PART ONE: HATCHLING

I.

The egg had not been touched in more than two years, but still it gleamed.

Theo remembered being a boy of eight when his father had first brought it home. He had held the egg out to Theo, who grabbed it gingerly. It was sleek like metal but as reflective as a mirror, and in its curving edge Theo saw an elongated version of his own image, his face sliding bigger and longer into eternity.

"You don't have to be so gentle," his father had said that first time. "It won't break. See?" He tapped his knuckles against it. "It's like real steel. I dropped it on the gravel out front, but there's not a scratch on it."

"But what's inside?" Theo asked. He was on the floor of their living room in New Bark Town, in the new house which was smaller than their house in Kanto, on the rug which was shabbier than the one from their old house.

"Something that's going to make me a winner," his father said, winking. "I have a contact from Sinnoh who mailed it over. It's going to be something no one in Johto has ever seen before." His smile was like hope unfurling. "They won't know what to do against this."

His mother, who had been leaning in the doorframe of the kitchen, smiled at that. "I hope you're right," she said. Her eyes circled the tattered rug, the threadbare curtains, the weathered furniture. She came over and took the egg, which was the size of a melon. Cradling it, she said, "We could use a little luck." She passed it back to Theo's father, and though the three of them had touched it, none of them had left a fingerprint.

The egg was still as pristine as it had been that day. It rested in a wooden frame Theo's father had used like a cradle, where it stayed when he wasn't trying to get it to hatch. For a while, Theo's father had taken it out every day. He walked with it from New Bark Town to Cherrygrove City and back. He let it sit in warm baths, he tucked it under blankets, and once, his desperation grown, he even put it into the fire pit and heated it. The egg remained inert.

"Are you sure there's a Pokemon in there?" his mother had asked, smiling, back when she still smiled. "It's not just a rock?"

"I'm sure," his father had said, but his usual grin was smaller, more uncertain. Even then Theo had noticed the darkening skin under his eyes, and sometimes when Theo came home from school, his father's hands were shaky and he stank like something sugary and awful. He took the egg down less and less, until he hardly took it down at all. When he did, his hands shook so badly that the sleek metal slipped out of his fingers. Still, not a scratch. It remained on its shelf, a shining reminder of the failures his father had endured and the shame it had brought to the family.

"Bury it with him," his mother had said after Theo's father died. Theo had been fifteen, and in the months leading to his death, it had been no secret in New Bark Town that his father's days were numbered. His mother had taken on a job as a housekeeper in town, and Theo took a minimum wage position cleaning up after the Pokemon in Professor Elm's lab on the north side of town. Professor Elm paid him little attention and less money, but every little bit helped, especially with a father whose dreams had only cost them.

Theo, the day his father died, was inclined to agree: the egg should go. It sat in its cradle, untarnished and unstained while everything else around them had gone to ruin. Yet neither he nor his mother could ever muster the will to dispose of it, treading cautiously around it as if it were an idol of bad luck. Theo, who took it down now and then, never even felt it move, except once. He had it cradled in his elbow, and he'd been looking at his own reflection in its surface, when outside two Sentret wrestled in the grass. His mother rushed out to shoo them away, and in that moment, Theo felt a little lurch against his arm. He looked down at his own startled face in the reflection, but that was it. The egg was a stone again.

Still, neither he nor his mother quite mustered the resolve to get rid of it, and so it was still there in their house, having long outlasted his father. Theo was nineteen by then, still working for Professor Elm by day and barbacking by night. Once in a while he thought to bring the egg in, to see if Professor Elm might be able to identify it, to see if it had any value. But Elm hardly seemed to notice Theo except to criticize him for tracking dirt in from outside or for the way he groomed the professor's favorite Noctowl. No, better to say nothing. The egg had never been worth anything for his family. It probably wouldn't be worth anything for anyone else, either.

At just the right moment, though, when the evening sun came through the window and glanced off its silvery surface, the egg gained a halo, like a platinum crown of victory. Theo noticed this now and then, though his mother never had.