Ghost Town

TWO: FAMILIAR SPIRITS
TACOMA

Tacoma is lost.

She really doesn't see how any of this happened. As far as she can remember it – and there is some haziness around the crucial moments – she was just on her way home. Got off at the station, said hi to Harry. He said hi back, refused to let her carry her case across the station, because he's just like that. Asked if her parents were coming to pick her up, but they weren't. Neither could get the day off work, and Nick hadn't arrived yet; his flight was supposed to arrive at Goldenrod at more or less the same time as her train arrived at Mahogany. He'd be up later that evening.

Nick. Did this have something to do with him? She was carrying that parcel in her bag. Take it to your Uncle Nick, said Keith, and Tacoma had to bite back her irritation at his overfamiliarity. You don't get to call him that, she thought. He's been telling me not to call him that for years, so you sure as hell don't get to do it. Makes him feel old, he says. And you're an adult now, Tacoma. No reason for you to be giving me epithets like I'm any better than you.

Anyway, she had that parcel in her bag, and she has a feeling that might have had something to do with it. Keith did say that it was to do with her uncle's research, and Nick is researching other dimensions, in his lab at Yellowbrick University. She remembers being irritated about it, even aside from the fact that she'd been roped into doing this for Keith. (She refuses to call him Professor Allbright. She is, after all, an adult now. No reason for her to give him epithets like he's any better than her.) The damn thing was heavy – really heavy, even. That was why Keith didn't just put it in the mail. When he handed her the parcel, at the end of that tutorial, she felt the heft of it in her hand and asked him what it was.

“A rock sample,” he said.

“Since when is my uncle interested in rock samples?” she asked. “Or you, for that matter?”

Keith did that annoying thing he does where he smirks and adjusts his glasses, and Tacoma thought to herself, oh, just get to the point, you jumped-up little prick.

“It's a special rock sample,” he said. “Related to your uncle's dimensional studies. I'd leave it at his lab, but I think he'll want it before he comes back from his sabbatical.”

Obviously she tore the parcel open as soon as she got back to her room, but it really was just a piece of rock: a smooth, vaguely conical piece of stone about twice as big as her fist. Heavy, too. She spent a while examining it, trying to figure out what was so special about it, but other than a crack on one side she couldn't find anything. The brief note that came with it didn't give any details: Nick, here's that sample we were talking about. Think you'll get a kick out of it. ―K. As far as Tacoma could see, it was just a rock.

A rock that, for some reason, the Professor of Ghost Studies at Kanto's top university wanted to send to the Senior Reader in Extradimensional Research. So urgently that it couldn't wait until Nick got back from his sabbatical. You'll see him at Christmas, right? asked Keith. I wonder if you could do me a favour.

And, well, Tacoma needs to pass his ridiculous little course to keep on track for her degree in pokémon medicine, despite the fact that if ghost-types get sick or injured there isn't much a doctor can actually do, so she said yes. Which is why she was carrying the mysterious, possibly extradimensional rock with her as she tried to manoeuvre her suitcases down the icy streets of Mahogany towards her parents' house.

Which, in turn, might be why she appears to be in one of those extra dimensions right now.

She really doesn't see how it happened. One moment, she's cutting through the park in the fading light, cursing the fuck out of ice in general and this path in particular, and then … then she's not sure, but after that not sure comes this.

Tacoma looks around again. It's night, or it's dark at least; the air is still in a way that makes her think she's inside, but she can't see any sign of a window. Can't see anything at all, in fact. She bends down, as she has a hundred times before, and feels the floor: smooth tiles, rectangular, worn. Impossible to tell the colour or the material.

She takes a deep breath. It tastes of dust and age.

At some point, she's going to have to move. But in the darkness all around her, in the cave-like stillness of the air, she feels like she can see that ravine in the Silverblacks again, its awful, impossible depth. Anything you dropped in there disappeared forever. No trace, no sound. Even after she saw people climb down to the bottom and back, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was simply nothing down there but void.

And faced with that, Tacoma finds that she cannot move at all.

Another breath. This place is so quiet. She's used to quiet – she's from Mahogany, for Christ's sake – but even in her sleepy little hometown there are night noises: wind, noctowl, nightingales, the hum of electricity in the wires. Here in this unnatural dark, there is absolutely nothing at all. And that is something Tacoma has no idea how to deal with at all.

She breathes in again. She wishes Nikole was here, but she was in her ball when this happened, and none of Tacoma's bags have come with her. Suitcase, shoulder bag, rucksack: all presumably still in the municipal park, lying there in the snow with her uncle's goddamn mystery rock. And Nikole's poké ball, at the bottom of her bag.

Hell. If only she'd put it in her pocket. But no. Nikole had a cold, so Tacoma refused to let her help carry the luggage, and so she stayed tucked away right at the bottom of her bag, as far away from the freezing December air as Tacoma could get her.

So. No Nikki, no company, no light, no anything but a boundless abyss.

Okay, then.

She stretches out her arms in front of her: nothing. Slowly, carefully, she edges one foot forward, and is relieved to find that she doesn't immediately fall into a bottomless pit. Another step, and still the floor stays firm beneath her. Another, and another and another and another, and―

Her fingers touch something. Tacoma leaps back, breath catching in her throat, but then her brain catches up and she realises what it is.

Oh. Right.

Sheepishly, she puts a hand out and feels stone beneath her fingers. Yes: it's just a wall. Big blocks, smooth with age. Like the old city hall in Saffron. There's nowhere like this in Mahogany, as far as she knows.

“All right.” It's the first thing she's said since arriving here. Her voice sounds thin and weak in her ears. The air, she tells herself. It's just a weird atmosphere. Bad acoustics. That kind of thing. This is much easier than admitting that it's probably all down to her. “All right, so … follow the wall.”

Step after careful step through the dark. How long has it been now? Long enough that she'd have expected her eyes to have started adjusting, but she can't even see her hand on the stones, six inches from her face. She tries not to think about it, and keeps following the wall as it curves around the room.

A minute passes, or maybe an hour, or maybe ten years, and then at last her hand meets something flat. She reaches up, feels first one edge and then another. Almost like …

Stairs. Stairs! Of course, she's just underground! So if she can just take the stairs up, she'll be able to get out of here, back up into the light. Tacoma leaps for what she thinks is the bottom, cracking her shin against the step in her rush, and then yes, thank God, there it is: a staircase. She scrambles up as fast as she can, stumbling as the stairs curve around, and falls over the last step into a dark every bit as deep as the one she just came from.

“No!”

It slips out before she can stop herself. The sound of it sickens her. Tacoma Spearing, whiny little asshole. She grits her teeth, shoves herself back up onto her feet, and moves around the wall again, looking for a door, more stairs, anything; there are stairs, yes, on the far side of the room, and she climbs them more slowly than the last set, telling herself that she doesn't expect to find anything at the other end, just more darkness.

She finds more darkness. She's disappointed anyway.

But she's not going to give up, not now that she's psyched herself up like this; she's going to keep going, find more stairs, find an exit. So: around the edge of the room again, and up the next flight of stairs, and the next, and the next, and somewhere along the way around what is either the eighth or the ninth identical room in a row she lets her hand fall from the stones and sinks down onto her knees.

It's the same place, isn't it? Looping over and over. A circular room, stairs at each end. The same place, sucking her back whenever she tries to leave.

She's shaking now, the kind of shakes that come from deep inside your bones and work their way out in heavy, painful waves. Like there's something vital broken inside her and without it her body is just going to shiver into pieces.

“Help me,” she whispers, arms wrapped so tight around herself they hurt. “Someone. Please help me …”

And then, quite suddenly, someone does.



Alex. It has to be. Who else has a pokémon called Lothian? Nobody that she knows. And, well, wherever she is, she's pretty sure that it would take extraordinary powers to reach her. Which, though Tacoma has never seen much evidence of it, Alex is supposed to have.

“Alex!” she calls, trying to find his voice again, somewhere in the back of her head. “It's Tacoma! Where are you?”

No response.

“Alex?” Please don't let him be gone, please for the love of God don't let him be gone and her alone in the dark again―

T-Tacoma?

He sounds upset. Shocked, even. Tacoma supposes she can understand that. She's not doing so hot herself.

“Alex!” She turns around and around, glaring into the dark as if he might somehow be there. “Alex, where …?”

Oh my God, Tacoma …

“What? What is it?”

The atmosphere in the room shifts suddenly, grows thick and dense as the muggy air of a summer night in Saffron. Tacoma's breath sticks – she coughs – feels the air collapsing in on her from every side―

―and suddenly there he is, looking down at her from between his hat and scarf, pale face blindingly bright after the concentrated dark of her prison.

“Tacoma,” he says, a real voice now, not a hum in the bones of her skull. “Oh my God, Tacoma …”

“Alex!” She leans forward to grab him, trying to make sure he's really there, but something goes wrong; she just bumps her head against his shoulder. “Wait, what the …?”

“Hold still,” he says, eyes wide. “Just – just hold still a minute, okay?”

Something's not right. How is Alex this tall? She's looking up from the height of his chest, somehow. And what's up with her body? Why can't she move anything?

“Alex,” she asks, observing the fear in her voice and despising it, “what's going on?”

“I don't know.” He bites his lip. “I, um … Tacoma, do you know what you … I mean, uh, can you see …?”

She turns her head. Her neck feels strange, elastic. If she pulls like this, and if she looks down …

There's Nick's mystery rock, in Alex's hand. And there's a thin ribbon of dirty purple mist, rising up from the crack in its side and into―

Tacoma looks up again, fast.

“Alex …”

“I know,” he says.

She can't think of a response. She looks at him instead, all pale and fearful in the moonlight. He looks cold. How come she can't feel it? Or do ethereal severed heads not have that power?

“Alex,” she says. “Am I dead?”

He's crying. Tacoma doesn't remember ever seeing him do that before, even when things were at their very worst. Seeing it now is almost as unsettling as being a disembodied head.

Almost.

“I just got home,” he says weakly. “I just got home today and they told me your … they told me Aaron Lockwood found your body in the river.”

It doesn't hurt, she tells herself. You knew this deep down, right? You must have done. So it doesn't hurt at all.

Tacoma is usually a pretty good liar, but tonight she can't seem to make it work.

“No,” she whispers. “No, I can't be …”

But she can, and she is, and she can see it all on Alex's face, in the pain of this boy she hasn't spoken to in years. His face is an awful grey rag of a thing, barely recognisable. He still cares, she realises. He still cares, and he came home to find …

To find that she was dead.

She swallows.

“Alex,” she says, straining towards him as best she can. She can't pull very far away from the rock, but she can get a little closer. “I'm sorry.”

He wipes his face on the back of his glove, gives her a look.

“Not your fault that you got killed,” he mutters.

“That wasn't what I was apologising for.”

Alex looks at her for a little while. Somewhere beyond the little slice of night that she can see, Lothian's wings are rustling, and Tacoma imagines him pressed up against his partner's good leg, transmitting his soothing vibrations.

“It's bloody freezing,” says Alex, in the end. His expression is unreadable. “Let me get back inside and I'll find you a mirror.”



Alex moves more softly than Tacoma expects; he manages to get the door open silently, despite having both hands full, and though he's limping a little from the walk in the cold he still takes care to place his cane on the strip of carpet running down the centre of the stairs with each step, masking its click in the thick pile.

She watches him manoeuvre himself up to his room, quiet and efficient as a Swiss watch, and then raises her eyes to the wall, ashamed. Tacoma Spearing, making assumptions. Aren't you supposed to be Alex's friend, she asks herself, and gives a bitter answer: yeah, the key word there is supposed.

In his room, Alex places Tacoma carefully down on his desk and sits down heavily on his bed, rubbing his leg. Lothian crouches by his feet, ears locked in position to focus the sound waves from his nose into Alex's calf. Whatever they're doing, it feels like something private, so Tacoma drags her eyes away and looks around the room instead.

It's not like she remembers. Desk, bed, bookshelf – all right, that stuff's been there as long as Alex has, but there's a travel typewriter next to her on the desk, and serious-looking books on the shelves where there used to be comics. Different chest of drawers, different wardrobe. No posters any more, just a single framed picture of a landscape she can't make out clearly in the dim light.

There's a photograph on the desk too, on Tacoma's other side, but she's too afraid of who might be in it to look.

“Thanks, Lothi.” Lothian chirps; Alex scratches between his ears and gets up again, flexing his leg slowly. “Okay,” he continues, speaking to Tacoma for the first time since he said he'd take her home. “Are you ready?”

No, not really. She's dead. She's a ghost, maybe, or a ghost-type, possibly. She's trapped in a rock whose inside is a terrifying void and her only alternative is to stick her head out into this unfamiliar room and see all the ways in which Alex's life has become something she no longer recognises. No, she is not bloody ready.

“Yeah, okay,” she says, and Alex picks up a mirror from his suitcase and shows her what she is.

A disc of grimy purple mist, swirling around the point where that thread connects her to the rock. Little bursts of green light eddying through it like drowned insects circling the drain. And there, drawn in thick, ugly lines of the same sludgy green: a crude approximation of the face of Tacoma Spearing, recently deceased.

She stares for a long moment. Wisps of purple smoke break off from the edge of her disc and dissipate around her.

She wants to tell Alex to take the mirror away, but she seems to have forgotten all the words she needs to make that sentence. As soon as she thinks it, though, he turns it away from her and puts it down regardless. Of course. Empath. Strange to feel it at work, after hearing about it for so long.

“I'm sorry.” He sits down in front of her, not breaking eye contact for a second. “Tacoma? How are you feeling?”

She tries to shrug, but of course she has no shoulders. The failed movement is embarrassing, and more embarrassing still is the fact that she finds it embarrassing, when Alex is sitting right there and looking at her so calmly.

“I mean you know,” she says, in the end. “Right?”

He has that look in his eyes, like the faintest suggestion of a sarcastic okay. It's comforting to see that that at least has remained.

“Yeah, well,” he says. “I feel like it's polite to at least pretend that I can't read other people's emotions.” He leans back and starts to take off his hat and scarf. When did his hair get this long? “Do you want me to tell you what I know about … what happened?”

“No,” she replies. At least she has the guts to say it this time. “I'm, uh, I don't think I'm – ready.”

It sounds pathetic, but Alex nods like he understands. He probably does, as well.

“Okay,” he says. “Do you mind if I eat something, then? Because otherwise I think I'm gonna faint.”

“Sure,” says Tacoma. She knows this much, at least. ESP takes ridiculous kinds of energy; there's a reason Alex has always been hungry. He doesn't look as thin as he used to, though. She supposes – hopes – that after the diagnosis his parents must have stopped thinking he was greedy and just let him have more to eat. “Go right ahead,” she adds, hoping that that sounds casual but encouraging, and not just like someone awkwardly accommodating her friend's unexpected needs.

He digs out a slab of chocolate from one of the bags on the floor and starts to demolish it, piece by piece. Lothian rears, gripping the arm of the chair in his claws, and Alex holds the chocolate up beyond his reach.

“Uh-uh,” he says. “This'll kill you. You know that.” Lothian stares up at him, a perfect picture of chiropteran innocence, and Alex makes a face. “Go on. Shoo.” Lothian withdraws, curls himself into a ball at the foot of the bed. His ears fold right the way down over his eyes, Tacoma notices. So damn cute.

She tries not to think of Nikole, still out there somewhere all by herself instead of sprawled on her bedroom floor, and almost succeeds.

“So,” she says. She has to say something. This silence is going to kill her all over again. “How's uni going?”

Alex pauses with a piece of chocolate halfway to his mouth.

“Really?” he asks, incredulous, and Tacoma feels something in her shatter.

“I just … I'm dead, Alex,” she says, and now she can't stop, her voice rolling on without any input from her brain. “I'm dead, I – I don't want to be dead, don't want to be whatever the hell I am now, I'm dead, I―”

“Hey.” He leans forward and puts his arms around her, fingers sinking a little into her fog. “It's okay, Tacoma. It's okay.”

“No, it's not―”

“Okay, you're right, it's not.” He's so warm. Tacoma never realised how warm living people were before. “It's not okay, and I don't know what's going on, but … tomorrow we can go to the library and do some research, try and figure what happened to you. I could take you home―”

“No.” He's doing the thing, isn't he? The psychic thing? Tacoma feels a glow, deep in the body she does not have. Like his hug is going right through her down into her soul. “No, I can't, Alex, not like – not like this―”

“Okay.” His voice stays level, no matter how much her own cracks and wavers. “We'll do what you want.”

She takes a deep breath. A fake breath, even, because she has no lungs, because she's just a weird ghost head―

No. Another breath. Focus on Alex's psionics, she orders herself. Let him help you.

A third breath.

Okay. She's dead. She's dead, and in defiance of everything she has ever been told about the afterlife it seems she now has a choice between being a misty ghost head or trapped in an endless void tower. This is bad. Probably the worst, actually. Tacoma can't actually think of a worse situation right now, though at least part of that's down to the fact that her mind isn't really bringing its A-game tonight.

So yes. Bad. But – she's not alone. And if anyone in Mahogany has a chance at understanding her enough to be able to help, it's probably the psychic.

She sighs.

“All right,” she says. “Okay. I'm … I dunno. Okay, I guess.”

Alex sits back in his chair. The glow of his psionics starts to recede.

“You were really upset when I started tracking you,” he says, after a moment or two. “Where were you? In that rock?”

She nods. It's about the only gesture she has left available to her.

“I guess it's not good in there?”

“No. No, it's … it's dark, and there are stairs that don't end.”

“Stairs in the dark. My worst nightmare,” says Alex, with a wry look at his leg, and manages to make her smile. “No way you can light it up?”

“I don't know,” says Tacoma. “I, um, didn't try.”

God. She is so damn thoughtless, isn't she? Should have at least had a go at it. You're a ghost, Tacoma. Spooky lights are sort of your thing.

“Hey,” says Alex, maybe picking up on her thoughts, maybe just seeing them in her face. “You didn't know.”

“I should've.”

“But you didn't. And that's fine.” Something about the way he says it makes it so much more persuasive than it would be in Tacoma's mouth. “Look,” he says. “It's been weird. That's gonna make you feel weird. But none of it's your fault.”

“I guess so,” she says, only half convinced. “Thanks, Alex. I don't even know if I'd have got out of the rock if you hadn't … you know.”

He shrugs awkwardly, like he doesn't know how to take the compliment.

“It's okay,” he says, in the end. “It's okay.”

Pause. He looks tired, Tacoma thinks: deep circles under his eyes, head slumping. He said he only got back today, didn't he? So still tired from travel, and then on top of that he tracked her down from a block away.

Time for her to do a good deed in return.

“I think we need to sleep on this,” she says. “Like, we can't even look whatever I am up till the library opens, right? And maybe I'll feel better in the morning.”

“Are you sure?” asks Alex. “I can talk now, if you―”

“No. It's fine.” She does her best to smile, and finds it comes more easily than she anticipated. “Dying really takes it out of you,” she says. “And I had to take the overnight train to get back to Johto. Never get much sleep on that thing. So. You know. I could use a rest.”

Alex looks at her carefully for a long moment, but doesn't argue.

“All right,” he says. “Are you okay there? You don't want me to move the rock somewhere more comfortable?”

“No, I'm fine. I think.” She can't actually feel the desk beneath her. Whatever sort of ghost she is, the rock isn't a part of her the same way the purple fog is. Like a shell, maybe. Or a cage. “But thanks,” she adds, wishing she hadn't thought of that. “You're handling this way better than I am.”

That veiled sarcastic gleam in his eyes again, as comforting as fireflies on a summer night.

“I'm not the one who died,” he says. “Okay. Night, Tacoma.”

“Night, Alex.”

He pauses partway through getting up, like he's thought of something else to say, but whatever it is, it remains unspoken. Alex gets back into bed without another word, and just a minute or two later, Tacoma hears a change in his breathing that probably means he's asleep.

All right, then. She did her good thing. Now she has till morning to get at least a modicum of her shit together.

Tacoma takes a deep breath, and withdraws back into the rock.



It's good to have a body again, even if it is stuck down here in the dark. Tacoma flexes her fingers, shuffles her feet, and, satisfied that all her limbs are still present, glares into the blackness.

“Okay,” she says. Tacoma Spearing versus the void, round one. “I want lights.”

Nothing. Okay. Maybe you need to focus more. She concentrates, imagines sunbeams and torches and bonfires, and then again she says lights, and this time―

Whoosh!

Purple flames roar out of nowhere and drift up to the ceiling, filling the room with an eerie light. Tacoma stares at them for a moment, then at her hands. These are definitely her gloves. The ones she was wearing when … well, when she died.

“All right,” she says. “Getting somewhere.”

She can see the room now: circular, maybe thirty feet either way, with a staircase at either end and a huge slab of stone on a dais in the middle. Grey stone walls, dull green tiled floor. She's seen this somewhere before.

“Pokémon Tower,” she murmurs. “Lavender.”

The last leg of her trainer journey took her up into North Kanto, into the huge stretch of wilderness that occupies the northeast coast. There's a little town called Lavender up there among the foothills, with a historic grave tower containing a thousand years' worth of cremated pokémon spread over seven floors. When she visited, it looked a lot like this, although it had oil lamps instead of spooky ghost flames, a rare fragment of Kanto left behind by the rush to modernise. What's that thing Keith said about the illusions ghost-types make? That they're mostly drawn out of the victim's memories? Maybe this is something like that.

Who'd have thought that Ghost Studies would turn out to be useful after all, huh. Tacoma tries to smile at the thought, but it get lost somewhere in the transition from brain to mouth, and after a moment she gives up.

Instead, she turns her attention to the big stone thing in the centre of the room. It's pretty clear what it is, even before she takes a closer look: a sarcophagus. There's a name on it too, engraved at one end. It isn't her name. Or possibly it is; it's in Chinese and completely illegible to her Johtonian eyes.

Although it does give her an idea. She stares at the name for a second, trying to commit it to memory, then goes up the stairs to an identical circular stone room to look at an identical sarcophagus there. Except no, not quite identical; that's definitely a different name. This one looks Italian: Mauro Pavone. So it's not a loop, then. There are other floors. Unsure whether to be encouraged or dispirited, Tacoma checks the next floor (Lucy Black), and the next (something in Arabic), and the next (Flavie Lavoisier). And up, and up, a new name on every floor, until she finally reaches a room where there are no more stairs and one final sarcophagus.

She reads the name. Tacoma Spearing. Right.

Well, at least she has the penthouse suite.

One hundred other floors. One hundred other names, from all around the world. Presumably, one hundred other people who are all just as trapped here as Tacoma. So where are they? Why is it her that can wander around, turn the lights on and off, push her face out into the real world, and not them?

She thinks about calling out to them, but the last time she did that Alex heard in his sleep, and she doesn't want to wake him. There's always just going downstairs and trying to open a coffin, she supposes, but somehow she can't face it.

She takes off her gloves, then her hat and coat; it's nowhere near as cold in here as it is out in Mahogany. She sits down, back to the sarcophagus with her name on it, and closes her eyes.

God. Her mother and father are out there somewhere, trying to deal with the fact that she's gone. Nick. Her brother Everett. Everyone waiting for her to come home for Christmas, thinking her train was delayed, until the next morning they got the knock on the door and saw Con standing there with a grave face. Did they know then, when they saw him? Or did it happen a little later, when he asked if he could come in, his voice all low and quiet? Even then, maybe they still thought she was just in trouble, that they'd see her soon. Maybe they kept on denying it right up till the moment when Con sat them down and told them she'd been fished out of the river.

Tacoma meant it when she told Alex she didn't want to go home. She has already destroyed her family, by getting herself killed. She doesn't need to make things worse by showing them the monster she's become. That face she saw in the mirror – it's hers, yes, but it's approximate, ugly, like a drawing done in blunt crayon with bandaged hands. Show that to someone who loves her and it will only look like a defacement of her memory.

She's sorry she had to show it to Alex, even. The look on his face when she first appeared out of the stone just kills her, now she knows what it was he saw.

Maybe she should just get in the sarcophagus and disappear to wherever all the other dead people are. She almost gets up to try it, but in the end she lets the thought go. She can't do that. Not now Alex has seen her. Die a second time and she'll kill him too.

These are bad thoughts, Tacoma, she tells herself.

Yes, Tacoma, she answers. I fucking know that.



In the end, she gets a little sleep curled up on her coat with her hat for a pillow, and pushes her face back out of the rock as soon as she wakes up, unable to stand lying down in the tower for one more second. Back in Alex's room, the world is light again, suffused with that special winter kind of sunlight that looks as bright as summer but without any warmth whatsoever. Alex himself is still asleep, a tuft of tousled dark hair protruding from beneath the bedspread, and Tacoma makes no attempt to wake him. He got up in the middle of the night to follow a weird dream and rescue her. The guy's earned a lie-in.

Lothian is asleep too, although he has migrated further up the bed than he was when he curled up last night; now, he's almost sitting on top of Alex. Tacoma is reminded of Nikole, of the way she would go to sleep at the other end of the room and by morning be pressed right up against the side of the bed. So close that Tacoma couldn't get out without stepping on her. Which was exactly the point, of course. Nikole wanted to be woken as soon as her partner was up.

Ugh. Not a line of thought she has any interest in pursuing. Tacoma blanks it out and looks around the room instead. By daylight, she can see that the landscape is a painting of Mahogany, from the hills northwest of town. She thinks nothing of it, until she sees Ella's signature in the corner. After that, the fact that it's so good becomes less normal and more of a surprise. Tacoma knew she painted, but it's been years since she last saw one of her pictures; apparently Ella's got a lot better now.

After a moment of hesitation, she looks at the photo on the desk as well, and is relieved to see that it's just a picture of Alex's parents, with a young Ella. Figures. He probably doesn't want photos of Ash or Helen just lying around in the open like that. She's a little hurt that there's no evidence of her here, after well over a decade of friendship, but she's aware that this isn't a reasonable reaction. It's her who broke off contact, after all.

Lothian tenses and uncoils in one sharp, swift motion, and as he yawns Alex stirs and sits up too. He blinks, stares at Tacoma in something like a panic, and then seems to remember last night and relaxes.

“Morning,” he says, rubbing the stubbly skin around his mouth. “Have you been there all night?”

“I went back inside the rock to sleep,” she answers. “Figured out how to get the lights on.”

“That's good,” he says absently, still probing around his lips. “Hmph. Um. Gonna … have a shower. Get dressed. Then after breakfast I can take you to the library and we'll look up ghost-types.” He looks up suddenly, taking his hand away from his mouth as if just now becoming aware of what he's doing, and smiles stiffly. “Is that okay? Sorry, I guess you'll have to hide in the rock for a while.”

“Sure, Alex.” Whatever he wants. Tacoma owes him, after all. And anyway, given that she doesn't seem to be able to move the rock by herself, she really can't afford to alienate the guy who can carry her places. “I really appreciate you doing all this.”

“It's fine.” He pauses, takes a quick, nervous breath, and says, “You know, I … I kind of changed my name. Earlier this year.”

Tacoma tries not to look shocked, but it isn't easy. Alex is … well, he's Alex. Why would he change that?

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, uh, okay. What – what should I call you now, then?”

A long pause. Tacoma hears the creak of floorboards in another room, the clunking of a cupboard door from downstairs.

Slowly, not quite looking at her, the fingers of his left hand fiddling with the thumbnail of his right, Alex answers.

“… Jodi.”

This time she definitely doesn't manage to hide her shock. Like she could hide anything from an empath, anyway.

“Oh,” she says. “Oh, I … see.”

She does. She does see. She's heard of this before, vaguely. There was an article in that magazine, wasn't there? About that one trans― what even is the right word, anyway? Transsexual? Trans …. something else? It starts with trans, she's sure of it, but the article was a year ago; she can't even remember it properly now. At the time, it didn't seem important. Not something she'd ever actually come face to face with.

Something else to feel bad about. You hear about things and you never realise that they matter, that you're not reading about some distant curiosity but the lives of actual people. People like Alex. No, Jodi. Jodi. Get it right, Tacoma.

“You do?” asks Jodi.

“Yeah,” says Tacoma. “I guess I do.” Pause. Got to be careful. What she says here matters, really matters, and Tacoma really doesn't trust her mouth not to fuck it up without close supervision. “Okay, Jodi,” she says, and sees her friend's shoulders untense in relief. “Um … I would hug you, but, well.”

Jodi smiles weakly.

“I guess it's the thought that counts,” she says. “Lothi?”

Lothian, who has been watching the conversation with interest, bounces off the bed and retrieves her cane from where it fell during the night. Jodi takes it, levers herself up, and comes over to put her arms around Tacoma.

“I really missed you, you know,” she whispers, her voice thick with unshed tears. It feels like a stake hammered through Tacoma's chest.

“Yeah,” says Tacoma, bowing her head against Jodi's arm. “I missed you too.”

Neither of them make any move to explain. It isn't the time, yet. But they're back again, same town, same lives, and even if Tacoma is a ghost and Jodi is a girl that still counts for something.

Counts for a lot, actually. Tacoma doesn't know how to say it, has never been all that articulate about feelings, but it's there, and it matters. And that's going to have to be enough for now.



It's a little awkward being stuck in the background while Jodi gets on with her morning, but Tacoma manages. She hangs around in her room, trying to read the titles on the spines of her books – mostly non-fiction, which Tacoma finds sort of surprising; she thought Jodi liked novels – and waiting for her to return. When she does, popping back in after her shower to do her make-up, Tacoma is startled by how pretty she is. You can tell that she is what she is, but― wait. Is this prejudiced of her? It probably is. Why shouldn't she expect Jodi to be pretty, Tacoma asks herself, and is forced to admit that she can't come up with any answer except that Jodi wasn't a girl before.

Or was she? Was this always in her, waiting for the right time, the right knowledge, the right whatever it is that lets someone take the plunge and go public? Tacoma imagines the secret inside her, choked and stunted with ignorance and fear. Jodi will be twenty on the seventeenth. That's an awfully long time to have carried something like that. If that is how it happened.

Tacoma has no idea what to think, or even if these are things that she is allowed to think. She retreats into the rock to hide her embarrassment, promising herself she'll get better at this in future, and when she comes back out Jodi is gone again, along with Lothian. It's a relief, even if it is lonely here by herself, and it gives her time to try and recover a little of her composure. No need to make this more awkward for Jodi than it already is.

Don't worry, it's me, she hears in her head, just before the door opens and Jodi comes in, looking elegant in her sea-green dress and chewing the crust of a piece of toast. “Hey,” she continues, aloud this time. “Sorry to abandon you. I told everyone that I'm gonna stretch my legs and get some Christmas reading out the library, so I guess we're good to go.”

“Is that okay?” asks Tacoma. “You're going to go out like … this?

So much for not making it awkward; she regrets saying it as soon as the words have left her mouth. Jodi pauses mid-chew, eyes clouding for a moment, then swallows her toast and forces a smile.

“Yeah,” she says. “People are gonna find out. Might as well let 'em know on my own terms.”

Tacoma manages to not tell her how brave she thinks this is; that feels like it would be condescending.

“Right,” she says instead. “Makes sense.”

“Yeah.” Jodi pauses. “So, uh, unless you want to explain to my family and everyone what's happening, I guess maybe you'll have to go back in the rock. Then I can put it in my bag.”

This suits Tacoma just fine. Back inside she goes, to sit on her sarcophagus and kick her heels for a while, until she hears Jodi's voice in her head again.

Okay, coast is clear.

“Gotcha,” she says, and pushes her head back out to find herself on one of the low tables at the back of the Mahogany Public Library. Yellow light, grey shelving units, a window looking out onto an icebound car park in which the lone car has been buried up to the wheel arches in drifting snow. Tacoma hasn't been here in months, but she knows where she is; the layout is as familiar to her as if she'd only left yesterday. Down that aisle and to the left is Lorna Rosemont's desk, where all searches for books begin; opposite her are the microfiche machines, last port of call for so many high school local history projects. At the other end of the library, perched in her chair hidden behind the stacks, Simone Weller will be reading one of the same three books on beekeeping, cover to cover. Time doesn't touch this place; Tacoma imagines that in thirty years' time, she could walk in here and still see Simone reading her books, still see Lorna showing teenagers how to read microfiche.

Actually, she decides, she really doesn't want to think about the future right now.

“You speak to Lorna?” she whispers, to distract herself. Jodi nods.

“She asked about uni,” she replies. “Then pointed me to where the Pokédex is. And …” Her cheeks redden. “And she complimented my eyeshadow.”

“That's cool of her,” says Tacoma. “No, wait, that's not what – I mean, it is good. I don't even know how you blend it like that. I suck at that kind of thing. And now I'm talking too much.” She sighs. Jodi is even redder now. Great job, Tacoma. “Sorry,” she says, but Jodi shakes her head.

“No, it's … thanks.” A little smile, awkward but unforced. “I'm glad you like it.”

She sits there for a while, fiddling with her thumbnail again. Behind her chair, Lothian twitches his ears, listening out for who knows what; elsewhere in the library, Lorna says something to Simone in her low librarian's voice.

“Shall we look at the Pokédex, then?” asks Tacoma, after a moment.

“Oh. Yeah, sure.”

They turn their attention to the thick, well-thumbed book on the desk before them: Pokémon Index, Fifth Edition. The library doesn't have the latest one yet, but hopefully this will do for their purposes. Jodi opens it at the section on ghost-types, then flips through, past informative factoids and years of annotations from kids dreaming of their journeys, until she finds a picture that she recognises: swirling mist, cracked stone, jagged faux-human face.

“Spiritomb,” she reads. “Mercifully rare, both for the sake of those who encounter it and the spirits consumed in its creation, this artificial ghost/dark-type pokémon is the result of trapping anywhere between seventy and two hundred human souls within a spiritually conductive stone.”

Spiritomb. So there's a name for this. That makes Tacoma feel a little better. If this is a thing that's happened before, if someone's written scholarly articles about it, then it exists, in a way that waking up in a spooky void tower does not. It has history and depth. She tries out the words in her head: I'm a spiritomb. Doesn't sound great, exactly, but she'll take it.

It's messed-up, though. Who exactly creates a spiritomb? Who believes they have that kind of authority over other people?

“That's gross,” she says aloud. “What asshole invented that?”

Jodi raises her eyebrows, keeps reading.

“The method of their creation appears to have been discovered independently in many different countries; spiritomb have been found, composed of varying numbers of spirits, all over the world. The oldest appears to be an entity dating from during China's Song dynasty, composed of the spirits of one hundred and eight outlaws, and currently held for research purposes at Fudan University's Handan campus in Shanghai.

“Spiritomb vary in disposition; many are unpredictable, their personalities changing as the different spirits within seize control in their turn, while others are dominated by one spirit alone, the others lying dormant for reasons that have not yet been determined. In all cases, they are generally uncooperative, the circumstances of their creation having understandably soured them towards humans. This misanthropy and unpredictability, combined with their ability to club a man unconscious with pieces of his own shadow, makes them generally unfit for training, and dangerous to deal with. This contributor cannot recommend engaging with them under any circumstances.”

Jodi looks up, biting her lip.

“Sorry,” she says. “It's … well, I guess it was written by a dude. A dude who didn't particularly trust spiritomb.”

“It's fine,” says Tacoma. “Wish I knew how to beat someone up with their shadow, though. That sounds cool.”

She isn't sure if she means that, but it sounds vaguely funny in her head, so she figures it might help the mood at least. Jodi smiles nervously. Maybe it isn't funny after all. Or maybe Tacoma's forgotten how her sense of humour works.

“I was carrying this rock home, by the way,” she adds quickly, wanting to move on. “One of my professors – he teaches Ghost Studies – he gave it to me to take to Nick. You know, my uncle?” Jodi nods. “Said it was for his dimensional research. So that was in my suitcase. I don't remember when I … how I ended up in there.”

“But I found it in the skip outside Rick Fawkes' project.” Jodi's face twists into that familiar scowl, the way it does when she's thinking. “So whoever, um, you know, whoever it was, they knew about it. They dug it out of your bag and made sure to dump it there with all the other broken stones, where nobody would find it.”

“Except they weren't counting on Psy Officer Ortega over here,” says Tacoma. “Because you did find it.”

Jodi shakes her head.

“Lothian found it,” she corrects. “I just helped.”

Lothian shuffles his foreclaws and pushes a few stray locks of hair back into place in his mane, unclear about what's being discussed but certain that he is being praised, and Jodi rests an absent hand on his head as she continues.

“So that might be it,” she says. “That might be why you were … why you were murdered.”

Heavy words. They fall into the space between them and sit there, as disturbing and enthralling as a traffic accident. Someone killed Tacoma for a reason. They knew about the spiritomb rock, they knew she had it, and they knew exactly how to make it disappear.

But Jodi found it. And if the murderer finds out – if they ever discover that this thing they were willing to kill to keep secret is, in fact, not secret any more – then she'll be on their hit list too.

Tacoma swallows.

“Do you, um …?”

She doesn't need to finish. She can tell that Jodi has worked it out too; it's in the lines of her face, in the way her hand has tensed on Lothian's head and made him look up at her with concern in his jaundiced eyes.

“We need,” says Jodi, pronouncing each word with deliberate care, “to find out why your professor sent your uncle this rock.”

Tacoma wants to ask if she's sure, to tell her this is dangerous and she should know that she doesn't have to do it just because she feels an obligation to the asshole friend who walked out on her because she couldn't travel any more, but when she opens her mouth what comes out is:

“Yeah. I guess we do.”

They look at each other across the table for a long moment.

“We're gonna find who did this,” says Jodi, closing the Pokédex with a decisive snap. “I promise.”

Tacoma remembers being a kid, striking out fearlessly in search of trouble while Jodi hung back and mumbled excuses. The depressing thing is that she knows how they ended up switching places like this. You grow up. You see the light, at first in pieces and then in its awful totality, the blistering white glow of a nuclear explosion on the horizon, and with it the knowledge that by the time you have finished thinking this the wave of death will have arrived to wipe you and your town off the face of the earth. And that's the moment of truth: are you strong enough to take it, or do you fall?

Tacoma fell. She's been falling for years. And, well, it seems Jodi didn't. Anyone strong enough to come home to Mahogany and say, by the way, I am a girl now – that person is strong enough to see the light and stand to meet it as it roars across her face. Strong enough to go hunting murderers, too.

To hell with it. She needs to know who did this, and what's the worst that could happen? If it gets too dangerous, they can always back out. And Con and the cops will probably wrap this up before they get anywhere near the truth, anyway.

“Yeah,” she says, hoping she sounds more confident than she feels. “Let's go catch us a killer.”

There's a lot going on here that I like, but I think what appeals to me the most is how grounded it all is. The paranormal/supernatural investigator thing has been done quite a bit in pulp fiction the past few decades, but while this technically has the trappings of that genre, it's definitely not pulp. There's a real weight and inertia to the world and characters, and the writing clearly conveys that there's a lot of history to the place, the relationships, and even the actions that are playing out in the current frame of the story.

I'm also a big fan of exploring the parts of the canon that don't get touched as often. In every pokemon canon, there are seriously powerful psychics and literal spirits of the dead, but it's rarely ever used as anything more than window dressing, so exploring that (and in such a deep and nuanced way) is sure to keep me interested. I'm definitely captivated by the idea of a field of Ghost Studies, but like, of course there would be such a thing as Ghost Studies, and university courses on using psychic powers. There's a lot of moving parts so far in the story, and I'm very excited for all of them.

I think the other major strength of this is the voice. It's very strong and very distinctive (to the point where I was wondering if there would be distinctly different voices for the Jodi and Tacoma POVs, but was not disappointed when the tone stayed more or less consistent). It's actually something I wouldn't mind hearing as an audiobook, just because the way the language weaves together is so captivating.

THREE: PERSEPHONE
JODI

Jodi crunches through the snowy streets, making her slow way back towards Foster Road and Rick Fawkes' project. Lothian, always the more energetic one, ranges ahead, flying up onto lampposts and the eaves of nearby houses, dislodging showers of snow with the sweep of his tail and wings.

It's been a long day already, and it's barely half ten. Breakfast was weird – everyone staring and trying to hide it – and the walk through town to the library wasn't much better. She didn't pass many people, but she did pass some. Fergus Wright didn't recognise her and stopped to welcome her to town before figuring out who she was and trailing off awkwardly; Carrie Savage recognised her immediately, narrowed her eyes and said good morning Alex in such a cold tone that Jodi didn't have the courage to correct her. Fortunately, she didn't have to. Lothian banked around immediately and landed at her feet, making a thin, needling whine that set her teeth on edge and disrupted the venom radiating from Carrie's head, and Carrie just walked on by with her skiploom, leaving Jodi trembling and trying to stop her heart from pounding its way right out of her chest.

The library was okay, though. Lorna is a librarian right down to the pith of her bones, aggressively sensible in the face of any and all weirdness, and she processed Jodi's new face the way she would a new edition: old one stored away for archival purposes, new one taking its public position. Good morning, my dear, she said. I haven't seen you in a long time. And Jodi said (shaking a little) I know, it's been ages. By the way, can I update the name on my library card? It's Jodi. And Lorna said of course, Jodi, I'll just need you to sign the new one on the back here.

So off she went to find the Pokédex, card in hand, grinning at the clumsy new signature on the back like a kid on Christmas morning. Simone glared at her over the top of her book, but that was fine; Simone glares at everyone. She doesn't mean anything by it. Jodi said hi and Simone mumbled something back before returning her attention to the intricacies of beekeeping.

Then back to the awkwardness. Tacoma is … well, Jodi didn't really expect her to be doing well, given her current situation, but the girl thing and the way they've suddenly been forced out of their estrangement is making things even worse. Frankly, Jodi is a little scared of her. She does her best not to snoop too much in other people's minds – it's kind of rude – but it's hard not to pick up on the violent negativity seething within Tacoma's rock.

If she was any kind of friend, Jodi tells herself, she'd try to talk to her about it. But they aren't friends any more, just strangers shoved into unnaturally close proximity, and anyway Jodi doesn't have the guts to broach the subject with her. So. She walks on through the snow in silence, and tries not to think about how weird it is that she's carrying Tacoma's prison cell around with her in her shoulder bag.

Up ahead, Lothian glides down from the roof of the Mercers' house to land on the skip outside Rick's project. Now, after the weather has driven all the builders away until spring, it sits there looking raw and unfinished, the plastic sheeting covering the scaffolding flapping disconsolately in the wind. It's a familiar sight. A running joke in Mahogany is that Rick Fawkes' house will be just about done by the time the bombs finally fall, though Jodi has always found the humour somewhat limited. She pauses for a minute to lean against the skip and catch her breath, then beams a message down to Tacoma.

We're here.

Okay. Tacoma replies just a little too quickly. Okay, cool. Is it, uh … safe for me to come out?

Jodi looks around. Nobody else is out, although it's difficult to say who might be watching from the windows of the houses.

I don't know, she replies. Maybe?

Lothian starts scratching around in the skip, kicking little flurries of snow over the edge into the street. Jodi would like to oversee this herself, but she really has no way of getting up there to help; she can barely even climb steep stairs.

Huh, says Tacoma. Okay, I'll … can you take the rock out of your bag?

Sure. Out it comes, sitting heavily in her hand. How much do souls weigh? Enough to make this thing far heavier than it has any right to be, it seems. That okay?

Yeah. Yeah, I think, if I just lean in …

Something shifts. Jodi can't tell exactly what without enlisting Lothian's help, but something about the rock is not the way it was before.

Like I thought, says Tacoma, satisfied. I can see out the crack if I concentrate on not pushing all the way out.

Oh. Cool.

I can also hear, by the way. So you can save your energy and just speak normally.

“Okay.” Suppressing the urge to look around for watching eyes, Jodi lifts up the rock and turns the crack to face Lothian, digging through the iced-over rubble in the skip. “Can you see?”

Yeah. Pause. Are we expecting to find anything?

“I dunno,” says Jodi. “Figured it was worth a shot.”

Abruptly, Lothian stops, and a faint hum that Jodi wasn't really aware of until it ended stops with him. He looks at her, and sends a guttural vibration crunching through her gut: nothing.

“Right.” She sighs. “Guess they only threw the rock in here, whoever it was. Makes sense. Anything else would stand out.”

Sure. Tacoma pauses. So, uh … what now?

What indeed. Jodi chews her lip as she mulls it over. What other leads do they have? Nick, obviously, but you don't need to be an empath to know that going up to a man grieving for his dead niece and asking probing questions is not a good idea. Apart from that, well. There aren't a lot of options, honestly. Maybe if she was a cop she could get away with just outright asking people if they know anything, but given who she is, she suspects that's not going to fly. (She thinks of Carrie Savage, and shivers in a way that has nothing to do with the cold.)

“About last night,” she says, turning the rock around so Tacoma can see her. “You said you weren't ready. But, um, are you ready now?”

To talk about it? I guess. I mean, we kind of already are.

“Okay.” Jodi glances up and down the street. Someone's walking down from the junction with Shadwell Road, and she decides to move on, to keep up the pretence that she's just out for a walk. Besides, it's cold. Too cold to just stand around like this. “Okay,” she says again, “so what I know is that Aaron found you in the river. You were strangled, I think. That's all I've got. Does it maybe jog your memory?”

Um … not really, sorry. I don't remember being strangled.

Pause. Lothian swoops low over her head with a shriek, making sure to swipe at her hat with his tail. Jodi laughs and watches him soar upwards again, wheeling back and forth across the colourless winter sky. So bright today. She has no idea how he stands it up there.

Tacoma's mind darkens next to hers, curdling with sorrow, and Jodi's laugh dies on her lips as it slithers into the recesses of her own brain and poisons the moment. Nikole. Of course. And here she is, flaunting Lothian without a thought in the world for Tacoma and her heartbreak.

Should she say something? She should say something.

“I … I'm sorry about Nikole,” she says, looking down at the rock in her hand. “Really. Maybe if we can find where it happened, we can track her down.”

Yeah, says Tacoma. Maybe.

Jodi keeps walking. House after house, all as anonymous as each other under their coating of snow. Some of them have shovelled driveways, but most don't. Mahogany is small enough to walk, for the most part, and it's just easier to only clear enough space for you to get from door to pavement.

“Morning, Alex,” calls Roger Young, as he steps out of his front door.

“Morning,” Jodi replies. He smiles and sets off down the street in the other direction without sparing her a second glance.

Not particularly observant, huh, says Tacoma.

“Better than mean,” says Jodi, and then instantly regrets it as a little tremor of concern runs through Tacoma's mind.

Right, she says. Right.

A few seconds' awkward silence. Then:

You know, I … I think I remember where it happened.

“Really?” Jodi stops, hefts the rock so she can look at her properly. “Where?”

In the park.

Jodi scowls, considering this.

“When did your train get in again?”

I didn't say. But four thirteen.

“So the sun was going down.”

Yeah. People would've noticed if it had happened on a street …

“But not if it happened behind the trees.” Lothian has landed on a wall up ahead, looking back at her expectantly, but Jodi barely notices. “And there wouldn't be anyone else in the park either, would there? Just you, because it's so much quicker to cut through the park if you're going that way.”

Even with the snow, yeah.

“Yeah. Okay.” Jodi breathes out, sends a plume of her breath steaming whitely through the chilly air. “I guess we need to head over there and see what we can find, then. While it's all fresh.”

I guess. Tacoma doesn't sound that enthusiastic, but then, that's probably to be expected. Things didn't exactly go great for her the last time she was there. But, uh, won't your family be expecting you? You came home yesterday, you got up, you went out all morning?

“I'll say I … needed some time. Or something.” Jodi shakes her head. “Doesn't matter. They'll buy it, what with – what with me, I guess. And you. And everything.”

If you're sure, says Tacoma. I just don't want you to – I mean, you know. You just got home. You should …

Jodi waits, but it seems she has nothing else to say.

“If you're not ready,” she says, “then that's fine, we can come back later, or―”

No. No, it's fine. Her mind swirls, dark and ominous. Let's go do this.

“All right, sure.”

She doesn't move. Down the street, Lothian shuffles impatiently, and a familiar vibration plucks at her nerves: what's wrong?

“Nothing, Lothi,” calls Jodi, forcing her aching legs back into motion. “We're just coming.”

She glances down at the rock once more as she goes, like she could see Tacoma's face if she tried, but all she sees is the crack, as dim and lifeless as the stone it is.



Three Pines Park is all but abandoned. The long path cutting across it from the southeast to northwest corners has been ploughed at some point in the past few days – people use it to shave ten minutes off the trip through the town centre – but other than that, the whole thing is one smooth, unbroken sheet of white. The snow must have been building up here for a while; the children's playground on the left is almost completely buried, the upper half of the swing frame standing out above the tops of the rockers and roundabouts. On the other side, Jodi sees nothing at all but snow, all the way out to the railing along the King's Road.

It's always a little unnerving, walking through Mahogany after months in Goldenrod. The city wears the recession on its sleeve: boarded-up windows that have gone unrepaired since the war, smokeless chimneys, the homeless people in every other corner whose naked despair roars against Jodi's mind like a cold flame. Mahogany looks so quiet and comfortable by comparison. Jodi knows well enough that all you have to do is open a door to see the threadbare coats and pinched faces. There's a reason Ella has been painting over and over the same five canvases for the past six months, and why Lorna lets Simone Weller sleep on the upper floor of the library.

Lothian flies on ahead and lands on one of the trees that line the path, before the snow slides off the branch beneath his claws and carries him with it. He hits the ground with an aggrieved shriek and jumps back to his feet, brushing snow out of his fur and trying hard to look like this is exactly where he meant to end up. Jodi hides her smile and lets him have his moment.

She has to slow down here. Not just because the path isn't as clear as the pavements, but because she's been out for a while now, and there's a limit to how much walking around town she can stand. She does try to take exercise and keep her strength up, despite her leg, but given that most of what she eats gets sucked up by her overdeveloped brain, she struggles to take in enough calories to maintain muscle tone. That was one of the problems she ran into on her trainer journey; she didn't have much money for food, and so she just didn't get any stronger, no matter how much hiking she did. By the time they got to Hawthorn she was actually thinner than when they'd left. Tacoma tried to go slow for her, but Jodi could tell that it was a struggle.

“Anywhere along here look familiar?” she asks, holding up the rock. “You can probably come out if you want a better look. There's nobody here.”

Cool.

That strange rushing noise, and then there she is, swirling out from the crack in her purple cloud. Tacoma shakes her head a little, the thread connecting her to the rock flexing and stretching as she moves, and sighs.

“Light,” she says. “God. This is so much better than peeking through the crack. Feels more like I'm outside.” She looks around. “Right, so. I don't think it was here. Definitely came this way, though.”

“Okay.”

They keep moving, girl and ghost and the noivern up ahead, between thickets of bare branches and bright white snow. Jodi's hand is getting tired; she shifts the rock from her hand into the crook of her arm, making Tacoma float just in front of her shoulder. This close, Jodi can feel a faint warmth emanating from her mist. It's surprising. She always thought ghosts were cold. Then again – if you compress gas, it gets hot, right? So what if you compress a hundred souls into one rock?

Well, what would Jodi know? She's neither a scientist nor a theologian. She isn't even a proper empath, yet. Not certified, anyway.

“Maybe here, actually.” Tacoma glares at a huge, skeletal beech. “I think – I definitely came this way. Might have been here? Might have been further on. I know I passed this tree, but I don't remember passing the, you know, Con Wicke's tree?”

Of course Jodi knows. Nobody will ever let Con forget that before he was a cop, he was a teenager with a pocket knife and an insatiable thirst to carve his name in anything that would take it. Over the decades, time and storms have taken out a couple of the benches that once proudly proclaimed that Con Was Here, but the massive oak halfway through the park is still there, and still scarred.

“Sure,” says Jodi. “So, somewhere between here and there.” She looks down the path. That might be the oak over there, though it's hard to tell from a distance, and without any leaves. There's nothing immediately obvious lying around, no monogrammed handkerchiefs or bloody handprints or anything else incriminating, but then, she supposed she wasn't expecting any. “Keep an eye out, then,” she says. “I'll go slow. Slower.”

Tacoma doesn't smile. Not that it was all that funny, really, but Jodi did think it might lighten the mood a little. Probably Tacoma isn't really in the mood for jokes.


CON WAS HERE, says the oak, coming up on the left. Jodi sighs and glances at Tacoma.

“Okay,” she said. “I guess you didn't spot anything either?”

“Nope.” Tacoma won't meet her eye. “Thanks for looking, I guess.”

“We're not done yet. Lothi!” Further up the path, Lothian turns, bounds back towards her. Jodi feels a bass hum in the marrow of her bones: what, he wants to know, does she need? “Can you do something for me?” An affirmative hum around the nape of her neck. “This whole stretch of path,” she explains, “from this tree to the big beech back there. I need you to tell me if there's anything under the snow. No,” she continues, in response to the questioning tilt of his head, “anything weird, okay? Not rocks or twigs, something that shouldn't be here. Got it?”

The affirmative hum returns, and Lothian begins to stalk down the path, ears locked together to form a single panel a radar dish. Every now and then, he pauses to scratch away a layer of snow from the bank at the side of the road and uncover whatever it is he finds, but he doesn't immediately locate anything worth showing Jodi.

She watches him for a moment, then leans against Con's tree to free up her hand to go through her bag.

“Cigarette?” she asks. Tacoma looks uncertain.

“I dunno if I can any more,” she says.

“You wanna try anyway?”

Tacoma's face cracks into an unexpected smile.

“Sure,” she says. “Just, uh, stick it in there.”

Jodi puts one in Tacoma's mouth and one in her own. She's just trying to find her lighter when Tacoma interrupts.

“Uh, hang on, let me get that,” she says, and a moment later two tiny purple flames pop briefly into existence at the end of each cigarette, lighting them both.

“Nice!” Jodi takes hers out of her mouth and inspects it. It's glowing purple rather than red, but other than that it seems to be pretty much normal. “So you're getting to grips with your ghostly powers, huh?”

“Yeah, kinda.” Tacoma does something that might be called inhaling; a wisp of smoke detaches from her cigarette and swirls around inside her before drifting out in erratic grey puffs. “Not quite beating up a dude with a shadow, but I sure can light a cigarette.”

The acid edge in her voice burns Jodi with its touch. She smokes silently for a moment, wondering whether to say something or not, and then Lothian tenses suddenly and she feels the sharp hum of his excitement tingle down her nerves.

“What have you got?” she calls, relieved of the distraction. He makes a squeak without a message, then turns around with something shiny in his mouth.

“Is that …?” Tacoma doesn't finish. With some difficulty, Jodi bends down, and Lothian pushes the shiny thing into her hand.

“It's … a pen,” she says, staring at it. An expensive one too, by the look of it – the kind that you inherit, or receive as a gift to mark a special occasion. Blue-black lacquered barrel and cap. Gold clip, gold nib, a little stained with ink. “I mean, it's distinctive,” she says, sliding the cap back on. “But I don't know anyone with a pen like this. Do you?”

Tacoma keeps looking at the pen. Something awful is leaking from her mind, so strong and poisonous that Jodi almost chokes on it.

“Tacoma?” she asks, coughing. Her cigarette slips from her mouth into the snow. “Tac― ugh, Tacoma, what's wrong?”

For a long, painful moment, she says nothing, smoke billowing out of her in clouds. When at last she does speak, her voice is smaller and thinner than Jodi has ever heard it before.

“It's Nick's,” she says, her cigarette tumbling from her lips to join Jodi's on the ground. “That pen belongs to my uncle.”



Tacoma isn't doing well. Jodi had a sense that she wasn't doing well before, but she really isn't doing well now. So she had Lothian clear a park bench of snow, and then sat down there with her, to give her the moment she seems to need.

“How are you feeling?” asks Jodi, after a little while has passed. The question is mostly redundant; she already knows that the initial shock is passing, and now Tacoma is just deeply, painfully sad. But you have to ask anyway. It's just what people do.

“You already fucking know,” snaps Tacoma, and then when she sees Jodi flinch she sinks her head down low against the cold slats of the bench. “Sorry,” she mutters. “You didn't deserve that.”

For a long moment, Jodi can't answer, has to concentrate on fighting the constriction in her chest and throat. Between her own sudden fear and Tacoma's own sorrow, her brain feels like it's going to burst open at the seams.

Lothian puts his claws on the side of the bench and rests his head in her lap, sending soothing vibrations thrumming down her nerves. A second passes, then another, and then, at last, Jodi's throat opens up again.

“It's understandable,” she says, in the end. “I'm really sorry, Tacoma.”

“You didn't―”

“I mean I'm sorry that this is happening.” Jodi hesitates, then reaches out to put her arm around her. Tacoma resists for a second, but then leans in against Jodi's shoulder, mist splashing against her coat. “It's not conclusive,” she says, hoping it isn't too soon for this. “Your uncle could've dropped his pen here at any time.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I guess.”

Nick could have …

“His plane didn't get in to Goldenrod till my train got in to Mahogany,” says Tacoma suddenly, twitching upright again. “He wasn't … God, he wasn't here.”

Her relief courses through Jodi's mind like an avalanche down the mountainside, unstoppable, sweeping all else out of its path. Lothian chirps and pulls away from her, unnerved by the strength of this third-hand emotion, and Jodi lets out a long, shaky breath as he goes. Okay. Okay, great.

“All right,” she says, not really hearing herself speak. “All right, that's … I'm glad, Tacoma.”

“But then why's the pen here?” Tacoma is animated now, twisting to face her, disc spinning faster and faster in her agitation. “Last time he was here was – I don't even know, summer maybe? And he couldn't have lost it then. He would have been complaining about it, I would have heard, like – he loves that thing. Granddad bought it for him when he graduated. So what's the pen doing here?”

“I don't know.” Jodi holds out a calming hand, tries to project conciliatory feelings. Lothian picks up on her efforts and joins in, translating her emotion into his vibes and pulsing it outwards at the world. “I don't know, Tacoma. It's just one clue, we don't – we really don't know enough yet.”

“I mean sure. I guess.” Tacoma makes a frustrated noise, swaying a little on the thread that connects her to the stone. Had she hands, Jodi thinks, she'd probably be gesturing frantically. “I just … I don't know what to think.”

“I know. I don't either.”

Some of the energy seems to leave her then; Tacoma closes her eyes for a second, lets the thread pull her back into position by the stone.

“Let's just go back,” she says. “We're done here.”

“Are you sure?” asks Jodi. “We could … I dunno, really. Look around some more.”

Even as she says it, she can hear how inadequate it sounds. Look around some more. Like there's anything else to see here.

“We're done,” repeats Tacoma. “C'mon, your family will think you died out here.”


“Okay,” she says. “Lothi, can you grab those cigarettes we dropped? Better throw 'em out on the way home.”

Tacoma looks up at that.

“Your parents know you smoke?” she asks.

Jodi shrugs.

“Probably. I'm not a very good liar.” Pause. “Yours?”

Tacoma smiles thinly.

“Nah,” she says. “I was always a better liar than you.”

“You were,” agrees Jodi.

The past falls like snow, piling up in thick drifts around them. How many little secrets have they had between them? Broken windows, illicit cigarettes, stolen beers. One time just before they left for their trainer journey, Victor Orbeck was sent home from school with a split lip and Tacoma was sent home for causing it; nobody could ever get her to say why. But Jodi knew. Victor was the kind of boy who found Jodi's frailty objectionable. And Tacoma was the kind of girl who found her fists were a great way to solve problems.

“I never meant for things to work out this way, you know,” says Tacoma. “I was gonna come visit.”

She's lying. It's okay. She doesn't know she's doing it.

“You were busy,” says Jodi.

“I was an asshole.”

“You were busy,” repeats Jodi. “You needed those results.”

“I made time for other people. Shoulda made time for you too.”

It's hard to argue with that. Harder still to explain why it is that Jodi doesn't blame her for it. But she really doesn't. Jodi was – well, she was dead weight. Busted leg, mutant brain, an annoying tendency to know how you feel before you do. Meanwhile, Tacoma was whip smart, the scholarship girl, one of just four from their year to go on to university. Jodi wouldn't have got a place at Goldenrod herself if scoring above fifty on the psychic test didn't get you a guaranteed government scholarship for psionics training. But Tacoma got her place – at Saffron's Yellowbrick University, no less, the best school on the Tohjo peninsula – off the back of her own smarts and hard work. And okay, Jodi didn't know she was going to do this back then, but as she got older she saw more clearly that Tacoma was way out of her league. People like Jodi don't get friends like her.

When it happened, it hurt. It really did. But at least Jodi was in a position to see that it was inevitable. Sooner or later, someone like Tacoma was always going to get tired of someone like her, and it was probably best she make that transition as smooth and easy for her as she could.

“Let's not fight,” she says, unwilling to explain and risk a conflict that will make her head feel like it's about to explode. “C'mon. You're right, it's time to go.”

She gets up. Lothian, who has so far been hanging back, places the two half-smoked cigarettes into her palm.

“Thank you, Lothi.” She puts them in the pocket of her coat and turns to Tacoma. “Is it okay for me to …?”

“Yeah, sure. Go ahead.”

She picks Tacoma up and tucks her back into the crook of her arm. Maybe she'll finally grow some muscles, if she carries this rock around much longer.

“Should we leave the pen here?” she asks. “I mean, I don't know if it's evidence or anything.”

“Dunno,” replies Tacoma. “I just … whatever, just put it back. Nick can get it himself.”

“Sure?”

“No. I don't know.” She sighs. “Look, it's a crime scene, right? You're not meant to interfere with those. And I mean like we are interfering, but we probably don't want to let the cops know.”

“Right. Right, I guess so.” Jodi gives the pen back to Lothian. “Put it back where you found it, Lothi.”

He reburies it carefully, patting the snowdrift back into place around the pen, and looks up expectantly. Jodi transmits a grateful thought and gets a happy vibe in return.

“I guess I better go back in,” says Tacoma unenthusiastically, intruding on their wordless conversation. “Don't wanna get you in any trouble.”

Right. Someone went to a lot of effort to make sure the spiritomb rock was out of the way; they won't be pleased to discover that someone's managed to activate it. Jodi would like to say it's nice hanging out with Tacoma, that she doesn't have to disappear till they get out from behind the trees if she doesn't want to, but she can't quite make up her mind whether it'd be kinder to say that or to tell her she can go if she wants.

Tacoma's mind is dark, contradictory. No help from that quarter. In the end, Jodi just smiles awkwardly.

“It's your choice,” she says, hoping that Tacoma knows what she means.

She doesn't answer. A moment later, she dwindles and disappears.

Jodi stands there for a few seconds, feeling something she can't quite name. Not quite disappointment, not quite sorrow.

Lothian plucks at her nerves and nudges her thigh, eyes turned up to her own.
It's debatable whether he knows what she's asking him, but he says yes all the same. Jodi pats him on the head, and sets off for home.



On the way out of the park, they bump into Gabriella Kendrick coming the other way with her shopping bag hooked over her elbow. She stops for a moment when she sees Jodi, looking puzzled, and then Lothian swoops down between them and the penny drops.

“Oh,” she says, eyes wide, mind blank with shock. “I … didn't recognise you.”

“Hi, Gabbi.” Stay relaxed, Jodi tells herself. Hope for the best, prepare for the worst. “It's, uh, it's Jodi now.”

“Right.” Gabriella blinks. It's a very pretty blink; Gabriella is widely reckoned to be the most beautiful woman in the county, with ice-smooth skin and vibrant auburn hair. This doesn't do much for Jodi's nerves. “Okay, Jodi. Nice, to, uh, see you.”

The moment when they could have just said hi and walked on by each other is long past. Now they have to actually talk, and Jodi is certain that Gabriella is exactly as uneasy about this as she is.

At least her wingull isn't with her. Pocket description: his name is Jack, but long years of unintentional training mean that he also answers to 'bastard'. Even Lothian is a little afraid of him, and Jodi always finds his raw hostility kind of overwhelming.

“So did you walk all the way in from the station?” Jodi asks her. Gabriella lives with Sam Spade in a bungalow behind their petrol station, out on the edge of town. Sam has always claimed that Gabriella is her cousin from New Bark, and everyone has always pretended to believe her, with the notable exception of Sam's parents, who are only children and also not on speaking terms with their daughter.

“I did,” says Gabriella. “Petrol's expensive, even if you own the station. And I thought I could use the air.” She smiles. Jodi can tell she doesn't mean it, but she wants to mean it, and that's even sweeter, in its own way. “What, um, what are you doing out here?”

She's making an effort. Jodi appreciates that. She doesn't ask that people to be cool with her right away, she just asks that they try.

“Me? Uh, same, I guess. Getting some air.” Jodi pauses. Can't be any harm in probing, can there? “And … and I figure this is the route Tacoma took,” she says, letting her gaze fall a little.

“Oh. Right.” Gabriella's smile dwindles and dies. “I'm sorry, A― sorry, Jodi. You two were close, right?”

“We fell out of touch a bit. But … yeah.” Jodi sighs. “I miss her.” She pauses for a moment, long enough to make Gabriella feel awkward, and then hits her with her best hopeful look. “You haven't heard anything, have you?” she asks. “Or seen anything?”

Now Gabriella looks about as uncomfortable as she really feels. Jodi can't imagine she ever thought she'd be having this conversation with her. Normally they just talk about music; Gabriella used to teach Jodi violin, and she is also one of very few people in Mahogany other than Jodi who like the synth-heavy stuff that's started coming out of the Goldenrod music scene in the past few years. From there to dead friends is a hell of a leap.

“Oh, I don't know,” she says. You can hear the New Bark in her voice, in the way she enunciates. Whatever life Gabriella really came from, it sure seems classier than anything in Mahogany. “I mean, there have been all kinds of rumours …”

“Yeah?” Jodi doesn't need to feign her interest now. “What have you heard?”

“Well, Sam says there was a car drove into town that evening that she didn't recognise,” replies Gabriella. “Blue Crowne with Kantan plates.”

Crowne is a Kantan manufacturer; their cars are far and away the most common on Johtonian roads, mostly because they're cheap. But this wasn't a Johtonian car, clearly. And Jodi can't think of any reason why someone would be driving all the way from Kanto to Mahogany, of all places.

“Kantan plates?” asks Jodi. “There was a stranger in town?”

“Maybe.” Gabriella shifts nervously on her feet. “Look, Jodi, it's probably nothing. Sam also said that Hester told her she saw someone driving a creepy black sedan with tinted windows that evening, and Jack Flanagan is telling everyone he meets that he swears he saw someone dragging a body down the alley round the back of Green Street.” She sighs. “People are worked up, Jodi. You know?”

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “I know.” She fiddles with her thumbnail through her glove, trying to look like a thwarted kid. It's not very hard. It's basically what she is, after all. “I just miss her, is all.”

Gabriella reaches out, puts a hesitant hand on her arm. Her awkwardness hovers around her like an anxious ghost. She can't be any older than twenty-eight; she probably doesn't feel old enough to be playing the role she's suddenly found herself in.

“I know,” she says. “We all do.” Pause. Jodi can actually feel the tears hovering behind her eyes. Maybe she's a better liar than she thought. “Why don't you go home, Jodi?” says Gabriella, kindly. “Talk to your family.”

Jodi smiles weakly.

“Yeah,” she says. “You're probably right. Silly idea, anyway.”

Gabriella smiles back.

“Come by the station some time,” she says. “Say Sunday? I have this new record I think you'll really like. This German band, Kraftwerk? Never heard of them before, but they're clearly going places.”

“What's it like?”

“Think Black Peaches, but more so.” The Black Peaches are one of Jodi's favourites from the Goldenrod electronic music scene: this is good news. “Sam hates the record, by the way, keeps telling me to put on some real music, so it'll be nice to prove to her that someone else likes it too.”

“Sure,” says Jodi. “Sounds good. Sunday, you said?”

“Sunday's good. Or any time, really,” says Gabriella. “I'm almost always there, you know that.” She seems satisfied now that she's dealt with the situation, that Jodi is going to go and do something more healthy than stalk her dead friend's final steps through snowbound parks. “Anyway,” she says, holding out her bag. “I need to get to the shops. See you around, Al― sorry. See you around, Jodi.”

“Bye!”

Jodi watches her go for a moment, then turns away and starts to move back down the path towards the street.

Blue Crowne, Kantan plates. A distinctive pen at the scene of the crime. Not much, but it's a start, and it's more than Jodi expected from her first morning as an amateur detective. She thinks about asking Tacoma for her thoughts, but given her mood at the moment that seems a little scary, and in the end she just beckons for Lothian to follow and walks on in silence.



“You were out a while.”

“Got talking to Lorna,” replies Jodi, closing the living-room door behind her. “And, um, you know. Needed a walk. To … to clear my head.”

Her mother nods understandingly.

“Of course, chickadee.” She puts a hand on Jodi's arm. “Are you all right?”

What can she say? Tacoma's not dead, she's in my bag and probably listening to this conversation? Yeah, right.

Jodi bites the edge of her lip, the way people say she does when she's upset, and shrugs.

“I can't really believe it,” she says.

“Nor can I.” Her mother pulls her into a hug, and Jodi leans into it as she would if she really were distressed. “I know it's not easy.”

The clock ticks. Jodi closes her eyes, feels tears beading on her lashes. Maybe she is upset after all. Tacoma might not be dead, but she's not herself, and she's hurting in ways that Jodi isn't sure how to deal with. Sure, she knows the theory – it's part of empath training – but it's much harder to apply it to your ex-best friend than to a psy-actor in a practical.

“Okay,” she sighs, pulling away. “Okay, you probably have more important things to do.”

“What's more important than my eldest daughter?” She smiles, and Jodi's breath catches in her throat: that's her, she's her daughter, how amazing is that? “How is Lorna, anyway?”

“O-okay.”

“Yeah? How was she?”

Jodi is about to say that she just asked that question, but then she realises that what her mother really wants to know is how Lorna treated her.

“She was good,” she says, giving her a meaningful look. “She put my new name on my library card.”

Her mother looks relieved, in a way that makes Jodi feel uncomfortable. It's nothing new to find her parents worrying about her – they've been doing it ever since she wrecked her leg – but this is a different sort of worry, and not something she was expecting. She'd thought that once – if – they accepted her, that would be the end of it: life as normal, just with a different name and nicer clothes. But no. No, they're her parents, and they worry, and now she's given them something else to worry about: will our daughter get the crap kicked out of her by small-town bigots?

“I'm glad,” says her mother. “Lorna's always had a good head on her shoulders.”

“Yeah,” replies Jodi. “She does.”

“Did you run into anyone else?”

Jodi hesitates.

“Yeah,” she admits, in the end. “A few people. Fergus – Fergus Wright, I mean. Carrie Savage. Couple others.”

“And?”

Her mother doesn't seem to know how to ask outright. That's fine. Jodi doesn't know how to answer, either.

“And it was … mostly fine,” she says. “Think I might be off Carrie's Christmas card list, though.”

“Oh.” Her mother's face falls. “Did she …?”

“I dunno, Mum.” Jodi sighs. “She just doesn't like it, I guess.”

“Jodi, I―”

“It's fine. She's not the first.” Jodi tries to block out the pain she can sense coming from her mother, but in her haste she fluffs it and it re-emerges elsewhere in her body as a stabbing sensation in her bad leg. She sits down heavily on the sofa, suppressing the urge to swear, and beckons for Lothian to come over and untense her muscles with his vibes. “In Goldenrod, I … look, I promise I'm okay, Mum. I always have Lothian. And my friends, they look out for me.”

She's said too much. Now she'll think that Jodi spends her life afraid of every trivial encounter with every passing stranger, and okay, that's not entirely inaccurate, but Jodi's life isn't all bad. Yes, she's been insulted, shouted at, threatened; yes, she nearly got beaten up once in the Goldenrod Tunnel before Lothian screamed the guy into submission so she could get away. But that doesn't mean this hasn't also been the best damn thing she ever did with her life. She loves being what she is, even if she also hates it. That's just how it works.

“Oh, darling.” Her mother steps around Lothian and sits down alongside her, slipping an arm around her shoulders. “I'm sorry. I wish I knew …” She spends a second or two thinking, trying to figure out how to end the sentence, then shrugs. “I wish I knew,” she says.

Jodi raises the corner of her mouth, just a little.

“Yeah,” she says, resting her head on her mother's shoulder. “I wish I knew too.”

Tacoma has probably heard all of this. It's kind of embarrassing, really, the way that having your parents wheel out their affection in front of your friends always is. But not embarrassing enough to make her stop.

“Sarah has pomegranates in at the store,” says her mother, after a while. “I saw 'em and thought of you. There are two in the fruit bowl with your names on 'em.”

Lothian looks up sharply, eyes alight, and Jodi's half-smile matures into a full one.

“Thanks, Mum,” she says. “We'll look forward to those.”

She's lucky. Isn't she? Yes. Yes, she's lucky. She really should be grateful, for her mother who loves her, who buys her expensive fruit because she knows that pomegranates are her and Lothian's favourite. For her friend who isn't dead and gone after all. For a world in which even someone as unlikely as her is allowed to exist.

“I have to work this afternoon,” says her mother. “Will you be all right by yourself till Ella gets home?”

“Sure.” Jodi raises her eyebrows. “Mr Martell can't make it to Monday without someone to write his shopping lists for him?”

“Oh, bosses are like babies, chickadee, you can't leave 'em alone too long or they end up sticking a fork in a plug socket and electrocuting themselves. That's why they invented secretaries in the first place.” She gets up and dusts imaginary crumbs off her blouse. “I'm making coffee. You in?”

You in? Nobody else Jodi has ever met says that except her. Like every cup of coffee, every slice of cake, is a little conspiracy. Something to be stolen together.

God, she's glad to be home.

“Yeah,” she says. “Thanks.”

Her mother leaves. A moment later, Jodi hears the gasjet hiss and the sound of water heating. Lothian looks at her with pleading eyes, and an unmistakeable vibration starts to rumble in her bones: pomegranate?

“You can have one,” she says. “The other one's for my breakfast tomorrow, okay?”

He's out the door almost before she's finished speaking, bits of carpet fluff trailing from his claws. There's a thump and a low growl like stones chipping against one another as he collides with Lucille, at her usual post by the kitchen door, and then the sound of something juicy being shredded by three dozen brutally sharp teeth.

“You're cleaning this up, Jodi!” calls her mother.

“Sure, when he's done!” she calls back.

Lothian keeps slurping. The kettle keeps boiling. Jodi leans back in her seat, and shuts her eyes. She can talk to her now. She has the courage.

Tacoma? she asks, but there isn't even the faintest suggestion of an answer.

Apologies for the delay. Storms destroying my internet and what not. But I can finally give this chapter a look-see.

And I continue to like the little real-world, small historial bits that you pepper through the story. In particular the recession having ties to an OPEC embargo, which I recall being a real big thing in the 70s and while I'm not entirely sure what it did to Britain (or Japan), it certainly mucked up American politics quite a bit (I mean, it got Reagan elected, so...). I was definitely reminded of the various police procedurals I've watched seeing Con go up to the Tacomas. Complete with crying breakdowns as soon as they're told the information. It was familiar, but in a "so, this is what it would look like written out," sort of way. Which is fun for me. And, given that I work with cadavers, I can say you're spot-on with Con's thoughts on corpses having their eyes closed. It is very unnerving to folks to have them open. The autopsy scene overall is, again, something very crime show-esque. But in a good way. I could imagine this happening in a Law & Order or a CSI. There isn't a lot of time spent lingering and showing off personal feelings. Con and the doctor address everything that needs addressing. Naturally, it's unfortunate to see that stuff about Tacoma. But, well, there's a very high right of depression and suicide in the pre-med/medical student community, so that's a sad bit of realism.

Squad room scene had one interesting nugget for me. And that's the bit about a new lab in Heahea City that Nick visited. My brain says Dimensional Research Lab and that makes me immediately think Ultra Wormholes and whatnot, but I get the feeling that's more of an Easter Egg and not necessarily something too relevant to the overarching plot. I'll file it away as a fun little nod and if it becomes more, I'll just be pleasantly surprised. The "hotbed of deviancy," conversation was one of those things where, like, my inclination is to say that's an overexaggeration, but then I've lived in communities where that's a legitimate mindset, so I can't really do much other than nod and just keep reading. It's... odd. In a way I'm not sure I can express in words. Though it does do a good job showing that Con has flaws and isn't one of those PC police chiefs that you might see more of in the 2010s. The stuff with Con walking around was much quieter. But I appreciate the scene because it does touch on that fact that these kinds of police offices get hit hard by cases like these. And, at the same time, it gives him almost sheriff-like pride about his position. Again, I know, I'm projecting American stuff onto this. It just reminded me of some sheriff's offices.

Lastly, there's the ending stuff b/w Con and Jodi. You can feel the awkwardness and the perception vs. reality debate Con's going through with the narration vs. what he actually ends up saying to Alex. Likewise, I can't tell if Dr. Ishihara is unshaken by Jodie's experience because she's just really good at extending Jodi professionalism or has a complete understanding of all the medical/behavioral science at play. But that's part of the mystery, I suppose. I can at least sympathize with Con that Ishihara is tough to get a read on, that's for sure. I'm not entirely sure what a "chapter house" is, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious to find out. ^^

FIVE: IN THE SHADOWS
TACOMA

Something bad has happened. Actually, it's been happening for a while now; Tacoma's range of vision is limited when the rock is in Jodi's bag, but she can sense it in the air. Maybe it's because Jodi has been sending her so many psychic messages, maybe it's just because she's a ghost now and has picked up a few spooky powers; either way, she's starting to find that she can feel Jodi when she's nearby, on the periphery of her mind. And, well. Jodi has been on the verge of crying for about forty minutes now.

Tacoma can't figure it out. She's heard everything, except for what happened when Jodi was doing her psychic thing on Nikole and the feedback drowned everything out, and while Con's cheer seems strained he and Simeon and Ishihara all sound like they're being polite. It's hard to know what to do, although she supposes it doesn't matter. There's nothing she can do, at least until Jodi is alone. She listens to her make her excuses, refusing Con's offer of a ride home by telling him she has a few errands to run in town, and then, after a few minutes of silence, to her speaking in a low voice:

“No, I'm not okay. Couldn't you feel it, Lothi? How he … you know.”

She doesn't hear Lothian's answer; probably Jodi is the only one who can. Still, it sounds like she's by herself now.

“Jodi?” she asks. Her voice sounds weird in her ears. She hasn't spoken in a while – since last night, actually, when she came out of the rock for a moment to tell Jodi she was okay and not to worry. And that was the first time she'd spoken since the whole thing with Nick's pen. Most of the rest of the time she's just spent lying here on top of her sarcophagus, staring at the ceiling and thinking without emotion about a stranger's hands around her throat. This is not all right, but it's just so hard to fight it that Tacoma can't bring herself to be concerned. It's nothing new, anyway. She has passed more than a few days this way at uni, unable to muster the energy to leave her bed.

You startled me, says Jodi. Her surprise bleeds through with the words.

“Sorry.” Brief pause. “I have my eye to the crack,” says Tacoma. It's not an accurate way of describing it, but it's all she's got; what's really happening is that a rough-edged image of the outside world is hovering right in front of her left eye, like she's sitting too close to a TV. At the moment, all she can see is darkness, but she can hear everything. “You can talk normally. I've … been listening in for a while.” Come on. Say it. Say it, you asshole. “Are you okay?”

Jodi hesitates for far too long before she answers.

“Yeah. Just tired. It was hard, getting into Nikki's mind. But I did find―”

“You literally just told Lothian you're not okay,” says Tacoma. She hears a sigh, and then a moment later her view clears and brightens as Jodi removes the rock from her bag. She's leaning against a brick wall by some icebound garbage cans, cane in the crook of her arm and a cigarette in her other hand. Tacoma can't see where they are, but it doesn't occur to her to look; her eye is irresistibly drawn to Jodi, pale and glamorous in the dull winter light. Even now, it keeps catching Tacoma by surprise, the way her face is transformed just by looking at it and thinking girl instead of boy. That nose, those lips and cheekbones – they are different now, and always will be. Tacoma has heard that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but she never knew that apparently everything else is, too.

Is she staring? She almost certainly is. And Jodi looks upset: probably best to focus on that for now.

“Sorry,” says Jodi. “I just … Con really hates me.”

Tacoma would like to say something reassuring, but nothing seems real when the rock comes between them like this. Jodi needs to be able to see her.

“Can I come out?” she asks.

“Sure.” Jodi takes a quick drag on her cigarette. “I'm in the alley behind the bank.”

Tacoma knows where she means: turn right as you leave the medical centre, left at the corner, past the bank, down the side. There's a gate but it's not locked, and in the whole twenty years that Tacoma has lived in Mahogany, nobody from the bank has ever noticed or cared.

“Okay,” she says, and pushes into the image before her, springing out the other side of the crack with a whoosh of displaced air. Now she can see properly; there's the entrance to the alley, there's Lothian huddled against Jodi's leg. Incidental details, really. The important thing here is Jodi. “I'm sorry,” she tells her. “He's an asshole.”

“No, I don't think he is,” replies Jodi. “He's trying to do his job and all, he just … I got close to him and felt his mind and he―” She breaks off, looking like she might throw up. “He hates this,” she says, swallowing hard. “He'd – I don't know, but he really can't take … what I am.”

“Which is called being an asshole.” Tacoma raises her eyebrows. “He can't deal with you, that's on him, not you.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Obviously. C'mon, Jodi, you – why would it be you?”

“I dunno.” Jodi blinks. “Sorry,” she says, looking away. “I, uh, well. Empathy. He hates, I hate. And like …” She swallows again. “There's this sickness, I― I mean, I thought I looked good this morning when I did my nails and now I look at them and it's just like I've mutilated myself.”

Her breaths are shallow and irregular. Rarely has Tacoma wanted to hurt someone as much as she wants to hurt Con Wicke right now. It's a good feeling, in that it is a feeling, and that alone makes it ten times better than the awful emotional void that comes with lying on her back and staring at the ceiling.

“Sorry,” she says, not wanting to say how angry she is, knowing that Jodi probably knows anyway. “It must be hard.”

Jodi sighs and raises her cigarette to her lips.

“Yeah, well, I'm not looking for pity,” she mutters. “I knew it wasn't all gonna be easy. And anyway, it's not like it's the first time.”

“No?” Hell. Tacoma hadn't really thought about that. Too preoccupied with her own problems to realise that every single social interaction is its own special problem for Jodi. Christ. Friend of the bloody year.

“No,” says Jodi. “It's okay. Lothian looks out for me. Right, Lothi?”

He looks up, nose palpating, and Tacoma sees Jodi smile slightly as some message passes from his mind to hers.

“He says yes,” she explains, scratching behind his ears. “Honestly, I'm not entirely sure he knows the difference between men and women anyway.”

Tacoma tries to smile, because that is the response that is expected of her, but it's hard for her to put her heart in it.

“I'm glad,” she says. “I'm glad.”

There is no immediate answer. Jodi taps the ash off the end of her cigarette and watches it spiral down into the snow.

“Guess you want to know about what I found out from Nikki, huh,” she says, after a little while.

“Heard some of it,” replies Tacoma. “But when you did your psychic thing, it all kinda went to static.”

Another long pause. Tacoma wonders if she should say it, and then decides yes, she definitely should.

“You know, you're fucking gorgeous,” she says, a little more aggressively than she intended. “No matter what Con thinks.”

Jodi almost inhales her cigarette. After several seconds of coughing, and a lot of concerned looks from Lothian, she grinds it out on the wall and manages a response.

“Oh,” she says weakly, cheeks as red as her fingernails. “Um … thank you.”

“Well, you are,” replies Tacoma, as embarrassed to have said it as Jodi is to have heard it. “So. You know.”

Jodi smiles shyly, unable to find any more words. It's kind of cute, but Tacoma is literally incapable of speaking right now, let alone pointing this out. They fall back into the silence, broken only by the distant grumble of someone's car and Lothian's scratching as he pokes around the alley, and then at last Tacoma gathers up the energy to push free of it. Okay. Move on to something less awkward.

“All right,” she says. “So what about Nikki? Dr Ishihara said she was okay, right?”

“Yeah. She said she could go home this afternoon.”

Tacoma should be pleased, but it's hard to be. Nikole is one of those kangaskhan who remain childless, either through choice or some quirk of biology not yet identified by science, and she is as attached to Tacoma as she would be to her joey, if she had one. She is much less interested in Tacoma's family, and they, for their part, have never really been that good with her. Right now, they're almost certainly not going to be up to the challenge of looking after a kangaskhan who can't find her trainer.

“Hope my parents can deal with that,” she says, shoving hard on her worry and not managing to shift it. “What about her memories? You said something to Con about where my stuff was?”

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “Out in the woods, by a bend in the river. I think she got worried and broke out of her ball there, and then I guess she was all feverish, so she didn't drink and just wandered around till she found her way back to town.”

Tacoma hears herself make a little involuntary noise of pain, which Jodi very kindly pretends not to have heard.

“I think it was near a cabin,” she says. “Which I guess means north of town, near the Lake of Rage. There are a few up there, I think. Guess the police will probably be checking them out today.”

“Right. I guess we can't really do that,” says Tacoma. “I mean – actually, I dunno why I'm assuming you can't drive. Can you?”

Jodi laughs nervously.

“Technically, yes,” she says. “But I don't. It's kind of difficult with this leg.” Fantastic. Tacoma Spearing, queen of unwarranted assumptions. “But … well, I didn't say to Con, but I think we might have to go there anyway.”

“What? Why's that?”

“There's a blue car parked outside,” replies Jodi. “A blue Crowne.”

“Oh. Uh … shit.”

“Yeah.” Jodi chews her lip, leaving a little red line across her incisors. “I feel like we need to talk to Sam. A bunch of people, even. Someone else must have seen it, right?”

“Right.” Tacoma thinks for a moment. “Gabriella invited you over, yeah?”

“She did. I'll see if I can talk to Sam then.”

“Good. I, uh, didn't know you were friends.”

It's strange to think of Jodi having friends Tacoma doesn't. But of course she's had her own life, her own social circles to navigate. Not like Tacoma has a monopoly on her. Even if some pathetic part of her would like one.

“She likes the same music as me,” says Jodi, looking a little uncomfortable. “And maybe if I go to church tomorrow, I can ask people about it?” she adds, changing the subject. “I'll try to be subtle.”

“Yeah. You do that, I'll … I dunno, try to think of a way we can get out to that cabin.” It sounds so inadequate, even as she says it. What's she going to do? Volunteer to drive Jodi over there? Sure, Tacoma, if that's what you want to think.

“Cool.” Jodi nods, as if this is even remotely plausible. “There was one other thing I found.”

“Which was?”

“When Nikki was in her ball, the night that, um, that it happened, she heard something. Can't tell who was speaking, but I think they said 'take her to the chapter house'.”

“The chapter house,” repeats Tacoma. “Where's that? What is that, even?”

“Dunno,” admits Jodi. “Never heard of it before.”

They look at each other for a moment.

“Library?” asks Tacoma.

“Library,” says Jodi. “No time like the present.”

Tacoma nods.

“See you on the other side,” she says, and withdraws to brood, feeling the cold stone of her sarcophagus against her back again. One day she'll get through a conversation with Jodi without insulting her, she promises. She better, anyway. This is no way to treat a friend.

She picks at her lips, tearing off tabs of skin and relishing the sharp sting of air on raw flesh. But her window to the outside world is still open, and a minute later, after Jodi has put the rock back in her bag, Tacoma hears her murmuring incredulously to herself:

“I'm fucking gorgeous.”

Tacoma pauses, startled into smiling. At least she got that one right, she thinks, and takes her bloody fingernails away from her mouth again.



A chapter house, it seems, is a building or room attached to a church where meetings are held. Learning this doesn't really help things make any more sense. There is a church in town, but it's pretty small, and both Jodi and Tacoma went there every week with their families right up until they got old enough to say no; they know the place well, and unless there's a secret chamber buried underneath it, there just isn't space for a meeting room there.

But the fact that Nikole heard it mentioned is suggestive. As is the fact that Con pretended he hadn't heard of it. Some people in town are meeting up in secret, people who may or may not be connected to Tacoma's murder, and the cops know but don't want to talk about it. That means something. Tacoma isn't sure what, and neither is Jodi, but it definitely means something.

“A secret society,” says Tacoma, looking out through the crack at a sliver of Jodi's face. “I didn't think this town was big enough to have one of those.”

“A secret society whose members will kill for ghost rocks,” murmurs Jodi, closing the encyclopedia. “Where do you think their chapter house is?”

“Dunno. That cabin, maybe? My stuff's out there.”

“Why would they dump it that close to their hideout?”

They're not sure, and it's not something they can look up. Right now they don't have the time for research, anyway. Jodi's been out for over an hour and a half at this point, and given the atmosphere when she left with Con, her family are probably going to be worried about her. It's time to go back and reassure them.

On the way back, she and Tacoma toss ideas at one another while Lothian flies on ahead. Where could people meet up without it being obvious? Town hall? Bar? General store? Remember, this place has to be somewhere you could hide a body. That's what the killer was thinking of doing, even if in the end they just dumped Tacoma in the river instead.

“Maybe we should just ask people,” says Jodi. “Kind of like 'by the way, I heard something about a chapter house the other day, do you know what that is?' And then I'll know if they recognise the word or not. Then we could … I dunno, tail 'em or whatever, see where they go.”

“Dunno.” Tacoma paces back and forth along the tiled floor, the inside of Jodi's bag bobbing gently before her eye. “Think we should probably stick with the other lead for now.”

“I could check the church tomorrow, I guess,” suggests Jodi. “Just in case.”

“How, exactly?” snaps Tacoma, frustrated. “You can't tell me you're gonna sneak out in the middle of the service.”

“I … don't know,” admits Jodi. “Sorry. I'm just trying to come up with ideas.”

Tacoma forces herself to stand still, to release her grip on her sarcophagus and calm down. Don't be a dick, she tells herself. It's not hard, Tacoma.

What else is new? Tacoma hates this. She's aware that she shouldn't, that this is an unhelpful reaction to her friend's compassion, but she hates it anyway. Nobody likes to be reminded of how unoriginal their inner turmoil is. Everyone thinks their pain is special; everyone wants to avoid the truth that it's just another damn cliché.

“Yeah,” she mutters, before she can stop herself. “Sometimes I wish you wouldn't.”

The sound of Jodi's footsteps stops. Somewhere in the distance, Tacoma hears the soft thump of Lothian landing.

“Tacoma,” she begins, except she doesn't seem to know how to finish it. “Tacoma,” she tries again. “I … you know I'm still your friend, right?”

Tacoma listens. She knows she needs to answer, but her voice is stuck somewhere at the bottom of her lungs. Jodi is her friend. This is true. It's just that Tacoma doesn't know if she really should be, any more.

“I'm not just trying to help you solve the mystery,” Jodi continues. “I'm … I can talk to you too. If that's, um, if that's something you're still interested in.”

Christ. Tacoma had almost forgotten about this. The boy – girl – whatever, the child in her memory is sweet and shy and not quite openly sarcastic; Tacoma remembers the school trip to the old temple, breakfast in the Ecruteak Pokémon Centre, the campsite on Route 38, and what stands out in her mind is mostly Jodi laughing at Tacoma's jokes and losing a bunch of battles with her vulpix, Helen. But that's not all, is it? She was always just … nice. Like she is now.

“You don't have to,” Jodi adds hurriedly, and Tacoma realises she hasn't yet responded. “I mean, it's just a suggestion, if you're – you know, if you want to talk, then that's cool, and if not then that's – well, that's cool too―”

“Okay,” interrupts Tacoma, voice harsh. “Okay, I get it, you don't have to―”

Stop. She's angry at herself, not Jodi, but she isn't sure if Jodi can tell the difference and she doesn't want to give the wrong impression. She takes a minute, clenches her fists so hard it hurts, and breathes out.

Take the opportunity. Jodi wants to help? Honestly, Tacoma needs it. She might not like it, but she does. And more than that … well, whether or not she deserves it after everything she's done, she kind of wants her friend back.

“Sorry,” she says, making an effort to sound calm, though of course Jodi probably knows she isn't. “Thanks, Al― shit. Thanks, Jodi. I … I think I might like that.” Is that enough? It'll have to be. She can't take much more of this feelings talk right now. “Gimme a minute?”

“As long as you like,” says Jodi, maddeningly kind, and Tacoma breaks the connection: a sharp movement of her head and the image in front of her left eye fades.

She stands there for what feels like an age, kneading her forehead with her knuckle. Could've handled that better. But at least she said yes. And it might work out, right? If they talk, if they're really going to do this, then maybe Tacoma can finally start making up for the past. Not even for abandoning her, really, but for what she did that meant Tacoma had to abandon her in the first place.

Because she did do something. Tacoma made a bad decision that day seven years ago, and she saw the results unfold with the slow and terrible majesty of a mushroom cloud above a burning city. And then she knew that there was nothing she could ever do to make it right. But it was okay, because nobody knew except her, and that meant that nobody ever had to know, as long as she just kept running.

Except that now, of course, there's nowhere left to run except up and down the stairs of her prison tower. And, if that's the way things are, if she and Jodi are stuck with each other for the foreseeable future, then that's got to be a sign. This is Tacoma's chance to make things right.

Her lips sting, and she realises she's picking at them again. She licks the blood away and grimaces.

“Today's the day you turn it all around,” she says, unconvinced, and goes back to her sarcophagus to stare at the ceiling and wait for something to happen.


In the purple twilight of her prison, certain questions are impossible for Tacoma to avoid. They are very short and very simple, and she can't find answers to either of them.

Who? And why?

Her mind makes movie reels, her body superimposed onto horror movie victims. She sees her back recede in grainy black and white; sees a shadow creeping up behind her, merging with the darkness underneath the trees. In the next shot there are hands around a neck too thin to be hers, thumbs digging into her throat, and the whole thing falls apart into the childish dream it is.

Dumb, she tells herself, jabbing her finger painfully into the half-healed cut on her arm. Try again.

Okay. Harry, following her from the station? He seems pretty strong, or at least, he carries all that luggage around like it's nothing. He knew where she was, too. Or Nick. He― no. Not Nick. He wasn't even here, right? Right?

Her teeth hurt. She unclenches her jaw and forces herself to breathe out. It's not him. Can't be. He was in Alola. And her parents probably told a bunch of people when she was coming home. Everyone knows everything here, that's just the way it is. Anyone with strong hands and bad intentions could have found her that night.

But then there's the why of it, and this is where Tacoma feels her thoughts beginning to unravel, warp and weft spilling in untidy tangles across the surface of her mind. There are plenty of reasons why she should be dead – hell, plenty of reasons why she should be dead and trapped like this. If you think about it, she's almost getting off easy, after what she did.

Thing is, nobody knows. Tacoma has made damn sure of that. Nobody knows. Nick and Harry sure don't. So why? What about this rock is so bad that she couldn't even be allowed to live after having touched it?

She starts to say the question aloud, as if hearing it might help her hear an answer, but then she remembers that Jodi might be listening and stops halfway through the second word. In the silence, the questions ring louder than ever: who? Why?

Tacoma closes her eyes, and listens until it feels like they will deafen her.



Back at the Ortegas' house, it seems that Jodi's parents have been waiting. Her mother comes out of the kitchen to meet her as soon as she walks in the door, asking questions before saying wait, no, come inside and tell your dad, too. Tacoma has opened the connection again, because the alternative is staring at the ceiling for a while and if she's trying to be a better person she should be trying to avoid that, and she listens in from inside Jodi's bag, feeling like a spy on the end of a wiretap.

As they enter the room, she hears the rustling of newspaper, and is hit with a memory so vivid it almost hurts: León with his feet up, reading aloud from the paper and pausing occasionally to let his chatot repeat back any words that catch his fancy. Except no, not any more, right? Javier died years ago now. Old age, she thinks. That or pneumonia. Johto winters must have been a hell of a shock for a Managua chatot.

“Would you look at that,” León says, over the shuffling of feet and the scratching of Lothian's claws. “Our bid for the new Gym might just go through. Apparently it's down to here and New Bark.”

Cherrygrove Gym was bombed to dust by the Americans during the war, after the occupying forces used it to store arms; the Indigo League has been pondering where to put the replacement ever since they finally extracted the money to build it from the Kantan government. Like everyone else in town, Tacoma's been following the news with interest. Pryce Aske, Mahogany's only resident pro trainer, has been spearheading the town's bid to have it put here, and apparently doing a pretty good job of it.

“Good to know,” says Jodi. “If we get a Gym, we get a Pokémon Centre. That's a bunch of jobs.”

“Including one for a counsellor,” León points out. “Something to think about.” A thin rustly noise as the newspaper is folded up and put aside. “So how did it go with Nikole, kiddo?”

“All right,” replies Jodi, after a moment's hesitation. “Chief Wicke was … polite.”

“Just polite?”

“Yeah. Just polite.”

León sighs.

“Well, I guess that's fine. He seemed kind of startled.”

“One way of putting it,” snorts Tacoma, unable to stop herself. Evidently she makes Jodi jump or something, because Michelle asks her if she's okay, and she has to lie and say the cold makes her leg twinge. Good one, Tacoma. Being real helpful there. She shuts up and listens enviously to Jodi's parents being nice to her, and then to Jodi's fumbling response:

“So yeah, it went okay. Just … I dunno. Seeing Nikki. And you know. Tacoma.”

God, she really is a terrible liar. It seems to fool her parents, though; there's an uneasy pause, and then in response to some unseen gesture Jodi asks:

“What?”

“The, uh, the funeral's on Wednesday,” says León, and Tacoma starts hard enough to bang her head on her sarcophagus. Right. That. Because she's dead.

Every time she thinks it, it gets a little less scary and a little more numbing. Dead. Who cares? Everyone who ever knew her, she answers, and the old guilt stirs inside her like a hornet's nest in her gut. Who and why. They'll be asking that too, same as her.

“I thought you should know,” adds León.

“Thank you,” says Jodi. “I … Yeah. Thanks.”

A soft sound. Tacoma imagines Michelle leaning over, squeezing Jodi's shoulder, and suddenly misses her mother so much it almost hurts.

“If you need anything, Jodi …” Yes, that's Michelle's voice. The one time she didn't want to be right.

“There is one thing,” says Jodi, in a tone of voice that suggests she wants to change the subject. “Unrelated. And nothing heavy, it's just – in my book, there's a word I don't know.”

“Oh,” says Michelle. “That'll be your department, León.”

“I'll do my best,” he says. “What is it?”

“It mentions something called a 'chapter house',” Jodi replies. “Can't figure out what that is.”

Tacoma feels Jodi's mind unfolding, attuning itself to something she cannot see. Gauging whether or not her parents are lying, she suspects. She holds her breath, waiting for the answer: if they aren't truthful about this, if they know, then that's kind of a problem. Even in the best case scenario, they'd be involved in something bad. The worst … well, the worst case doesn't even bear thinking about.

“Never heard of that,” says León, and Jodi's relief washes through the connection like a wave across a beach, smoothing her ruffled mind back into the usual calm. Okay. Telling the truth, then.

Thank God. Tacoma doesn't know what they would have done if he'd been lying. She listens a moment longer, to León asking for the context and Jodi claiming to have lost the page, and cuts the connection with a sigh.

She's too tired to listen to people who love each other. And if there aren't any more clues to be gathered here, she's just going to stay put till Jodi comes looking for her.

Not exactly the healthiest way to deal with this, but it definitely is a way. Given how her life is going recently, Tacoma will take what she can get.



As it turns out, she doesn't have to sit there long. A few minutes later, she gets a message from Jodi.

We're alone. If you wanted to have that talk.

Tacoma waits for a long moment, so long that Jodi probably thinks she's ignoring her, and then when she can't put it off any longer she drags herself up and out through the crack to materialise on Jodi's desk. Bright sun, cold air. Lothian curled up unobtrusively by the door, unwilling to leave his partner but trying to stay out of this.

“Okay,” she says. It comes out sullen and mean; Jodi wilts, and Tacoma grits her teeth and tries again: “Sorry. I do want to. I … I know I'm not doing great at being your friend.”

Jodi looks sympathetic. The emotion rises around her like a gentle glow emanating from deep within the earth, and the hornets buzzing in Tacoma's gut calm a little as it comes.

“You died,” she tells her. “I think you're allowed to be upset.”

“Thanks. Almost managed to forget for a second there.”

Jodi winces.

“Okay, sorry, I didn't phrase that very well.”

They look at each other for a moment. Tacoma blinks first.

“I'm sorry,” she says. “You don't deserve this. You're being nice, and I'm being a dick.”

She isn't expecting Jodi to agree, and is pleasantly surprised when she almost does.

“I mean you could be slightly more friendly,” she says, tentatively. “I guess. Like … I'm trying, Tacoma. I'm sorry I'm not getting any answers yet. It's only been a couple days.”

“It's not that.” Tacoma looks away. The hornets are back, and this time they aren't just buzzing but stinging. “I'm really grateful for everything you're doing. I'm just – I dunno, you probably know already, but I wasn't, uh, wasn't doing that good even before I got killed.”

There. She said it. Hard to believe, but she finally actually said it.

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “I noticed.”

She's waiting, like she thinks Tacoma is going to say something else, but Tacoma has said all she can. Like – she said it. It's taken her literal years, but she said it. Tacoma wouldn't be surprised if after that she never managed to say anything else ever again.

“It's been really nice to see you again,” says Jodi, after a little while. “Obviously I'd prefer it if it were different circumstances, but I did miss you.”

Tacoma smiles. She has a feeling it probably doesn't look like she's all that happy.

“I missed you too,” she says. “I'm sorry I abandoned you.”

“You didn't abandon me,” says Jodi. “You just moved on.”

“What?” Is she seriously still trying to let Tacoma off the hook? “How is that any different?”

“You know,” says Jodi, shrugging awkwardly. “We were busy. We grew up. I had ESP classes, you had tuition. We moved on.”

Tacoma frowns.

“But you said you missed me,” she says. “And you did, I know you did. Saw the way you looked at me when you found me the other night.” She sees it again now, doubled in Jodi's eyes. That pain. “Hurt you to see me like this.”

Jodi's uncertainty surrounds her head like cigarette smoke. She unwraps a chocolate bar and takes a bite, giving herself time to think of something to say, and then, still thinking, takes another. The clock ticks; Lothian glances up, and then when he sees Tacoma looking back quickly lowers his head again.

Jodi swallows, and leans forward on her elbows.

“Tacoma, I don't know you any more,” says. “But you were my best friend. And I know everything is weird and we have to solve your own murder, but I kinda wouldn't mind if we gave that another go.”

Tacoma's eyes prickle. Can she even cry, when her eyes are made of fog and green light? She doesn't really want to find out. Not in front of Jodi.

“Yeah?” she asks, through the lump in the throat she doesn't have.

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “But you actually have to talk to me instead of just hiding in that rock all the time. This is … it's weird and horrible, I know, but we're not gonna make it any less weird or horrible unless we talk.”

“I just figured you'd want to spend some time with your family,” mutters Tacoma. “You didn't ask for me to take over your life like this, so. You know.”

“Oh, you complete dork,” says Jodi, exasperated. “Are you listening to yourself? 'Aw, gee, I don't know if that girl who keeps saying she really misses me wants to spend time with me, better just hide away and not ask her!'”

Tacoma coughs.

“Uh, okay, so when you put it like that it makes it sound way dumber than it did in my head,” she says, and Jodi smiles at her.

“Sure it does. That's what I went to school for.”

“To show me that my ideas are terrible?”

“To help people understand themselves better.”

“Not sure I see the difference.”

“Doesn't matter,” says Jodi. “You're smiling.”

Tacoma freezes for a moment, unprepared for this new line of attack, and then she realises that Jodi's right and, almost against her will, laughs.

“Okay,” she says. “Jeez. You win, Jodi.”

Jodi's happiness is effervescent, bubbling up all around her like the fizz in a glass of champagne. It's contagious; Lothian perks up and scampers over to put his head in her lap, and Tacoma finds that the echoes of her laughter won't leave her alone.

“Great!” says Jodi, eyes bright. “Just – great.”

Tacoma does her best to give her a hard look, but she still can't stop smiling.

“Is this just because you made me laugh?” she asks, and when Jodi nods she laughs again. “Jesus,” she says. “And you call me a dork.”

“I can't explain it,” says Jodi, but she doesn't have to. She wants Tacoma back, and Tacoma wants her back as well: that's all there is to it, all there needs to be. Somehow, despite everything, it looks like she's going to get that second chance after all.

“You're gonna have to take point on this,” she says. “I don't have arms.”

“Take point on what?”

“The hug, dimwit.” Tacoma raises her eyebrows like she would have done when she was twelve, playing at being the girl she was before she ruined everything. “Or are you just gonna sit there grinning at me all day?”

Jodi does just sit there grinning, as it happens, but she does it with that sarcastic gleam in her eye that lets Tacoma know she's being mocked.

“You've got meaner,” Tacoma tells her, making a face.

“So have you,” says Jodi. “C'mere.”

She leans in and hugs her tight, arms sinking slightly into her mist. Tacoma rests her head against her shoulder, and turns her face away. It looks like she can cry after all. But she thinks she's going to keep that one to herself.



Jodi is … well, she's very good at this. Now that Tacoma's let her in, she refuses to leave again. She can't spend the whole day up in her room, but she puts Tacoma's rock on the coffee table in the living-room, and spends the rest of the afternoon poking her mind into it, commenting on anything and everything that crosses her mind. It's annoying, but it means Tacoma can't wallow in her unanswerable questions or lie there staring at the ceiling, and for that she supposes she ought to be grateful.

I dunno if you saw Ella's picture over my bed? asks Jodi, when Ella comes down after a morning spent painting up in her room. She's got really good.

“She has,” agrees Tacoma, watching Ella flop onto the sofa next to Jodi with a bag of nuts. “Also I think she just changed the channel.”

“Hey,” protests Jodi, but Ella waves it aside.

“You snooze, you lose,” she says, popping a cashew in her mouth. “Budge. The Bug Show is on.”

“Well, I know better than to come between you and your bug-types,” says Jodi, and she raises her eyebrows at the rock in a way that makes Tacoma irritatingly aware that she knows she's just made Tacoma smile.

Or later, when Michelle comes in and asks about the rock, she shrugs and says it's a focusing stone. Something she uses for school.

“Well, what's it doing on my coffee table?” she asks, and Jodi goes okay, sure, I'll move it, nestles it in the crook of her arm with the crack pointed outward so Tacoma can still see. She watches the Ortegas moving through the room, watches Ella leave to hang out with her friends, Michelle bring Jodi some hot chocolate, León argue with the newscaster.

It's all so achingly familiar. She sees herself and Everett overlaid on Jodi and Ella, her parents' gentle bickering in the way Michelle and León take pleasure in disagreeing about things on TV. It hurts, even filtered through Jodi's constant commentary (she is still just as keen on bugs as you remember, by the way, half her paintings are of insects; which is your favourite news presenter? I always like this guy's terrible taste in ties) – but Tacoma keeps the connection open all the same. This still exists, she reminds herself. There is something outside dark stone rooms and empty corners of the library. People are still alive and doing all their normal people things.

She's startled by how much she needed to be told that. Late that night, long after Jodi has curled up at one end of her bed and Lothian at the other, Tacoma dims the lights in the tower and lies down to sleep with a strange feeling hovering somewhere at the bottom of her ribcage. It takes her several long minutes to classify it as contentment, and when she does she finds she is too startled and fearful to hold onto it any more.



On Sunday she wakes late, the way she would if she were still living, and puts her eye to the crack to find Jodi's room empty. The radio is gone from the desk, and drifting up from downstairs is the sound of both music and Jodi singing along. Tacoma smiles, surprised: she'd forgotten Jodi was musical. But of course she is; she played violin for years, and since then she's spent a lot of time working with Lothian and studying sound. As far as Tacoma knows, she refuses to sing when anyone else is around, but still, she's good at it.

Probably she's alone in the house, then. Everyone else at church, maybe? Which means that Jodi didn't go, in the end. She wonders why, then realises that if everyone's gone she can probably just ask.

Maybe it's the singing, but she's feeling reckless. She stretches herself out as far from the rock as she can, and calls out:

“Hey! Taxi!”

The singing stops. Tacoma hears footsteps, and then Jodi comes in, looking vaguely put out.

“C'mon,” she says. “What if someone else had been home?”

“Is anyone else home?”

“Well, no. But they might've been.” She leans against the side of the door, twisting nervously at the handle of her cane. “I thought about going to church, but then I realised that if I went, I was gonna walk in the door and absorb everyone's reactions at once. And while I do wanna help you out, Tacoma, I don't want a brain haemorrhage.”

Right. Tacoma is willing to bet that the only two things anyone is talking about in Mahogany right now are her – and Jodi. And that means that everyone will be waiting to catch a glimpse of her, to satisfy their curiosity and be pleasantly shocked at the freak in the dress, and that in turn means that Jodi will be forced to feel a hundred people's pity and disdain exploding inside her own skull. Bastards.

But saying so would ruin the moment, so she just raises an eyebrow and fakes a smirk instead.

“Yeah, that would be counterproductive,” she says.

“That all?” asks Jodi wryly, but before Tacoma can answer Lothian interrupts, poking his head through the door and butting it insistently against Jodi's good leg. “Oh,” she says. “Sorry. I was halfway through giving him breakfast. Come downstairs?”

“Sure,” says Tacoma. “Do you think I can drink coffee?”

“Dunno. Wanna find out?”

She does, and they do. As it turns out she can't, not even through a straw: the drops swirl around inside her disc and make her momentarily dizzy before they fly out and have to be sponged off the kitchen cupboards by Jodi. They laugh and for a moment Tacoma could swear they're twelve again, wasting a morning in a Pokémon Centre canteen while Nikki and Helen snatch leftovers from the plates.

“Kind of reminds me of our journey,” says Jodi, clearly thinking the same. “You remember Ecruteak? We got to the Centre and we just … didn't know what to do, so we hung out there for like a whole morning till we figured we should probably go for a hike or something.”

Tacoma remembers. How could she not? She's replayed her journey in her head, a thousand thousand times over. The tentative beginning. The glorious middle. And the brutal end. There is an epilogue too, the part when she went back out after what everyone calls the accident, but that part is dim and shadowy by comparison. Everything important happened before then.

“I think it was Helen, wasn't it?” Jodi's eyes have unfocused slightly. She's looking at her coffee cup, but Tacoma doesn't think she's seeing it. “We were sitting around in the lounge, feeling lost, and then she just up and ran out. Followed her, and she was sitting by the front door, looking at me like come on, time to go.”

Lothian raises his head from his bowl of fruit, eyes wide. Tacoma reaches hesitantly for that weird connection, trying to figure out what she's thinking, but it's not something you can force, and Jodi's mind stays closed.

She swallows. Looks like she'll have to do this the old-fashioned way.

“I never said,” she tells her, after a moment. “I'm really sorry about Helen. And Ash.”

Jodi's face gives nothing away. Tacoma hopes this isn't her being forgiven. When your best friend's partners die, you have to say something, and Tacoma didn't. She was just too scared to say any of the important things, and so she just pretended everything was normal. You'll be back out there before you know it, she said, while the voice in her head screamed her condolences, and child-Jodi smiled weakly through her painkiller daze and said sure, sure.

This isn't how she ruined things. Tacoma committed her crime much earlier than that – before the accident even happened, let alone the aftermath. But it's still a black mark against her, and she hopes Jodi isn't so eager to please that she'd let her get away with it.

Jodi shrugs and downs the rest of her coffee.

“It was a long time ago,” she says, and now Tacoma is sure: she's trying to be relaxed, trying very hard with every ounce of her empath training, but there are some things you just can't control. “I don't really think about them any more.”

You don't need to be psychic to know that she's not telling the truth. Jodi and Helen were inseparable; Helen even followed her to school once or twice, and Jodi always let herself be charmed into missing her first lesson to take her back home again. Out on the trail, in the tent they shared in defiance of their parents' refusal to let them sleep over at one another's houses, Tacoma saw her sleeping curled around Helen like a cat around her kitten, and was vaguely jealous that she and Nikki couldn't do the same.

She loved her, she really did. She loved Ash too, even if she only caught him eight months before it all went to hell in the Silverblacks. And then Tacoma told her that she'd be back out there before she knew it, as if there was anything left for her out there at all.

“Okay,” says Tacoma. “I just thought I should say it, is all.”

A perfunctory smile.

“Thanks,” says Jodi, although she doesn't actually sound very grateful. “Look, it's ancient history, okay? And honestly, I feel like there's been enough death round here recently.”

Tacoma nods. She's probably reacting too fast but she can't seem to help herself.

“Yeah, I feel you,” she says. “Kinda hard not to. In my position.”

Jodi says nothing for a while, just leans back from the kitchen table and lets Lothian push his head into her lap. She reaches down automatically to pet him and then takes her hand away sharply, pulling a face.

“I have told you about doing that,” she says, shoving Lothian away. “Not while you're all sticky with fruit juice.”

He chirps unapologetically and returns his attention to his bowl, licking his lips. Jodi shakes her head and brushes at her skirt.

“So,” she says, not looking up. “What's Saffron like?”

Tacoma starts.

“What?”

“You've been to Saffron.” Jodi catches her eye. “What's it like? It looks cool on TV.”

“Are you serious?”

“Why not?”

Tacoma's mouth is already open to answer before she realises she actually doesn't have a response. Why not? It just doesn't feel right, is all. She has some vague idea that what they're supposed to do is make the most of this second chance, to say all the important things that were left unsaid before and to plan out their investigation, but even as she thinks this it starts to sound dumb. The oldest spiritomb is from the Song dynasty, the Pokédex said. She isn't sure how long ago that was, but it has to be a few centuries at least. That means (and try not to think about this too much) that she's going to be here for a while. She has some time.

And, well. If she's going to make this second attempt to be Jodi's friend stick, she's probably going to have to actually get to know her at some point. It's been five years, after all.

“Okay,” she says. “Why not.”

Jodi smiles, and Tacoma feels her face answering without any input from her brain. It is actually kind of unfair how easily beauty comes to her. Tacoma has spent the last three years trying to lose weight and sort her hair out and she still looks like a sack of potatoes shoved into a pair of jeans and a clown wig. She shouldn't be envious – Jodi is thin and delicate because of a mutation that means she has to see Dr Ishihara four times a year to check she isn't dying – but then, Tacoma does a lot of things she shouldn't.

“So,” says Jodi, taking away Tacoma's coffee and making a start on it herself. “What's Saffron like, then?”

“Well,” Tacoma replies, “it's not as yellow as it is in the pictures.”

“What!” Jodi looks scandalised. “But that's its whole thing! It's in the name of your university and everything.”

“Yeah, well. Have you ever actually seen a yellowstone in real life?”

“No.”

“They're kinda hideous,” says Tacoma. “One of my lecture halls is a yellowstone and on a bright day you can't even go near it without sunglasses.”

“You're ruining my dreams. I always wanted to go there and find my fortune on Golden Row.”

“Golden Row is the ugliest street in Kanto. It's like you've been eaten by a lemon.”

“God, you go away to the big city and come back all jaded. How am I, a simple country girl―”

“Oh, fuck off,” says Tacoma. “You're the one at brain school.”

“I said how am I, a simple country girl―”

So it goes. They play at fighting, and then at reconciling. They talk about university, in a careful kind of way that leaves out their social lives and the state of their minds, and Tacoma complains about Keith Allbright in exchange for a story about Jodi's Professor Crapwell. Yes, she says. Seriously, Crapwell. She could not make that up.

Lothian insinuates his head back into Jodi's lap, still sticky but no longer noticed, and the three of them stay there until the car pulls up outside and Tacoma has to disappear. As she goes, Jodi catches her eye.

“By the way,” she says, as if it doesn't matter. “You did say it.”

Tacoma pauses halfway back into the stone, her disc a mass of bubbling fog.

“Huh?”

“That you were sorry. You said it.”

“I what?”

But the front door is opening now, and before Jodi has a chance to tell her about the condolences Tacoma is certain she did not offer she has to vanish back into her tower.



Tacoma doesn't get a chance to ask about it. Michelle asks Jodi to help her with lunch – apparently this is a thing the Ortegas do on Sundays, or possibly just to celebrate the fact that Jodi is home and also no longer Alex – and her rock ends up in the corner of the kitchen counter while Jodi chops onions and shoos Lothian away before he steals them. (Raw onion. What is even with him.) It gets left there while everyone goes into the dining-room to eat, and nobody even looks at it until Jodi comes back out a couple of hours later, looking guilty.

Sorry, she says, filling a glass with water. Couldn't get away. But Dad says he'll drive me out to Sam and Gabbi's, and I'm gonna call her now to see when she wants me. Pick you up before I go?

“It's fine,” says Tacoma. “'S your family, so. You know.”

Still. Jodi shoots her a look. I shouldn't just leave you lying around.

Tacoma would like to argue, but it's hard to come up with a decent counter. She shrugs, remembers that Jodi can't see her, and sighs loudly instead.

“I can wait,” she says. “Go on, before they start thinking you forgot how taps work.”

She cuts the connection to underline the point, and spends a bleak half hour pacing up and down the stairs, trying to work out how it is that Jodi's got it into her head that she ever said anything about Ash and Helen. Tacoma remembers asking her if she was okay, several times, and then falling back on a bunch of trite platitudes. Nothing that mattered; nothing that Jodi could have mistaken for a recognition of her loss.

She's still mulling it over when Jodi returns with her coat and bag, and then she has to put it out of her mind and get her brain back in gear. There'll be time to dredge up the past later. Right now, there are leads to chase.

The drive out to the edge of town is quiet. Something seems to have put León on edge; he asks twice if Jodi will be all right, without apparently realising that he's repeating himself, and both times Jodi answers patiently that it's okay, Dad, I met Gabbi on Friday and it's all fine.

Right, he says, without conviction. Right.

In the rock, her eye pressed up against the darkness of Jodi's bag, Tacoma listens and runs out of loose skin to pull off her lip.

The car engine cuts out abruptly, and León clears his throat.

“Well, uh, here we are,” he says. “I'll be back at four. That okay?”

“Sure,” replies Jodi. “I'll call you if anything changes.”

“Right,” he says. “So … you'll be all right?”

Jodi sighs.

“Dad. It's fine. Gabbi is my friend. Okay?”

“Okay, okay.” Pause. “Sorry, kiddo. It's just – this is so new, still. You know?”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know.”

“You always do.” Tacoma can't quite tell if he's exasperated or grateful. She supposes there's no reason he couldn't be both.

Something rustles, and her window wobbles slightly: Jodi's picked up her bag.

“See you later, then,” she says.

“Yeah,” replies León. “See you at four, Jodi.”

The clunk of the car door, the crunch of Jodi's boots, the scratchy noise of Lothian bursting out of the back seat. Jodi's breath sounds slow, so slow it has to be deliberate.

Tacoma imagines asking her if she's okay, and then imagines her response: yeah, it's just been weird lately, or maybe yeah, I guess, or maybe just I don't know. It's not a substitute for actually asking her, but for some reason she just can't quite make herself do it.

Knock knock. The door clicks open. Tacoma holds her breath―

“Heya, kid.” It's a pack-a-day-for-fifteen-years sort of voice: unmistakeably Samantha Spade. Not the most well-liked woman in town, but Tacoma has always admired her. She's just so damn cool. “You, uh, here for Gabs?”

No immediate hostility. Tacoma breathes out again.

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “She's expecting me, I think?”

“She is,” agrees Sam. “Guessin' you two are about to fill my house with that shitty krautrock.”

“Heh. Uh, yeah. Sorry.”

A big, theatrical sigh.

“Can't be helped, I guess. Come on in, kid.”

Footsteps. In the background, Tacoma hears a car starting up, and realises Leon must have just been sitting there, watching. Like the worried dad he is.

The door closes. Jodi takes off her coat, makes polite but distant conversation: how's uni? Okay. How's the petrol station? Shit; nobody's buyin'. But we're still kickin', so it's all right. They're just about to run out of things to say when Gabriella pops up from somewhere.

“Jodi! Hi. Come in. I made a cake.”

“Oh,” says Jodi. “You didn't have to …”

“Yes, she did,” says Sam. “'Cos I wanted one and I can just pick her up and hold her in the air till she does what I want.”

“And here was me thinking I was doing it out of the goodness of my heart,” says Gabriella dryly. “Next time let me know when you're threatening me, Miss Spade. I might notice that way.”

“Oi, behave, Gabs. I pay your wages.”

“Better pay more if you don't want the lip then, huh?”

Both their voices are rich with unspoken laughter. Cousins, huh? Sure. When she was a kid, Tacoma always thought that something about that didn't quite make sense; it wasn't till she was seventeen that she figured out why.

“Whatever,” says Sam. “You two nerds have fun. I'll be in the garage, see if I can fix that leak. You know. Doin' actually useful stuff.”

“Good for you, Sam. Meanwhile, Jodi and I will engage in some serious appreciation of the arts.”

A vicious shriek, so loud and piercing it makes Tacoma wince. She once looked up how long wingull lived, out of a kind of desperate attempt to figure out when Mahogany would be free of the mad bastard, and was disheartened to find out that many species of seagull can live for forty or fifty years. Add in a few more from the pokémon vitality, and it looks like the damn bird might be here even longer than Gabriella.

“Not you, Jack,” says Gabriella. “You are getting shut in the bedroom before you get your beak in Jodi's cake. Or Lothian's ear.”

That's genuine affection in her voice. Tacoma can't even pretend to understand this. How the posh New Bark girl ended up with a glorified seagull for a partner is completely beyond her.

“Thanks,” says Jodi. “Um, sorry, Jack.”

More shrieking, and a nasty snapping sound that Tacoma hopes isn't a beak closing on someone's ear, but Gabriella just talks right over it.

“Shut up, you,” she says. “I'll be right back, Jodi. Make yourself at home.”

Tacoma gives her a second to go away, then speaks.

“I hate that fucking bird.”

Jodi suppresses a laugh.

“You can't see,” she replies, under her breath, “but Lothian has literally just stopped trying to hide behind me.”

“Wow. So much for loyalty between partners.”

“It's not like that. If Bastard attacks Lothi, he'll run away. If he attacks me, he'll scream him unconscious.”

Tacoma was joking, but she doesn't have time to explain before she hears clinking plates and footsteps.

“You like coffee cake, right?” asks Gabriella. “Because that's what I made.”

Jodi does, as it happens, and so the time finally comes for the music to begin. It is exactly as awful as Jodi promised: it drones, it whines, what few lyrics it has are all in a language Tacoma doesn't speak; there are barely even any real instruments, just a bunch of synthesisers and voice modulators. Worst of all, Jodi and Gabriella can't seem to get enough of it. Tacoma listens to what she always thought were two of the smarter people in town talking appreciative bullshit about literally the worst song she's ever heard, and feels her faith in humanity slip a few notches lower. What the hell is wrong with a guitar and a nice voice?

But Jodi's happy. She laughs, talks excitedly about bands Tacoma has never heard of and vaguely suspects are just made up; and Gabriella reciprocates in ways that make her happier still and Tacoma viciously, pointlessly jealous; and Lothian chirps and hums like he's into the music too; and Jodi's happy, and despite herself Tacoma can't quite make herself close the connection on it all. She sticks it out, reminding herself that she's the one who broke the friendship in the first place, and finally, finally, the record player falls silent and the music talk gives way to something else.

“I'm glad to see you laughing,” says Gabriella. “You seemed, um, really out of it the other day.”

“Oh,” says Jodi. “Yeah, I … I'm sorry. You must think I'm―”

“No. No, I understand. It can't be easy, especially when you can't get away from it; it's all anyone's talking about. Well, that and … and you.”

The awkwardness in the air is palpable, even inside the rock. Tacoma finds herself shrinking back from her window out of second-hand embarrassment.

“Yeah,” says Jodi slowly. “I noticed.”

“Sorry.”

“'S all right.”

“No, it isn't.” Gabriella sighs. “I owe it to you to make an effort. It's just that with this town the way it is―”

“Gabbi.” The sound of Jodi's cane: she's leaning forwards maybe, half-out her seat. “Gabbi, it's okay, I know it's weird. I knew it was gonna be weird before, too. I just had to do it anyway.”

“You had to?” The words sound heavy. All of the questions Gabriella is too polite to ask are crammed in beneath their surface.

Tacoma is appalled. She never even thought to have this conversation with Jodi. Is Gabriella really that much better a friend than she is?

“Yes.” Jodi pauses, gathering her thoughts, and before she speaks again Gabriella jumps in:
“You don't have to talk about it―”

“It's okay. And yes, I had to. Once I figured it out, I couldn't hold it back. Like there was an arcanine straining on a chain and it was barking and biting and clawing and then finally the chain broke and nothing could stop it any more.” Jodi stops herself, self-conscious. “I guess that probably doesn't make any sense.”

“No,” says Gabriella. “It makes perfect sense.” Long silence. Somewhere in the distance, the door bangs and Tacoma hears the stamping of Sam's heavy boots as she comes back in. “I had something similar, a long time ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes.”

Gabriella does not elaborate. Jodi does not ask. It's fine. Tacoma feels like everyone here probably has an idea of what she's talking about anyway.

“Are you glad you set it free?” asks Gabriella. “The arcanine, I mean?”

“Yes.” The answer is so immediate and heartfelt it makes Tacoma uneasy. She should have asked Jodi about this herself. “Are you?”

“Every single day.”

This is a different silence, deep and comfortable. Tacoma imagines the two of them on those patched old couches that Sam and Gabriella have, settling into the moment, and tries not to grind her teeth.

She does not try very hard.

“I guess I'm happy for you,” says Gabriella. “But I'm still sorry about Tacoma.”

“Yeah,” says Jodi. “Me too.”

“You know she was one of the first people I met in town? Back when I'd just arrived, when Sam and I were living in one of those rooms Simone used to rent out, before she lost the house.”

Tacoma remembers. Gabriella was wandering around town, looking lost, and Tacoma was riding her bike and searching for something interesting. And she found it too, in the beautiful stranger with the one-eyed wingull on her shoulder.

“Nothing happened,” Gabriella goes on. “She just welcomed me to town. It was very cute; she must have been about nine, but you would have thought she was the mayor, the way she spoke. I suppose it isn't a very good story, really. But I always liked her for that.”

“She told me about that,” says Jodi. “I remember. She said there was a mysterious stranger in town, but it was okay because she'd checked her out and she seemed like a nice person.”

“She really said that?” Tacoma can hear the smile in her voice.

“Yeah. She's … she was like that.”

“Yes.” The smile fades. “I'm sorry, Jodi. We're all going to miss her.”

“I know.”

The silence is unbearable. It's almost okay, at this point, to hear people talking about her like she's dead. (Because she is, she is and she has to keep staring at this fact until she finally understands it.) It's something else entirely to hear their pain, to know that she has punched a hole straight through her stupid, wonderful little town and now nobody can do anything but stare at the bleeding wound and try to remember.

Not her life to throw away, was it? But it's too late for regrets now. She's already gone and bought the fucking farm.

“I had a question,” says Jodi, after a while. “You're smart, right?”

“Some people like to think so,” says Gabriella. “What is it?”

“In this book I'm reading, there's a word I don't know. A chapter house? Dad didn't know, either.”

“Oh, I know that one, I think. It's a kind of meeting house. There's one in Ecruteak, isn't there? On the old temple, where the Knights of the Luminous Order were based.”

“A meeting hou―?”

The door opens.

“What did you just say?” asks Sam. Her voice makes something tighten in Tacoma's chest: no laughter there now, just suspicion.

“The Knights of the Luminous Order,” says Gabriella. “Fourteenth century? Come on, even you must have heard of them.”

A moment. A heartbeat. Jodi's worry drips slowly through the connection and pools around Tacoma's feet.

“Well, no,” says Sam. “That's why I have you, innit, 'cause you can know things on my behalf.”

“Glad I mean so much to you, Miss Spade. Are you coming in, or …?”

“Nah, you can tell me about your knights another time. Later, kids.”

The door closes again. The tightness in Tacoma's chest does not go away.

She doesn't pretend to be an expert at reading people – that's Jodi's thing – but if Sam's really interested in knights then Tacoma is the Princess of Johto. That's an excuse if she ever heard one.

Which means, if she's right, then Sam knows a lot more than just who was driving into town that night. Tacoma wants to know who and why? Well, here's a bloody lead.

“Sorry, Jodi,” says Gabriella. “I don't know what's got into her. What were you saying?”

“O-oh,” stammers Jodi. “I, um … you know, I kind of forgot.”

“Are you okay?”

“Yes. Yes, I'm … fine. I'm fine,” she repeats, with more conviction. “There's one in Ecruteak, you said?”

“There is. I think it's free, if you ever felt like visiting. It has a tapestry that's very pretty if you ignore the fact that it's a picture of a white guy decapitating a Hoenner.”

It goes on. Jodi expresses interest; Gabriella explains. Tacoma keeps listening, but at this point the words are going in one ear and straight out the other. Sam knows something. Sam Spade, of all people. If she had to pick one person in town who she thought would be trustworthy …

She isn't sure how Jodi's planning on starting that conversation, but now it looks more important than ever that she does.



In the end, Jodi doesn't have to. As she's getting ready to go, Sam puts her head in again and asks for a word.

“Sure,” says Jodi. Somehow, she doesn't even sound nervous, though Tacoma can sense through the link that she is. “What's this about?”

“Come in here and find out.”

“Very mysterious,” says Gabriella, a hint of disapproval in her voice. “Play nice, Miss Spade.”

“No promises, Miss Kendrick.”

Jodi's cane thumps, and then starts clicking. Tiles underfoot. The kitchen, then?

“So,” says Jodi, as the door closes. “What is it?”

“Where did you hear about the chapter house?”

Straight to the point. Her voice is low and serious, but not hostile. Or so Tacoma hopes, anyway.

“Like I said, I just saw the word in a―”

“No, you didn't,” says Sam flatly. “Where did you hear about it?”

No answer.

“Kid. Seriously. Who's been talkin' to you about the chapter house?”

“No one,” says Jodi. Her voice is level. Maybe it's that empath self-control at work, maybe she's just tough; either way, Tacoma is definitely impressed. Sam is scary when she's like this. “I'm just trying to help Tacoma, okay?”

“Yeah, and I know you was close, but she ain't gonna thank you for―”

“Sam. Please.” Not so level now. There must be a limit to her self-control after all. “Please, I just want to …”

Silence. Tacoma strains to hear, like that even makes a difference, and all she hears is something dripping elsewhere in the house. It makes her too uneasy to sit still; she gets up, starts picking and pacing, willing someone to speak.

“I'm sorry, Jodi,” says Sam. Still gruff, but gentler now. “I know you're hurtin'. But you got to leave this alone.”

“Why?” Jodi sounds almost desperate. “What is so bad you can't even tell me about it?”

“The … well, the reason I left town,” replies Sam. “You ain't the only one who's ever asked questions, Jodi.”

Seriously? That's why she left? She was investigating this too? Tacoma had always thought it was just that a woman like Sam doesn't fit into a town like Mahogany. But if she was run out of town – well, that's not an option for Jodi. She has nowhere else to go. Nowhere she even can go.

Maybe Sam's right. Maybe they should drop this after all.

“You think I wanted to go?” she continues. “I love this town, kid. That's why I came back. But it's got some real bastards in it all the same.”

“I know,” says Jodi.

“No,” says Sam. “You don't.” There's nothing dismissive about it: this is, her voice says, just the way things are. Jodi must know this too, must in fact be able to sense the truth of it in Sam's mind, because for several long seconds she doesn't even respond.

“But I can't stop,” she tells her eventually, her voice so quiet Tacoma almost doesn't catch it. “I … I really have to help her.”

Sam sighs. So gravelly it's almost a growl.

“Yeah,” she says. “That's what I told myself, too.”

“What you …?”

“Like I said. You ain't the only one who's ever asked questions.”

A pause. And then:

“I'm sorry.”

“So was I.” Movement of some kind. “I can't stop you,” says Sam. “But I ain't gonna help you, either.”

“That's … that's fair. I guess.”

It seems like this is all the words they've got between them. Tacoma hears nothing for a long, long time, and then the low snarl of a motor outside.

“Guess that's our ride, Lothi,” she says. “C'mon. Time to go.”

Out in the hall, Gabriella tells Jodi to come back sometime soon, and Sam asks her to think about what she said. Jodi says she will, though which of them she's talking to is unclear, and then at last she and Tacoma are back outside and alone once more.

“Well,” says Tacoma. “What the hell was all that about?”

“Dunno,” says Jodi. “But next thing we do, we're gonna have to figure that one out.”

Tacoma was going to suggest that maybe they should consider stopping after all, but in the face of Jodi's determination she just can't seem to get the words out.

“Yeah,” she says instead. “I … I guess we do.”

You're quite right. She does have a few ghostly powers – she's even figured out how to use will-o'-wisp, although she hasn't realised that that's what it is yet – but the explanations she comes up with, while plausible, aren't always true. She's a medical student, not a philosopher; her attempts to figure out how all of this works are haphazard at best. A lot of data has passed between her mind and Jodi's, and that's opened up the connection somewhat; her ability to perceive what's happening outside the stone is, uh, kinda narrative convenience, honestly, but it is also that there's more left of her than she thinks. As she herself has identified, her binding to the keystone is all about perception and memory – but what she hasn't realised are the implications, which are that she might well be able to challenge the limitations that the stone places on her. Unfortunately, that would probably require mental resources that she really doesn't have at the moment.



I'd be the last person to defend Con, but I should probably point out that he doesn't have a whole lot of choice here. He can't openly say to her “yeah, no, I hate this, but also can you help me out with the murder investigation?”, so it's not like he can be honest about it. He just has to pretend, and she has to pretend that she believes him, because she in her turn can't really call him out on it, either.



One of Jodi's problems is that she consistently downplays all her own issues and will go to any length to avoid making anyone else have to deal with those issues; she just hates to cause a fuss, probably at least in part because as an empath it makes her really uncomfortable to raise her own emotions above those of other people. That's why she lies, because I think she also knows that Tacoma knows that's a thing she does. Except that obviously Tacoma doesn't want to let that stand, because she really cares about Jodi and wants to make up for what she sees as her failure to show that in the past.

And, like – she's clearly a naturally angry person, who is also years deep into untreated depression, recently murdered and now trapped in a form where she cannot meaningfully interact with 90% of the world. It's kind of amazing she isn't more frustrated more of the time.



I'm glad you think so! Although, we're a little before remotes at this point; what happened here was that Ella flicked the switch on the set itself.



I feel like I've reread this too many times to be quite sure I can pick up the nuances any more, but I think I can see what you mean; the scene probably needed rewriting to bring it in line with future chapters anyway, so I've redone that conversation and taken it in a slightly different direction.



I was thinking more of the Order of St John, but same basic deal, yeah. Some sort of religious military chivalric order. Mahogany's chapter house is used by an even shadier kind of group, and much like the Hospitallers, they have something to defend. Something dark and horrible. Mahogany is, after all, a town with a rich history of hiding things underneath it.

Anyway! Thanks for the review, and especially for helping me tighten up that last part of the chapter – I really appreciate it!

It's kinda the scale of it -- I've done stories with this much past where there are much smaller casts, but broadening my focus out to the whole town is something else. Anyway, I'm glad that it's hitting the right notes. I picked the year 1976 on a whim, wanting to go to a time before personal computing, mobile telecommunication and the internet, but then once I started thinking okay, what happened in 1976 and what would that mean? I started to think that it fitted very well -- I wanted an economically depressed Johto, I wanted it to be an uncomprehending and sometimes hostile environment for Jodi, and I wanted that nagging sense of potential apocalypse that came with the Cold War. Partly because so much of this is resurgent today (or rather I guess they're no longer dormant), and like I've caught a few episodes of Endeavour here and there recently, and got really into the way they use sixties Britain to point at the way present-day Britain is still kinda terrible, so the opportunity to do something similar with my seventies story seemed too good to pass up.



I'm glad that works for you. It's something I stole from Blue Velvet, which is obviously all about someone who returns to his hometown from university and discovers its dark underbelly, and it's definitely meant to be more noticeable for Jodi than Tacoma -- Tacoma got to complete her journey, after all. And the whole Tohjo area has this really strong tradition of going out into the world as a kid and growing as you learn about the world, as I interpret it, so I figured Jodi would be growing much more at uni than Tacoma -- even aside from the fact that Tacoma's mental health has not exactly been conducive to personal growth over the past few years, and that Jodi's whole education is about understanding the pain of others, which I think necessarily involves gaining some understanding of the world.



I never really watched Broadchurch, except second-hand when I was writing or whatever in a room where other people were watching it, but it's good to hear you think that device is working well here. I took more cues from Twin Peaks, which does a similar thing but with, if anything, more ghosts and psychic powers than I'm using, and from its noir and neo-noir antecedents; I wrote a whole bunch about early- to mid-century detective films and films noir back in university and have been trying to figure out how to make use of all that research in a story for a while now. This kind of thing is also connected to your earlier point about Jodi coming back different to how she was before: often, this type of story begins with an outsider entering town and pulling at threads that locals avoid for fear of unravelling things. That's one reason why Jodi is a student on holiday, aside from the fact that she needed to be someone with a lot of free time, and why the story started on the train with her, other than to slow the pace of the opening down to match the setting and to build up the tension for her coming out later on in the chapter.

Anyway -- thanks for your thoughts! They're always so considered and interesting; it's a pleasure to read them. Next time: Gabriella has some errands to run, but in Mahogany, no interaction is ever quite that simple.

Good point! I've ... kind of been ignoring that and hoping nobody noticed. I needed Tacoma to be trapped in the odd keystone for a very specific reason, and I also needed Jodi to be able to communicate privately with her. We could kind of say that, as a ghost, Tacoma has picked up some telepathic skills of her own and is unconsciously using them to open a connection with Jodi -- she did, after all, manage to telepathically scream at her from several streets away back in chapter one. Yeah. I guess that kinda works. :P



You're never too dead to tell your friends how gorgeous they are! Especially if someone's just accidentally mind-controlled them into thinking otherwise. Then you should definitely remind them.



Just a metaphor! It's a thing that runs through all of Tacoma's narration, this idea of nuclear explosions. Living during the Cold War as she does, nuclear annihilation is obviously on her mind, but in the way that depressed people sometimes do she's grabbed hold of it and extended it into a metaphor that she returns to again and again. Kinda like Gwyneth and her ideas about being chosen in Go Home.



It kinda has to happen, after all. I'm a sentimental dork, and I don't like unhappy endings; there are too many of them in the real world for me to enjoy them in fiction. So Tacoma will be, if not great, then at least okay, at the end, and that means that she needs to begin healing at the very least.



Frankly, I think this would be a pretty weird small-town mystery if Mahogany didn't have a seedy underside. :P And it's interesting that you mention Hot Fuzz, because of course that's drawing on all the same things I'm drawing on here, just spinning them in a different kind of way. That's kind of one of the reasons I wanted to do a detective story in the first place -- there are just so many things you can do with it! As for the chapter house group itself, we'll be seeing plenty more of them in due course, starting with some hints in the next chapter. I'm looking forward to showing it all off as it comes up!

Anyway, I'm glad you liked this chapter! And thank you for sharing your thoughts. I always very much appreciate it.

Stop the presses, it's an actual review on April 1st! (I spent all my energy on one large joke...)

Let me start off by calling past!Amby an idiot (to be fair, present!Amby and future!Amby are, too) b/c I didn't actually realize the exact nature of Sam's and Gabriella's relationship from that last scene in the previous chapter. I feel like I should've. And reading this first part makes a lot of the ribbing that goes on b/w the two of them in that other scene read differently. I wish I was smart enough to have caught that originally. *nervous laugh*

It's also interesting to see a flipped perspective on an early scene. And again I look the fool b/c despite the previous mentions of Jodi's injury never did it occur to me that she was walking with a cane. I must've missed that somehow. And now I'm thinking of Hugh Laurie's stint as Gregory House for some reason (it's the 'younger person with a cane thing,' gotta be). Still, it's a nice brief recap that helps me get inside Gabriella's head and better explains how the whole visiting invitation offer thingy came to fruition. So that's much appreciated.

As for the stuff that follows leading up to the chapter house conversation, it did blend together a bit for me. I think that's because, at this point in the story, I haven't developed a particular investment in Gabriella since she only had a pair of other scenes previously. This chapter's kind of similar to the Con one in structure, now that I think about. Introducing this member of the town, talking about a daily routine, and throwing a bit of a wrench into it with Jodi and Tacoma. The difference is that I think this time around it didn't hold my attention as strongly... moreso because it felt more focused on Gabriella and her thoughts, whereas Con had a significant amount of interaction with other townsfolks even before he gets to Jodi. I don't want to be too negative, though, so I'll add that I appreciate the scene in the the store where Gabriella's shutting down one of the town's gossips. It was very well-timed and one of those nice stinger moments that made me feel like walking out a door snapping my figners in a sassy fashion. XP

The actual conversation made me nervous. I had forgotten that early chapters mentioned travellers getting lost... and to think there may be some underground group in the town that's involved in that is actually quite frightening! And that only gets a lot worse at the bar. The other conversations are mostly filler, though it's nice to see Gabriella putting her people skills to such good use here. Still, the fact that there's nothing that Con seems able to do about this potential problem is kind of unnerving. And it certainly makes you wonder who we've met in the story that may be involved in this little circle. We also get the first impressions of Nick... and they're not pretty, to say the least. Though, under the circumstances, I can totally understand where he's coming from here. Still, considering we've heard his name getting floated as a suspect (and he's kind of connected to that Odd Keystone), you'd think he'd be trying not to give off any bad impressions. But what do I know? :V

Also...

100% Jax approved! (And I beat her to saying that, ha ha!)


I put that into Google and I got pig's blood cake as an answer. So, if that's what you were describing, it's... yet another thing I really can't eat. XP