Again, some slightly stronger language; also a touch of death, although it's very minor.
TWELVE: VIR, VIRTUS, VIRTÙ
Tethys Edict 412.5: Works relating to the suppression of those who act against the city shall be under the sole administration of a civic committee answerable directly to the High Administrators. No other committee, organisation or council shall be permitted to interfere in said works.
Question: why in all my years in Tethys did I never meet another girl like myself? Answer: we were never supposed to. Just as Maxie said, it was we on the margins who were most able to see the city for what it was – and when two such people meet, they suddenly find they're capable of putting their misgivings into words. I'm told that, of Tethys' thirty-one thousand citizens, there are a few hundred of us at any one time. (That figure includes the men too, and those others who are neither; I don't know how many women specifically there are.) Yet we never go to the same schools, never work in the same organisations, never live within walking distance of each other. Quietly, unobtrusively, our lives were placed in their own little quarantines.
And I can tell you that the same is true of those who write poetry, or who ask questions, or who retain their attraction to those of their own gender beyond the permissible experimentation period of youth. Everyone is
tolerated; that's the great boast of Tethys! That's what's left of what the Founder wanted, what Maxie wanted – a place where everyone would be accepted, where anyone in need at all could shelter until the floods could be reversed. But there's a difference between acceptance and tolerance, and as soon as the Administration knows about your deviancy – and unless you are very careful and have friends to cover your back, it very soon does know – your life is no longer quite your own. Or it's a bit more restricted than those of the other citizens, anyway.
One person feels afraid and isolated. Two people discover they have experiences in common. Two people talk, and all those uneasy thoughts that torment them are suddenly intelligible, reflected back at each in the other's face and words. Two people take strength from each other and ask questions.
Two people are dangerous, and there's nothing like the Tethys Administration for stamping out danger before it even appears.
No birds yesterday. Did you notice? I did. I think that's a good sign, if I'm reading these omens right. Not quite enough to cheer me up, though. You may have noticed that this isn't a particularly pleasant period of my life. Recalling it isn't fun at the best of times, and right now I'm kind of hungover, which isn't exactly making it any easier. I might have drunk slightly more last night than I intended to.
So yeah, anyway. Enough of birds. I'll deal with them another time, when I'm in a better mood. Right now, we just have to soldier on, dear reader, and look forward to the moment when hangovers and Tethys agents no longer loom so large in our minds.
It hurt to see the Museum. I had been vaguely hopeful that it would be OK, since the tree was unharmed (the keening wind, it seems, can eat flesh, stone and steel but not vegetable matter), but of course it wasn't. It was dented, battered and badly pitted on the windward side, as if someone had sluiced it with acid and had a group of sharpedo ram it for good measure. I would later find out that it was damaged below the waterline, too. You have to dive pretty deep to escape the hungry particles.
At least it survived. It had been built to withstand the pressures of the deepest oceanic trenches and further reinforced by Maxie for his voyage into the Blue Chapel, and it turns out that that's just about what you need to catch the keening wind on your back and come out in one piece. Even the glass was intact – although it must be said, they say that glass is better at resisting the wind than most materials.
Virgil's boat, on the other hand, was utterly destroyed. Bits of metal were scattered halfway up the beach, some of them still fizzing with leftover red dots. He looked at them without emotion and pulled a flare from his pocket. A moment later, a spot of unbearably bright white was burning on the hillside, sending gouts of thick, pallid smoke up into the sky.
“They'll be here soon,” said Archie, pacing like a caged arcanine. “Think. Think! There's got to be―”
“Give it a rest, Archie,” said Maxie. He sounded tired. “Please.”
Maybe it was the uncharacteristic 'please' that did it; I don't think Archie would ordinarily have capitulated. Whether it was or not, he stopped talking and stood still.
Zinnia said nothing. She just looked at me. Knowing what I know now, she must have been terrified that the past was going to repeat itself. I guess it might have been all she could do just to keep her fear in check and follow us.
The corvettes were smaller than the Museum, but sleeker and much faster; when they surfaced, it was with the dangerous grace of a hunting sealeo, their torpedo ports open and ready like mouths. One of them dispatched another dinghy, piloted by a woman in her thirties with a shrunken Tethys staraptor gripping her shoulders, its eyes bulging in inbred neoteny.
Her name was Virginia, and alone of the major players in this story she has no past. I never knew where she came from, or where she went afterwards. All I can say is that she didn't make a good impression while she was here.
“Well, well,” she said, beaching the dinghy and leaping lightly onto the shore. “I have to say, we thought you might have been shredded. I'm glad to see you haven't. And you've got her, too. Congratulations.”
Virgil nodded.
“Thanks,” he said, although he didn't sound grateful. He didn't sound like much at all, in fact. “Are you ready?”
Virginia indicated the corvettes, which were manoeuvring themselves into position on either side of the Museum. Her unmarked badge winked on her chest as she moved.
“Almost,” she said. “They'll be done by the time we're back.” She took a couple of steps up the beach, crushing pieces of boat beneath her boots, and stopped directly in front of me. Her eyes were overlarge and the colour of honey; you could have swapped them with the eyes of her staraptor and I wouldn't have noticed. How she managed without sunglasses is anyone's guess. “So you're Avice,” she said. “I'm surprised. I was expecting someone … taller.”
I said nothing. I was taller than her, as it happened; I get it from my mother.
“What, lost your tongue? I was told you were vicious and sarcastic.” She clicked her tongue. “At least you've learned your lesson. Pity it's coming a bit late. Penitent or not, the future looks pre-tty bleak for you right now. Tethys must survive, you see, and to survive you gotta remain stable. You got to find your niche and cement yourself in. And when someone comes along with a crowbar to jemmy you outta there …” She spread her hands theatrically. “You got to send a childhood friend to break their heart and arrest 'em.”
Some tight knot seemed to tear in my chest and a faint noise escaped my mouth. For an instant, the pain retreated, pushed aside by a swelling nausea. This hadn't just been Virgil losing control. This had been
planned. The Administration had sent Virgil here in the full knowledge that he would lose himself to their anger and turn his strength on me. I had thought that this was an arrest, but it was so much more. It was the start of a particularly brutal punishment.
Virginia smiled. I can remember nothing human in her eyes.
“You're a child,” she said coldly. “A librarian's kid, huh? Lost in stories, I bet. Heroes are mythical for a reason.”
“Twist the bloody knife, why don't you,” muttered Archie furiously. “Who the hell does she think she is?”
She thought she was the victor – and she thought she was right. I want to deny that she was either, but the truth is that she was both. Tethys is the safest place in the ocean, after all. You'll never lack anything there, except freedom – and that's where we differed. What's your autonomy worth to you? For a starving urchin like the young Ulixa, not much. Only someone like me, with my own ship and my own independent wealth, can afford the luxury of rebellion.
These are the unpleasant thoughts that come back to haunt you at a time like this. What I've done will destroy the harm in Tethys, but it'll destroy the good too. When the last ship drops into the newly emergent dirt, we're going to be back at square one. I could tell you about the story that that reminds me of – but you know it already. It's the story of Archie and Maxie, and of the world that they destroyed. I'm not so naïve that I can't see the other side of my own story. You, dear reader, you who live in whatever future I've made, will have to decide how to judge me for yourself.
I looked at Virginia and she at me, and somewhere beneath her triumph and my panic two fresh new hatreds blossomed. It may only have been that she was older and more experienced than Virgil, that the fire of the CCC had been tempered in her by experience, but she seemed more consciously … well. Evil. I don't know if that really is a word that you can apply to something, but at the time, that was all I could think of her. Evil.
“They're ready,” said Virgil. “We should go.”
The corvettes were clamped onto either side of the Museum like lampreys feeding on a milotic. Caught between their sleek lines, it looked old and clumsy, and I felt a strange kinship with it. It was steel and I was flesh but we'd both been beaten up and taken prisoner; the ragged stump of the old drill seemed in that moment an analogue to my broken nose.
There are times when a poetic bent of mind is an advantage, but just then I really didn't need it.
“Come on, then,” said Virginia, jumping back in the boat. Her staraptor spread its wings briefly to keep its balance. “In you get, the pair of you.”
Virgil made sure I was in before pushing the boat out and climbing in himself. He sat opposite me, but his gaze never moved from the corvettes out on the water.
“Let's – ah. Don't think we'll fit,” said Archie, as Zinnia took the last seat. “We'll catch up with you at the hatch, a'right?”
I nodded minutely, and he and Maxie waded out ahead of us, unhindered by the water or the waves.
“So,” said Virginia, pulling the cord and starting the engine. “How'd you survive? There like a cave or something out there?”
I didn't answer, but Virgil nodded.
“Kind of bunker.”
“A bunker? Huh. What, like pre-making over?” Virgil shrugged. “Hm. Guess you're not an archaeologist.” She sat pensively for a moment, one hand on the tiller. “Maybe it's smugglers,” she suggested, after a while.
“What is
wrong with these people?” asked Zinnia. I shook my head slightly. I didn't know. It felt like I had been in this moment for years; all my old terror of the Administration had swooped back down on me at once.
As we neared the corvette, its side opened up and a sling descended in the gap; Virginia manoeuvred us into place and the boat was winched back into the hold. It was alien and familiar at once: I'd been half expecting the white plastic and blue steel of the Museum, but here was the red paint and black metal of Tethys, the conical lights, the uniforms, the hold full of not mysteries but supply crates and spare parts …
I shivered, and let myself be led out of the dinghy without protest, laid low by the uncanny sense that I had somehow stumbled straight back into the city. I barely even noticed when Archie and Maxie climbed up the winch rope a moment later; I could see nothing but the repetition of the red wall panels, the black beams, the lights, and merging with them memories of the guarded passageway that led to Gaoler's Bridge and the prison beyond, of my father's eyes when he spoke about his time under arrest, and of Moll's face when she told me that they would kill me and I promised her I'd never go back to the Museum.
Have you ever been imprisoned? I wouldn't recommend it. I'm not that keen on revisiting it, but we've brought my younger self to this place and now we have to face the consequences. Let's be brief: they brought me to a small, sparsely furnished cabin without windows or a handle on the inside of the door, and shut me in. A few minutes later, a doctor came to set my nose and make sure the rest of my injuries weren't life-threatening; after that, they took off the handcuffs, dimmed the lights and left me alone with the pain and the ghosts.
It takes a long time to travel when you're hauling a ship like the Museum, and it takes longer still when the ship itself is damaged – although more of that a little later. The point is, I was in there a long time, maybe a month all told. It's hard to be sure: they never switched the lights off or turned them all the way back on, so I couldn't count the days. I guess the person who brought food probably came once a day, but I didn't think to count the visits at the time. The doctor visited every so often too, though less regularly – and whatever else I might have to say about the inhabitants of the corvette, I can tell you that he was very good at his job. It's thanks to him that you can't now tell that my nose was ever broken. Well – him and Edie, to be fair.
Would you like to hear a joke? They brought me my pills. They'd actually sailed out from Tethys with a couple of bottles with them for when they caught me. Can you imagine that? They wanted me dead, and they wanted to make it painful – but they weren't going to break the one little Edict that stipulates every citizen who has been prescribed medication must have access to it. It wasn't kindness, not in the slightest. They were simply being scrupulously legal. The Administrators and their lackeys follow every Edict to the letter – though they often ignore the spirit, as when they chose Virgil to send after me. This was just one law that they couldn't find a way around, I suppose – and speaking as a former Legal Apprentice, I'm quite sure that if they
had tried to get out of giving me my pills, I'd have been able to bring a counter-suit against them at my trial. They would still have won, of course, but it would have been an uglier victory, and the Administration likes things to go smoothly. It keeps the public happy.
None of that stopped me feeling vaguely triumphant every time I took a pill, though. I probably got the timing a bit off with them, but it didn't seem to do me any harm. Between that and the presence of the ghosts, I actually felt a little better than I expected. Yes, I had lost my pokémon, my freedom and my hopes of success, and I was being shipped off back to the city to die – but you can only feel bleak for so long before you reach the point where you have to despair utterly or pull back from the brink and try to find what peace you can. Which you choose depends on you and where you are in life. I like to think that I'm the kind of person who picks the latter option, but I know, deep down, that I'm not – and so by now do you, dear reader; you've seen for yourself that I'm probably capable of thinking myself almost literally to death. It was only because I was surrounded with people who loved me that I was able to resist the call of the first choice.
And they did. Love me, that is. I knew it and so did they. I remember the first night, or day or whenever it was, when I woke up feeling awful but at the very least less tired, and saw Maxie leaning against the far wall.
“Hey,” I said, rubbing the eye that wasn't swollen.
“Good … night, I think,” he said. “How are you feeling?”
I heaved myself up into a sitting position and leaned gingerly against the wall.
“Pretty bad.”
He nodded.
“I thought so.”
I looked around the cell. Zinnia was curled on the floor, transparent and unmoving. In her faux-sleep, she seemed much more fragile than usual, as if a harsh word might move her to tears.
“Where's Archie?”
“Spying.” Maxie jerked his head at the door. “We're trying to find out whatever we can.”
I sighed.
“I don't think it will help.”
“No,” he said. “Neither do I.”
There was a long silence. He kept his eyes fixed on a point in space a little left of my face. I thought of the fight in the bunker.
“I'm sorry,” I said.
“It's not your fault,” he told me. “We've made our choices. We'll stay with you, Avice. To the end.”
“That's not what I meant. I was …” I broke off, took a deep breath. “I've been really childish about this grudge.”
“Oh.
Oh.” Maxie met my gaze, startled. “Avice, you have every reason to―”
“Tooth take it, Maxie, could you drop the self-loathing for once in your life? I was wrong. Like. You can be angry, but at some point you have to try to address the issue. Right? And I left that all up to you. You tried to help me – I mean, try to
save me – and I just … was mean to you.”
It's hard to be eloquent when you're trying to swallow your pride, but I think I at least got the point across. Maxie curled and uncurled his hands, the way he does when he's agitated.
“Avice,” he said, voice cracking. “I …” He put his head in one hand. “Avice, you put us to shame.”
“You and Archie?”
He nodded.
“Fools that we were,” he said bitterly. “And are! I'm glad at least that you learned from our mistake.”
I moved to get up, thinking I might go over to him, but he raised a hand for me to stop and came to me instead, leaning on the edge of the bunk.
“Avice, sometimes, I know, you are worried by your inexperience,” he said. “But you should at least know that you … well, in some ways you're rather a better and more mature person at nineteen than I am five hundred.”
“You did leave it for a while,” I told him. “It's harder to apologise if you do that.”
“Yes,” he said. “It certainly is.”
I hesitated, wondering if maybe I was interfering too much, then ploughed ahead.
“I hope you can fix things,” I said. “I know you've done a lot, but I get the feeling – stop me if I'm wrong – I get the feeling that you two … aren't quite there yet.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“I wonder what gave it away. No, we're not. But we're getting there. I hope.” He closed his eyes to hide it, but I could see the emotion in him anyway; his hands were trembling with it. “Sometimes I'm afraid that Archie may not want to,” he said, voice barely above a whisper. “But I hope.”
If there was any lingering animosity towards him in me, it dissipated then. This was not the Maxie of the Museum, the furious spirit of revenge longing for escape and a second chance at his old dream. This was a newer Maxie – or perhaps an older one, from before the time of Tide and Groudon and Rayquaza, back when it was just him and Archie and a headful of ideas to make the world a better place. In my current state of mind, I could feel nothing for him but pity.
“You'll get there,” I said. “I'll help.”
He smiled.
“You do help,” he said. “More than you know. You're the only thing we can agree on.”
“You keep agreeing,” I said. “I'll keep helping, for the last few weeks of …”
There was a long, uncomfortable silence. I licked my lips and felt the sting of the cuts beneath my tongue.
“Does it hurt?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“I've made a promise,” he said diffidently. “I said to myself I wouldn't lie to you again. But I admit, I find my resolve … tested.”
I sighed.
“That's a yes, then.”
“Mine
was a very violent end,” he said. “Maybe yours will be less so.”
“Yeah,” I said sourly. “Maybe the Administrators will be merciful.” I shook my head. “I guess I should've expected as much.”
Maxie didn't say anything. There wasn't much you
could say in response to that.
So much for Maxie. Now for Zinnia. There were a lot of conversations in that room, between all four of us – but there were two that stand out from the others in my mind. One I've just written down. The other was when Archie and Maxie were out spying (and, I suspect, arguing, although that's one altercation they've never actually admitted to), and Zinnia was perched on the edge of the bed with me, swinging her legs and trying to fill in some of the blanks in our knowledge about each other.
“Tell me about Virgil,” she said.
It had been four days. My injuries were a good deal less painful, but the memory wasn't. Still, I wanted to tell her. If I was going to die, I at least wanted to get to know her better before I went, and I'd have told her anything she asked for.
“We were at the academy together,” I answered, after a moment or two. “I mean, he was at the trainer school and I was at the academy, but they're right next to each other. They share a refectory and some dormitories.”
“What did you study?” asked Zinnia.
“Law.” I made a noise that might have been a laugh or a snort. I'm still not sure which. “I was going to be a civil servant.”
“I think you made the right choice, giving that up,” she said, looking around at the cell. “This isn't exactly the kind of system I'd want to support.”
“I never wanted to support it,” I sighed. “I just wanted enough status to survive.”
She nodded slowly.
“Yeah,” she said. “I get it.”
“But Virgil, he was always going to― I mean, he was good. Second best in his year. Most people would say joint best, but the other one was my best friend, so.” I took a deep breath. “Sorry. I miss her.”
“It's OK,” said Zinnia. “What's her name?”
“Moll. Moll Kathleen dol' Tethys.”
“Moll,” she echoed softly. “Nice name. I – I have a friend too, that I lost. Her name was Aster.”
We were quiet for a moment. I looked at her, but couldn't read her face. I think she'd practised that expression. It's hard to hide yourself so completely as that.
A little while later, she smiled and broke the tension.
“So Moll and Virgil,” she said. “The two best trainers at the school. Were they rivals? Is that a thing people still do?”
“Yeah. They were. They sort of hate-loved each other, if that makes any sense. Like, they were friends through being enemies.”
“Oh, believe me, it makes
perfect sense,” she replied. “Where did you fit into all that?”
“I was Moll's best friend,” I said. “And …”
A minute passed, and I didn't manage to finish the sentence.
“Hey, we don't have to talk about it if you don't want to.”
“No, I do,” I protested. “It's just – it's messed up. And I'm pretty bad at picking people to like.”
“You and me both,” she said, mouth twisting into that familiar ironic grin. “Virgil, huh?”
“Moll first,” I sighed. “I had a crush on her for
years.”
“What's so bad about that? She didn't turn out weird too, did she?”
“No, but it was … inadvisable.” I hesitated. “When you're like me, people watch. You know? Just looking for things that might be reason for them to call you – to say you're not really a girl.”
Zinnia blinked and straightened up a little.
“Ah,” she said, and maybe I was imagining it, but I really got the feeling that she knew. “Yeah. I had a partner once told me that.”
“Someone like me?” I asked, forgetting my story in my eagerness.
“Kind of,” she said. “But I'm interrupting. You first.”
“Oh. Um, right.” I gathered my thoughts for a moment. “OK. So I didn't say anything. Because of that, and because I was already different, and I didn't need to be
more different.”
“It's dangerous to be different in Tethys, isn't it.”
She phrased it as a question, but it lacked the inflection. She knew, after all; she'd seen enough of the city's law to get a sense of what it was like.
“Yeah,” I said. “It is.” I leaned back and pulled my legs up onto the bunk, folding them against my chest. “By the time I started feeling seriously revolutionary I was over her, though, so I just never said anything.” I shook my head. “It sounds ridiculous to talk about it so seriously. I mean, I was just a kid.”
“Did it hurt you?”
I nodded.
“Then it was serious,” Zinnia told me. “At least, it was then.”
I'd never thought of it like that. It was something of a revelation.
“I know everything seems serious when you're that age,” she went on. “I was that age once. Kind of an alarmingly long time ago now, but I was.”
I half smiled despite myself. Even then, in that drowned boat, Zinnia could do that.
“Anyway. Then came Virgil, and to begin with, you know, he was a lot like her. He was … well. Kind of sweet. If you ignored the arrogance. Then he started training to be an agent, and you saw how that ended up.”
The ache of my injuries seemed to burn higher as I spoke, as if the marks Virgil had written on me responded to his name.
“It's one cure for infatuation,” I said bitterly.
Zinnia sighed.
“I'm sorry, Ava,” she said. “You're right. Your city is a messed-up place.”
It was the first time anyone but my father had called me that. Maybe it was that, or maybe it was that I thought I was going to die, or maybe it was the fact that I had never really admitted to myself the reasoning behind my absurd teenage crushes, or more likely it was all of these things coming together in a great knot of despair, but it was too much. I snapped under the weight of it all and cried.
Zinnia leaned in close and put one spectral hand through mine.
“It's not over yet,” she said fiercely. “Not this time.”
I was almost glad I was crying, because it meant I didn't have to reply. Not this time – what did that mean? And how did you respond to that kind of refusal to see what was self-evident?
“It's not,” she repeated, and had she been solid her grip would have been tight enough to hurt. “It's not.”
She was right, as it happened. Like I said, she's always right. Well – there's one thing she might be wrong about. While we were in that room, whiling away the hours, she opened up to me, as if she had been split open with a stroke of a sword and the past couldn't help but spill out. Her life, her daughter, her plans – and her role in raising Tide from its stasis and ending her world. According to her version, it was more her than either of them, but it's tricky to tell if she's right about that or not. Everyone who was alive at the time seems convinced that it was all their fault, and under the pressure of that much guilt, memories can twist and buckle. I've seen it often enough.
I hope she understands when she reads this. I have to be honest, at least about this sort of thing.
But she was right about it not being over yet, because (as you might have guessed from the fact that I'm alive and free to write this) it wasn't. The voyage didn't end with a mock trial and an execution, it ended with blood and fire and my subdued return to the Museum. It wasn't what you might call a triumphant exit, but it
was an exit.
As you might expect of vessels on such an important mission, the corvettes were fairly stuffed with crew, sergeants and CCC agents, and they had the resources to have people on watch twenty-four hours a day. If anything was going to infiltrate and rupture the aft ballast tanks, then they should have seen it coming. And they would have, too, if they'd been looking in the right direction. As so often, disaster struck from the most innocent and unlikely of places.
So: that day, in the bridge. The officers were at their stations – it takes a lot more than two people to pilot a modern ship; there aren't any computers to help them out – and Virginia, who was either the captain or just sufficiently frightening for everyone to obey her, was overseeing. And then, quite without warning, the shriek of damaged metal sounded from down the corridor and the floor did its best to become perpendicular.
Swivel chairs ejected their occupants and rattled down the room; knuckles stood out white on the edges of desks and those not quick enough to grab something were thrown unceremoniously to the floor. Virginia stumbled backwards into the doorway and seized the jamb, and her staraptor launched itself into the air with a worried screech and a cacophonous flurry of wingbeats.
“What in
all blood is going on in here?” Virginia demanded, just before a junior navigator rolled into the doorway and knocked her legs from under her. “'Sflukes―!”
The intercom crackled and emitted a strident and rather unclear voice that told anyone who would listen that the aft trim tanks had been ruptured.
“Get off of me,” growled Virginia, shoving the junior navigator aside and scrambling to her feet. “You! What's that about the trim tanks?”
The target of her interrogation, a young officer who had just got to his feet and looked like he wanted nothing more than to go home and never set foot on a ship again, blinked and turned pale.
“It's, it's,” he mumbled. “Someone's bust the trim system!”
“Someone's―? How could anyone
do that?”
“I'm just saying what happened, ma'am,” stammered the sailor. “We―”
“Message from the
Champion's Folly,” interrupted another man, brandishing a book of light-signal codes. “They're hit too. Same place.”
Virginia threw her hands up and nearly smacked her staraptor out of the air.
“What in―? You know what, forget it, just fix it.”
“But―”
“
What now?”
Metal groaned and the ship juddered upwards, stern sinking as water flooded into the tanks. A lamp rolled off its desk and shattered, sending shards of glass cascading underfoot and into the helmsman's hood; he yelped and tried to empty it out and get up at the same time, in the process knocking two other officers over again Maxie, hanging semi-solid in the middle of it all, watched with interest. It must have done him good to see his jailers reduced to chaos. Come to think of it, I wish
I'd seen it. I'd have loved to see that agent stumbling around in the panic.
Actually, considering what happened at the Pillar, perhaps not.
“We can't fix it, ma'am,” said the communication officer, somehow remaining at attention despite the increasing incline beneath his feet. “Nor can the
Folly. We'll both have to surface or lose stability entirely.”
Virginia thumped the wall.
“Whatever,” she said. “Fine. Get us out of here before we end up in the bloody sediment.”
It was the only option. A vessel's trim tanks give it its balance; without them, you'd have a hard time controlling it underwater. With the aft tanks suddenly out of commission, and the system regulating water flow between them and the fore tanks screwed up into the bargain, the only option was to empty the main ballast tanks and surface, where the damage wouldn't matter so much.
There was only one person who could have come up with such a technical plan, of course. But I wouldn't find out about that until much later, and while you won't have to wait quite as long, dear reader, I'd like to finish this story before I get on to that one.
Anyway, the damage had been done, and the corvettes left incapable of submarine manoeuvring. They rose as fast as they could towards the light, moving in a series of jerks that knocked several crew members over and put a sergeant in the medical bay with a broken hand – and while they did, Virginia stormed down the corridors towards my cell, muttering furiously about revolutionaries and being trailed by two other agents ineffectually trying to stop her.
Maxie got there a few moments before her, slipping under the door and materialising before me with a worried look on his face.
“Er – brace yourself,” he said. “That woman is―”
The door slid open and Virginia strode straight through him, eyes smouldering.
“What in all blood did you do?” she roared. “Are you that keen to die, you treacherous drowned
pirate?”
I stared and blinked, blinded by the light coming in behind her.
“Er,” I said. “What?”
“The bloody trim tanks! That was you, wasn't it? How did you do it? What have you done?”
She seized me by the front of my shirt, and might have beat me up all over again had not the other two CCC agents summoned up the courage to drag her away. She never did come back; I think she must have realised that there was no way I could have had anything to do with the attack, and didn't want the embarrassment of having to admit it.
All in all, it was quite an exciting day, after so many hours of isolation. But it was more than that, of course. It was the genesis of my escape – because of
course I escaped. Do you really think I'd be sitting here now, let alone sitting here with the skies clear and the water level falling, if they'd managed to get me back to Tethys? No, if I hadn't been rescued, it really would have been over, no matter what Zinnia said. I would now be dead, cremated and my ashes conveyed to the synthesis plant to be made into fertiliser for the greenhouse. And yes, I was rescued rather than breaking out myself. It would do me good to remind myself, at this point in a story that's become rather heavily centred on me, that no one person is ever the hero all the time. We all have our moment on centre stage.
With the trim system damaged, there was no way that the corvettes could manage the descent to Tethys, and that meant stopping off at Cormac's Mourn for repairs. Risky, but if they weren't too domineering then they thought they would be able to avoid any conflicts; Tethys had been the prime sea power ever since the Battle for Tethys, and if its Administration found out that its forces were being harassed at some minor port it wouldn't have hesitated to send in the kingdra-riders to exact some retribution. Only the year before a warship had been sent to Semmerva of Iron because a couple of sailors got roughed up in an alley behind the casino. Even so, it wouldn't take much to spark a conflict – and that, dear reader, would give my rescuers their chance.
But who were they? That takes us to another story, and about time! That other one was pretty grim. Like, there are the bad times in life, and then there are the times that you thought you were a month or two away from being executed. And you and I both know that I won in the end. We don't have to dwell on the exact degree of unpleasantness involved in being imprisoned.
So, let's go back a few days and a few more miles, to that little island and the bunker on its northern slope – and to Edie, lying in a transparent heap in the middle of the chamber.
It took half an hour or so for her to regain consciousness, and even then she was operating with limited power; the battle had utterly drained her, and after something like that she really needed a full twenty-four hours of rest before doing anything at all strenuous. But once she was awake enough to know that I was gone, she knew she didn't have time to rest. She'd spent a long time down in the bowels of the city, skulking in the Museum and hiding from sergeants; she knew that the forces of Tethys were bad news. She didn't know what exactly would happen – this was long before the updates and the glitches – but she knew that they had me, and that that wasn't good, and that something had to be done about it.
, she said to herself, trying to solidify and finding she didn't have the power for it. And then, more forcefully: >:[ ! ! !
There was no time to be lost. Fluttering weakly from the bunker, almost invisible in the weak sunlight and faint rain, she struggled back over the hill, hopping from rock to rock and occasionally sinking into them for want of tangibility. By the time she'd reached the tree, the dinghy carrying me, Zinnia and the agents was halfway out across the water, and it was clear that even if she succeeded in making the flight out to the ships she wouldn't catch us in time to save me.
D:, cried Edie, slipping down the side of the hill in her agitation – but none of us saw. She was just too faint after the battle. The boat moved away, and as she reached the shore, scurrying along between the twisted fragments of Virgil's dinghy, it disappeared into the shadow of the corvette's open hatch.
♥, said Edie sadly, wings drooping.
She stayed there for a moment, watching the sling tightening around the boat's hull as it was winched back into the hold. It had happened, as she had been half expecting for several hundred years. She was to outlast someone.
Do you know how they managed porygon, back in the old world? I suppose not. That information is dead and buried. I'm probably the only one who has it now. And maybe I'd be better off leaving it for another time – when I present the logs, for instance, which I guess will be when I come to talk about the Hollow. For now, let's just say that they didn't know how long they could last, if no one interfered. Edie found that out by herself, during her long wait in the darkened corridors of the Museum. Then someone had appeared, this unimaginably young thing that smiled and hugged her and told her she was cute – and now, a scant year or so later, the city had snatched her away again.
>:[, spat Edie, and launched herself into the air.
Here is something you might not know about porygon2: their wings are more or less entirely aesthetic. They don't do anything. They fly using a kind of magnetic levitation, in the same way that electrode can float for brief periods of time. Now, an electrode is an electric-type, constantly generating a huge supply of its own volatile internal power – and even that only keeps it in the air for a few minutes. It runs dry soon afterwards. And Edie, who I now know is not an electric-type at all but simply draws power from the radio waves of the sun and stars – well, I told you how drained she was after flying to shore from the Museum. Making the same journey after having battled to the point of exhaustion was pretty much impossible.
And yet.
At the first leap her magnetism almost failed, and she came within an inch of destroying herself in the surf – but at the last moment something whirred deep inside her and she rose again, belly alive with sparks of fizzing light. She pushed forwards one yard – two – three – and it held. Without so much as a pause, Edie flicked her wings and surged out across the waves.
Fifty yards. Forty-five, by that point. Forty-five yards, and there was the safety of the Museum, just starting to sink as the corvettes on either side began the process of submerging. Edie made a tiny grinding noise and tried to speed up. Colour and saturation bled away from her until she was barely visible at all, a slight twist of the light atop a cushion of sparks―
The wave rolled in barely a centimetre beneath her. Foam lanced through her body, boiling away in a series of red flashes; Edie juddered, almost fell, disappeared for an instant – and impossibly, miraculously, kept going, invisible eyes fixed on the sinking ships just twenty-five yards away. The corvettes were almost under, but the Museum's conning tower was still high up above the waves. There was still time – perhaps only a few seconds, but that might just be enough.
Tiny explosions sparkled like phantom gems within what remained of her body. The corvettes were gone now, and the Museum's upper decks were fast following. A high-pitched whine started to build all around her, its source uncertain but its sound a clear indication of oncoming disaster; no longer even trying to flap, Edie pushed on for the final ten yards towards the sinking conning tower―
A pop like a broken bulb, and Edie disappeared.
Half a second later, something faintly luminescent like the soul of a jellyfish dropped into the ocean where the conning tower had been moments before. It fell through water that bubbled at its touch, growing smaller and more fragmented―
―and then, reduced at last to the most abstract and immaterial she ever possibly could be, Edie fell straight through the roof of the conning tower and landed in a laptop computer.
It's been over a year and I'm still thinking about how lucky it was that Zinnia had taken one up there that morning, and that Edie hadn't had a chance to put it away yet. If it hadn't been there, asleep, its code calling out to hers, Edie would have kept falling, straight through the floor, through the lower decks, through the hold and out of the bottom of the Museum, where within a minute she would have been utterly destroyed. She had lost so much substance by then that she could fall through solid steel. Whatever waterproofing you have, by the time you get to that point it won't do you much good.
But she was alive, if damaged. And she was safe, if only for the moment. And, secure at last in a cradle of circuitry, more familiar to her even than the Museum, Edie at last began to recharge.
I have to say, some of that last passage is speculation – and we all know what I think about that. The details about what Edie
did are more or less right; she filled me in much later, when she learned how. But what she thought is a bit harder to get at. Edie's internal logs don't show that, and I've had to make some educated guesses. And you know, it's a curious thing, but I feel a little less worried about all this now – the writing thing, I mean. This is the two hundred and fiftieth page I've covered so far, and I'm starting to think that I'm getting the hang of it. When was the last time I broke off to worry about getting my facts straight? Not for a few days now. Recently, I've been feeling that maybe it's not possible to get everything right, just as it's not possible to fit everything in, and that that's OK. Has there ever been a neutral historian in the history of the world? I can't imagine that there has been. This story, for instance, would be different if the scholars of Tethys wrote it, or if Zinnia wrote it, or if a kadabra from the Golden Isles wrote it. Maybe what we need from history is not the plain, unvarnished truth, but something more personal – a voice on the other side of a sheet of paper, a story that wraps around what facts are left and fills in the gaps where the others used to be.
Huh. I just read that back, and … well. Maybe I am an all right historian after all.
The point is, dear reader, I think it's time we were a bit more adventurous when it came to speculation. After all, how much of this is speculative anyway? Quite a lot, actually. It's not like I remember all these conversations in perfect detail. Let's allow ourselves some more licence. A few scraps of conjecture here and there won't be enough to condemn us to the fate of Oliver Saturnine dol' Tethys.
Besides, what else is there for me, really? People like me have to invent a way of writing for ourselves. And if we can't speculate, then that, I'm afraid, is off the cards.
But back to Edie. Brave little Edie! She's only small, and she did all that – for me. Can you believe it? It makes me feel very loved. Also very unworthy, although I suppose that's just my own anxieties talking. I'd always felt a bit overwhelmed by how much I meant to her, and after this I felt that pressure even more.
Anyway. She lay there in the computer for a long time, healing. Little portions of her coursed down the wires and coalesced in its memory, lines of code forming and reforming as bit by bit her self re-emerged from the morass of energy that she'd become. On the corvette, just a few dozen metres away, I settled into my confinement, and Virgil paced silently in his cabin, and Virginia barked her commands; hours passed, then a day, and at last the part of the porygon2 program that was Edie woke up and with a soft hum slipped out of the laptop onto the desk.
She was still very weak – hardly even visible. It was an effort not to slide through the floor and out into the ocean. But she couldn't let herself heal any further, not just yet. Not before she had got into the corvette.
There was no question of flight that day. Edie simply dragged herself down the corridor, willing herself not to fall through the floor, and pressed herself against the clamp system. She barely encountered any resistance: half a second, and she slid through the paired hulls and into the corvette.
I think you know what happened next. Edie was capable of reverse engineering a synthesis machine; the controls of a post-making-over vessel were nothing to her. Five minutes, and the trim system was in a mess that wasn't going to be resolved without the help of a capable mechanic working from submersible pod. She just had enough power to phase back through the Museum into the other corvette and cripple its tanks as well before she had to retreat to the computer and rest.
It was a bold plan. Imagine
deliberately keeping yourself so close to death, just so you could pass through metal and enter somewhere even more dangerous than the place you came from! Because let's be clear about it, every moment that Edie was on Tethys deck was a moment in which she was in mortal danger. She might not have been solid just then, but Tethys is protected by more than flechettes, and fire from a growlithe or the violent winds whipped up by a staraptor could have torn her to shreds. Even if she hadn't been discovered, it would only have taken a momentary lapse of concentration for her to lose what limited tangibility she had and fall out into the crushing dark of the ocean.
And yet she did it all. For me.
I don't know if I've repaid her yet, really I don't – and I
want to repay her, even though I know that it would never even occur to her that I might do so, that this is simply what it means to be a trainer. To be part of that tradition of humans partnered with pokémon, so old and so great that not even the destruction of the world could put an end to it.
I wish I'd seen that sooner. Moll saw it from day one, although she probably never put it in those words. If I could have shared that with her, before I left― but what's done is done. And anyway, it won't be too long before we meet again.
Time passed. Edie sank into a healing oblivion, growing more solid and more herself; I sank into something more depressing, and then after a while into a kind of resignation. The ghosts had learned from spying on the crew that we were going to stop at Cormac's Mourn, and so I knew about that, but it didn't occur to me that that might be my salvation. I'm not sure that Edie knew it would be either, not then. Her main impulse had been to slow the corvettes down and force them to stop somewhere on the surface, where she could move around more freely and perhaps infiltrate them without having to half kill herself first. What happened when we got there was, I think, as much a surprise for her as for anyone else.
As soon as the corvettes came into view, the Mourn was on high alert. The Tethys freighters were one thing; their crews were rarely interested in anything bigger than the occasional brawl. But these were ships of war, with torpedoes and battle-trained pokémon aboard. If it came to a fight, even the relatively small number of soldiers they contained could be a potent threat. Besides, there was the possibility of reprisal. Kingdra are pretty scary creatures, and they only get scarier when you organise them into battalions and mount sergeants with harpoons on their backs.
But the expected attack never came. It was clear that neither corvette was in good shape, and after a brief argument with a Mourn patrol-ship that made use of some startlingly inventive light-signal codes, they were allowed to dock, sliding in between two piers so that they could keep the Museum sandwiched between them. Crew were dispatched to seek out parts for repairs; guards, both pirate and sergeant, were posted at the ends of the piers to prevent unauthorised access on the part of either faction; and Edie, back at full power and fresh from a round of reinforcing the Museum's wind-scarred hull, popped out onto the deck and glided over the corvette to the pier. Tucking herself underneath a collapsed tarpaulin that had once sheltered a dock official, she peered out at the corvettes and narrowed her eyes.
:[, she said, and began to run some calculations.