Evelina
She could hear the sound of waves breaking on the shore.
Or at least, she thought she could – a brief, vivid figment of her imagination, because this inn was far from the sea. It was probably the painting that gave her the idea. It was the only charming thing in the otherwise generic room. The painting looked original rather than a print, a gorgeous Impressionist seascape depicting a city of narrow streets and golden sands, dramatically cut in two by a rocky, steep-sided point. The eye was drawn to the head of the point, to a white lighthouse with bright, glittering windows.
There was something about it. It wasn't just that the rest of the room was so hopelessly bland. Something about it …
Well, perhaps a shower could change her mood. She padded into the bathroom, shedding clothes along the way, glanced into the bathroom mirror -
Fuck!
She was blonde. Not an exciting blonde, like honey or gold, just a dull, commonplace, wheaten blonde. Her curled fringe was gone, her long looped tresses were gone. She hadn't been blonde since she was four years-old.
The mirror was hung right opposite the shower, the reflection apparently doubling the size of the bathroom. She kept catching glimpses of herself. That girl in the mirror was like a stranger. Without the pink hair we really are just moderately pretty girls. Nobody would give me a second look.
No matter what she tried the water remained stubbornly lukewarm. Unobscured by any steam she caught sight of her bum reflected in the mirror. Nobody'd give that a second look, either, she thought, and sighed. Various friends had generously called it 'athletic' or 'heart-shaped', in the same way that 'beige' could be called 'champagne'. She knew it was simply uninteresting to look at. Her ex had lost interest in it, in her. It was amazing how lonely you could feel when you technically had a boyfriend but he only reluctantly paid attention to you. Usually, she'd later learned, when he'd failed to pick up a more interesting girl.
The shower didn't really change her mood. Eve redressed sullenly, buckling on her belt. There were no Poké Balls clipped to it. What the hell? They weren't in her pockets. They weren't in her backpack. They weren't in the pockets of her spare clothes, they weren't in her backpack, they weren't in the drawers, they weren't under the bed, they weren't in her backpack!
She hadn't lost them. Eve stormed down the stairs to the bar, crossed the room in four strides, and waylaid the manager at the till.
"My pokémon have been stolen!" she burst out.
"Sorry, what?"
"My pokémon have been stolen," Eve repeated firmly.
The manager smiled at her indulgently. "There are no pokémon in Qara."
Eve yanked her wallet from her back pocket. She flipped it open, intending to slap her trainer card down on the bar, but her trainer card wasn't there. Neither was her debit card, nor her driver's licence. There was a university ID card in the name of Evangeline Vreugde. The photo on it was her own.
"You couldn't have even entered Qara with pokémon, or checked in here with them," the manager said, in a strange overly gentle tone. Eve didn't say anything. That uni ID had her photo on it.
"Don't you remember checking in?"
No. No, I don't. She realised she couldn't remember anything about this town.
"Excuse me," Eve said coldly. She pulled out her phone – but there was no signal. "Fucking hell!"
"Oh, yes, signal's hard to come by in this town," the manager said. "You can usually get one by the fountain at the cross."
Dusk was settling on the town, a few dim streetlamps flickering on. There was something at once exotic and familiar about the town – it was handsome, in a faded sort of way. It was Esteday evening, a weekend night, and yet there was hardly anybody about. Where was everyone? She crossed a terrace paved in terracotta and cream and carried on through a fragrant garden.
It was a chilly evening. The fountain was in a square in the middle of a crossroad, its dry bowl spotted with lichen. The wind shivered through the empty streets. She managed to get a lousy bar or two of signal. She decided she wanted answers, about her pokémon foremost. But Josh didn't pick up, even after she called four times in twenty minutes. Eve knew she shouldn't be surprised, and in point of fact she wasn't. He wouldn't be the first boy to lose interest and disappear just when she needed him.
Night was now fallen. There was nothing else she could do.
She sat at the end of the bar, nursing what was left of a glass of wine. Her doppelgänger in the mirror behind the bar looked as morose as she felt. Occasionally a couple of locals would enter, and glance at her. Eve was used to being glanced at, but these were unwelcoming glances, as if they were trying to figure out why she was there, and wished she weren't.
"Another merlot!" Eve said, pointedly. It was bad etiquette not to catch the barman's eye first, but he had been assiduously trying to ignore her all night. She flicked through her wallet – no debit card, several hundred dollars in cash, and that damn uni ID card. Wherever the hell it had come from. She was beginning to get a nasty suspicion she was, in some way, Evangeline Vreugde. Who's to say she wasn't? She couldn't remember yesterday. She couldn't remember why she was here. Everything else was wrong.
For the third time that evening she did a double-take, and realised the strange girl was her own reflection.
I want to go home.
Eve hefted her fully-loaded backpack, and tapped her hand restlessly against her chest. She stepped up to the ticket window. She was, nevertheless, a Joy. She was pretty sure what that bloody well meant, though everything else in this town contradicted her, including her own wallet. "Single to Cherrygrove City, please."
"The train doesn't run to Cherrygrove City," the ticket officer said, his tone bored to the point of mechanical.
"Fine, then just give me a ticket to the nearest town."
"Can I see your passport?" he said, his tone barely changing.
"Passport?"
"You can't go beyond the wall without a passport."
"… this damn town," she sighed.
"You can apply for a passport at the Guildhall," he said, not unkindly.
She left the train station with a heavy heart. There wasn't even a Departures board in sight. Qara, she thought bitterly. She knew a Kara at uni, Karas were always trouble -
She saw the wall. It tried to dominate the sky. It inspired one word above all others: monolithic. It was like a cliff of cold, pale yellow stone, stark and unadorned, stapled to the earth with square towers. She stopped and stared at its immensity. She'd seen giants of trees in the Heartwoods, and high-rise buildings in Goldenrod City that were taller, but none that bridled the horizon.
Try to keep me in, Eve thought, with habitual defiance.
Qara was built on a hill, streets winding back and forth across the hillside like honey drizzled on baklava. This was a town of stone and plaster, the cool creams and pechas of the walls offset with accents of coral, cinnabar, and burgundy. They seemed to like round arches here, for their doorways and windows, and the ends of streets. The signposts, the lampposts, were all of wrought iron. At another time, in other circumstances, the old-fashioned aesthetic might have been charming. But always, out the corner of her eye, was the brooding presence of the wall.
The Guildhall was in the centre of town, somewhere near the summit of the hill. The iron signposts were frustratingly ambiguous, seeming to point the way in two directions at once. This one pointed through the souk. The Sunday morning market was just opening. Awnings crackled in the wind. Rubbish drifted down the street like tumbleweeds. People here wore slightly strange clothes. Almost all the women were in dresses or skirts; some of the men went by in light cloaks. Nobody wore denim. And not a pokémon in sight. She tried asking a few people for directions. The first muttered something equivocal, the second just stared, and the third ignored her entirely.
On the other side of the souk the Guildhall was by a leafy plaza. Eve really expected the passport office to be closed, but the place had the air of an office where there's never that much to do, so nobody minded doing it on a Sunday.
"Passport application, is it?" the clerk said, pulling out a form. "It's quite a simple process. If I could just see some photo ID?"
Her heart sank. ID? University ID cards were never anything like official enough. But then it hit her. A registered Pokédex was as good as a trainer card. She pulled the slim, brushed-silver oblong from her back pocket.
"Ah, I'm sorry, that's not valid."
"… my other ID is missing," she admitted.
The clerk spotted her crestfallen expression. "Do you have a permanent address in Qara?"
"No. No, I'm staying at the inn on the high street."
"It would be easier if you had a job … but it would probably be quicker to find your ID."
Whose ID? Evelina's or Evangeline's?
She found herself meandering the town, trying to remember. In this town I might as well be Evangeline.
All the while she hoped with growing anxiety that her phone might ring, and she'd hear a friendly voice. Hoping, in a silly way, that it would be Josh's voice.
It didn't ring. She missed her pokémon. On sunny mornings like this, when she was a young bug, Lyra would be her constant company. Lyra wasn't just her loyal ace – she was her most purely uncomplicated companion, as well.
After a couple of hours she dropped into a chemist. There didn't seem to be anything other than natural shades among the hair dyes.
"Excuse me? Do you have any bright pink?" Eve called to the shop assistant.
"Pink? Oh dear," she answered. "We have some pretty sassy reds."
"No. No, never mind," Eve sighed. The wrong shade of pink she could put up with.
She spent the morning wandering the countryside with no aim in mind. The wall completely encircled this country in a dozen miles of cold stone. Sometimes you almost forgot it was there, until you looked up and saw it across the fields looming pale and grey with distance. The Qarans didn't pay any attention to it, as if to them it was just there.
Somehow, her wanderings led her to the foot of the wall. Something about the colour remained sullenly dull in spite of the ascending sun. The sunlight merely dispelled the morning's shadows. The austere geometries of a tower jutted from the wall, not ominous, but stern, as if the stones were already strong beyond memory and intended to remain standing for an age.
An archway at the foot of the tower led to a stairwell. On a whim, she climbed hundreds of feet of stairs, to the parapet. From the top of the wall she looked out and saw – a world.
With the sun at her back she could see for miles and miles with wonderful clarity. From this high vantage point you could perceive the ancient basin of an astrobleme in the landscape. Long acres of green meadows, rippling in the breeze, blended into wildwood. Maiden wildwood marched up to evergreen highlands, or else faded from the high places to reveal craggy, heather-swept hills. The silver flash of a waterfall tumbled over the brow of the astrobleme, falling to the crater floor where it wound away like a dropped ribbon. And there at the furthest reach of sight, blue mountains rising to enclouded peaks. The land was wild, and it was beautiful – and it was empty.
Empty, all the way to the horizon, as if the meadow had never known the plough, nor the forest the axe. No roads scored the land, not a tumbledown stone or brick was there to say 'people had been here'. It was so quiet, so very lonely, here on the edge between worlds. There was no sound but the wind, whistling about the tower. She glanced down at the outer face of the wall, and stifled a gasp. As high as the wall was, its depths were far deeper. On the eastern side it cast an immense shadow.
She walked along the wall, trying to remember. Occasionally she looked back inwards, in the hope she might recognise something. It was too quiet. The countryside within the wall was a patchwork of fields, hamlets, little streams, and wooded odds and ends. The willowy vale of the river watered this narrow land, springing from apparently nowhere and disappearing the same way.
At first sight it was reminiscent of Cherrygroveshire. And yet on second sight it wasn't a Cherrygroveshire she recognised. There were no shrines, either, or henges, or any sacred groves. Few people drove, and those that did owned vehicles that looked about fifty years-old. Nobody seemed in a hurry to do anything. And the absent pokémon … Eve sighed. On a reasonably fine, breezy morning there should be skiploom floating above the grass, with butterfree fluttering between them. There should be mareep grazing on the downs.
She didn't know a soul in Qara. Maybe she ought to give up. Maybe she ought to just get a job, settle down, and be a stranger in this town.
It was still only six o'clock, the obscure boundary between afternoon and evening, but she sat at the end of the bar anyway, stoically working her way through a second glass of wine. It wasn't like she had anything better to do. She watched her reflection gloomily, trying to calculate how long her money would last, and resenting that this was even a relevant consideration.
How long had it been since she'd last seen Cherrygrove City? Mum wouldn't stand for this, Eve reflected. She had always been quick to browbeat anyone in authority being malicious, petty, or stupid at her. Including her supervisor at her first job, which at the time was mortifying, but Mum meant well.
"Oh, this came for you this afternoon."
The bar maid was thrusting an envelope at her. It had the inn's address printed on it, but no name, just her room number.
'Your driver's licence may be found in the Shillingwood. Look for that which is out of place.
P.S: When the time comes, accept the call.'
The letter was written in a neat, round, female hand. There was still plenty of daylight left. Eve abandoned her wine. And she was still a Joy, damn it. She shouldn't stand for this, either.
People kept giving her strange looks as she left the town. Perhaps they thought it an odd time of day to head into the countryside, but to her a mile of country lanes was an evening stroll.
The Shillingwood lay across a clear stream. She crossed it via a plank bridge. A rather tangled, bushy margin gave way to a dark and still interior. The trees were ancient-looking things, with gnarled, grey limbs and foliage dark as holly leaves. The silence felt tense, and watchful. The woods seemed to disapprove of her presence, but that was irrelevant because the people at the inn didn't approve either. The path became ferny, turning into a narrow road of waist-high bracken. Old, dry stems from previous seasons cracked underfoot. Then she saw something that had no earthly business being in a wood like thus. It was an iron signpost not unlike those that stood in the streets of Qara. There was only one arm, pointing west, towards some place called Ercledoune.
Her phone buzzed in her back pocket. There was a weak phone signal out here for some reason. She scanned through the notifications. Missed calls, three of them. They were somehow, surprisingly, all from Josh. He hadn't disappeared.
Eve stood staring at the screen. A tiny bar of signal flicked uncertainly on and off. But she'd called him four times! She resolved to be really bloody huffy with him at the next opportunity.
The signpost pointed towards the ruins of a castle. It was easy enough to find a way in. The woods had demolished most of the outer bailey. The roof of the keep had long since fallen in, leaving the Great Hall open to the elements, like a glade hemmed by stone walls. She wandered down the length of the hall. Grass was usurping the mossy flagstones.
There was something on the dais, a plastic card half-hidden beneath a spray of wildflowers. It was a driver's licence with her photo on it, in the name of Evelina Joy. It was really hers.
A chilly breeze cut down the station platform, but Eve was feeling both optimistic and determined. The third morning in Qara was going to be her last. The clerk at the passport office was obviously perturbed by her insistence, but she was getting that passport today, hell or high water. The ticket office was closed, but a melancholy soul making his way to the platform said she could get a ticket from the conductor.
The train rested at the platform, a sleek high-speed electric liveried entirely in midnight black. The conductor stood in the lee of a carriage, uniformed in a neat black suit and cap. He looked distinctly gaunt about the face, but the polite smile he gave her was almost avuncular. Eve hefted her fully-loaded backpack, and handed over her brand-new passport. He inspected it carefully through a pair of reading glasses.
"Single to Cherrygrove City, please," she tried.
"The train doesn't run to Cherrygrove City," he replied kindly. Eve's phone started to ring. "A single will be $8.50."
Eve fumbled in her wallet for the money, her phone still ringing loudly. She handed over a note and rejected the call. There was a signal here; she could call back.
The conductor handed Eve her ticket. She glanced at it - 'STANDARD SINGLE. From Qara. To'. She glanced at it again. There was no destination listed on the ticket. "Where does this train stop?"
"Beyond the wall."
Her phone started ringing again. There wasn't a departure time listed on the ticket, either. "Hang on, when does this train leave?"
"In a minute's time," the conductor replied. "You ought to board now."
Eve's phone kept ringing insistently. The conductor blew his whistle. "All aboard!"
"But – where does it stop?"
"Beyond the wall."
"That's not an answer!" Eve yelled, her phone still ringing and ringing. She ripped it from her pocket and answered in one movement. "What!"