X groans. "I've woken up bruised, wet, sporting a raging headache, with no idea where I am before, but I at least got a night of booze and sex beforehand."

Thank Arceus. Or the Primals. Thank the god of Weedles if it helps.

"Wait, where's Sky? And Bear?"

Tick-tack-tack goes Claws upward dig. Surge covers his face with his hands.

"Your Scyther's gone," says Ghost.

X blanches and Bridge shakes her head. "It's not dead, X. It escaped. There and gone. Abra style."

The look X gives me is one I haven't seen on him since Kaido and Eiji died. Serious.

"No bullshit," I say. "Sky really is alive. The car flipped, tossed the rest of us in the drink, and he bailed."

X grins. "He always was an asshole... Wait. Bear."

It looks like Bridge is about to pat X's shoulder, thinks better of it, then just shakes her head.

"Shit!" X screams. "Fuck! Fuckshit-shitfuck!"

"Yeah," agrees Ghost.

X looks at Dragonair with pity. "Poor guy."

Claws drops some dirt on the unburned half of my face. I shake it off, knowing Ghost is still itching to talk about the mine, and truth is there'll never be a good time. So I start.

"Kazan's lab was built on top of a Crystalnode vein."

X blinks. "No shit?"

"A huge one, by the looks of it," says Bridge. "Might be valuable enough info to keep Command from killing us over Kazan."

"Or," whispers Ghost. "Or we don't have to. Tell them."

Bridge leans forward as much as she can. "I'm going to forget that treason. Just this once, understood?"

"I'm not saying cover it up and leave the Crystalnode to the Consortium. Not indefinitely. But do we have to report it right away?"

"Yes."

Somehow, Ghost shrinks to even smaller. I should say something.

"I just... I mean, we can go back to the base. Take initiative. Blow the mine sky high ourselves," Ghost whispers.

Bridge snorts. "With what ordinance? What guns? What evac plan or vehicle? Besides, command may want to take the mine for themselves."

"Impossible," says X. "Kanto is in no position to hold ground this far inland in Hoenn, if at all."

"Yeah, well, we have air superiority on Hoenn, and it's not too far to carpet bomb," says Bridge. "That base made the mistake of going lax on the AA guns. Time to pay in blood."

Ghost closes her eyes. "The surrounding village will be flattened."

A ray of blue light bursts into our hole. Surge recoils and its sudden enough to make me squint. Claws drops down and looks to me for permission to sleep. I give it. Of course I do.

But Ghost doesn't seem to notice. I want to tell Bridge we're going with Ghost's plan. I want to support her because I know her history. So does Bridge, though. People from other squads think our Specialist is called Ghost because she's a medium and stealthy.

But she's been a Ghost since eleven years old, when the war first went truly global eight years back. When she lived on a neutral island with the richest Crystalnode cave system yet discovered. Where the Allied and Consortium powers clashed so fiercely that a tiny fishing isle between the Sevii and the Orange didn't stand a chance.

No residents survived, save one. Living among the ashes of the dead for three years after the caves dried and the powers had long since left, scrounging and talking to the dead, until a passing naval ship rescued her. If you can call being drafted into this war a rescue.

I want to hold Ghost and tell her that it will never happen to any little girl ever again and if it does, she will have no part of it.

But it will, and she probably will, too, because Bridge is right. As usual.

"How is that my problem?" Bridge finally responds.

And since Bridge is fire and Ghost ice, Ghost melts. I place a hand on my specialist's shoulder. She doesn't react.

"I'm sorry, Ghost," I say. "Our focus now is getting home. What happens after that is on command's head."

"Why, uhh—" Surge finds the courage to speak. I guess his next words. "Why is this mine so important, ma'am?"

"It's Crystalnode," says X, like that's the end of it.

"Sure, and I'm sure it's worth a lot of money, Sarge. Crystalnode shrunk computers a shit-ton. But... we're a military unit. Not a tech contractor. You're all talking like the enemy has Zapdos chained up under the base."

"Oh, right, he doesn't know," says X before giving me a look suggesting disclosure. Ghost is still AWOL, so I glance to Bridge.

"Tell him," she says. "Whatever else he is, Rook's still a Ranger. He should know."

"Agreed. So, Corporal, the war started after the Kanto prez got iced by an Unovan assassin and the Kalos marines moved in on Fuchsia City to take advantage of the chaos, right?"

He nods.

"Wrong. Most of it, at least. Hard to say. Maybe the Commander-in-Chief was murdered, maybe he had a stroke, maybe he's sipping daiquiris and giving orders from a clandestine base in a Johto forest."

"But—"

Bridge slaps him upside the head lightly. "Can it. Listen. Learn."

"So, the siege on Fuchsia wasn't a land grab and we didn't repel Kalos against all odds. I mean, shit, motherfuckers had two battleships, a Gyrados, and a Salamence. No, they got what they'd come for, and left. A major shipment of Crystalnode from Four Island. Whatever the war is about on paper, it's all over that element."

Surge's eyes are half as wide as his head. "But, uhh, it's an element for data storage and processing."

"That's what we thought at first. Look, X is better at this sort of thing."

X's eyes light up, at the compliment or the chance to explain something, I'm not sure. "Computers are just the beginning, Greenie. When the potential applications came to light, the government nationalized the whole supply, leaving the mega corps with just enough to keep up the illusion that it's a computer component and not the most important discovery in centuries."

X grabs a piece of sandstone. "See this rock? It contains imprints of its history. A carbon signature. Dents and run off lines and sediment it's picked up from it's fascinating ten million year rock life."

Sarge smashes the stone on the wall and it crumbles.

"And now it's gone forever, which isn't part of the illustration. Anyway, anyway, anyway. Imagine that rock was translucent and purpley and kept imprints of every photon that's passed through it in a hundred years, ready for retrieval if you knew where to look."

I see the implications fly over Surge's head. I know the feeling.

"What are, uhh, the uses of that?"

"Right now? Not much, to be honest. But the theoretical applications of an element that can convert everything to pure data? Endless. But the coup-de-grace that could win the war? Breaking living matter down to a photon-data-stream and storing it perfectly. I get hard just thinking about it.

"Copying someone's memories and filtering through them like a video-reel? Go screw yourself, dubiously useful interrogations. Cloning? Why not. Breaking you down to light and reassembling you somewhere else? Maybe."

Surge raises both eyebrows. "Hmm. Would that be teleporting or just killing you and making a copy?"

"Look, kid, I know a lot of shit. War. Science. Cards. But I know fuck all about philosophy."

The sun must be rising because the blue light turns blood-orange. It hits Surge's face and I notice how pale it is. I wonder if the truth is that shocking or if it's blood loss. The color of the water is finally visible and it's far more red than expected.

Please, whoever's listening, don't let the rookie lose an arm on his first mission.

"So how do you know all this if it's such a conspiracy?" the rookie asks.

X shrugs. "All Rangers piece together half of it. Most our missions have something to do with crystal. But I was a late bloomer, trainer-wise. My first bonding was just a few years back, so I spent nineteen o' four to nineteen o' nine in the Navy's R&D corps. Older than I look. Either way, turns out I prefer fatigues to a lab coat."

"History lessons over," I say, shaking awake Claws and Yamada." We need to move before dawn ends and it's so bright anyone could spot us for a mile.

We consider asking Claws to burrow us out and avoid getting wetter, but I can't bring myself to ask. I help Surge and Claws swim to the surface while Ghost helps X, whose balance is still fucked. If Arceus has any mercy, his usefulness as a sniper won't be shot, no pun intended.

Dragonair meets us at the shore, head and tail bobbing above the surface. We all know it. She's staying. Command will chew me out, but every damn one of us will falsify the after action report. It's tradition in every ranger squad from Kanto to Oblivia. A ranger dies, their Pokémon goes free.

General Kenjii will tell me that a trained and battle tested Pokémon is a military asset. They'd rather lock her in a pen until they find another Ranger to forcibly bond her to. So we lie.

It ran off in the chaos. We had to leave it behind or risk all our lives. It was vaporized by a Tropius.

The lie doesn't matter. The brass knows the game and we play it anyway, because we're out here in the mud and they get iced drinks.

"It's wrong," says Bridge. "Leaving his body to decay in a foreign lake."

Surge nods. "The bones can't weigh much. Maybe if we dive down—"

"No," I say. "Corporal Mitsui... Bear. It's best he stays with Dragonair. Had no living relation."

"He had us," whispers Ghost.

"Damn right," says X. "If I had one to pour out right now..." X has to think about it, I guess. "Yeah. Yeah, yeah I'd dump it."

Bridge smirks. "He never once drank, you know. His dad did. A lot. He made me promise not to tell."

X looks offended. "Bull. We hit up bars together on his twentieth! And that guy had to be seasoned, he out-drank me. Me."

"Ginger ale," says Bridge with a chuckle.

"Cheating son of a bitch! We had money on that drinking game."

The troops all laugh, and I join in. Who knows when the next one will come along? Bridge has a pretty, melodic laugh. Surge's is quiet. Barely audible. And Ghost sounds like a person who's never heard a laugh before, just seen actors do it on the silent screen of the cinema. Dragonair adds a sort of mournful dirge to the mix and we go still.

I'm momentarily stunned by the beauty of the sun's pink rays reflecting off the lake, made more breathtaking by the Dragonair. I soak it in; I'll more than like never return to this lake and just as likely never see another Dragonair.

Maybe I should say some words, but I'm not religious or good at speeches, so I just salute the lake. The eleventh follows suit and then I find a driftwood cane for X. Ghost finds X's helmet in the sand and fills it with water. We'll drink from it once Yamada, (currently carried by Bridge's good arm and Surge,) has enough energy to boil it.

We're supposed to be at evac within the hour. Clearly, that's not happening. And since our comms are all dead, we can't ask our pick-up to wait. Policy says he waits eleven hours before leaving us high and dry.

On foot, unarmed, with wounded, and taking a wide berth around populated areas, we'll be cutting it close. But I'm sure we can make it. Half-sure, at least.