FIVE: HELEN THE DESTROYER

Sunday, 11th September

The Relic Passage (Gwyneth can't seem to avoid calling it that) is not very interesting. It's long, and meandering, and badly lit by a few chargestones placed here by the Henuun builders millennia ago, or maybe by the League when they set it up as a trainer trail the other year. Saadiyyah has a wind-up torch that the two of them take turns at keeping charged, and between its light and that of the stones they can just about see where they're going.

The venipede is quiet – has been since they went underground, actually, but Gwyneth really notices it now, as the minutes turn slowly into hours. It's barely even moving. She turns her head to make sure it hasn't died, and sees it staring into the dark, antennae moving in long, sweeping circles. Sensing air currents maybe, or sniffing out strange new subterranean odours. Whatever it's doing, the venipede seems intimidated.

Gwyneth tells herself she doesn't care, and for fifteen minutes or so believes it. Then she sighs and swears and plucks the venipede off her pack.

"C'mere," she says, settling it in the crook of her good arm. "I don't like you standing and staring like that. Stay where I can see you."

The venipede clicks at her, but without malice, and Gwyneth thinks: we're in rock-type territory, aren't we? And she sighs again and runs her bandaged fingers over the venipede's hump.

"Okay," she mutters, low enough that Saadiyyah won't hear. "You're gonna be fine, dude. Any rock-types come for you they've got to get through that first."

She jerks her head at Steggers, Saadiyyah's gigalith, who is keeping pace alongside them with surprising grace and silence. He raises and lowers each colossal limb with a gentleness that probably comes of long experience of human buildings and their fragile floorboards. It's the only thing about him that seems alive to Gwyneth. The orange things in his face where another animal would have its eyes are just geode-like cavities that terminate in small, dark holes. She has no idea what they're for, but they creep her the hell out.

The venipede does not appear noticeably comforted by the reminder that a rock-type is actually right there. For her part, Gwyneth doesn't press the issue. She tried, didn't she? She doesn't owe it any more than that, if she even owes it anything at all.

The walk continues. Sometimes they travel down a single corridor; other times, their route takes them down forks and around corners, into places where the tunnel widens out and complicates itself with rockfalls and slopes. Gwyneth begins to see the rhythm of it, how the ancient miners cut their tunnels with unerring accuracy from one cave network to another, tracing the veins of the earth as they spiderwebbed their way from Hil'Zorah to the coast. She feels that fierce, angry love kindling in her at the thought. Unova. Her Unova, her country, her stupid, broken, beautiful country. That's one bit of Heniil she does know: Aân Hen, our land. The Henuun never called it anything else.

She clenches her teeth against the thought. None of this is anything she wants to think about.

Time is plastic here. Gwyneth has turned her phone off to save power – it's not like there's any signal down here anyway – and without it she has no way of telling the time. She hasn't worn a watch in years, and of course there's no sunlight here, just the blue glow of the chargestones. So she walks through the passing minutes without knowing if they really are minutes or if they are in fact hours, or seconds or (as it sometimes seems) days. The only constants are the pain and the dark, and the soft sound of Saadiyyah's hiking boots on the stone.

"What time is it?" she asks eventually, unable to stand it any longer.

"Uh, let me see." The torchlight swings around wildly as Saadiyyah aims it at her wrist. "Oh, wow, it's like half two." She drops the beam back to the floor ahead of them and turns to face Gwyneth. "You want to stop for a bit? I guess we're probably overdue for lunch."

"Okay," agrees Gwyneth. "Here, or …?"

"I think there's a cave up ahead," says Saadiyyah, motioning ahead with the torch, at a place where the walls of the passage give way to another cavern. "Seems like a good place to me."

"Okay."

It's further away than it looks, or maybe Gwyneth's just tired. Or no, no, she is tired, she realises. One night's sleep and a hot shower might have refreshed her, but the aftereffects of the poison are still burning away inside her, knotting up her muscles and making her eyelids heavy. Even the venipede feels heavy, and it's all shell and claw, virtually weightless. The doctor was right. She needs rest. Better, a week of sleep and probably a healthy dose of painkillers.

Well. People don't always get what they want, she tells herself, and ignores the fact that she has just transformed a necessity into a luxury.

Somehow, she does make it to the cave, dragging herself off the path and half collapsing down onto her shed pack. The impact almost jolts the venipede out of her weakening grip, and it hisses at her, bouncing around under her arm.

"Yeah, yeah," she mutters, releasing it onto the rock floor. "Save it, dude."

In front of her, Saadiyyah gives the torch a few extra winds and sets it on the floor between them like a plastic campfire. She shucks her own pack and sits down, Steggers settling into restful immobility behind her. Gwyneth isn't sure his legs actually bend enough for him to sit. She supposes it probably doesn't bother him.

"I think," says Saadiyyah, rummaging in her backpack, "that we've actually done pretty well so far." She pulls out a map and runs a finger across what look to Gwyneth like lines drawn more or less at random across the page. "This is the cave we're in now," she says, tapping the paper. Gwyneth has no idea how she knows this. "Which, okay, it doesn't look that far, but the passage is pretty long. So it's good for just like two hours."

"Yeah," agrees Gwyneth politely. "Guess so."

Saadiyyah folds up her map and puts it away, exchanging it for a plastic-wrapped package of sandwiches.

"Mom insisted," she says, with that vague embarrassment that kids feel for the evidence of their parents' love. "D'you want some? There are … eight, I think. Which is more than double what I can manage."

Gwyneth is about to suggest she save some, but catches herself before the words come out. Who does she think she is, to tell Saadiyyah what to do? Like anyone who gets herself into the kind of place Gwyneth has got herself into ought to be giving out life advice. Besides, she thinks, Saadiyyah has probably got more than enough food to see her through to Driftveil. She wasn't stupid enough to start this trip without enough supplies to get to the other end.

"Um …" says Saadiyyah awkwardly, and Gwyneth realises she still hasn't replied.

"Sure," she says. "Thanks."

She takes two. She wants about ten. She would have taken just one, but when she took the first one Saadiyyah kept holding out the packet and so she felt she had to take another.

"It's tuna, I think," says Saadiyyah. "Sorry, should've said."

"It's okay." Gwyneth does not particularly like tuna, but she's more hungry than she is picky. Besides, she's more or less out of cash. What food she has, she needs to make last.

In the circle of torchlight, the venipede moves back and forth between them, antennae waving as they pick up the scent of food. Gwyneth watches it for a long moment, then glances surreptitiously at Saadiyyah, who is trying hard not to look like she is watching Gwyneth.

She sighs.

"Hey," she says, tearing a sandwich in half and tossing one part to the floor. "Here. Probably better for you than Virbank garbage."

The venipede darts over to it faster than Gwyneth has seen it move since it first appeared in the alley. It pauses, eyes first her and then Saadiyyah and Steggers, then seizes it in its mandibles and drags it out of the light, into the shadow of the rock formation at Gwyneth's back.

"She really is pretty wild still, huh," says Saadiyyah, watching it go.

"Yep," agrees Gwyneth. "It is."

She regrets it immediately, even before she sees the vague hurt on Saadiyyah's face. She wants to say something else, something that will make things better again, but Gwyneth has always found it easier to hurt than to heal and when she looks for helpful words she finds she doesn't have any.

She sighs, and eats the sandwich in silence.


Later that afternoon, they run into their first wild pokémon. It comes out of a crevice between the rocks, a great black shambling mass of granite that lunges into view like a piece of the darkness made solid. Gwyneth swears and starts, making the beam of her torch sway wildly, the huge animal a mess of unintelligible geometry in its fitful light. Boldore, she thinks. Nothing else looks so little like a living animal.

The venipede screeches in her ear and she jumps again, just as she manages to get the light back on target. Electric orange crystals flash in the beam.

"Cut it out!" she yells, at the same time as Saadiyyah cries for her to keep the light steady. "I'm trying!" she snaps, shoving the venipede back off her shoulder onto her pack. "This bastard―"

But Saadiyyah isn't listening; she's intent on the boldore, giving orders and pointing Steggers forward. The boldore's charge takes it straight into his chest, rock clashing against rock with a godawful sound like a house falling down, and the two of them gnash out some harsh, guttural noises that set Gwyneth's teeth on edge.

"Don't panic!" cries Saadiyyah, except that Gwyneth barely hears her through the frantic clicking and shrieking of the venipede, so that when all at once the torchlight goes out and so do all the chargestones she swears and winds the handle frantically―

And then the light comes back, Steggers' jewel-like spines flaring with an intensity that briefly lights the whole cave as a scarlet beam pours from the central crystal into the boldore, blasting it away from him as if hit by a freight train. Gwyneth's eyes shut out of self-preservation but she hears the stony growl, the brutal impact of the boldore against the ground, and then a quick limping scrape as it drags itself away.

Then it's over, and she comes back to herself. The torch is on. She tried to wind it with her bad hand in her panic and now her wrist feels like someone just stamped on it. She blinks, gasps, stares at the light fading from Steggers' crystals.

There is a noise in her ear. She listens to it for several seconds before realising the venipede is still screeching.

"Are you okay?" Saadiyyah asks, looking worried. "Sorry – I didn't have time to say. That was, um, a move that absorbs light and―"

"Yeah, I know what solar beam is," snaps Gwyneth, before she can help herself. "Uh. Sorry. I didn't mean …" She blinks again. She tries to move her hand to touch the venipede, to calm it down, but she finds she cannot. The pain has the whole arm paralysed. "Sorry," she repeats. "It startled me, is all."

"No, that's – that's okay." Saadiyyah looks at her more closely. The venipede is still screaming. "Is your veni―"

"I can't move my goddamn arm," says Gwyneth, in a tight, short burst. "Sorry. Can you. Can you grab it?"

"Oh." Saadiyyah glances helplessly at Steggers, who does not react. The venipede is still screaming. Gwyneth imagines what it would be like to burst an eardrum: a pop and a spreading wetness and then at last no more noises. "Uh, yeah."

She reaches up to her shoulder and lifts the little bug-type away, and finally, finally, it stops. Gwyneth lets out a breath.

"I tried to wind the torch with my – with the wrong hand," she says, forcing herself to breathe. "Didn't take." She puts down the torch and touches her left hand gingerly. The bandages feel wet. "Think I'm bleeding."

"Oh. Oh, god, right. Um, hang on, I have a first aid thing …"

She isn't bleeding. The back of her hand is a grotesque rainbow of colours, and the wound itself is a horrible sickly yellow, but she isn't bleeding: her hand is just oozing some thin, clear liquid that Gwyneth doesn't know the name of. Saadiyyah gasps when she sees it, but she's not squeamish, and she helps Gwyneth clean it up and put fresh bandages on it without flinching. Once again Gwyneth is reminded of Bianca, of her unswerving kindness, and the thought eats at her nerves like acid.

All the while, the venipede just squats there on the stones, staring. Gwyneth stares right back.

"That from when you caught the venipede?" asks Saadiyyah, after a while.

"Yeah," replies Gwyneth, without looking away. "I woke up in the hospital."

"Oh." Saadiyyah looks from her to it and back again. "How's it feeling now?"

Gwyneth tries to move her fingers. The pain is still there, but the muscles are working, if only weakly.

"Better," she says, which is not entirely a lie and which helps restore the mood a little. "Um. D'you think we could … stop a minute?"

"Sure." Saadiyyah picks up the torch and shines it around them. No one is coming. "I don't think we're in the way here."

Gwyneth grunts and eases herself down against a rock, holding her hand close to her belly. God. What is she doing? How did she get here? Why? Humilau, she thinks, but there is no Humilau, not really; there's nothing at all out there except the dark and the boldore and there sure as hell isn't anything in here except for the pain. Even that doesn't feel real. It's too much, too theatrical, too staged. It feels the way it looks when someone gets shot in a movie. Fake blood and fake grimacing. Nothing actually feels like this. Like her arm is coming apart, fibre by bloody fibre.

"You know," says Saadiyyah, leaning back against Steggers and unscrewing her water bottle, "that was actually a pretty rare boldore."

"Yeah," replies Gwyneth without thinking. "Igneous black. We must be deeper than I thought."

Saadiyyah pauses, bottle halfway to her lips.

"You know your boldore," she says, surprised. "How'd you know that?"

Gwyneth shakes her head. She is still thinking about pain, and Humilau.

"Uh. Right, well, you know what they say. Trainer journey's a year and it stays with you a lifetime."

"Right," says Saadiyyah. "But like, not a lot of people know all the species of boldore."

Gwyneth does. Or she did; she's forgotten some now, but she remembers most. She remembers all the woobat, too, and the three species of patrat, the eleven of sewaddle. She was never one of those walking encyclopedia kids, never had Cheren's memory for all the trivia of training or Nika's internal dictionary of classical literature, but she knew a lot. Up there on the pinboard, all around the map of Unova, there were the photoguides to rare pokémon that came with every issue of her magazine. Lesser spotted minccino. Whitetail ducklett. Igneous black roggenrola.

The names come to her like lifeboats out of the past, and Gwyneth feels herself slipping back out of herself and into the world. Why is she here? Humilau. And Humilau is out there, somewhere, even if it seems like nothing can be. Hot sand and warm water, gently baking in the last of the summer sun. There's a world beyond the dark. There are women named Nika who are getting married.

Gwyneth picks up the venipede without a word and puts it on her shoulder.

"Okay," she says, getting stiffly back up onto her feet. "Let's keep moving."


Wild pokémon attack a couple more times that afternoon, but neither event is anywhere near as dramatic as the first. A few pale timburr, bug-eyed and white from cave living, slouch out of the dark, brandishing snapped-off stalagmites, but once the first one smashes its weapon without effect on Stegger's chest both run off, cowed. There's a swoobat too, spiralling down from the ceiling like the flap of an intricate umbrella; that one startles even Saadiyyah, but it panics and flees as soon as it gets a good look at Steggers, too good a judge of its opponent to think it stands a chance.

None of them startle Gwyneth like the boldore, although the venipede fires a vindictive poison sting after the fleeing swoobat. But Saadiyyah carries the torch and doesn't give it back to Gwyneth, just the same.

Neither of them comment on this. They are beginning to come to an understanding of each other.

The cave moves, or they do. Time passes, possibly. Gwyneth feels herself coming unstuck from the world, observes her body limping along after Saadiyyah as if down the wrong end of a telescope. Part of her informs the rest quietly that it is in pain. Nothing inside her seems capable of responding. She no longer thinks about the beauty of the way this place was built.

Eventually, she and Saadiyyah reach a sign that points off to the left of the main path that reads CAMPSITE 2, and this, Saadiyyah says, is where they're stopping for the night.

"Where's Campsite 1?" asks Gwyneth distantly, following Saadiyyah down the slope into the side passage.

"I don't know," she replies. "I'll look on the map when we get there."

Campsite 2 is not much: a small cave, cleanse tags stuck around the entrance to keep the wild pokémon out, floor pounded flat by some ground- or fighting-type. Saadiyyah shines the torch in and the metal fittings of a chargestone generator glint in the beam.

"Okay," she says, stepping over to it and hitting the switch. "Let there be light."

There is a clunk, and a whirr as the chunk of charged rock inside the generator starts spinning, and then the lights come on overhead, revealing a tiny hot plate, a metal box containing the emergency phone, and a few shelves cut into the rock to sit or sleep on. Gwyneth blinks. Her eyes are watering in the sudden brightness, but her vision is getting clearer. She stares dumbly at the stone walls, brain wandering back towards the usual spot between her ears, and then all at once she becomes aware of the ache in her legs and arm, and the weight of her pack.

"Hey," she says. "We're here."

"Yep," agrees Saadiyyah. "We are." She glances back towards the cave mouth. Outside, Steggers has locked his legs, motionless as a statue; he is too big to fit inside. "You okay out there, big guy?" One crystal pulses red for a moment. "Okay, then." Saadiyyah shoves her backpack into a corner and sits down with a sigh, already reaching for her boots to unlace them. "God. I forgot how hard those stones are on your feet."

"You've been here before?" Stiffly, Gwyneth shrugs off her own pack and levers herself down onto one of the shelves. The venipede scuttles onto her arm, and she lifts it away and to the ground before it can put any more holes in her.

"Yeah. Well, kinda. I did some exploring near the entrance back when it first opened, just to see what sort of pokémon were down here." Saadiyyah pulls her feet up and crosses her legs with the kind of ease and flexibility that Gwyneth wishes she still had. "Didn't camp out down here, though."

"Right."

The venipede makes a slow circuit of the cave, brushing its antennae over the walls. Checking to see if it's safe, maybe. With an effort, Gwyneth looks away from it and undoes the straps around her sleeping bag and blanket instead, unrolling them from the top of the pack and spreading them out on the shelf. It's only marginally more comfortable, but she'll take what she can get. At least it isn't cold down here.

"Okay, so Campsite 1 is … nonexistent, I guess," says Saadiyyah, now studying her map. "Seriously, I can't see it anywhere. Weird." She holds it out. "Can you?"

Honestly, Gwyneth isn't sure she'll be able to do any better, not when she barely has the energy to get her blanket out, but she doesn't want to say so and make things awkward, so she takes the map and looks at it for a few seconds. Her eyes won't focus, the labels sliding back and forth through themselves on the paper, and she hands it back again, shaking her head.

"Beats me."

"Weird," repeats Saadiyyah, and starts going through her bag. Gwyneth watches her for a moment, then goes through her own. Food and water, that's what she needs. It won't fix this, but it's all the remedy she's got.

For a few minutes, the only sound is that of two very hungry people eating, and the occasional crunch as the venipede shears pieces off an apple with its mouthparts. When it passes, Gwyneth is slightly more alert – enough to feel the weight of the silence, anyway. She looks out of the cave at the shadows beyond, at the gleam of reflected lamplight on Steggers' crystals, and then back at Saadiyyah.

Right. Come on, Gwyneth. She's taking you to Driftveil. The least you can do is be polite.

"What other pokémon do you have?" she asks. It's always a safe question. Saadiyyah's eyes light up.

"An onix, Noor, and a carracosta, Jems," she answers. "But Noor's too big for the passage and Jems is not so good at hiking, so both of them are in their balls right now. Then I've got a nosepass I'm training at the moment, but he's nowhere near ready for a tournament and he's also like the slowest thing in the entire world, so I've sent him on ahead using the box network."

When she was little, Gwyneth was afraid of the box network. She remembers a vivid nightmare from when she was ten or so about being trapped inside it, every molecule of her disassembled and frozen in stasis, paralyzed on an atomic level. She knows that's not how it works, really, but even so. The old unease lingers.

"Cool," says Gwyneth, unable to think of anything else to say. "I … I didn't know there were onix in Unova."

Saadiyyah smirks.

"There aren't," she says. "I traded with a friend I have in Kalos. She was kinda nervous about catching it, but she really wanted an oshawott. Like nobody over there has ever even heard of them."

Gwyneth frowns.

"And where did you get an oshawott?"

"They breed on some like … well, they're not really islands, more like rocks off the south coast," says Saadiyyah. "One of Professor Juniper's assistants was doing a population count and was advertising for a trainer to escort her." She shrugs. "There were a few that really obviously wanted trainers. I wouldn't have caught one if Chana hadn't been after it."

Gwyneth nods. She's too tired now. She just has no more words left in her.

"Okay," she says. "Okay." A yawn. "God." She rubs her eye with the heel of one hand. "Sorry," she says. "I got to sleep before I fall asleep just sitting here."

"Oh. Yeah, no problem. The poison?"

"Yeah. The poison." Both of them find themselves looking at the venipede, still methodically taking tiny bites out of its apple. Gwyneth doesn't even know if it should be eating that. They're carnivores, aren't they? "Anyway, it's all right now," she adds, with an effort. "Not gonna poison us in the night."

A little later, when the lights are out and the world has narrowed down to the finger of warmth inside her sleeping bag, Gwyneth has a few minutes to hope that that's true before she gives in to her exhaustion and falls asleep.


The thing about that dream, the thing that makes it so difficult to talk about, is that it's not just the girl thing. She's standing there under the lights, staring at Juniper as she fires off her questions like rubber bullets, and she knows that Hilbert's there, even before he steps into view. She feels him hanging over her like the shadow of a condor. "What's your name?" asks Juniper, and she wants to answer, sometimes even thinks she knows the answer, but Hilbert's there, a choking mist, a pressure on her chest, the first trembling intimations of a panic attack; "Are you a boy or a girl?" asks Juniper, and Gwyneth knows as she always has known that there is only one answer, that whether she gives it or not is dependent only on when she is, but Hilbert's there, a noose around her neck, a night terror, the distant rumbling sound of Reshiram raising its flames.

"What's your name?" asks Juniper. And Gwyneth tries over and over to answer, but Hilbert defeats her every single time. He does not say anything. He does not do anything. He is there even when he's not, and long before he steps out into the light to give his answer, "Boy. Hilbert," he has crushed her back into the dark and the fear with nothing more than the memory of his enigmatic smile.


Monday, 12th September

Gwyneth wakes with something almost but not quite like a hangover, a bad taste and a warm fuzz hovering in her mouth and a pressure on her temples. She sits up slowly, joints protesting with every movement, and sees Saadiyyah making instant coffee on the hot plate. It smells indescribably awful.

She thinks about saying good morning but does not, because she isn't sure it is morning, or even that mornings are a thing that still exists. She pulls a hand slowly out of her sleeping bag and rubs the lower half of her face.

Okay.

"Hey," says Gwyneth, reaching for her jacket. Saadiyyah looks up and smiles.

"Morning," she says. "I hope I didn't wake you. You seemed exhausted."

"It's okay, you didn't." Gwyneth finds her pocket, extracts tweezers and mirror. "And I was. Only got a couple of hours' sleep Saturday night."

She opens the mirror and begins to attack her face with the tweezers, hair by painful hair. It would be better if she were alone for this, but right now she finds she's past caring. If anything, Saadiyyah is more embarrassed than she is; all of a sudden, her coffee seems to have become incredibly interesting to her.

Click-click. Gwyneth glances away from the mirror to see the venipede looking up at her from the floor.

"Hey, asshole," she says, turning back again. "Think I heard you crunching that apple in my dreams."

It rattles, though not particularly aggressively, and trundles off like a toy train across the stone.

Gwyneth finishes taking things off her face and putting other things on it, inspects the result – unideal, but passable under the circumstances – and slowly worms her way out of her sleeping bag. The stone feels cold against her hands, too cold, like she has a fever. Maybe she does. She takes a long, careful look at her left hand, wiggling each finger in turn, but it doesn't seem swollen.

Well. She isn't in imminent danger of dying. That will have to do.

"Coffee?" asks Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth shakes her head. She probably needs the caffeine, but a long walk in a damp cave will wake her up just as well, and at the moment she isn't sure her stomach can take whatever ungodly concoction Saadiyyah's brewing over there.

"No, thanks."

She shoves her legs off the edge of the stone shelf and feels them fall like lead weights. She bends after them, and with some effort manages to get both of her feet laced back into their respective boots.

Christ. What is she, seventy? Some deep-down part of Gwyneth still has all its energy, still has nothing but explosive impatience for the fatigue that has taken over the rest of her. She feels it vibrating at the root of her skull like a wasps' nest, full of latent malice.

"Sleep well?" she asks, more to work the croak out of her voice than out of curiosity, and Saadiyyah nods.

"Yeah. Surprisingly. I thought it would be less comfortable."

"Mm." No. More than that, Gwyneth. You're a guest. Come on. "I bet you've slept in way worse places. Travelling."

It's not perfectly coherent, but Saadiyyah gets the gist of it.

"Yeah." She chuckles and drinks deeply from the stinking blackness in her cup. "Slept in a tree once. That was pretty bad."

Gwyneth blinks in surprise. Her eyelids stick slightly as they close.

"A tree?"

"Yeah. God, it was dumb, we got off the trail somehow and ended up in the real woods, like really deep in there, and by the time we figured out which way back to civilisation it was getting dark. You know the kind of dark in like movies with the big cartoon glowing eyes in it? That kinda dark. So we're all paranoid and decide to sleep in a tree so we don't get eaten by druddigon." Saadiyyah smiles at the memory. Gwyneth thinks it's like a sunbeam has suddenly broken through the earth and struck her face. Kids are unfairly beautiful like that, graceful without effort. She used to be pretty when she was that age, kind of, before bad diet and worse sleep ruined her skin. "This was when I was just starting out. None of our pokémon were tough enough to be that much protection."

"You … didn't think you might fall out in your sleep?"

Saadiyyah considers this for a moment.

"It was pretty nasty up there," she says. "I don't think any of us were actually asleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time. We didn't really have much of a chance to fall out."

"Oh. Right."

"What about you?"

"Huh?"

"You were a trainer, right?" (Yes. Was.) "You must've had some bad nights too."

Oh, sure, thinks Gwyneth. There was the alleyway between the laundromat and the old apartment building, that was pretty bad. It was out of the wind and the rain, and in the end no one came down there, but she heard those drunk kids go past in the street a couple of times, and then the cops, and every time she was just waiting for them to take a right and find her, say something, do something, and she held her breath and her switchblade deep inside her sleeping bag and prayed to Nika's God for them to leave her alone.

This is not what Saadiyyah means, however. So Gwyneth smiles blandly and says:

"Sure I have. One time I woke up with a beartic in my tent."

"What! Really?"

"Well, just the head." She shrugs. "Didn't find what it was looking for, I guess. I just kinda lay there and it breathed frost all over me and then it went away. Waited till I couldn't hear it any more and then we all got up in complete silence, packed up our tents and like sprinted back to Icirrus."

"Oh my god," says Saadiyyah. "Seriously? That's messed up."

Gwyneth shrugs.

"They don't usually eat people. Too bony."

"Usually! Emphasis on usually!" Saadiyyah shakes her head. "Oh my god," she repeats. "I'm never going to be able to sleep near Twist Mountain again."

Gwyneth smiles. It's only slightly crooked.

"You're welcome."

Something hangs in the air between them, warm and inviting. It takes her a moment to recognise it as trainerly camaraderie, that force that keeps you up late around a campfire swapping stories, or pulls you into the practice rooms at the Pokémon Centre to see two strangers getting to know each other through a good stirring fight. It tugs at her insides like the Nuvema skyline, like the rolling Unovan hills, like the memory of Nika.

The hard thing inside her unclenches again, and settles down into her bones. Gwyneth pauses, straightens her back a little.

"Actually," she says, "can I change my mind about the coffee?"


This morning when she walks, Gwyneth thinks about Bianca Valentino.

The suggestion was there yesterday, in Saadiyyah's unthinking kindness, the way she automatically saw the venipede as a person and not a murderbug, but it's today that the realisation crystallises. Saadiyyah reaches casually up to Steggers' head as she leaves Campsite 2, runs her fingers affectionately across the heavy lines of his face, and he presses his neck against her hand, infinitely careful of her fragile human bones. And Gwyneth thinks of a musharna coiling smoke around an outstretched hand, of a girl in a Pokémon Centre saying hello to the minccino as well as the trainer, of an assistant to Professor Juniper with an interest in the oshawott population, and memory opens up and Gwyneth says to herself, okay.

Bianca's not the kind of person who ends up in the headlines, not even when her friends are making news every day. There's endless speculation about the legendary dragon, about that kid N Harmonia who seems to be at the heart of Team Plasma in some way no one can quite identify, about Cheren and Hilbert and their relation to him and to the dragon, but nothing about her. A few days into her stay in Nacrene, Gwyneth is reading the news about her brother, as she always does for reasons she does not fully understand, and she comes across the first reference to her she's ever seen: We spoke to a friend of Cheren's, who told us he's always been this way. No name. But it can't be Hilbert, because Hilbert doesn't offer details. And so it must be Bianca, talentless, enthusiastic, forgotten Bianca, visible as usual only when you read between the lines.

Gwyneth tells Nika about this later that day when they're in the park, listening to another kid's stereo and having practice battles against other trainers. She tells her about how Bianca's father tracked her down in Nimbasa and said she'd gone far enough, that it was time she came home, and how Bianca stood her ground and told him he was going back without her.

"It was incredible," she says, her fingers twined in the long fur of Blossom's tail. "No one ever knew she could be like that."

But that's Bianca for you. No one ever knows, with Bianca. She has no skill at pokémon battling, no head for strategy, nothing beyond empathy and enthusiasm. But her empathy is bottomless, and her enthusiasm inexhaustible, and no matter how many Gym battles she loses she keeps on travelling Unova, following her best friends across the country.

In a way, fifteen-year-old Gwyneth loves Bianca more than anyone else in the world. She knows that she herself is clever, like Cheren only not so much, and she is afraid her cleverness crowds out her kindness, like Cheren only not so much, and she is in awe of the way Bianca is so brilliantly not like this. Some people get chosen and some do not. Bianca was not chosen. And she thrives.

Nika listens to Gwyneth and tries not to feel jealous. She doesn't know, yet, that Gwyneth and Bianca don't even really speak, that the one's love for the other is teenage hero-worship and nothing else.

"She sounds pretty cool," she says, and though Gwyneth doesn't agree, thinks rather that part of what makes Bianca Bianca is her determined uncoolness, she senses that Nika is trying to end the conversation and she nods, and puts her thoughts about Bianca away for another day.

It was just a passing reference in someone else's news story, after all. Only Gwyneth's imagination makes it anything more.

Eventually, they move on. Neither of them ever bring up the question of Gwyneth challenging the Gym, in the end. Her diffidence about it belongs to the category of things that are tacitly understood by everyone present. Gwyneth will take no badges home with her, and both she and Nika know this now without ever having to say it.

So, with nothing to keep them in Nacrene, they move on, teaming up with Ashley and Tomás one last time, to make the trip to Castelia. It does not take long. There's no wilderness trail to the capital. It's possible to hike through Pinwheel Forest, but after that there's just the Skyarrow Bridge, layers of road and rail and footpath stacked atop one another all across the bay. You can walk it, and Gwyneth has, once, many years ago when she climbed on the railing and her mother shrieked and snatched her back down again, but they don't. They take a train, and after a couple hours of Unova rolling by outside the window, green hill dark forest glittering blue water, the rail plunges all at once into the hot chrome belly of the capital.

Castelia in the summer. Gwyneth and Nika, from drowsy Nuvema and isolated Humilau, really aren't ready for it. They spend two days there, nervous of the city and its vast, bustling carelessness, and mutually decide to move on. They can always come back later. And Nika isn't ready for a third Gym challenge yet, anyway. Now she has two badges to her name, the Leaders will start getting serious with her. No one stays a rookie forever.

The wilderness trail to Nimbasa is hard. It cuts through the wasteland, what in Heniil is called Aksa, the Scar: the desert burnt into the heart of Unova from when the twin heroes fought and Reshiram and Zekrom fought with them. One duel, three hours, fire and lightning on a thermonuclear scale, and when it was over there was no more Hilaan. There was no more anything for miles and miles all around. Just the dragons and their trainers, tiny flecks in the uncompromising emptiness.

Gwyneth thinks of this as they hike across the sandy wastes. She feels nothing, although she tells herself she ought to feel something, some sadness or horror at the violence that was done here. All those people, vanishing in a cloud of smoke, ash and regret. And two men afterwards who realised that they weren't heroes any more.

Nothing will grow here except maractus, plodding stolidly across the ash-coloured plains after dark. There are silent, hungry dwebble hiding under boulders. Darmanitan that sun themselves on dunes. This is your heritage too, Gwyneth tells herself, making an effort to take it all in. This is your land as much as the hills and forests. Aân Hen, in sickness and in health.

At night, they find no wood to make campfires. It's cold without the sun, and the two of them share a tent, huddle close, their pokémon pressed in around them. Gwyneth whispers to Nika that she's part Henuun. (Part, because all she has is a throat-choking surname and dark oily hair, because she is only a jackal picking the bones of her father's culture. The shame is scored into her heart even then.) Nika says that she knows.

The two of them say nothing for a while. Somewhere very far away, a sigilyph pauses on its patrol of the city that no longer exists and lets out a long, ululating wail. In the silence after, their breath resonates like the chimes of a bell.

The next day, Nika catches a sandile and names him Astyanax, because, she says, he's the last guy left to be king of the city. Gwyneth doesn't understand – she has never even heard of Troy – and Nika, delighted, retells the Iliad from memory as they pick their way across the sand. Gwyneth listens, rapt, although her wonder is less at the strivings of gods and men than at Nika for carrying this whole vast world with her in her head; and then Nika comes to the part where Troy burns, and some irresistible force makes Gwyneth look up, out across the level wastes to the north, and the low mound of the Hilaan ruins against the sky. Now at last she feels, as Nika describes the heat, the slaughter. Now the savagery of the twin heroes comes to life in her head, in the brutal scheming of Odysseus and the butchery of Pyrrhus. As long as you kill the right people, she learns, you can still be a hero after all. Even if the wound you make cuts so deep it scars the world forever. Aân Hen. Until we burn it to the ground.

They never do go to the ruins, which Nika studiously avoids calling the Relic Castle. This is a place with a long memory, and the weight of it on their imaginations is too much. Troy and Hilaan, blood-blackened Pyrrhus and smoke-white Reshiram; it's all important, all something that must not ever be forgotten, but there is a time and a place for the atrocities of the past, and a trainer journey is not it. Gwyneth and Nika train their pokémon in mock-battles and keep on walking, day after day, and then at last they reach the bus terminal on the outskirts of Nimbasa and thirty minutes later the world has come to life again.

It's then that they run into Bianca, in the Pokémon Centre. She's just on her way out, and when she sees Gwyneth hanging around in the lobby waiting for Nika, she stops and calls out: hi, Gwyneth! And Gwyneth sees her and says hi too, and Bianca smiles and looks at Blossom and Corbin, the one perched atop the other, and she says hi, you guys, and a moment later Gwyneth says hi to Bianca's musharna and dewott but it seems too late, too forced, and there's an awkward pause before Bianca asks if she's here for the Gym.

She sure is, says Gwyneth cheerfully, like she means it, and Bianca smiles again, happy to see someone on her trainer journey. She's finally beaten Elesa herself, having come back here for a third attempt. She's on her way north now, to catch up with Hilbert and Cheren. Has Gwyneth heard from her brother at all? No, admits Gwyneth, she hasn't, and Bianca sighs, rolls her eyes. She told him the strong-silent thing isn't always appropriate, that his family might like to get a phone call every now and then. But does he listen? Nope. Anyway, she goes on, she'd better get going. Cheren called her and said that things are starting to look serious with Team Plasma. She looks side to side like a shifty cartoon character, and in a lowered voice she says it's true what they're saying, that N of Team Plasma has been chosen by Zekrom. She was there at Dragonspiral Tower. And you mustn't say, but you should know, that Hilbert's gone to Opelucid to find out how to awaken Reshiram.

Oh, says Gwyneth. She feels cold all the way through. She doesn't know why. Oh, she says again, and Bianca tells her not to worry. Hilbert's really strong, she says. He'll be okay. It's just that Team Plasma really has to be stopped.

Yeah, Gwyneth says. They do. (She's thinking of Harmonia and his electric eye, of keeping Blossom in her ball, of her failure to challenge even a single Gym.)

Bianca has to go. They say their goodbyes and then Gwyneth is left there alone with a shivery sick feeling in her stomach. Hilbert against Team Plasma. Reshiram against Zekrom. Troy and Hilaan. She thinks of Harmonia's TV interview, of Cheren's response. She's only fifteen. She has no idea whose side she's on. She is afraid she might be on Harmonia's.

Nika comes downstairs, hair still damp from washing out the desert dust.

Hey, Gwyn, she chirps. So what do you wanna do first?

And Gwyneth stands there and trembles and has no words with which to answer.


But Bianca was right, thinks Gwyneth. Team Plasma did have to be stopped. Only by the time everyone knew that – when the footage went out of Harmonia raving in defeat, screaming that N was broken and that if he hadn't been so weak then Plasma would by then have been the only people in Unova who still commanded pokémon – by then it was much too late. The damage had been done and Gwyneth was broken inside.

Not that she blames Plasma. The seeds were there long before what happened in Nimbasa made them sprout their poison flowers. She destroyed everything all by herself, no help necessary. Nimbasa and Team Plasma were just the excuse.

It's the only part of her heritage she really has any claim to. Hilbert got Reshiram and she got Aksa. Some people get chosen. And some do not.

It occurs to her that she's probably directly underneath Aksa right about now. All those miles and miles of wasteland, testament to the fact that You People just can't be trusted.

What hurts Gwyneth most of all is that she doesn't know how to say it isn't true.

The venipede steps carefully off her backpack onto her shoulder, the pressure of knifelike legs pulling her back into the world. Her left arm reaches automatically to brush against it (expecting: soft minccino fur, warm munna fuzz) but then a blunt needle of pain digs into her wrist and makes Gwyneth aware of what she's doing. She grinds her teeth and lowers her arm again. There's no going back, she reminds herself. Never. Not for anything.

But why is she going to Nika's wedding, then?

Around her, the cave begins to slope. Almost imperceptibly at first; then more and more, until Gwyneth finally has to admit it's too steep for her battered, aching body and Saadiyyah helps her up onto Steggers' back, where she sits feeling angry at her own weakness as the gigalith follows his partner down into the dark. He is warmer than he looks, and somehow contrives to move his legs so that his body remains perfectly level despite the uneven terrain. Gwyneth is comfortable, and furious about it.

The venipede, by now accustomed to Steggers' presence, climbs down off her and scuttles freely around on the big pokémon's back, even clambering up some of his spines with a blasé disregard for the burning energy crystallised inside them. Steggers, as far as Gwyneth can see, doesn't mind. Somehow this makes it worse.

Several hours later, long after her rage has burnt itself out and left only indignant cinders, the path levels out again.

"Guess we must be below the bay now," says Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth slithers roughly down off Steggers' back without asking him to stop.

"Yeah," she says, stumbling and not falling mostly out of sheer stubbornness. "Guess so."

The venipede, currently clinging to Steggers' neck, watches her with its evil orange eye. Gwyneth glares right back until it turns away to make another circuit of its new mobile fortress.


There are other people out here, if not many. They pass some of them later that day, three kids whose chatter echoes down the passage towards them a long time before they actually come into view. Gwyneth listens, catches a name or two, and analyses. Teenage boys, loud voices and brash laughs, with that certain tone to their speech that makes some warning instinct deep in Gwyneth's mind light up in apprehension.

Gwyneth thinks of school, and of the police station. She thinks of hands, and eyes. Of ordinary pain that belongs to everyone and so is not worth talking about.

She looks at Saadiyyah and raises her eyebrows. Saadiyyah, half-smiling, raises them back. Together, they keep on walking.

Up ahead, torchlight begins to show around the corner, and the babble starts to solidify into voices. Someone's telling a story, Gwyneth thinks, but his friends aren't listening. They're talking about something else, a game maybe, though she can't work out what sport; even so, he's persisting, with a kind of baffling determination. She'd wonder how any of them can stand it if she wasn't so aware of being a terrible conversationalist herself.

After a few minutes more, the kids appear, along with a ragtag collection of pokémon, and finally seem to notice Saadiyyah and Gwyneth. They stop, and one of them raises his torch.

"Hey!" he calls, and Saadiyyah calls back.

"Hey."

The two groups come closer, blinking in each other's torchlight. Squinting through it – the boys haven't lowered theirs properly, are shining the light on her and Saadiyyah to better see them – Gwyneth makes out three kids, fifteen or sixteen, with a herdier, a gurdurr and a krokorok trailing along behind them. The krokorok has a shiny brass coin on a chain around its neck, and Gwyneth finds herself softening momentarily in the face of this unexpected tenderness. It's okay. It doesn't last.

"Going to Driftveil?" asks one of the boys. Gwyneth thinks his name is James, although the echoes made it hard to tell.

"Yeah," says Saadiyyah. "Could you maybe not blind us with the torch?"

"Oh. Right."

Three torches move suddenly, leaving blue ghosts floating in Gwyneth's vision.

"We're going to Castelia," says the boy.

"Yeah, I kinda guessed," replies Saadiyyah, and there is some laughter, part nervous and part something worse, from the other two kids. The lead one makes a show of not caring about it.

"Well," he says, "our eyes met and all. You wanna battle?"

Saadiyyah smiles thinly. Gwyneth can see all her previous meetings with incarnations of this boy behind it.

"I don't think so."

"Aw, c'mon―"

"No, really," says Saadiyyah, motioning into the darkness behind her. "I don't think you'd get much out of it."

And Steggers steps forward into the torchlight, all one and a half tonnes of him, and Gwyneth watches the boy reassess the situation.

"Go on, James," says one of his friends, insidiously encouraging. "You've totally got this."

"Uh, well, we still got a long way to go," says James. "And she said no so―"

"So?"

"So I guess not." James attempts a debonair smile. It's less than successful. "Anyway. Good to, uh, talk to you."

"Likewise," says Saadiyyah. "Have a safe trip to Castelia. It gets kind of steep back there."

"Um. Thanks."

Saadiyyah starts walking and Gwyneth follows silently, aware as she has been throughout of the eyes on her, taking an inventory of her aberrations. (Telling her: you exist because we allow it.) Then Steggers gets moving, the venipede crouched motionless on his back, and the boys all turn and move on south in the direction of the slope up to Campsite 2.

"Nice," says Gwyneth, after she's sure they're out of earshot.

"Well, they were assholes," says Saadiyyah, defensively, and Gwyneth surprises both of them by laughing.

"Yeah, I know," she says. "I meant it as a compliment."

Saadiyyah laughs too.

"Okay."

"You travel by yourself a lot?"

"I try not to. But I'm okay with Steggers."

Gwyneth nods. She's seen it before, with Nika and Britomartis. Although of course Nika never went anywhere without Gwyneth, by that point.

"Guess you are," she says, faintly admiring. "My, uh, my friend, the one whose wedding I'm going to, she had a bisharp. She was okay going anywhere too."

"Huh. Really? Those are meant to be really hard to train."

"They are," says Gwyneth. "It was vicious as hell. I was kinda glad when she released it."

Saadiyyah glances at her.

"Why'd she do that?"

Gwyneth shifts uncomfortably. She hadn't meant to say this. Saadiyyah probably doesn't want to hear it, and she is starting to realise that she actually does care a little about what Saadiyyah wants.

"Uh. You know. She finished her trainer journey? And you can't keep a bisharp if you're not gonna battle with it. They need to fight or they end up starting trouble. Which is … well, they're covered in blades, you know?"

"Oh," says Saadiyyah, subdued. "Yeah, I guess."

A brief and awkward pause. Gwyneth stumbles on a rock. Chargestones gleam in the distance like airport lights.

"Still," says Gwyneth, after a while. "A mean pokémon is good for scaring off creeps."

A smile.

"Yeah," agrees Saadiyyah. "Wish I didn't need Steggers to do it as much as I do, though."

Gwyneth nods.

"I feel you," she says. "Some things never change."

A man in a police uniform. Hands and eyes. The dead boy still lingering in her mind's eye.

Gwyneth rubs her forehead as if to push the memories back in, and carries on walking.

It's the kind of walk that seems to drag on far longer than the distance it covers. The day stretches out, broad and quiet. A few more wild pokémon come out to test their mettle – among them a kind of shaggy white woobat that Gwyneth has never seen before; they are very deep now, and the wildlife is getting weird – but nothing that Steggers can't handle. The venipede, used to his presence by now, takes pleasure in firing poison stings after the fleeing pokémon from his back as if it was the one who beat them. It's kind of funny, although Gwyneth can't find it in her to laugh.

They finish Saadiyyah's mother's sandwiches. Gwyneth aches. Under the bandages, her muscles move in pained twitches, like dying fish. She wonders if she'll be able to see a doctor any time soon.

She keeps walking.

After a while, the venipede stands on Steggers' shoulder and hisses at her, wanting to go back to its usual perch. She ignores it until it stops, and goes to sulk in the shadow of one of his spines. Saadiyyah watches the whole thing without comment, and Gwyneth feels the shame slip in through the back door of her mind like an old friend.

The passage narrows. There are very few caves in this area, down here under the ocean. Gwyneth guesses this was all dug out by the Henuun. One long, ruler-straight line, right under the bay. It's amazing, when you think about it. She says this to herself, as if the words were a substitute for the emotion. "It's amazing, when you think about it."

Saadiyyah asks what was that, and Gwyneth shakes her head. Nothing.

A long time later, when Saadiyyah has slowed, and Gwyneth is visibly limping, they stop to check the map again.

"Shouldn't be far now," says Saadiyyah. "I think there's a rest stop somewhere … oh, hey, look! Campsite 1."

"Guess it's here after all," says Gwyneth. "How much further?"

"Um, let's see, the scale says … uh … okay, I'm not sure exactly, I'm not great at maps, but I don't think far."

"Okay."

She's right, it isn't far. Ten, maybe fifteen minutes later, a pair of chargestones comes into view casting a blue light over a sign, CAMPSITE 1, and Saadiyyah and Gwyneth turn off down the side passage, heartened. It's not long before they're dumping their backpacks (with twin sighs of relief) and sitting themselves down on the stone slabs, one lightly, one stiffly. Gwyneth has just started to appreciate the weight taken off her feet when the venipede comes scurrying in, rattling aggrievedly.

"Hey, dude," she says, tired. "What d'you want? Food?" She rummages in her bag, tears off a piece of bread. "There." She tosses it on the floor and the venipede pounces as if it might sprout wings and fly away. It's a real hunter's pounce, venom and all. Gwyneth can tell because of the sizzle of acid on the floor. One more rule broken, she guesses. Whatever.

She has a drink, although not too much; she's almost out of water. She chews some of the bread herself, although she doesn't have much of an appetite and it's getting stale. She watches Saadiyyah go out and give Steggers some gravel to chew on – just for something to do; rock-types can go weeks or even months between meals, and he probably won't even be hungry till after his big fights at the tournament. Still, Saadiyyah's toting around a literal bag of rocks for the sake of his comfort. It's so nice of her it makes Gwyneth vaguely angry.

"We should get there tomorrow," Saadiyyah tells Gwyneth, as she comes back in. "Just in time. Registration closes Wednesday."

"Right."

"Are you on track for getting to your wedding?"

Gwyneth thinks about it. She would be, assuming she had transport figured out. As it happens, who knows?

"Yeah, I think so," she says. "I got like a week and a half yet." She makes an effort to smile. "Thanks for this, Saadiyyah."

It may be the first time she's actually said her name. She's almost surprised by the sound of it in her mouth.

"Oh, it's okay." Saadiyyah looks embarrassed, busies herself looking for nothing in her bag. "I was going this way anyway. And it's lonely down here. I love Steggers, but gigalith aren't big on conversation."

"Yeah, I had him down as more the strong silent type," says Gwyneth, and Saadiyyah smiles a little, though it isn't really very funny. "Anyway, I hope I haven't been too bad company. I know I'm … kinda grumpy."

Now Saadiyyah smiles in earnest. God knows why.

"You're not that bad," she says. "I've had worse company. Really."

"Yeah?"

"I once went through Reversal Mountain with an expert on moths, a gun nut and a girl who thought the Middle East was a single country."

Gwyneth nods, impressed.

"Yeah," she says. "That's so bad, it sounds like the start of a joke."

Saadiyyah laughs.

"Oh my god, I hadn't thought of that," she says. "That's amazing. I gotta use that one next time I tell the story."

"You're welcome," replies Gwyneth. She doesn't know if she feels amused or awed by Saadiyyah's unforced happiness. It's been a while. She's forgotten what kids are like.

"What about you? Got any stories like that?" asks Saadiyyah, and Gwyneth shakes her head.

"Not exactly," she admits. "My friend Nika and me, we did the whole thing together, so we were kinda insulated. There was one time we were staying in a lodge in the forest off of Route 6, though, that was us, an ex-Rocket and a clown."

"I don't even know which one to ask about first," says Saadiyyah. "What was a clown doing out there?"

"On his way to a clowning convention. I guess they have those." Gwyneth shrugs. "He was taking the scenic route. Wanted to be reminded of his trainer journey, I guess."

"And the Rocket?"

"Just doing a trainer journey. Trying to start over, I guess."

A pause. The sound of the venipede chewing, like nail scissors opening and closing, fills the silence.

"You heard about Team Rocket disbanding the other month?" asked Saadiyyah.

"Yeah. That Red kid, right? The new Indigo League Champion."

"Yeah."

Another pause. Gwyneth almost thinks she can hear the sea, miles and miles above them.

"There's something I wanted to tell you," says Saadiyyah. "I don't know if you knew already, but … there's this place in Driftveil where some ex-Plasma people look after pokémon that got stolen way back when? And they try to track down their owners, too."

Gwyneth says nothing. She can't find her voice.

"So I just thought I'd say," persists Saadiyyah. "'Cause like … I guess it's a long shot, but maybe they still have yours."

She looks at Gwyneth. Gwyneth tries to breathe, through a choked, narrow throat. She feels like she might cry.

"Oh," she manages. "I … didn't know that. Thanks, I'll … I'll check it out." She fiddles with the bandages on the back of her hand. "That's … that's real good of you to say, Saadiyyah. Really appreciate it."

It sounds hollow to her, but she means it more than anything else she's said so far on this stupid, stupid trip. God. Her pokémon won't be there, of course, but Saadiyyah doesn't know that; she only knows what it's like to love pokémon, and she reached out with that knowledge to try and touch the horror of losing them, and she offered Gwyneth all the help she could.

Trainer journeys. She's always said she still believes in them, despite everything. Here's why. There's nowhere else in Unova where you find this kind of love.

"Oh, it's okay," says Saadiyyah awkwardly. "I mean, it's just a thought …"

And she plays it down, and Gwyneth can't explain to her why it's as big a deal as it is, but she can hold the knowledge close to her while she settles down in her sleeping bag, as warm and soft as a minccino snuggled close against her breast.

And she can sleep, for once, without dreams.