[Last edited July 22, 2017]

Chapter 6

June, 2017

Hanna was walking down a narrow, poorly lit hallway in a dilapidated apartment building. She rarely stepped foot in this part of Goldenrod City, but this was where Derek lived. Unless he changed his mind, she was going to help him track down Jason and friends using the police's private network. It had taken a good deal of persuasion to get him to invite her over, but no threats, which she supposed was progress. When she reached the end of the hall she knocked on door number ten, which had lost its '1' and now appeared to be door zero. She heard the noise from a chain lock, a dead bolt, and a doorknob lock in sequence before it finally opened.

"Hey," said he.

"Hey," said she.

Derek looked slightly better than she had expected. He hadn't shaved or anything like that and his eyes looked like hell, but he was at least presentable. He was even wearing a collared shirt. As soon as she walked in he shut and locked the door all three ways again. The room was startlingly empty, and the mattress in the corner didn't have so much as sheets on it. "Kind of Spartan, but I was worried it'd be filthy. I guess you're doing okay."

Derek looked confused for a second. "…Huh? Oh. Uh, no, I don't live here. I just work here sometimes. Someone else's name is on the lease, so it's safer to use the internet from here."

So they both tended to sleep where they worked. Hanna could relate, but his justification seemed odd to her. "Can't you just use an anonymizer like D0r or something?"

"I do both. It's not like D0r's perfect."

Hanna made a note not to assume that Derek's technical knowledge was that basic. He'd clearly done his research on security and privacy topics, which made sense considering both his career and his private paranoia.

Derek gestured to the modem/router in the corner and the laptop connected to it. "There's a spare cable you can use. There's no wireless."

Especially his private paranoia, she realized. Most commercial routers had vulnerabilities, of course, but she'd never known anyone to be this thorough in avoiding them. She saw there was even electrical tape over the spot where Derek had physically removed the antenna. When she took all this into account, the fact that he'd even told her the apartment's address showed that maybe he trusted her more than she thought.

She sat down on the floor and pulled out her laptop. "So what's the plan?"

Derek sat down as well. "Well, there are two police databases I can get us access to. Neither of which you're going to tell anyone about."

"Naturally. What are they?"

"One's a citizen database. Names, photographs, addresses, immediate family. No birthdays, which is inexcusable but you can't ask for much from these clowns. I'm hoping we can find Krissy in there along with her parents."

"That's a start."

"And the other one's… well…" Derek shifted his weight in discomfort. "It's got every Pokémon Center transaction from Johto and Kanto for the last twenty years. Since Krissy's license is still active, she's probably still visiting them."

Hanna couldn't keep her eyes from bugging out. The only people who thought the government held Pokécenter records were conspiracy theorists.

"Like I said," he continued, "you can't tell anyone about these. Especially not the Pokécenter one. It'd be kind of a P.R. meltdown if it got out."

"Yeah, I guess it would be."

He rubbed his eyes and groaned. "I'm so dead for showing you this stuff."

Maybe he was, but she couldn't let him think so. "Hey, relax. Nobody's going to know. It's our little secret."

Her computer was finished booting, and there was a notification from the network manager. "What's the password?" she asked.

"Let me type it."

She handed him the laptop, and he went out of his way to keep the back of the screen between her eyes and his fingers. She thought for a moment how funny it would have been if she had installed a key-logger on her own machine.

"By the way," said Derek, "And you're gonna think this is pretty terrible… but I was simplifying a bit when I said there were two databases."

"Oh?"

He continued typing after he entered the password, which was arguably a breach of etiquette but she let it slide. "Here. You'll see."

He handed it back to her, and she found an open window with a directory of over forty separate databases. When it became apparent what the deal was, she was as miffed as Derek suggested she would be. "Are you kidding me?"

Derek sighed. "No."

"Each town has its own two?"

"Yup. Each police department is responsible for its own data. All different software, all different schemas, all different names and conventions. Nothing's centralized, some of them are down half the time, and they're all on hardware that's older than Bill. Sometimes when no one else is using them I can get the results from a simple query in forty seconds."

Hanna suddenly felt a renewed appreciation for her own job. She never had to work with systems that were in such disarray. "But how—"

Now Derek was fuming. "Look, it's a miracle our department has access to the other towns' data at all. You don't know what it's like working with these people. Our tech support never gets back to me in less than a day, and they barely know how to reboot the freaking servers. Hell, I had to buy my own laptop! For work! My boss doesn't know what attachments are, he makes his secretary print out his goddamn email—" He dragged his hand down his face and took a deep breath. "…Shit. Sorry."

Hanna wasn't offended at his outburst. She'd probably go postal in his shoes. "Sore subject. Got it."

Derek took a moment and then continued. "Anyway, the last dumb thing we have to deal with is that the Pokécenter databases use trainer IDs, but we can't look up the actual trainers by their IDs. That's all in another system they haven't given me access to. Usually when I'm coming in here I already have a suspect's ID from somewhere else. If we want to find where Krissy last was we'll have to figure it out based on whatever else we know about her."

"So we can't use the answer to one of our questions to figure out the other. They're separate."

"Yeah. If you and Marie can try to tackle the Pokécenters, I'll start going through everyone whose nickname might be 'Krissy.'"

So she had the hard problem while Derek had the tedious problem. She decided she'd rather be stumped than bored, but it was daunting all the same. She stared at the list of databases and then had a thought that could potentially make her own problem much simpler. "Do you think she could have taken Jason and Travis's Pokémon in with her?"

"Not a chance. Their balls are tagged with their trainer IDs. The cops would be on her before she got 'em back."

Hanna clicked her tongue. In that case she was definitely going to need some extra help for this one. She reached into her bag for Marie's Pokéball, but as soon as she touched it she felt a familiar, dismissive vibration in her head. 'Oh, great,' she thought. That meant Marie was too tired to help her piece through the data. Five years ago Marie could do this every single day for a month, but lately she was crashing every few weeks and hard. Hanna made a mental note to dial down Marie's workload again, but there was nothing to do about today. As this meant they were going to be here even longer than she thought, she asked Derek, "Think you can order pizza?"

Around the same time and miles away from there, Jason was sitting on a rock and trying to ignore the soreness in his ankle. Nearby were Travis and Leviathan, the Quagsire. Travis was massaging one of his Pokémon's fins where he had a sprain. You had to be careful where you stepped in the badlands at the base of the mountains to the northeast of Violet City. A combination of forest fire and rock slide several years ago had left the place uniquely inhospitable. This suited Jason fine in the sense that it was a good place to keep a low profile, but poorly in the sense that they were banged-up and tired enough already. Worse yet, it had been more than two weeks since they set out and they were still short on clues.

Krissy was not present. At the moment she was either still at the Violet City Pokémon Center or on her way back. "Maybe she'll overhear something this time," said Jason. "There are enough Rockets in Violet. We just gotta get lucky once and then we're in the clear."

Travis said nothing in reply to this, which didn't surprise Jason. It felt like they couldn't get more than ten words a day out of Travis lately. Jason couldn't wait until they finally got to Russo, if only because it meant they might finally have something that resembled the real Travis again. Until then Jason wasn't going to push the issue. He couldn't imagine what Travis was going through.

Off in the distance there was a shrill bird-call. It sounded like a Fearow, which under normal circumstances would make Jason excited at the prospect of catching a new species. But they couldn't afford to go looking for fights; not when they were having enough trouble fending off the ones that came to find them. At this rate they wouldn't be remotely fresh when the time came. "I don't think we'll have to beat Russo outright," said Jason. "We just have to make it more trouble than it's worth for him to hold onto that key." It occurred to Jason that he had said basically the same thing the week before, but it was tough to come up with new topics of conversation when Travis wouldn't contribute anything.

When he turned his head, though, Travis was staring in his direction with dread on his face. Rather, he was looking over and behind him for some reason. Then Jason heard the call from the Fearow again only this time it sounded much closer, and Travis yelled, "Look out!"

Jason scrambled forward in a panic, and before he made it two yards he heard the Fearow touch down behind him and strike the spot where he'd been with its beak. He got himself turned around and there it was: wings spread, long neck stretched out, and entirely too close. It screeched at him at a pitch and volume that hurt his head. Jason stumbled back further, and the Fearow stepped forward in turn. It may have been smaller in stature than his own Noctowl, but its wings were wider and everything about it looked more dangerous, especially its long, sharp beak.

"I don't got this, Jason!"

He knew it. Leviathan may have been out of his ball but he wasn't in fighting shape. Jason fumbled for the balls on his own belt. Specs was still recovering and could barely fly, and Ali would get torn apart by the type-matchup, so that left Rabies once again. Jason dropped Rabies's ball in front of him while still backpedaling, and for the first time in his career he didn't call his Growlithe's name as he sent him into battle. At the same time the Fearow lunged and snapped with his beak, and it would have caught up to him if the sudden appearance of another Pokémon hadn't taken it off guard.

"Use Roar!"

Rabies put his whole throat into it, but it was still more of a squeal than a technical Roar. His voice was spent from overuse. The weak outburst was enough to convince the Fearow to flap a few paces back, but that was it. The fight was still on. Jason desperately tried to seize the initiative. "Flamethrower!"

Rabies's reserves of fire were deeper and more powerful than his voice. He sent a jet of billowing but directed flame toward the Fearow. His aim was just high, but he singed one of its wings, and more importantly this seemed to discourage it from taking to the sky to attack. Rabies gave it another round, and this time he was on target. He put a fierce burn on the Fearow's breast, and forced it to defend itself with its wings.

Things appeared to be going as well as Jason could hope for, but something strange caught his eye. There was a faint shimmer around the Fearow's feathers. It was almost like the glow of fire on glass, and it flickered on and off. Then he remembered something from the Pokédex and nearly went into a panic. In the heat of the moment he realized they needed water, and fast. "Travis, you gotta soak us!"

Jason ran back to Travis and Leviathan, and Travis understood immediately. "Leviathan, Water Sport!"

Leviathan pounded his tail against the ground, opened his mouth, and spewed a copious amount of water all over Travis and Jason. Both boys dove to the ground in the nick of time. Jason's face was covered and he couldn't see it, but the shimmers coalesced as a sheer plane of glass. An opposing stream of flame shot out from it: Mirror Move. Jason felt the searing heat just above his back despite his drenched shirt. The Fearow wasn't even aiming for Rabies.

Jason just managed to keep his head and realized that he'd played right into the Fearow's obvious strengths. That wasn't how Krissy would handle it. She would neutralize the enemy's advantages and then pound its weaknesses. Only one weakness came to mind, and he gave a new order without looking. "Rabies, use Bite! Go for the neck!"

It wouldn't have worked if the Fearow had already taken off, but moments later Jason heard a pained squawk. He pushed himself up again, which wasn't easy with his heavy clothes and the scrapes and mud on his hands. Rabies had clambered onto the Fearow's back and had its neck in a death grip with his jaws. The Fearow clearly wanted none of it, and finally started to flap its wings again. Jason realized in horror that Rabies was climbing along with it. "Drop! Come back down!"

For once Rabies listened the first time at the word 'drop,' and he fell onto a rock with a thud.

"Roar again! Big one!"

The Fearow was ten feet in the air when Rabies tried to yell again. This time a little more of the deeper end of Rabies's range broke into it. Whether it was because the Roar itself was more persuasive or because of the deep marks in the Fearow's strong but thin neck, the wild Pokémon flew off. It was heading back where it had come from, and the fight was over.

Jason stood still. His heart was nearly pounding out of his chest. At length he felt his back to see if he was burned. It didn't hurt, but the back of his shirt was noticeably drier than the front. He didn't know how much more of this he could take.

It was getting dark when Krissy finally returned. Jason, Travis, Leviathan, and Rabies were sitting around a small campfire closer to the edge of the forest than they had been earlier. The boys were only slightly damp. "Took me a few minutes to find you," said Krissy. "Why are we over here now?"

"Long story," said Jason.

The short version of the long story was that they didn't want a rematch with what was probably a highly territorial Fearow. Krissy however didn't seem too interested in either version of the story. She sat down at the fire with nothing more than a non-committal "Hmm."

There was a stretch of silence, and it ended when Jason decided that he wanted to tell the long story even if Krissy didn't want to hear it. They had to talk about something or he'd go nuts, and in any case it was important that everyone knew the whole situation. He described the battle beat-by-beat and put especial emphasis on how Leviathan may have saved them from the Mirror Move. When he was finished, Krissy finally spoke again. "I wondered why you spent all that time teaching him Water Sport. It's not a move a Quagsire usually learns. Guess it paid off." There was something missing in her voice, either energy or attitude, and Jason thought it sounded like she was trying to impersonate herself.

Travis said nothing, and just continued rubbing Leviathan's hurt fin. Now that Jason thought about it, he wasn't sure Travis had said anything to Krissy in particular for days. Surely that was just his imagination. "So what about you?" he asked Krissy. "Learn anything today?"

Krissy stared into space for several seconds before answering. "No."

Jason bit his lip. They needed to make progress soon or they'd lose any chance they had. This used to be so much easier. For a while it had seemed like all they had to do was spend two days watching a road and they'd run into Rockets that they could track or fight. It had never taken more than a week, much less two. Maybe they'd just been on a terrific run of luck that had to run out eventually. "There'll be one of them on the road tomorrow," he said. "Got a good feeling."

Krissy didn't seem to be listening to him, and stuttered before saying, "Oh. I went shopping. Here." She reached in her bag and brought out a few Potions, which she handed to him. One of them she should have handed to Travis, Jason thought, but then again Travis was on the other side of the fire and maybe she was too tired to get up. He tossed him one in her stead.

"I also got you one of these." She handed him an empty Pokéball. "In case it helps you end a fight early."

Jason was glad to take it. A Poké Doll was far more effective for that purpose—even considering how good Jason was with a Pokéball—but those were expensive. With the extra money they'd had to spend on medicine lately they didn't have that much to spare. Jason fished around in his bag for some coins, but Krissy said, "We'll settle up in the morning. I'm… tired."

Jason shrugged. "Whatever you say." He didn't see how it was tiring to get reimbursed, but she didn't seem to be in the mood to argue. For that matter, no one seemed to be in much of a mood for anything. Even Rabies didn't react much when Jason applied the Potion to a cut on his side and rubbed it in. Later Jason even he had to convince him to drink some extra water for his throat. He remembered something from Jen about how when a Pokémon starts to refuse water it's getting ready for death, and he was afraid for a minute. But Rabies drank. He just needed some rest.

They let the fire die, and at some point the sleeping bags must have come out because Jason was lying awake despite his best efforts to fall asleep. Once again he heard the same nagging question in the back of his mind of whether he was really doing his part. Lately Krissy was carrying them through this ordeal nearly single-handedly, and not just because she was the only one who could step into a Center or Mart without walking right by a "MISSING" poster with her face on it. The nighttime doubts asked Jason if he was just slowing her down; if Krissy was more likely to save Wyvern by herself.

The doubts were dispelled quickly. Even if they were a burden on her now, he knew that when the critical moment finally came the task would call for more than one trainer. Even if he and Travis were just there as warm bodies, two warm bodies might be enough to make the difference. Still, he wanted to do more in case one real battler and two warm bodies weren't enough, but he had no idea what he could do or how he could do it.

His eyes were heavy now and things in his head weren't entirely clear. He vaguely heard something rustling near his sleeping bag. Krissy was in that direction, and in his drowsiness he assumed she was mistaking midnight for morning. It was too early to get up, and they all needed their rest for tomorrow, so he muttered something to the effect of "Go to sleep, Krissy." Then he finally nodded off.

He slept without dreams until he woke up with the sun, or at least what little of it passed through the clouds. He got on his feet, stretched his sore back, and rubbed his eyes. It was a gray, damp morning of the sort that made you want to go right back to bed, preferably indoors. This may have been why it took him a minute of staring at nothing until he realized that they were short one sleeping bag. He blinked once and then his eyes went wide. Krissy was gone and so were all of her things. They all knew better than to go wandering off without saying anything, so he was at a loss.

"Travis." No response. "Travis! Get up!"

Travis slowly pulled himself out of his sleeping bag, and as with Jason he didn't see what was wrong right away. Then he started to ask, "…Where's—"

Jason waved his arms in exasperation. "I don't know." There was no trace of her. If he hadn't been here the night before he would have thought it was a two-person campsite. But then he spotted one thing that was different: there was a note under one of the rocks in the fire ring. He wasted no time in swiping it up and brushing it off.

"What's it say?"

He read it aloud. "Dear Jason and Travis—"

Travis made a dismissive noise with his lips and shook his head. But his expression turned more serious as Jason read the rest of it.

"It's becoming increasingly clear that our combined teams aren't in suffi—suf-fi-cient-ly good condition to continue. It's not your fault and you guys were doing well, it's just too hard for anyone to keep this up without proper rest for their Pokémon. I was thinking last night and I figured out a lead to get to Russo, and I decided it would be best if…" Jason trailed off for a moment. What followed didn't make sense to him. "…if I went after him by myself. You can count on me to get the key to save Wyvern, but you guys need to go to a Pokécenter as soon as possible. I know it'll be hard, but I think you'll get your licenses back someday.

"It wasn't right of me to put you in this situation in the first place, and I hope this makes up for it, even if you don't think it's for the best right now. You're my best friends and I—

"I'm not reading the rest of this."

Jason seethed. He crumpled the letter, but shoved it in his pocket instead of throwing it on the ground. "There's a whole paragraph of tearful-goodbye bullcrap. Where the hec—hell did this come from!"

Travis stared at the ground, and then he said something in the smallest voice Jason had ever heard him use. "I… I did this."

This did nothing but add to Jason's confusion. "What do you mean?"

And then came the explanation. He had never thought about what Travis and Krissy might say to each other while he wasn't listening, so Travis's account of this one conversation hit him like a truck. Every last detail threw him for a loop, not the least being the suggestion that fighting Team Rocket had been Krissy's idea. That was wrong, wrong, wrong. They had come to that decision together, at least he and Krissy had. He was certain about this. But the worst, least explicable part came at the end. "What? Why? Why would you say that?"

"I don't know. I was mad. And cause we're not. We're not friends. I don't even like her. You knew that!"

"No I didn't! I mean, that was all a year ago! You… You got used to her!"

Travis was shaking. His fingers dug into his sleeping bag and he wouldn't look Jason in the eye.

Jason asked him, "Why didn't you say anything?"

"What would you have done if I did?"

Jason didn't know what that was supposed to mean.

"Would you have kicked her out?" asked Travis. "Would it be just the two of us again?"

This question had never, not once occurred to Jason. And why should it have when it broke the most important rule? Any question about your friends was supposed to be easy. 'Will you do (good thing) for your friend?' and the answer was always supposed to be yes. 'Will you do (bad thing) to your friend?' No. Every time. Was he supposed to believe that one friend had to be miserable unless he left another friend on her own? It was a fake question, and there had to be a different answer.

"I'm sorry," said Travis. "I tried. I really did."

He'd better have, thought Jason. At the moment he couldn't think of why anyone wouldn't try to be friends with Krissy. He had entirely forgotten all the time he'd spent agonizing over how much better a battler she was, or how much it bugged him that she didn't have the competitive decency to celebrate a victory like it came as a surprise. She was a friend—their friend—and that was all there was to it. "Well, you're gonna have to try harder! And don't tell me you're gonna let a girl save your Pokémon without your help! Are you?"

"…No."

"Thought not." Even if they discounted pride, it would be unconscionable to let Krissy run into this with no other trainers to help her. The good news was that she couldn't get rid of them that easily, not even with that big a head start. He pulled Krissy's note from his pocket and Rabies's ball from his belt. He let him out, and as soon as the pup had his bearings he waved the paper under his nose. "Find her, Rabies. Where's Krissy? Go find Krissy."

"Wait a sec!"

They'd forgotten to pack up their stuff. They broke camp in record time as Rabies bounced around in anticipation. Jason took it as a good sign that Travis didn't slow them down. As soon as they were ready Jason held the paper in front of Rabies again. "Okay, this time for real! Where's Krissy?"

Rabies snatched the letter right out of Jason's hand and darted into the woods. "Good boy!" Jason ran after him, and Travis was close on his heels.

Hanna's eyes were having trouble focusing and her leg had fallen asleep at some point. She got up to walk it off, and in the process she knocked over two empty cans of vending-machine coffee from Derek's stash. They'd been enough to carry her till four in the morning, but the remaining two and a half hours she'd pushed through by force of will alone. The payoff was that after running on fumes for so long she'd narrowed the field down to four trainer IDs, and four places that Krissy and the others could have visited recently: Cianwood City, Violet City, Pewter City, and Lavender Town. In other words, they could be anywhere from the extreme western end to the extreme eastern end of greater Johto/Kanto.

There was a part of her that had gone into this endeavor with the mindset 'Hey, it can't be that hard! First narrow it down to whoever has both a Sneasel and a Bayleef, and then the rest should be easy!' She felt embarrassed to still have such hubris at her age. Even the first step was harder than it sounded, as there were over a hundred such trainers spread throughout both regions. To complicate things further they wouldn't all necessarily drop off both of those Pokémon in the same trip each time, she had to query each town manually and separately, some of the databases played things fast and loose with timestamps thereby limiting the potential for meaningful correlations and pivoting, some of the 'databases' were in fact spreadsheets full of typos…

Suffice to say, Hanna could talk for an hour about everything that was wrong and difficult about the task, but the only one around to listen was Derek and he was even more familiar with this maddening hodgepodge of systems than she was. On that note, she decided it was as good a time as any to check on his status. He was still hunched over his laptop on the floor, and his eyes looked even more sunken and dismal than she imagined her own did. She walked over (rather hobbled over, as her leg was still waking up), took a knee, and craned over his shoulder to see his screen. "Where are we at?"

Derek moved his head an inch, took a quick glance at her, and then to her immense surprise he laughed. This was a rare phenomenon even under normal circumstances. "What?" she asked.

"When your head's right where it is…" He sounded sort of drunk or maybe high as he trailed off. It was hard for Hanna to tell when she was so tired. He continued, "When you're right there you're like, literally my shoulder devil. Y'know, all telling me to divulge police secrets 'n shit. Heh."

Hanna rolled her eyes and gave him a shove. "Fuck you. I'm your shoulder angel. Now what do you got?"

The half-smile vanished from Derek's face, and he stared at the screen again. "Got a one-in-a-million or whatever chance that this wasn't a waste of time. Here goes." He clicked on a line in the Cinnabar Island window, and after several seconds there came up a page with the title "CHRISTIAN, LAURA JESSICA" and a photograph of a woman in her late fifties or early sixties. Derek put his head in his hands and kept it there for several seconds. At length, this is what he said: "She's not here."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean she ain't. Fuckin'. Here." He shut his laptop's lid with enough force to possibly damage it. "I went over all of them, and there ain't a single person in Johto or Kanto whose first name, middle name, or last name could conceivably be shortened to 'Krissy' who looks like our Krissy."

Hanna didn't believe it. There were so many people who fit that description that he must have missed a few of them. But he seemed so certain in the finality of his investigation, and she didn't see any problem with his methodology. Regardless, this was looking worse than she thought. "So are the records incomplete or something?"

"They'd better not be. More likely she's from Hoenn or Sinnoh or somewhere, and moved here after she got her license. Or maybe she pulled her nickname out of thin air, I dunno."

Derek covered his eyes again. Hanna had never seen him like this. He often looked tired of whatever life through at him, but never this beaten by it. It was more disconcerting than she thought it would be. His voice was hollow when he asked her, "So what about you?"

"I'm close," she said, trying to sound more confident than she was. "Really. It's one of four. I just need to think of a few more ways to narrow it down."

"Hmm. Lemme see."

They moved over to her machine, and she tried to think of where to start her explanation and how to frame it in the most optimistic way possible. While she was bringing up a few windows to show the general trajectory of her four candidates, she had the first turn of good fortune in their entire session.

'Check rxxxshhchxhx. Check shhhxxrchhrs. Check srcchchshxx,' came Marie's voice. It was too complicated an idea for her to convey from inside the ball.

'Where were you four hours ago?' asked Hanna through her head.

'I sleep. You knew.'

Hanna found herself laughing a bit as she took out Marie's ball and opened it. The Alakazam stretched her back and bent her spoons in circles to get herself ready for work.

"I wasn't gonna ask why you didn't bring her out earlier," said Derek.

"I don't mind telling you. It's cause she's a creaky old lady, and sometimes you can't move her an inch."

Marie made a deep growl with her throat instead of her mind, presumably so Derek could hear her disapproval as well. "Point taken, Marie," said Hanna. "Mind giving us a hand?"

Marie didn't mind at all, and without another word Hanna saw the familiar blue glow in her peripheral vision. Apparently her Pokémon had been paying half-attention for about an hour, and had spotted no fewer than ten combinations of date and location where there might be inconsistencies with Krissy's profile. Hanna had already checked hundreds of such intersections, and dozens of them were off from these by only a week, but somehow she'd missed them. She started typing away. At one point she became conscious that Derek was staring at the glow in her eyes, but other than that she was in the zone. After checking the first seven intersections, only one candidate remained.

"Violet City," said Hanna. She leaned back on her hands and let out a deep, exhausted breath. "They've been in—no, probably around Violet City for at least the past week. Krissy's last Pokécenter visit was toda—yesterday, so they're probably still close by."

If there had been a single flash of relief on Derek's face at this news, Hanna had missed it. To her surprise and dismay he said, "Oh, fuck."

She didn't really want to know, but she asked anyway: "…What's 'oh, fuck?'"

"They're after Russo. Mariano Russo. Maybe they don't know they are, but that's where they're angling."

"How bad is that?"

Derek sighed. "I'd say top-five worst ways they could go about this. Most of the Executives are in charge of one city, and he's got three. Goldenrod, Violet, Ecruteak. His mansion's outside Violet. Man's got ice-blood. He's the only Johto Exec the Kanto-Rockets don't joke about."

Hanna couldn't judge for herself just how bad this was, but the look on Derek's face and the dread in his voice were more than convincing. "We gotta find them right away, then," she said. "Search all around Violet. I can take all the time off work we need—Bill gave me his okay. And we just need to call Jen and she'll be ready to go."

Derek looked away before nodding. "Right."

Without warning, Marie brought a thought from Derek's head into Hanna's ear. 'If I don't report in soon, they'll start asking questions. Two weeks is bad enough, but I can't put off my job for three weeks. I'll get fired. I can't get fired. I can't get fired.'

Hanna swallowed. This caught her so off guard that she forgot to chastise Marie for eavesdropping. She didn't believe for a second that Derek would give up on saving the kids even if his job was at stake, but this was still yet another reason for them to hurry.

[Next time, in Lucia, it is late March of 2016 when a young girl has anxiety about her upcoming birthday among other things.]