VAJRIN
II. Hyacinth Girl
don't be scared; machines can't have nightmares; there are merely recollections.
the blade will rip through the air first.
please, wait, I don't want to die.
the only thing that will be in the way after that will be the body of the young girl who had, regrettably, fallen into the blade's unceasing path a few seconds prior.
I don't want to die
it will then bite into her skin, ripping through the subcutaneous layer in an instant
I don't want
from there, it's a simple matter of travelling remorselessly through the tight-bound, lean layer of neck muscle before following through to dig into her trachea.
I don't
there will not be much biomaterial after that to stop the impact, so it won't.
I
In the ten seconds afforded to her before her neck bleeds out, she remembers ten years.
Vajrin Inda was named for the old legends. Her parents picked a name that meant she was as adamant as a diamond, and as irresistible as the thunder. She was born in a simpler time, when such a name was only a wish for good luck instead of a prayer.
She was three the day her world ended. She didn't fully remember it. What she had instead was a collection of blurs. The imprint of the white ferry on the sparkling sapphire waters outside of Gateon port. The scintillating scales of an enormous, blue pokémon erupting out of the sea. A blast of heat, so hot, so bright, so painful on her arm. Her mother pulling her from the rubble, running. One hand outstretched for Father.
She split the world into two chunks. The chunk she was living in was After. There was a chunk of time in Before, when the entire world, not just her, learned to be happy. She got the images of those sometimes, hints of them slipping into her dreams when she least expected them. She'd find herself crying, but she couldn't fully understand why.
Kana, her mother, took her on a nomadic journey across Orre. It wasn't by choice. When Gateon fell to shadow pokémon, the two of them stumbled over to Pyrite. When Pyrite proved too dangerous to raise a daughter who was just learning what it meant for her family to be less than three, they fled to the outer territories, to a land beyond the maps. When that failed, they went further, eventually making it out piece by piece to the walled fortress of Phenac.
From there, they moved again and again, until all that was left of a family of three was a wary, battle-hardened woman who saw an enemy in everyone, and a bright-eyed girl who learned the exact opposite. The little girl lost an arm when the shadow gyarados razed her hometown, but you couldn't tell that she had the scars if you only looked at her face.
The smiling girl became the darling of every settlement they stayed in. She had a sort of optimism that survivors in Orre found quaint, like a relic, something to be cherished and put on a shelf, like a cute pokémon without the threat that it might one day become a shadow.
By the time she was four, she'd moved twenty-seven times. Not that she was counting.
It was at the age of five that she finally got the courage to ask about her father. Kana looked away.
They walked on eggshells around each other. Kana didn't believe that her cripple of a daughter would ever truly have a place in this world that was learning to devour itself alive. And in turn, her daughter was learning what it meant to love someone who's walled themselves off from loving and losing ever again.
The girl went by Rin, now. In her mother's native tongue, it meant cold, distant—everything she needed to be in this world in order to survive, and everything she still wasn't. There wasn't much trace of what her life used to be. She couldn't help but wonder if there was something missing, something spelled into the syllables of a name that was starting to sound foreign even to her own ears. Orre certainly didn't remember it.
But that didn't stop her from lying awake at night, staring at the crumbling ceiling above and rolling her full name on her tongue. Vajrin, she whispered. I am Vajrin. And with that seditious word came the memory of two parents who were nothing like the one she had now. She didn't understand why, and she didn't love her mother any less, but she understood the loss.
She was re-learning to use her other hand now, and she practiced by writing letters, crudely, to a man she once remembered as father.
She didn't get toys growing up. They simply weren't necessary, so Kana didn't give them to her. And besides, everyone reasoned, what would a crippled girl do with creativity in a world like this?
And yet, trapped behind walls, a little girl's imagination had to wonder. Rin reached for what she could find, scraps of a world that used to have more than she could've asked for, and started to create. She wasn't sure at first what caused the whisper, the drive, but by the time she was six, she built her first motor out of scraps in the junkyard. Machines were fascinating and boring to her in the same way that people weren't: they were predictable.
Her next project was a prosthetic, stumpy arm.
It was at age seven that she finally made her first friend.
They talked all night and all day. While her mother spent the days and nights fighting to make her world safe, her new friend told her stories of far-off places, of fantasy and daydream. He kept her company when she played in the scrap heaps, gave her advice on how to wire the circuits up in her arm so that her fake fingers could flex like her real ones. He even helped her practice her spelling out her letters to her father.
One night, he helped her sneak off to the walls of their settlement, encouraged her to climb to the top. He showed her the constellations and told her of how far, far away they truly are, so far that it took the light years to cross down to her. She threw a letter to her father from the wall, watched it vanish into the night and hoped it'd reach him. Her friend told her tales of the wide, wide universe, and he told her a great many stories that were laced in the stars. There was the little boy who flies a small biplane and discovers a floating castle in the clouds. Here was the woman who befriends Suicune and learns of their true nature.
His name was Shyena, and he was too scared to talk anywhere but in her mind, so she called him Shy.
When she was eight, Rin witnessed a killing.
Kana was the one who did it. A growlithe leapt over the walls around Phenac. The people screamed, but Kana didn't hesitate. She was a Guardian now, big and strong like the heroes Shy has been telling her about, and she impaled it with a piece of steel rebar.
The people cheered for her. Kana did a good thing, defending Phenac. Guardians like her were the reason that they could stay in one place for as long as they had. This was good. Rin knew it. Pokémon were bad. They hurt humans. That was all they'd ever do, and all shadow pokémon needed to die if humans were ever to live peacefully in Orre.
She had dreams that night of her mother's smile, of her unscarred face and open hands. It looked just like her mother, except it wasn't, and Rin decided to write a letter to her dream-mother too, asking where she'd gone.
Shy was awfully quiet that evening.
Her ninth birthday was a lonely affair. Kana was busy repairing the barricades around Phenac from where a swarm of raticate almost broke through, so it was Shy's turn.
He sang her a quiet song from his homeland and told her a surprise story he'd saved just for her birthday. It was a special story about an enormous bird with beautiful, rainbow feathers. And the bird loves a little boy, and they play together, and the bird is happy. But one day the boy asks for some of the bird's rainbow tail, and the bird gives, so that the boy would be happy. And the bird loves the boy. On a different day, the boy asks for some of the bird's rainbow wing, and the bird gives, so that the boy would be happy. And the bird loves the boy, and—
It was at this point that Rin got distracted by a new transformer that she found in the engine they were taking apart, so Shy instead told her about a joyous tradition from his childhood, where they celebrated their birthdays by producing massive showers of sparks from themselves to spread their joy outward.
He taught Rin how to do that too.
Rin spent a lot of the next year thinking about how it was unfair that she and Shy didn't get proper bodies. Hers felt lopsided and asymmetrical, no matter how many times she tweaked her prosthetic arm. It was like there was a weight there that she wouldn't ever quite get back, something she was missing but—
daddy? mommy? do you still love me?
—and it was certainly not fair to Shy, who had no body at all.
She decided to make him one, to pass the time. Kana was starting to say that Rin was too old for imaginary friends, so Rin decided to prove once and for all that he wasn't imaginary at all.
She made him a bird body, like the bird who gives things to the boy.
In a very quiet, very small voice, so she wasn't demanding like the boy in the story, she asked Shy if he could use his new wings to fly out of Agate and take a letter to her father and dream-mother.
At age eleven, Rin saw Cipher for the first time.
She was ushered inside before the talks began, but she asked Shy to go listen for her, so he did.
What he told her was quite surprising: Cipher wanted them to kill as many shadow pokémon as they could, and Cipher would pay them for it.
That didn't make much sense, she told Shy, because they were already killing as many shadow pokémon as they could. That was sort of the whole point.
That didn't make much sense, Shy told her back, because shadow pokémon didn't deserve to die, and Cipher had created them.
Rin made the mistake of repeating this out loud.
No one from Agate heard, but the gaunt, silvery man from Cipher swiveled his head to stare. Then he smiled at her with sharp, pointed teeth.
She was twelve when shadow pokémon overran their settlement. The day before that was the last day that she was truly allowed to be happy.
The next day, Phenac was wiped out by shadow pokémon who brought thunder and blood. Rin was the only survivor, until she met the stranger with the sword, and then she wasn't.
And the day after that, Vajrin Inda woke up in the reverse of the situation she'd spent the past ten years learning. She blinked her tired eyes open and found that instead of she and Shy borrowing her body, they were piloting his.
Sometime along the years, on a day she couldn't remember, Orre took away Rin's ability to call herself "Vajrin".
This was the day she stopped being able to call herself "I".