FIVE: I'M DOING THIS TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT
Gibbous Isle is almost as far as you can get from Jubilife without leaving Sinnish territory: a tall, windswept stack of cliffs and shrieking gulls, rising from the harbour to the ever-fluctuating township that houses the Sinnoh League and its attendants. In summer, when the year's best trainers take the boat in to take the League challenge, it looks like a snapshot of paradise; in November, with the black waves crashing in explosions of snow and white foam on the jagged rocks, it has a wild, unapproachable beauty that makes all the grandeur of the Indigo Palace seem like little more than a painted seashell.
"It never gets old!" cried Cynthia, her voice battling the howl of the wind as Morgan began her descent toward the island. "Isn't it marvellous?"
"Yeah!"
Clair had always loved flying. The clan often lets its youngsters take to the skies a little younger than Johtonian law permits, and she had been wheeling through the massive mountain valleys up in the Silverblacks on dragonback since she was a girl. During Cynthia's brief trip to Sinnoh last year, they had flown south through the Silverblacks together – but she had to admit, there was an altogether different pleasure in riding pillion, with her arms wrapped tight around Cynthia's slender waist and her face deep in the scented ocean of her hair.
Below them, the smear of civilisation began to expand into a town, neatly ringing the warped oval of fallen stones that had once been a fort and was now the outer perimeter of the challenge arena. Morgan circled once, blasting through a flock of gulls with rather more enthusiasm than was strictly necessary, then at the flashing light from the tower banked into a steep descent towards the chalked-out landing zone.
"Morgan!" cried Cynthia. "Not so fast, we've got a passenger!"
"Don't you dare slow down! This is what I live for!"
Morgan drew in a deep breath of air and blasted it through the hollow innards of her crest with an exultant boom like a solid rocket catching light. This was the sort of human she approved of. One who knew that the best way to deal with a wall was to hit the accelerator and smash clean through it.
Down, the wind tearing at them like a wild luxray at its prey, and then Morgan's wings ballooned against the air and her clawed feet tore two massive furrows into the stony earth.
What the hell was that? asked Silent, as the impact jostled their headphones from their ears. Serris?
But she was too busy laughing to even attempt a response. She slipped off Morgan's back, staggering and breathless and feeling truly alive for the first time in months.
"That's the fuckin' life," she said, in thoughtlessly casual Johtoni. "That's how you live!"
"Speed demon, are we?" said Cynthia, climbing down and untying her hair. "You aerodactyl riders are all the same."
"You're the one who's trained Morgan to go a million miles an hour."
Morgan gave another boom, rattling windows all across the island, and snapped her jaws shut with a displeased crack.
"I know, Morgan," said Cynthia, patting her neck. "I've spent most of the time since her wings grew in trying to slow her down. Unfortunately I've never managed it."
"Well, I appreciate you, Morgan. Faster next time, yeah?"
She hissed and licked her hand.
"Arceus above, don't encourage her." Cynthia rolled her eyes. "Right, you. Parker's waiting at the end of the field, get yourself some water." She was already on her way. They'd stopped twice on the way, but even so, a cross-country flight with two riders had been hard going. "Good of you to listen for once. Clair?"
"Yeah?"
"Silent?"
The blood surged up through Clair's face. She hadn't even meant to be rude to them this time. She'd just forgotten.
"Right," she said, taking her enthusiasm between both hands and squeezing until it stopped breathing. "Yeah, I'll let 'em out now."
It felt very novel to Silent to enter a League building simply by walking through the front door. They liked it better than being let out of their ball in a back room, though they were less fond of the stares they were getting.
"This is not the first time Sinnoh has suffered outbreaks of distortions," said Cynthia, as she led them, Clair and Lune through the hallways of League HQ. "There's evidence to suggest they happened very frequently in the days of the Celestica. And, of course, there was a massive plague of them during colonisation, a few years before the War of Unification."
What happened then? asked Silent.
"Divine intervention. A young man of entirely mysterious origin managed to win himself the favour of the gods and undo everything, just in time to die in the cholera outbreak of 1867. Afternoon, Edward," she added, as someone passed by with an armful of paperwork.
"Afternoon," came the reply, along with a very inquisitive look at her companions that Cynthia entirely ignored.
"His example was our only lead," she continued. "Especially since we never found where the cult hid its research. But the gods weren't listening; Dialga and Palkia seemed to accept me and Dawn as partners at the Spear Pillar, but we couldn't get in touch with them when we returned. The best guess I have is that Cyrus's actions permanently damaged the Pillar's link to wherever it is that their consciousness resides. We had to search elsewhere."
She swiped a keycard and pushed open a door onto a stairwell. There were no more passers-by here, or windows, just cement steps that drilled down into the fabric of the cliff. It reminded Silent uncomfortably of the Indigo League's containment facility, albeit a lot less heavily guarded.
"So you came to Sinjoh," said Clair, as they descended. "Heard of it?"
Another thing Silent didn't know. They couldn't lie about it, not with so much at stake, but they couldn't easily admit it, either; at times like this, their awareness of their ignorance felt like it would burn right through the back of their skull.
"No reason why you would," said Clair, when they didn't say anything. "It's a ruin up in the mountains back home. Cynthia, your research showed the gods had manifested there before, yeah?"
"More that they might have done; there was a lot of legend to sift through in search of the facts. But it seemed worth a shot. And in the end, it paid off. We … well, we asked for a miracle, and we got it."
You keep talking about your friend from Sinjoh, said Silent. Something came to you there?
Cynthia smiled faintly.
"Oh, they certainly did." She pressed a button and let them out into a broad corridor of fresh concrete. "And if anyone can help us figure out what this carved shard might be for, they can."
Silent looked down the corridor to the double doors at the end, the wired glass glowing with sunlight.
Out there?
"Yeah," said Clair. Her face was pale and bloodless – not from fear, as Silent thought, but from the memories spreading through her like the fumes of a chemical fire. "Yeah, out there."
There were no guards, which Silent couldn't understand. Whatever they kept down here, they surely had to keep it in. Or keep intruders out. But then they thought about their cave, unguarded except by isolation, and about Red flying in on his charizard, and Solomon with a bedroom instead of a poké ball; and their breath caught in their throat for no reason they could understand, but which I knew immediately was the half-realisation that had they washed up in Sinnoh instead of Kanto that night in 1993, their life would have been something incomprehensibly far removed from what it was.
Is there anyone down here? they asked, backing away from the thought as fast as they could. Can I smoke?
It was hard to watch their desperation. Harder still to see Clair and Cynthia looking at each other, fumbling for understanding. I try to keep my heart open – to not respond to all the pain I see by hardening myself against it – but sometimes even I wish I could be a little crueller.
"People come and go here all the time," said Cynthia. "And there are cameras everywhere. But afterwards, we can―"
Forget it, they said, fixing their gaze on the doors so they wouldn't have to see the concern on her face. Feel everything and do nothing. They would not make the mistake again. Let's go.
Clair glanced at Cynthia, who did her best not to glance back.
"All right." She scratched her scar through her hair. "Um, well … all right, then."
Beyond the doors was a grassy paddock, nestled down among the cliffs where no one flying over would see it; at the far end was a sturdy shed with straw spilling out of the doorway and a knotty, prismatic mindprint folding and refolding itself in a way that gave Silent a headache.
What the hell …?
A long, dark blue head poked out of the doorway, bringing with it a whiff of the scorched spacetime smell of shards. It didn't look like it was made of flesh, and it wasn't; it was something hard and unyielding that, on close inspection, took on the lustrous, polygonal shimmer of hoppered bismuth.
The creature's crimson eyes smouldered in the depths of their half-developed facial plates, the red glow reflecting off the fresh steel. But if Silent expected an attack, none came: the creature bobbed excitedly and scampered out of their shelter, half-tripping over legs too long for their little body in their eagerness to thrust their head into Cynthia's hands.
"Say hello, Baby," she said, and Baby threw back their head, jaws wide; no sound came out, but the sky pulsed black and the walls writhed. Lune rumbled hard and reached around with her tail, looking for something to root herself; Silent might have been alarmed too, if they hadn't been so busy trying to hold Baby's mindprint at bay. This close, it bloomed like a piece of complex origami, rigid planes and edges pressing in as if trying to cut right through their skull. "That's right, It's me again. And you remember Clair and Lune, don't you? No? Well, you were very young at the time. This is Silent."
Baby spared them one curious look, then determined that they had no food concealed about their person and so started nosing at Cynthia's pockets instead.
"What kind of a name is Baby for a god of time?" asked Clair, laying a comforting hand on Lune's shoulder.
"Everyone kept calling them Baby Dialga," said an unfamiliar voice. "And then it sort of stuck."
Silent hadn't noticed his mindprint through the squall of Baby's own, but there was a man emerging from Baby's shelter. He was short, Black, and wore wire-rimmed glasses above a well-kept moustache.
"Hi," he said, as Baby bounded over to meet him at their usual graceless lollop. "Dorian Walker, Department for Inhuman Intelligences. I'm Baby's … interpreter? Keeper?" He shrugged. "I'm basically their dad."
Baby opened their mouth again and for three seconds the world turned black and white. Lune flinched, fins folding back along her body, but she took her cues from her partner, and if Clair wasn't alarmed then she'd do her best not to be either.
"Yeah, love you too," he said, scratching around the nubby fan of steel that would one day grow into their breastplate. "Baby understands simple English, but they can't do words. Which is where DfII comes in. It's just me right now, but I'm trying to train a couple others." They really were a curious combination: the body of a god, the grace of a foal, the mind of a three-year-old child. Silent had seen a lot of strange things in their thirty-odd years, usually just before beating them into submission for Keller's team, but nothing quite like this. "And you are …?"
"Clair Serris. Leader of― I mean, field agent for the Indigo League. I was at Sinjoh."
"Oh, of course." Dorian nodded gravely. "We owe you. That could have gone badly."
"Yeah." She forced a smile that convinced nobody except Baby. "Any time."
Everyone waited for her to say something more, but she didn't. After a while, Dorian picked up the silence and tucked it away with a delicate cough.
"So, this carved shard you mentioned? When you called me?"
"Ah, yes." Cynthia clapped her hands together. "It seems someone's figured out both how to ride spacetime distortions and work shard-stuff like the Celestica did."
"I love how you said both of those things as if they were equally shocking," said Dorian. "I assume you mentioned them because they're connected and not just because you're really into ancient pottery?"
"I don't see any reason why it can't be both. Shall we get started?"
"Yeah, sure. Baby? Baby, over here. No, I know it's fun to crunch leaves, but they'll still be there after, okay?"
Baby stomped a couple more for good measure, then came over, looking very put out that anyone would take them away from such a good game. Silent wondered what kind of life they led here. If they grew up and decided they wanted to leave, would the League let them? Could it even stop them, if they grew to even a fraction of the real Dialga's power?
"There's a good kid," said Dorian, stroking the long backward sweep of their head. "Okay, Cynthia, you've got their attention."
"Perfect. Clair?"
Clair reached into her pocket and pulled out the carved shard in its little plastic wallet.
"Thank you." Cynthia gestured for her to hold it out. "Baby, have you ever seen something like this before?"
Baby jumped up, tripped over their own feet, and rolled back upright again with the effortless vigour of the new-to-the-world. From their open mouth came a silence that turned the snow into sticky puddles of honey that sucked disgustingly at Silent's paws. It wasn't part of the act when they levitated out of it, growling; they had the same fastidious streak as any cat.
"It's all right, it always goes back to normal," said Cynthia, as Baby stumbled back in alarm. "Look, it's snow again now."
It was. Silent floated back down, annoyed at themself for reacting, and pretended not to notice the long list of questions in Dorian's eyes.
"It's all right, Baby," he said, rubbing the sore spot where their chestplate was growing in. "You just startled Clair's partner, is all." He looked up. "All the time, is what they said. You've brought them shards before."
"I did," said Cynthia. "But this one's different."
Baby swished their heavy tail back and forth, a steady stream of reality-warping nothing coming from their mouth: pink and grey holes cut into the air, trees turning to glass, everyone's breath changing briefly to the sound of bells.
"Uh, right." Dorian scowled. "That's a complicated one. A few different things mixed together. They say … that the leaf people use these. And they go all over the big island. That's Sinnoh."
Leaf people. Silent looked at the shard again: a curved line with flanges on either side. And the shape fell into place in their head.
It's meant to be a twig, they said, to Clair and Cynthia alone. I've seen its kind before. There's a grove of trees with leaves like that in my territory. I made it my training ground. Add up all the time and they'd spent years there, crunching and pummelling and learning the footwork. Honing their body until it sang as loud and clear as their psionics. I don't know the name.
Clair nodded, facing Baby but watching Silent.
"Leaf people," she said. "Cynthia? These people on your radar?"
"Rather worryingly, no. Baby, who are the leaf people?"
Baby cocked their head on one side and almost overbalanced, pulled down by the weight of their elongated skull. They opened their mouth and the shelter exploded silently in a lightless cloud of wooden fragments before reforming a moment later.
"I hate that one," said Dorian. "That's just emphasis. They said they're the leaf people, and they go all over Sinnoh."
"Using distortions?" asked Cynthia.
The world flashed monochrome again, like a dream of old Hollywood; Lune squeezed her eyes shut and wrapped her tail briefly around Clair's calf. A yes, if Silent had understood it right. Someone really had learned to bend time to their will. And what had they done with this great power? Pulled a man from his bed into the cold and stabbed him with a bit of sharp bone. Silent had never understood this – how humans could work so hard and attain so much without ever learning to use it for anything other than the smallest and most sordid ends.
I confess, it troubles me too, from time to time. But I see the good as well as the bad; Silent only saw cages and cattle prods.
"Where? For how long?" asked Clair, stepping forward with her eyes full of hard intent. "Were they around earlier this week?"
Baby stamped a foot and looked plaintively at Dorian.
"No idea," he explained. "They're not good at that kind of thing."
"What? They're Dialga, don't they have knowledge of the entire timeline of the universe?"
"They're not quite the real thing," said Cynthia. "I'm not sure there even could be two Dialgas at once. Baby is … well, we don't know. A minor aspect of the main Dialga, maybe. Or a sort of sub-Dialga, created to oversee just this one part of the timeline that needs special attention."
"And either way, they find it hard to talk about time in a way we can understand," said Dorian.
"Right, because it'd be too easy otherwise." Clair made a sharp sound of frustration. "Okay, so … how can we find them? Where do the leaf people go?"
A snap of Baby's jaws, and the fallen leaves blew backwards through time to reattach themselves to the trees. Dorian scowled, the beginnings of a question squirming through his face, but before he could say anything Baby opened their mouth and spat out a whole string of minor alterations: Clair's bootlaces flashed pink, Cynthia's skin burnt and healed, blazing blue holes flickered through the air around them.
Silent felt their instincts quickening inside them, staccato endocrine pulses like synthpop spinning up to speed. Even without Dorian's reaction, it was clear that this was something. Maybe something that would get some dark-dealing murderer murdered in their turn.
"They can't really say," translated Dorian. "You don't want to find them."
"Why not?" asked Cynthia, at the same time as Silent said:
Yes. I do.
Baby's tail drooped and for five long seconds the paddock lay under a heavy black midnight.
"Because of the dark," said Dorian, even before the sun reappeared. "They live in the darkness. Or the darkness lives with them."
"And what is the dark?"
Baby shifted uncomfortably, the ground around them rippling like the water down in the harbour.
"The dark knows about you," said Dorian, as the ripples took on form and direction. "But it's not coming for you yet. And it doesn't know about … wait, what?" Baby clicked their metal teeth, eyes burning red holes through Silent's reserve. "That's just Clair's partner," said Dorian, confusion scrawling lines across his forehead. "Do you mean Clair?"
They did not. And Silent knew this was their opening, their line, their gift from the opaque God who Red half and fitfully believed in; and the synths inside them flared out in a pink crystalline sunburst; and they pushed past Dorian and clamped one malformed hand around Baby's forehead.
It seems you know me, they said, forcing their consciousness through the skin link and into the head below. Can you understand me, too?
"Silent? What are you―?"
But they weren't listening, lost in the attempt to find intelligible words in the razored chaos of Baby's mind. There was a way, they could taste it. If they could find the right beat, if they could fuse their and Baby's rhythms into some pure new syncopation – and then quite suddenly they had, and a voice like nothing they'd ever heard was whirring through their skull.
scary kitty, said Baby, staring wide-eyed through the gaps between Silent's fingers. hi! fragment has seen kitty before but not so big.
Enough. Silent's tail waved dangerously behind them. Show me the dark.
nonono! Baby bobbed in their grip. too scary for fragment, too scary for kitty, need to be big and strong―
There is no one stronger, said Silent flatly. It was not a boast. Twenty-six years had passed since Red had just barely defeated them in that cave. They had been a child then, and now they were unquestionably an adult. Show me.
can't, whined Baby. beyond fragment. outside its limit. and too scary! too too scary!
Their fear was kindling to Silent's fury. And they had held it back so well, for so long, so powerfully, that neither of us should be surprised at how hard it burned when their control slipped.
Then scream, they said, each word landing in Baby's mind like a red-hot stone dropping into cold, black water. Tell the dark who I am. Tell it that Cynthia is the least of its problems. Tell it that I am coming. That I will kill it. That I will make sure its last thought is that it could not protect its human. That it had better train hard―
"Silent!"
―because my job is to take things that no one can kill and break them under―
But that was when Clair's patience ran out, and Baby melted away under their palm into the dark inside their ball.
"Ready?"
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"It's a simple question, Clair."
"Whatever. Yeah, I'm ready."
Silent re-emerged on the roof terrace of Cynthia's apartment, facing one furious face, one concerned one, and one muzzle-deep in half a pig.
"What the hell was that?" asked Clair, ignoring the blood spattering the snow around her boots from Morgan's meal. It was possible she didn't see it – it was night now, and the only light came from the moon and the lantern – but she was a dragonmaster; I suspect she was comfortable with a gory shoe.
Silent moved their head into a more insolent position. They had had time to think over their outburst during the flight back, and had not been able to argue themself into backing down. The League would never know. And Silent had carried Red with them on their shoulders for half a week now without any kind of relief except the cold comfort of tobacco.
Clair folded her arms and leaned back on one leg, mirroring their pose and setting her seal on it with a pugnacious jut of her chin.
"Not got anything to say for yourself?"
Give me a cigarette.
"How about you get fucked?"
They crooked a finger and undid the clasp on her bag for the pack of Camels to float out into their hand.
"Hey, keep your hands out of my―!"
"This isn't helping anyone," said Cynthia, putting a hand on Clair's arm and, miraculously, preventing her from breaking every bone in her hand trying to hit them. "Clair, take a moment."
"You're taking their side―?"
"And Silent," Cynthia continued. "I know it hurts, but we can't do anything if we don't know what's going on. So please, talk."
Silent returned her gaze evenly over the flaking tip of their cigarette. There was something of Keller in her, they thought. That same assumed authority. It was an unfair comparison, I think – Keller had long since forgotten what weakness was like, while Cynthia never could – but an understandable one.
I was angry. I am angry. I don't think you understand.
"How would you know? You haven't asked. You're hardly the only person who's ever had to stand there and make nice when you wanted to burn the whole world down."
Whatever happened to you, they treated you like a person.
Clair scoffed; Cynthia gave a faint but savage smile.
"I'm sure Red could have told you a thing or two about that. Or Rye or Dorian, for that matter."
The silence flowed around them like a rising tide, thickening with each passing moment. Silent had the feeling that they had made some error of judgement, but its details remained resolutely out of reach.
"Well, anyway." Cynthia ran a hand through her hair. Behind her, Morgan lifted her head from the corpse, licking blood from her jaws, and bumped one crest comfortingly against Cynthia's shoulder. "Yes. Thanks. Let's try and … what were you doing with Baby?"
I wanted them to find the dark for me, but they were too scared. They shook their head. Just a cub. Should have known.
Clair sighed.
"Yeah, well, we didn't get much either," she said, a little more forgivingly than either Silent or I expected. "Just the same stuff about the leaf people and the dark. Guessing none of this stuff is on your radar, Cynthia?"
"None whatsoever. But I'll call in a few favours and see if this rings any bells for anyone. Tomorrow, though. It's late, and we've flown across Sinnoh twice."
Morgan tapped her claw against the concrete.
"Okay, you've flown across Sinnoh twice." Cynthia shook her head. "Come on. Let's eat."
I'll join you in a moment, said Silent, indicating their cigarette. I've been cooped up all day.
Clair's ears reddened slightly where they peeped through her hair, but she didn't say anything.
"Fair enough," said Cynthia. "See you in a minute, Silent."
And then at last they were free, standing under the cold, light-pricked dome of the night sky. Silent drew in a deep breath of freezing air, and another of warm smoke, and blew it all out with the day's complications. So they had acted unwisely. So what? Humans did it all the time and hardly any of them were caged for it. But there was always one standard for them and another for those they were afraid of.
I suppose they seal you in your ball if you make trouble, too, they said to Morgan.
She hissed and covered her meal with a wing. The meaning was unmistakeable: much bigger monsters than Silent had tried to take her food and none were left to tell the tale.
Well, they said, putting out their cigarette. At least you're honest.
Silent dreamed of Red. It wasn't unusual. Their subconscious didn't have a broad cast of characters to draw upon in weaving their dreams; they often dreamed of Keller too, and Misty, the gym leader whose task it was to monitor their cave. But they'd dreamed of him more often since he became a cold face on a refrigerated slab, and this was the form in which he came to them tonight, pale and bloodless and retreating infinitely down an impossible corridor. When Silent finally caught up with him, they seized him by the jacket and pulled him in close, but his forehead split open and Solomon's disc lurched up out of the breach, their face swimming in it like a vision in a crystal ball.
"Excuse the intrusion," they said. "Cyn and I are going out on League business. Major spacetime distortion in the northwest. Do not be alarmed if we're not here when you awake."
"Whahht," said Silent, and it was only then that they realised they were dreaming, because if they were awake their telepathy would be working. "Whahhrt ish thhish?"
"Dreams are crossing points," said Solomon, in the tone one might use to deliver the news that the sky is blue. "This one's near done. I'll leave you to it."
"Waiihhr," said Silent, but even if that had been intelligible Solomon was long gone, slithered back inside Red's skull. "Sohlohmyun―"
They growled and sat up, pushing horn-first through the membrane between the dream and the waking world. Moments later, they were at the door, heaving it open and casting their eye down the hall.
It fell across Clair, doing the exact same thing at her door. Her eyes and mindprint were bleary, but Silent read the question in them all the same.
They nodded.
"You go," she said. "Getting dressed. Don't let her leave without us."
I'd like to see her try, said Silent, and they loped off down the hall toward the light gleaming under Cynthia's bedroom door.
The Galaxy Expedition came to Sinnoh for the same reason anyone else does: there is gold in those hills. Manganese, too. And coal, iron, tin, a huge polymetallic deposit of heavy rare earths in the south, even a cave of opals in Diamond territory that got mislaid during the War of Unification and has lain undisturbed for over a hundred years. If you really go back, if you pore over the prophecy that led the Celestica to pack their civilisation up on dragonback and fly to the frozen north, you'll see that among its promises was a land where grains of good iron could be plucked like groundnuts from the earth. Later, the old tribes made their living by iron too, and their descendants, the Diamond and Pearl confederacies.
And so too the colonisers of the Expedition, though I'm sure you know the history of your country as well as I do. They came to study, they said, and often truly meant it; but of course, their backers at home were not providing funding for pure science alone. Under their guiding hand, the clay furnaces became brick, and the charcoal became coke, and cold blast became hot, until the hills north of Eterna Forest were a patchwork maze of dirt lots and slag heaps, huge brick foundries and towering furnaces like Stygian torchbearers.
It never slept. You could see the fires and work lights from miles away at night. Clair could, and then as Morgan lost height over the northern fringes of the forest she could see the rest of the compound too.
"Looks normal to me!" she yelled. But a moment later, the hulking cathedral of the main building flickered and was gone, leaving nothing more behind than scaffolding and plastic sheeting. "Wait, what?"
"I did tell you!" Cynthia cried. "Desequence! The historical moments have slipped out of order. Rather like some philistine putting an album on shuffle instead of listening properly."
"Hey, I put albums on shuffle!"
"Well, nobody's perfect!"
Below, the construction site stuttered, wobbled and resolved into a cheery summer's day, wedged in among the nocturnal hills like a cabochon on a black velvet cushion.
"Paledrake preserve us," she murmured, her gaze stuck on the impossible transition between sunlit facade and moon-soaked car park. "How can …?"
She couldn't finish, though I'm not sure anyone could have answered, either. Morgan boomed once and flared her wings for the descent, coming to an abrupt landing in the car park.
"Showtime," said Cynthia, pulling the tie out of her hair. "You can let go of me now, by the way."
"Oh. Right. Uh, yeah, and Silent, right …"
They re-emerged into the familiar tightly-reined chaos of a League operation: barricades, nervous pokémon, a half and half mixture of people who looked like cops and people who looked like art students.
I take it this is it? they asked, looking at the sunlit building and trying to contain their instinctive animal panic. It smells like―
The ironworks reappeared deep into its future, an empty shell of itself tattooed with graffiti tags and storm damage.
―spacetime distortions. Silent flared their nostrils. Vile.
"That's it," said Cynthia. "And here comes our confirmation. Gardi, I came as quickly as I could."
Silent turned to see a tired-eyed woman in a green coat and a two-tone haircut hurrying over, a behemoth of a torterra trailing her with the slow, implacable pace of a creature that confidently expects to outlive several countries. Morgan hissed at their approach, but not out of hostility; when the torterra finally arrived, she rubbed her snout against Morgan's wing and Morgan ruffled the grass growing from her shell with one claw.
"Hiya, Cyn," said the woman. "You beat Baby, anyway. HQ has the chopper's ETA at five thirty."
"Still an hour away at least. What's happening?"
"Historical desequence, a good hundred years deep in either direction. It hit in the middle of the night shift, which, typical. Dragged me out of bed before I'd even properly fallen asleep."
"Another all-night bender? You wild young thing."
"Hey, you would know. No, it's―"
"Gareth's birthday. I know." Cynthia smiled. "Pass on my well wishes."
"And mine," added Solomon, disc mushrooming out of Cynthia's bag.
"Aw, thanks. You know he's a big fan, right? This'll make his week."
Silent watched Clair watching the pleasantries, her expression apparently etched into her face with acid. Whatever she was thinking, it was probably worse than the truth, which was that the two of them only ever hooked up a few times a year, and without any kind of commitment whatsoever.
"Let me introduce you," said Cynthia. "Clair Serris, Indigo League, and her partner Silent; Gardenia, Eterna Gym Leader, and her partner Sward."
"Nice to meet you," said Gardenia. "Cyn speaks highly of you."
"Oh." Clair's face softened very slightly. "She does?"
"Well, I guess you gave her a lot to think about last year in―"
"Gardenia," said Cynthia, putting a hand on her shoulder. "The distortion?"
"Oh, yeah. So, uh, in there." She jerked a thumb at the building, now almost invisible in a heavy rainstorm that would have been deafening, had they crossed the League cordon and entered the distortion. It made Silent's skin crawl, but Morgan and Sward scarcely spared it a glance; they'd seen far too many of these to still care. "It's been active for about an hour and a half, which is too long for my liking. Much longer and the night shift might end, which is where things get dicey."
"Are they okay in there?" asked Clair. "Doesn't look safe."
"Should be for now. They're shifting with the building, so when it vanishes they vanish with it." Gardenia gestured at a man in a smudged boiler suit, huddled in the entryway of the storm-wracked building and smoking a roll-up without apparently noticing the swarm of people and pokémon staring at him from beyond the rain. "The problem comes if they try to leave and end up in the wrong time. Or if someone gets in from outside. They're part of our timeline, not the building's, so if it shifts they could end up inside a wall or worse."
He has no mindprint, said Silent, only half listening. I've never met a human like that before.
They spread their awareness out as far as it would go, but though a few of the gym trainers' pokémon (and one trainer with a measure of undiagnosed psychic potential) looked up in alarm as its cold wave broke over them, Silent still couldn't detect it. Though they could feel several others, pulsing intently somewhere beyond him. Presumably people from the present who had had the misfortune to walk into this building after it had come unmoored from the present moment.
"Hence the cordon," said Cynthia, gesturing at the bustle of League staff around the barricades. "No one in or out until Baby arrives to close this down."
You've failed there, said Silent, narrowing their eyes. Did no one think to sweep this place with a psychic? Eight signatures, four human and four pokémon, moving purposefully. Trying to escape, maybe.
Clair cursed.
"Silent's picking up minds in there. Four people."
"Then we can't wait for Baby," said Cynthia decisively. "We need to get them out. Gardenia? How many could you feasibly send in for an extraction?"
Silent stared hard, bringing the mindprints into as close a focus as they could. Things were a little hazy at this range, but even so they could feel them throbbing with purpose. More intention than just a desire to escape.
"Shit, Cyn." Gardenia laid a hand on Sward's head for comfort, above the spike on her jaw. "We're grass-type trainers. Half the gym is hibernating, and a bunch of the others are too slow to dodge the shifting geography. Deb's got an exeggutor, so we could probably put a personal shield up around one person―"
"I can armour two," said Solomon. "Assuming they can stand the dark."
"Us three, then," said Cynthia. "Pokémon in balls until we need them, to minimise risk …"
No, Silent was sure: the people in the ironworks were not in there by mistake. And the League had not yet sent anyone in.
They took a step toward the barricade.
"Silent?" asked Clair, pulling her head out of the discussion. "What are you doing?"
They're not running. That makes them either League or leaf people. And they're not League.
"Silent, don't―!"
Silent, don't do that. Silent, do this. Silent, kill the monster. Silent, hold it down so we can catch it. Silent, if you do that you're going back to the containment facility. Silent, put out that cigarette. Silent, get fucked. They had heard it all so many times before. And sometimes those people had been right: they would not have come here if they hadn't agreed to Keller's terms, hadn't listened to Clair when she told them to make use of her and Cynthia. But here were targets, and here were their fists, and Silent did not need Red's head for tactics to know what should happen next.
One weak psychic blow behind them, slapping Clair's hand away from their ball; one jump forward, enough to take them out of effective recall range. Silent came down hard near the barricade, hardy Sinnish breloom and snowfan shiftry pulling their trainers back out of panic at their presence, and set one hand on the barrier.
The rhythm section began to pound in their veins, bass licking over rack tom and snare. Around and behind them, people were yelling and shouting in a way they hadn't since the days of Silent's childhood, when they'd lived the life of a bad angel descending upon the undeserving. It felt nostalgic. Or perhaps it would have been more accurate to say that it felt like a homecoming.
Let's see how tough you really are, said Silent, and they vaulted the barrier into the past.
Silent burst into 1996 like a message from God, the storm roaring into life around them and instantly slicking all their fur down flat against their skin. From the entryway, the smoker stared at them in shock, cigarette dangling perilously from his lower lip. They could feel his mind now, but it was distant, muted, like the call of a frog sealed up in its vivarium.
Give me that, they said, plucking the cigarette from his unresisting mouth and floating it into their own. It wasn't a Camel, but it wasn't bad either; they kept it there, snorting smoke through their nose, as they shouldered open the doors and sent a startled receptionist screaming for cover beneath the front desk. People came through the doors behind her, growlithe and machoke materialising around them, but Silent only had eyes for the mindprints, somewhere up above them. There was a sign for stairs – the door was locked – they leaned back on their tail like a kangaroo and kicked it down with both legs, crashing through onto cement steps in a welter of woodchips and tortured steel.
Raised voices, stomping boots, the flare of pokémon moves at their back. It was all part of the rhythm, a dim pulse beneath the bassline. Nothing Silent couldn't handle. And besides, it would probably only be a few minutes before all of these people fell away into another time.
It was a conservative estimate. Silent had just reached the top of the stairs and turned down the hallway when the smell of shattered time grew stronger. They had half a second to stop before carpet and plaster slithered away into the future and left unfinished cement and dangling bunches of cables in their stead. Silent blinked, twisting their head away from the sunset light now lancing in through the glassless window – and saw, through a gap in the wall, a human staring back at them.
The shock in his mindprint rang as clear as a bell in cold mountain air, clearer by far than the smoker. Silent's eyes travelled down from his, across the nose and the stubble, down to the carved shard on a cord around his neck. Curved line. Fan-shaped flanges.
Leaf people, murmured Silent, and they flung themself at the gap. Beyond it was a small bare skeleton of a room, the floor an ankle-breaking morass of loose wiring and scattered shards that crunched under Silent's paws as they landed.
"Oh fuck," breathed the man, backing away as they tore through shreds of insulation. "Uh … nice kitty. Niiiice kitty."
Silent took a good, slow, menacing step forward. They knew how to hunt, how to lean upon their prey's fear until its soul bruised even before Silent's hands met its throat, and they could see something breaking in the man's eyes with every pace they took.
"Shackle," he called. "Shackle, c'mon―"
The gengar flowed up out of nowhere, a curling vine of scorched smoke that expanded into a thickset phantom cradling an armful of shards. He saw Silent, grinned, and threw them all aside, spreading his stubby arms wide.
p-o-o-r-s-o-g-g-y-p-s-y-c-h-i-c, he burbled, in the odd, fluid telepathy of ghost-types. Unintelligible to humans, but Silent always did have a gift for languages. t-h-i-n-k-y-o-u-c-a-n-h-u-n-t-m-y-h-u-m-a-n-w-e-l-l-h-e-i-s-p-r-o-t-e-c-t-e―
Silent punched his eye through the back of his head. It burst into a shower of white grains, splattering and sizzling on the far wall while the whole left side of his body collapsed back into mist. For half a second he simply stood there, his half-mouth slack with incomprehension; then he realised what had happened and set to screaming and clutching at his spilled substance like an oil spill trying to cram itself back under the seabed.
You love him, they said, for his remaining ear alone. I loved mine too. But it didn't save him, and it won't save yours.
They pulled their fist out of him, smoking and pitted with acid wounds that crawled and bubbled and began to seal over even as they watched. Shackle crashed from wall to floor to wall to ceiling like a loose balloon, howling and streaming black mist; his partner shrank back into the corner as Silent stepped through the smoke and screams, his fingers groping for purchase along the concrete wall.
"Gods have mercy," he murmured, trying and failing to look away from the writhing sores on Silent's hand. "I know we have our differences, but―"
Shackle shrieked and dived past Silent's shoulder, bursting blackly over him and dragging him away into the ether. Silent cursed and spread their mind out, searching for signatures – but before they'd even finished, they heard a crash outside as Shackle's strength gave out and deposited his partner in the hall.
"Captain!" The crackle of a radio. "Captain, we need to shift! There's a wild pokémon in here and it just tore Shackle in half!"
Silent bounded out of the far doorway and out into a void roaring with heat, the floor melting away and leaving them in freefall toward a searing orange sun. They yowled, curled and kicked hard against their psionics, leaping away from the grasping heat and clutching at the metalwork ribbing the ceiling. For a couple of seconds they hung there, rubbing the water and after-images from their eyes; then the room swam into focus and they saw that they were above a clanking, pounding ocean of machinery and molten metal. The smell of oil and hot iron was so thick they could barely smell the distortion, but there was no human scent at all, and on a second glance they saw no one walking the mill floor.
The future, they said, taking in the machines a second time, noticing now the fluid polymer musculature of the crane arms shifting the rows of moulds and the drones keeping watch over them. But where …?
There: two mindprints, one broad and spiny with panic and one pain-blanked and tattered, moving across the hall. Silent looked, saw Shackle and his partner sprinting across a catwalk above the mill floor, and swung themself out into the air without a second thought. Their paws found the framework from which the vat hung and stayed there, all their feline ancestors guiding their steps as they sprinted along the narrow beam and leaped ten metres through the scorched air to come down lightly just behind Shackle and his partner.
Have you ever encountered one of the great cats? A tiger, a pyroar, something of that sort? No, you were always more of a dog person yourself. But I have stood and watched a lion announce his presence to his rivals at night, his voice breaking loose from him like a herd of maddened tauros turning the veldt to dust beneath their hooves. Now you imagine that coming from Silent's throat, in a confined space, rattling the windows in their frames and the drones in their orbits.
That was who Red was, you see. The man for whom they broke their silence.
"But that's impossible," gasped the man, when he had taken his hands off his ears and truly seen what it was that was stalking down the catwalk towards him. "You were in the other – the other – uh, time …"
Silent moved. And so did he, and so did Shackle, who was at heart simply trying to do what Silent would for Red, and who flung himself into Silent's face in a last-ditch attempt to choke them to death on his own substance. It only took the weakest of psychic flexions to fling him off again, his weakened mist unable to cohere around their head, but it was enough for his partner to vanish through a door at the other end of the catwalk.
More mindprints, above and below, moving fast: three more humans, three more pokémon. Silent caught half a line of radio chatter about the monster having shifted with them before the door swung shut and they kicked it back open, crashing through into a dingy corridor made dingier by atrocious strip lighting and a dearth of windows. At the far end, the man rounded a corner with a sound of boots on metal stairs. Silent was about to follow when some instinct pinged their radar and they ducked aside just as twin spears of lightning cracked down the corridor and tore two reeking holes in the plasterwork.
Silent looked up, twisting in anticipation of another bolt, and saw the whole corridor full of rushing yellow movement: an electivire, charging through the smell of ozone with her fangs on full display. Her tails snaked over her shoulders, tips sparking white-hot, but Silent was not intimidated, could not be intimidated, did not know how to be intimidated, and they turned to let the two bolts of lighting pass them on either side.
And then the electivire was on them, reaching out to crush their slim ribcage in her massive fist. Silent snorted, took the hand as it came toward them and snapped her wrist over their knee in one sharp movement.
My partner told me to trust my instincts over his word, they said, driving a foot into her ribs and crushing the scream from her lungs. Yours should have done the same. Know a predator when you see one.
They split their burnt knuckles on her jaw and jumped over her fallen body to see a man and a woman with the same carved shards around their neck as the first.
"What the hell is that thing?" said the man, backing away. He kept trying to look at his fallen partner, but humans are animals too. Millennia of evolution had left him incapable of taking his eyes off the big cat advancing toward him.
"A reason to leave," said the woman. She wore a complex harness of coloured shards over her shirt, each one lovingly restored and wired together over tough leather backing. I wondered what Cynthia would have made of it, but Silent was lost to the moment; there was nothing for them just then but these humans and the answers they'd be able to tear from their broken bodies. If their world had been a little less narrow, they might have thought something of the way the woman brushed her fingers along the shards and loosed the scent of broken time. They might even have decided to risk telekinesis, despite Keller's injunction, and pin her arms before she finished.
But they didn't. The woman barked "Shift!" into her radio, grabbed her carved shard and vanished into a light that drowned the whole world in pearly incandescence. Silent ducked instinctively, covering their eyes; it could only have been a moment, but when they were able to open them again they were alone beneath a violently bright sun.
They whirled, looking for some sign of their quarry, but man, woman and electivire were all gone. Around them, the ironworks lay in ruins, its walls ragged and the roof long gone, exposing it to the blue flame of the sky above. How this could still be Sinnoh Silent had no idea; the air was as thick and clotted with heat as it had been above the vat of molten metal.
You're here somewhere, they muttered, licking blood off their hand and casting their mind out through the building. Show yourselves.
A cluster of signatures, all overlaid and crushed into one another with fear and mutual affection, throbbed its way downward in the middle distance. Silent spat red and black over a clumsy graffiti tag and loped off toward the stairwell on all fours, tail held out stiff for balance. Now they could hear footsteps, smell mute human panic rising through the pervasive stink of spacetime; two flights down and they could see the bright glimmer of the captain's shard-harness vanish through the exit onto the mill floor.
"It's back! Did you see, it's―"
"Save your breath! Two minutes till I can shift us to the exit!"
Silent snarled and smashed what remained of the door off its hinges. Beyond, the floor seemed vast and naked, long since stripped of its machinery. Bits of broken glass and bright blue shards winked at them from beneath bushy eyebrows of sunburnt brown grass, but if they had a message it went unheeded, crushed beneath Silent's paws as they choked down the distance between them and salvation.
Ahead: three men, one woman. The electivire, running hard on three legs. Shackle, nothing more than a fuzzy black comet with a single eye staring from its depths. An espeon, keeping a steady pace at the captain's heels. A gligar around one man's shoulders like a cape, tail wrapped around their waist. All of them running just as hard as they could, and nowhere near hard enough.
Silent caught up halfway across the room and grabbed at the nearest man; his gligar twisted without hesitation, sank his fangs into their arm and stabbed his tail sting-first into their ribs. He could not have made them happier. Silent pulled their lips back in delight, exulting in the hot, fresh feeling of broken skin and flowing blood, and ripped his left ear off between their teeth.
The gligar fell away from them, keening and thrashing his tail like a thing possessed. Ahead, his partner slowed, turned; the captain shouted, but he could no more leave his partner at Silent's feet than you could have left your arcanine under that rockfall.
"Liteh!" he called, snatching him up. "Liteh, it's going to be all―!"
Silent lunged – but twisted away at the last moment as the captain's dagger flashed between them and the man.
"Chona!" she snapped, as they hit the ground and rolled back onto their feet. "Move it, now!"
It only bought them a second, but a second was all they needed: by the time Silent was in motion again, the group was clearing the doorway back out into the cloakroom. Twenty feet at most. Silent knew they could close it, even with Liteh's poison pounding its sickly drumbeat in their veins. Over scabbed tiling and scrubby grass. Past shards that fell from nowhere and scared rats diving for holes. And through into a dim room lined with hooks and their ghosts, to see the captain standing at the far end with her espeon.
She lifted an eyebrow and brought her finger down on the last shard in her sequence. Silent froze, quieting the instinct that told them to close for the kill, and was rewarded by not materialising fatally inside the man pulling on his coat back in 2022.
There was one of those slow moments that occurs when something wild and unexpected appears in a room full of people operating on autopilot. Silent blinked. A few tired-eyed men and women paused with one coat sleeve on. And then the world roared to life around them as the ironworkers woke up hard to the monster in their midst.
"What the―?"
"Holy―!"
But there could be no distractions, not now. Silent cleared a path with fist and tail and weak telekinesis, breached the doors and half fell down the passage back to reception. They kept stumbling, but couldn't see why; the poison was weak, and they were already sweating it out. It was only when they looked down that they saw they were missing their leftmost toe, lost to some unfortunate intersection when the ironworks had last shifted around them.
The pain could wait until they had time for it. They smashed open the last set of doors, tracked blood through reception and stumbled out into the cold night air, casting their eyes and mind around for the captain and her team. Only here was a familiar mind, and a familiar ponytail, and then:
"Bloody stupid idiot," Clair snapped, and she recalled them.
I promised you that I would not judge Silent. I can't ask that you do the same. They would have killed those people, if they'd caught them, and they would have killed the pokémon too, if there'd been time. They would have left one alive, probably the captain, and broken parts of her in sequence until she gave up information about her employers. And then they would have killed her too, of course. Their heart was a sword just barely hanging from the threads Red had tied around the hilt; it only took the slightest touch to sever them and let it fall point-first into those below. I won't shy away from that.
But I will, and must, speak for the casualties. Liteh survived, though the scar was ugly and his balance never quite the same. Shackle lingered eight months without ever truly recovering his form – too much exertion after too much damage. A good doctor could probably have saved him, even then, but ghost specialists are rare and his partner could not find one. Ceph, the electivire, regained full use of her hand and jaw, though her chin ached forever in cold weather and she struggled a little to deal with those four lost teeth.
And, finally: Jakob Wist, the man in the cloakroom whose toes had intersected with Silent's when they reappeared in 2022. He lost his left foot, and with it, his job. This in turn lost him the next five years to drink and painkillers, until he fell on softer circumstances and managed to build himself a life, if not really the one he wanted.
You can understand why people like Keller had made careers out of making sure Silent never came into contact with humans. But I hope you can also understand why human contact was the only thing that could have saved them. That's what we lost, when we lost Red. That's what happened when the woman you think is your friend put her sword through his chest.
Oh yes, I know. I know her far better than you. And now I'm going to tell you just how it was that Silent met her, and which of them walked away when they did.
This week in Silent's headphones: Maria Uzor's 'Donuts'; Amygdala's 'We Exist/Yo Existo'; Nova Twins' 'Antagonist'.
Next time: fresh leads, ambuscades, a chance to catch your breath.
Achille would also like to point you to the official Make You Suffer playlist, where you can listen to every song featured here in order (except those that aren't on Spotify), plus the occasional extra. Search 'This Week in Silent's Headphones' on Spotify to find it.