The sunlight hurt.
Door squinted and shielded her eyes with one hand. Blair held her other as she led Door through the gate at the northern end of Mistralton and onto the safe zone of Route 7. In front of them, Opal led the way with a glowing map suspended between her hands, and with every meter the group crossed, a tiny, circular icon traced up an illuminated path winding across the air in front of Opal's face. Every so often, Opal announced a distance—1.5 kilometers to destination, 1.25 kilometers, 1 kilometer—and eventually, Door learned to tune it out, listening instead to Knives's humming at her side.
Tea, followed by withdrawing her remaining pokémon (on Blair's insistence), followed by working their way through Mistralton. It must have taken more than an hour to work through that process, yet the sun had just barely passed its zenith. Apparently, Door had lost all sense of time. She hadn't realized it was still early morning when she left her room, but that explained the foot traffic in the Mistralton pokémon center.
She shifted her gaze to her right, still shielding her eyes with a hand. Route 7 was a lot like all the other routes in Unova: just a plexiglas, elevated surface fringed on both sides by tall grass. But the grass here was taller, probably to emulate the Route 7 of Hilda's day, and it hid a lot of the trainers who must have been out there. The only clues Door got that they were there were the sounds of battles: kids shouting commands, pokémon crying out, attacks landing and exploding…
...and Companions. Every so often, Door could hear their mechanical voices guiding their trainers through battles, and every so often, light from holographic screens would paint the grass a rainbow of colors. Door felt herself crack a wry grin, even though her heart twisted in her chest. All of them seemed so fake. Just following orders and doing the things that would make their users happy.
Geist probably wouldn't. As Door listened to the Companions around her, she thought back to the first battle Geist guided her through after she knew for certain he was a Companion. The one where she had caught Storm. She remembered his words, laced with a mixture of extreme patience and exasperation. He didn't rely on screens or tell her where to go every five seconds. Not like these Companions. He only pointed her in the right direction and gave her hints.
And treated her like a human being.
Door breathed in. She hadn't broken down since the pokémon center, and she wasn't going to now. She had to keep it together. She had to keep walking.
But then, Opal stopped, and Knives's ears twitched. A tiny dot appeared close to the line on Opal's map, and she whirled around to face the rest of the group.
"Oh! Miss Blair!" she exclaimed. "There's a wild deerling only a few feet from us. Would you like to catch it?"
Blair stopped. Then, she grinned and nudged Door's side.
"Why don't you go for it?" she asked. "Go on. The battle will make you feel better."
Door took another deep breath. Her mind had wandered back to Prongs, back to the last time she had seen her first deerling. She didn't want to tell Blair about him. She couldn't put into words why; she could only feel her throat close up a little, cutting off any sentence she could have said.
So instead, she nodded.
"O-okay," she rasped. "Knives—"
Knives was already gone. Door straightened, staring at the empty space Knives had occupied just a moment ago before frantically looking around.
"Shit," Door cursed. "Knives? Knives!"
Door tore her hand away from Blair's. She scrambled to one edge of the safe route and frantically scanned the tall grass for any sign of her audino. She couldn't help it. She thought of Jack in his last moments—his expression when he died and how scared he looked when it happened—and her heart pounded at the possibility of Knives looking like that.
"Knives!" she screamed. "Knives! Get back here!"
Knives answered with a literal bang. A wild deerling burst from the grass, propelled by a thin but bright beam of crackling electricity, only to sail past Door and Blair and into the field on the other side of the route. It crash-landed just at the edge of the field but slid backwards, plowing the soft earth until it came to a rest in a bed of bent grass and tilled soil several feet away. There, the deerling lay, smoking and unmoving.
A second later, Knives climbed back onto the route, padded to Door's side, and grabbed her hand with both paws. She tilted her head and trilled, and her tail wagged vigorously.
Door looked at Blair.
"I … might have taught her Charge Beam while you were asleep," Blair said sheepishly. "Hope you don't mind."
Door shook her head vaguely. "Uh … nope. Don't mind at all."
"Hey!"
At the sound of the new voice, Door stiffened. She whirled around, facing the grass Knives had just come out of, to see a boy about her age climb onto the walkway, followed by a green-haired female Companion in a maid outfit. The boy shoved his hands into the pockets of his baggy jeans as he slouched and glared at Door.
"Was that your audino kicking my deerling around?" he asked.
"Excuse me?" Door deadpanned.
"Oh, you must be mistaken!" Opal said, clasping her hands together. "That deerling was not registered to a trainer!"
The boy snorted. "Just because it wasn't registered don't mean it wasn't mine. You know how long I've been tracking that thing?"
Blair stepped forward, holding her hands up. "H-hey. Hold on. We don't want any trouble. We're sorry. We didn't see you, okay? Right, Door?"
Some part of Door knew what she was about to do next was a bad idea. She had just lost most of her pokémon, and she nearly had a panic attack over the prospect of losing another one. But something else tugged at her the moment this kid walked up. No. The moment Knives killed the deerling in one shot. The idea of power, the idea of wielding it against someone else.
All of a sudden, those ideas sounded nice. Because for the first time in three days, Door suddenly felt something other than this deep chasm of nothingness or the edges of pure pain. She felt something other than sadness and frustration and self-hatred.
She felt a fire. Not an ember, even. It was like her entire heart just burst into flames and threatened to consume her.
She needed to hurt something else. Badly.
"It's fine," she said, her voice toneless but sharpened to a knife's edge. "You're right. Let's settle this like trainers."
"Door?" Blair whispered.
The boy cracked a grin and pulled his hands out of his pockets. In them, he held three poké balls. Not one. Not two. Three. Door eyed them without shifting her expression.
"I wasn't gonna actually challenge you, but sure," the boy said. "Triple battle sound good to you?"
Door narrowed her eyes. She thought back to the last three-on-three battle she had—the one against Heartbreaker. The one where she lost Boomer. The one where Geist was shot. She narrowed her eyes and stepped forward, in front of Blair. Blair reached out and grasped her shoulder.
"Door, wait," Blair said.
She shrugged Blair off and drew three poké balls out from her pockets. Without a word, she flicked them forward, and in a second, Neptune, Queen, and Huntress were standing in front of her. The boy's smile grew, and he released his own pokémon. Swoobat. Watchog. Liepard.
"Door, you don't have to do this," Blair said.
"Neptune, Air Slash on that watchog!" Door commanded. "Queen, Fake Out on swoobat! Huntress, Helping Hand on Queen!"
The boy sucked in a breath through his teeth. "Ooh. You a newbie or something? Swoobat, Air Slash that ducklett back into the ground. Watchog and Liepard? Use Crunch."
Huntress was the first to move. She thrust a paw out as a red light washed over her body, and she pressed her paw into Queen's shoulder. Queen arched her back, forcing her hair to stand on end, and as a long hiss escaped Queen's lips, the red light flowed from Huntress into her body. She shook off the red light, ground her paws into the earth, and leapt forward, claws out, at the swoobat. Before the swoobat could move, Queen clapped her front paws together, sending a shockwave through the air and into her opponent's body. The swoobat shrieked and shot from the air into the plexiglas ground, leaving a spiderweb of cracks as it rolled across its surface. Queen landed gracefully, then bounded forward and jumped onto the swoobat to keep it pinned.
The problem with that was, as Door realized a little too late, that focusing most of her attention on a single pokémon left two more free to attack.
That and she had barely trained Neptune. Which was probably why he had chosen that moment to give her an uncertain glance.
"Neptune! Move!" she shrieked.
The ducklett quacked and flapped his wings to take off, but he couldn't get much further than half a foot into the air. Abruptly, the boy's watchog caught Neptune in its enormous jaws, and before Door could even think about it—in a move so fast she almost missed it—Neptune snapped in half.
And just like that, he spilled, in pieces, onto the walkway at his trainer's feet.
Door froze. She stared at the two halves of her ducklett. Her mind had blanked. She didn't even see the liepard dive at Queen, nor the two cats roll off the boy's woobat and away. She simply stared at the ducklett at her feet.
Then, Blair's arms were back around her, and the girl's voice was in her ear. "Door! Call off the battle! You don't have to do this!"
And somehow, that made the fire in her chest burn hotter.
"Huntress, Crunch!" she screamed. "Queen, Pursuit! Knives! Charge Beam!"
She couldn't hear the boy's orders, but she knew he called them. The swoobat took to the air shakily, only to be shot through the chest by a quick beam of electricity from Knives. Queen dove at the watchog with a hiss, and as the watchog's teeth clamped down on her shoulder, she slashed at him with her claws.
And then there was Huntress and the boy's liepard. The two dove at each other once, its claws slashing at Huntress's shoulder while Huntress snapped at its face. They landed, teeth bared, hair raised, circling one another. Door said nothing as she watched, but the boy yelled and whooped, his fist flailing in the air above him as he cheered his liepard on. Without even thinking about it, Door let her eyes fall on the swoobat not far from where the boy stood. Its body lay still, wings spread, smoke rising from the hole Knives had made.
The boy didn't seem to notice. Or care. Or maybe he did, and he was just as angry as Door. She looked up in wonder.
And then, just as Huntress bit through the liepard's neck, it impaled her forehead with its claws.
And the two fell over, still and silent.
And Door realized the fire in her wasn't a feeling.
Not really.
It wanted to consume her, yes, but it wasn't pain or anger or fear or sadness. It was something else entirely. Just a blind, emotionless want.
It should have scared her … but it didn't.
"Queen, Fury Swipes. Knives, Charge Beam."
Her voice was even but quieter than usual. She could feel Blair respond to it by tightening her grip on her waist. But Door didn't care.
Instead, she watched.
She knew about the cliche—the one where everything would seem to go in slow motion when something terrible happened. And so it went then, with the four remaining pokémon lunging at one another, paws skittering across plexiglas and over the broken bodies of fauxkémon all over the battlefield, until they met in the center.
The boy's watchog moved first, launching itself at Queen. Its teeth sank into her shoulder before she could dodge. Her left paw rose, its claws fully extended, but as she raked them across the watchog's back, the watchog bit clean through her neck. Her head rolled off her shoulders and bounced onto the ground, and the rest of her slumped sideways.
The watchog looked up, eyes blinking lazily, just as a beam of electricity engulfed its head. This one was larger than the others—far larger and more powerful—and at the other end of it, Knives screamed with her paw raised above her, fingers splayed and beam bursting from her hand.
The watchog fell over, head melted in, edges blackened. The air reeked of rubber and metal and burnt plastic. Door felt Blair gag against her back, and she felt sick herself at the sight of the decapitated watchog and the smell of its dead flesh. But she didn't move.
Knives cut off her attack and pivoted on her back paws. The boy's liepard was on her in an instant, head slamming into Knives's chest. Both pokémon fell, Knives beneath the liepard, flat on her back with the cat's paws pinning her own to the plexiglas. The cat leaned down, its jaws snapping, its claws poised above Knives's face, held back only by Knives, physically holding the liepard at arm's length by its parted maw.
And then, right then, Door realize she was about to lose her last pokémon.
Not just any pokémon, either.
Knives.
"Knives," Door whimpered.
And then, she thrust herself forward, held back only by Blair.
"Knives!" she screamed. "Knives! GET UP! FOR GOD'S SAKE!"
Beneath the liepard, Knives's ears twitched. She tensed, and she glared at her opponent.
And then, she opened her mouth, and a ball of bright yellow light swirled in her throat.
The Charge Beam that erupted from her mouth ripped the liepard off her and sent it flying, head over paws, onto the plexiglas. It slammed into the path, smashing it beneath its weight as it skittered backwards. Electricity crackled off its body, and smoke curled up from its frame, and given the way the boy's watchog went down, Door half expected the battle to be over right then and there.
Except it wasn't.
The liepard pushed off the ground and rose, shakily, to all four paws. Its head cocked with jerks and jolts, and each slow step it took was halting and erratic. But somehow, it began to crawl, inch by inch, back to Knives, and when it was halfway there, it yowled—its voice not much more than a mechanical screech—and dove at Knives with its jaw unhinged and ready to rip her to shreds. She flinched, holding her bleeding paws up to catch it.
Without warning, a stream of boiling hot water blasted from the fields, slamming into the side of the broken liepard and into Knives's arms. The liepard screeched, both mechanically and in its own cat-like voice, as it toppled to the road and slid to a stop at its edge. It tried to get back up, but the moment it did, a shower of sparks rained out from its open and soaked mouth, and it toppled over, its legs kicking uselessly beneath its twitching body.
Knives, meanwhile, was screaming. Blair and Opal were at her side first, pulling her up and onto her haunches. She cried out, paws reaching up and grasping for Door while Blair tried to pull her hands towards Opal.
And it was that sight—the sight of her helpless little rabbit crying and grasping for her that shook Door out of her daze. With a half-sobbing cry, Door dove down and scooped Knives into her arms, and as she frantically apologized into her rabbit's pudgy side, her audino's wails began to subside. Gingerly, Blair grasped Knives's elbows and held her paws up to Opal, who finally spread her hands over the audino's palms. Light drifted from Opal into the burns and bites stretching across Knives's hands, and Door watched, rocking Knives back and forth and sniffling into the rabbit's shoulder. Before her eyes, she could see the bites stitch back up and the burns dissolve, and with each passing second, Knives grew calmer and calmer until she rested in Door's arms.
"It's okay," she whispered. "It's gonna be okay. You're okay now."
Blair knelt beside Door. She kept one of her hands on Knives's elbows, but the other reached out to grasp Door's shoulder. The look on her face was one of sympathy. Eyebrows knitted. Eyes glittering not with judgment but with concern. From anyone else, Door supposed she would have felt a spike of disgust from that expression, but from Blair … she felt shame.
And the thing was … she knew she deserved that shame.
Knives was her only pokémon left now. Three pokémon died because Door wanted … what? Why did she even do this? To let off steam? Because she wanted some kind of cosmic revenge for the fact that so many of her other pokémon were taken from her? What?
Beyond Blair, Door was just barely aware that someone else had gotten onto the route. The boy was arguing with that someone else. He was getting close. His chest was pressed against the newcomer's. A poké ball appeared in his hand. And Door felt a pang of jealousy. The boy had more pokémon.
The boy had more pokémon.
The boy had more pokémon, and Door had used four in the match.
Door's heart thundered when she realized the implication. This battle wasn't over. It wasn't going to be over until she was out of pokémon. Knives was still in danger, and this was her fault. She held Knives tightly as she tensed, and Blair's expression shifted into one of confusion before she looked over her shoulder and realized what Door had. Blair shifted her body between Door and the other trainers, her arm stretching out to block Door, but she didn't need to worry.
The second trainer's simipour took care of things—namely by rushing in and throwing its entire body at the boy.
He went sprawling across the plexiglas, and the newcomer stood over him, hands on his hips. The second trainer said something—what, Door couldn't parse—and just like that, the boy blanched, scrambled to his feet, and took off running.
With a sigh, the newcomer's shoulders sagged. He waited for a few seconds before whirling around and tossing black bangs out of his gray eyes. Sauntering forward, he slipped one hand into the pocket of his skinny jeans, but the other he hung at his side. When he was close enough, he knelt down and patted Knives on the head. Then, he smiled brightly at Door, drew his other hand out of his pocket, and offered it to her.
"Tu vas bien?" he asked.
Door took one look at his hand and punched him in the face.
—
FILE NAME: UNTITLED
AUTHOR: N/A
NOTES: From Series Alpha Zero-One's audio-visual backup system. Transcript of audio track only; video component has been corrupted. File transcribed by Cassius Cassine.
████: I'm sorry for scaring you.
[BACKGROUND: Metal-on-metal clicking. LANETTE does not reply.]
████: You're mad. I know. I should have listened to you. But we nearly lost two months of work. I thought—
LANETTE: Is that what's most important to you? A hunk of metal?
████: Well, you know me.
LANETTE: Yes, I do.
[pause]
████: I mean, it's not that serious, is it?
[BACKGROUND: Clicking stops.]
████: Look! You did an amazing job. See? I'm almost as good as new! No big deal.
[pause]
████: Anyway, this is why you're letting me help you in the laboratory, isn't it?
[BACKGROUND: A piece of metal strikes a concrete surface.]
LANETTE: I'm letting you work with me because I need your help, not because I can put you back together if something happens to you.
████: Lanette. I'm okay.
LANETTE: No, you're not! Don't you get it? It's not about me having to fix you. It's about—
[pause]
████: What?
LANETTE: I'm shutting down the LFA system. Maybe you'll start to get it then.
████: What? No! Wait—
[END RECORDING.]