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Oh cool you're posting this here! Been wanting to check this out for a while (and Ghost Town eventually too haha).

I have to say how you have the game's introduction be a reoccurring nightmare of Gwyneth's is quite deep introspective to think about how it relates to being asked that in real life, and the people in same situation like Gwyneth can relate. There's also references to Gwyneth being like second best to Hilbert, which can be overwhelming when you have a brother as well known as him (and on that note, I've always like canon characters having families not mentioned in canon itself, gives new perspectives sometimes).

I look forward to this Unova roadtrip, and also knowing more about Nika and Gwyneth's (past) relationship!

TWO: POISON

Friday, 9th September

Here is what Gwyneth packs into her backpack, on Friday night when she is sitting up and worrying about what she is on the verge of doing:

• two changes of clothes
  
• her medication
• her make-up
• a sturdy sleeping bag (rolled across the top of the pack)
• a thick woollen blanket (wrapped within the sleeping bag)
• a bag of toiletries
• a bottle of water
• her phone charger
• a book, Three Nights in Opelucid, by Shauntal Grimes
• a single ultra ball, polished to a warm shine by years of handling

This is not an easy trip to pack for. She has no idea where she will be on any given day, what kind of accommodation she'll find, if any. She reluctantly suspects at least one or two nights in what she ironically refers to as the Great Outdoors. It will be okay; she's not proud of herself, but she has done it before, and she has survived. Not for a long time now, and she hopes it won't come to it, but well, if it does, she supposes she does at least have experience to draw upon.

There are ways to avoid this. One of them would be to call her mother. Hey, mom, I'm trying to get home for the wedding. Can you loan me a couple hundred bucks for a plane ticket? And you never know, it might even work. Maybe, despite all those past loans that never got paid back, she'd get her money, for an occasion like this. How often does your brother get married, after all?

But if she's honest, it's not going to happen. She can't pick up that phone. She just can't. She'll get to the wedding, one way or another, but she can't pick up the phone. Part of her is astounded at the abyssal depth of her own stubbornness: would she really take the streets over admitting defeat? Yes, apparently. She really would.

It's kind of a problem, for all sorts of reasons, but she doesn't know what to do about it. So she does nothing, and packs the sleeping bag and blanket. Just in case.

Gwyneth sits on her bed in the dim yellow light of her bedside lamp, looking at her backpack. This is a terrible idea, she tells herself. You know you'll regret this immediately, right? Go to bed, Gwyneth, and sleep it off. In the morning you'll see this bag and laugh at how serious you were when you packed it.

In the morning she takes it and she goes to find Shane.



Saturday, 10th September

“Well, here we are,” announces Shane, somewhat redundantly. “Told you I'd getcha here.”

Central Floccesy, bright and quiet in the morning light. Low buildings, grassy spaces, trees, playgrounds, cute little shops. Gwyneth vaguely remembers learning it was set up as some kind of commune ages ago, but then it got bigger and more municipal, and now while a little ranching still goes on around its outskirts most of its residents commute into Aspertia or Virbank. Still, it looks pretty enough. Quiet and prosperous. She supposes it's a refreshing change.

“Yep,” she agrees. “Thanks again, Shane.”

“No problem, man.” He drives into the parking lot outside the bus depot and the car chugs to a halt. The two of them get out, and before Gwyneth can reach her pack Shane pulls it out the back and hands it to her. She takes it off him with a force slightly greater than is strictly necessary.

“Well,” he says, not noticing or pretending not to. “I guess I oughta wish you good luck, Gwyn.”

“Thanks, dude.” She summons up her energies and smiles. “I think I'm probably going to need it.”

He grins, shakes his head.

“Not gonna disagree with you there, Gwyn, 's a crazy damn idea. You really gonna hitchhike all the way to Humilau?”

She shrugs. Why does he keep asking? She's said she doesn't know what she's going to do. Would it kill him to let the thing drop?

“If that's what it takes,” she answers, voice level. “We'll have to wait and see.”

Shane sighs. He does not like this. He understands, or he thinks he understands – would he go to Humilau for Casey? no doubt he thinks he would – but he does not like it. He probably only agreed to drive her out here so he'd have more time to convince her that she shouldn't go getting herself hurt over an ex-lover who's clearly moved on. Joke's on him. The reason he hasn't succeeded is that she already knows this.

“All right,” he says reluctantly. “Guess I'll see you when you get back, then.”

“Guess you will.”

He steps closer, reaches out awkwardly, thinks better of it.

“Uh … listen, take care of yourself, man,” he says. He's no good at this, he thinks; he can feel his face reddening. “'S a long road. You feel me?”

The hardness in Gwyneth's chest slackens a little. Shane is really not so bad, is he? Look. He clearly cares. And he drove her all the way out here. The guy can ask questions if he wants.

“Thanks, dude,” she says again. “I really appreciate this.” A graceless pause. What else is there to say? “I better let you get back. Don't want Casey complaining that I'm stealing you away on your morning off.”

“Ah, he's cool with it, man, don't worry.” Obvious lie. Gwyneth doesn't point it out. “Still, better get started on the way back,” says Shane cheerfully. “Gotta get lunch before I head on out to the store.”

“Right. Bye, Shane.”

“Bye, Gwyn. Tell Nika I said hi.”

Hesitation.

“Yeah, okay, I will.”

Walking away across the cracked tarmac, cloud of breath in the air. Shane stays watching by his car until Gwyneth disappears through the sliding doors of the bus depot. She never looks back to see him go.



The buses are irregular on the weekends. Gwyneth has forty minutes to kill before the next one departs for Virbank, according to the electric departures board hanging from the ceiling. She buys a ticket for twenty-two dollars, which she feels is extortionate but what are you gonna do, right, and sits on a steel bench under the >VIRBANK sign to wait.

After a little while, someone else joins her: a kid, fourteen or fifteen, with a tranquill on his shoulder that keeps rearranging his hair with its beak. She supposes it's trying to preen him, but it's a losing battle. Hair isn't as stiff as feathers.

She thinks she should say something. He's a trainer, right? You can spot them a mile off. And what you do with trainers is you talk to them, make them feel welcome. She remembers the woman at the bus stop in Accumula, giving her the ultra ball; she remembers a dozen others, with gifts and bits of advice. It's the right thing to do.

“Hi,” she says, after a while. “You on a trainer journey?”

He looks up, a little nervous. It's okay. She gets that a lot.

“Yeah,” he says warily. “I'm going to take on the Virbank Gym.”

What's that in his eyes? Gwyneth imagines herself at fifteen, seeing herself now. An adult, age indeterminate as it is with everyone on the far side of twenty-two, tired eyes, wild hair. Probably this kid would have crossed the street to avoid her a couple of months ago. But now he's on his pokémon journey, and she just bets he's finding that even the drifters have turned friendly.

“Neat,” says Gwyneth. Come on. Be inspiring. “Hey, uh, when you do, have your tranquill stay in the air if you can. Roxie will probably have her pokémon scatter toxic spikes all over the floor.”

He looks astonished. It's been a while since Gwyneth's seen that kind of uncomplicated amazement.

“Really? Is that a thing?”

“Oh, yeah.” She knows all about poison. “There's a few moves like that. They call them entry hazards? 'Cause usually people place them so when you send out your pokémon they stumble right into them.”

“Wow.” The kid takes a minute to consider this. His tranquill twitters despairingly and turns away from his hair in a huff. “I read about this thing called stealth rock,” he says hesitantly, and Gwyneth gives him her very best encouraging nod.

“Yep, like that,” she says. “That's a pretty good one. It floats, so even if your pokémon can fly it's probably going to get hit by it. But you don't need to worry about that in a poison Gym,” she adds quickly. Inspiring. Encouraging. Make him believe. “How many badges d'you got?”

“Uh, none,” he admits. “I tried against Cheren, but he's really tough.”

“Yeah, tell me about it. I mean, I've heard that,” she corrects herself. “I work at the Aspertia Pokémon Centre, so you know, I hear a lot of kids are struggling with him.”

She does not want to think about Cheren. Neither of them like each other. She doesn't like many of her brother's friends, if she's honest, but Cheren is one of the ones who dislikes her right back.

He'll be at the wedding, she realises. Well, won't that be fun?

“Anyway, Roxie's not so bad,” she says. Smile, Gwyneth, smile. Be the woman with the ultra ball. “You just have to watch out and not get poisoned.”

“Thanks,” replies the kid. “We'll do that! Won't we, Blitz?”

He raises a knuckle to stroke the side of the tranquill's head, a tender little gesture that cuts Gwyneth up inside and sublimates her resentment into anger, and it leans into his finger, cooing softly.

“Well,” she says, through gritted teeth. “Happy to help.”

And maybe it will work out; maybe the kid will look up entry hazards on his phone on the bus, and he'll decide he wants a roggenrola so he can test this out for himself; and maybe, a month or two from now in Castelia, Burgh will hand him his Insect Badge and tell him that that was some damn fine work, that he barely even managed to get his pokémon into the arena through that stealth rock field. And maybe the kid will smile and remember the drifter at the Floccesy bus depot.

Just goes to show, he might think. You never can judge a book by its cover.

Or maybe not. Maybe he just wants the weirdo at the bus stop to leave him alone. But Gwyneth has to try, at least. You have to believe in something, and despite it all, she still wants to believe in trainer journeys.

When the bus finally crawls out of the depot and pulls up at the stop, the kid goes on ahead to the back, of course, to sit there alone with his partner, and Gwyneth breathes out as she takes a seat near the front. That's him out of the way. She didn't do too badly, she thinks. Perhaps she could have been nicer. But she could have been much nastier, too, and she wasn't, so she guesses it's all right.

Outside the window, Floccesy starts moving. Not much; Gwyneth imagines there isn't a lot going on at ten o'clock on a Saturday morning. But there's a couple of people out and about. Old guy and a herdier, sitting on a bench by the clock tower. Woman with a carton of milk in her hand, on the way back from an emergency visit to the convenience store. Girl about her own age, sandwiched between giant red headphones, braids flying as she twitches to the beat. Saturday morning in suburbia.

She thinks about Cheren, despite herself. He's the one who started this, in a way. Mom called him, he called Shane, Shane called her. That irritates her: Cheren barely even knows Shane – only knows him, in fact, through Gwyneth. She's not particularly pleasant company, she knows that, but is she so bad he can't even call her to say her own brother, his best friend, is getting married?

But Cheren has always been fastidious. Doesn't like a mess, doesn't like to touch anything that might leave a mark. And Gwyneth has always been a mess, has always left marks. No, she can't blame him. She doesn't like him, but she can't blame him. He's probably too busy to want to worry about dealing with her himself; he's still new to the Pokémon League, and he hasn't got the knack of it yet. That's why people are finding his Gym so hard. The trick with Gym Leadership is to gauge the challenger and pick out the pokémon and strategy that are just on the limits of their capacities, so that the fight is difficult but fair. There is a sense in which Cheren is a victim of his own talent.

She takes a grim pleasure in this. Some people get chosen and some do not. It doesn't always turn out like you'd expect.



Cheren was in the news a lot back then, too; he's probably the second most commented-on trainer in Unova, after Hilbert. That's one of the downsides to the rivalry tradition. Second best, second most famous. Honourably mentioned. When you have two rival trainers, unless they're unusually well matched, one of them always ends up stealing the other's thunder.

He gets his share of attention in the magazines, though. Cheren Boyadzhiev: This Year's Rising Star! The interviewers ask about his strategy, about his encounters with Team Plasma, and then, inevitably, about Hilbert. So we hear you're a long-time friend of his. Tell us, what's he really like? “I'm sure there's nothing I can tell you that you couldn't find out from someone else. Now, if I could just return to your previous point for a second, I wanted to say …” He's always very slick. If he resents Hilbert at all, he knows how to hide it.

Gwyneth never gets the feeling that he does. But then, she isn't sure of her instincts about him any more. It's been a year since he left Nuvema, and when she sees his face in the magazine photographs now, she can't say what she recognises from before and what only seems familiar from the relentless media coverage. His face is not the face of the boy who lives down the road, but that of a major new force in the world of Unovan pokémon training.

Gwyneth decides not to worry about it. He's Hilbert's friend, really.

But Nika keeps bringing it up. It comes out, later on in that conversation in the Striaton Gym, that Gwyneth is Hilbert's sister, and Nika is so excited. So you know Hilbert? And Cheren? And Gwyneth laughs nervously and says yes, she does (even though she doesn't know if that's true, any more), and she wants to get away back to Ashley and Tomás, back to the casual pleasure of anonymity; she gives Nika the magazine and makes awkward excuses, saying she needs to go support her friend when he takes on the Gym Leader.

And Nika, well; Nika is a little disappointed, because this girl is Hilbert's sister, and because she seems sweet and lost and Nika has something of a weakness for sweet, lost people, but nevertheless she understands and she lets her go.

“Okay,” she says. “I should probably see if they're ready for me, too. Maybe I'll see you in there!”

Maybe, replies Gwyneth, and off she goes.

At the desk, the receptionist says that Tomás has already gone through. Does she want to go in to watch? Yes, Gwyneth would very much like that, and so the receptionist lets her into the main part of the Gym, where the arena and the restaurant are. It looks just like it does in the pictures: the oval stage at the back of the room, ringed with tables and chairs where patrons of the restaurant can sit and watch challengers while they eat. (Gwyneth remembers Cheren talking to Hilbert about it: it's a good racket, you have to give them that. They could serve the worst food in Unova and they'd still be booked up all week with a show like that every day.) Tomás is already up there onstage, opposite Chilan, by the look of things. Striaton's a tricky Gym; there are three leaders, triplets who all field different types and strategies and arrange challenges so that you always end up matched against the one who'll be hardest for you. Chilan uses the grass-type, which doesn't have a straightforward elemental advantage over fighting-types like timburr but which however is disruptive, defensive, enduring; Gwyneth suspects that Tomás will find that Chilan's pokémon can absorb everything he throws at them, heal themselves up and then whittle down timburr's strength with status moves.

But it's not her place to tell Tomás what he can and can't do. She finds Ashley among the little group of onlookers at Tomás' end of the stage and slips into place next to her, whispering excitedly. Isn't it amazing? Have you ever been in a Gym before? No, this is my first time too― hang on! It's starting! Go, Tomás! You can do it!

Sadly the cheering is not enough. Tomás cannot, in fact, do it. It's a good battle. All those practice matches against Ashley and Gwyneth do pay off: the trick his timburr learned where he jabs his staff between the opponent's legs and cuts their heels out from under them takes Chilan by surprise, and to rapturous cheering Tomás has his timburr lay the stunned pansage out cold with a swift punch to the jaw. But it's not enough. Neither he nor his timburr have any idea how to deal with a cottonee, into whose fluff blows simply sink without effect, and after a protracted struggle during which he is paralysed no fewer than three times the timburr finally gives in, drops his stick and limps back to Tomás for help, growling indignantly. Match forfeit.

Tomás is disappointed, but cheers up after Chilan says how well he did to last that long. Eighty per cent of rookies fail, et cetera. Good tactics. Why not round out your team a little further, develop more tricks like the one with the staff? Ashley and Gwyneth loyally inform him how cool he was, and by the time they're back at the Pokémon Centre Tomás has half forgotten that he didn't actually win.

In the lounge, the TV is showing an interview with Ghetsis Harmonia, one of the Team Plasma activists. He talks about the sacred bond between trainer and pokémon, and how it has to the nation's shame become a thing of the past. He says that the trainer journey is too formalised, that pokémon are just given to people like tools. He says that pokémon must be liberated, that we must return to the old ways, that humans must allow pokémon a new and radical freedom to decide whether they work with them or not.

Harmonia lost an eye in an industrial accident in his youth. In its place he has one of those new prosthetics, a flashily synthetic machine that clicks and ranges around the room in odd directions when he speaks. Sometimes it focuses directly on the camera, and in those moments Gwyneth feels it staring straight into her heart.

Someone asks him whether it's true that the legendary dragon pokémon has reawakened at Dragonspiral Tower and chosen the leader of Team Plasma as its champion. He is as slick as Cheren, says he cannot comment at this time, leaves just enough blanks for anyone watching to fill in and come up with an emphatic yes.

Tomás says he's a liar and a fraud, and of course Ashley falls over herself in her eagerness to agree. Now they want to know, what about you, Gwyneth? What do you think?

Yeah, she replies. Yeah, he's way off base.

But she's thinking about Tomás' timburr, blindly swinging at a foe it couldn't beat just because he told it to. She thinks about Blossom and Corbin, who she hasn't let out of their balls at all today. It was too crowded at the Gym, she'd thought. She didn't want them to get lost or hurt. But is that really a good reason? Isn't it more accurate to say she kept them in there because it was more convenient for her?

On the Castelia Times website the next morning there's a joint interview with Cheren and Hilbert, in Icirrus now to try for their seventh badges. It's remarkable: no one's cleared the Unova League this fast in decades. They didn't even break for winter, and an Unovan January is no joke. Hilbert, as usual, keeps his answers short and unobjectionable, but Cheren takes the chance to respond to Ghetsis' arguments on yesterday's interview.

“I think Mr. Harmonia's goal is commendable,” he says, in a slippery, icy kind of way that means exactly the opposite. “But if what he truly wants is an overhaul of our relationship with pokémon, he is not going about it in the right way. Certainly there are some pokémon rights issues that both we in Unova and our colleagues overseas desperately need to tackle – trafficking, for instance, which has only got worse in recent years with the increase in Rocket activity in and out of the greater Tohjo region. But mass release is a step too far. What we need is reform, and if Mr. Harmonia continues to insist on total liberation without compromise then I feel we all need to consider what sort of motives lie behind such a baffling refusal to engage in any kind of a debate.”

Gwyneth thinks he sounds incredibly grown-up. (So, for that matter, does Cheren.) But all his long words and erudite phrasings pale in the face of that electric eye, staring through the camera, through the wires and out the TV into Gwyneth's soul.



Well, guess who turned out to be right after all? Everyone knows how that story ended. Harmonia broken and beaten in the halls of that freakish castle. That sacred bond he kept going on about wound up being his undoing.

Cheren. So grown-up, so smug, so right. It makes Gwyneth furious to think of it.

The bus rumbles around a corner and the town falls away on one side to reveal an apparently endless line of rolling hills, studded with mixed herds of sheep and mareep. Beyond them is the dark line of the northern forests, and above that, the distant shadow of the mountains. Unova, laid out on a plate. How long has it taken? Maybe half an hour. Floccesy is not so big.

If she keeps going at this pace, getting to Humilau won't be a problem. The issue is that this pace doesn't seem sustainable. She's one third of the way through her bank account after just one bus ticket, and while she hasn't checked the prices of the ferries to Castelia, she has a feeling that they are all substantially more expensive than any provincial bus.

But there's nothing to be done. She'll be in Virbank in a few hours, and then by tonight she needs to be on a boat. That's just how it has to be. Beg, borrow, steal or straight-up stow away, she has to be on the first boat she can find.

It will probably be okay, she thinks. She has no particular reason to think it will be, but she thinks it anyway. This is one of those situations where you think it, or you fail.

The view from the window shifts as Floccesy gives way to Route 20, houses falling away into the rolling hills of the Norna river valley. The highway has been cut through them, leaving crumbling embankments of chalk on either side, faced with wire netting to stave off collapse. Probably it was cheaper to bulldoze the hills than to go around them.

There isn't much of a view in between them, but occasionally Gwyneth catches a flash of sunlight reflected on water and knows that the river's back there, somewhere. She's never walked that particular trail, but she's seen photographs. There are bridges, stairs cut into the cliffside, stands of long grass sloping down towards the water's edge. In spring there are a multitude of wildflowers that she should be able to name but finds that she cannot. And of course there are kids, making their way from Floccesy to Virbank and vice versa, pokémon leaping at their heels.

Gwyneth thinks of the kid at the back, stroking his tranquill. Her fingertips ache with the absence of Blossom's fur.

She puts in her earphones and gets out her book. It's time to stop looking at the landscape.



Virbank: an electric dream of a city, equal parts canal, fog and neon – if you can get to it. It's not like Aspertia; it isn't wedged into a gap between the forest and the hills. The terrain changes somewhere along Route 20, and you come out of the maze of embankments into the kingdom of the sprawl. Unova is a big place, a land defined by space as much as history, and its cities like to put their feet up. Gwyneth sits and watches suburbs move past, thicken into small business hubs, and fade back into suburbs again for what seems like an impossibly long time before the buildings get tall and stay that way, packed in around the canals reaching inland from the harbour. This is where the magic happens, say the travel adverts. Virbank: hey, we're not all movie stars. And an image that looks like a regular crowd scene, until you look again and realise you recognise all the faces: Brycen Ellis, Stu Deeoh, Sabrina Whitmarsh, Giulia Santangelo.

When they first came here, Gwyneth and Nika watched everyone like a hawk, just in case any of them turned out to be celebrities. They didn't – movie people stay up north, in Normandy Heights and Moorview, along with their movie money and their movie mansions – but they didn't care, either. If you travel for the reasons they travelled, the place you actually end up in is not so very important, in the grand scheme of things. They travelled a lot, Gwyneth and Nika, even after first one of them and then the other stopped being trainers and moved on with their lives. Gwyneth thinks there's something about this country that calls out to you, asks you to wander it.

Well. She's certainly answering now, isn't she.

There are a lot more stops now, and it's slow going. People from one suburb need to get to other suburbs, or to any of the various pseudo-centres studding the city that the bus route winds through, and seats empty and fill all around her. Humans, pokémon, even on one occasion a double bass whose owner swears constantly, mechanically, with every little movement she has to make to haul the giant instrument towards her destination. Gwyneth watches, hopes she looks unfriendly enough that no one tries to sit next to her. She is not so fortunate. About an hour into the slow drive through Virbank, someone does take the seat, although she is somewhat gratified to notice that he does so with obvious distaste.

Little victories, she thinks, and takes out one earphone so she can hear when her stop is called.

It comes, eventually, and the guy sitting next to her is forced to get up to let her out if he doesn't want her backpack clocking him round the head; she wriggles free of the now-too-full bus and pops out of the doors into the cool salt air of coastal Virbank. Behind her, the bus closes up and moves on.

She heads east, the life flowing back into her cramped legs. The buildings are tall and slick as Cheren or Harmonia, black steel and plate glass mirrored in the canals that cut the streets in two. This is a city of the marvellous, Nika announced, and Gwyneth told her she was being pretentious, but if she's honest, and sometimes she is, she agrees. There is a particular kind of poetry in the reflection of a neon sign in dark water.

It's less impressive right now, at quarter to two in the afternoon, when all the lights show dimly in the summer sun. The clubs have their doors shuttered; the pedestrians all have the look of people with places to be and things to do. To be expected. It's working hours. For people who have jobs. Which Gwyneth at this point probably does not.

She doesn't think about it. Instead, she finds a street map on a sign and works out that if she goes straight on and then left at Habergeon and right again at the corner of Wexley and Frost, she should end up at the passenger ferry terminal.

A few minutes into this new trip, her phone rings.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Gwyn, it's Shane.” (Shane again.) “How's it goin', you in Virbank yet?”

“Uh huh. Just got off.”

She steps out of the way of a couple of white-collar workers, moving fast, talking fast, probably on their way back from lunch.

“Nice. You know what those buses are like, man, I wouldn't've been surprised if you were still stuck in the suburbs.”

“Tell me about it.”

She's not being welcoming, she's very aware of it. Sometimes she just can't seem to stop herself. Today, it's down to the fact that there's only one reason Shane will be calling, and that's to tell her about his friend Maxine, who she will, apparently, like.

“So,” she forces herself to say. “What's up, dude?”

“Ah, sure, man. Remember I said about my friend Maxine in Castelia?”

(Crystal clear.)

“Yeah.”

“Well, I called her, and she says that there's somethin' up on Route 4, blockin' the whole damn highway and the railway too, if you can believe it.”

“What?” Gwyneth stops. Someone nearly walks into her, tells her angrily to watch where she's going. She barely hears. “The whole of Route 4?”

“Yeah, apparently. Some kinda pokémon swarm or somethin'? There's some League G-men up there tryin' to clear it all up, Burgh and his crew, you know, and like it's terrible timin', 'cause the Skyarrow Bridge is closed for inspections―”

“What? No. No, oh hell, Shane, you got to be kidding me …”

How is this even possible? The northern and eastern routes into Castelia closed, at the same time? This is Unova: you can drive anywhere, if you can afford the gas. And now the capital is cut off from the whole of the southeast?

“'Fraid not,” he says, regretfully. “Apparently you can still get through out to the east on the South Bay Bridge, but it's backed up all the way to Sanderlyn, and the trains are screwed up because of the Route 4 blockage, so you're not gettin' out that way either.”

“So what am I supposed to do?” Gwyneth is working hard to keep the anger out of her voice. Shane is not the problem. Shane is a friend, and he wants to help. “Sorry, I just – seriously? There's no way out to Nacrene or Nimbasa?”

“Well, like I said, there's the South Bay Bridge, but it's only two levels, you know, like it doesn't have the capacity of Skyarrow. But hey Gwyn, don't panic, I got good news for you.”

“Yeah? Let's have it, then.”

“Maxine's got a niece,” he says. “Nice kid, trainer, in town to see her folks. But she's headin' back out tomorrow to this thing in Driftveil, some kinda tournament deal, and since she's gotta be there to make the registration window and she can't go via Nimbasa she's takin' the Relic Passage―”

“The what?”

“The Relic Passage, Gwyn. Don't you know? You people built it, didn't you?” (Gwyneth bites her tongue, very hard, tastes blood.) “Part of that old city thing in the desert. Well, you got to ask Maxine if you want the details, I guess, but like, important thing is, it's this cave that goes right under the bay from Castelia to Driftveil. Got pokémon down there and all, right, but Maxine's niece is goin' through anyway, could escort you.”

There is a silence. Gwyneth is straining against herself to not say the things she wants to say. You people. Whose people?

She remembers being seven, in elementary school, learning about the first Unovans, how they came here and built prosperous little farms, shared their bounty with the indigenes – still struggling, of course, poor things; they never really recovered after the battle between Zekrom and Reshiram scorched the land. She remembers everyone turning to look at her, and the awful moment when she really truly realised that no, she was not like them at all.

You people. Okay.

“Sure, dude,” she says. “That sounds great. Thanks. Seriously, you've saved me, you know that?”

“Hey, no problem, man,” answers Shane, obliviously happy to be of help. “Wasn't much use me drivin' you to Floccesy if you were just gonna get stuck in Castelia now, was it?”

“Heh. I guess not.” Gwyneth takes a breath. You people. “So, uh … where does Maxine live?”

“Oh, right. Sure. Uh, Salmond Street? Like it's near Thaneway, I'll text you the address. Listen, man, I gotta get back to work, but before I go – Maxine's niece is goin' tomorrow at noon. Gotta get to Driftveil in time to register for this tournament thing, you know? So just so you know, Gwyn, you're on a time limit here. She can't wait for you.”

Of course. Don't be late, Gwyneth, not like you usually are. Not an insult, it's just true. Gwyneth thinks that this probably makes it worse.

“Sure, dude,” she says. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

“No problem, Gwyn, happy to help.” (In the alley behind the video game store, Shane is smiling to himself, cigarette dangling from his free hand; he wishes Gwyneth didn't need all this help, seriously, but since she does, he's glad he can give it.) “Anyway, man, I gotta get back to work. Let me know when you get to Maxine's, right?”

“Right. See you, Shane.”

“See you, man. And good luck.”

Click. She stuffs her phone furiously back into her pocket, gets her finger stuck in her haste. You people! Okay, Shane. Us people.

The thing is (so she claims), she barely notices it herself. It was her father who was Henuun, and he's been gone since she was two; her mother is white, and Gwyneth herself feels so is she, more or less, with her upbringing: what right has she to a name and a history she is so completely alien to? Besides, she takes after her mother. It is important to her that she takes after her mother. Blake was told so many times that he looked like his father, after all.

But no one else will ever let her forget – not even, it seems, Shane. You people. One of the things Gwyneth is never not aware of and hates with all her soul is that she lives and dies in the eyes of others. You People. Oh, I Never Would Have Known To Look At You. And This Is Your … Friend?

Anyway. Shane doesn't know, Shane can never know, Shane meant nothing by it. She's been standing still for the last five minutes, chewing her tongue. And isn't she working to a deadline now? Noon tomorrow, or she loses her ticket out of Castelia.

Okay. She straightens up, runs bitten fingernails through her hair. Forget about it. Shane's better than she deserves, and if she was only willing to talk about any of this she's sure he would listen, and do his best to learn.

She breathes. She lets Virbank settle around her, cars and sea mist and syncopated music rattling out of a passing biker's radio.

She adjusts her backpack and she walks east down towards the seafront.



Friday, 9th September

Here are the things Gwyneth does not put into her backpack but which she nevertheless carries with her, on her person:

• her wallet (one debit card, eleven dollars and change, a folded photograph)
• her phone (password 0517, still, even after eighteen months)
• a small folding mirror
• a pair of tweezers
• a switchblade

[/ul]She's never used the knife before, but she understands that one day, Unova being what it is and her being what she is, she might have to. Someone once told her that a weapon you don't know how to use belongs to your opponent. They were probably right.

Still. In theory, if someone tries to stab her, she can try to stab them right back.

This is what is referred to as cold comfort.



Saturday, 10th September

Inside, the ferry terminal is pleasant, all pale wood and neutral paint. A little hole-in-the-wall café at one end, along with low chairs, tables, magazines. A counter at the other where you can buy your tickets, where a fraught-looking receptionist is trying to deal with a couple of kids.

Gwyneth looks around. There are fewer people waiting than she'd expected. Has she just missed a ferry? She has a look at the departure board, and stares.

ALL SERVICES CANCELLED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. WE APOLOGISE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

She keeps staring. This is really happening, isn't it? She is right here in Virbank, trying to catch a ferry that isn't running, to a city blocked to the north by a pokémon swarm and the east by the worst-timed civic engineering work in the history of the world. This is all real. Humilau is getting further and further away, and she just spent most of a day travelling towards it.

Maybe this is the universe's way of telling her she's wasting her time. And who's to say it isn't right? If she heads back now, she might, might, be able to explain away today to her manager at the Centre. Family emergency, maybe. She could get the next bus home and be back at work in the morning, like nothing had ever happened. She could forget about Nika, as she should have done eighteen months ago. She could …

But here's the thing: Gwyneth doesn't know what she could do. There is nothing waiting for her in Aspertia. Everything she ever had, she burned. And no, going to Humilau won't change that, but it's something, isn't it? It's a decision, like she told herself this morning in Shane's car, and it has been a long, long time since she made a real decision.

So, Humilau.

But. The ferry. The bridge. The swarm.

She kneads the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger, resisting the urge to swear loudly in the middle of the lobby, and through her silence come the voices of the kids at the desk:

“But we really need to get to Castelia!”

“I'm sorry,” the receptionist replies. “The captain―”

“Don't you have any other boats?”

“I'm sorry, but we don't at present.” He sounds on the verge of tears. This must be one of the longest days of his life. “It's to do with the union disputes – until it's resolved, we can only offer a limited weekend service―”

“So what about this captain?” The kid is relentless. “Where did they go?”

“Hugh.” The other kid. Quieter, slower. “Calm down. It's not the end of the world.”

“I'm sorry,” repeats the receptionist. “We're doing everything we can. It's Jon Palmer, he's just – I mean, we've called his daughter, and she's trying to contact him―”

“But where is he?” asks Hugh. “Look, I'll go and get him if I have to.”

“Well,” says the receptionist unhappily. “Well. Apparently he's gone to, uh, PokéStar.”

“PokéStar?” It's the other kid again. “Kind of weird, huh.”

“Tell me about it,” says the receptionist, with feeling. “Mid-life crisis or some sh― nonsense like that,” he corrects himself, remembering the kids. “Apparently he's been spending all his spare time hanging around the studios, trying to get in to see Deeoh.”

“Is he any good?” asks the kid, with interest.

“Not according to his daughter. Deeoh's guys keep turning him away, and he keeps coming back. I guess they're auditioning today or something.” The receptionist takes a breath, trying to retake control of himself. He shouldn't be saying any of this. Everything is terrible right now and everyone wants to blame him, but still, he shouldn't be saying it. “I'm sorry, it's not my place to say. Um, look, she – his daughter – is trying to get hold of him to sort all this out. If you'd just like to wait …”

But the kids don't want to wait, or Hugh doesn't, anyway; nor does Gwyneth, because she has to be in Castelia by noon tomorrow or else, and she's thinking – she doesn't know what she's thinking, something desperate and stupid, but she might do it anyway. PokéStar studios. Jon Palmer.

I'll go and get him if I have to, the kid said …

What the hell. It's not like she has anything to lose. And if it gets the boat moving again, she might turn out to have everything to gain.

Gwyneth makes another decision. She thinks she is starting to get the hang of it now.



Near the coast at least, Virbank is easy enough to walk around. Go west and you run out of sidewalk; stick to the old town and you'll be okay. Dockside to Moorview is just about workable on foot, if you're determined and you have time. It's not easy, but it can be done. Gwyneth is determined (she thinks) and she has time (she thinks); okay, she doesn't like walking, but this is walking for a purpose, walking to save the boat. She can't take herself seriously, even at the very moment she thinks it. Save the boat? Who cares about the damn boat? This is for her.

It's selfish, but it's powerful. It keeps her moving, one foot in front of the other, even as she starts to wonder when it last was that she ate. (That is a concern for another time, for after she knows when she'll be getting out of this town.) North. Up along the seafront, past the concrete shells and oily stink of the freight dockyards, the giant cranes and bales of steel. Cutting west along Harvard Avenue, all the theatres and their lightbulbs dormant until night like sleeping giants. Through the little alleys of obscure bookshops, specialist stores who advertise in eccentric typefaces EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY JOHTONIAN MEDICINE or 100 YEARS OF THE MODERN KANTAN JOURNEY-NARRATIVE.

An hour passes. Her backpack grows heavier, a lead ache hanging off her spine. She starts to regret the things she's packed, except that almost all of them were essential, so she regrets instead the book, Three Nights in Opelucid, as one of the only things she didn't actually need. It's a library book, anyway. Probably it's already overdue. She should have dropped it off in the return slot on her way to Shane's earlier this morning.

She should have done a lot of things, says a small and candidly nasty part of her mind, and Gwyneth decides she would like to think about something else.

It's not too far to Moorview now, and PokéStar is just on the other side of that. She has no real idea of what she plans to do when she gets there, how she intends to find Jon Palmer or what she's going to say to him when she does. She tries out a few lines to herself as she walks:

“Please. My brother's getting married.”

“The city needs you, Mr. Palmer.”

“I have a knife.”

The last one makes her lips twitch into something that is almost but not quite a smile. In a very unfunny way, there's something hilarious about the idea of her actually threatening to stab someone.

But you never know. It might come down to threats, in the end. He must be pretty far gone, if he's actually walked out of his job to sniff around at auditions. Gwyneth tries to imagine a life in which an action like that makes sense, and finds it difficult. She is not always the best at knowing irony when she sees it.

She stops on a nondescript corner somewhere for a drink, and while she's getting the water bottle out her fingers brush the ultra ball in her bag. Now there's an idea. It's empty, of course, and by this point it must be close to forty years old; it may well not actually work any more. But no one else knows that. And while Gwyneth doesn't exactly look fifteen any more, she is short, and right now she looks like a traveller.

When you meet a pokémon trainer, you have to be the woman with the ultra ball. Okay: that doesn't hold true for adult trainers, and Gwyneth is never going to look under twenty again. But even so, they get a certain amount of respect. More than random drifters, anyway. More than You People.

It's dishonest, but so is threatening to stab him, and if she's going to win his affection by lying she'd rather do it the peaceful way. She is not the sort of person who does well out of fights.

Gwyneth drinks, puts the bottle in her pack and her pack on her back, and starts walking again, rolling the ultra ball between her fingers in her pocket. It feels faintly tacky with sweat and the oils of her skin. It feels like it's always felt.

She takes her hand out of her pocket and makes a conscious effort to stop thinking about it.

More walking. The buildings get shorter, the shadows longer. Now there are chic cafés and independent art galleries. Nika's kind of places. She is cultured, Gwyneth always says, or said, with the vague reverence of someone for whom art has always been something for other people, better people, smarter and wealthier people. Nika likes art. She talks about Cy Twombly and Jean-Michel Basquiat with command and self-assurance. She takes the people she loves to museums and gets excited, tries to explain how to interpret the pictures and sculptures. Sometimes they understand; always, they enjoy her enthusiasm.

Gwyneth looks in the windows of the galleries and sees a language she does not understand. Students with notepads and cameras. A woman gesticulating wildly, expansively, Nika-ly.

Gwyneth keeps walking.

Her stomach growls, but nothing around here looks cheap and anyway, she's almost there. It's half three now and Virbank is getting classier with every street she walks: a fancy restaurant here, an upmarket organic grocery store there. This isn't Normandy Heights, not yet, but this is clearly a part of town with aspirations. Gwyneth starts to feel eyes on her face and a tenseness in her stomach.

She keeps going. There does not seem to be much of a choice here.

A little later on she checks her route on her phone again and is irritated to see it recommends her going most of the way around the upcoming block to get to a street on the far side. She refuses to believe that the wide, angular C the map suggests is the most efficient way to get there; and sure enough, if she looks up ahead, there seems to be an alley or something cutting through the block. Okay, then. It's the middle of the afternoon in a good part of town. Probably a safe bet for a shortcut.

“Stupid phone,” she says, to hear the thought aloud, and crosses the road to get over to the alleyway. It doesn't appear to contain anything beyond a few trash cans and a couple of locked gates leading off into the back yards of various stores. There are whole streets in east Aspertia that look worse. Fine, Gwyneth thinks, and sets off down its length.

And it is fine, really. It is not a dangerous alley. Except that she sees a trash bag shift slightly as she comes near, and because she's no Virbanker but an Aspertian eastsider, she doesn't pass it off as a purrloin or something but freezes, aware of potential danger; and pinned in her gaze, the creature behind the bag gets uncomfortable; and then it bolts, because running out screeching has always scared people off in the past and it sees no reason why it wouldn't work now; and Gwyneth doesn't get scared off; she sees a flash of many-legged movement heading straight for her and instinctively moves to kick it away; and the creature feels her foot coming and throws itself aside, spitting something ragged and purple into the air; and something rips into the back of Gwyneth's left hand and she swears violently and throws the first thing she can find at the creature.

And then it is over, and Gwyneth is standing there alone, breathing heavily and looking at the ultra ball wobbling on the cracked black asphalt.

Nine years. She's been carrying that thing nine years. What if she really needs it, she always thought. Well, here you go, kid. You needed it.

Click.

Gwyneth steps forwards and nudges the ball with one foot, just in case, but it actually seems to have worked. The thing – she has no idea what it was, it all happened so fast, but she has a working theory it was some kind of demon – is caught.

Nine years. She laughs. It's the kind of laugh that makes people uneasy: could be joy, could be trauma. Nine years. Just like that! She hated that thing, even if she couldn't bring herself to get rid of it. Nothing says missed opportunity like the empty poké ball you still carry round with you at twenty-four.

Then she looks at the back of her hand and stops laughing. There's a scratch there, bright and red and weeping clear yellowish liquid. It sits in the middle of a fat cushion of swollen flesh.

Gwyneth blinks. She feels her pulse thumping in her hand, warm and stifling. She feels the blood moving through her veins like sand.

Gwyneth remembers coming into Nika's study one day in the spring, feeling feverish and asking why the TV wasn't working, except that Nika could hear it was on through the open door and she looked at Gwyneth and Gwyneth asked again and then after the third time she stumbled and it was all a blur until later in the hospital someone finally told her it wasn't a cold, it was pneumonia, and her mother was there, she remembers, and even Hilbert, everyone was there and they brought flowers …

Gwyneth is trying to get her phone out of her pocket but she can't figure it out. Her jacket is so complicated, she thinks. And it's so tight around the wrist. Is it shrinking?

Daffodils, she remembers. Hilbert brought her daffodils, because those were always the first flowers that popped up out of Mom's flowerbed in the spring, a wedding gift she had planted and that had become a memorial for Dad, and when she was little she used to say daffing dills, and Hilbert laughed so much that she said it again …

“Hey? Hey, you! You okay?”

Gwyneth turns in slow motion through a world like hot glass, thick and plastic. She sees a face swimming in the air like a fish.

“Hi,” she mumbles. “Where's Nika?”

“Oh my god, your – what happened to your arm?”

“Mom? No, she's – already here …”

She tries to gesture with an arm as fat and stiff as a freshly-cut log and loses her balance. The ground comes up to meet her so softly, so tenderly, and she smiles.

“Okay then,” she says, and it all goes dark.

I too thought Gwyneth's scene with the kid with the tranquill was neat, with the shout out to hazard entries being used as a strategy for battles often and the mention of Gwyneth getting advice/gifts like the ultra ball when she was in her journey.

Cheren's speech on Pokemon rights reform reminds me a particular hot issue going on now in the US. Heck, there was a big march in the country's capital and across the country the past weekend. I guess it's ironic that while you had this story written a while back, US politics is still, well, all over the place haha.

Virbank City does have that Hollywood flair to it with the PokeStudios, movie star, and even a gym leader that plays in a rock band. I remember Brycen being in movies but not Sabrina, heh. And well, this is where Gwyneth's first obstacle is giving her trouble (and no, I don't think threatening the captain with a knife will work, dear).

Hmmm, I wonder what Pokemon Gwyneth caught there. =P Otherwise, yikes the aftermath of that capture didn't sound too good.

THREE: AULD LANG SYNE

Nine years ago: Gwyneth at fifteen, gawky and inelegant in a bright print dress. And there's Nika too, of course. They never did see each other in the Gym, but they were both staying at the Centre. When Gwyneth and her fellow travellers go to get breakfast in the morning, Nika's sitting right there at one of the tables with a couple of other kids. And when she sees Gwyneth, she waves her over, and Ashley and Tomás look at her, and Gwyneth wishes the ground would swallow her up, but okay, she can't pretend she hasn't seen, she'll have to go sit with her.

Nika introduces herself, and her friends too, Aimée and Katja. Katja is from Opelucid; Aimée is from Algiers. Katja has been waiting for this trip her whole life. Aimée only found out it was even a thing a few years ago, when her family moved to Opelucid, but she is already loving it. Unova: it's the greatest country in the world, right?

Now Gwyneth has to introduce Ashley and Tomás, and explain that she met Nika yesterday at the Gym, and all of this goes well, she thinks, even if it is completely weird. She's no fool, not even at that age; she's fairly sure Nika is just interested in her as Hilbert's sister, and she doesn't want to pick friends based on who she's related to. But Ashley and Tomás don't know that, and they get talking, swapping stories of the Gym – Nika actually won, how amazing is that? – and of the road south to Accumula and Nuvema. Katja intends to go down there a little way today, to see what pokémon you can find out there, and Aimée is going with her because these two started their journey at the same time and somewhere along the road to Village Bridge the two of them became friends, and so now they do all their journeying together. Nika wants to move on west, though. She's come here via a strange route, south from Humilau via Undella, detouring west to White Forest by way of Reversal Mountain, and then by train here to Striaton. (Apparently she didn't want to go to Nimbasa yet. There's something there, but no one pushes her to say it; they're all teenagers away from home, they all have secrets.)

Well, says Ashley, they're all thinking of moving on now, after Tomás' attempt at the Gym. Does she want to tag along?

And Nika smiles her metallic smile and says great, she'd love to, and Gwyneth smiles too and wonders if she's a bad person for wanting Nika not to come.

It's another long hike from Striaton to Nacrene, and the terrain is starting to change. The land flattens out and humps up again apparently at random, blanketed in pines that sweep in dark curves down to the shores of Houston Lake. Somewhere to the north there's supposed to be somewhere called Wellspring Cave, where a whole bunch of different pokémon live. Everyone agrees they want to have a look.

But things are different now to how they were on the road to Striaton. Tomás appears to have finally noticed Ashley, and now the two of them are more of a pair than they were, which leaves Gwyneth with Nika. And Nika is – well, she can't figure her out. She hasn't mentioned Hilbert again, or Cheren. But she does ask a lot of questions, and Gwyneth doesn't know if she's genuinely curious or attempting to get close to her to learn more about Hilbert or just trying to fill the silence. She answers as best she can, without letting her guard down, and Nika just finds more to say.

It all suddenly seems to have gone wrong. Gwyneth knows she shouldn't complain, that this is an amazing thing she's getting to do, but still, the magic seems to have gone out of it. Her little trio is breaking up. Nika's slithered in through the gaps. She thinks of Hilbert, of Cheren and Bianca, and is confused. This isn't how a trainer journey goes, is it? There's a group of friends and they stick together. Right? She doesn't realise yet, hasn't noticed the transitory nature of all these comings together. Even Hilbert's group, and it is exceptional, as he is, doesn't always remain unified. Bianca falls behind. Sometimes Hilbert or Cheren stop with her; sometimes she travels with others to catch up. Hilbert and Cheren themselves split up a lot, go hunting in woods or caves or cities each on their own.

She starts to feel very lonely. In the evenings she sits on the hillside hugging Blossom, staring out over the trees to the south as the sky changes colour. And Gwyneth doesn't realise how unhappy she looks, doesn't realise why Nika keeps trying to make conversation, trying to joke and laugh and smile. Because it's not about Hilbert, and it never was, not really. It wasn't the magazine that caught her eye, that day in the Gym. It was the girl reading it.

There comes one absolutely miserable day when they at last reach Wellspring Cave, following a tiny brook through the woods until they arrive at a cleft in the earth that goes down into a profound darkness; and somehow she gets separated from everyone else, trying to find her way back with her flashlight and the faint purple glow that rises from Corbin's skin, and sometimes she hears voices echoing from other parts of the caves as if they're about to just pop up behind her, and sometimes she hears wild pokémon scuttling around in the shadows beyond the beam of the flashlight, and in the end Gwyneth just can't take it any more, she just folds up like a collapsing house of cards right there in the corner and she starts to cry.

It's something wrong with her, she thinks. How can she be so ungrateful? Blossom is right now trying to burrow between her arms to press her warm little body against her face, and Corbin is doing his best to beam positive thoughts to her in puffs of psychic smoke. She's a pokémon trainer. She has partners. She's on a trainer journey. All of this was given to her and she still manages to ruin things, still somehow manages to make herself feel so lost and alone.

And then someone has a hand on her back, crouched beside her.

“Hey,” says Nika. “I'm really sorry. I didn't mean to lose you like that.”

It's a watershed moment. Gwyneth could wrench her shoulders away, throw the hand off, turn and shout. Why are you still following me? What do you want from me?

Or she could turn and lean into Nika's outstretched arm, let herself be held, feel the wrongness ebb inside her in response to the simple truth of present human warmth.

It is the easiest decision she's ever made.


Saturday, 10th September

It's the strangest thing. When Gwyneth wakes, she's on a hospital bed, curtains drawn around her to keep out the hum and bustle of the ward, and for a brief hallucinatory instant, she half believes she's nineteen again and about to learn she has pneumonia. The pain in her hand, however, soon convinces her otherwise.

“Ow,” she mutters, shifting slightly. “Ah, hell.”

Now it's coming back to her. God damn it, this was meant to be the nice part of town. What are the odds that she'd stumble into the one feral poison-type in the whole of Moorview?

She blinks, raises her head. There's a pressure on her finger – one of those pulse monitor things, she thinks, although actually she isn't sure if they really do measure your pulse or not. She just assumed. But the other hand is the real issue. It's wrapped in bandages and hurts like hell, but it's no longer the same size and shape as a turnip, which she supposes is a good thing. The fingers are working again too, she notes, if stiffly.

What else? A cannula in her wrist, running yellow fluid into her. Some form of antidote, she figures. At least, it's the same colour as the stuff they carry in the Pokémon Centre.

It's probably also a lot more expensive, she realises, with a sinking feeling in her gut.

“You're awake,” says someone. “Hey, take it easy now, okay? We just washed six times the lethal dose of venom out of you.”

Gwyneth looks up, and sees a nurse slipping through the curtains. She looks friendly enough, with strong hands and the scarred cheeks of someone who once had truly terrible acne. Her name tag says TASNIM. Gwyneth wonders briefly what Tasnim sees when she looks at the body laid out along the bed. A patient, hopefully, before anything else.

“Where am I?” asks Gwyneth. It seems as good a way to start as any.

“Virbank North General Hospital,” answers Tasnim.

“Oh. Okay.” Gwyneth doesn't know what sort of answer she was expecting. It's not like she knows anything about Virbank hospitals. Last time she was here, she had other things on her mind.

“Do you have any other questions?” asks Tasnim. “If you do, I'll answer if I can. Otherwise, I have a few questions for you, if that's okay.”

(Here we go.)

“Uh, sure. Sure, I guess.”

“First of all, can you tell me your name? I'm Tasnim, by the way,” she adds, indicating her badge. “We looked in your wallet, but I'm afraid we couldn't find any ID on you.”

Everyone's favourite question. Gwyneth sighs and answers.

“Gwyneth. Gwyneth ze'Haraan.”

Dad's name. It always feels weird on her Unovan tongue, this relic of someone else's language. She feels like it belongs carved into the ruins in the desert, in the ancient letters Gwyneth cannot read.

Tasnim pauses.

“Sorry,” she says. “Can you spell that for me?”

“Little Z, E, apostrophe, big H, A, R, double A, N.”

“Okay, thanks … right. Got that down.” Tasnim lowers her clipboard and pen. “Now, I'm not expecting anything here, but I have to ask, can you tell me what happened? It looks like you took a really bad poison sting from a venipede, but we'd like to be clear.”

“That's pretty much it,” answers Gwyneth. “I went down this alley, and it just … jumped out at me.” She pauses. “Didn't know it was a venipede, though. Never got a clear look at it.”

“Right. There was a poké ball with you when you were found …”

“Yeah. Yeah, I had one in my pocket and I guess I just sort of threw it.” Gwyneth shrugs. It's a more painful process than she remembers. “Souvenir from my trainer journey.”

Tasnim smiles.

“Lucky you still had a trainer's arm on you, then. That venipede was either super angry or super afraid. It must have more or less emptied out its venom sac trying to get you.”

Gwyneth shakes her head, not sure what to say. Venomous little monster. Of all the alleys in Virbank …

“Huh,” she replies, in the end. “Guess my luck hasn't run out after all.”

“I, uh, guess not,” says Tasnim, the faintest hint of an unasked question in her voice. “Okay, now we've established that, I've just got a few more administrative questions for you. What's your address?”

It goes on, all the little bits of trivia that make up Gwyneth as a legal citizen of the Democratic Federation of Unova, and then the sixty-four thousand dollar question: does she have insurance? No. No, she does not. There's a pause, because although only Gwyneth knows how much money is in her bank account Tasnim can make an educated guess, and then Tasnim moves on with her questions.

Gwyneth feels it again inside her, that grinding shame like a millstone working on her gut. Unova. It's the greatest country in the world, right?

There is another pause, and then something else occurs to her, something even more important than money.

“Uh, what time is it?” she asks.

“About a quarter after eight,” says Tasnim, without even looking at the upside-down clock on her breast. “Why?”

Gwyneth sits up. It hurts, and her head is spinning, but she stays up.

“I got to go,” she says urgently. “I have to be in Castelia tomorrow morning.”

“What?” Tasnim lays a hand on her, trying to ease her back down, but Gwyneth refuses to give way. “Ms. ze'Haraan, you really shouldn't be trying to move―”

“I have to,” insists Gwyneth, trying to focus on Tasnim's face through the dizziness. “You don't understand―”

“Maybe I didn't make it clear, you were very badly poisoned. You're going to need rest―”

“My brother's getting married,” pleads Gwyneth, playing her last card. “I have to be in Castelia, I really can't miss the ferry tonight.”

Tasnim wavers. Gwyneth's vision is settling, and she can see the uncertainty in her eyes.

“Well,” she begins, and Gwyneth pounces.

“My family will be there,” she says. “I'm not going to be wandering around alone. I can see a doctor afterwards, I just – I can't miss this. Please.”

She waits. Tasnim bites her lip.

“I'll have a word with the doctor,” she says. “But he's not going to like this.”

“Thank you,” says Gwyneth earnestly. “Seriously. You don't even know how much this means.”

She's being honest, but she knows it doesn't matter. Whatever the doctor says, she's going. Even if it turns out Jon Palmer's still at PokéStar, she's going; she'll drive the damn boat herself if she has to. She's going. She has no choice.

Castelia by noon tomorrow. Driftveil what, two days after that. It will be slow to walk, but after that she can speed up, get back on the buses. (Don't think about the money, not now.) Nimbasa, White Forest, Undella – and Humilau.

Humilau, and Nika.

She told Shane she wasn't going to break up the wedding. She really hopes she wasn't lying.


It's dark out now. Gwyneth feels rough, kind of like she has a bad cold and kind of like she just got beaten up, and she can't face the walk back down to the dockside; she caves and takes the bus, for another nine dollars. She'll do the math later; right now, she thinks, she'll collapse halfway if she tries to go on foot. Irritating, but it can't be helped.

The doctor was reluctant, but Gwyneth was relentless, and that makes people give up, eventually, just so they don't have to talk to her any more. She was only held for an hour or so longer, and then they took the tubes out of her wrist and the sensor off her finger and said she could go.

By night, Virbank comes into its own. The bus goes south via the coastal route, taking in Harvard Avenue with its theatres and playhouses, and the neon pops in the dark like a galaxy of light. Her eyes ache from looking – the poison, she thinks, or maybe just exhaustion – and she closes them, slumped forward on the pack resting on her lap. What was she thinking, trying to save the ferry? Who does something like that? Not Gwyneth. Some people get chosen and some do not, and Gwyneth is the kind of person who has to wait for the ferry like everyone else. Now she's wasted an afternoon, got herself sick and picked up a medical bill she has no chance in hell of being able to pay. What a perfect day.

Her fingers trace the edges of her pack, and stop on the pocket. There's a bulge there that she'd almost managed to forget.

What's she going to do with the damn venipede?

The hospital staff did give her the ball back, along with a lecture about the dangers of venipede that Gwyneth nodded her way through without listening, her mind full of questions about the ferry. Now that there's nothing to do but wait, the ball and its contents are coming back to her.

Gwyneth doesn't want it. She is not a pokémon trainer any more, and even if she was, this venipede is clearly not the friendliest of creatures. It wouldn't be anyone's first choice for a partner – or their second choice, in fact, or third, or fourth. She could release it when she gets off the bus, she supposes. Probably that isn't ethical, and she should take it out into the country or something, but once the thing's out of its ball it's not her problem any more. Besides, it was already living in Virbank anyway. It can't do much harm.

The only issue is whether or not it's going to go for her as soon as she releases it. Gwyneth would like to think it will just run away. After their last encounter, however, she isn't so sure, and she would rather not spend any more time in a hospital tonight.

By the time the bus pulls up outside the ferry terminal, she's made up her mind. She walks a little way up the street, to a little yard full of trash cans, and tosses the ultra ball behind a garbage bag. A blue light spikes up out of the dark, and she hears the skittering of pointed feet on tarmac. When she is sure she cannot hear them any more, she peeks carefully behind the bag.

The venipede is still there, a hump of scab-red carapace between two sets of gently waving antennae. It's missing its left eye, but it can clearly see her: it stiffens immediately, clicking its jaws in an insectoid warning.

“Whoa, there,” says Gwyneth, straightening up hurriedly. “Let's not either of us do anything we regret, huh?”

It keeps clicking, and Gwyneth takes a few healthy steps away, in the direction of the street.

“You go on now,” she calls. “I don't want any trouble, you hear me?”

A sudden scratching. A dark blur between the shadows. Gwyneth throws up a hand in front of her face, but there's no poison sting, no attack of any kind. Maybe it's out of venom, she thinks. It wouldn't surprise her. Or maybe it just wants to get away from her as badly as she wants to get away from it. She can't say she'd blame it. Gwyneth has no idea what it's like in a poké ball, but she wouldn't like to find out.

She waits a little longer, just to make sure it really has run off, and then looks behind the bag again. Nothing there now except the ultra ball.

Gwyneth picks it up and pushes its two halves together, hard. A sharp twist, and they separate cleanly with the crisp snap of breaking plastic.

“So long,” she says, and drops the broken ball in with the rest of the trash.

Back down the street, the ferry terminal is looking livelier. The waiting area is half full, and the little café is doing a brisk trade, the smell of coffee making Gwyneth's empty stomach turn. For a second in the doorway she loses her balance, has to reach out for the wall to stay upright. Okay. Food is definitely a priority now. Ticket first, though.

At the desk, a different receptionist is on duty, a woman with dyed hair and a service industry smile.

“Did they find Jon Palmer?” asks Gwyneth, as she puts her card into the machine and hopes the transaction will clear.

“Oh, you heard?” The receptionist raises an eyebrow. “Yeah, thank god. Some kid who was in here earlier went up to PokéStar and talked him into coming back.”

“Hugh?”

She looks surprised.

“No, the guy who was with him. Nate, I think his name was. You know them?”

Gwyneth shakes her head.

“I bumped into them earlier,” she says. “Seemed … like the kind of people who get things done.”

CARD APPROVED, says the reader, to Gwyneth's relief, and she takes her ticket and moves on.

Well, that answers her question, then. Who does a thing like that? Nate does. So everything she did was a waste, then. He got Jon Palmer back and she got poisoned. Gwyneth thinks this is probably the most succinct summary of her life she's ever heard.

She shakes it off, or tries to, and looks at the departure board. Fifteen minutes to kill until boarding; long enough to get something to eat, preferably from somewhere other than the café here, which she suspects of being overpriced. A grocery store a couple of streets away yields a large and inexpensive sandwich, and Gwyneth washes it down with the last of her water. It's not good food by any stretch of the imagination, but neither is what she usually eats, and if it keeps her upright then she feels she can't complain right now.

Gwyneth sits in one of the chairs in the waiting area and dumps her bag at her feet. The ache in her hand seems to have got into her blood and been washed right through her, a blunt, all-pervasive pain that pulses inside her like the bass at a concert. She hears the conversations of the other people waiting, the staccato zing and bang of a child's 3DS, the muffled roar of traffic outside. The lowing of some big pokémon. Laughter. Sirens. All of it is somehow utterly unbearable.

But there's nowhere to go, so she sits there and bears it until it's time to board.


Sunday, 12th September

It's a five-hour ride – closer to six, really, considering how long they have to wait at each stop. There are two before Castelia, at the Liberty Garden and at Unity Tower; apparently there are no express services at weekends, or maybe it's because of the strike. Every time, the ferry stays still for what seems like forever as cars are driven on and off the vehicle deck. Gwyneth doesn't mind. This was cheaper, and the longer it takes the more time she has to sleep.

She spends most of the trip in the big lounge at the front of the ship, dozing in one of the soft chairs scattered around the room. She dreams fitfully, feverishly, sweating and groaning in a way that keeps the other passengers away from her. When she wakes, she remembers none of it, and the world seems colder and clearer, sharper around the edges. Everything still hurts, but at least she no longer feels like she's about to die.

In the restroom, she wipes off her foundation and washes the sweat off her face and neck. Someone else comes in then, and she retreats into a cubicle, where with her tweezers and mirror she plucks out the most obvious hairs on her face before quickly running a razor over the rest and hiding its ghost beneath a fresh layer of make-up. She checks the mirror again and nods to herself: okay. Acceptable.

Back at the sink, she brushes her teeth and refills her water bottle, and heads back out to the lounge, glad to have got all that over with. The actions in themselves no longer bother her, having faded from an emblem of her difference to another part of daily life sometime during the past ten years, but there is always a difference between doing them at home and doing them out here in the wider world. Gwyneth has caught her share of flak. She would do almost anything to stop herself catching any more.

Standing at the window, she sees hazy spires of light forming in the darkness as Castelia draws near. It barely even looks real, and Gwyneth finds herself wondering, for a few seconds, if it's really there at all, if there is anything outside this bubble of light and glass but black water and the void of the night sky. Can there really be a Humilau out there, waiting for her to arrive? Suddenly it seems so unlikely.

Someone screams and Gwyneth snaps out of it, turns sharply to see a couple of kids running in through the door at the other end of the room. She can't see what they're fleeing, and she's about to dismiss it as some game they're playing when a man in a chair near the door jumps up, swearing, and something rattles loudly near his feet. Now other people are getting up, some of them even climbing over the chairs in their haste to get away. A lillipup jumps in front of its master, barking ferociously, and then leaps back again, yelping in dismay.

Everyone's staring now, or trying to retreat, and the chaos is working its way closer and closer, some unseen thing working its way between the chairs and tables. Gwyneth cranes her neck, trying to see the cause of it all, but whatever it is, it's well hidden by the furniture and the people trying to get out of its way. At the bar, a woman jumps up, fumbling for a poké ball, and a lithe green figure materialises at her feet, its hands bunches of thorns and petals. The roselia whistles an eerie tune, sending people as far away as Gwyneth into fits of yawning, but the move doesn't appear to take; the thing keeps moving, and now Gwyneth thinks she sees a flash of colour between a suitcase and a table, and now the man beside her is pushing past her to get away, and now, she realises, it's right here, it's coming right at her―

“Now!” yells someone, and the thing suddenly rises up into the air, wriggling and hissing in the grip of a giant beige hand. Gwyneth blinks, and her brain catches up with her eyes: here's a conkeldurr, squat and powerful, with a bulbous red nose and a concrete pillar slung over its shoulder. It's barely five foot tall, but at least three of that is arm.

“Anyone hurt?” asks the conkeldurr's trainer, a tall Latino man in a well-cut suit. There is a general shaking of heads, and a crew member runs up to him, red-faced above his white shirt.

“Thank you, sir,” he gasps, chest heaving. “Been – chasing that thing – for fifteen minutes now.”

The creature in question writhes, legs protruding from between the conkeldurr's massive fingers. Gwyneth hears a muffled clicking noise, and freezes.

“What do you want me to do with it?” asks the man. “Does it belong to anyone, or what?”

“Don't think so,” replies the crewman. “Crawled out of – a vent. Must've come aboard while – we were docked.”

Gwyneth is straining to see over the conkeldurr's thumb. Is that an eye in there?

“Right. Er, I don't suppose anyone has a poké ball? We could release it when we get to Castelia …”

The creature has worked its head through a gap in the conkeldurr's fist. It surveys the room with a single, malevolent orange eye.

“Release it?” The speaker, a woman in a wine-red leather jacket, laughs hollowly. “It's a goddamn menace. Ought to be destroyed.”

“No!” cries Gwyneth involuntarily, and some small, sane part of her closes its eyes in despair. What is she doing?

All eyes turn to her, and her insides clench up like a steel trap.

“Is it yours?” asks the conkeldurr's partner politely.

Gwyneth hesitates, and feels the moment stretch out into infinity.

“Uh, yes,” she says, stepping forwards. “Yeah, it's – it's mine.”

And she is screaming inside, screaming at herself to forget the venipede, you have enough problems and you don't need any more; and it's just a bug, it's probably going to die in a month anyway as soon as it starts getting properly cold; and the damn thing's dangerous anyway, it nearly killed you; and somehow Gwyneth is still standing here in front of everyone, in front of all of these people and all of their eyes, and the screaming thing inside her keeps screaming and she keeps listening and nothing whatsoever shows on her face.

“Right,” says the woman in the red jacket, derisive, looking at Gwyneth in that same old way. (Seeing: the jacket, the boots, the hair, the dirt, the androgyny, the ethnic ambiguity.) “Figures.”

And Gwyneth knows better than to say anything, even though she is tired and sick and angry and her arm hurts like hell. So she says nothing, and stands there as the millstone goes to work again on her gut.

“That thing is yours?” asks the crewman, surprised. “I'm sorry, ma'am, what I mean is that it, ah, seems sort of wild.”

“It's a rescue,” invents Gwyneth. “It … it gets nervous.” They're all still looking at her, at the woman fool enough to take responsibility for all that chaos. She burns and hates her pale skin for showing it. “I'm sorry, it must have wandered off when I fell asleep. I'm … I'm very tired. I'm sorry.”

The crewman scowls.

“Ma'am, venipede are highly venomous―”

(Tell me about it.)

“―and letting it loose like this is highly irresponsible. There are signs up at all the entrances saying that potentially dangerous pokémon must be confined to their balls for the trip―”

“Doesn't have one,” replies Gwyneth. The screaming thing inside of her has quietened down, is now simply staring wide-eyed as she digs herself deeper and deeper into the hole. She cannot believe she is doing any of this. “It's ex-Plasma. It has a problem with poké balls.”

“Ma'am―”

“I'm sure there won't be any more trouble,” says the man with the conkeldurr. “The venipede is back where it belongs now. Right?”

He looks at her, and Gwyneth feels a surge of gratitude rising in her. God. Everything might have gone to hell, but at least the guy with the three-hundred-pound fighting-type is on her side.

“Right,” she confirms. “Like I said, I'm sorry. I'll take it from here.”

She holds out her hands (and wonders if she is really doing this) and the conkeldurr deposits the venipede her arms. It seems to have calmed down since it was caught – resignation, maybe, its little insect brain deciding that its time had finally come. At least, it isn't wriggling any more, and Gwyneth can cradle it in her good arm without much difficulty. All she has to do is not think about the fact that less than twelve hours ago this animal put her in the hospital.

“Well,” says the crewman. He looks unhappy. He has chased this damn thing around the vehicle deck for fifteen minutes in the middle of the goddamn night, Gwyneth can see it in his eyes; he's gotten oil stains on his trousers and broken a shoelace. If this were a regular-size centipede, he would have stamped on it by now. But it's a pokémon and that makes things different; his anger turns around, finds a new target in this scruffy punk kid who says it's her partner. Who the hell has a pet venipede? That lady over there is right, the creature is a menace. It probably broke the kid's hand itself, he's thinking. Gwyneth almost smiles at the idea.

“Well,” he says again, looking at the man with the conkeldurr. The big fighting-type swings its stick of concrete off one shoulder and effortlessly up onto the other. “Okay. I guess, if you promise to keep it under control …”

“I will,” says Gwyneth earnestly. “Seriously, I'm so sorry. Won't happen again.”

The venipede twitches in her grip, its legs digging into her chest like blunt knives. She swallows and hopes her discomfort isn't visible.

“Okay,” says the crewman. “Fine. But I'm keeping an eye on you. Anything like this again, and you'll be barred from our ferries.”

He turns around to leave, and Gwyneth sags in relief. Everyone can see, but she doesn't care; people are starting to look away now, to go back to their books or tablets or whatever, and this is over, and she isn't being fined or killed by a bug-type, and right now that's all that matters.

But it's not all done. The other man is still here, though, looking at her and grinning in a way that makes her feel uneasy. Gwyneth cannot see anything funny in this situation. She is suspicious of anyone who can.

“Thanks,” she says, not knowing what else to say. “I think you probably saved me there.”

He keeps grinning.

“C'mon,” he says. “Gwyneth? It's me. Don't tell me you've forgotten me already.”

And then Gwyneth sees it, and she is so deep in astonishment she forgets the poison-type she's holding pressed up against her heart.

“Tomás?”

“Hey, you got there in the end,” he says. “Still causing trouble, I see.”

Gwyneth feels herself reddening.

“Yeah,” she says, trying to laugh and not succeeding. “Guess I am. But, uh, Tomás, how's it going, dude? I see Rafa's all grown up.”

The conkeldurr looks up at the sound of his name and sniffs deeply, nose bobbing. Gwyneth vaguely recalls hearing somewhere that that's something like a greeting, for a conkeldurr.

“Yeah, yeah he is,” says Tomás proudly, looking at him. “Blossom not with you?”

“Oh,” she says. “Uh, no, not today. She … she's pretty old now, she gets dizzy on boats.”

“Oh yeah, guess she would be.” Tomás gestures to a chair. “Hey, now all that's over, let's sit down a minute. We have a little while before we hit Castelia.”

“Okay,” agrees Gwyneth uncertainly, and sits down next to him. Automatically, she releases the venipede into her lap, and for a second is seized by a sudden terror that it will run away again – but it doesn't move, just crouches there like a pint-sized demon. Does it know that she just saved it? She has no idea how smart bug-types are. For now, she's just glad it isn't causing any more trouble.

“So how've you been?” asks Tomás. His suit is impeccable, Gwyneth notices. She isn't a good judge of this kind of thing, but even she can tell it was not cheap. It fits too well for that.

“I've been okay,” she answers, resting one hand gingerly on the venipede's carapace. She tells herself that she is doing this in case it runs. She does not believe she will really stop it if it does. “I'm in Aspertia at the moment. Heading back east for my brother's wedding.”

“Really? That's great news! Wish I had a wedding to go to. Unfortunately, I'm just on my way to a conference in Castelia.”

As if waking from a trance, the venipede shifts in her lap and turns to bring its eye to bear on Rafa. A rattling sound comes from somewhere deep inside it, and Gwyneth runs her fingers over its shell, hoping it isn't thinking of taking revenge.

“Yeah? What kind of a conference?”

“Bridges,” he says. “No, seriously. Structural engineering. I make bridges. Well, I help at least.”

Unova is split into three by the two huge rivers that come down from the north and empty out into the bays; it's a country with a lot of demand for bridges. Gwyneth doesn't know the first thing about structural engineering, but even she can guess that this is a lucrative business.

“Neat,” she says. “That must be interesting.”

Tomás laughs.

“You may be the first person to ever say that,” he tells her. “I just do simulations, water flow over supports, that kind of thing. Pretty tedious, really, but I like it.”

“Can't be that bad,” says Gwyneth, because she is still looking at the suit and all the money that went into it, and trying not to be angry. Tomás doesn't deserve it. It wasn't him that put her in the wrong end of Aspertia. That's all on her.

Besides, he just saved her. She should make an effort to be nice, she thinks.

“It's weird, bumping into you like this,” she says. “You, uh, still in touch with Ashley?”

Tomás grins and shows her his hand, a gold band on the ring finger.

“Sure am,” he says. “We're getting married next year.”

Gwyneth's smile freezes, turns glass-brittle. Of course.

The venipede clicks in her lap, and she realises she is starting to squeeze it between her fingers. Probably it's too tough to be hurt like that, but she releases it anyway, and quickly. She's all too aware of what an angry venipede can do.

“Really?” she says to Tomás, trying to disguise her alarm. “That's … that's amazing. You've been together all this time?”

“Kind of. We drifted apart a bit when we came back home and went to college, but then we caught up again afterwards and it was like we'd never left.” He smiles. “It's a cliché, I know, marrying the girl you meet on your trainer journey. But hey, if it works, it works.”

She forces a smile. Yes. The girl you meet on your trainer journey. That old chestnut.

“That's really great,” she says. “I thought you two were cute together.”

“Hah! Thanks. What about you, what've you been doing with yourself all this time?”

Great question. What has she been doing with herself all this time? She realises that she really does not know.

“Bit of this, bit of that,” she says noncommittally. “Travelled around a lot with my … with a friend. Worked in a few different places.” She gives him her best impression of a smile. “Nothing as fancy as structural engineering, though.”

Tomás must know this already. Her life is stamped all over her, as his on him; Gwyneth can see how embarrassed he is to be sitting there in his expensive suit in front of her unwashed hair and ratty bomber jacket. So he changes the subject, and makes his mistake.

“It's not all that,” he says. “Hey, by the way, there's something I've been meaning to say to you for the past nine years now.”

“Yeah? Well, let's have it, then.”

“How come you never told us who your brother was?”

The fury in her eyes is there and gone so fast Tomás isn't even sure he saw it. She sees the uncertainty on his face. If it's real, she thinks, he doesn't understand it. Who wouldn't be proud to know Hilbert ze'Haraan?

“He's … I just figured I could do without the pressure,” says Gwyneth tautly. “Kind of rough for a kid on her trainer journey to have a brother like that.”

“Oh, right.” Tomás looks embarrassed. “Makes sense. Uh, sorry about that. Ash is always saying I need to think more and talk less.”

How cute. Gwyneth has no idea what she's supposed to say. Some sort of reassurance, maybe.

“It's okay,” she tells him. “I'm not a trainer any more. No competition now.”

“Huh? I thought you were.”

“What? Why?”

“Well, you know.” Tomás gestures at the venipede, which flinches and makes Gwyneth's heart skip a beat in panic. “Venipede aren't exactly ideal pet material.”

“Oh, right.” (Don't attack. Please for the love of god don't attack.) “Uh, sorry, Tomás, but could you, uh, not do that? It's … well, like I said. It's a rescue.” She holds up her bandaged hand. “This is what happened last time someone startled it,” she says, hoping it comes across as a joke.

It does not. Tomás looks aghast.

“What, seriously?” He casts a sideways glance at the venipede, uneasy. “Wow.”

Gwyneth forcibly unclenches her teeth.

“It's no big deal,” she says, slowly and carefully. “Looks worse than it is. Just, uh, I really don't want to cause any more trouble.”

“Right,” agrees Tomás. “Sure. Can I ask how someone who isn't a trainer ends up with a rescue venipede, anyway?”

“You can,” says Gwyneth, trying to think of a plausible lie. “I … well, I just … saw it at the shelter and fell in love. You know.”

She pats the venipede lovingly on the hump, which is to say that she brings her hand very close to its shell but does not actually touch it.

“Okay,” says Tomás. “Takes all sorts, I guess. I mean, there's Roxie and Burgh and all.”

“That's right.” Gwyneth wonders what he's thinking right now. She would be willing to lay money on it not being complimentary. “Anyway, I wouldn't change it for the world.”

That must have come out especially convincing, because Tomás smiles in the way that people do when they think they see genuine affection.

“Nice,” he says, and then a bell chimes over the PA system and the voice of Jon Palmer drifts out over the heads of the passengers:

“Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. We will be arriving Castelia in about five minutes. Would drivers please return to their vehicles, and all passengers ensure they have all their belongings with them ready for disembarking.”

Tomás stands up – although, Gwyneth notes, not too quickly.

“Well,” he says. “Guess I'd better get back to my car. Nice catching up with you, Gwyneth.”

“Yeah,” she says, shaking his hand. “Real nice.”

He walks off, Rafa slouching after him with the casual pace of a creature unaccustomed to being stopped. Gwyneth watches the two of them until they disappear in the crowd, imagining the car in the deck below, imagining it gliding out into the electric dawn of a Castelia night. She imagines a return to Virbank, Ashley waiting, a knock at a door, a kiss. She imagines Wellspring Cave.

Gwyneth sighs and looks down at the venipede. It looks back up at her with undisguised venom. She has never seen anything as nakedly acidic that wasn't reflected in a mirror.

“Well,” she says, uncomfortably. “Guess it's just you and me, then.”

It hisses at her, jaws clicking. She shrugs and looks out in the direction Tomás took.

“Yeah, me too, asshole. Me too.”


Some people get chosen and some do not. Gwyneth is standing on a broad stone jetty in Castelia at four in the morning, holding a venipede, and she is not sure how any of this came to be.

At her back is the sea; at her face, a wall of night-dark glass. Castelia doesn't have the space of Virbank. Here, the skyscrapers push right up against the shore, their shadows tumbling out and onto the waves. Gwyneth remembers being eight and coming here for the first time, some school trip or something, and seeing the spires flame in the afternoon sun as the bus came over the Skyarrow Bridge. It doesn't feel that much darker even now. The streetlight, the traffic, the lit-up windows; Gwyneth saw on TV once that dolphins have half their brain sleep at a time, so the other half can keep swimming, and that, she thinks, is Castelia. Half of it sleeps, and half keeps on whirring towards the light.

The venipede adjusts itself in her arms and she comes back to herself.

“Okay, dude,” she says. “I saved you, and thanks for not killing me again, I guess. You can go now.”

She puts it down and starts walking up the pier towards the shore. She stops at the sound of skittering feet.

Gwyneth turns and sees the venipede squatting at her heels, its evil orange eye glinting in the streetlight.

“C'mon,” she says. “Give me a break here.”

The venipede does not move.

Gwyneth sighs. She's tempted to kick it into the sea, except she knows that even she isn't that cruel, not really. After all, she was a trainer once. Her viciousness is mostly reserved for human beings.

“This is 'cause I survived your poison, right?”

No reaction. It's possible the venipede doesn't understand a word she's saying. Bug-types are not known for their intelligence.

“Look, dude, I know what this is.” She read all about it in those magazines, a lifetime ago. How do you get a pokémon to work with you? You prove your worth. Usually that's a contest of strength; that's what capture is all about. Sometimes it's other things. (She remembers Corbin, who followed her because, she thinks, he liked the shape and texture of her dreams.) “This is about me surviving your poison, right?”

The venipede threw everything it had at her, and she survived. She's proven her worth, in a grotesquely hardcore kind of way, and now it's impressed. It sees power, and wants to share in it.

Gwyneth cannot even begin to figure out how to explain what a colossal mistake it has made.

“I'm not a trainer,” she persists. “Seriously. And I can't afford to feed you, either.”

It keeps its eye on her. Gwyneth wonders, briefly, what gets close enough to a venipede this aggressive to take out an eye. Then she realises that she has it the wrong way around, that it is probably aggressive because it lost the eye, and all at once she sighs and closes her eyes, aware now that she has lost.

“Okay,” she says. “Whatever. See if I care.”

She turns around and walks on towards the city. The venipede pauses for a moment, then follows.

Except that of course it isn't the venipede, not any more. Now, thinks Gwyneth, it's her venipede.

The thought sits worse with her than the poison ever did.

Oh, is she? Nice. Maybe I did look that one up when I wrote that part and then forgot.


Yeah, BW2 is set two years after BW, but I've scaled that up to 10 years, mostly because I needed time for Gwyneth and Nika to grow up, get into a committed relationship and then break up again -- and also because I wanted BW2, like all the other games, to be happening in the background of Gwyneth's journey, to emphasise the whole NPC thing.


Glad you think so! I really like venipede, and I really enjoyed writing about this one. Gwyneth needed a pokémon, of course, because this is a kind of trainer journey, and while travelling together isn't going to be easy for either of them, it will probably be for the best. Maybe. We'll have to wait and see!


That makes sense! I've edited that part to vary it up a bit -- he has more than one distinguishing characteristic, after all. Thank you for your review, and I hope you continue to enjoy the story!

Such was the plan! There were a few candidates for Gwyneth's partner – I was sorely tempted by wingull, because I live near the coast and am completely in love with how spectacularly dickish seagulls can be, and also because I've never seen a wingull written as if it were just like a herring gull but with the power to vomit water on you hard enough to knock you over – but in the end, venipede fit the best. They're canonically numerous around Virbank, they're small and angry and probably classified as vermin, and they're very, very poisonous. Given that Go Home is among other things a study in abjection, all these things together were just too apposite to pass up.

There's a lot about Go Home that's the result of research into the northeastern US, but this particular bit of accuracy is … completely unintentional. Neat. In bringing Tomás – and, through him, sort of Ashley as well – back, I was mostly just trying to set up a shaky sort of parallel between the starts of Gwyneth's childhood and present-day journeys, to start encouraging a comparison, but it's always good to know that thematic structure hasn't made the actual course of events too unbelievable.

Thank you! If metaphors to do with TV documentaries about marine life are your thing, then this, surprisingly enough, might just be your thing; I'm pretty sure she makes at least one or two others over the course of this story. I guess maybe she watched a super impressive documentary one time and it stuck with her. As for her stepping out into the wider world, we'll see just that later this afternoon – for a little while, at least. Up next, Castelia – and the uncomfortable realisation of what travelling with a trainer really means.

While I don't think Maxine and Gwyneth will have the same interaction as Artemis and Emilia from Artibary Execution, Maxine still left an impression to Gwyneth there. Saadiyyah is also neat, I like the idea of a hijab wearing trainer.

I thought it was cute of Gwneyth being impressed with Nika there! Makes me kinda sad thinking about how eventually their relationship won't work out.

The part where Gwneyth laments about not learning her father's language reminds me of how many American children, including me, who have immigrant parents feel the same way. Like I know several people and friends that aren't able to speak Chinese, Spanish, and several other languages.

Another enjoyable chapter there, looking forward to more!

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 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 slip down whenever she stops concentrating on looking where she's going. 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, paralyzed 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 her good 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, asshole,” 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 Hector 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.


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, the beam of a flashlight 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 each other's flashlight beams. 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 flashlights 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.

Yeah, afraid that poison is really slowing Gwyneth down. I predict it's going to be rougher from here on out.

I like we get more interaction between Gwyneth and Saadiyyah and how her more optimistic personality contrast Gwyneth. There were also some neat references like the different types of boldore and the box network.

I also like the Bianca shout out there. Indeed she deserves more appreciation.