Patch notes:
I've made some significant changes to previous chapters and added new content that comes before this chapter! You won't have gotten a notification email because I combined old chapters and replaced placeholder chapters with new content.
What's new:
- Chapter 1 has been rewritten! The first and last scenes are brand new content. The middle scene is similar to the previous version of the chapter, but the dialogue is different and includes a lot of content from what was previously chapter two.
- Chapter 2 (previously chapter 3) has a new scene at the end.
- Chapter 6 is a completely new chapter, featuring quality time with big brother and lots of boats. You'll be confused by this chapter if you don't read that one first.
That's it! Hope you enjoy.
Chapter 8: Oil and Water
Though at first bewildered by the constant activity both above and below deck, Natalie quickly learned the Ultimatum's mess hall hours. She had no tasks and nowhere to be, so mealtimes provided the only structure in her days. Archie was absent from meals as often as not, but he must've put out the word to keep an eye on her; Natalie always remained on the outside edge of the conversation, but she never ate alone. Or maybe the ORCA sailors were simply being kind. Certainly, they never said anything important or incriminating in front of her, but she got the impression that it was because what they needed most was to joke and complain, not because they were being careful.
She observed the crew the way she might watch a flock of wingulls: as a distant, shifting mass. So during breakfast her first full day on the ship, she noticed the ripple of movement around the room even before someone passed the pokeball to their table. Her companions quieted, each one examining it in turn, snickering as they handed it around—until Natalie was next in line. There came a pause and then, "Oh, let her see it. What's she gonna do?"
It was an ordinary pokeball, if well-worn. Like each of the others before her, she turned it to read the text crawl at the seam between the red and white halves. The text was corrupted—she hoped it wasn't a sign of something wrong with the pokemon inside—so it took her several moments to parse: reg1sTEred tr4iner MÅ18x0ÑSTAn—li3paRd.
Liepard. That was a surprise. Not many of those in— With a wash of revulsion, she remembered: she'd met Mark's liepard, Gibs. And they'd taken one of his pokeballs back in the parking lot.
"So what do you think I should do with it?"
Scarlet appeared at Natalie's elbow, her dark hair in a French braid and a cold smile on her lips. She made no move to take the pokeball back, but Natalie sensed Scarlet had approached to better supervise her with it.
When Natalie didn't respond, Scarlet offered airily, "I thought about tossing the thing overboard."
She remembered the ripple of muscles as the liepard tensed to lunge at her, and she could hardly believe he was now curled powerless in the palm of her hand. It would take so little send the pokeball flying over the rail: a short walk and a flick of the wrist. Over in less than a minute. Pokeballs were supposed to be waterproof, but …. She shivered, imagining Luna's pokeball bobbing in the ship's wake instead.
"Please don't."
"You're right—enough trash in the ocean already." Scarlet cast Natalie a sly look. "Or you think I should give it back?"
Aha. A test. Well, Natalie didn't want anything to do with it. Wordlessly, she shoved the liepard's pokeball back at Scarlet.
"How loyal is a cat, d'you think?" She held the pokeball up like a jeweler inspecting the cut of a gem. "A dog will wait 'til death for its trainer's return—almost impossible to retrain. That's why cops love them. But a cat … harder to say. Hard to tell with people, too." And she shot Natalie a pointed look.
Don't lecture me about loyalty, Natalie wanted to fire back. I'm the one who was left behind. But she had no friends or allies aboard the Ultimatum, so she kept her mouth shut.
Scarlet pocketed the pokeball with a shrug. "Probably better to sell it off, right? We could use a new welding torch." With that, she sauntered back to her own table.
Natalie couldn't wait to get back to shore.
—
Five of them gathered around a table towards the back. Mark had arrived first, bone-tired and full of venom for every overwatered lawn in Mauville City. Sierra and River had arrived together—possibly siblings and possibly a couple but definitely a unit—both cheerful but guarded. Eben had arrived next, to Mark's relief. He'd also traveled from Rustboro, though as a precaution he'd taken a different route. Mark trusted Eben as much as he trusted anyone: he showed up when asked and didn't panic under fire. Last to arrive was a Zig, short for Zigzagoon, who nattered away as he stealthily nibbled from the others' plates. Like his namesake, he never held still.
Tabitha had yet to arrive, and Mark had no doubt her timing was purposeful, more of her usual psychological bullshit.
Over drinks, they idly compared notes on the situations in Rustboro, Mauville, and Fortree. They examined recent headlines on each other's phones, sharing a dark laugh at what had been left out. Someone mentioned the anti-mask bill, and they hissed and fumed together. All the while, each of them caught the others' eyes in turn. Probing. Making silent contracts.
Like before his very first action and like every other since, Mark began to love these near-strangers a little, even sketchy Zig. They were going to spike trees until the logging stopped. They were going to hit DevCo in the teeth with its own infrastructure. They were going to save the world—because no one else would.
Zig checked his watch with a flourish and asked, "Is anyone, like, keeping tabs on Tabs?"
"Don't let her catch you calling her that," Mark said dryly. "She doesn't like nicknames."
River and Sierra exchanged a look.
"What?"
"I'm pretty sure—"
And then there was Tabitha, stepping out of the crowd like an apparition. Her hair was shaved shorter than even Mark's, her scalp gleaming with blue light from the TV screens. As she offered a curt wave and slipped into the remaining seat, Mark mustered a smile.
"Well, there she is," he said.
Tabitha scowled in greeting.
Seriously?
Mark let his smile fall. Yeah, hello to you, too.
"My pronouns," Tabitha said coolly, "are he-him-they-them."
Heat crawled up Mark's neck. Tear me right the fuck in half. Since when?
He shoved down his indignation and took a breath. "Sorry. I genuinely didn't mean to—"
Tabitha cut in, "Let's just go around and share names and pronouns. I'll start. You all know who I am, and we already talked about my pronouns … but this is Cipher. They, them."
What Mark had at first taken to be a backpack crawled up and over Tabitha's shoulder, flicked out its wings, and flitted onto the table to investigate a sticky patch where something had spilled. Oh yeah, Mark remembered that ninjask. Fast, persistent, and always watching both enemies and friends alike.
After the others dutifully recited their names and pronouns, Tabitha leaned forward and pushed aside her—fuck—his drink. "I'm glad you all made it. No one had any trouble? No incidents or encounters?"
They shook their heads.
"Good." Tabitha nodded slowly. "Since some of you haven't worked under me before, let me tell you how this is going to be: if I give an order, you do it. No questions."
He was imitating Montag's speaking style, Mark thought, but missing the point. Montag didn't make demands—he offered invitations.
Tabitha continued, "We only get one shot at this. There's no room for screwups or showboating." He looked at each of them in turn, his gaze lingering on Mark, who folded his arms but didn't interrupt. "If anyone has a problem with that, any doubts at all ... go home."
No one spoke.
When he was satisfied with their silence, Tabitha withdrew a pen and paper from his pocket. He shooed Cipher out of the way and—wonderful—the ninjask buzzed to the back of Mark's chair instead. Tabitha smoothed the paper flat and then, with careful attention to each bend, drew a zigzag down the page. "This is the Route 110 overpass." He added a second line, in some places parallel to the first and in others arcing away to hug an invisible coast. "And this is Ridge Access."
Just like that, a piece of paper became the world. They all leaned closer to watch the ink move across the page.
"There will be lookouts here and here." Tabitha indicated each spot with an X. "Zig, you and your murkrow will be here."
"Eyes in the sky," Zig said with an exaggerated grin.
"And ... Mark. You've got a liepard and a swoobat, right?"
Mark couldn't stop himself from wincing. "I don't have my liepard right now." He cleared his throat. "But I have a golbat."
Tabitha shrugged, no hint of sympathy in his face. "Golbat works. You're on watch on this side." Then he looked up and raised an eyebrow at Mark, waiting for an objection.
Is that what it was about, elevating himself above Mark? Fuck off, Tabitha. I don't work for you. If Montag wanted him to follow Tabitha's orders this time, he would—out of respect for Montag, not Tabitha's ego. But let Tabitha think whatever he needed to.
"Can do," Mark answered evenly.
Cipher's claws scraped along the back of his chair. Little creep.
Tabitha returned his attention to the page, circling a segment of the pipeline. "The rest of you will be with me, somewhere around here. We're looking for a place where the surface has already been damaged. That's where we'll apply heat. Camerupt, magcargo, whoever you have. Then … who's got a reliable digger?"
Mark counted off in his head—everyone on his belt except for Octavia the golbat. But Tabitha wasn't asking him, so he kept it to himself.
Eben spoke up. "I've got a graveler."
"Good. Then you'll make the trench to flush the pipeline with water. It has to be fast. Intense heat, then—" He snapped his fingers. "—sudden cold. After that, one or two good hits should crack it."
"I thought the point was to keep it away from the water, control the damage."
Tabitha shot Mark a nasty look, and he returned one of his own. "The point," Tabitha snapped, "is the overpass. If Hoenn cared about water, they wouldn't have approved the pipeline in the first place."
Mark closed his eyes and imagined standing up, letting his chair topple to the floor, and walking out—fuck Tabitha and fuck this entire plan. But Montag's words held him in place: those in power will wait until the worst has already happened before they do a single thing, both a warning and a promise. And Mark believed it because he'd seen it.
He'd gone to his first protest against the Virbank refinery—his first ever—when he was sixteen. The noise and spectacle had made him feel hopeful, angry, and alive ... but nothing had come of it. When the protests had grown larger and louder, the only change had been for the police to become more aggressive. When Mark had come of age two years later and left home, those two plumes of smoke had still squatted on the horizon at his back. Even after he'd left Unova entirely, Mark had kept an eye on the news at home, so he knew the half-hearted protests had continued, as had the refinery.
Last year, the refinery had finally closed for good—but only because it had self-combusted. A corroded pipe, the reports had explained almost sheepishly, as if it could've happened to anyone. The explosion had launched a drum the size of a gigalith clear across the river to Liberty Garden, and it had also released five thousand pounds of hydrofluoric acid into the air. Benzine in the groundwater. Lead in the soil.
By then, Kathy had already started at Castelia Academy of Music, thank gods. But by then, she'd also already lost half her childhood to hospital visits and countless days when the air quality had been so bad she'd had to stay inside.
"Do we have a problem?" Tabitha demanded.
"No." Mark forced himself to lean back in his chair. "I get it."
Tabitha eyed him warily for a long moment. Finally, he turned back to the map to indicate their exit route, west through a wooded stretch to a pickup point. "We'll teleport back to Mauville, separately, to make us harder to track. Oh, River, you'll be fine. It's only a short distance."
He sat back. "Any other questions? Okay, good." Then he drummed his fingers and called, "Cy, come."
The ninjask shot onto the tabletop, nearly toppling several drinks.
"If the cops or ORCA show up," Tabitha said, tearing a long strip from his hand-drawn map, "we don't engage. We're not here to fight with them. We do the job quickly and get out. Everyone got it?"
The five of them made sounds of assent while Tabitha continued shredding the map. They watched him feed the pieces of paper to Cipher, demolishing both evidence and pipeline one strip at a time.
—
The ship continued relentlessly forward, carrying Natalie closer both to her point of origin and to a fathomless future. All she could do was wait to arrive. She spent most of her time above deck, watching the crew tease each other as they worked, the sharpedos that knifed alongside the ship. She was grateful the deck was large enough that she could give her team some air. Cramped as the ship was for her, she imagined it was worse to be cooped up inside a pokeball for days on end.
Predictably, Luna hated being on the ship. She'd been on the ocean before—starting with childhood day trips on the family Bowrider and most recently during the journey to Dewford—but she never seemed to acclimate. Natalie let her out a few times anyway, just to try. Each time, the mightyena swayed, claws scrabbling with an increasing frenzy until she all but knocked herself over; then she lay belly-down, whimpering and waiting for Natalie to recall her.
She'd expected Gus, the whismur, to start screaming immediately upon release—but, to her surprise, he seemed to like the Ultimatum. The deck was loud, but it was a wash of constant sound that drowned out the sudden noises that would've normally set him off. The ship's rolling wasn't unlike Natalie rocking him to calm him down from a crying fit.
A few times, she convinced one of the crew to spar with her, wanting as much to exercise her pokemon as to break the monotony. She lost each match. Over and over, a sudden pitch would send Natalie's pokemon sprawling or unbalance them enough for the opponent to knock them down instead. Samson and Gus didn't have enough experience to roll with the motion of the ship, and she didn't have enough experience to help them compensate for what they didn't know.
Only Amelia was untroubled by the rolling of the deck, but she was much more interested in chasing and amicably squabbling with the other wingulls and pelippers that followed the ship. Some definitely belonged to the crew—occasionally swooping down to beg their human for treats or to give an affectionate nip—but others seemed to be wild, coming and going at will. When Amelia first flew up to join them, Natalie's heart clenched in momentary panic that she wouldn't be able to find her again. But only Amelia had speckles along the edges of her wings, and only Amelia came when Natalie whistled.
Was Amelia glad to be heading home? Surely she could sense that Slateport was close. Had she missed her family, Natalie wondered, or would she be disappointed to return to familiar shores and find them smaller than she'd remembered?
With Gus in the crook of her arm, eating a nabab berry she'd saved from lunch, Natalie stood at the guardrails to watch Amelia drift and dive between the pelippers. Her wingull's calls almost sounded like laughter. Natalie heard the footsteps behind her but, accustomed to being mostly ignored on the ship, didn't turn her head.
"In the wild, they actually eat wingulls sometimes."
It took Natalie a moment to realize she was talking to her. She had seen the woman around the ship—her mane of gingery curls was hard to miss. Most often she was in conversation with Sinbad, her brows drawn together. But she was half-smiling now as she leaned against the railing next to Natalie.
Without waiting for her to respond, the woman continued, "They cooperate more often, though. When a pelipper dives, it also stuns the fish—easy pickings for the wingulls. And then, eventually, the wingulls become pelippers and pay it back to the next generation."
Squinting against the wind, Natalie swept her hair from her face with her free hand; it was too short to pull up, so all she could do was hold it back. "I thought pelippers did the hunting for the wingulls. Mouth-feeding and all that."
"Only the young. Adolescents and unevolved adults are on their own." She paused to point out a pelipper overhead. "That's my girl Alba with the pinkish beak. And yours is the little speckled one, right?"
"Yeah, that's Amelia. And I'm Natalie."
"I know."
Right. Of course.
But the woman smiled and said, "I'm Shelly. Captain of Rosie the Riveter—when I'm not here."
She pointed again, though she didn't need to. The catamaran with the rose painted on its side was still sailing alongside them, but the other had split off along with the freighter some time ago.
"I've been missing her. Excited to get back behind the wheel."
Gus began to fidget, so Natalie switched him to her other arm, bouncing him gently. She was getting ready to ask if there had been a reason for the biology lesson when Shelly spoke up again.
"I know this probably isn't easy for you. Sinbad can be …." She paused. "Easily distracted. He means well, though."
"Sure." Natalie turned back to the water, scowling and swiping her hair from her mouth.
"I just wanted to make sure you're okay. See if you need anything."
"It's fine." For the hundredth time, Natalie checked her watch—still no signal. "Though I kinda thought I might get service back as we got closer to Slateport. I left my backpack at the hostel. Gotta ask them to forward it to the pokecenter."
"Oh. No one told you."
Natalie shot her a wordless glare. No, no one had told her much of anything.
In a kind voice, Shelly explained, "Zinfandel blocks all outgoing signals except for the ones we authorize. You won't be able to make any calls while you're in her range."
"Oh," said Natalie, not fully understanding.
Shelly smiled, the low sun shining golden through her halo of hair. "I could help you put a call through if you want."
"What's the catch?"
"There's no catch. Something like that isn't a big deal. We just have to do it from the bridge. Come on—I'll show you."
The bridge was full of boxy panels of lights and machinery, long windows lining the front and rear walls. It was mostly as Natalie expected—aside from the porygon-Z perched atop one of the consoles like a dashboard bobblehead. Zinfandel, she guessed. When Shelly and Natalie came through the door, the porygon swiveled its head to look at them without moving its body.
Sinbad, who leaned against one of the panels, didn't react to their entrance at all. "You're sure?" he was saying. The throbbing vein in his neck belied his relaxed air.
"You're really asking if I'm sure?"
Standing opposite were Scarlet and a woman with close-cropped hair and a woolen traveling cloak.
Shelly sucked in a breath. "Shit, Sin—you weren't gonna call me?"
"Relax. She just got here."
Shelly did soften somewhat, and then all four pairs of eyes turned to Natalie, the interloper.
She caught the gaze of the woman in the cloak. A frown flickered across the woman's face—but then she smiled so fiercely it was like the frown had never existed. Her canines were slightly crooked, creating the illusion of fangs. "Cute pokemon," she said.
Natalie held Gus closer, not caring that he'd reached up to pull a handful of her hair.
Shelly turned to Sinbad. "I was going to help her make a call. I didn't know things were happening in here." Then to Natalie she added, "Sorry. I'll come find you later if I can."
Sinbad dismissively waved a hand. "It doesn't matter. She can stay if she wants." He paused only briefly before charging ahead. "Tell them, Zinnia."
The woman in the cloak suddenly sobered. "Magma has been hanging around near Slateport the past few days," she said. "They're planning to target the Ridge Access Pipeline."
Natalie stared. Target? As in ...? She glanced at Shelly, whose face had gone to stone. The silence in the tiny room confirmed her worst suspicions, but she couldn't make herself believe it.
"There you go, Small Fry," Archie said, baring a grin that was all teeth and no joy. "You wanted to know the difference between us and them? There it is. We fight to keep oil out of the ocean, and Magma spills it to make a fucking point."
She thought bitterly of Mark's words in the parking lot: It's killing us and nobody cares. Had he even believed himself? Or had he simply not known?
"But that's horrible," Natalie said.
Scarlet laughed. "No shit."
Natalie turned to the woman in the cloak—Zinnia. "How do you know?"
With another flash of crooked teeth, Zinnia brought her hands to the top of her head and mimed tuning them like satellites. "Supersonic hearing." Then she let the smile fall, tucking her hands behind her back.
Natalie fought back a grimace, unsettled by her jerky movements, the stop and start smile.
Sinbad cut in, "Do you know when?"
There was no hint of a smile when Zinnia answered, "I don't think they'll wait much longer. They might even make their move tonight."
"God fucking damn it." He turned to look out the window at the sun, which sank slowly through a bank of clouds red as flame. "We're cutting it close, then."
Sinbad's silence seemed to radiate a heat of its own, and no one dared speak. He picked at his beard where a bare patch was beginning to show—then he snapped up to look at Zinnia. "Go follow them. I want you to tell us every time one of them so much as scratches his ass. Alright? Every little movement."
That smile again, a twist of her mouth, quick and sharp as a dagger. "You got it, boss." For a second, she almost sounded teasing, but then her expression turned grave again. She started for the door, her skinny arms vanishing into the folds of her cloak.
Sinbad called after her, "Spook should be there too. Can you take them?"
Zinnia paused and seemed to sink deeper into her cloak. But then she said, "Lycoris can carry us both, yes."
"Good."
This time no one stopped her from sweeping past Natalie onto the deck.
As the door shut, Natalie blurted, "Where is there a pipeline near Slateport?"
Sinbad shot her an irritated look but answered, "North. Ridge Access runs from the desert down the coast into the city. And the stretch that feeds into Slateport crosses an estuary. It's the breeding ground for half the local species."
She remembered the journey to Mauville: the smell of grass and saltwater. Home at her back and, ahead, electric bursts arcing between the bushes where a pokemon had startled from its hiding place. She'd stopped in the shade of the overpass to watch a distant pod of wailmers. And across the water to the west, there was the occasional glint of metal. She'd assumed it was an electrical line.
Shelly sighed. "So, what is this? Revenge?"
Sinbad slowly shook his head, jaw clenched. "No. As far as Montag is concerned, we're just collateral damage."
"Not if we damage his collateral," Scarlet said, followed by a metallic snap. With a pit in her stomach, Natalie watched Scarlet click her switchblade shut and open and shut again to an imagined beat.
Shelly snapped, "Stop that."
While Scarlet closed the blade and tucked it back into her boot, Shelly fired a glare at Sinbad.
He stood abruptly. "Alright. This is what we're doing," he announced. "Scar—when we dock, I want you to go with Natalie and make sure she gets home safe."
"What? Why me?"
At almost the same instant, Natalie drew herself up and protested, "I don't need a bodyguard."
Then Gus took a couple of fast breaths, the first indication of an impending fit. She scrambled to recall him.
Sinbad ignored Natalie and said to Scarlet, "Because I don't want any kamikaze shit from you tonight." Then he added more softly, "And because I want someone I can trust to keep her safe. We don't know what the fuck is going down in Slateport."
Scarlet made a momentary show of pouting before she uncrossed her arms and went to Sinbad's side, laying a hand on his chest. "And who's going to keep you safe?" she asked, her tone teasing but her eyes serious.
A good question, Natalie thought. "Why don't you just call the cops?" she said, hating the pleading in her own voice. But even as she spoke, she thought of Rustboro, how effectively Magma had broken through the police line and then slipped away again.
Sinbad leveled a stern stare at her. His eyes, so like her own, had gone dark with rage. "Because this is home."
—
Even after four years, each mission carried with it some of the fear of that first night.
Mark had been eighteen when he'd abandoned his half-finished badge quest, agreeing instead to join Magma in disabling diggers and excavators in Twist Mountain. It wasn't a mountain anymore but a pit, and on that moonless night, it had also been endlessly black. The darkness itself wasn't what had scared him but the very real possibility of blindly putting his foot over a ledge and tumbling to his death. The thought left no room to worry about hypotheticals like being arrested. But Gibs had been there, invisible yet solid and steady. Mark had crept along with his palms turned out to feel for a nudge from the liepard, listening for a growl warning him to stop or a cat-chirrup urging him ahead.
Hoenn Route 110 was neither as dark nor as perilous as Twist Mountain. The path was flat grass, silver in the moonlight, here and there sinking into marshy pools. Even in the dark, the lapping of the water told him how far before he hit the edge. But without Gibs, Mark moved haltingly. Octavia flew circles around him, which should've been comforting but instead was disorientating. Her wingbeats first from one direction and then another created the nauseating illusion that he was the one changing directions even when standing still.
There was little to see but pinpricks of light: Slateport was a line of glitter to the south. To the north, Mauville was dark, hidden in the foothills. In between, the grass rippled with intermittent sparks, like a blanket full of static. He watched the drifting lights of distant ships, but those weren't the ones to worry about; ORCA would travel under cover of darkness, just like Magma.
A few hundred feet behind him, his teammates were hazy outlines among spouts of flame from three different pokemon. He smelled the burning grass, but it was almost comforting, evoking memories of battles during his early days on the road. Mark imagined Tabitha was squinting through the heat, waiting for a section of pipe to glow white-hot before he gave the order to stop and introduce the water. But from where Mark stood, it was one big fiery whorl. A signal fire. Tabitha's crobat swept clouds of shadow back and forth, but they only softened the effect, far from hiding the flames completely. Mark felt exposed, aware that he, too, would be visible as a silhouette from the water. Not much he could do about that except to stay alert.
The waiting was the worst part—nothing to distract him from his worries and doubts. He'd already come this far, and he would hold to his word. But he felt nearly sick with being there. Uselessly and foolishly, he found himself for the first time in years wanting a cigarette. Something to occupy his hands.
In his early days with Magma, lookout duty had meant crouching with the older trainers, sharing cigarettes and quiet jokes while they burned through hours of waiting for something to begin. They all smoked Blue Rings, a Hoenn brand named as a nod to the wild camerupt herds. He'd only ever smoked socially, but for months he'd carried a pack of Blue Rings in his breast pocket like a memento from a lover. An internal combustion all his own. The tobacco was probably grown in Kanto or Johto, but the pack in his pocket had felt like his passport, proof he belonged.
He didn't carry cigarettes anymore. Even if he did, he wouldn't be stupid enough to light one so close to a pipeline about to blow its highly flammable load. But he thought about it all the same. His own fault—he shouldn't have indulged with Cora.
Focus, he scolded himself.
He swept his gaze across the darkness, searching for change in the movement of the grass. Listening for a boat motor or footsteps or the call of Zig's murkrow. But there were only crickets. Even the overpass was silent, thanks to their carefully placed traffic cones and construction signs. For a little while longer, it was a beautiful night.
Then, off to one side, he heard two sharp clicks from Octavia and a jumbled flapping. First he spotted the dustox, its pale body luminous in the dark, and then Octavia diving. For a split second, he thought she was preying on it—hard to train out that behavior when what he called a lookout seemed to her like a hunt. But, no, the dustox was far too large to be wild. Mark hadn't seen its trainer yet, but he could just make out the powder flaking from its wings: sleep spore.
Even as his pulse quickened, two goals crystallized in Mark's mind: he had to raise the alarm, and he had to keep Octavia away from the sleep spore. Whether this was ORCA or police, he couldn't afford to be down a pokemon. He started to reach for his belt, calling, "Octavia, pull ba—"
Breathtaking cold swept through his chest. Before he'd even realized he'd fallen, Mark was on his knees. I'm having a heart-attack. But even as he coughed and gasped for breaths that would not come, he watched the ghost waft out through his shirt and materialize before him, baring a grin made of zipper teeth.
Mark strained to lift his hand and grab a pokeball, but his arm was as numb and unresponsive as if it had fallen asleep. He tried to shout but only managed a wheeze.
The banette's smile stretched until its face puckered, and it raised an arm, claws glowing a sickly green.
With a screech that made Mark's ears throb, Octavia swooped and caught the banette's arm in her teeth. It swung the other arm and raked its claws across her face. As she backpedaled, there was a sound of fabric tearing.
Then he saw the human figure shambling towards him along the water line, bent low over the grass. The banette must've been keeping the trainer hidden before.
Not police then.
Murkrow caws burst out from the other side of the overpass—and then cut short. Zig.
The feeling began to return to Mark's limbs, a prickling of pins and needles spreading out from his chest. He reached again for his belt, but an icy stab through his shoulder brought him up short with a grunt of pain. For a moment, he thought something else had hit him, but as he twisted to look and cold sliced across his back again, he realized his mistake. The banette must've cut him.
Octavia dove for the banette, fangs flashing. Like fog in the wind, the banette split down the center, ghostly fabric flowing to either side to let the golbat pass. When she'd gone, the banette reassembled itself with the sound of a zipper closing.
Better to slow it down. "Toxic," he rasped, but he knew Octavia hadn't heard. She wheeled for another attempt to take a bite out of the banette, and this time the dustox was on her tail.
And the trainer was almost on Mark.
He gritted his teeth against the aching cold that lanced through his back, and he seized a pokeball, fumbling with half-numb fingers and nearly dropping it. But Mark held on long enough to hit the release, and moments later, Orwell's purple light shield dropped over him like a loving embrace. "Ore," he croaked. "The dustox."
Mark didn't turn to watch how it played out—he trusted his pokemon. And he had to stand up. Hissing curses, he climbed to his feet with jerky motions that took every bit of his effort and concentration. By the time he was upright again, tears pricked the corners of his eyes, and he was out of breath again. What the fuck had the banette done to him? The numbness had passed, but every motion brought a stab of fresh pain. He couldn't tell whether he was bleeding—all he felt was preternatural cold.
He turned in time to see the dustox vanish in red light. The trainer clipped the pokeball back to their belt and took off running towards the pipeline, the banette whisking behind them in a streak of smoke. And the pipeline, he realized, had gone dark.
Mark didn't know if it mattered anymore, but he still had to try to warn the others. "Ore, flash the signal!"
The solrock whirred behind him and, in bursts, cast the scene in stark light and shadow: two of his teammates still stood beside the pipeline, their pokemon fluttering overhead, and the others had moved to intercept the ORCA onslaught rushing up from the southwest. Mark counted ten of them but couldn't be quite sure. And then darkness again.
That was it, then. They'd failed … but maybe, just this once, it was for the best.
Then another thought hit him: They knew we'd be here. There was no other way they could've gathered so fast.
But he'd have to deal with that later. If he didn't act quickly, the team would be cut off from their exit. And behind him, he heard more running footsteps. "Octavia, go!" He gestured behind him, toward the approaching silhouettes, grimacing at the pain it shot down his arm. "Confuse them. Slow them down." Then he started forward, Ore hovering alongside him. The best he could manage was a jog, each step another burst of icy pain.
Mark was under the shadow of the overpass when two blasts rang out. He didn't know whether it had been an attack from his side or theirs. But then a breeze carrying oil fumes hit his face, and he slowed to a stop.
On the other side of the overpass, maybe fifty feet ahead of him, a camerupt barreled through the jostling people and pokemon, and some of the crowd drew away behind it. Light shields in various colors flickered on, forming a haphazard wall against ORCA. A command carried across the field: "Light it up!"
Lines of red light crackled up the camerupt's back, the brightest thing in sight. A blast of water arced toward the camerupt but instead splatted harmlessly against a glowing shield. The camerupt drew in a breath, sides heaving, and opened its mouth to show a throat full of molten yellow.
Mark scrambled back. "Ore—!"
Everything happened between one breath and the next: a blue light flashed across the surface of the pipeline, cutting between the metal pipe and the torrent of flames, which poured like water to either side of the light shield. Sparks hit the grass, blooms of flame shooting up where they landed. The blue light shield buckled, swelling with heat and pressurized air—
And then, for an instant, there was only white silence.
Mark felt the explosion instead of hearing it, but his ears rang in the aftermath. Concrete and pulverized rock rained down from the overpass, hitting Orwell's light shield like hailstones. Drops of oil rained down, too.
All around, the marsh was on fire.
—
Wedged between two benches, Natalie sat on the floor of the little motorboat with her arms wrapped around herself. Scarlet perched at the back to steer, and her starmie clung to the prow, casting red light onto the water ahead. Natalie turned away from them both, watching the city lights on the water and replaying the conversation with Archie in her mind.
So is this it? she'd asked. Goodbye forever?
I think that's up to you.
They'd moored the Ultimatum in a cove off the coast of Slateport. Her brother had briskly her, then Scarlet. Then he and a handful of his loyal crew had piled into motorboats and sped off to dispense justice, while she and Scarlet crawled up the eastern waterfront in stiff silence. They would dock at Sedge Park, which was a fifteen-minute walk from Natalie's childhood home. Door-to-door delivery.
She should be relieved, she knew. Certainly, she was happy to be off the Ultimatum, and she would be glad to part ways with Scarlet. But mostly, Natalie felt awful.
What was she going to tell her parents? What could she tell them? If anything, she should probably say something to the police, but … despite everything, she didn't want Archie to get in trouble.
She didn't know what she wanted.
Natalie let the view of her city fill the empty spaces inside her. She'd never seen it from the water at night before and was comforted by the game of picking out landmarks by their lights. The lighthouse and the shipyard were easy. The museum she recognized by the pillars. She kept expecting to see the contest hall, whose lights changed colors at night, but that was on the other side of the city. Then she spotted Sedge Park: a stretch of trees where hammocks hung in the summer, the grassy hill topped with the city flag, and the iron railing where the Slateport wave had been recreated in neon lights. And their motorboat shot past all of it.
Natalie sat up. "That was the park!" she yelled over the motor and the wind.
"What?"
"The! Park!"
At last, Scarlet cut the engine. "What?" she shouted again.
"Back there. That's Sedge Park."
Scarlet squinted in the direction Natalie pointed. For a moment, they drifted on the current. "Are you sure?"
Natalie puffed herself up to deliver a cutting retort—but she was interrupted by a distant thunderclap that wholly captured Scarlet's attention, her mouth falling open. When Natalie looked over her shoulder, her jaw dropped too. A fiery plume spiked into the night sky. The entire horizon had gone crimson.
Scarlet growled a string of curses. "If he thinks I'm going to just stand by and—" She revved the motor, and their little boat plunged ahead into the darkness, leaving the lights of Slateport behind. "We're taking a detour!"
As they drew closer, Natalie smelled the smoke and chemical fumes. She couldn't look away from the towering, flaming spectacle. She gripped the sides of the boat until her hands ached.
When the buildings along the shore had given way to trees and sand, all lit a hellish red, Scarlet and her starmie guided the boat into the shallows. She leapt out to drag it the rest of the way onto the shore, heedless of the water sloshing up her legs.
Up the slope, a line of flames cut across the long stretch of fields. The route beyond was swallowed by smoke. Through the haze, Natalie could barely pick out the outline of the overpass, a chunk missing from the left side as if a giant creature had taken a bite from it. Fire geysered higher than the overpass, marking the source of the destruction. Wild pokemon scattered away from the flames, but on the other side, silhouettes of larger pokemon and people collided and fell and rose again, flashing in and out of view.
Scarlet reached into the boat for a bundle of rope, then changed her mind and tossed it down again. She started away, pausing only to whip out a blue bandana and tie it over her face. "Stay here," she commanded Natalie. Then, as an afterthought, she pulled a second bandana from a pocket and tossed it to her. "Better cover your nose and mouth." Before Natalie could protest, Scarlet took off running down the path, her starmie gliding behind her, until she vanished from sight.
Part of Natalie had to admire her for diving in, though she wondered what Scarlet intended to do. What could anyone do in the face of that?
She clambered out of the boat, suddenly unsteady on solid ground. She edged closer, stopping at the invisible line she decided marked the point of no return. I'll bear witness, she told herself. Never taking her eyes off the scene before her, she heeded Scarlet's advice and doubled the bandana over her nose and mouth.
How could they do this?
Not far from where Scarlet had entered the fray, another figure burst into the open air at a halting run, moving west. A half-shell of light hung around him like a mantle, melting globs of it dropping off. She watched in horrified fascination as a solrock spun out of the haze to join him.
Mark of Rustboro. Mark of the MGMA.
At the sight of him, she began to tremble. He'd ranted about the world's problems like he had the answers, then come to her home to pollute and destroy. And for what? What gave him the right?
Without planning to, Natalie unhooked a ball from her belt. His voice burned inside her, taunting: You could make a difference. Her anger swelled, lifting her along with it and carrying her forward, first at a walk, and then a run.