TWO: I'M DOING THIS FOR LOVE

Time is relative. Clair's plane trip was three hours of recycled air and tiny airline-sized bottles of dark rum, catching up on Johtonian soaps on her tablet; Silent's was three hours of crypt-close darkness and old memories. You expect me to tell you that Clair's three hours were faster, but you'd be wrong: she couldn't focus, kept realising she'd missed the last five minutes and flicking back to watch it again. She hadn't wanted this mission, but Will had insisted. She spoke Sinnish, didn't she? And she already knew the Sinnish contact. It made sense.

She didn't like the way he'd said that, with his smug little smile. He knew. And he knew she knew he knew. And now she had to go to Sinnoh and face it all over again.

The conversation buzzed around her in circles like a horsefly, angling for a bite. She set her jaw and pushed her earbuds in tighter, until it seemed like her head might pop between them, but try as she might, she never got more than two episodes in.

At one point she asked Silent how they were doing, in the hope of finding a distraction, but they were deep in the dream, hurling Red's charizard into a wall on that fateful day when their lives first crashed into one another. (It had been a good fight; they wouldn't have minded dying there, if that's how it had turned out. But how much better to be gifted their first taste of true life, instead.) She thought about asking again, in case they hadn't heard, but couldn't stomach the idea of seeming desperate.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," said the pilot, crackling to her rescue through the overhead speakers. "We're now beginning our descent towards Jubilife. Local time is 12:52 a.m. and we should be on the tarmac in fifteen minutes."

"Finally," she muttered, pulling out her headphones and slipping her tablet back into her bag. She could spend fifteen minutes putting everything in order. Then she'd be up and on her feet, picking up bags, putting things together, and … well, and walking straight into a problem she'd spent the whole flight trying not to think about. But she didn't want to think about that now, either.

On the other side of the window, Jubilife bloomed in the night like a field of alien flowers. Warm clotted oranges and yellows, pitted with red from radio masts and brake lights and crawling with bright-eyed traffic. Somewhere down there, Clair thought, was a murderer, and a Sinnoh League contact, and a hotel bed with her name on it.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're now beginning our descent towards Jubilife. Local time is 11:47 p.m. and we should be on the tarmac in fifteen minutes."

"Finally." Clair pulled out her headphones and slipped her tablet back into her bag. Fifteen minutes was nothing; she could spend that packing up, no problem. Only hadn't she already done that?

She looked up. The person in the seat next to hers, a youngish man whose premature grey made him look older than he was, looked back at her.

"What," he began, and the pilot's voice crackled over the intercom and Clair lifted her eyes from her tablet.

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. We're now beginning our descent towards Jubilife. Local time is 11:26 p.m. and we should be on the tarmac in fifteen minutes."

"Finally."

What the hell is happening? asked Silent, and Clair felt something snap back into focus like an optician's lens sliding into the frame. This – this feeling, it's like―

"You can feel it too?" asked Clair.

"Yeah," said the man next to her, thinking she meant him. "I think it's one of those―"

"Good evening, ladies and gentlemen," said the pilot, and in their ball Silent gave in and snarled aloud, pounding the not-quite-ground beneath them with their fists.

What is this? It was something, of that much they were sure. A fuzziness between the ears, like their brain was a balloon pulling loose from its moorings; a smell like nothing they'd ever encountered before, hot and earthy and as dead as a burnt-out star. Serris? What's happening out there?

"Finally," she muttered, something hard clattering over the outside of Silent's ball. "Can't wait to get to the hotel and … and, uh―"

"―10:59 p.m. and we should be on the tarmac in fifteen minutes."

Her hands were back on the tablet. No, not 'back'; they'd always been there, she'd just finished watching―

The man next to her gasped, tears starting in his eyes.

Wait. This seems – what's that smell?

"―be on the tarmac in fifteen minutes."

Clair gripped her tablet so hard the plastic creaked.

Serris? Is something―?

"Minutes," finished the pilot. "Apologies for the turbulence, folks. Looks like we hit a localised stutter there. Local time is now 10:34 p.m. and I think that's holding steady. I'll keep you posted."

Clair sat upright and rigid, staring at the back of the seat in front of her. Sovereign slumped in the corner of their ball, fingers clamped tight over their nostrils.

Serris, they murmured. What just happened?

"I think … I think a spacetime thing." Clair breathed in very deep, angry at herself for being so unsettled by something that was so evidently nothing to worry about. "Sinnoh has some problems with those."

You know all about the Galactic affair, I'm sure. Two years prior to Red's murder, a cult had, for whatever dark complex of reasons, managed to tear open the fabric of the universe at the Spear Pillar, an ancient Celestica ruin high in the Coronet Mountains. It had taken two Champions – one current, one still-to-be – to contain it, but it had been contained; still, something like that does not just go away. The aftershocks remained, echoing across the island like the trembling leftovers of a gunshot: time-stops, spatial desyncs, stutters like the one they'd just flown through. Clair had read everything she could find on it after the Sinjoh incident – had even puzzled over YouTube footage of a directional collapse, trying to see how the angles fit together – and yet when the moment came, she hadn't even begun to recognise it until someone pointed it out to her.

"Fucked-up," she muttered.

"You're telling me," said the man next to her. "Is it like this all the time?"

"No clue. Never been here before."

Something clinked against her tablet. She turned her hand over to see two small, bright shards of something in her palm, clattering against each other with the same brittle clack as ceramic. Not ceramic, though: these weren't glazed but solid green from surface to core.

"What are those?" asked the man. "There are some over there on the floor too."

"Beats me." Clair turned them over, then slipped them into her pocket. "They weren't there before, though."

She could ask the Sinnish contact. If anyone knew, it would be her. She'd have that particular way of explaining it, too, animated by her own enthusiasm, a faint smile perpetually threatening to grow beyond her control. Clair thought about that for a moment – a couple moments – a few moments too many – then shook it off and put her tablet into her bag, hopefully for good. It was time to get off this plane and never come back.

Unfortunately, a plane that arrives two and a half hours early cannot land with any expedience. They circled the airport for quite some time while a runway was cleared for them, and it was a good way past eleven for the second time before Clair had managed to claim her luggage and find a spot in the arrivals lounge where she could release Silent and Lune.

This is a cursed country, said Silent, after she'd got done explaining. They didn't like any of this – the stutter, or the crowd. This was more people than they'd seen in a very long time, and the noise and smells and motion set their heart crashing about in their chest like a bird that can't find the window it flew in through. What kind of place has problems like these?

"Sinnoh, I guess." Clair put a hand to her forehead, sweeping back a loose lock of hair. Beneath it, her eyes were red with fatigue. "I can't explain it either."

Lune rumbled on a level that Silent felt sure was too low for Clair to hear, but she reached out and rubbed the slick scales of her neck all the same.

"Long day, I know," she said. "You can go back in the ball if you want. Easier to breathe in there."

Another rumble, slightly higher in her chest, and a few stubborn bubbles foaming on the tip of her snout.

"Heh. Well, if you insist."

For some reason it surprised Silent that they should love one another. But of course they did. They must have been partnered since both were young. Like them and Red.

Their lips pulled back over their teeth without them noticing. They reached for his ball, but their jacket was currently packed away in Clair's suitcase, and their hand brushed only empty air.

Not even that, they thought. Not even these small talismans of personhood. People walked past and looked at them the same way they looked at Lune: some exotic-looking foreign pokémon to Google when they got home, or else to forget all about entirely.

"Clair?"

They blinked. Someone had detached herself from the crowd: a tall woman in a heavy black winter coat, her hair a gold waterfall down to her waist.

"I hope you haven't been waiting long," she said in accented Johtoni, smiling faintly. "I came as soon as I heard you'd arrived early."

Clair smiled back. A big smile, Silent noticed. Broad and exhilarated and very nervous.

"Hi," she said, switching to Sinnish. "Long time no see, Cynthia."

The moment felt palpable, as if whatever lay between the two of them was solid enough for Silent to pick up and throw. They didn't like it, whatever it was. Another complication in the already tangled weave the League had forced them into.

"Oh," said Cynthia. "I didn't know you spoke Sinnish."

Clair looked away, blood riding high in her cheeks.

"I took classes. Field agents need at least one foreign language. So, uh. You know."

"Really." Cynthia's eyes widened, lit from behind by some private realisation like two stained glass roundels. "Gosh."

Silent watched carefully and without comprehension. What was so important about languages? They were like anything else, you learned them as needed – when you wanted to find out why people raved about a Balinese songwriter's carefully wrought lyrics, or needed to appreciate a particular Galish musicologist's paper in the original. Humans found them a little harder than they did, but even that didn't explain this reaction.

"Anyway," said Cynthia, visibly recovering herself, "it's good to see you. And, you, Lune!" she added, crouching and reaching out for Lune to twine her tail around her forearm. "Ah, you remember me, yes?"

"She wasn't likely to forget," said Clair, somewhat obscurely. "And, uh, the Foreign Office somehow got me travel papers for two pokémon, so I was able to bring one of my new partners, too. This is Silent."

It had been several minutes, and only now was she introducing them. Silent felt that, and filed it away, but they knew they wouldn't mention it, even later when they were alone.

"I was about to ask." Cynthia straightened up and cast a piercing grey eye over Silent. They looked back, impassive as ever. No one would ever see through the lifeless silver glaze of their stare. "Pleased to meet you," she said. "May I ask―?"

"What are they? Yeah. Psiger. Rare psychic/dragon-type from the Silverblacks. They were just discovered. Technically not announced yet, so, uh, keep that to yourself."

Cynthia's eyes glittered in a way Silent didn't like. This was a woman who enjoyed getting to the bottom of things. A dangerous quality, in a situation like theirs.

"A secret," she said. "Well, I do enjoy those. Can I ask about the piercing?"

Silent's creators had drilled a hole through their left horn shortly after their birth, to attach an ID tag. Later, Red had bought them a thick silver ring to thread through in its place, to make it look like they'd made the hole of their own free will. In the years since, as their horn thickened with age, it had become firmly lodged in the bone, and to their relief they hadn't been able to remove it as part of their disguise.

"It's a clan thing," said Clair, without hesitation. "Lune would have one too if we could do it without her killing us."

"Fascinating," said Cynthia. "I may have to ask you some probing questions at some point. But!" She clapped her hands together decisively. "It's late, even if not quite as late as you were expecting. I should imagine you're eager to get out of here."

Finally, movement. And movement, moreover, out of this blood-sapping morass of human life. Silent hated cars, but they'd take one right now over this.

"Yeah." The word came out on a sharp exhalation, not quite a laugh. "Yeah, I … yeah. If we can drop our stuff off at the hotel, then go over what you know about the case? Just a quick intro, we can start properly in the morning."

"Hotel?" Cynthia waved a hand dismissively, as one who had heard much of hotels and never put any stock in it. "No, you don't want that. I have a very nice apartment here in town. Plenty of space for you and your partners. You'll be much more comfortable there than at the soulless little Lodgepole Inn the Sinnish League has booked you into."

"What?" asked Clair, stiffening slightly. "Your apartment?"

It seemed like a strong reaction. Silent had been banking on that hotel room, on a little private space where they could smoke and listen to music and feel like a person, but they didn't think this was what Clair was concerned about.

"Yes." She paused. "Your own room, don't worry. I was the Champion, you know. I have some square footage to throw around. And a pool for my milotic that Lune is very welcome to use."

Lune bobbed eagerly on her tail, fins fluttering like a dragonfly's wings. While Clair had been walking around her house in Blackthorn, monologuing in Sinnish to herself and getting angry when she botched the pronunciation, Lune had picked up a handful of the more important words: 'fish', 'pool', 'water', 'fight'. As is the way of dragons, her needs were few, but her appetites were tremendous.

"Right." Clair glanced at Silent; Cynthia followed her gaze, brow furrowing in confusion. "Uh, I mean, I'm not … I mean, it's already booked, you know."

She returned her attention to Cynthia, but Cynthia kept looking at Silent, the furrow in her brow growing deeper.

"Well," she said. "I won't force you. I just thought it might be nicer than a mid-range chain hotel. And you're a good friend."

Clair's breath caught, then released in a sharp little 'keh'.

"Right. Friend."

Whatever it was that lay between the two women was growing thicker and stranger. Silent couldn't understand why Clair didn't just refuse outright; unless they were a worse judge of character than they thought, she was not the kind of person who felt she had to step lightly around other people's opinions.

Lune rumbled quietly, then sent herself floating over to Cynthia with a flick of her fins.

"Not that simple, Lune," said Clair, in Johtoni. Then, in Sinnish again: "Okay. Fine, I guess. If you're sure that it's … okay."

Of course it's not, said Silent, focusing the message on her mind alone. Are you out of your mind? I need that hotel room. There was an agreement.

"Great!" cried Cynthia, evidently relieved. "Wonderful. Now, ah, yes, let's get going – I think I can get you in the car, Silent, but Lune might be more comfortable in her ball."

"Cool. C'mon, Lune, back you go. Moisten your gills in there."

Serris. Don't ignore me.

"This way, then."

Cynthia started walking toward the exit, a black-and-blonde heron striding confidently through a flock of drab grey ducks. Heads turned, but Silent only had eyes for Clair.

Serris!

"Fuck off," she hissed. "It's complicated, okay?"

What exactly is so complicated about checking into a hotel?

Her face twitched with a sudden fierce anger like the flash of a zapdos's fury at the moment it bursts through the stormclouds.

"You really wanna get locked in your ball and airmailed back to Keller, be my guest."

Silent had not chosen their name at random. After those early days, when they learned that all the violence they could expend on the gigantic body politic of Kanto would never match what it could repay, they chose silence: go to ground, lie low, cause no trouble and make no noise. It worked, for a long time. And after Red brought them to the attention of the League, it served them better still. Show up for the hunt when they tell you to. Stay cool and keep your mouth shut. Feel everything and do nothing.

Everything in them fought against those habits now. It would only take a moment. Rise up like a waking lion, crack the air with the height and breadth of their mind, and scour Clair and Cynthia and this hideous crowd from the face of the earth; and then rise further, a new star in the frozen Sinnish night from whose searching rays Red's killer would never be able to escape.

Silent fixed their eyes on a spot behind Clair's head and waved their tail in a slow, even rhythm. After a moment, she stormed off after Cynthia, the dark wings of her cloak swirling in her wake.

Feel everything and do nothing. Like the reverse of that Dry Cleaning song. They thought of that, the glow-in-the-dark LP gleaming like blacklit uranium glass in the depths of their cave; they thought of Red's face when they saw it glow for the first time; they thought of climbing onto the roof of whatever apartment building they were about to get stuck in and lying flat on their back on cold, icy concrete, watching white puffs of cigarette smoke rise to cloud the broken eye of the moon.

Silent blinked slowly, breathed in, and walked toward the exit.

Jubilife is as busy as Sinnoh gets, which is to say that, as someone with intimate knowledge of Lumiose and Wyndon, I've always found it rather quiet. I once observed a cab driver apologise for the rush hour traffic and his Castelian passenger burst out laughing: this? This is rush hour? Oh honey, don't you worry about it.

It's quieter still at half eleven, and Cynthia's Subaru slid through the yellow bands of streetlight as easily as a gorebyss through forests of kelp. In the back, Silent lay across the seats, staring out at the unfamiliar world beyond the glass: shop fronts and bike racks, mosaic pavements slick with snow, graffiti tags in cursive Sinnish script that they struggled to make out before the car moved on. I've always thought Sinnoh was beautiful, in its own steely-eyed frozen way, but I'm not sure Silent would have agreed with me.

"Was your flight all right?" asked Cynthia. "Aside from the stutter, I mean."

"Pretty big aside," said Clair.

"Yes, I expect it was." Cynthia sighed. "Hardly the best introduction to Sinnoh, but I suppose I ought to have considered the possibility. If anything, they're getting worse."

"Really? Even since" (and here, Silent felt her attention shift toward them, just for a moment) "Sinjoh?"

"Oh, we can now eliminate distortions, if they're still happening by the time we get the alert. But it's all rather like blocking up a crack in a door to fix a draught. We need to find out how to close the door entirely." A long, black-nailed hand lifted briefly from the wheel in a gesture Silent couldn't understand. "We'll get there. Part of the problem is that our friend from Sinjoh is so young; we're hoping they'll come into their power as they get older."

Silent didn't notice that Cynthia matched Clair's vagueness, despite the fact as far as she knew there was no one to hide anything from. They weren't unobservant by nature, but they were a refugee from the kind of childhood measured out in blood tests and assessments; sometimes these subtleties escaped them.

"I hope so," said Clair. "That stutter was … awful. I don't like the idea of that carrying on."

Cynthia chuckled, though Silent didn't read much happiness in it.

"You get used to it."

"Not sure people should have to."

"They won't. Eventually." Cynthia paused, indicated, turned right onto a quiet street, dark enough that Silent caught the dim leathery blur of zubat in flight overhead. "But listen to me! You're not here to talk about our problems. You want to know about poor Red."

Silent's training stood them in good stead; their heart jumped seven leagues straight up in their chest, but no outside observer would have seen its mark upon their face.

"Yeah," said Clair. "I do."

"He was meant to meet me yesterday at eleven to talk about me putting in a turn at his Battle Tree," said Cynthia. "But he never showed. Or called me back, when I left a message." She shrugged. "I was told at five that he'd been found about an hour ago, on the rocks near Sandgem Beach, about forty minutes south of here. He'd been stabbed, poor fellow. They're still trying to figure out what with; the wound isn't consistent with a knife."

Silent forced themself to imagine it: a spike, a tooth, a claw, a piece of chipped-sharp rock, thrust by a gloved hand into their friend's chest. The give of flesh becoming meat through the irresistible action of hard, sweaty physics. Then the withdrawal, the rush of blood over the knuckle, the soft gasp and wide eyes, Red tottering backwards, clutching for support, for his killer's shoulders, for anything that might give him a few breaths more before the end―

Enough. They coughed and carefully unpeeled their fingers from the car seat. It was important to name these horrors, but they didn't want to miss anything else Cynthia said.

"It's a terrible shame." Cynthia turned to Clair, and Silent caught her face in soft black-and-orange profile, its brittle avian sharpness smoothed out by streetlights and stress. "I met him several times on the independent circuit. He was very sweet, if very serious. I couldn't understand how he was directing his pokémon without speaking."

Silent set their jaw and stared hard out of the window. Everyone asked the same questions. Red, how do you do it? And he smiled and shrugged, because it was so obvious, really, if you looked. But nobody ever really did. Not when he was ten and tiptoeing fearfully around his childhood home, not when he was sixteen and riding a four-year win streak, not when he was thirty-seven and bleeding out at a stranger's feet.

I would have liked to tell them that I did – that at least one person out there cared enough to pay attention. But as you of all people should know, things so rarely work out as we would like.

"He was one of the good ones," said Clair, scratching awkwardly at her cheekbone. Sympathy was not her strong suit; hers was a heart more comfortable with sturdier emotions, ones you could lash together into makeshift weaponry.

"He was." A left. It was beginning to snow, thick white flakes that stuck where they landed in a way that suggested they did not intend to leave. "Did your superiors mention the pokémon angle?"

"Kinda, but he didn't have details," said Clair, which surprised Silent. They'd tried to pay attention to what Will had said in the briefing, but they weren't used to his way of talking, and this had passed them by somewhere in the dense thicket of his circumlocutions. "That's why we're involved, right?"

"Yes. The League wouldn't normally intervene in a murder investigation, but …" She shook her head. "There's that stab wound, for one. There's these odd scorch marks around the scene that the snow refuses to land on. There's his pokémon – two dead, one alive, all covered in some kind of black slime that didn't throw up any matches in the police database."

A pokémon. Something powerful enough to draw Red's attention, and to stand against half his team at once. Something as strong as Silent, and as secret.

They pulled back their lips and watched their reflection in the window bare their fangs. Their enemy was mighty, then. That was good; they would have hated for Red to die at the hands of someone weak. And it meant they would put up a fight when found. Silent had not come all this way, bent their head to Keller and swallowed Clair's barbs, to find some snivelling human who couldn't even take one punch before going down.

"Sounds like a League job to me," said Clair.

"Unfortunately." Cynthia sighed. "I don't like playing cop, and cops don't like League meddling. Neither of us like the Ministry of the Interior telling us that Kanto wants to be involved as well, but I suppose it could be worse." That faint smile flashed briefly across her face. "They could have sent someone else, after all."

Clair cleared her throat and turned her face away.

"Yeah, well. I speak Sinnish. And we know each other already."

"Hm." There was something wistful in Cynthia's voice that Silent couldn't readily identify. "Yes, we do."

This seemed to be something of a conversation-ender. It was a shame; Silent would have liked to know more about Red's death – to wind the spiked chain of his memory tighter around their chest, so the wounds stayed fresh and bright and loud. Humans pushed through pain, or tried to ignore it, but that was because they didn't speak its language: you had to listen to it, talk with it, let its song guide you through the smoke to freedom.

But they had a location, and a target. And if you are someone like Silent, the only other thing you really need is a chance to slip away.

Cynthia's apartment was a huge and artfully disguised concrete box, heavy on dark wood and glass and light on soft edges. The rear wall was one gigantic window, which would perhaps have been impressive if it hadn't been midnight, pitch black, and snowing; of considerably more interest to Silent was the wall to the right, which was lined from floor to ceiling with books, CDs and records, all centred on a sound system almost as good as their own. It came as a shock. The only house they'd ever been to before was Red's pathologically small and empty bungalow; they'd understood, intellectually, that other people probably liked to collect more possessions than he did, but this was more than they'd ever expected. A personality drawn large in furniture and art.

There wasn't time to study it. It was late, and even later for Clair, Lune and Silent, who had lost several hours to the time difference and the stutter. Cynthia showed Lune to the pool, which Silent noted did not contain the promised milotic, showed Clair to her meat locker, where she would find what she needed to keep her partners fed, and, at last, showed her and Silent to an elegant guest room overlooking the street.

"I'm sure you're exhausted," she said. "Your bathroom's just through here. Do you need anything else?"

She seemed to be looking at Silent when she spoke; they only barely managed to keep themself from shaking their head.

"No," said Clair. "I'm good, thanks. Just need sleep."

"Of course." Cynthia hovered in the doorway for a moment, as if about to say something more, then smiled briskly. "Goodnight."

"Night."

She closed the door. Silent and Clair stared hard at one another until her footsteps faded away.

"Don't suppose you want to sleep in your ball," said Clair.

Would you sleep in a cage?

She sighed, which implied something closer to reasonable than Silent wanted to believe she was capable of.

"Okay. Ideas?"

Silent gestured at the bathroom.

When you're done, I'll sleep in there.

"Sure. Fine. Let me find my toothbrush."

Ten minutes later, the lights were out and the door was shut between them. Half an hour after that, Clair's breath sounded slow and her mindprint felt sluggish. Fifteen minutes after that, Silent stood up, shrugged on their jacket, and slipped out.

Of course it was that easy. How could it not be? Who was there to stop Silent padding silently through the apartment, unlatching the heavy door, making their quiet way down the tiled stairwell under the flat yellow eyes of the emergency lights? To hold them back as they stepped out into the black-and-white slurry of a Sinnish winter's night?

You're wondering how Keller didn't anticipate their escape. But that's the wrong question. You should be asking, why was Keller so confident that Silent would fail?

Silent wasn't used to cities. Technically the Indigo Plateau was one, but whenever they were there, they spent most of their time in vans or helicopters or nondescript back rooms in the palace; other than that, they had spent a little time on the outskirts of Vermilion, where Red lived, but the outskirts of any city are no preparation for the centre. Cynthia lived in the penthouse suite of a luxury apartment building in the Sinnish capital. Nothing in Silent's life had prepared them for this: no stars, no moon, hemmed in on all sides by dark, frozen walls. Every so often cars drove past, shredding the night beneath their wheels and burning eyes, and every time Silent jumped half out of their skin and pulled back into the shadows, cupping their cigarette in their palm to hide its light.

It took a long time to figure out which way was south. Longer still to make it any distance in that direction. The cold didn't bother them – their body temperature was far higher than human, a by-product of the metabolism that supported their powerful psionics – but the dislocation did, the aching sense that this was not their world and they would never be anything more than an alien invader. A jacket, a cigarette: these things were enough to gift them a kind of personhood, when you saw them in their home. Here, they were a costume, cheap and flimsy as the cardboard wings of the angel in a school play.

At one point they walked down an alley full of bins, startling a pair of luxio that had been tearing through unattended bags. Both looked up sharply, hackles rising, and stared into their face for several long seconds as if into a mirror.

Silent stared back. The luxio dropped their glowing eyes and padded softly away – not running, but still retreating. Silent watched them go, forcing their thoughts away to some dark corner beyond their sight, then lit their last cigarette and kept walking.

It was going to be a long night. But they felt sure Red would have done the same for them.

Ah, but all of this happened on the 19th of November this year. A Friday, if you remember. And even you must know what that means: the week was done, and snow or not, half the city was out on the town.

Balmen Hill, south of the Long Mile, is a part of Jubilife through which, a certain kind of person might say, one wouldn't like to walk alone after midnight. Silent didn't know this; they weren't well versed in the art of reading buildings, could not spot the marks by which the area might be damned in the court of middle-class opinion. It was safer than was thought: just loud, just full of people spending what they had in forgetting how they earned it. A few blocks from Silent's path, people were standing around talking earnestly of their affections under the heaters in smoking areas, spilling drinks onto sticky floors, screaming with laughter as they stumbled home through moonlit side streets.

As I say, this was a few blocks away. Where Silent walked, the snow deadened the sound, and they felt themselves alone in a private world of concrete and drifting ice. Until that is, the illusion of solitude that had carried them through the city failed. Until three drunk kids, their monferno and sneasel darting playfully around their heels, rounded a corner and came face to face with a Legend-class pokémon.

The conversation died. A vape was dropped; the pokémon all froze. Silent stood very still, looming in a way that usually sufficed to drive off other predators that entered their territory, and waited for them to run.

"Mate," said the first kid, swaying in place without ever taking his eyes off Silent. "Are you seeing …?"

"Yeah," said the second. He had been holding his breath without realising; the white watermelon-flavoured cloud of his vape enveloped the word as it left his mouth. "I, uh, yeah."

There was a pause. Silent felt the wind of each second falling past them toward an ugly conclusion.

"Don't," said the third kid, bending to scoop up his aipom before it could start anything. His movements were measured, assured. Even Silent, who had only met one drunk person before, could tell he wasn't intoxicated. "Don't, just … let's just go, yeah?"

"You think it broke out the zoo?" said the first kid. Silent wondered if it was possible to be so drunk you couldn't see their jacket or ring. "Hey, I wonder if I could …"

His hand went to his pocket. His monferno screeched, its tail-flame flaring up to double size in warning, but he was too far gone to notice; he took out an empty ball, and he yelled and he pointed, and his friend yelled too, and the brave, loyal, stupid monferno joined forces with the sneasel and charged Silent like the good partners they were.

In Silent's head, the rhythm section began to play, drums sounding out like a heartbeat as blood and psionic lymph coursed up their second neck to their brain. You've seen a gun in motion before, I believe. You have seen the parts of a killing machine work their poetry, hammer to pin to cartridge to rapid exothermic expansion. You'll recognise Silent's movements as the apotheosis of this same art.

They leaned to the right, let the sneasel streak past with her talons dripping black, caught her with their left hand as she overbalanced and squeezed the breath from her skinny ribs. The monferno saw it all play out – Silent saw the panic in his eyes, felt his mindprint swirling and spiking in terror – but he couldn't slow down in time; he kept charging, fists ablaze, and caught their foot in his stomach hard enough to send him flying back to his human like a discarded toy. He hit the kid's thigh – bounced off – fell in a horribly heavy way down the side of the wall into a snowdrift, where he lay still with his tail-flame guttering dimly in the slush.

Silent tossed the sneasel into the silence, a wriggling, wheezing scrap of black fur that barely seemed like an animal, let alone a pokémon. There was a long moment when nobody seemed to know what to do, when there was nothing except breath steaming white in the dark and guitars howling out in the echo chamber of their mind; then the kid screamed and fell to his knees by the monferno's side.

"Stevie! Stevie, no, c'mon, you're okay, it's just a knock …"

In the heat of the moment, we make poor decisions: so too did the sneasel's parter run at Silent. They stepped forward to meet him, twisted, lifted, and let him hang there from a broken wrist, his face flooding with tears and snot and sputtered Sinnish curses.

"I told you!" shrieked the third kid. "Damien! Look, please, just let him go, we didn't mean to!"

Silent wasn't sure what to make of this. The kids definitely had meant to attack them, even to catch them. They had spent long enough puzzling out Red's code of ethics to learn that you were allowed to retaliate if attacked. And theirs had been a very gentle retaliation. As pokémon, the monferno and sneasel would be fine with rest, and even fragile humans could heal a broken bone. All they had to do now was get out of Silent's way and they'd never have to see each other again.

This problem was the fatal distraction: Silent became aware, much too late, that there was another mindprint approaching from behind. They dropped the kid – turned – were swallowed up by an unfocused blue glow that drowned the whole world in moonlight.

No!

But it was too late. The light cleared, and they were in the hazy gloom of their ball once again.

"Any injuries?" asked Clair, in a terse, sharp voice that made it sound like if there were, she didn't really want to know.

Serris! Silent slammed a fist hard into the half-there wall of their prison. Serris, let me out of here or else I'll …

They didn't know how to finish. What threat could they make? What cat ever believed the caged bird when it sang about defending its territory?

"What the," began the third kid, then seemed to think better of it. "What was – what happened …?"

"Is anyone hurt?" asked Clair. "Come on. Spit it out."

Serris! Silent pitched it loud enough to trigger visual hallucinations, and they felt something shift in Clair's mindprint, but she still didn't respond. Listen to me!

Nothing. Silent cursed and sank down on their haunches, rubbing the scars on their knuckles from a thousand pummelled walls. They'd taken their shot and they'd missed. And now they were going home – no, not even home: back to Keller and her prison complex ten miles north of the Indigo Plateau. Back to concrete and force fields and non-negotiable tracking devices.

"Red," they signed. "Red, I failed you. Like you would have wanted."

"No," the kid said, outside their cell. "I mean, um, our pokémon, and … and Damien's arm, I think …"

Clair sighed. In the background, the kid with the broken arm whimpered.

"Give me your phone."

"What?"

"Just do it, kid." There was a pause. "Finally. Ambulance, please. Uh huh. Centime Road, about five minutes away from the Long Mile. Yeah, we're, uh … hey, kid, what does that say? Weird font, second language."

"Absolute Doner?"

"Yeah, by the kebab shop. No, I dunno, they're too drunk to say. Call back on this number if you need to." She sighed again. "Catch."

"What – but what happened, what was that thing?"

"You ran into a machoke. Came down out of the hills 'cause it was starving, but it wasn't used to humans, so it panicked when you disturbed it, and then it ran away."

"That's not – what was it? Really?"

"It was a machoke. That's what you're going to tell the doctors and the cops."

"But …"

"You wanna see that thing again?"

"No. Never."

"Then you do your job and tell 'em it was a machoke and I'll do mine and keep it off the streets. I'm out."

Her north Johto childhood was showing in her voice, though the kid could not have identified it. The stress, one assumes. Clair's body clock felt sure that the real time was past four a.m., and on top of that she had Will and Cynthia and Keller all drifting through her like smiling ghosts.

"B-but …"

"I said I'm out." She raised a hand without looking back, one sharp line extending from elbow to the tip of her index finger. "Better forget about me."

Silent heard muffled footsteps, carrying them further from the sound of sobbing and simian groaning. They curled their tail around their haunches and chewed the tip of their thumb. They had fallen at the first hurdle. The one man who had ever seen them as his equal would go unavenged. It was what he would have wanted, and far less than he deserved. And now Silent would get what they deserved, too. As all monsters do, in the end.

"So Keller told me that you'd do this," said Clair, in Johtoni. It's not the same as Kantan, despite what Kantans say, but it's close enough that a Kantan speaker like Silent would have no trouble understanding. "And she said that I should pretend to be asleep, then tail you till you hurt someone, and then guilt you about it 'cause it's something Red wouldn't want, and use that to get you back in line."

Silent didn't say anything. It was their usual modus operandi when confronted with something they didn't understand: better not to give the League a single reason.

"And obviously that's psychotic. Uh, shit, not that, that's – someone told me I should stop saying that and I hate being wrong but I get it, he's right. But I don't like it. So I wasn't gonna do it, except I lost you for a few blocks and by the time I caught up you were already going full Rambo on those idiots." She sighed. "This is … ugh. I'm gonna let you out now."

She did. They were in the corner of a small square, lost in the shadow of the walls and carpeted with a perfectly even layer of snow. Silent had crossed it earlier, but their footprints were long since gone.

"Don't run," she said, although they weren't. "What were you even doing?"

Going to the crime scene.

"To do what, exactly?"

Their hackles rose at the scorn in her voice, but they bit down on it. Whatever was happening here, it didn't seem to be an instant return to the containment facility, and that was worth pursuing.

To pick up the scent. I need to track down Red's killer.

"You think it's that simple?" she asked. "You think the cops don't have bloodhounds or psychics?"

They don't have me.

"Yeah, lucky them." She curled her lip. "Look, I don't wanna be here either, okay? We just need to get through this―"

You keep saying that, Silent snapped. This isn't something to 'get through'. My human is dead, Serris. What would Lune do if you were killed? What would you do if Lune were killed?

"Don't turn this around on me!" She took a step towards them, either brave or just thoughtless, chin aimed right at their face like a battering ram. "I wanted Keller to be wrong, you know, I wanted you to turn out to not be randomly attacking people in the street―"

You wanted me to be human. Silent took a step forward themself; now the two of them were almost chest to chest, their fangs inches from Clair's forehead, but dragonmasters are made of stern stuff and she did not so much as flinch. But you treat me like an animal. You decide to abandon the hotel room and go with this Mandeville, you ask me to sleep in the ball―

"Oh, you don't know shit." She planted her hands on their chest as if about to shove them, then bared her teeth and pulled away, grunting in frustration. "It's not all about you, Silent. They sent me here to …"

It sounded to Silent like she checked herself, though in my estimation she simply could not picture herself being a person who said the kind of thing she was about to say. She always was a proud woman, as both challengers and trainers at her former gym had often discovered.

"Whatever," she said. "Cynthia was being nice. I let her do it. And that was a mistake."

So fix it.

She turned with a quick, angry movement, as if to shout again, but her face was wan and drained.

"Yeah," she muttered. "Yeah, I … I'll talk to her. Don't know what I was doing. But tomorrow, okay? It's late."

This was certainly more than Keller would have given them. Silent understood that. What they wanted to understand was how much more she might give, if pushed further.

I'm still going to the crime scene, they said.

Clair closed her eyes and tipped her head back on her shoulders.

"You want to find this guy?" she asked.

Obviously.

"Then do it right, killer. Use every tool you got. Use me and Cynthia and the forensics team." There was a mocking twist to her mouth, the kind of thing that made challengers' blood boil. "Besides, you go on like this, you're gonna have a Sinnoh League team on your arse before you even get to Sandgem."

This was worse than Keller. Silent flared their nostrils and reached for their cigarettes, but of course the packet was empty.

"Seriously?" Clair rolled her eyes. "Here. Catch."

She reached into her bag and tossed them a pack of Camels. They caught it without thinking, looked at the logo, then looked hard at her face, a question in their eyes.

"I bought you a whole carton. At duty-free." She gestured vaguely. "You seem like a pack-a-day guy and I didn't wanna have to deal with a Legend-class in withdrawal."

Silent opened the pack, tore out the paper and sniffed. Just cigarettes. They'd have understood this better if she'd been trying to poison them, but they smelled nothing but unfiltered Turkish tobacco.

"Hmm," they said, aloud.

Clair clicked her tongue.

"You're welcome," she said. "You had to smoke the expensive stuff, huh?"

Low-level animosity: this much Silent understood. They narrowed their eyes and floated a cigarette to their lips.

You will take me to the crime scene tomorrow.

"Yeah. And Red's hotel room, the morgue, whatever. Just for the love of the paledrake, let's go back and get some sleep."

Silent flicked a Will-O-Wisp from thumb to cigarette.

After you make your report to Keller and Simony, I assume.

"What for? We haven't even been to the crime scene yet." She gestured for them to follow and started walking. "C'mon. If I'm still awake in thirty minutes I'm gonna die."

She wasn't even looking. Silent could have run off right then and she'd never have had time to recall them.

They blew a long white plume high into the frozen air, and they followed her home.

You have seen that Silent's story is so often one of management: what is to be done with a thing that should never have been? Red had his answer; Keller, hers. Yours was clearly lacking. Mine – well, things didn't turn out as I wished, but I need to hear the matter over again before I decide whether I did right or wrong. One question that we both need to answer, though: what was Clair's answer, truly? What makes sense of her actions – that cigarette, the casual arrogance, her grudging recusant's care?

I will tell you. And this time, when I speak, you are going to listen.

This week in Silent's headphones: Dry Cleaning's 'Scratchcard Lanyard'; NOBRO's 'Don't Die'; Lost Cherrees' 'Living in a Coffin'.

Next time: black magic, broken promises, an unlikely coincidence.