TWO: POISON

Friday, 9th September

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday, 10th September

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

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

"Yep," she agrees. "Thanks again, Shane."

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

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

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

He grins, shakes his head.

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

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

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

Shane sighs. He does not like this. He understands, or he thinks he understands – would he go to Humilau for Casey? he believes he might – but he does not like it. What he was hoping to do during the trip out here was to blunt the edge of her devotion, make her see what a bad idea this is. He worries. She's a good kid, he thinks, and she doesn't need to go getting herself hurt chasing an ex-lover who's clearly moved on. He doesn't realise that the reason he hasn't succeeded is that she already knows all of this.

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

"Guess you will."

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

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

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

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

"Ah, he's cool with it, man, don't worry." (He's not. There was an argument last night about this, or not about this, really, but about Gwyneth in general, about how many second chances Shane is going to give her, about the fact that Casey's life is not what he imagined it would be, about whether or not Shane is even trying, any more; about everything, really, but on the surface at least about this.) "Still, better get started on the way back," says Shane cheerfully. "Gotta get lunch before I head on out to the store."

"Right. Bye, Shane."

"Bye, Gwyn. Tell Nika I said hi."

Hesitation.

"Yeah, okay, I will."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Really? Is that a thing?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well," she says, through gritted teeth. "Happy to help."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe, replies Gwyneth, and off she goes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hello?"

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

"Uh huh. Just got off."

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

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

"Tell me about it."

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

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

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

(Crystal clear.)

"Yeah."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Yeah? Let's have it, then."

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

"The what?"

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

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

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

You people. Okay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Right. See you, Shane."

"See you, man. And good luck."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, 9th September

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

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

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

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

This is what is referred to as cold comfort.

Saturday, 10th September

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, Humilau.

But. The ferry. The bridge. The swarm.

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

"But we really need to get to Castelia!"

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

"Don't you have any other boats?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Please. My brother's getting married."

"The city needs you, Mr. Palmer."

"I have a knife."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gwyneth keeps walking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Click.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Hey? Hey, you! You okay?"

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

"Hi," she mumbles. "Where's Nika?"

"Oh my god, your – what happened to your arm?"

"Mom? No, she's – already here …"

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

"Okay then," she says, and it all goes dark.