Mark landed hard. The plateau rippled and bucked with such force that he feared the entire thing would come crashing down. When he managed to roll to his hands and knees, he tasted blood. He ran his tongue over his teeth to make sure they were all still there.
The cops rushed back in like a tide, masterballs zinging through the air like locusts. One hit a bagon, and it vanished instantly; a police manectric darted into the opening and tackled the now-exposed Draconid. Seconds later, a cop was there to zip-tie her wrists behind her back. Nearby, a camerupt disappeared into a masterball, and one of Mark's teammates screamed.
Rand hoisted Mark up. The second he was on his feet again, the darmanitan let go to swing at an approaching machoke. For a moment Mark tottered, struggling to focus on what was in front of him. Ore spun around him tight and fast, pinging him repeatedly with worry, worry, worry, until Mark waved the solrock back and said firmly, "We're okay." He was glad, at least, that Ore seemed to be back to normal. "We're okay."
Hux was down, legs splayed. Mark cursed and recalled him. If he could just get a second of cover, he could patch his bastiodon up. He threw out Jemisin's pokeball and then dropped behind the gigalith.
While Mark tried to catch his bearings, Stone had released more pokemon: a pink cradily and a golden-eyed claydol. The metagross lumbered amid the cops like a tank, idly raising a leg to smash down a pokemon, and then continuing sedately onward.
Fuck that thing. Getting rid of it was top priority.
Without thinking, Mark laid a hand on his belt—but he only had Octavia left. Gibs had been gone for weeks, and yet Mark was still reaching for a pokeball that wasn't there.
The tyrantrum charged into the police ranks, grabbing officers in its teeth and shaking them until they flew—and then finally a masterball caught it in the leg, and it was gone. So much for that, Mark thought bitterly. The black ball whipped over the crowd and into the orbit of Stone's golden-eyed claydol; several others already haloed its head.
Mark wasn't an idiot. With the state his team was in, he didn't have a chance to take out a metagross by himself. Not without Gibs. He swiveled around, searching for Eben and his graveler, maybe, or someone with a camerupt, or—
He spotted Raquel. In sharp contrast to her trembling, her baltoy was very still. At least one of them was calm. But when Mark locked eyes with her, she gave the smallest shake of her head.
Oh no.
"Raquel—"
And then, with a pop, she was gone.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
That wasn't the plan. Teleporting out was their last resort, but they didn't all have a pokemon that could do it. They had to coordinate, fucking communicate, or else people would be left behind.
"Pull the fuck together!" Mark shouted at the top of his lungs.
But he was screaming at empty air. As if an invisible switch had been flipped, his teammates began to blink out of existence, first a scattered few, then all across the crowd, trainers madly recalling pokemon and grabbing for a neighbor before making the leap into the void.
Mark's pulse stuttered. He squeezed his radio's push-to-talk button one more time. "Cora? Can you hear me?" But it was still dead plastic.
The cops swept into the empty spaces, the remaining blips of red swallowed by gray and black. A trainer in red turned helplessly, only able to watch as their pokemon vanished one by one. Another swung their fists until a manectric downed them.
Mark had one last failsafe. "Ore, send up a flare." The solrock's purple fire was distinctive; Cora would know what it meant.
As the ball of flame shot into the air, Jemisin rumbled and hurled rock chunks into the ranks of police. Rand screeched and struck down a swooping magneton. But all of Mark's attention was focused on Cora's team, a patch of red only yards away.
Come on, Cora. She had to have seen it, right?
Bit by bit, her crew drew into a tight pack. Good, if they scattered too, there'd be no point in—And then, all at once, they disappeared.
Mark couldn't breathe. She'd misunderstood his signal.
Or maybe she'd understood exactly what had happened.
For a moment, all he could do was stand and try to breathe. The sound of a manectric throwing itself into Ore's light screen snapped him out of it.
Focus!
He'd gotten himself out of tight positions before. His only possible escape was behind him, into the heart of Meteor Falls. Getting to the cave mouth would be dicey, but fighting to leave something was much easier than fighting to keep it. His pokemon could clear the way.
"Ore, Rand, let's go!" He raised his gigalith's pokeball, readying to recall her and run for it. Orwell did a loop around his head, buzzing and crackling, but Rand—"Fuck, Rand, enough!"
Before Mark could recall the darmanitan, there was a sound like an engine accelerating, and then something crashed into Jem with a horrible crunch. The gigalith reeled, jaws working; one of her crystals was fractured. The second blow was nothing more than a streak of silver, too fast for Mark to do anything to stop it. He managed to recall her at last, and then the only thing between him and the fucking metagross was a membrane of light.
"Fire spin. Don't let it any closer," he said to Ore, backpedaling. "Rand!"
Purple flames shot out with a hiss. The metagross froze for a moment. Then, despite heating to a pink glow, it pressed through the flames and swung a massive leg into the light shield. Mark and Ore slid back several feet; the shield held, but cracks webbed the left side.
"Rand!"
The metagross brought its leg up to swing again, but Rand lunged and caught its claw between his hands. He jammed the leg up higher, and for a moment it looked like the metagross might flip onto its back. Instead it yanked itself free and scuttled backward.
"Fire punch, Rand!" Mark shouted. "Aim for the leg joint."
But he should've been watching Stone.
As Rand's fist connected, something burst from the ground beneath the darmanitan in a spray of dirt and rock. Not until it had hooked its claws into Rand's back did Mark recognize the excadrill. They tumbled backwards together, and the metagross clomped towards Mark. It held one leg off the ground, but that didn't slow it down.
"Ore, solar beam the …." He couldn't hit the excadrill without hitting Rand. "The metagr—"
The dome of Mark's light shield rocked back and forth. A machoke on one side, manectric on the other. Fuck, they were everywhere, closing in tight. He could ask Ore to sweep them away—but then nothing would be holding back the metagross. He needed backup, but there was no one in sight any direction he turned. The only pokemon he had left was Octavia, who wouldn't be happy with that metagross or under the full sun—
Ore shouldn't take this long to charge up a solar beam.
The solrock was frozen in place, not even twitching. It buzzed so loudly that Mark felt it in his teeth. For the second time, radio static burst through his skull—west end secure. Copy—and then the light screen popped like a soap bubble.
With a final shriek, Ore lashed energy out in all directions. The machoke and manectric skidded backwards, kicking up dust. The radio static fell silent. Mark took a breath—
Then something black whizzed through his peripheral vision, and Ore's presence in his mind suddenly cut off. By the time Mark turned his head, Ore was gone.
Gone.
He looked up in time to see the rebounding masterball shoot past Stone's smug, smiling face and join the others that orbited his claydol.
I'll fucking kill him. Mark reached to his belt again, but he still only had Octavia left, and she'd never get him past that metagross.
"Rand—" He whipped his head around in time to see his darmanitan vanish, too. No!
Under the cover of the claydol's golden light shield, Stone strode forward, raising one arm—
Mark felt the drop in his stomach before he registered that his feet had left the ground. Legs dangling, he tipped back and back …. MetFalls swung overhead, all those stratified shades of red rock stretching long … then only sky, and then no sky at all—
Until he was skidding facedown along the plateau. Something landed on him, hard, and he wheezed for air. Before he could even think about fighting back, rough hands yanked his arms behind his back and zip-tied his wrists.
Another hand reached for his pokeballs—standard cop procedure—and Mark's panic mounted. They were going to take everyone. And then he would be truly alone.
But a voice made the hand pause.
"That's one of the leaders, right? I want to meet him."
They dragged Mark up into a sitting position. He squinted against the sun until Stone's shadow fell across his face.
For a moment, the former champion only stared down at him, head tipped to one side, smiling faintly. He crouched and reached for Mark's bandana.
Mark thrashed, but the cops to either side had him by the shoulders. And then a breeze hit his face, stinging against his split lip. He glared up at Steven Stone, every possible insult boiling inside him, but kept his mouth clamped shut.
"Well," Stone said softly, "you've caused a lot of trouble today, haven't you."
Behind him hovered the claydol, spinning and spinning its collection of masterballs. Following Mark's eye, Stone turned and then grinned. "I'm sure they're all legally registered in your name … right? If the judge decides to let you out on bail, you'll get them back right away."
Stone let that sink in before he spoke again. "So, where did you get that bastiodon? That's more than theft, you know. That's copyright infringement."
Montag had gifted Hux to him years ago, but like hell Mark was going to so much as breathe his name. He clenched his jaw tighter.
The former champion waited a moment. When Mark still gave no indication of opening his mouth, Stone shrugged and stood, brushing dust from his suit. Without so much as a glance back, he stepped away to address the cops.
Mark tested his bindings, but the zip-ties only bit into his skin harder when he strained. At last, he let his head hang and sucked in a ragged breath. By a stroke of luck—if Steven fucking Stone unmasking him could be called luck—he still had his team with him. Or, at least, half of them. But the moment the cops noticed he still had balls on his belt, they'd be confiscated. Gone. Forever.
Would they release them into the wild? And what about Rand and Jem, Unovan natives? It seemed unlikely that a Hoenn police department would bother with the cost of shipping pokemon across the ocean. No, they'd more likely be sold at a police auction to some spoiled little shit hoping to fast-track their badge quest. Would they think he'd abandoned them? Or maybe they'd be left to gather dust in a filing cabinet.
If someone could just grab Octavia's ball from his belt …. Erica Spitfire sat zip-tied among several of the Draconids, their faces smudged with dirt and paint but their heads high. A few feet away, someone hit ground with a flurry of curses: Eben, his bandana slipping partway down. At the sight of a teammate, Mark felt a rush of joy—but none of them were close enough for a whisper, and a yell would also catch the attention of the cops and remind them that he still had pokeballs on his belt.
Even if one of them managed to release Octavia … then what? His hands would still be tied, and they'd still be outnumbered.
What had been the point of any of this? Mark had failed his pokemon, he'd failed the trainers under him, he'd failed Montag … and he hadn't deflected harm from anyone.
And then, gods, he hadn't even considered Mom and Kathy yet. They'd be heartbroken when they found out … but he couldn't avoid it, could he? He'd need Mom's help finding a lawyer, not to mention paying for—fuck. It wasn't supposed to be like that. He was supposed to be the one supporting them. If he'd just listened when Kathy—
The fleeting coolness of a shadow swept over him, and he looked up on instinct. Two winged shapes wheeled high above the plateau, one quick and lithe and the other much larger and bulkier. Neither was the right shape to be the skarmory. Maybe an aerodactyl, but even the heir to the Stone fortune didn't have two of those. Then one of them bellowed, smoke trailing from its mouth, and Mark knew exactly whose pokemon they were: Zinnia had decided to show up after all.
The cops had noticed her, too. The two remaining helicopters circled closer but kept their distance. Stone's skarmory shot out ahead of them, flinging razor-edged feathers with each wingbeat. Zinnia's noivern easily dipped below while the salamence flew to meet Steven's bird. Green flames spewed from between the dragon's teeth until the skarmory was forced to pull away.
The noivern tucked its wings and hurtled towards the ground.
"Shields up!"
Fewer police kadabra were out than before, but there were still plenty to raise a glittering dome of light over their ranks. The noivern held to its course.
Maybe it didn't know. Octavia's daytime vision was bad, and Mark guessed noivern was the same. It was going to hit the light screen like a pidove against a high-rise window, and while it lay stunned, the cops would swarm.
The smack he expected never came. Instead, in a jumble of shouts and radio commands, the cops all ducked behind their riot shields. Overhead, the light screen was still intact, but the noivern had slipped through somehow. It was hardly more than a blur ripping along the crowd, knocking polycarbonate shields and pokemon aside with its wings and tail as it went. Finally, with a hiss, it landed among the officers it had stricken prone. A riot shield cracked under one foot.
"Manectric, go!"
As the pokemon bounded towards it, the noivern whirled, reared up, and brought its wings together with a terrific clap of air that blew out the light shields and sent cops and manectric flying. Even at a distance, Mark's ears popped.
The salamence dropped through the opening, spraying flames to force the cops further back. A few of them dropped half-melted riot shields as they ran.
Zinnia clung to the salamence's neck. When it dropped to all fours with a ground-shaking thump, she leapt down, black cloak streaming behind her, and bolted for the protesters. "Tacca, clear the way!" The noivern slithered ahead, slapping police and pokemon aside. Cheers rose up then, and Zinnia grinned as she whipped a long hunting knife from her hip.
Mark craned his neck to watch her lean over one of the Draconid protesters and snap the knife through her zip-ties. Zinnia, please. But what right did he have to ask for her help? He'd go to his sister first if he were in her position, wouldn't he? She'd free the other Draconids first.
"What happened to Kalmara and Harsumna?" she asked one of them. "Where are they?"
A roar drowned out the answer. The salamence lifted off the ground in a gust of sparks and dust, narrowly avoiding the metagross's swinging leg. The breeze stirred Zinnia's cloak as she turned for a moment to watch. Her expression was pained, but she whirled back around and continued down the line, sheltered by the noivern's wings. The cops threw masterballs from a safe distance, but the noivern blasted them with green fire; the masterballs fell as splatters of molten metal.
Finally, Zinnia came to Mark and—snick—cut his hands free. He almost could've cried in relief.
"You're amazing," he said, but she'd already moved past him.
The Draconids and protesters helped each other up, some rubbing life back into their hands. Most were faster on the uptake and ran, skidding over discarded riot shields, towards the opening of Meteor Falls. A few of the bolder cops started after them, but the noivern darted up to pepper them with fire.
Beyond the ring of destruction the two dragons had caused, Rustboro RPD was reforming their ranks and reactivating light screens. She'd taken them by surprise, but Zinnia couldn't keep this up for long. This was the only chance Mark would get to run to safety.
But he couldn't leave Ore and Rand. He couldn't.
A hundred feet away, Stone's metagross and Zinnia's salamence were still locked together in a cloud of dust, fumes, and flecks of metal; the crowd had moved back to give them a wide berth. The metagross planted a foot on the salamence's chest, grinding the dragon into the rock and smashed polycarbonate—until a claw raked its face, and it reeled back. With a kick and a blast of fire, the salamence wrenched free.
Through the heat haze rising off the metagross's cherry-red shell, Mark could see the former champion out ahead of the ranks of police officers, his brows knit together. The cradily had been cordoned off by a line of burning debris, but the claydol bobbed at his side, still juggling more than a dozen masterballs that gleamed with reflected fire.
Spitfire had already gone, and Eben too. Mark was on his own.
He felt naked without Ore, but he knew his pokemon were counting on him. He had to try. Before he could second-guess himself, Mark took off running, Octavia's ball in hand. He hoped the dust and smoke in the air would provide him some cover.
By the time he burst through to clear air, he was already calling out his golbat. "Confuse ray!"
Mark didn't get within thirty feet of Stone before the claydol caught him in an invisible grip and yanked him to a stop mid-air, but Octavia was much faster. She shot past him, trailing lights that flickered and pulsed colors that hurt to look at. Mark was powerless to turn his head, so he shut his eyes instead.
The claydol's hold didn't loosen, but it hadn't been Mark's target: the most dangerous opponent on the field was always, always the trainer.
A cry of alarm prompted Mark to open his eyes. Steven Stone had sunk to one knee and swayed like a drunk as he tried to stand back up. The nearest cops stumbled into each other.
Then the claydol began to tilt slowly to the left, and Mark tilted, too. Octavia was quick, but he'd seen her fly in the opposite direction from—Holy shit, it's Stone. His pokemon are dizzy off his confusion.
From behind Mark came a creaking, grating sound, and he managed to slowly turn his head. The metagross shimmied first to one side and then the other as if the floor were tilting beneath it. It swung a leg at the salamence, missing widely but nearly striking down several cops instead.
When Zinnia's noivern dropped next to the claydol, writhing shadows cupped in the crook of its arm, Steven's pokemon was defenseless. The instant the noivern struck, Mark tumbled free from the psychic grip. Even as he hit his hands and knees, he laughed, half-delirious with relief.
Like beads dropping from a snapped necklace, the masterballs surrounding the claydol dropped at once and rolled in several directions. Mark's stomach lurched. He dove forward, shoveling masterballs into his messenger bag. Some were half-melted or smashed, empties that had already been on the ground. There was no time to try to sort through them—he picked up every single one he saw.
"No!" someone shouted.
The noivern hunched between Mark and the cops, but a clear path lay between him and Steven Stone. The former champion braced himself with a hand on the ground, his gaze sliding all over, but he reached his other hand for a pokeball.
Mark froze. He had nothing left to defend himself.
The ball slipped from Stone's fingers and rolled away without releasing. Stone fumbled after it, leaving Mark to resume his mad grab for masterballs.
As he scrabbled for the last one, he saw a flash of pink out of the corner of his eye. He rolled, trying to cover his head—but it was Octavia who saved him. She slashed at the cradily's face in defiance of the tendrils snatching at her wings.
From behind came a crunch like a car crash, and the salamence roared. Mark stole a glance over his shoulder to see it clamber atop the fallen metagross and roar again.
He grabbed the last masterball and stood—but there was nowhere to go. The cops surrounded him on all sides. A couple of them were helping Stone to his feet; he pressed a hand to his head, but two of his pokemon stood nearby, and another pokeball was in his hand.
"Hey, over here!"
Zinnia stood beside her salamence with a hand on its neck. It bellowed and exhaled green flames again, incinerating another barrage of masterballs before they could find their marks. Crouching to avoid the worst of the heat, she waved wildly to Mark.
You don't have to tell me twice. He recalled Octavia and ran for it.
As Zinnia hoisted herself onto the salamence's back, the noivern took to the air; it zigzagged hard and fast around them, warding off both masterballs and manectric with wind and flame. "Come on." Zinnia reached a calloused hand down to Mark and helped him up behind her. As soon as both of his feet were off the ground, the salamence lurched forward and spread its wings. There was nothing to grab onto but Zinnia, so he shut his eyes and held on tight—
And the ground dropped away below them. Above, violet dazzled against the sky—a light screen. The cops were trying to trap them in. But the noivern shattered it with another sonic blast, and the salamence didn't even slow.
Only as they veered away from Meteor Falls did Mark see how many of his teammates and the protesters were still left behind, little specks of color among the gray. The longer he looked, the dizzier he became. He squeezed his eyes shut against the wind and the bone-crunching drop to earth below. The salamence was all power and pumping muscle, surprisingly warm beneath him, and Mark tried not to think about anything but the space between one wingbeat and the next.
He had no sense at all of how long they'd been flying before they landed. The impact jarred him hard enough that he released his grip on Zinnia. As the salamence trotted to a standstill, he tumbled off and rolled into the bushes. He dry-heaved until his eyes watered. Then, for a few moments, he let himself simply lay there, cheek against the cool dirt.
Mark decided he hated teleporting slightly less than flying.
He sat up slowly. They'd arrived at a forest clearing, though he couldn't begin to guess whether they were north or east of MetFalls. The air was still save for the chirping of tailow.
Zinnia said nothing about Mark's landing when he finally emerged from the bushes, brushing dirt and leaves from his hoodie. She'd busied herself examining the salamence's injuries. While she ran a hand over its side, it dropped its head onto her shoulder, making a sound remarkably like a cat purring. The noivern lay nearby, grooming its ruff of fur with a forked tongue.
"Zinnia … thanks," he said. "I owe you one."
Her smile was there one second and gone the next. "Yes, you do." She made an air-grab at his messenger bag. "The pokemon?"
"Right." His stomach twisted. What if he'd missed one of them?
One way to find out.
Gingerly, he lowered himself to sit at the base of a tree; the adrenaline had worn off, and he felt like he'd been hit by a truck. He dumped the masterballs into a pile beside him, then he heaved a sigh. "So, you think I should just—"
Zinnia snatched up a few of them and tossed them down, releasing a pair of swablu and a bagon. The swablu flitted up to perch on a branch; the bagon took a few unsteady steps and plopped down with a sad bleat. She told them, "You fought hard. I'll do my best to help you find your human friends if you want to return to them, but no one would blame you if you'd rather return to the mountain."
Mark wondered how much of this speech was intelligible to the pokemon, but he remained respectfully silent.
The clearing quickly filled with pokemon. He released a police manectric that growled long and low before turning and streaking away into the underbrush. Zinnia released a graveler that might've been Eben's or might not have. Before long, the pile of empties was bigger than the pile of pokemon waiting to be released.
When the tyrantrum burst forth with a roar, Zinnia wrapped her arms around its leg and cried, "Kalmara!" With astonishing gentleness, it lowered its massive head to snuffle her hair.
The pile began to thin, and they still hadn't come across either of Mark's pokemon. He felt like something was squeezing him by the throat, the pressure mounting until—
"Rand!" he choked out.
The darmanitan emerged in his dormant form, but at the sound of Mark's voice, he began to rise up, stone arms rasping against stone ribs. By the time Mark threw his arms around him, Rand was furry and warm again. He didn't even care that the darmanitan nearly knocked the wind out of him with the force of his hug.
When Mark pulled away, his fingers came away sticky and red. "Shit. That excadrill got you good." He recalled Rand into his own pokeball, the one he'd carried with him since he left Unova.
When the next ball burst open, a familiar crackle of energy grazed over Mark's mind, and he thought his heart might burst with relief. "Ore! Thank fucking gods. You okay?" The solrock trilled and made a loop around him before it held still long enough to let Mark press a hand to its side; Ore buzzed with an echo of his own joy. "Yeah, you too."
"Is that all of them?" Zinnia cut in. "There has to be more, right? She has to be here."
Mark's smile fell. He didn't know Zinnia well, but he knew that awful gnawing feeling when he touched the empty slot on his belt. He checked his bag one more time but came up empty. "I'm sorry," he said. "The rest are duds."
Her mouth twisted. "You didn't see a goodra out there?"
"I did, but … I guess Stone didn't grab it."
Zinnia raised one fist to her mouth and swiped at her eyes with the other. Mark turned away to give some semblance of privacy. After a moment, she let out a breath and bent to scoop up one of the recovered bagon. She cradled it like a baby. To his surprise, she bared a toothy grin.
"Well. She's not the first dragon stolen by the Hoenn state, hmm?" Her grin wobbled and then became fiercer. "The rest of us will just have to fight even harder. For Harsumna. For Aster. For all those who came before and all who will come after."
A growl and a thump prompted Zinnia and Mark to turn to the salamence. It fanned its wings, stirring a wind that rustled the leaves. "Don't you go flying off without me, Lyco," Zinnia said in the same tone she might scold a naughty toddler. "The last thing we need right now is to call more attention to ourselves. If you wait a few minutes, I'll get you dinner."
The salamence regarded her for a long moment. Then it folded its wings and slunk off between the trees, its sides scraping bark as it went.
Mark repeated her words to himself with growing unease: call more attention to ourselves. "Why don't you just recall it?"
Her smile was quick and sharp. "I don't use pokeballs."
"Oh." That explained a few things. He turned to Ore and thought maybe he understood: he didn't want to let the solrock out of his sight again if he could help it.
With a swish of her cloak, Zinnia turned away to tend to her pokemon, and that was that. Fine by him.
Mark settled back against the tree with his bag in his lap and counted up his potions: three left. As he uncapped a potion for Ore, he made a mental tally of his team's injuries. Rand definitely needed one. Hux was out cold, and Jem needed care, too—none of them were in great shape, really, but—
Zinnia tsked as she examined a patch of blackened scales on the tyrantrum's back. When her hands strayed too close, it snapped its teeth at her. She shoved its snout away one-handedly and said, "I know, I'm sorry. I'm only looking. I won't touch."
Mark rolled one of his two remaining potions between his palms. Finally he said, "Zinnia. Catch."
She did easily. "Thanks."
For a moment, he watched her shake and spray the bottle, how she stepped automatically to avoid the tyrantrum's swinging tail and ducked to reach its underbelly.
"I didn't know you could fight like that." He paused, then added pointedly, "I thought you were a pacifist." That had always been her excuse to skip out on a fight. Her skills were best suited to surveillance, she'd said.
Zinnia didn't pause to look at him. "With exceptions."
"Fine, but … where the hell were you? It would've made a difference if you'd been there earlier." Even as he spoke, he wondered how true that was, but it felt good to say.
"A difference?"
She gave the tyrantrum's haunch a thump, and it pivoted away towards a patch of sun, nearly catching Mark across the face with its tail. Ore buzzed in protest, but the tyrantrum paid no mind; with a thud that sent pine needles raining down from the trees, it dropped into the dirt and rolled around, legs in the air.
As Mark straightened back up, Zinnia flashed him another snaggletoothed smile. "The Devon data center is burning," she said. "How's that for a difference?"
He paused dusting pine needles from his shoulders to shoot her an incredulous look instead. That had to be a joke, right? Except Zinnia returned his stare with unblinking calm. Goosebumps broke out along his arms. "You're not kidding."
"Nope."
"Holy shit." Mark grinned but shook his head. Dragons or no, that was no small feat. At the very least, Tabitha would've had to be involved—who else could disrupt their security system? But even then, they would've needed a larger team, and Mark couldn't imagine how—
Then he saw it: half of the Rustboro police force diverted to MetFalls. Steven Stone helicoptered in with his monstrous metagross.
Montag's plan had never been just the pipeline, not when he could destroy one of their buildings, too.
He felt lightheaded at the enormity of it. Devon Tower was a more elaborate structure, the jewel of the Rustboro business district, but the data center was Devon's heart. Even before Mark had been assigned to Rustboro, it had been a potential Magma target, but for years it had only been a pipe dream. It was protected by both the latest anti-pokemon barriers and a metagross—sometimes two, now that Stone was no longer holding court at Evergrande.
Now and again, plan proposals bubbled up from the ranks, but Montag had never approved any of them. One idea had been Mark's: getting Gibs into the building would be impossible, but he was more than capable of shadow-swiping key cards, phones, and datebooks from the security team once they were on the street. A good first step to breaking through, Mark had thought. He flinched now, remembering how he'd delivered his pitch in an excited rush.
Montag had at first said nothing, then simply, "No."
Mark had accepted that answer, the lack of explanation, just like he had accepted every other impenetrable decision that Montag passed down. He trusted Montag. And yet ….
A scuffling and a chirruping made him look up. The noivern pawed at Zinnia, nearly knocking her over, until she reached into the folds of her cloak for a strip of fruit leather. She tossed it high; the noivern snatched it from the air, then came knuckle-crawling back for more.
"He didn't tell us," Mark said in an accusatory tone.
Zinnia's eyes flicked over to him and then back to her pokemon. She shrugged and then tossed another piece of dried fruit. For a moment, the only sound was the noivern's chittering and chewing.
Montag operated on a need-to-know basis … but Mark had always been one of the ones who needed to know.
He spoke as the realization hit him: "We were the distraction."
She was still smiling, but it wasn't a happy expression. "You. My people. Huwasi."
Right, the Draconid word for MetFalls.
Ore drew closer as if to protect him, and Mark squeezed his eyes shut.
After a moment, he mustered a hollow laugh and one of Montag's maxims: "No change without sacrifice."
Mark had always nodded along before, but … fuck, when had he become disposable?
Fine, Montag couldn't have guessed that Mark would fuck it up the way he had—that hadn't been part of the plan. But Meteor Falls?
DevCo would get to build their pipeline—maybe not today, but soon enough. Losing the data center wouldn't inconvenience Devon enough to halt their projects … but it would motivate them to pull in more revenue quickly. Neither Magma nor Root Revolution nor the Draconids would be able to rally enough manpower in time to intercede: they were spread thin, too many of them tied up in personal legal fights now. Locals would hiss and complain for a little while, but eventually, normal life would take over again and they'd forget to be angry. The grass would regrow. Some or maybe even most of the pokemon would come back. The oil would trickle quietly beneath the surface, forgotten … until the day a valve blew or the protective coating wore away and thousands of gallons of crude painted the foothills black.
Then what? Would Montag ask him to make an example of the MetFalls pipeline next? The thought made him sick to his stomach.
As if reading his mind, Zinnia piped up, "Yeah, funny thing about that. I dunno if you've been following the news but, apparently, it's very sad that our sacred land is being disturbed." She leaned one elbow on the noivern's shoulder and with her other hand pet the bridge of its nose. "But at least we get good, cheap oil, thanks to DevCo's sacrifice."
Mark shifted in his seat. "You don't actually believe that Montag and DevCo are the same."
Her smile stretched wider. "Do you want me to tell you that he's the brightest star in my sky? Would that make you feel better?"
Then why are you here, he wanted to say, but she didn't give him a chance.
"It doesn't matter what I believe. I show up and play my role, just like you."
Ore pulsed an echo of his own frustration back to him, and Mark snapped, "Do you think this isn't real for me?"
She scratched her noivern behind the ears without looking up. Her silence needled him.
"You know Montag is the only one who can stand up to DevCo." Zinnia still didn't look up at him, but Mark didn't slow down. "Say what you want about him, but at least he doesn't waste time on stupid feel-good bullshit."
Mark had watched Thrive, Virbank's biggest clean air advocacy group, slowly suffocate under red tape. They were good people—they cared—but what was the point of a protest when you asked the city for permission and clearances first? What good was a potluck, period? All their petitions, divestment campaigns, and dialogues with the city had literally blown up in their faces when the refinery exploded. Now Thrive mostly organized cleanup efforts, too little too late.
Do you want to go home and plead with City Hall for a street permit and a speaking slot at the next committee meeting? Montag had asked him. Neither do I.
"Megacorporations don't give a shit about the slogan on your sign or signatures on a petition," Mark continued. DevCo didn't care what happened to a small city downwind of their refinery, and they sure as shit didn't care about one girl with bad lungs. "They care about their bottom line—that's it."
Of course, Montag had his own bottom line … and only he knew how far down it was.
Kathy wasn't part of his equation either—she was a statistic, one dot on the map across an ocean. But worrying about Kathy was Mark's job. Montag's job was to wake people up, get them moving, and give them something to rally around. Thrive had lots of theory and literature, but Magma had that and more: it was an engine that turned anger into power.
In Unova, Mark had felt hopeless and powerless. The deeper he traveled into the heart of the country, the more he felt like a patrat in a maze. The street names changed, but the concrete walls and smoggy skies didn't. Eight hours before he first learned about Magma, he'd been arrested at a protest in Driftveil. It hadn't been the first time, but it had been harder than other times: he'd been thrown around, humiliated, left for hours in an overcrowded cell—and through it all, the cops had remained calmly indifferent. He'd ben far from home and no closer to accomplishing anything real. Or anything at all. When the cops had turned him loose, Magma had been there with water bottles, energy bars, and an invitation to join them at Twist Mountain.
They did what the protesters had failed to do: they shut the mining operation down.
"People need someone to believe in," he said. And for a moment he felt a rush of the old conviction singing in his blood: Montag made him want to be a better, bolder person.
Or he had. Desecrating a Hoenn salt marsh had never been on Mark's wishlist. He'd believed in the plan to stop the MetFalls line from being built … but that had never been the plan.
Montag was right: they'd made Ridge Access impossible to ignore. Mark knew the call to arms, so he spoke now: "Most people will do anything to avoid looking at the fucked up parts of the world. If people knew …. " He trailed off, thinking of the Virbank refinery. How long would the public outrage in Hoenn last, he wondered, and what would come of it? If Virbank was any example … the answer would be no time and nothing.
Mark sucked in a breath, groping for the words that would vindicate Montag, or maybe just himself. But all he had left was, "Things don't have to be like this."
When he finally raised his head, Zinnia was staring down at him impassively. "But they are."
He let out a long, slow breath.
"Buck up, colonizer," Zinnia said with such forceful cheer it came like a slap even before her words registered. "You got what you wanted, didn't you? So did I."
Before he could figure out a response, she spoke again. "Look, after I feed these guys,"—she patted the noivern's side—"I'm taking the rest of the pokemon to the Fortree clan. If you want, I can drop you off anywhere between here and there."
He opened and shut his mouth before he managed, "I thought I was a colonizer."
She shrugged jerkily and smirked. "You saved our pokemon—some of them, at least. Maybe you were just looking out for yourself, I don't know. But it still means something to me. So you want a ride, or are you hoofing it?"
Mark closed his eyes and took a deep breath. The alternative was to travel on foot—overnight with an injured team and no supplies. And returning to Rustboro was a bad idea right now. As little as he liked the idea of getting back on Zinnia's salamence, he wasn't stubborn or stupid enough to turn her down.
He sighed and said, "Yeah, alright."
—
Zinnia refused to fly too near to Mauville. Instead, she dropped him on the sandy eastern outskirts. This time Mark was more prepared for the bumpy landing. He managed to hold on until the salamence stopped and then slide down on his own terms, stumbling but still landing on his feet.
As checked his belt—everyone accounted for—Zinnia leaned down over her salamence's neck. "I guess I'll see you around."
"I guess so," he said, a little out of breath. Then, "Thank you."
He squinted up at her and could hardly believe he'd been behind her on the salamence's back only moments before. She looked like a storybook character, rail thin amid the folds of her cloak but sitting tall and straight between the dragon's open wings.
"Zinnia … if you don't trust Montag, why do you work with us?"
She flashed a jagged grin. "Which place is safest from dragon fire?" She didn't wait for him to guess. "The dragon's back."
With that, she thumped the salamence on the shoulder, and it lurched into a waddling run. Then, with a few pumps of its wings, it lifted off the ground and wheeled away with improbable grace, as easy as kite on the wind.
Mark watched them until there was only empty blue above. Then he released Ore and the two of them headed up the hill that marked the edge of the city limits.
He hadn't planned to return to Mauville so soon: it reminded him too much of Nimbasa for comfort, all those neon lights crowding against raw desert. But as the hub of Western Hoenn, it gave him the most options for his next move, the most exit routes.
After a quick stop to buy a few basics—potions, a toothbrush, a change of clothes—he made his way back to the hostel where he'd stayed before and got himself a room. When he dropped onto his bunk, he finally turned both his personal and burner phones back on. Immediately, one of them lit up with a new message, and his heart leapt—but it was from Cora: What the ever-loving fuck was that? He closed it without answering and got in the shower. There were no new messages when he returned.
He couldn't bear to sit still.
Mark walked without knowing or caring where he was going. The marquees and telescreens washed the streets in light, but the dusk sky was gray. Ore hovered alongside him, filling the air with trills and static. He pressed the burner phone to his opposite ear, clenching his teeth as the ringing dragged out longer and longer.
"Hello. The person you are trying to reach is not available at this time. Please leave a message after the—"
"Fuck."
He turned to Ore. "Now what?" But the solrock only whirred and stared back unblinkingly.
Montag was probably busy: he had a lot of people to debrief, after all.
Or he was ignoring him.
Unthinkingly, Mark reached into his breast pocket for the pack of Blue Rings, only catching himself when the cigarette was already in his hand. He paused in the middle of the sidewalk, staring at it. No, he shouldn't.
He kept walking. With the cigarette still pinched between two fingers, he dialed Montag again. On the third ring, he gave in and lit it. If there was a time to indulge in bad habits, it was now.
As he turned down the next street, a flicker of red caught his eye. The Hoenn National News was playing on a telescreen. His stomach fluttered when he recognized the Devon data center, and he slowed to watch. The building had become a pillar of flame and smoke, a flaming middle finger to the world. Maybe it should've made him feel better.
"Hello. The person you are trying to reach is not available at this time. Please leave a message after the tone."
The chime sounded, then silence. Mark knew he should hang up, wait and follow Montag's lead. But he didn't. The silence stretched on, punctuated by Ore's crackling presence on the line. Mark's throat clenched tight, and then he drew in a sharp breath and blurted, "We have to talk—in person. I'm in Mauville and … you owe me an explanation."
That was a mistake—he had no business making demands of Montag. But he'd already said it. Haltingly, he finished, "Call me when you get this."
Mark jammed the phone into his pocket. He wouldn't check it again, he told himself, until he finished this cigarette. Move, keep walking.
On the screen behind him, pixelated smoke climbed higher and higher into the darkening sky.