties, chatting over the remnants of a meal. One is a guy in his late teens, feeding peanuts to a colourful bird pokémon that Gwyneth doesn't recognise. The last is Tor, hunched a little in their chair, and looking nervous.

These five people see her back, and it is in their eyes that she sees how things stand.

She sighs. She could leave, it's true, and take her chances in the forest. Maybe if she felt better she would, except that Tor is here, and even now, as messed-up as she is, she knows she can't abandon them.

So. She swallows, and breathes, and summons up the last of her energy to speak.

“Hi,” she says. “Full house, huh?”

“Hey, the more the merrier,” says the teenager she doesn't know. “I'm sure we can find space. Come on in, you look beat.”

“Perceptive of you,” she says, grabbing the venipede and dropping her pack with a sigh. “I'm Gwyneth.”

“Nick.”

The men don't say anything, which is about what Gwyneth was expecting. She picks one and holds his gaze while she takes a seat between Nick and Tor.

“Hey, Tor,” she says. “Didn't know you were coming this way.”

“Hey,” they reply. They look obviously, desperately glad that she is here. Her heart sinks to see it. “Yeah, I thought I'd do some exploring in the woods. Stay in this cabin for a while and see what I can find around here.”

They must have come around the north way. Which means that somehow, by luck or stubbornness or the grace of Nika's God, Gwyneth has made it all the way down the east path to the place where it joins up with the north one and the trail to Route 14. It's incredible, although she isn't really in the right frame of mind to appreciate it right now.

“Your sigilyph okay?” she asks. “I mean, I'm sure she is, after beating Elesa like that, but I know sometimes they get funny if you take 'em too far from the ruins.”

Gwyneth actually does not know this, is in fact inventing all of this wholesale, and maybe the three men can tell this and maybe they can't, but that's not the point. The point is that they now know Tor has a sigilyph (which is intimidating) that beat an electric-type Gym Leader (which is more so). The point is that Tor is now safe.

Gwyneth has seen eyes like these men have before. They are afraid of her, on some level, and they are infuriated by her, and they are sickened by her, and they might express this in any of several violent and unpalatable ways and it would not even be personal. It would just be a lesson in human history, in the forces that shape her world. It would be the kind of lesson she learned from the boys who beat her up when she was a kid, or the police officer in the station at Nacrene, back when Martin died. Hands. Eyes. Symbols of power. And always, always, the knowledge that she exists only because they permit it.

Tor might have been taught this lesson already, but they're a kid and a trainer and Gwyneth isn't, and so even if it draws attention she'd rather not have she has to stand between them and those who would teach them. She asks them her question, and out of the corner of her eye watches the three men's faces shift minutely as they register her words.

“Oh yeah, she's fine,” replies Tor, oblivious. “I think the rain bothers her a bit, but she's okay.”

“Good.” Gwyneth turns to the men on the other side of the table. “I didn't catch your names?”

There's a suitably chilly pause, and then she gets her answers. Harry. Abel. Truman.

“What brings you out here?” she asks.

“Hiking,” says Truman.

“You guys trainers?”

Another pause. Maybe they've figured out that she's probing them. Maybe they just don't want to talk to her. Gwyneth supposes the second option's probably more likely. Generally the people who have the power only have an intuitive sense of how a dynamic like this works. It's left to the other person to calculate the nuances. And okay, Gwyneth is not so good at math, but she's had a long time to run these particular numbers.

“No,” says Abel. “No, we're just hiking.”

(Then Tor will be fine.)

“Cool. You?”

“Me?” Nick sits up, blinks. “Uh yeah, sure. I'm visiting friends in Undella. Just taking the scenic route with my partners.”

The bird pokémon whistles, and in Gwyneth's lap, the venipede rattles warningly, forefeet raised in a feeble attempt at a threat display.

“Hey, keep your damn bug under control,” says Abel, and Gwyneth is so tired she can hardly keep back the anger, but she knows better than to reply, so she just pushes the venipede gently back down into her lap, nodding something that might be an apology.

“She's cranky sometimes,” she says blandly. “Anyway, that's nice. I'm going to a wedding in Humilau. Also taking the scenic route.”

“You a trainer?”

“Kinda. Travelling with pokémon, anyway.” This is getting hard. That initial buzz of fear and hate is wearing off, leadening her limbs and clouding her head. Come on, Gwyneth. Keep it together, for just another damn minute. End this conversation naturally, like you're a real person and not whatever the hell it is you actually are. “Haven't trained properly for years now.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

There is an uncomfortable silence. Maybe she can't end this naturally after all. Nick looks uneasily at the hikers. He's sensing something, clearly, their anger and animosity, but he hasn't clocked her yet, hasn't worked out what's going on. Tor is quiet and hunched in their chair, folded as small as their long limbs will allow.

Gwyneth yawns. It starts off fake but turns real halfway through.

“Well,” she says, climbing stiffly out of her chair. “I'm gonna get some sleep. Don't mind me, now.”

“Sure,” says Nick, a little too fast. “Hey, I can sleep on the couch―”

“Nah, 's okay. I'm not hurt as bad as I look.” Gwyneth appreciates it, though. His offer is much nicer than she expects of a kid his age. “Uh – Tor, can you give me a hand with my bag? I only got one arm and it's carrying my venipede.”

“Oh.” They look startled to be drawn back into conversation. “Um, sure.”

They grab her backpack from where she dropped it by the door, hefting it with enviable ease, and takes it over to the couch. Behind them, Gwyneth hears the hikers start to talk again. Okay. She deposits the venipede on the couch and puts her hand on Tor's arm.

“Hey,” she mutters. “Everything okay?”

They nod, but their eyes say otherwise.

“Seen their type before,” she tells them. “They're a*sholes, I know, but you'll be okay. Keep Vega out of her ball, just in case.”

Tor blinks, and Gwyneth notices along with the firelight a glimmer of understanding in their eyes that makes her feel old and dirty. They're only now realising the game she's played, the calculated gambles that form the fabric of her life. Cynical jerk that she is.

“Okay,” they say, very quietly. “Um – thanks.”

She smiles. It's not a very good smile but it does the job.

“'S nothing,” she says. And then, louder: “Thanks, Tor. Goodnight.”

“Night.”

They go, not back to the table but to one of the beds in the corner to the left. Gwyneth hears a low, inhuman murmuring as she unlaces her boots, followed by a momentary pause in the conversation at the table, and nods to herself in a kind of dissatisfied satisfaction. Okay. Her job is done, her duties discharged. For once.

She takes off her jacket and sling and drapes them over her bag. She moves the venipede to one side, then lies down. It's the one time her height, or lack of it, ever comes in handy. She can't reach tall shelves, but she fits better on a couch than most people she knows. It's not perfect, but then, what is?

She listens to Nick and the hikers talking for a moment, then closes her eyes. The fire is warm on her face, and as she at last lets go and drifts off to sleep she finds herself reminded of the bright Humilau sun.

*​

This time, it takes. Gwyneth sleeps, and sleeps deeply, without dreams or fear or shadow people, and she does not wake for a long, long time.

*​

Wednesday, 21st September

Gwyneth opens her eyes, finds herself stiff and uncomfortable but otherwise more all right than she has any reason to expect, and sits up.

“Ugh,” she mumbles, blinking until the fireplace comes back into focus. Just embers now, but the room is still warm.

She looks around. Four empty beds, one occupied, Nick yawning over coffee at the table. The hikers are gone, she realises. The hikers are gone, and Vega's still hovering over Tor's bed like the world's creepiest guardian angel. Okay, then. Things are looking up.

Or they do for a moment, anyway, until she remembers what day it is. It's Wednesday the twenty-first. The day before the wedding, and she's still hundreds of miles from Humilau.

Gwyneth swallows, and puts this information down carefully somewhere at the back of her head. It's fine. She's going to make it. She isn't sure how, yet, but she's going to do it. One foot in front of the other, right? And don't die. You do that, you're halfway there already.

“Morning,” she says, and Nick starts. His bird, still on his shoulder, shrieks indignantly and flaps to keep its balance.

“Oh. Hey! Morning.” He looks at her a little differently this time. Probably he's figured it all out by now. The fact that she needs to shave is almost certainly something of a giveaway. Still, no overt hostility, which after last night is actually kind of refreshing. “I'm making more coffee,” he says. “Do you want some?”

“Yes. Thanks.”

“There's no milk, though. Or sugar.”

“'S okay. I'll live.”

Gwyneth rubs her eyes and looks around for the venipede. For a moment she can't see her, and her eyes leap automatically and irrationally to the fireplace, in case she somehow managed to jump in and burn herself to death, but then she looks again and sees the antennae poking out from underneath the sofa.

“Hey, a*shole,” she says, leaning down. “You awake?”

She can't get low enough to see under there, but she hears the clicking and straightens up, satisfied.

“All right. You hang out under there then, I guess.”

She gets out her mirror, props it against the cushions and applies her tweezers to her face. There doesn't seem much point in being coy about it now, and anyway it's more for her benefit than anyone else's. Not many people see Gwyneth and think she's cis even on a good day, but looking in the mirror and seeing hairs sticking out of her face makes her want to remove her skin with a vegetable peeler.

“Here,” says Nick, coming over with coffee, self-consciously not looking at her.

“Thanks,” she says, taking it and putting it down on the floor. “The other guys gone already?”


“Hm? Yeah, they're like serious hikers. I think they're going most of the way across Calarat.”

The Arat and the Norn, two rivers whose names are corruptions of old Heniil words, divide Unova into three. Calarat, Khel Aaràt if you care about these things, is everything east of the Arat. It's a long way, although not as long as the trip Gwyneth is trying to make.

“Guess they wanted to make the most of the light,” she says.

“Guess so,” agrees Nick.

There is a pause.

“Thanks for the coffee,” says Gwyneth, and Nick goes back to his seat at the table.

Gwyneth finishes with her face, covers the red blotches of irritated skin with foundation, and starts looking for food in her pack. She finds her tablets, and realises she forgot to take them again, so she gulps them down now with her coffee and follows it with very stale bread and slightly wrinkly apples. She actually has an appetite this morning, which is a pleasant change, and she makes the most of it.

“So did you come round the north way?” she asks Nick. “That's where we are, right? The bit where the paths join up?”

“Yeah,” he says. “And no, I came round the east way. But I've been here for a few days. I'm trying to find a ralts. I caught one here a year ago, so I'm back to find one for a friend.”

“There are ralts here?”

“Yeah.”

Nick takes a ball from his pocket and releases a kirlia, a lithe little figure in green and white that as far as Gwyneth see has no feet. It must stand with its psychic power instead, she decides, and looks up hurriedly. Those pointed legs are making her feel like her own feet might fall off.

“His name's Celio,” says Nick. “And he's a damn thief, hence why he's been in his ball. Didn't dare let him out while there were so many people around with bags and stuff.”

Celio folds his arms and gives Nick a look of wounded pride.

“What does he steal?” asks Gwyneth.

“He likes pencils most. But he'll take pens, and, failing that, anything that can make a mark on anything else. I don't know why, he doesn't draw or write or anything, he just likes to take them and pile them up in a corner where he never looks at them again.”

“Huh,” she says, eyeing him. Celio eyes her back, unnervingly smart. “Weird.”

The conversation dies out. Vega drifts soundlessly from her position above Tor's bed to investigate Celio, scrutinising him carefully with her fake-looking eye. Celio squirms and retreats behind Nick; Vega, apparently satisfied that he poses no threat, moves slowly back into place.

Gwyneth takes a breath. She's rested, she's fed, she's drunk at least some coffee. It's time to make use of what little time she has left and get going.

“Okay,” she says, leaning down and beckoning the venipede out from her hiding place, “I got to go if I want to stay on track for this wedding. Thanks for the coffee.”

“Oh sure,” replies Nick. “No problem. You got far to go?”

“Humilau.”

“Oh yeah, you said.”

Gwyneth fills her bottle at the tap – an actual tap, what a goddamn luxury – and arranges her stuff on her back: jacket, backpack, venipede. It's heavy, but she doesn't feel nearly as close to falling over as she did this time yesterday morning.

“Say bye to Tor for me, would you?” she asks Nick. “If you're still around when they get up.”

“Sure, I'll be here a while yet,” says Nick. “Till we find that ralts. Or the end of the week, whichever comes sooner.” Celio twitters and the bird pokémon caws softly. “Good luck!”

“Thanks,” replies Gwyneth, from the doorway. And then, when the door has closed between them and she knows he can't hear her: “I think I might need it.”

*​

Just outside the cabin, there's another map, right where the path splits three ways. One branch goes back the way Gwyneth came; one goes west-northwest, round the other side of the loop; the last goes northeast, up towards Route 14. Gwyneth looks at the scale and measures it against the paths with her fingers. Even she is impressed at how far she's come now. The only problem is, none of it means a damn thing unless she somehow gets out of the woods, up Route 14, through Undella, over the hills and across the water out to Humilau – all before tomorrow.

“Maybe the wedding isn't till the afternoon,” she says, as if an extra couple of hours makes any goddamn difference.

She sighs, and starts walking up the northeast trail.

Today, the forest is warmer and drier. Gwyneth isn't sure whether that's because she's going east or just because the weather's changing, but it's welcome either way. The damp wasn't making the aches and pains she's picked up over the past couple of weeks any easier to bear. It's a small thing, but right now even small things make a difference, and she walks a little lighter for it.

White Forest really is beautiful, in the right weather. Gwyneth will concede that much. The russet leaves, the first early berries on the bushes, the glint of light on water when the path veers close to a stream. Birdsong, the pops of colour from cardinals and blue jays, the sudden flash of white overhead as a togetic glides between trees. Under different circumstances, with a working arm and better diet and a friend to walk with, Gwyneth might like to linger, to follow the streams to their sources, to find caves or waterfalls or spectacular trees grown massive with age and lack of human interference. Now all she can do is look, and let the little part of her that isn't concentrating on Humilau and one-foot-in-front-of-the-other nod and say, that's cool.

It reminds her a little of Route 6, in a way – of that particular forest, that particular beauty. Light filtering through leaves, the sound of boots on dirt and fallen sticks. Of course that was different, that was at the height of summer and anyway she herself was different (younger, bouncier, hopefuller); still, there's something there. Some kind of beautiful that only forests share in.

Still, Gwyneth remembers being glad to get out, in the end. She has that time down in her mind as taking a long time, an extended ramble playing out over several weeks. Probably it isn't even really about the forest, in the end; it's about Nika, or from Nika's point of view, she supposes, about Gwyneth.

They stay for several days in that cabin, walking around in the woods, looking for pokémon – not really with an eye to catching any, since Nika's fairly happy with her team for now, but for the pleasure of seeing them, of creating moments in which the two of them at once witness the same amazing thing. They never get bored. Later, after she becomes something of a connoisseur of boredom, Gwyneth will look back on that and not understand; at the time, however, it makes perfect sense. Everything is special and everything is fun, because they're both doing it and that, in the end, is all that really matters.

And out here they really are alone. They don't have to play the game that dances around Gwyneth's untouchability, the wrongness in her; there's no one to perform for but themselves, and so they can just be that, be themselves. They hold hands and sing badly and quote poetry and video games. They watch Hekate crow with delight and burst free from the broken skull she wears around her legs, suddenly huge and powerful and rising up above them on wings broader than Nika is tall. They don't exist. They live, and they flourish.

What drives them back towards civilisation is, in the end, the knowledge that there is so much more of this to come, in so many more places, and also (being practical for a moment) the lack of laundry facilities out here in the middle of nowhere. So they pack up their stuff and head west along the riverbank, and though it's a little sad, it's hopeful too. Because if it happened once, it can happen again, right? And there will always be cracks in the pavement through which even a life as unlikely as theirs can push.

They wait for hours at the deserted bus stop outside Chargestone Cave, and eventually manage to get a ride through the mountain pass to Icirrus. (They didn't intend to skip Mistralton, but this bus apparently does not stop there.) It's a long ride, eight hours of winding between snow-capped walls of ice and stone, the road getting higher and the air colder with every turn, and they fall asleep somewhere along the way, waking to darkness and a chill that makes them shiver in their shorts. Apparently summer only reaches so far, and one of the places it struggles to get to is Icirrus, way up here among the mountains.

Stumbling through the gathering dusk, trying to find the Pokémon Centre, both of them feel lost in the freezing night, and wonder if they made a mistake in coming here. But they get there, and the night passes, and in the morning it's as bright as it ever was, and okay it's not as warm as it looks but whatever, who cares, the point is Icirrus is fine after all. It's windy, and everything is wet all of the time, even when it's not raining, but that's part of the charm, right?

Right, they agree, and get to exploring. And there are things to see, people to meet, trainers to defeat (and it is always defeat; Britomartis is slowing down, saving energy for evolution, but Hekate is revelling in her new strength as a mandibuzz and under Nika's direction shreds the competition), and the rhythm of travel begins again. Gwyneth forgets about Kit, forgets about autumn. She does know by now that Nika's parents have only given her this year – that she has to be back in Humilau by October – but she forgets this too, blanks out everything, even as the days pass and Nika starts to think about how to divide up her remaining time.

I think we can do Twist Mountain and Mistralton, she says. It's really not so hard going in summer.

Mm, says Gwyneth, non-committally, and fiddles with the ends of her hair.

Of course, there's a Gym challenge to do here. They're both pretty confident Nika can handle Brycen, even if he is her fourth Gym. Astyanax is obviously not going to be much use here, defensively weak as he is, but despite her weakness to it Hekate tanked an aurora beam to the chest the other day, and Britomartis has never had a problem with ice-types. The main reason why Nika waits at all is for Britomartis to finish evolving, so she'll be at her best, and sure enough one morning she's woken by a crash like a steelworks collapsing to see her flexing new muscles among the twisted remnants of her old shell, as tall now as Nika and much, much sharper.

After they've managed to get rid of her baby armour (the Centre staff give them the number of someone who buys this kind of thing, and actually Nika makes a couple of hundred dollars out of it; dark-infused pawniard steel is pretty valuable stuff), they head down to the Icirrus Gym, which is up in a cave to the northeast. It doesn't sound very impressive, says Gwyneth, but Nika, who of course has seen pictures, assures her that it is – and when they get there, Gwyneth has to admit, it's actually not bad at all. Calling it a cave is kind of like calling a wailord a large animal; it's not wrong, but it isn't exactly right, either. You could drive a train in through the entrance and not even chip the carved ceilings or the pillars. It's the kind of place you look at and think immediately, this is old, and someone spent their life in making it.

It's also freezing. Maybe they ought to have expected this, but the waiting area near the lobby is cold and the arena itself, a big circular chamber lit spectacularly by light refracted through icicles, is colder still. Gwyneth zips up her coat and huddles while Nika walks out onto the icy floor.

Brycen is meant to be a tough Gym Leader to beat: most pokémon don't like the cold, and the arena is slippery underfoot. But the size of the room means Hekate doesn't have to touch the floor, and Britomartis' metal nerves are like circuitry more efficient when chilled, so Nika feels she's in with a chance. And if Nika thinks she can do it, well, so does Gwyneth; she's not quite certain enough of her footing to jump around cheering her on, but she has a quiet confidence. Clay? Well, he was a jerk anyway. Brycen, now, here's the guy to beat.

He leads with a beartic, not as big as Nova's but with a beard the size of a small iceberg that it smashes free from its jaw and hurls into Britomartis' face. She, with a speed normally beyond her, raises a bladed arm and punches it out of the air, so cool that all the kids watching stare and murmur, and Brycen nods, impressed.

“Done your homework, huh?” he says. “All right, then.”

Britomartis closes the distance, heavy claws ripping up the ice in sprays of water and crystal; she drives her steel arms into the beartic's chest, but it's fast too and it keeps breathing out more ice across its chest and arms. The armour breaks with every blow, but if it's getting hit the beartic isn't and the big bear looks like it can keep this up all day, blocking Britomartis' hits and striking back with heavy chops from its paws that flash brown with the telltale light of fighting moves, putting dents in her new armour. Nika orders her back; Britomartis obeys, and the beartic takes advantage of the space to get down on all fours and charge. She hunkers down, shoulder braced against the onrushing bear, and Brycen raises his eyebrows, smiling – but at the last minute Britomartis steps aside, lashing out with one arm and catching the beartic a blow on the side of the head that knocks its beard clean off. It stumbles, loses its footing and slides straight past Nika into the protective barrier, which it hits with enough force to leave a bear-shaped dent.

“Ah,” says Brycen, disconcerted. “You're the one Elesa mentioned, aren't you? Took out her zebstrika with a vullaby.”

Nika grins and Gwyneth, no longer feeling the cold, jumps up and leads a general cheer among the spectators; did you hear that, zebstrika with a vullaby, and anyway did you see how quickly that beartic went down? Did you see?

“That's me, yeah,” says Nika, with just a touch of teenage boastfulness. “I'm glad to see my reputation precedes me.”

Next out is a vanilluxe, double-headed and soft; Gwyneth thinks that this one should be easy, after the beartic, but though it is slow and squishy it out-ranges Britomartis considerably, filling the arena with whirling snow, disappearing into the mist only to needle her with ice beams from unusual angles. Britomartis' new speed disappears under the frost riming her limbs; she stumbles, slashes blindly, utters growls like grinding metal in her frustration. The vanilluxe can't quite get through her armour, though, and in the end it needs to come in close to try and snap-freeze her to finish off. It gets the angle of approach wrong, and that's its last mistake. Nika spots it through the mist, directs Britomartis, and watches in satisfaction as she grips its cone with both hands and drags it bodily out of the air.

Brycen recalls it before it gets needlessly hurt and sends out – something, nobody's sure what exactly, hidden in the fog of ice crystals as it is. There are murmurs in the crowd, and then a few yells and sudden gasps as suddenly a looming shape appears behind Britomartis and spouts a pale mist that freezes her solid. In one of those dramatic flourishes Brycen seems to like so much, the fog clears in eddying swirls, revealing a huge, floating nest of angled ice lit by burning eyes: a cryogonal.

Its next blow knocks her to the ground, stiff and motionless, and Nika recalls her, conceding the point. She registered all three of her pokémon for this, and now she selects Hekate, timing the throw to release her midair. Gwyneth remembers watching the two of them practice this trick, Nika tossing the ball up and Hekate bursting forth, wings straining against the sudden pull of gravity, and her heart is in her mouth in case it fails and drops Hekate into the mouth of the ice demon below – but works fine, works perfectly even, and Hekate throws back her head and crows in delight as she makes a showy lap of the arena, easily avoiding the cryogonal's attempts to pin her down with ice beams.

The crowd loves it, of course. So does Brycen, always the actor, who is smiling now as he urges his cryogonal up into the air to engage the mandibuzz. Its problem, as quickly becomes clear, is speed: cryogonal are ambush predators by nature, and while Hekate isn't fast by the standards of flying-types she can easily avoid most of its attacks. She keeps her distance, swoops in to dive-bomb it with pulses of darkness, and then pulls back again. It lashes out with its chains of ice, but they're too heavy and its freezing breath too slow, and really it's a foregone conclusion. Nika gives the word, Hekate dives in, and in the centre of the arena she takes a bone in her claw from the collection on her breast and clubs the cryogonal down onto the ground.

It's perfect. This is, although no one knows it yet, Nika's greatest battle; it's big, it's showy, it's precisely coordinated. It's her last big victory as a trainer, and the only one of her Gym challenges to make TV. The crowd goes wild and Brycen spreads his hands and smiles, what can you do, and in the middle of it all Nika looks back up at the stands and meets Gwyneth's eye.

In this moment Gwyneth knows that this is, somehow, her victory too, that in a way that she doesn't understand but which is nevertheless very important this wouldn't have happened without her. And then Nika looks away again, at Brycen approaching with her badge, and the feeling passes. Now she's just excited again, exulting in the knowledge that Nika has beat another Gym Leader and balance has been restored to the universe. Clay was just a blip, obviously. This is how things are meant to be, and how they'll keep on going from now on: victories, cheering, her and Nika, winning, forever. It won't matter any more, what she did, how she failed (as son, as Henuun, as trainer, as girl), because this is her future. It's like she thought in Driftveil. Everything can be okay again. All she has to do is be a good sidekick.

She will remember this, years from now, and she will almost laugh. But not quite. Some things are too personal for even her savage mockery.

*​

It's strange now to think she was ever that optimistic. She really did think everything would just go away, didn't she? Or maybe not, maybe she's being unfair. Could just be that she wanted everything to go away so bad she convinced herself it would. Even after Kit, even after Nova. All those reminders that bad things never die, and she still clung on to hope.

Gwyneth sighs. She's not mad about it, really. If anything, she's jealous.

“Hey, you.”

She stops dead. She curses under her breath. She knows the voice, and she knows the tone, and now she knows that one of those hikers must have been unable to let go of his frustration at her, her, a Relic b*tch, a six-letter word, daring to play him and his buddies yesterday evening; and she knows that that rage sat in him and festered all night like the infected wound on the back of her hand, that this morning he looked at her and Tor asleep and Vega above them and fumed at the injustice of the weak being protected by the strong; and she knows that he made his excuses, doubled back, waited, knowing that she was on a deadline, that it would not be long until she too started heading along this trail. Alone. Because Tor and Vega are staying back to explore.

Gwyneth knows this the way she knew there would be trouble last night. She may not speak Heniil, but she is more than fluent in hatred.

She turns to face him. He's a little way off the side of the trail, among the trees. His face is pale and tight with anger.

“Hey, dude,” she says. She can't run. He'll be faster. This is just one of those times where you have to take a hit, it seems.

It is a very practical conclusion, but it does not offer much in the way of comfort.

“You think you're so smart, don't you?” he says, walking towards her. “You think you're so f*cking smart.” He uses words. All her old friends: Relic, six-letter words ending and beginning with T, a few newcomers that don't really seem to apply to her but which slip in almost without him noticing, the rest of his pathetic, dangerous hatred caught up in the outburst and revealing itself by accident.

“I'm not,” says Gwyneth, mechanically, without faith that this will work. “Seriously, dude, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to―”

“Shut the f*ck up,” he tells her, too close now, close enough for her to count the veins in his eyeball, it's strange the things you notice at times like this she thinks because she can even now tell you what the boys who beat her up that time were wearing, that red shirt and the broken shoelace vivid in her mind like blood―

She feels every ounce of his eagerness to do this collide with her face, knuckle first. The venipede screams weakly and she reaches for her, desperately trying to grab her before she does anything that gets her hurt, too, but the next blow comes before her arms arrive and she doubles over, silent, the venipede tumbling off her shoulder into the dirt.

“Where's your f*cking sigilyph now, you f*cking Relic tranny b*tch?” the hiker asks her, or she thinks he does, she isn't paying attention, and there's another impact and she falls too, next to the venipede. For some reason all she can think about is that she's glad she didn't land on her. The hiker is saying more stuff, shouting it, even, but her mind is now a long way off and Gwyneth lies there holding her stomach and saying nothing, being hit, until with one last kick the hiker's energy is spent, and he backs away, staring horrified or admiring or both at what he has done, before turning and running off down the trail.

Silence. Gwyneth coughs. She does not think she can move from this position without everything hurting even more than it already does.

“You okay?” she whispers, through the bloody soil caking her lips, and the venipede crawls slowly into her field of view, blurry through the haze of tears. “That's good,” she mumbles. “That's real good, dude.”

She lies there, not moving. This goes on for some considerable time.

It occurs to her that getting to Humilau by tomorrow is starting to look a little unlikely.

 

[Cutlerine]

THIRTEEN: GO HOME

Wednesday, 21st September

Gwyneth does start to make an effort to sit up, at one point, but she gives in again at the first sign of pain. It doesn't matter. She's not getting to Humilau, all right? She's learned her lesson, the same damn lesson that everyone's been trying to teach her from the day she set out, and she's not going. It's too hard. It's too hard and she's too hurt, too sick, too tired, too stupid, too selfish, too stuck in the past, too weak, too gross, too monstrous, too broken, too dead, a walking goddamn cadaver that hasn't realised it's meant to stay in the goddamn grave where it was goddamn put, and she's not going.

So there's no point in getting up. Not really. Let it pass. Let the deadline go. Let your pride and your stubbornness and your pain all just go. It doesn't matter any more. You're here, and that's all. Just let everything else go.

Let Nika go, Gwyneth. Because that's what this is, isn't it? If we're being honest here. It's her, it always was, and it's just not healthy. Let her go. Let her have Hilbert. He's famous and makes good money and he's stable, Gwyneth, he's stable. Hilbert is a lot of things, he's boring and he never tells you what he's thinking and he would be a terrible husband to anyone not as hideously perfect as he is, but he's stable, and if Nika wants stable then let her have it. She deserves it, after everything Gwyneth put her through.

Let it go. Gwyneth is not chosen, she has no Aân Hen, no country and no culture, no tie to this land, no claim to her history, her gender, her body, her lover. She does not even have pity, because there's nothing of her left to pity. Just a skeleton rattling in the dark.

Gwyneth lies there, empty and emotionless, the venipede picking at the soil around her, and waits for nothing to happen.

She is not disappointed.

*​

“Uh – hey! Are you – oh my god, Gwyneth? Gwyneth, are you okay?”

Footsteps, pounding up the trail behind her. Gwyneth raises her head, ever so slightly, and sees someone coming, reaching out.

“Hey, Tor,” she tries to say, except her throat is dry as hell and nothing comes out but a faint hiss of air.

“What happened?” they ask, panicked, crouching over her. The sudden noise is confusing. She blinks and tries to make sense of what it means.

“Got beat up,” she mumbles. Not much of it actually makes it out of her mouth.

“Oh god. Um … can you walk? Here, let me – sorry! Sorry, I didn't mean to hurt – um―”

“'S okay,” Gwyneth manages at last, sitting up as they tug on her shoulders. “'S fine.”

“It's really really not,” says Tor, worried and earnest behind their glasses. “Are you okay?”

Gwyneth almost says yes, but she can't fake it any more. She just can't.

“No,” she says, making a half-hearted attempt to wipe the dirt off her mouth. “Not really.”

“Oh.” Tor knew this already, but they probably weren't expecting her to say it. They don't have a proper response on hand. “Um, okay. Can you walk? I'll – I'll help you back to the cabin.”

That's the wrong way, thinks Gwyneth, and then remembers her decision. To hell with it. She's in no condition to go anywhere anyway.

“Thanks,” she says, and lets Tor help her back onto her feet. The movement feels bad, and standing upright feels worse. Ribs, stomach, her knee where she fell. The whole left side of her face. It was a pretty thorough working over. Harry or Truman or Abel or whatever the hell his name was can be proud of his work. “Agh,” she sighs. “Can you grab her?” She points at the venipede. “She won't bite, but be careful, she's hurt.”

“Oh. Sure.” Tor picks up the venipede, gently, and settles her in the crook of their arm. She looks up at Gwyneth with her big evil eye. “Here, lean on me.”

“Thanks, kid.”

The two of them start to shuffle back west, down the trail towards the cabin. Gwyneth feels like she ought to be humiliated, but she can't seem to find it in her to care.

“Didn't know you were coming this way,” she says, after a while.

“I wasn't gonna,” replies Tor. “I was gonna explore for a bit. But … I don't know, I just wanted to get out of there.” They go red, and look away. “I … y'know.”

“Yeah, kid, I know.” Christ. Her voice is hoarse as hell. How much of that soil did she breathe in?

They walk on a little more, or rather Tor walks while Gwyneth comes as close to crawling as you can get on two legs.

“Vega not with you?” she asks, to break the silence.

“She's tired after last night,” they reply. “She's resting.” They hesitate, then ask the question that's been sitting in the background since they found her. “Who was it?”

Gwyneth sighs.

“Dunno. Couldn't remember which one was which.”

“You mean …?”

“Yeah.” She takes another step and grimaces. “'S okay. Wasn't the first time. Probably won't be the last.”

Tor is silent for a while, chewing their lip.

“I'm sorry,” they say at last. “I'm really sorry.”

“I didn't see you throwing any punches,” replies Gwyneth. “You got nothing to be sorry for.”

“But I figured out what you were doing last night. It's my―”

“Some people just hate,” she says. “Lots of people. It's not your fault, Tor.”

It's nobody's fault. It's just something that happens. Gwyneth knows well enough that you can't fight history. You just stand there and try to take the beating with some dignity.

This is not what might be called a balanced view of the matter. She is not, at this moment in time, a balanced person. It's debatable whether she ever has been.

“But,” says Tor, only they don't know what else to say. “But …” They shake their head. “Okay. I'm still sorry, though. That it happened, I mean.”

“Yeah,” says Gwyneth. “Me too, kid. Me too.”

*​

Back in the cabin, Tor helps Gwyneth down onto the couch while Nick stands and stares and then offers her water. She accepts, washes the dirt and blood off her face, and leans back. She does not explain what happened. Nick seems to pick up on the fact that he shouldn't ask.

“Do you want me to signal a ranger?” he asks. “There are flares here somewhere, I think.”

“Nah,” says Gwyneth. “I'll be okay. I just need to rest a bit. Thanks.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

She is sure, actually. It's not so bad, now she's back inside on a comfortable seat. Split lip, black eye, a lot of bruises; these injuries are just painful and spectacular, not serious. She won't be winning any beauty contests for a while, but then, that was never really an option for her, was it.

And anyway, if they called in a ranger she'd have to decide what to do next, whether to go back west or continue on east, and Gwyneth doesn't know any more which direction she should go in. West is an apartment she can't get back to and a job that's no longer hers; east is a wedding she won't arrive in time to attend. Neither is a particularly compelling destination.

The venipede crawls slowly up onto her lap. She seems to be okay, at least. She's so light, falling off Gwyneth's shoulder didn't even faze her. Although Gwyneth hates to think what might have happened if she'd landed on top of her. Venipede aren't as squishy as normal bugs, sure, but her venipede's shell is still weak from the attack. Something bad could have happened, and there's no way Gwyneth could have got her medical attention before it was too late.

She strokes her shell absently and listens to Nick's voice.

“What about your wedding?” she's being asked now. “I thought you were on a deadline.”

“I dunno. I got to think about it.” Gwyneth closes her eyes. “I … can't think just now,” she says. “Sorry. Think I need a minute.”

“Okay. Sure.” Movement behind her. Now it's Tor who's speaking.

“Here,” they say. “Painkiller.”

She takes the glass and the tablet, swallows. She has her doubts about how much effect it's going to have, but she thanks them anyway.

“It's okay,” they say. “I'll – I guess I'll hang around a bit. Okay?”

They sound a little afraid, a little desperate. Gwyneth wants to reassure them, but she just can't manage the words.

“Okay,” she says. “Okay.”

*​

Gwyneth actually falls asleep, for a minute or two. It doesn't stick, though; she wakes up again right away. Mostly she just sits there, getting over being beaten up. It's weird how hard it hits you. The punches are okay, all things considered; really it's the fact that this is a thing that's happening, that someone you don't know hates you this much. If Harry or Abel or Truman or whothehellever was more familiar with her, well. There are a lot of reasons why someone who knew Gwyneth might be tempted to take a swing at her. But it's something else to beat up a stranger, just because she tries to be more human than she's meant to be. Not that Gwyneth didn't know where she stood already. It's just that it's never a pleasant belief to have confirmed.

She sits there and thinks about this and strokes her venipede carefully around the edges of her damaged shell.

She starts to have ideas.

Right now, she has a little creature on her lap that should be dead. She isn't, partly because Gwyneth saved her and partly because she was too much of an ornery a*shole to let the reaper get a grip on her.

Gwyneth could be lying in the dirt still. She isn't. Partly because Tor saved her and partly because …

She sighs. Forget it. Even if she wasn't as messed-up as she is, there's no way to get to Humilau before the wedding now. There just isn't.

Besides, isn't she meant to be letting go?

Gwyneth kneads her forehead gently, frowning at air. Nika is gone. But Nika kept her going, all the same. Gwyneth can look at her life dispassionately and say without a shadow of a doubt that she'd be dead without Nika. Several times over. Even if she's gone, even if there's no chance she'd ever take her back, she's still saving Gwyneth now. She got her here, didn't she? Because in Humilau, it won't just be her, it'll be Gwyneth's mother, and brother, and everyone else she left behind. Gwyneth has been following Nika, and Nika has been leading her to everything that might, if there's anything left in her to salvage, save her.

Sharks have to keep moving, or they suffocate. Stop now, and she's dead. She really, really is. And you can't die if there's an injured pokémon depending on you.

She stares at the venipede.

“A*shole,” she says. “You just keep on not killing me, don't you?”

The venipede clicks back at her, and Gwyneth clasps her gently to her chest.

“Okay, then,” she says. “Let's go to a wedding, dude.”

*​

Tor and Nick are a little concerned, to say the least.

“Are you sure?” Tor keeps asking. “Are you really sure you're okay?”

“I'll be fine,” she says. “I just need to get out of the woods up to the highway. I can hitchhike from there.”

“Will that be okay?” What they're really asking is, will this happen again, and Gwyneth can't answer that. The future right now is as vague and open as it's ever been. Even she doesn't know where she'll be tomorrow. Sure, she's going to say she'll be at the wedding, but she's not fooling anyone with that kind of phony certainty.

“I dunno,” she says in the end, shrugging. “Probably. It'd be real unlucky if that happened twice in a row like that.”

Tor glances helplessly at Nick, maybe looking for an argument to make Gwyneth stay, maybe not knowing what they want at all. He scratches his head and speaks hesitantly.

“Um … I have an idea.”

“Shoot,” says Gwyneth. Whatever he has to say, it's worth hearing. It literally cannot be worse than any of her ideas.

“Celio can teleport. And like I want to stress, not super far, he can't get you to Humilau or even to Undella, but … I don't know. I mean, it's probably not a good idea, he might teleport you into a tree or something, but like … I don't know if I'd be okay with letting you just walk out of here the way you are now.”

Gwyneth nods. This could be interesting.

“Okay,” she says slowly. “How far are we talking here?”

“I'm really not sure. Maybe out to the edge of the woods?” He shakes his head. “Look, I – I'll ask him, okay?”

“Sure.”

Celio is let out and consulted. He seems eager, but his thoughts are only being broadcast at Nick, and anyway he's probably the only person who knows him well enough to have any hope of interpreting them.

“I think he's saying he could do it,” Nick tells her in the end. “I tried to ask if he could put you near the highway and he sent back a picture of the place with you there, which I think is yes.”

Near the highway. She could hitch a ride and be in Undella by this evening. It's a long road; it runs along the railway line most of the way, and Gwyneth knows from teenage trips to visit Nika that it's a long damn railway line. But if she could get to Undella … well, what if she could get to Undella? Where does that leave her? It's not like she can afford another ferry trip, or even the Marine Tube.

Screw it. Think about that when you get there.

“All right,” she says. “Ready when you are, then.”

Tor starts.

“Just like that?” they ask.

“Just like that.” She hesitates. Tell them? Maybe an edited version, so they get why she's in such a hurry. “I'm actually kinda running out of time,” she says. “The wedding's the day after tomorrow. I was gonna hike to the highway, get a lift to Undella and then take the boat, but I wasn't figuring on getting beat up.” She pauses for a moment to gauge their reactions. Neither looks particularly judgemental. “Now I don't think I can do the hiking part,” she says. “So if you can help me cut that out, I'd really appreciate it.”

Long silence. It feels heavy.

“Okay,” says Nick at last. He sounds kind of relieved, kind of like he wishes he hadn't offered. “Sure. I'm glad I can help.”

*​

The goodbyes are awkward. Tor really isn't sure how to handle this situation, and neither is Gwyneth, for that matter. She thanks them a couple more times than she needs to, and they do the same in return. Nick and Celio just hover in the background, uncertain what it is they're looking at but unwilling to intrude on it.

And then it's time. Gwyneth puts on her backpack, wincing at the pain as the weight settles onto her bruised body, and holds the venipede close, to make sure it doesn't get left behind. She smiles nervously at her worried teenage saviours, and then Celio raises his arms and cries out in a thin voice and she blinks out of their lives.

It is unpleasant. The human body is ill-equipped to deal with sudden massive changes in its immediate environment, and Gwyneth's body in particular isn't exactly bringing its A-game today. Motion sickness hits her like a brick between the eyes; she staggers, almost drops the venipede, and finally throws up on a rock.

Then she straightens up, and sees that she's standing by the sea.

She knew it was going to happen, but she stares all the same. There's the ocean, just a grassy slope and a short beach away. That's the Atlantic, right there. And behind her …

Gwyneth turns to look back west, and sees, right between her and the leafy bulk of White Forest, the huge vacant sprawl of a good old Unovan highway.

Her face cracks involuntarily into a grin. She's never been so happy to see something so ugly.

“Would you look at that,” she mutters. “Guess we made it, dude.”

The venipede clicks indistinctly. Gwyneth takes a closer look at her, and detects a certain wobbliness of the antennae and wooziness of the eye.

“Got you feeling sick too, huh.” She shakes her head. “Just don't throw up on me, okay?”

She doesn't even know if centipedes can throw up. Honestly, she'd prefer not to find out.

Gwyneth looks up and down the highway. No cars, no nothing. She thinks about walking north, to get some distance behind her while she waits for someone to come by, but she knows she won't. She just can't make her body move.

She eases her backpack off her shoulders and sets it firmly on the ground by the wayside, upwind of her vomit. She sits on it, lowers the venipede onto her lap, and waits.

It feels wrong, this immobility, after so much restless, furious movement. But it's all she's got. Gwyneth is finally and completely out of juice. If a bear or a scolipede showed up and tried to eat her now, she isn't even sure she'd be able to run away.

At least it's warm. This side of White Forest, the temperature is starting to pick up a little. The sky is blue, the sun is out, and if Gwyneth looks over her shoulder at the ocean she has to squint against the glaring flashes of light on the ripples. She thinks back to Aspertia, to the cold that sticks to the whole west side of Unova like a bad smell, and has to admit that if she's going to be messed-up and alone, it is at least better to be that here than there.

After a while, some cars go by. None of them stop.

Gwyneth sits and waits and watches, sometimes shuffling her legs slightly when they start getting numb. A gigantic silhouette passes overhead, broad wings, wedge-shaped tail, and she knows it must be a braviary. She looks up to see a bunch of seagulls flapping around in its wake, trying to chase it away. They're succeeding, but the braviary has a way of making even defeat look dignified; it dips a wing and rises, soaring up and away without moving more than a couple of feathers. The seagulls fly after it for a moment, then give up and return, shrieking and mewling in triumph, to the shore.

“Good for you,” says Gwyneth. The gulls are small and vicious and eaters of trash; the braviary is big and strong and stands for Unova. She knows which one wins her affection, any day.

She yawns. In her lap, the venipede settles down. Both of them feel much less nauseous now.

A truck goes by, and a few more cars. Gwyneth's thumb is ignored, and they roll by with a sudden roar that seems to leave echoes in the silence after it has passed.

The sun climbs. It must be noon now, maybe later. Time is slipping away from her. It's okay. It usually does.

More cars, no stops. One slows, and Gwyneth catches a glimpse of a face at the window, but then for whatever reason the driver decides against it and speeds up again, zooming off into the distance.

“Thanks, dude,” says Gwyneth sourly. “Real nice of you.”

A cloud forms in the distance, over White Forest, and then disintegrates. It all happens very slowly, but Gwyneth doesn't have anything else to do, and she watches it from beginning to end with the same kind of gaze she uses for TV: attentive, bored, numb.

She closes her eyes. Her backpack doesn't make a very comfortable seat but she could fall asleep here anyway, she thinks. She'll have to be careful.

She's not careful. She almost misses the next truck, never even moves to flag it down, and in fact she only opens her eyes when she hears the snarl of its engine die down to an idle grumble.

“Hey,” someone calls. “You headin' north?”

Gwyneth blinks. It's a big truck, closer to her than she was expecting – closer, maybe, than she ever has been to a truck this size before. The side is printed with the name ARAT-NORN SHIPPING, and there's a woman wearing sunglasses leaning out of the open window of the cab.

“Yeah,” she says, dragging her voice up from wherever it's been hiding for the last hour or so. “Yeah. You going to Undella?”

“I am. Need a ride?”

“Sure do.” Gwyneth gets up slowly, takes hold of the strap of her pack. “Thanks.”

“No problem.” The woman frowns. “Do I wanna ask what the other guy looks like?”

Gwyneth smiles and makes her split lip sting.

“Heh,” she says. “Nah, I came off worse. He got away fine.”

She starts limping towards the cab. The truck driver looks uncertain, a little angry, then cuts the motor.

“Hold on,” she calls. “Lemme help you with that.”

She disappears for a moment, then reappears coming around the front of the cab. She's taller and bulkier than Gwyneth by a long way, in a strong way, and she takes her bag and thrusts it up into the cab like it's full of feathers. The only thing that makes her hesitate is the venipede.

“She's okay,” says Gwyneth, seeing her pause. “She's tame.” (Mostly.)

The truck driver nods and hands her up into the cab, then helps Gwyneth follow. It's higher than it looks, she thinks, pushing her pack down into the footwell and arranging the venipede on her lap. The road looks weird from up here. Smaller, further away. She never thought she'd call an Unovan road small, but there you go.

The door slams on the other side, and Gwyneth looks up to see the truck driver back in her seat.

“I'm Cheryl,” she says.

“Gwyneth.”

They look at each other for a moment, then Cheryl starts the motor again and the truck shudders into life beneath them, like a gigantic pokémon waking up. She navigates the bewildering dashboard with expert ease, and pulls the big truck back onto the highway as easily as Nika would her car. Gwyneth watches with quiet admiration. She can't drive at all, although Nika was starting to teach her just before they broke up. To be able to control this giant monstrosity of a vehicle is something else entirely.

“So you're goin' to Undella, huh?” asks Cheryl, after a moment.

“Humilau,” answers Gwyneth. “But Undella's fine for now.”

“Okay.” Cheryl nods, adjusting the wheel. “You, uh, all right?”

“Yeah, I'm okay.” It's patently not true, but if they both pretend it is then this will be less awkward. “Just met one a*shole too many on my way through the woods.” Momentary pause. Is that enough? It's probably enough. “Thanks for this, by the way.”

“Sure, sure.” Cheryl takes her eyes off the empty road for a moment, glances at her. “Not tryin' to pry.”

“Nah,” says Gwyneth. “'S fine.”

The truck continues. Trees on the left, ocean on the right. On and on and on, unfolding into the great emptiness of Unova.

“Where'd you start out?” asks Cheryl.

“Aspertia.”

“Aspertia?” Cheryl whistles. “Helluva trip.”

“It's my brother's wedding. We don't get on much, but you know. It's his wedding.” Gwyneth shrugs. “Thought I'd make a trip of it.”

“Hope most of it's been better than this.”

“Hah. Yeah. Yeah, I guess it has. Long road, you know? After today I'm kinda ready for it to be over. Take the Marine Tube or a ferry out to Humilau.”

Cheryl nods.

“Don't blame you,” she says. “Helluva trip.”

She adjusts her sunglasses. In Gwyneth's lap, the venipede clicks inquisitively, staring, and Gwyneth wonders if maybe she sees the mirrored lenses as bug eyes. She supposes it doesn't matter. Not like she has a way to find out.

“Where are you going?” asks Gwyneth, feeling like she ought to say something.

“Just Undella. Got two hundred crates of those little parasols you put in fancy cocktails for the resorts. After that, Lentimas. Not sure what I'm taking there yet.”

“They don't tell you in advance?”

“I'm just a driver,” says Cheryl. “Nobody tells me sh*t.” She shrugs. “I like it, though. Calm. See a whole lot of neat sunsets. Peaceful. Not that I don't appreciate the company.”

“Right.”

Cheryl is right, it is peaceful. The truck is the nicest vehicle Gwyneth's set foot in this whole trip, with the possible exception of the ferry: there's the height, the calm, the way it eats up distance with every turn of its wheels. As far as ways to cross Unova go, it certainly beats walking.

Outside, on the right, the ocean disappears behind a stand of trees and just as quickly re-emerges, glittering like jewels, as the road curves left around Undella Bay. The town is just visible on the other side, a haze of concrete and light in the extreme distance.

“It's further than it looks,” says Cheryl. “I've done this run before and I swear to God Route 14 just gets longer every time.”

On the left, the ground rises up and breaks open into tall bluffs of brown stone, the eastern end of the chain that started on the plains west of White Forest. They curve all the way across Calarat, from the river round the woodland to the sea. Gwyneth tries to imagine this, to hold the scales involved in her head, but she fails. Once again, Unova is just too damn big.

She settles back into her seat. Never mind. Accept the ride, rest your smashed-up body, and wait for Undella.

One of Nika's Greeks went on a stupid journey like this. Everyone thought he was dead, but he came back seven years later with stories of a trip to the northern end of the world, where the griffins and the giants live and there's treasure in the mountains. Gwyneth doesn't know that she's got much of a story to tell, but she's not dead, and she's coming back. It's going to have to do.

*​

Bit by bit, the two of them get over their reticence. Neither is much good at talking, but Cheryl's not unfriendly and Gwyneth is grateful, so they work at it, and they learn about each other. Cheryl's family is from Hoenn, if you go back a couple generations, but she's a west Nacrener, born and bred. Gwyneth can kind of see it when she mentions it; she's got the eyebrows. Everyone always says Hoenners have good eyebrows.

She's had the truck-driving gig for five years now. Before that, she worked at a clay pit way out in the sticks, west of Lentimas; at a lumber mill in the literal middle of nowhere, a hundred miles north of Twist Mountain; and at various places all across the country, which she seems to have crossed a thousand times over, as time and jobs have pulled her this way and that. It's an interesting life. Gwyneth finds herself moved to reciprocate, as someone who has also visited most everywhere in Unova at one point or another, and share stories of towns they've both spent time in. Through Cheryl, Gwyneth discovers that the Blackjack bar and nightclub is still open in Opelucid, and laughs at the unexpected delight of an old haunt's survival.

“Do they still do that godawful house cocktail, what's it called, the―”

“Four Jacks, yeah.” Cheryl shakes her head. “God. I had one as a dare once. Blackout drunk in less than twenty minutes.”

“You actually drank the whole thing?”

Cheryl laughs, a little embarrassed.

“I was a kid,” she says. “You know what it's like. You're twenty-two and you'll drink any damn thing.”

Gwyneth wonders briefly how old Cheryl thinks she is, then decides she probably doesn't want to know. At the moment, any last traces of her youthful good looks (such as they were) are probably fairly deeply buried under the dirt and bruising. Whatever estimate Cheryl's made of her age, it's highly unlikely to be very flattering.

“Yeah,” she agrees. “Hah. The bad old days, huh.”

“I honestly have no idea how anyone survives past twenty-four,” says Cheryl, which is perhaps not intended as a joke but which strikes Gwyneth's somewhat dented sense of humour just right, and makes her laugh again.

“Me either,” she says, grinning and cracking her lip. “Me either.”

After all, she has no idea how she's going to survive it herself.

*​

Cheryl's feeling good about having picked up this hitchhiker; Gwyneth can't see her eyes behind her mirrored sunglasses but it's in her voice and laugh. Maybe it isn't often that she meets someone she gets along with. It sure isn't often that Gwyneth finds anyone that she gets along with; she does okay with Shane, but that's always strained, always something that happens in the shadow of the fact that he saved her. Tor and Saadiyyah were nice, but they were kids really, and trainers as well, and that means Gwyneth has to be an adult and an ex-trainer when she speaks to them, not just herself.

Hell, Cheryl might be the first really good company she's had this year. And Cheryl definitely doesn't seem like she gets any company at all, very often.

It's nice, is what it is. Strange to think it, after everything, after this morning, but it is. Maybe the worst really is over. Or at least it's letting up for a while.

They talk about family, prompted by the fact that Gwyneth is going to her brother's wedding. Cheryl has three sisters, all of whom have spread out across Unova in various directions. Her mother has been gone a long time, and her father moved back to Hoenn soon after. They are a fractured, exploded kind of family. Gwyneth tells her that her own father is gone too, and she hasn't spoken to her mother or brother in a long time.

“Although in my defence he doesn't really speak back,” she says. “Hard to get two words out of him, and since he's been travelling a lot that means he's got real bad at keeping in touch.”

“What's he do?” asks Cheryl. Gwyneth takes a moment to think about it, glances at the venipede as if for guidance, immediately tells herself she's being stupid. The venipede's asleep anyway, even if she did somehow have an opinion.

“He's … well, he was Unova League Champion,” she says, in the end. “But he went off looking for that N guy. You know, Ghetsis Harmonia's kid?”

Cheryl's head snaps round from the road towards her.

“Your brother's Hilbert ze'Haraan?”

“Yeah,” admits Gwyneth, hoping she hasn't made a mistake in saying so. “Yeah, he is.”

Cheryl is quiet for a little while, processing this new information. Outside, a single sawsbuck darts away from the road with quick, sharp movements.

“Well,” she says eventually, “that's a tough act to follow.”

“Yeah,” agrees Gwyneth. “It is.”

Cheryl hesitates.

“Y'know,” she says, “maybe it's the way he just stands around smilin' and not doin' nothin', but somethin' about him always seemed kinda odd to me.”

“God,” breathes Gwyneth, with eager gratitude. “Yeah. Yeah, that's … not an act for the cameras. He's just always been like that. Quiet and strong and … creepy.”

Cheryl nods slowly, as if something is starting to make sense to her.

“Yeah, I wasn't gonna go that far, exactly …”

“But since I said it,” says Gwyneth, and Cheryl smiles.

“Yeah,” she says. “Since you said it.” She sighs. “No one in my family like that. Probably for the best. Don't know what I'd do if there was.”

“Move to the opposite end of the country,” suggests Gwyneth, trying to lighten things up a little. “It's working out okay for me so far.”

Cheryl laughs.

“Yeah, maybe,” she agrees. “Maybe.”

The blue of the sky deepens. Undella inches closer. Gwyneth talks and feels the pain recede a little with her divided attention.

Cheryl says she hopes Hilbert at least opens his mouth around his bride-to-be. Gwyneth says he'd better not, she's too smart for him. Oh, so she knows her? Yeah, she says, they go way back; she met her on her trainer journey and they did most of it together, kept in touch a while afterwards. She says it in a way that hints, but does not confirm. If she's gauged Cheryl right, then she'll get it; if not, she won't. No harm done either way. But she's pretty sure each of them has the other figured out by now.

A while into the drive Cheryl locates a bottle somewhere near her feet and takes a drink, offers Gwyneth some.

“Thanks,” she says, accepting.

“Hey, anything for a pretty face.” She says it like it's a joke about the bruises, but they both know it isn't. Gwyneth chuckles.

“So that's why you picked me up, huh.” She also says it like it's a joke. These are just the rules of the game; this is what makes it fun.

“Well, mostly it's 'cause I got a policy that says it's bad news when you see someone sittin' by the side of the road with a black eye and a busted arm,” says Cheryl. “But you know, it helps.”

On the right, the beaches stretch out like fields of white gold, deliriously bright in the afternoon sun. They laugh and talk and do not quite openly flirt, and Gwyneth almost thinks everything has been worth it, just to have this one afternoon at the end of it all where she can feel human again.

(There is a sadness in it, too. In coming back to life, she realises how long she has been dead, and can clearly see the death to which she will return once this ride is over. But life is rare and precious, and vampire that she is Gwyneth will pay anything to get it between her teeth.)

Cheryl recalls her own trainer journey. Closer to two decades ago now than she'd like, but she remembers it well: a herdier, a swanna, two badges, a summer like no other. She smiles when she speaks about it, and Gwyneth watches while she listens.

“Yeah,” concludes Cheryl. “It's a pretty great thing, when you think about it.”

“Even when you don't,” suggests Gwyneth.

“Sure,” agrees Cheryl with a smile. “I guess so.”

*​

Dusk begins to fall and Undella becomes a ripple of lights beneath a sky awash in amber and rose. Gwyneth can't remember the last time she saw a sunset and actually cared enough to find it pretty, but this one is gorgeous.

“What'd I tell you,” says Cheryl, looking at it alongside her. “Lotta neat sunsets.”

By this point she has taken off her sunglasses. Her eyes are dark and alert and unusually large, maybe uncannily so, but Gwyneth has been enjoying her company for long enough now that they seem to her to fit her face just fine.

“Yep,” agrees Gwyneth. “You were right.”

“I usually am,” says Cheryl. “One of my best qualities.”

“Yeah, sure, I bet people never get tired of it.”

“Never do, no. Although for some reason they're always busy when I'm makin' plans to go out.”

Gwyneth shakes her head solemnly.

“Must be bad luck,” she says.

“Yup,” says Cheryl. “No other explanation for it.”

The closer they get to Undella, the less they see of it through the rapidly fading light. The beaches are empty and the town itself a collection of dark shapes punctuated by glowing windows. Gwyneth seems to remember hearing somewhere that they have strings of lights up between the lampposts on the seafront, but she can't see any. Maybe they turn them off after all the tourists have left each summer. Although the weather's still good enough for vacationing, so maybe she just heard wrong.

They start to pass little bastions of civilisation. A gas station. A few houses. An elaborate sign welcoming people to Undella that probably looks much more impressive by day. There are a few more cars around here, although not many. This isn't a very busy part of the world.

“Not long now,” says Cheryl, sighing and shifting in her seat. “Once you hit that sign, you're nearly there.”

“Right,” says Gwyneth.

The conversation is mostly over now, or at least, the spoken part is. The silences linger, still warm, like the dregs of the day outside. It's okay. Soon it will be over, and Gwyneth will have to face the truth bearing down upon her like a runaway train, but for just a few minutes more everything is just fine.

In her lap, the venipede stirs and waves her antennae sleepily.

“Hey, dude,” says Gwyneth. “You got a hard head, you know that? Next time you can find someone else to be your pillow.”

The venipede clicks at her, and she pulls the jar of medicine from her bag.

“Here,” she says, taking one of them out. “You slept through meds time.”

By now, the routine is familiar: she holds out the tacky little thing and the venipede takes it, carefully bites off the end she has decided is the head and settles down to nibble at the rest. Cheryl watches with interest.

“Never seen a venipede act like that before,” she says. “I always figured they were just mean.”

Gwyneth laughs.

“Nah, dude, they are,” she replies. “They're one hundred per cent just mean. She just likes being fed.”

Cheryl nods.

“Now that I can relate to.”

She takes the truck off the highway, onto a broad road circling the west side of town. This part of Undella doesn't look like the photos; there are no beaches here, no hotels, just big, featureless buildings that might be warehouses or might house some kind of light industry. Every town needs a motor, thinks Gwyneth. There has to be some kind of machinery propping up Undella's shining surface.

“I'm gonna stop for gas in a minute,” says Cheryl. “You can get into town from there. I assume you don't wanna be taken all the way out to the storage depot.”

“Yeah, that's right,” says Gwyneth. “Thanks.”

Up ahead, there's a little gas station like an island of light in the rounding dark. Cheryl swings the big truck effortlessly off the road and up to the pumps.

“Well,” she says, killing the motor. “Here we are.”

“Yep.” Gwyneth reaches for her bag. “Here we are.”

She gets out, gritting her teeth against the pain as she forces her body to move again, and Cheryl follows suit with her pack and the venipede.

“Thanks for the ride,” Gwyneth tells her, shouldering her pack and settling the venipede back into her usual position. “Really appreciate it.”

“Ah, 's nothin',” replies Cheryl. “I was glad of the company.”

“Still,” says Gwyneth, which is as close as she can come to saying no, it's not nothing, and it's not just a ride either, and Cheryl shrugs.

“All right, then,” she says. “Well, good luck. You're all right to walk into town?”

“Yeah. Sitting down for a while helped out some.” It's not quite a lie. It did help, just not as much as Gwyneth is implying. “See you, Cheryl.”

“See you, Gwyneth.”

She turns and walks away, into the night. The air is cool and tastes of brine and late flowers. Behind her, the vast dark bulk of the truck looms in front of the gas station lights.

It's a beautiful goddamn night to be alive. And it will only be beautiful for a few seconds longer, before Cheryl and her truck fade away into memory with everything else, but right now it's beautiful, and as Gwyneth walks away down the side of the road she holds onto that beauty for as long as she can.

*​

Undella is very small, really. Gwyneth can walk from this northwesterly corner of town all the way down to the beach in just half an hour, even as tired and achy as she is. It's an unremarkable place after sunset; the plazas are empty of tourists, the markets have all been packed up, the lights beneath the fountains have been turned off, leaving them to gurgle quietly to themselves in the dark. Probably the shops and cafés she passes are quirky and interesting, but there's not enough light to be sure and anyway she doesn't really care. Undella for her was only ever the place where she got off her train and onto the boat out to Humilau. And then, after Nika moved to Nacrene for college, it was nothing at all.

When Gwyneth turns the last corner the view opens up suddenly, dramatically, buildings falling away on either side, and she looks down across the darkened beach at the rippling, sighing blackness of the sea. She stands there on the seafront for a while, staring, then slowly makes her way down the steps onto the sand.

“Look at that,” she hears herself say. She doesn't know what she's supposed to be looking at.

Gwyneth wanders until she finds a big, smooth rock, still hanging onto a little bit of the day's warmth, and then she sits down, dumps her pack at her side and lets the venipede down into her lap. She stretches out her legs in front of her and watches the moonlight touch the edges of the waves with silver.

“Well, dude,” she says. “Here we are.”

If she's honest, she supposes she must have known it wasn't going to happen. Aspertia to Humilau on foot in two weeks? Yeah, right. She came damn close, though. But close isn't good enough. And now here she is, in Undella, out of water and broke and all but homeless.

At least she had this afternoon, she thinks. At least she had those few hours.

Tomorrow she will have to start thinking about what happens next. How to get back home, or no, that's too ambitious; how to survive till the day after. And then again, and again, and again. Tomorrow she will think about all that. But tonight, the beach is warm and the breeze is cool; tonight she'll manage fine just sitting here. Tonight is a night for an ending.

She remembers the other ending, all those years ago. Worrying and fretting about what would come next, not knowing that things would work out, that pairs do not always break when divided. Those last few days in Opelucid. Rough times. But before that – well, before that it does not seem so real, the impending separation. In Icirrus itself, after the Gym challenge, Gwyneth remembers everything continuing just as it was, her younger self flush with her new conviction that it could and would go on forever. She remembers eating victory ice cream despite the cold because after you do something a few times it becomes a tradition and you just have to keep doing it then; she remembers stopping in at the shop in the Pokémon Centre and buying some heavier blankets and things for their next trip down towards Mistralton. Twist Mountain is the tallest peak in the Sierra Castaña, or indeed anywhere in Unova; it's not as cold as it can be at that time of year, but still, you want plenty of layers up there. Or a warm body to lie next to, as Nika points out in a clumsy child's version of the flirtation game they will both learn to play over the coming years.

She's not wrong, though. The high trail winding up from the south end of Icirrus into the foothills of Twist Mountain is damn cold. They go with a group of others, five or six kids who each have two or three pokémon with them; usually they've avoided this, because people tend to notice after a while that Gwyneth doesn't seem to have any pokémon of their own, but in a group this size that sort of thing is easier to hide. Each night, they camp higher up the slope than the day before, and Nika and Gwyneth share a tent and huddle close against the growing cold, while Nika's pokémon hunker down inside their balls, glad of the climate-controlled sanctuary. A few people talk hesitantly about going back, maybe returning next summer. Nobody leaves. Everyone here is aware that they probably won't be trainers any more by the time summer comes again. They've got one shot, here and now, and they are all determined to take it.

On the third night, half a day's travel from the cave mouth that will take them into the network of caverns and crevasses that would take them through the mountain and out onto its south flank near Route 7, a wild beartic shows up. Gwyneth becomes aware of it at three in the morning when she feels a cold wind on her face and opens her eyes to see a huge, jagged silhouette at the other end of the tent. She draws in her breath sharply and does not move. She isn't sure that she can.

The silhouette moves back and forth for what feels like forever, breathing ice crystals, and then withdraws. Gwyneth blinks, frost cracking on her eyelids, and looks across at Nika's face poking out of her sleeping bag. She stares back, wide-eyed, a patch of ice melting across her cheek.

Half an hour later, everyone has packed up their somewhat torn tents and is marching back through the night towards Icirrus. Nobody says anything, but everyone agrees that maybe next summer would be a better time after all.

So Twist Mountain is a bust, but there's still Opelucid, at the other end of Route 8. The trail is cold and wet and winds in a meandering kind of way across the moors, but nothing breaks into their tents at night and both Gwyneth and Nika enjoy it much more. Who needs Twist Mountain, anyway? People go there for the challenge, but it's more important to have fun, right, and anyway there's a Gym in Opelucid that will do just as well as the one in Mistralton. It's meant to be one of the hard ones, but the Leader retired recently, so perhaps his successor will be easier.

And Opelucid, after the trip across the Tubeline Bridge and the short, pleasant hike down the much warmer Route 9, turns out to also be a really beautiful city. Like the slogan says, it's older than Unova; there was originally a Henuun town here, founded after the fall of Hilaan, and after the Unovans came they built their own settlement up around it. By then it was dying: most of the golurk had stopped working and the art of making them had been lost to the Aksa catastrophe. There were never many Henuun, even before the twin heroes killed most of them, and they had always relied on their automata to make up the labour shortfall. With the golurk gone there were simply not enough people left to maintain the city and work the farms.

This is what Nika reads out to Gwyneth from the brochure she picks up in the Pokémon Centre, although she tactfully leaves out the part that goes on to talk about how the remaining Henuun, weak and hungry, welcomed the protection of the new Unovan regime. Even if she thought this was true (and she has her doubts), it doesn't seem like something that would be particularly kind to say.

Still. Opelucid is beautiful, and storied, and full of trees that are just starting to grow rich with browns and reds as the season turns. Gwyneth and Nika explore, and win battles, and marvel, and do not talk about how September has somehow managed to insinuate itself into their lives.

Nika challenges the Gym, figuring she might as well, but there's really no contest. The new Leader, Iris, has the same issue Cheren will encounter a decade later: she's an excellent trainer, and finds it hard to moderate her strength and leave each challenger at least the possibility of victory. Her fraxure and Britomartis take each other down in a savage brawl that neither trainer is completely in control of, and her haxorus deals with Astyanax and Hekate without even trying. Nika is a little disappointed, but not too much; she can kind of see that Iris didn't mean to do what she did. It's left to Gwyneth to get indignant on her behalf, and as usual Nika lets her. (In her diary, she writes: Gwyneth is so cute when she gets worked up like that, and years later when they reread it Gwyneth will laugh so much she feels sick while Nika scratches her head and pretends not to be embarrassed.)

That evening, in the Centre lounge, they have to face the facts. This is the point at which they would usually start making plans about where to go next, only this time there is no next. This is the last stop before home.

Nika begins to talk hesitantly about her parents. Clearly this is difficult for her to say, and it comes out a little jumbled, but Gwyneth gets the idea. A household thick with a cloying sort of Catholicism. A hostility to certain kinds of relationships. A reason why Nika wanted to get away for a while.

Is this it, Gwyneth wants to ask, but she can't. She can't say anything; she's never been able to say anything. She tries instead to listen well, the way Nika does, and isn't sure if she succeeds. (Nobody will ever tell her, but she does.)

They worry. They make plans that fall apart as soon as they are exposed to light and air, like ancient manuscripts held together only by mould. They keep doing things, visiting places, seeing shows, with a frantic sort of desperation, as if they could postpone their parting by filling up the time before it comes. It's then that Nika spots the photobooth as they're passing by and pulls her into it; it's then, afterwards, that she writes the line from Sappho's Fragment 16 on the back and says, with the kind of absurd seriousness only a teenage lover can manage, that this will be something to remember her by. That Gwyneth will be her Anaktoria.

It's kind of funny, how things turn out. In the years to come, both of them will laugh when they remember this (although not too much, because after all it meant a lot to them at the time), and Nika will call Gwyneth Anaktoria in an exaggeratedly solemn voice. And little by little, without either of them quite knowing how or when, this will shrink down into Annie, and cease to be ironic and once more be sincere and heartfelt. Full circle, so to speak.

Eventually, the day comes. They let Britomartis and Hekate go in the wilderness south of town, or Nika does; Gwyneth cannot watch her do it, not after Nimbasa. She knows it's different, but still, she can't. Nika comes back a few hours later, tells her it went okay, and then they get on a train and go.

They make one stop in Nimbasa, so Nika can take the bus out and release Astyanax into the wasteland. Then they can't put it off any longer, and it's time to say goodbye.

I'm going to call you, says Nika, in the huge, arched concourse of Nimbasa Central Station. I promise.

Okay, says Gwyneth. I'll call you too.

There is a long pause. Neither of them have any idea how this is supposed to go. It feels like they'd barely scratched the surface of everything they could do and achieve together, and now everything is over.

We'd better go, says Nika, looking at her watch. Your train is soon.

Gwyneth stands there for a moment, hands by her side, looking at the ground, and then with a speed and energy that surprises both of them hugs Nika tight.

“It's not over,” she says, fiercely. “I'm coming back. So are you. That's a promise too.”

Nika hesitates for a moment, startled, and then she hugs back.

“Sure, Gwyn,” she says. “We'll figure this out. Somehow.”

A voice on the loudspeaker announces Gwyneth's train, and she pulls away reluctantly, blinking back tears.

“We'll figure this out,” repeats Nika, and now she sounds like she really means it, like just by saying it she can will it into happening. “But for now we have to go home.”

*​

Gwyneth kept her promise, she reflects. This was back when you could expect her to do something like that, instead of snapping or giving in or just disappearing for a week. Back before she was what she is now.

She sighs, stretches out her good arm. It's very dark now, but the moon is high and if she looks hard she can just about see the outline of the beach in the light it casts.

“I don't know, dude,” she says to the venipede, tapping her fingers gently against her shell. “I guess I thought I'd be dead by now.”

It's okay. Nothing is okay, she has failed and Nika is marrying Hilbert and tomorrow she will probably have to start begging in order to get together enough change to buy herself something to drink, but it's okay.

Gwyneth sits on her rock, staring out at a beach that lies there like a stretch of sand and an ocean that moves like rolling water, and waits for morning to come.