[Last edited February 27, 2017]

Chapter 4

Hanna Maris had just woken up. She was lying on an exceptionally comfortable couch in a spacious basement, the corners of which were stacked high with technical manuals and miscellaneous electronic equipment. This was not Hanna's home, but it was fairly close. It was the sea cottage and laboratory of her employer, intellectual colleague, and friend Bill. The house only had one bedroom, but the well-furnished basement was always available for those who found themselves working at odd hours. On average Hanna slept down here 3.2 nights out of the week.

She checked her phone and saw that it was 5:30. This meant she was still short on sleep but just in time to see the sun rise over the ocean. While she was looking at her phone, she scanned through her last text conversation from the evening before. Derek had informed her in discrete fashion that he'd acquired 'some stuff' for her to check out, and they'd arranged that he'd drop it off in person sometime this morning. She had finished the conversation with the following message: 'gr8, see u then!' She had almost sent 'gr8, see you then! 3' but barely decided against it. As fun as Derek was to tease, she'd put him through the ringer enough for one month. This was a person who twitched when you asked him how his day was going, after all.

Hanna smiled. She got up, stretched, and ran her fingers through her hair as if that would make it more presentable. After she climbed the stairs to the small kitchen, she saw that Bill had already made a pot of coffee. She helped herself to a cup and took it with her through the small sitting room and out to the wide front porch. It was still dim out and there was a blue cast over everything. Bill's house was built on the last solid hill before the land fell away to the sands on the shore. The salt breeze settled on Hanna's tongue and gave her coffee the exact taste she was now used to.

"Morning." Bill was sitting in his favorite chair and had his eyes on the horizon and its rich colors.

"Morning, Professor."

"FYI, I'm still not a professor."

Hanna knew, and she knew Bill knew she knew. It had been fifteen years since she'd made the honest mistake of referring to him as a professor, and she wasn't about to reverse course now. Besides, she adored the way he sucked in his teeth oh so slightly in resigned annoyance when she called him that. "You taking the day off?" she asked him.

"Yeah. I figure I owe myself a Saturday now and then. Everyone else go home last night?"

"Mm-hmm. Mind if I use the lab for a side-project today?" Bill's cottage was roughly fifty percent lab and thirty percent basement. Hanna wished every house were like that.

"It's all yours. This for that friend you mentioned?"

"Yup, Jen's brother. You met him when we were kids, I think. He should be here in a few hours."

By 'when we were kids,' Hanna meant when she and Jen were kids, Derek was a late teen, and Bill was in his early twenties. Now she was twenty-nine, he was thirty-nine, and his hair still had perfect curls. There was something cosmically unjust about that, but she forgave the heavens for it. Speaking of which, the sun was just now poking its head over the water. Hanna took the seat next to Bill's and soaked it in. She had a good thing going with this job, and she meant to keep it that way as long as she could.

A few minutes later the sun was in full view and putting space between itself and the sea, and it was then that they heard a vehicle driving up from the inland road.

"Guess your friend's early."

"Guess so." Hanna now felt a bit silly for assuming that Derek wouldn't be in such a rush. She had meant to at least shower before he came, but there was nothing to do about that now. Without thinking she ran her fingers through her hair again.

"Relax, you look fine."

"Hush, you."

Hanna downed the rest of her coffee and headed for the driveway. She saw a dull-red pickup truck coming around the bend. At that moment a familiar voice popped into her head. 'Derek here.'

'I know, girl.'

The voice was Marie's. Specifically, it was the voice that she had imagined Marie would have back when she was a kid and Marie was a Kadabra, only now she heard it without pretending and it truly belonged to Marie. She could even hear it through the Pokéball she kept on her belt, which put a hole in the prevailing theory that Pokémon were in stasis while inside their balls. Or perhaps it indicated an exception based on the particular species. This was one of several Pokéball-related research topics that she explored in her spare time. She was mulling over the possibility of writing a thesis on the matter someday when Marie spoke up again. 'Rabies here too.'

'Huh?'

If Rabies was here, then presumably Jason was here as well, and presumably Jason was here with Derek. Hanna suddenly felt an uneasiness in her stomach. Part of her was irritated at Marie for not allowing her ten more seconds of believing she was in for a good day, but she knew it was best to be as well informed as possible. Even if it was the tiniest advance warning, it was best to know that bad news was coming.

The truck pulled up in front of her. Derek opened his door and stepped down in a huff, and Hanna could see the three kids keeping still in the back. She wondered how early they had woken up this morning to get here so quickly. Before she could say anything, Derek addressed his passengers. "Get out."

Jason and Krissy obliged with hesitation, but Travis stayed where he was.

"Travis!"

Hanna didn't approve of Derek's tone, even if it did get Travis to move. The boy looked sick and exhausted. Without a word, he plodded over to her and handed her a black, custom Pokéball whose manufacturer went without saying. Once again, Derek spoke up before she could find any appropriate words. "I'll explain inside."

Derek hurried the silent kids along as Hanna led the way to the porch, where Bill was now standing up to greet them. Hanna had the feeling she'd need to recruit his help for this one.

The most prized piece of equipment in Bill's lab was arguably the quantum scanner. It was one of only a handful in the world that could provide a real-time, 3D image of the inside of a closed Pokéball. Unlike a normal X-ray, this machine could analyze the sea of quantum information contained within and derive the state of its alternate spacetime. It was of exceptionally fine build to boot, and one the rare occasions when it didn't work a simple reboot and quick recalibration was always enough to resolve the issue. Except for today. After four tries the display still showed nothing but static.

Bill clicked his tongue. "Well, this is embarrassing." He had led the scanner's design team years ago.

"I don't think it's the machine," said Hanna.

Derek was sitting away from the action on a stool with his arms crossed. "You mean a malfunction in the ball?"

Hanna shivered. If that were the case, it would probably mean that Travis's Seadra was dead. Annihilated. Broken up on a molecular level into a soup of meaningless quantum noise. She was relieved that the kids weren't around to hear Derek say that. She replied, "Not necessarily. It might have a difference in design that makes our scanner incompatible."

"Only one way to find out," said Bill. He tapped away at the console and turned off the scanner's quantum features so they could analyze the circuitry and construction of the ball itself. The machine whirred to life again and one minute later they had a set of schematics on the lab's large main screen. There were wire-renderings of sixteen concentric spheres, each of which was in fact a dense circuit board. After a few more seconds of processing, the spheres were unfolded, flattened, and spread apart to make had a more legible representation.

Bill put his fingers to his lips. "Huh."

"Anything stick out about it?" asked Derek.

Hanna answered him. "It's the number of spheres. A normal Pokéball has four and even an Ultra Ball only has eight. Sixteen is unheard of. That doesn't necessarily mean it's better at catching, but it does mean it's either doing a lot more processing than we're used to, or the designers wanted it to be especially hard to reverse-engineer."

Derek's expression grew harder and harder as Hanna gave her explanation. 'Help read Derek,' came Marie's voice, but Hanna turned her down. She wanted to save Marie's energy for more pressing brainwork, and besides that she didn't need help to tell what Derek was thinking in this case. The Rockets' scientists had obviously put AAA work into this into these new balls, and the police's own scientists were AA at best. She knew it and Derek knew it.

More importantly, she knew that Derek would never deliver any information they uncovered here to his employer. That would lead to questions about where he had gotten the analysis, then (correct) accusations of mishandling evidence, and then, she assumed, dismissal. She decided that if Derek behaved himself she'd ask Bill to share their findings with the police directly and without mentioning Derek's role. It would take forever to get their scientists to listen and the exchange would probably be one-sided, but what could they do?

Bill laid out the plan of attack. "First thing we want to do is identify any novel components. There may also be traditional components split up and spread across different boards to throw us off track, so keep that in mind. Let me know right away if you can't tell what something does."

"Roger." As Bill sent a copy of the schematics to Hanna's workstation, she let Marie out of her ball. The Alakazam stretched her limbs and let out a deep growl. She wasn't young anymore and thus prone to cramping up when she fully engaged her brain without easing into it. Slowly Hanna's peripheral vision was filled with a blue glow as her partner began to share more space inside her head.

Then Hanna heard a faint mumble that started just inside her ear and moved behind her lips that had the tenor of Derek's voice. She could tell he was thinking something along the lines of 'We need someone who can do that.' She had half a mind to tell Derek that if the police wanted someone who could borrow an Alakazam's processing power, that someone had better start now with an Abra and train very closely with it for at least ten years. But she didn't want him to know she had 'overheard' him, and instead sent Marie the message to stop eavesdropping and focus on the task at hand.

Under Hanna's direction, the pair entered a rhythm. Hanna would focus on a chip, and Marie would highlight in her mind's eye all the components it was connected to. Hanna would try to guess its probable purpose by the pin mapping, and if she couldn't do so immediately Marie would help her file through her own memories in case she was forgetting something. Every few minutes she'd consult Bill, and each time it would turn out to be an ordinary chip divided into counterintuitive parts and obfuscated by redundant or irrelevant operations. It was proving just as tedious and frustrating to decipher as the Rockets must have intended, but with Marie's help Hanna could go at it like this for hours and hours without her mind so much as wandering once.

So sure enough and before she knew it, Marie declared, 'You hungry.'

All of a sudden she felt how empty her stomach was. She looked in the corner of her screen. Dinnertime. That was a little scary. "Hey Bill, you want to take a break?"

"Hmm?" Apparently the thought hadn't occurred to Bill either. They were awfully compatible in this way. "Oh shoot, look at that. Good catch."

Hanna returned Marie to her ball and silently instructed her not to let her massive brain overheat. Then she turned around and was a little surprised to find Derek sitting on the same stool with his arms still crossed. She asked him, "Have you been there the whole time?"

"No. I left around noon to make sure Travis ate lunch. Came back at quarter to one. What's our status? I can't follow half of what you've been saying."

It was one thing to be able to sit for hours while mentally occupied, but Hanna found the thought of someone being able to stay in place for that long in mere boredom disturbing. She hoped he had at least done a crossword or something while she wasn't looking. "We've gone through about two-thirds of the circuits. Still haven't found out why we can't scan Wyvern, though, and we don't know which component is locking the release switch either."

"I care more about the lock."

"I'd be inclined to agree," said Bill, "but it may take a long time to figure out how to pick it or bypass it. We wouldn't need to worry about the lock if we had a perfect quantum scan. Then our own tools and programs would be able to handle the extraction and the ball's opening mechanism wouldn't matter."

"We need one or the other," said Hanna, "and it's hard to guess which way would be faster."

"I think I follow." Derek stood up. "What do you guys want for dinner?"

Hanna was chopping vegetables for a stir-fry while Derek mixed the sauce. It was nice of him to offer to cook alone so she and Bill could relax, but Hanna was hungry enough to prefer that things go faster. Over at the kitchen table Bill was talking to their three young guests about their teams and their journey so far, as he did with each trainer who came to visit.

Jason was doing most of the telling. "And that was in late March. A few weeks later was when we started to… um…" he trailed off.

"That was when you decided to make a difference, right?"

"…Yeah. The first Grunt was easy. He had a Raticate and that was it. He ran away before we could get him to give back anything he stole."

Hanna looked over her shoulder. None of them were facing Bill directly, and Travis was staring out the window at the sea. Poor kids. It must have felt like an interrogation to them, especially if they didn't know Bill.

Krissy spoke up next. "We're sorry to trouble you like this."

Bill waved his hand. "Hey, no. You haven't troubled us at all. The thieves are the trouble, got that? This is their fault and no one else's."

A mumble from Derek made its way into Hanna's brain again with Marie's help. She wasn't sure, but she got the idea that he wanted to add something to the conversation. She glanced over at him and saw that tension in his hands and that jumpiness in his eyes that she hated to see so much. The mumble grew louder, and the impression she got was this: 'Don't reinforce their behavior. They could have avoided this. We weren't hard enough on them.' But he didn't say anything out loud. Something was keeping his mouth closed, and she had a good guess of what it was.

He was acting the same way as when they'd first met. That was back on Jen's first day as a trainer. He had been playing chaperone to her and trying to catch her a starting Pokémon when Hanna ran into them by chance. Jen had talked up a storm and asked her a million questions, while he had said maybe three words to her. 'That's my big brother over there. He's different, but he's not as bad he looks!' Hanna agreed that 'different' was the word for a sixteen-year-old who was scared to talk to a twelve-year-old lest some random preteen think he was stupid or weird. And now she wanted to tell him to just let it out and not worry about what Bill would think of him.

She realized she was digging into personal parts of Derek's brain, and once again told Marie to stop eavesdropping for her.

'You want listen Derek head. Always. I know.'

'Don't go do something just because I want it. Do what I say instead, please.'

'Derek right. Their fault, our fault too. You me fault. Very.'

Hanna bit her lip. She'd gone almost the entire day without reminding herself of the portion of the blame that was unique to her and Marie. 'This isn't the right time to think about that. Could you blot that thought out for now, please? We have to focus on freeing Wyvern.'

'Okay. But I bring back later. You me fault. Very.'

There was a buzzing noise, and Hanna zoned out for a second and tried to remember what she had been thinking about. Then it occurred to her: chopping vegetables. They had to get this dinner ready so they could get back to work. "How's it going over there? I've only got the carrots left."

Derek had just finished marinating the chicken. "I'm going to put on the rice and then I'll be ready for the vegetables."

"Great."

Hanna gathered up the used plates from their delicious meal while Derek scrubbed the pans. Then she blinked and wondered why she had just skipped ahead forty-five minutes. She was reasonably sure they had eaten dinner and that the conversation had gone without incident. The most probable situation was that she had asked Marie to suppress a thought for some reason, and a portion of her short-term memory had taken collateral damage. This was prone to happen when she asked Marie to perform this favor too many times in a row. She made a mental note to avoid any more suppression for the rest of the day, whatever it was she didn't want to think about.

"You okay?" asked Derek. "You look woozy."

Hanna snapped out of it. "Yeah. Long day, you know."

"Mm."

She brought the dishes over to the sink and then looked out the window. The kids were on the beach. One of the boys, she thought it was Travis, was in the water. She supposed that was a good sign. "You know, if you were bored watching me and Bill work earlier you can go play with the kids instead. Or just keep an eye on them, whatever."

Derek peeked out the window but only for a moment. "They're not going anywhere. Not as long as Wyvern's still trapped."

"I didn't mean it like that. I was only thinking it might make them feel better."

Derek looked at her in a way that said, 'Oh, really?' Maybe he was right. But she didn't think he had to be right if he didn't want to.

Bill came in through the side door. "You guys can leave that stuff for tomorrow. Let's get back to it."

There was no argument, and they returned to the lab. Derek went straight to his stool and took up the same position he had held for hours before. While they waited for the machines to boot up again, Hanna decided she had to engage him somehow or it would drive her nuts knowing how bored he must be. "You have any thoughts on this?"

"What? No, no, I really don't know a thing about this stuff." There was that jumpiness in his eyes again.

"I'm not asking you solve it for us. Anything can help, even a question. We might not have thought to ask it ourselves."

Derek stared into space, and Hanna gave him time. "Well, one thing occurred to me. It might be wrong, or maybe nothing. One of Team Rocket's problems—I've heard that one of Team Rocket's internal problems is that a lot of their Grunts keep some of the Pokémon they steal for themselves, usually to sell without giving their bosses a cut. So I don't think this ball of theirs is just designed to keep us out, it's also meant to keep the Grunts from doing anything with them after they've stolen a Pokémon."

This grabbed Bill's attention. Hanna noticed Derek fidget in place before he continued. "So if I were one of the execs, I'd order the scientists to make it so there's no way to get the Pokémon out without bringing the ball to HQ. And if they have their own custom extraction tools at HQ, their best op-sec would be to have a ball with no re-opening or self-extraction mechanisms at all."

He swallowed and rubbed his forehead. "So… So I think you guys haven't found the lock because there isn't even a door anymore. It probably has no functionality for letting a captured Pokémon out."

Hanna couldn't believe she hadn't thought of it herself, and Bill was visibly ecstatic. He clapped his hands together and said, "That's it! I bet that's it! Oh, we might have wasted days on that rabbit-hole. See, Hanna, this is what I'm always talking about with reverse-engineering: start with the use-cases! Always easier to begin with what they're doing than how they're doing it. We'll focus on getting the scan, then. Thanks, Derek!"

Derek stared at the floor. "You're welcome."

While Bill dove right back into the work with renewed vigor, Hanna walked over to Derek and whispered in his ear. "Maybe this is a lesson for your employers about the importance of collaboration? That they might get their best results if we actually share our findings?"

Derek whispered back, "Look, I know you're right, but they won't care. I'm not going to lose my job trying to explain it to them."

Hanna returned to her desk without another word and wondered if Derek really knew how right she was.

It was one in the morning, and they had gotten much farther than Hanna thought they would. That one insight had made so much of it fall into place. Marie sat on the floor with a yawn and closed her eyes. "Do you want back in?" Hanna asked aloud. Marie nodded, and Hanna recalled her.

"I think we've hit a good stopping point," said Bill.

"Mind giving me an update?" asked Derek.

"I'm afraid I'm going to have to say goodnight, so that's up to Hanna."

"I don't mind. Night, Bill."

Bill gave them a wave as he exited the room and left them to it. Hanna pulled her chair over to Derek's and she showed him the schematics on her laptop. "We've all but confirmed that your guess about the ball having no self-extraction feature is correct: the release switch connects to an isolated circuit that does nothing. As for these three layers over here, we don't have specifics but the way they're wired suggests they have something to do with behavior modification in the Pokémon."

"It's probably an aggression booster. They have a history of using testosterone and amphetamines on Pokémon. You'll want to scan for other chemicals in the apricorn cartridges." said Derek.

"I'll make a note of that. Now over here is one of the more unusual features. It's a miniaturized version of the hardware we use in the PC Storage System to release Pokémon to the wild. Basically it takes the unique quantum matrix encoding applied to a caught Pokémon which prevents other Pokéballs from catching it and resets it. Make sense?"

"You lost me at 'quantum,' but sure."

"I'll try to explain the rest in traditional terms, then." She frowned. This next part was going to be unpleasant. "Spread across the four innermost layers are the components that are keeping us from getting a scan of Wyvern. Do you know much about public-key/private-key cryptography?"

"I recognize the phrase."

"The main idea is that you have one key to encrypt the data, and another to decrypt it. The person writing the message encrypts with the public key, and the person reading it decrypts with the private key. You can't use the public key to decrypt its own message."

"By 'data' here you mean 'Pokémon?'"

"Yes. Usually that quantum matrix I mentioned is simple enough that the PC can decode the Pokémon inside the ball without trouble. In this case though the ball uses an encrypted matrix, meaning we can't read what's inside without the right key. The ball itself holds the public key to capture and encrypt, but not the private key."

Derek sighed. "And the Rocket execs are probably the only ones who have the private key."

"I'm afraid so."

"Is there any way we can guess the private key through brute force, like by trying all of them? Or, I don't know, work backwards through the part that does the encrypting?"

Hanna couldn't blame Derek for trying, but she also couldn't hold back a hollow laugh. "It'd take a decade to brute force it. And as for working backwards, if I could prove that's even possible the proof would be worth a hundred million Pokéyen, easy."

Derek rubbed his eyes. "So it's the execs or nothing. We're stuck."

Hanna agreed that she and Bill at least were stuck. When it came to Team Rocket itself, that was Derek's turf. "Maybe it's time to hand the ball over to the police? I'm sure Bill won't mind giving them all the info we've got, and we won't use your name."

"It won't help Travis any. Not even if you share all your data. They've never managed to touch a Rocket Executive before, and they're not going to ramp things up over this. Not with the guys we have in charge now. It'll take them years."

The lines on Derek's face looked thicker than ever. She had to wonder if he was going to be dead by sixty at this rate, and it made her sad.

They sat for a minute in contemplation. Then Derek sighed and said, "Thanks for doing this, Hanna."

"It's the least I could do, and don't forget to thank Bill. I just wish—"

At that moment Marie set off something like an alarm bell in Hanna's head. It went, 'You fault! Me fault! You fault! Me fault!' She remembered now. This was what she'd been trying to avoid all day. She put a hand to her forehead and let Marie know that she got the message.

"—Derek. I need to apologize."

"Don't. Jen and I couldn't talk them out of it either."

"No, you don't understand. I knew they were lying."

He twitched. "Excuse me?"

"They told us they gave up. I didn't believe them so I had Marie poke around in Jason's head and I saw there was a 95% chance that he wasn't telling the truth."

Derek's eyes grew wider and he opened his mouth, but no words came out right away. Hanna had been dreading this. "Why didn't you call him out!"

"Let me explain. If I pushed him he was just going to dig in and then we'd have had no choice but to lock them up or tell their parents. But I also saw that we'd gotten through to them about how dangerous it was. He was feeling more cautious than before, and Marie felt the odds were five-in-six that he'd get cold feet and quit before they did anything stupid."

"I don't believe this! You let them go, knowing they were lying, because your Pokémon said they might be fine anyway? That's insane!"

Even if Derek was a basket-case himself, it did make her sound insane when he put it that way. "I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry. I thought the odds were good enough."

"You blew it, then. And I blew it. I should have called Jason's mom the minute I found out; saved Travis the heartbreak."

Hanna still wasn't convinced of that. Was the risk really so high that it would have been better to pull the plug from the beginning? "If you'd done that you'd be kicking yourself for not giving them a chance. If we get their licenses taken away there's no fixing that until they're adults, and by then they've missed their only opportunity to be kids. We can still salvage things as they are now."

Derek put his face in his hands. "'Not giving them a chance,' huh? Like a five-in-six chance? Do you realize how much you had riding on not rolling a one?"

"They're not helpless. You have to cut that one in six down again because they might have won their next fight. From what you told me this guy they ran into was better than most Grunts. We still had time to get them to quit for good."

"You're talking like a kid trainer, now. They all think they're invincible. You and Jen especially did."

Marie reached up into Hanna's brain again and brought a mutter from Derek with her. 'Are you still a little kid in there, Hanna? Do you still think a smart girl with the right Pokémon is safe from anything and everything?' Hanna wasn't going to answer this question unless Derek asked it himself. And if he did ask, she was going to ask him if he was still that pathetic little boy who quit his journey after only three years because he was convinced everything was going to kill him.

'Do you know it was almost a relief to learn you were a cop? If only because it meant you must have outgrown your crippling fear of anything remotely dangerous? Sorry, but I think kid-me was more right than kid-you.'

'I read Derek more now. Tell you if kid-Derek in there.'

'No thank you, Marie.'

Before Hanna thought of what to say next, the fire went out of Derek's eyes and he spoke again. "Sorry. It's not my place to second-guess you when all I could do was pass the buck." He stood up. "Let's figure out what to do in the morning. Jason said they wanted to sleep outside, right?"

That must have been during the gap in Hanna's memory that evening. But now that he mentioned it, she seemed to recall that Travis said he preferred the salt-air to the indoors. "Yeah. We don't have to join them, though. There's more than one couch in the basement."

"That sounds nicer."

Travis was standing just outside the lab door. He should have known better than to have hope, and now it was dashed. He had just heard Derek speak these words: "So it's the execs or nothing. We're stuck." After Derek said that it would take the police "years," Travis walked away toward nowhere in particular. He didn't understand what a 'private key' was aside from that it was a computer thing, but everyone knew what a Rocket Executive was. That private key might as well have been on the moon.

He found himself in front of the screen door that led out to the porch. His entire body felt completely hollow except for his head, which was heavy. Jason and Krissy were sitting out there on the front steps, and he had to make a decision before he talked to them. It was already settled that he was going to find an Executive and get that key, no-hope be darned. But Jason and Krissy were another matter. Wyvern wasn't their Pokémon. It was bad enough to put Leviathan in danger to save Wyvern, but it wasn't his place to ask the same thing of his friends' Pokémon. He wouldn't even blame Jason and Krissy if they wanted to stay behind. They shouldn't have to risk losing Rabies and Lucia forever over such a slim chance.

So that was that. He would tell them he why he was leaving, beg for whatever material aid they could give him first, and then say goodbye. He opened the door and approached them.

Jason got right to it. "You were listening to them, right?"

Travis nodded.

"What did they say?" asked Krissy.

Travis sat on the top step. He swallowed, and then explained everything as well as he could. There was so much that had gone straight over his head, but he got the essentials across. His friends were stunned. They sat in silence for a minute. The only sounds came from the flickering light above their heads and the waves off in the distance.

Travis knew he had to tell them about his plan before the night was over, and he almost started to but Jason was faster. "Travis, I know I can't ask you to risk another Pokémon, but I want to save Wyvern."

Krissy went next without a moment's hesitation. "Me too. None of this was your idea. We owe it to you, and we'll get that key for you."

This was backwards. It was supposed to be his problem. What was he supposed to say when they flipped the script on him like this? His eyes had welled up far too many times during the last two days, and now it was happening again. "…It's better odds with all three of us."

There was a smile on Jason's face for an instant, but it was gone when he asked, "You know they're gonna tell on us this time, right?"

"I don't care. If they tell the cops then we stay away from the cops. And anywhere they can track us, I guess."

"No Pokécenters would be tough," said Krissy. "But none of your parents know my parents. It might take them longer to put me on their list."

"That'll help," said Jason. "So we leaving tonight or what? Let's figure this out quick."

Before they worked out the details, Travis said one last word to both of them. "Thanks."

It was seven o'clock the following morning when Hanna stood outside the front door in a state of panic. Wyvern's ball was gone and the kids were nowhere in sight. She jumped down from the porch and ran twenty yards out as if it would make a difference. "Jason!" No one answered her call.

She hadn't seen the three children sneaking away several hours ago. She didn't know about the footsteps on the beach that had been washed away by the tide, or that from there Jason had taken flight on his Noctowl while Krissy shared Travis's Quagsire as they went south. She might have guessed that Travis was good enough of a swimmer that he only needed the Quagsire's tail, but none of that mattered now. She knew that they were gone, and it was obvious why they had left.

She rushed back inside the cottage and found her laptop in the kitchen. If Jason's cell phone was turned on and sending a signal, then she could still track him. She had told him back at Ecruteak that in order for her program to work on his phone again someone would have to call him again, but that was a lie. The map came up, but there was nothing. She swore and closed her laptop's screen with too much force. Then she noticed the sheet of paper on the table behind it, next to which was a cell phone.

There were a few crudely written words on the page: 'Nice try,' which was struck out and followed by, 'Sorry. Thx for everything, we'll take it from here –Jason' He hadn't trusted her either, then. Her heart was pounding. It had been so long since a situation went this far out of her control. What was she going to tell Jen? Or Derek, for that matter?

She walked down the basement steps as quickly as she could bring herself to. Derek was still sound asleep, and she stood over him for longer than she thought was appropriate. It felt bad to wake someone up who looked like he'd never gotten a good night's sleep in his life. It felt worse to tell the most neurotic person she knew that his cousin had run away to raid a den of thieves and cutthroats. She reached down to shake his shoulder and tried not to think about the miserable look that was surely going to be in his eyes in a matter of seconds.

[The title of the next installment is The New Recruit. We'll be stepping back just shy of fifteen years to see when Derek's career started going downhill. Spoiler alert, it was when they hired him.]