SIX: THE BREAK

Tuesday, 13th September

The next morning the tunnel starts sloping upwards again. It's hard to notice at first in the dark, but when she does see it Saadiyyah stops and looks at Gwyneth, a question in her eyes. This time, Gwyneth doesn't hesitate.

"Yeah, okay," she says, and Saadiyyah comes back to help her climb onto Steggers' back. "Thanks, Saadiyyah."

He marches on, legs eating up the distance at a steady, mechanical pace. Gwyneth slumps and tries not to scratch her hand, which has started to itch. She hopes it's just hot under the bandages. All the other possible explanations are not very pleasant to think about.

There aren't very many wild pokémon now: the odd boldore or roggenrola, almost all of the sandy brown sedimentary species, with toffee-coloured geodes where their igneous cousins have glittering orange. Steggers stamps and flares his crystals bright red, and most flee before things get any more serious. On the two occasions that they do, he is conscientious of his passenger, holds his head erect so that she can crouch behind it, shielded from stray chips of flying stone. Somewhere underneath all that rock is a living heart after all. Reluctantly, and much to her surprise, Gwyneth feels herself starting to warm to him.

The passage continues straight up, sloping quite sharply now; even if she'd been healthy – hell, even back when she was on her own trainer journey and so the fittest she's ever been – Gwyneth doesn't think she'd have done half as well here as Steggers and Saadiyyah. Now there's no comparison at all. She takes no exercise, eats badly, often feels like she's rotting from the inside out: poison or not, this is not a slope Gwyneth would be able to climb.

She doesn't mention any of this. Despite the lack of evidence, she likes to imagine she has some dignity left to protect.

"Oh thank god," says Saadiyyah, after a while. "I think it's flattening out." She flashes a self-deprecating smile up at Gwyneth. "Kinda rough going."

Gwyneth hesitates.

"Yeah," she says, after a moment. "Yeah, it looks it."

Saadiyyah is right. The slope becomes shallower and shallower, and then nearly flat again. Gwyneth slides off her perch wedged against one of Steggers' crystals and lands awkwardly behind him.

"You know, you don't have to," begins Saadiyyah, but Gwyneth shakes her head.

"Nah," she says. "I want to walk."

Saadiyyah looks like she might want to say but you're not well; if she does, however, she's sensible enough not to follow through. She just shrugs and starts winding up the torch again.

"Okay," she says. "Up to you. Option's there."

"Thanks."

Gwyneth glances back at Steggers. He keeps moving, undeterred by her absence. On his back, the venipede glares orangely at her.

"Quit it," she hisses, too quietly for Saadiyyah to hear, but the venipede is not in an obedient kind of mood. If venipede ever are.

She turns away again and concentrates on following Saadiyyah's torchlight. It's fine. This will be over soon. It has to be, if they've come up again. And then … well, then she isn't sure, then she'll be on her own in Driftveil with three dollars, seventy-five cents and a stale heel of bread. And two apples, she reminds herself. Not that they make much difference, but when you start from almost nothing even a couple of apples count.

So. What happens when she leaves this tunnel? What happens when she's suddenly back in the real world, where there is a place called Humilau she somehow has to get to within the next ten days?

Gwyneth does think about it, and she tries to come up with a solution. She really does. But there's only so long you can think about something like that before you have to stop or start hurting real bad, so five minutes later she puts it out of her mind again and thinks only of the tunnel and the perfect straight-line beauty of its construction.

We did this, she thinks to herself, with a tinge of pride. And then, immediately afterwards: no, they did it. She had nothing to do with it.

As distractions go, this leaves something to be desired.


Eventually, it ends. Everything always does. A brighter light than the chargestones becomes visible up ahead, and as they draw closer Gwyneth and Saadiyyah see another of those metal emergency phone boxes, glinting dully in the beam of a construction light. There's another of those big, blocky doorways just beyond – and past that, concrete stairs. Daylight is only a few minutes away.

"Yay," says Saadiyyah, only slightly ironically. "We made it."

"We sure did," agrees Gwyneth. She feels slightly sick. She tells herself it's just the poison.

"Better recall Steggers," says Saadiyyah. "Grab your venipede, would you?"

"Sure, dude."

Gwyneth picks it up and puts it back on her shoulder, the familiar trash-smell settling back into her nostrils. It rattles loudly in her ear, which she figures she probably deserves, and then marches off to ride on her backpack.

The flash of Steggers' return to his ball is blinding in the dim light; they have to wait a few seconds before either of them can see where they are supposed to be walking. And then – well. Then it's time to go. Through the doorway. Up the stairs. And through a metal door out into another little cabin like the one in Castelia. Sunlight pours in through the window and Gwyneth stares with watering eyes out at the beach beyond. She should have brought her sunglasses, she thinks, before remembering that she lost them.

"Hey," says Saadiyyah brightly to the woman behind the desk.

"Hi," she replies. "Come all the way from Castelia?"

"Yep. Looong walk."

"Definitely. Can I scan your cards? Gotta log you as having left, so we know you didn't die down there."

"Just mine," says Saadiyyah, handing it over. "Uh, my friend's not a trainer, I was just escorting her."

Gwyneth looks away from the window sharply. Friend, huh? Something in her recoils violently from the thought, but a moment passes, she watches Saadiyyah chatting to the clerk, and then the thing inside her calms.

Okay, she thinks, with a certain sadness and a certain satisfaction. Friend.

Saadiyyah finishes at the desk and turns back to her with a smile.

"Okay," she says. "Let's get some fresh air, huh?"

"I've been counting the seconds," says Gwyneth, which sounded funnier in her head but what the hell, she's trying, isn't she, and out they go.

Crisp salt air. Brilliant September light. Waves breaking on the stony beach. And to their right, across the water, Driftveil rising up like the Sierra Castaña, a mountain range of factories and dockyards.

Unova, thinks Gwyneth, and feels for a brief moment that old fierce love flare with the taste of brine in her mouth.

"God, that air tastes good," says Saaddiyah, stretching out her arms. "I spend a lot of time in caves, obviously, but I never get used to coming back out again."

She feels it too, Gwyneth can hear it in her voice: that love that only trainers and wanderers know. Once you've walked this country, it never leaves you. Unova. Unfeasible, insane, marvellous.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah."

The cabin they have just come out of is set into the western side of Veil Island, a tiny spit of rock south of the city which, the last time Gwyneth was here, was mostly warehouses and docks; now, as they climb the path leading up from the beach to the island proper, she sees that it's been redeveloped. Gardens and plazas, little stalls and gazebos, are all arranged around a single huge building that can only be a tournament stadium.

As she watches, a dragonite descends from the sky and flares its wings, coming to an abrupt halt in the centre of a nearby plaza. A rider drops neatly off its back, pats its flank; the big dragon snorts a plume of smoke, pleased. Lots of trainers here, thinks Gwyneth. At the stalls, walking the gardens, flying in.

"Is this where you're going?" she asks Saadiyyah.

"Yeah." Saadiyyah's watching the dragonite and its rider with an appraising trainer's eye. "It's called the Pokémon World Tournament. Clay Morton built it – you know, the Gym Leader and mining guy?"

Gwyneth remembers an excadrill ripping apart the ground, shaking Britomartis off her feet. Clay's a strong Leader, one of the ones Nika didn't beat. He also wears a cowboy hat, which both she and Nika agree is suspicious behaviour for anyone who isn't actually a cowboy.

"Yeah," she says. "Mining guy."

"There's gonna be this grand opening," Saadiyyah tells her. "He's been after a bunch of tough trainers for the first tournament. I hear the new Gym Leader – you know, Cheren Boyadzhiev? – he's going to be here." She sounds excited. "Kinda hoping I get to go up against him. He's meant to be super good at strategy."

"He is," says Gwyneth shortly.

The path takes them up to plaza around which various stallholders are hawking vitamins and supplements for various species of pokémon – ZINC GRANULES, getcher ZINC GRANULES for TOUGHER STEEL-TYPES; come on come on we got FEATHERPRO for category B FLYING-TYPES – and here they come to a halt. North is the bridge to the mainland. East is the way over to the World Tournament, the stadium and the hotels.

Gwyneth and Saadiyyah look at each other for a little while.

"Well," says Gwyneth, after a moment or two of awkward silence. "Thanks for getting me here. No way could I have got here on time without you."

"Oh, that's okay," says Saadiyyah, smiling, embarrassed. "I was glad of the company."

"Yeah?" asks Gwyneth. It's been a long time since anyone said that to her.

"Yeah," she replies. "Nice meeting you, Gwyneth."

"Likewise, Saadiyyah." Gwyneth smiles. It isn't even forced. The kid likes her. How weird is that? "Maybe I'll see you if you ever do come down to Aspertia to take on Cheren."

"Pokémon Centre, right?"

"Yep. In the store."

"I'll make sure to grab a few potions, then."

"You do that." Gwyneth glances north, at the bulk of Driftveil, at cargo ships moving ponderously across the water. "Well, I better let you go register. See you around, Saadiyyah."

"Bye!"

And that's it. Gwyneth turns and walks away towards the bridge. She does not look back. She does not want to know if Saadiyyah does.

They won't meet again, she's sure of that. Saadiyyah shouldn't be wasting her time on people like her. She's seen how that road ends.

Besides, she probably doesn't have a job at the Centre any more.

Crossing the bridge – pedestrianised now, she sees; it used to be that the trucks drove over – Gwyneth switches on her phone and brings up a map to find somewhere to refill her water bottle. This is not really a solution to her biggest problem, she is aware, but whatever she does do next, she's going to need water. So she finds a mall within walking distance, turns off her phone again to save the battery, and starts.

Driftveil is brown. There's spots of colour here and there, sure, but nothing like Virbank's neon ghosts or Castelia's glass-and-chrome elegance. This is a city where money comes out of the ground, from clay pits and steel mines, and where those people who aren't digging stuff up or smelting it down are probably shipping it out. Where Gwyneth is by the south seafront is more commercial than industrial, but she can see the smoke rising up over the rooftops from the north; there's nowhere in town where you can't. She wonders if the World Tournament is supposed to make people think of something other than raw industry when they think of Driftveil. It doesn't seem likely to have much of a result.

Still. Don't look up, and this part of town might be any big city in Unova: chain stores and shopping malls, phone lines, pedestrians, heavy traffic. The only distinctive thing is the scars in the road where the streetcar tracks used to be, and even then you wouldn't recognise it if you didn't already know. Gwyneth does already know; Nika has a vaguely embarrassing and very endearing habit of entering enthusiastically into touristhood, of reading every bit of information she can find about a place, and then regurgitating it into her companions' ears as they walk along. She doesn't remember all of it, but there are little bits, here and there. Streetcars in Driftveil, historic Pard Square in Castelia. Little bits of trivia. Little fragments of Nika.

Gwyneth finds the mall, finds the toilets, refills her bottle. She looks at herself in the mirror in the flat yellow light. What she sees is deep, dark circles under her eyes, missed hairs on her chin, the pale face of sickness. What she sees is more or less how she feels.

On her shoulder, the venipede starts rattling, antennae bristling at the sight of its own reflection.

"Chill, dude," says Gwyneth, too tired to argue. "It's just a mirror."

It doesn't get it, so she puts it down on the floor where it starts running around frantically, searching for the other venipede. She watches it for a moment, wondering how you explain reflections to a centipede, then shakes her head, defeated, and turns back to the mirror to pull out a few more hairs. The result is not great, but it's better than what she managed in the dim light of the caves.

Gwyneth looks into the mirror again. She cannot read her reflection's expression.

"All right, then," she says, stooping to pick up the venipede. "Time to go, dude."

She walks out, of the toilets, of the mall, of the street, and then she takes off her backpack and sits down on a bench. She counts the coins in her pockets again, in case she missed any before. (She didn't.)

Gwyneth closes her eyes, and thinks of home.


Here is what Gwyneth knows about money: it takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are.

That's how she explains it to Nika, when it comes to it. She doesn't do such a good job of it, but Nika gets the gist of the thing. It's like the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland, Gwyneth says. It takes all the running you can do, just to stay where you are. Just to plug the leaks and put out the fires. If you want to get ahead, you have to go much faster still.

What she means is this: when she was little, hers was an ordinary family in an ordinary house. All it took was for one unexpected thing to happen (one dead husband, one smashed car, one funeral, one colossal expense) and then suddenly the ordinary people in the ordinary house were also people who stayed up late at night at the kitchen table, swearing softly at their bills. It was okay, even though it wasn't. There were savings to fall back on, and that covered some of it; her ordinary mother carried on in her ordinary house, thinking that if she got another job, if she saved, she might claw her way back to where they were before, give her children some semblance of normality. So she worked and she saved, except that her kids needed food and clothes, and then her car broke down and that was what she'd saved gone again, and the kids still needed food and clothes, and her shoes were so worn out they had to be replaced because at this point they were letting her down in interviews, and a pipe burst under the sink, and then Gwyneth came out and needed new clothes and couldn't take Hilbert's cast-offs any more, and it kept on going and going, and as hard and fast as she ran she never once got more than a step or two forwards.

Still an ordinary family in an ordinary house. No Dickensian squalor, no ostentatious poverty. Just debt loping after them like a midnight lycanroc, and the race to stay one step ahead of its long white jaws.

And then things changed. They never do, for ordinary families in ordinary houses with ordinary lycanroc on their tail, but sometimes ordinary families spawn extraordinary people, and Hilbert brought home tournament money, the Championship prize, and then, later on, sponsorship deals and advertising revenue. (Gwyneth's mother will never stop being grateful for the League official who approved their request for his training grant, or for Aurea Juniper who gave him his starter free of charge and provided the family with all those copies of the trainer magazines that he and Gwyneth loved so much.)

So Hilbert saved everything. Again. But once the lycanroc has your scent, it's always there inside you, deep down. And Gwyneth, who never remembered a time before it started following them, kept right on running. So she tells Nika about the Red Queen, and Nika, who is wealthy enough for this never to have occurred to her and empathetic enough that she wants to understand, listens, and knows better than to say that the Red Queen is from Through the Looking-Glass and not Alice in Wonderland.

She hugs Gwyneth, though, and won't let her go. And Gwyneth feels the hot breath of the lycanroc on her neck a little less keenly for her grip.

But it's still there, deep inside her; she knows this instinctively, and when she and Nika split she is not surprised to find it there again, lurking in the corners of the shabby apartment she moves into. It's an old foe by this point, she tells herself. She knows how to deal with it. But the truth is that she is not her mother or her brother, and without Nika she is barely even Gwyneth, and her head is a mess and she fails to run fast enough and she has to leave the apartment; and this brings her back to where she is now, sitting out in the cold and waiting on the kindness of strangers.

Back then, it was Shane who stepped in. She hardly knew him before then, but he remembered her and he found her, brought her back to his place. He lent her a couch to sleep on, a computer to search for jobs on, and the difference between what money she had left and what she needed for a new apartment. An awful apartment, one that the previous occupant never cleaned or repaired and which Gwyneth never does either, but an apartment.

And then she left town for Humilau, to go and watch Nika marry Hilbert. Then she got herself poisoned. Then she threw away the last thing she had left in the hope of seeing something terrible.

It's as if she just needed to prove it, one more time. That there really is no good thing so small she will not destroy it.

Gwyneth hunches on the bench, over her bad arm. She can't stop shaking.

Whoever it was that called the ambulance for her back in Virbank, she wishes they were dead.


Nika would say, you don't mean that. But that's the thing about Gwyneth that Nika never seemed to understand: she really does mean it. She really is that bad. And she refuses to let herself forget it. So: sorry, Nika, no therapy, and no doctors. As if Gwyneth could ever allow anyone to tell her that any of this is not her fault.

Some people get chosen and some do not. Gwyneth is not chosen. Gwyneth is Aksa.

She opens her eyes again and stares at the traffic, unseeing. Cars. Pedestrians. There's a pidove among the regular pigeons on the sidewalk across the street, shoving them out of the way with the bullying confidence of a pokémon amongst animals. It's hard to look at any of it. The air is blurry, or her eyes are unfocused, she isn't sure. She feels her body like a series of heavy pieces of meat, hung loosely together from jointed bone. Her head is full of the emotional equivalent of a modem dialling up, loudly, forever.

It's okay. Gwyneth has been here before and all she has to do is stay alive until it's over. This is easy. The trick to staying alive is not dying, and that happens by itself.

For an indeterminate period of time, she sits there, not dying.

Then she gets up and walks away.


It's been a while. Gwyneth isn't sure how long, but it's been a while. She tries to remember when she sat down on the bench, but she doesn't really know. The sun has moved. The shadows sit differently on the street. This much she's sure of. She supposes she could check the time, measure it against whatever time her phone said it was when she searched for directions to the mall, but she doesn't really see the point. Some of whatever that was back on the bench is still with her, clouding her head like a charged fog of static electricity, and she cannot quite make herself believe in time right now.

She wanders without thinking of where she's going, taking corners as they come, crossing streets without waiting for red lights. A couple of cars nearly hit her. A lot more honk their horns at her. She is aware of this, conceptually; she knows that what she is doing is a bad idea. But the information is hovering at a level too distant for her to access.

The venipede spits insectoid curses back at the drivers, fearlessly vicious. Its saliva smells sweet, sickly, like old roses or blood or a munna's pain. Gwyneth feels the odour drifting inside her, mixing with the decay inside.

She keeps walking.

Eventually, she stops.

It's over now.

The strangeness falls away and her vision seems to clear, even though it wasn't clouded to begin with. She feels the wind in her hair and the fading sunlight on her face; she sees a police car rocket down the street, siren blaring. She sees shopfronts, shutters coming down, people hurrying home.

Has it been that long? Where even is she? Suddenly alert, Gwyneth checks her phone again, finds her location. Acker Street, wherever that is. Somewhere in southeast Driftveil. There's probably a name for the area but she doesn't know it.

"Any ideas?" she asks the venipede. It doesn't answer. "Yeah, thought so." She sighs. "C'mon, dude, let's get out of here."

She doesn't actually have anywhere to get out to, so she just starts walking. It's slightly less random than before, although not by much; the main difference is that she's conscious now, properly conscious: she sees people looking at her, waits for the roads to clear before crossing them, holds her arm close against her chest to stop it hurting as it moves. All the time, with every step, she asks herself what now, and every time she has to admit she doesn't have any answers.

For some reason, she finds herself thinking about what Saadiyyah said, about the ex-Plasma pokémon shelter in the north end of the city. They won't have Blossom or Corbin there, obviously, but still, she thinks of them. It's hard to say why. Does she want to tell them, after all these years? And what good would that do, exactly? Gwyneth can't see the logic in it. Okay, she might make some old Plasma grunts feel guilty. But clearly they feel that way already, or they wouldn't be running the shelter in the first place.

It doesn't matter, anyway. It's after five now; they're probably closed, and if they aren't then they will be by the time Gwyneth makes her way over there. So that answers that question. But the other one still remains, the what now that haunts her every move, and Gwyneth, standing there on the street cradling her aching hand as the air slowly grows colder with the deepening evening, is no closer to answering that than she is to Humilau.


Gwyneth scouts the area.

This part of town feels a little too nice to her. When people say an area is nice, that's usually code for there being money there, and where there's money there are people around to guard it. Gwyneth sees four cops on patrol around here, and she knows that they see her too. Or no, not quite; they don't see her, they see a suspicious individual, and they watch that individual until it retreats out of their view. Fortunately, none of them decide to follow her any further than that.

Still. This part of town won't suit her purposes. She moves on, the venipede clinging half-asleep to her backpack, and makes her way back to an area she passed through earlier. It's not east Aspertia, not dangerous-looking by any stretch of the imagination, but it does feel emptier than some of the rest of Driftveil. This is not always a good thing; tonight, however, Gwyneth wants isolation. She doesn't remember much of her last time on the streets, spent most of it in the same haze that gripped her earlier today, but she remembers feeling safest when there was no one else around.

At least she has the venipede, she tells herself, and nearly smiles when she catches herself thinking it. Okay, it's annoying and aggressive and it keeps wanting food that she doesn't have, but if it wants to do for her what it did to her in the alley in Virbank, she's willing to concede that maybe it has its uses after all.

After all, she reminds herself, she doesn't really know how to use the knife. And a weapon you don't know how to use …

She finds herself a dark, dry corner, down a sidestreet where the buildings have those old-fashioned indented shopfronts and there are plenty of recesses and blind alleys in between them. Out of the wind. Out of the rain too, should that become an issue. It doesn't look like it will.

Gwyneth looks at the spot for a long moment. She feels the blurriness pressing at the edges of her vision, the modem dialling up somewhere in the back of her head.

She takes a long, unsteady breath.

"Done it before, dude," she tells herself. "Done it before. And lived, right? And …"

Gwyneth hates herself for this, for what she thinks of as her inability to be practical, to just get the hell on with it. She should be trying to get what sleep she can so she can figure this out in the morning. And yet here she is now, worrying about the mere fact of her being here. Grow up, Gwyneth. Aren't you used to it yet? Were you expecting the goddamn Ritz? Where d'you think you've been all this time?

Gritting her teeth, she clenches her left hand into a fist, slow and unflinching. She feels her arm catch fire in protest, so sharp and bright a pain she can barely even feel her fingers.

"Feeling better yet?" she growls, and takes off her backpack.

Sometime very late, hunched against the wall, she takes the photograph out of her wallet and unfolds it with painful fingers. She looks at the two kids in the picture, laughing against the white background of the photo booth.

She turns it over and reads the words on the back: the sparkling glance of Anaktoria.

It's almost laughable, really. Who else but a child would say something like that? Quote classical literature to lend her love maturity? Yes, it's ridiculous, as kids are, but then Gwyneth was a kid too and she had never had anyone throw poetry at her before. Her heart fluttered every time she looked at it, in that time after their journeys ended and they each went back home, so far away from one another. And even now it has some power to it. Anaktoria. Nobody but Gwyneth knows why Nika calls her Annie. A little bit of their childhood, preserved in a pet name.

Little fragments of Nika.

Little people by the wayside.

Little fires to huddle around in the shadow of the temples.

There's no Shane out there this time, no one to pick her up off the street and lend her a couch. This time she really is alone.

The venipede crawls towards her, a moving darkness in the dying light. Gwyneth stretches out her hand and feels its shell, warm beneath her fingertips.

"Hey," she whispers. "Hey."

The venipede clicks curiously. Gwyneth takes her hand away again. It's stupid. She's stupid. She should have listened to Shane. She should have stayed home.

The night passes. It is long and cold and very nearly as unpleasant as those nights in Aspertia, all those months ago.

Gwyneth does not get much sleep. She doesn't get much of anything.


Wednesday, 14th September

She gets lucky, and not. Nobody disturbs her, but when she wakes up to the early morning sunlight she finds she's acquired shooting pains up and down her arm. She tries to sit up and feels her arm lock up, breath catch, fingers tingle.

"Oh hell," she whispers, too breathless with the feeling of it to raise her voice any louder. "Goddamn it."

With some difficulty, she drags herself to the wall with her right hand and levers herself up into a sitting position. After what seems like an age, she manages to disentangle her other hand from the sleeping bag, and finds the courage to look at it. The bandages are stained yellow, with a few spots of red. Her fingers look much too flushed where they stick out at the end.

Gwyneth swallows. She tries to remember what she did last night, how she managed to mess up her hand like this – hell, even how she got to this alley. None of it comes easily to her, and for several long minutes, none of it comes at all. Yesterday's haze lies around it like a shroud over a corpse.

She lets her head fall back against the wall and her eyes slip closed. She is if anything more tired than she was last night, the kind of tired that you feel almost as a physical ache, deep down in the marrow of your bones. But she made it, she reminds herself. Her head is clear. Her hand is screwed and she's going to have to spend her last three dollars on something to eat if she doesn't want to risk fainting from hunger later on today, but she's here, in the clear light of day, ready to do … whatever it is that she thinks she's doing.

Gwyneth sighs. Even before she ran out of words, she wasn't doing a very good job of convincing herself.

She hears a low rattle and looks up to see the venipede trundling along towards her down the alley, some oddly-shaped lump clutched in its jaws.

"Whatcha got there, asshole?" she asks. The venipede transfers the lump from its jaws to its forelegs, hisses at her, and then reapplies itself to eating. A few seconds later, Gwyneth realises that what it's got is a chicken nugget.

"Hey," she says, leaning towards it slightly. "Where'd you get that?"

The venipede hunches over its prize and rattles warningly, glaring.

"Look, I'm not gonna take it off you, you've probably dribbled poison all over it. Just where'd you find it?"

It flicks its antennae around, agitated, and Gwyneth sinks back against the wall with a sigh.

"Whatever," she says. "At least I don't have to feed you for a while."

She unzips her sleeping bag and kicks her way out, slowly and stiffly. She packs up her stuff again, although it's hard to tightly roll a sleeping bag with one hand and painful to do it with two. It takes her three-quarters of an hour to get everything back the way it was, and when she's done she sits down heavily on her backpack, exhausted by the effort of pushing through the pain in her hand.

For the first time, she seriously considers how long she thinks she can keep doing this. Not that long, she thinks, with surprising honesty. But she doesn't have to do it that long. If she can just make it to Humilau, then … what, exactly? Nika will break off the wedding, welcome her back with open arms and pay a doctor to fix her hand? Sure, Gwyneth, if that's what you want to think.

She sighs. Forget about that. Get to Humilau. Focus on that. If she gets there, it will be okay. It will. It can't be worse, anyway.

And how will she get there? She can't answer this, and she's still worrying the thought like a loose tooth when she hears a scratching by her feet and looks down.

The venipede is back, dragging a torn cardboard carton. There are three and a half chicken nuggets inside it, and also an eye-watering amount of bird crap.

Gwyneth stares.

"Dude," she says.

The venipede clicks to itself and swivels its big orange eye to face her.

She bends down and picks it up, pats its hump gently. She has to use her injured hand, but she figures it's worth it.

"You tried," she says. "'S more than I ever managed."

The venipede hisses. It's probably Gwyneth's imagination, but it sounds marginally less hostile than usual.

Well. She'll take what she can get.


Gwyneth eats everything she has left on her, does a quick and haphazard job of making her face palatable to the general public and sets off, the venipede perched on her shoulder like a chitinous parrot. She has a plan, kind of, and a direction, kind of. The direction is north, and the plan is to go to the shelter run by the ex-Plasma activists.

She isn't sure what she expects to find there, or indeed what she'll even do when she gets there. But she has to do something, has to convince herself that she's still moving. Once she saw on TV that sharks can't stop swimming because if the water stops running through their gills they'll suffocate. This is something like that, she thinks. Yesterday she stopped, and she suffocated, and now she's up again she has to keep moving or she might not recover the next time around. And going to the Plasma shelter is the only plan she can come up with.

It's in the north of the city, she knows that, and her phone – 68% battery, it tells her, and she fights away the worry about what to do when it runs out – helps her narrow it down: 97 Great Drummond Street, way out in the foothills. A hell of a walk, but then, she made it all the way to Moorview in Virbank, and that couldn't have been much shorter. Even if she was in better condition back then, she thinks she can manage.

Around her, Driftveil starts to come to life, cars nosing their way out onto the streets like rabbits venturing out of their burrows, engines drowning out the distant noise from the docks to the southeast. Metal shutters go up, shop lights turn on; five unfezant fly by overhead in spectacular formation; a burnt-smelling man with hair standing on end leads a nervy zebstrika down the street, making soothing noises and occasionally receiving minor electric shocks. Tiny metropolitan dramas, that's what Nika calls stuff like that. All those baffling little stories happening constantly in every major city. People living and loving and fighting and dying. Pokémon … well, pokémon doing pokémon things. They're weird enough already.

The sun climbs. It's surprisingly warm today, or maybe she's a little feverish. She hopes the former. Either way, she stops to take off her jacket and tie it to her backpack, and walks on with the warm light and cool air mingling deliciously on her bare arms. Gwyneth has always liked this kind of early-morning weather, where the sun is blazing and you know it will be hot later but for now the air hasn't warmed up. She hasn't really ever slept well, or she's been sleeping badly for so long now that she doesn't remember a time when she didn't, and it's not uncommon for her to wake before dawn. Back in Aspertia, when she and Nika had that apartment with the balcony, she would often get up and sit out there, watching the light swell over the city, and this weather reminds her of that. Pre-dawn air. Post-dawn warmth. Hekate on the roof, doing the same thing: watching, waiting for her partner to wake.

Gwyneth moves on.

She slows. It's not that she's tiring, although she is, but that Driftveil's streets seem to get clogged up faster than their counterparts elsewhere. Maybe she's just in a busy part of town, maybe this is just how things are here; either way, by nine Gwyneth finds she's moving at a snail's pace, trying to squeeze through the gaps between other pedestrians and the traffic.

"What the hell?" she snaps, at everybody and nobody. "What gives?"

What indeed. She really doesn't know. She can't think of a way she might find out, either. Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps on walking.

The shops begin to change, sliding from a mishmash of franchises to independent bookstores and cafés. The pedestrians skew towards the young and eccentric. This all seems familiar to Gwyneth; she recalls vaguely that there's a university here in Driftveil, and guesses she must be close. Kids. Dyed hair and strident opinions. Music, politics, art. She never went to college, but Nika did, and for some of that time they lived together. Not that they meant to, exactly. Gwyneth moved to Nacrene when she left home so that the two of them would at least be in the same city, and then when the other people she was sharing an apartment with left Nika said one of her roommates had left too and she had space for Gwyneth to stay with her for a while. So she moved into what had been Keisha's room, and then after a few weeks Nika moved into that room as well, and in the end 'for a while' turned out to be forever.

Or six years, anyway. But this is old news, even if she does keep endlessly rehashing it, so Gwyneth shakes it off and does her best not to envy the passing students their freedom.

She passes buildings with plaques outside that say things like NATURAL SCIENCES SITE B or LINCOLN HARKNESS MEMORIAL LIBRARY. There are kids lounging on the steps of the library, smoking, laughing. Looking at them, Gwyneth feels very strongly that she wants a cigarette, like an itch that can't be scratched. Wonderful. Something else to keep bothering her as she makes her way through this overpopulated hellscape of a city.

Sometime around mid-morning, three swanna fly by overhead, and half the street stops to watch. Gwyneth isn't sure she's ever seen one in flight before. They look even bigger than they do on the ground like this, their broad white wings stretching out wider than Gwyneth is tall. Pausing, she watches them until they disappear behind the buildings, and then for a little while longer in her mind's eye, tracing their path east. She imagines them settling down into warm Humilau water, massive wings folding back up into their flanks like a magic trick.

"Bastards," she says, although she is really only angry at her own lack of speed, and keeps heading north.

A few streets later, she's out of the college part of town. Now she could be anywhere, Virbank or Aspertia or Castelia; now Gwyneth's spirits lift a little. Chain stores and coffee shops, apartment blocks and offices: it's all kind of depressing, but it's hers, in the same way that university is Nika's. One thing people don't understand about Aân Hen is that it's not the land part that matters, it's the our. The Henuun are engineers, not mystics; they're talking about culture, not geography. Hell, that's what the word means: hen uûn, Us People. In a way, You People is more accurate than white Unovans know. (So Gwyneth says to herself, painfully aware that she learned this from the internet.) And this place, this middling Unovan blandness, this is part of Gwyneth's culture, her Us-ness, and it's okay. Its inhabitants are wary of her, stare at her injured arms and ambiguous face, but it's okay.

The venipede interrupts her thoughts by crawling off her backpack and onto her shoulder, its claws much more obvious now that she has removed her jacket. The pressure of them on her bare skin makes Gwyneth uneasy.

"Get off there, dude," she says, pushing it back onto her pack. "I don't like you that much."

It rattles angrily, tries to return. Gwyneth pushes it back again.

"Not gonna tell you again," she says, trying not to be cross and not doing very well. "Stay. Okay?"

She can't see it back there, but she can't hear it moving, either. It will do, she thinks. It will have to.

It's getting hot. This isn't a good day to be dragging a bag the size of Gwyneth's around, or to have one hand wrapped up in bandages. She thinks again about not taking Three Nights in Opelucid back to the library when she had the chance. When did she think she was going to read it, exactly? She must have known she didn't have the money to do the whole journey by bus. And she did know really, if she's honest. It's just that she refused to think about it. And now here she is, limping through a city she doesn't know to a place she's never been for reasons she isn't sure of.

There is a lesson here about the value of organisation, but Gwyneth isn't in the mood for learning.

She passes the Pokémon Centre and sees fire licking up at the sky from one of the practice courts around the back. Lots of kids around here, and lots of pokémon, too, a riot of colour and noise and unusual smells: the usual suspects, of course, the krokorok and boldore and watchog, but Clay's Gym is popular enough and September close enough to peak trainer journey time that Gwyneth sees a few more uncommon species too: an eelektrik that swims through the air above its partner's head, wreathed in sparks; a heatmor licking its flanks with tongues of flame; even a druddigon, casting evil looks around from the centre of an awed ring of onlookers, a beaming girl bursting with pride on its back. Even Gwyneth stares at that. People don't generally train druddigon; they're dangerous, even by dragon standards. She figures the League probably has an eye on her, as it does with people whose pokémon pose a particular risk to public safety, but even so, she moves on in a hurry. Druddigon were killing dinosaurs a hundred million years ago. They haven't had to change much since: humans aren't much trouble by comparison.

After this, the traffic starts to thin out and the buildings to shrink: she's made it. The suburbs stretch away and up over the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, humps of housing rising palely before the distant backdrop of brown stone and pine trees. If she wasn't at street level, Gwyneth thinks she might be able to see Twist Mountain from here, a faint ghost of a shape behind the other peaks. She can't remember whether she ever did see it before; there was an observation tower somewhere that she and Nika went up on, she recalls, but that might not have been here in Driftveil.

There's not much to see out here, not much to keep her mind off the ache and the tedium. There are a lot of nice-looking houses, among which Gwyneth feels dirty and out of place. (She is dirty and out of place, but she doesn't appreciate the reminder.) The roads start sloping uphill too, and this last leg of the trip is one hard slog right up to the little commercial block where Gwyneth at last finds Great Drummond Street. It's not as great as the name makes out; in fact, it looks like anywhere else to her. But that's not important. What she came here for is the big barn-like building at number 97. The one with the sign that reads TEAM PLASMA POKÉMON SHELTER.

Gwyneth stares for a moment. She knew what the place was called, of course; she saw when she searched for it on her phone. But still, she's not prepared to see the words up there like that. TEAM PLASMA, in big white type, as if the name doesn't mean a thing. How this place hasn't been vandalised by an angry mob she has no idea. Do people really forget that quickly?

She shakes her head. Maybe they didn't make as big an impression as she thought. No, they did, she knows they did; that was the whole reason Plasma worked, the spectacular magnetism of Harmonia and N. One of the few things she and Cheren agree on is that this is what made Plasma so dangerous: give an expert propagandist like Harmonia someone as naturally charismatic as N, and he'll build himself a cult leader. Some people get chosen and some do not, and Harmonia chose N in all the worst ways. If Hilbert hadn't been there to expose the lie, people really would have followed N right into Harmonia's trap.

Her lip curls. If Hilbert hadn't been there. Okay, Gwyneth.

She sighs. She's been standing out here for several minutes now. If she's going to go in, it's probably about time.

Gwyneth wipes the sweat off her forehead and makes a half-hearted attempt at smoothing her hair. She looks in her mirror, winces, and puts it away again.

She pushes open the door and goes inside.


It's dark in here after the bright sun outside, and Gwyneth stands there blinking for a moment while her eyes adjust. After a little while, she sees a desk along one wall, and a door on the other side of the room from behind which she hears the sound of various animals all attempting to be noisier than the rest.

"Can I help you?" asks the woman behind the desk. She looks twenty-nine, thirty, and she has spectacularly long blonde hair. Something about this seems familiar to Gwyneth, but she can't immediately place her.

"Can I help you?" she asks again. The silence is growing strained. Gwyneth has no idea what to say: can she help her? She isn't sure. She wasn't sure before, but now, standing here with the musky smell of watchog rising from the carpet and an earnest woman asking her questions she is less sure than ever. The lack of certainty is in her bones, in her blood, washing around her body with every beat of her heart. She feels it in her like a paralysing drug.

"Um, hello?" asks the woman, now slightly desperate. "Can I help you?"

Gwyneth stands and stares, mute as a swan. She tries to say something about her pokémon but her throat is raw and dry, her lips two strips of wood.

"Hello, Concordia," says someone else, coming in through the back door and letting in for an instant before it closes a cacophony of barks and whines. "Could you put in another order for those cattle bones? They're going down rather well with the herdier."

"Oh. Um, yes, Rood, I can certainly do that. I …"

The someone – Rood, thinks Gwyneth, through the fuzz of indecision: Sage Rood of Team Plasma – stops and looks. He is tall and stooped and grey-moustached, dressed in faded overalls that are worlds away from his cultic Plasma robes. Gwyneth sees his past overlaid on him, the TV reports, Hilbert running him down out on Route 18 with that International Police agent. He hunted them all down, in the end. Mechanically. Silently. Like cleaning house.

"Hello," says Rood. He has an accent that Gwyneth doesn't recognise. Something European. The Sages came from all over the world. "Can I help you?"

Concordia raises her eyebrows to herself, but says nothing. Neither does Gwyneth.

"Is this about adopting?" persists Rood. "Or are you looking for a specific pokémon that was taken from you in the past?"

So careful, the way he says it. No mention of stealing or even the name, Plasma. It doesn't occur to Gwyneth that perhaps he does this to minimise the pain of visitors and not to soothe his guilt. Slivers of anger creep in, and the lock on her voice breaks.

"It's my pokémon," she says, croaks really, fidgeting nervously. Rood nods understandingly, gives Concordia an I'll take it from here glance, steps forward. His face arranges itself into an expression of calm, soothing concern. How many times has he done this, Gwyneth wonders. How much human pain has this man seen and tried to redress?

"Of course," he says, ushering her deeper into the room, round a corner to a door she hadn't seen before. "Please, come into my office, sit down―"

"You don't understand," she says, pulling away from his arm. "It's not – you don't have them. They're not here."

Rood pauses, a faint frown of confusion hovering on his brow.

"I'm sorry?"

"They're not here," Gwyneth repeats. "You – you didn't steal them, exactly, but I mean …" She takes a deep breath. It tastes of dog. "I was just a kid," she says, hearing the pleading tone in her voice and hating herself for it. "I was just a kid and I – I believed you, and I … liberated them."


Gwyneth does not really remember the event itself, although it comes back to her often, as smells and sounds and emotions that well up through the cracks in her head and frighten her with their undirected intensity. Nika says this is a characteristic of trauma. Gwyneth knows that she is wrong, that trauma is something that happens to you when real bad things happen, and that whatever has happened to Gwyneth, it is nowhere near bad enough for that. She looks at the awful broken majesty of her country, at its violence and madness, and she smiles harshly and shakes her head. No, nothing of hers is bad enough. Gwyneth's are ordinary misfortunes in an ordinary life. She and her pain are not chosen.

Sometimes she tries to fit it into a series of life-altering events: one, coming out (the first time, the one that started her transition); two, misguided pokémon liberation; three, Martin getting shot; four, the end of her and Nika. This system never seems convincing, somehow. Gwyneth supposes that history never does.

Here are the facts, as far as she can reconstruct them: after she and Bianca had their chat in the pokémon centre, Gwyneth pleaded fatigue and illness and stayed in the Centre while Nika went exploring. Nika believed her, of course. Gwyneth has always been a good liar, and after her conversation with Bianca she looked ill, too. So Nika said okay and asked if Gwyneth wanted her to stay (she didn't) and then went off to do her thing, and Gwyneth went back up to their room and looked at every single Harmonia interview and statement the internet had to show her.

This is one of the things that haunts her across the years: the glint of his electric eye staring into the camera, visible even now in the flash of light on someone's spectacles or the glitter of a ruby ring.

After she did this, Gwyneth knows she must have gone out to the north edge of town, although she does not remember, and she knows she must have let her pokémon out of their balls, although she does not remember this, either. She does not know what she said to them, how she made them understand that their time with her was over. She remembers hurt and confusion, vaguely, on all sides. She remembers the sickly smell of munna smoke charged with fear and anxiety. Like old roses, or blood.

She knows that when Nika found her again her throat was hoarse and her voice was husky, so she imagines she must have screamed at them. They would not have understood; she is aware of this. All they knew is that they were partnered to a human who loved them and whom they loved. They could not know that Gwyneth only ever needed the slightest bit of encouragement to be convinced of her monstrosity – that she was easy prey for Harmonia and his slick, plausible rhetoric.

She does not blame Harmonia, or she does, but she tries not to. One thing Gwyneth does know now is that it's all on her. She was weak and she paid the price. If she had really believed, the way Hilbert believes or Cheren or Bianca, she would never have been taken in. She has been told that this is not a fault, that she was just kind and trusting and these are strengths as much as weaknesses – even that this is exactly how Harmonia manipulated N – but she remains unconvinced. She was weak. Years of persuasion from Nika brought her round, in the end, to the idea that maybe she wasn't such a bad trainer as she thought she was, but she still fell into the trap, didn't she? And that ruins everything. If she was weak enough to be driven to liberate her pokémon, then she was never worthy of them at all.

Nika says she found Gwyneth back at the Pokémon Centre, wandering and staring. She says she thought for a while that maybe Gwyneth was really ill; she wouldn't or couldn't say what had happened, just stared with eyes whose pupils had grown huge and dark. She thought about taking her to the Centre doctors, but she always did have good instincts and her instincts told her that Gwyneth didn't like doctors, so she decided to try just a little more before she caved and took her there, and then that was that: a few more questions and the spell broke.

This is usually where Nika stops. She does not like to talk about that evening, and Gwyneth does not really want to hear, either. She has never been certain why repression is supposed to be a bad thing. There are plenty of things you're better off not knowing.


Rood looks shocked. He is the kind of man who keeps control of his face, Gwyneth can tell, but he can't hide this. He reaches for the frame of the door with one hand as if to steady himself.

Neither of them speak. Gwyneth can almost hear Concordia's stare.

"I'm so very sorry," says Rood eventually. "Forgive my surprise, I … I am not sure I have ever actually met anyone who did that."

No, most people weren't that stupid. But that's Gwyneth all over, isn't it?

She forces a smile. She can tell it looks wrong the second she starts, but she guesses she's committed now.

"Yeah," she says. "Neither have I."

Rood gathers himself visibly. Now he looks at her properly for the first time, and Gwyneth feels the familiar discomfort: the light in here is dim and forgiving, but still, there's no way he doesn't see the bags under her eyes, the punctures, bruises, bandages, the haphazard shave job. No hiding here; she looks exactly like what she is, a beat-up trans girl who spent last night in an alley.

"We should discuss this in private," he says, reaching for his composure and grasping at least a little of it. "Come in and sit down."

Gwyneth follows him into a cramped office that might be neat if there was more space to tidy things away. A big pot plant drapes rubbery leaves over an unstable-looking clutch of filing cabinets; an unfezant coos to itself on a perch by the window. The left side of its head is featherless, the skin tight and pink with burn scars.

"You can put your bag down anywhere," says Rood, installing himself behind his desk, and Gwyneth drops it by the chair, transferring the venipede to her lap. It twitches restlessly at the unfezant's presence, but soon settles down. "Can I offer you a drink or anything?"

Gwyneth shakes her head.

"No," she says. "Thanks."

"Okay then." Rood leans on his desk, papers crinkling under his arms. "I'm going to have to admit that this is unprecedented for me, um, Miss …?"

Gwyneth knows what that um means. It means Rood is very professional but that he is no different to anyone else, underneath it. This doesn't hurt her. She has had twenty-four years to learn that she is an abomination and now it is in her bones and there is nothing left to hurt.

"Gwyneth," she says, in a level voice. It's the kind of voice that says everything and nothing.

"Gwyneth." Rood nods, masking his awkwardness with a businesslike demeanour. "I am Rood Smits. I started the shelter here with a number of other members of Team Plasma, with the authorities' permission of course. Technically this is part of our sentence. A dispensation in acknowledgement of good behaviour." He smiles briefly. Gwyneth has the feeling he tells this story a lot. "There was a schism after the events at the Pokémon League, you understand. Some of us sided with N and some with Ghetsis. Not everyone was in on Ghetsis' scheme, you know. Please understand, I am not excusing our actions," he adds quickly. "This is after all an attempt to limit the damage we did and bring Plasma back in line with N's own dreams for the organisation. Mostly our work involves reuniting as many of the stolen pokémon as we still possess with their owners, although of course some remain with Ghetsis' Plasma cell, and also the care and rehoming of abandoned or otherwise abused pokémon."

Gwyneth finds her eye drawn to the burnt unfezant. Someone did that to it, she thinks. She does not notice, but the fingers of her right hand close defensively around the hump of the venipede.

"But I am aware that we did more and worse than just that," says Rood. "Which brings me to this. We … offer what we can to those we have hurt." He spreads his hands. "We cannot undo the damage. We can apologise for and control it."

Gwyneth is tempted to mutter something sarcastic like big of you, but she holds her tongue. Rood is a good man. She can see that, and that, more than anything, is what makes her angry about this. What use are enemies if they're better people than you are?

"I see," she says.

"So." Rood folds his hands. "On behalf of Team Plasma, I would like to offer you a formal and sincere apology, Gwyneth. Our actions were inexcusable, and we do not ask you forgive, only that you allow us to continue working as far as we can towards mending the communities and relationships that we damaged."

There's a long silence. Gwyneth doesn't know what to say.

"Uh, thanks." She rubs her forehead with the heel of her hand. "Yeah. Thanks, I guess, I … I was a dumb kid, naïve―"

"And we should not have abused that," says Rood smoothly. "I am truly sorry. I … it's strange, I've thought about this quite a lot. What I would say if someone in your position ever came here, that is. Until today I never really knew." A small, awkward smile, breaking through the administrative composure. "I suppose I had hoped that our message had gone unheeded."

Gwyneth nods. She is now entirely out of words. It's all right; Rood still seems to have a few more.

"Now, as to more concrete redress," he says, "you should of course be compensated, but I am afraid we lack the financial backing we had in our … ten years ago. There was a compensation fund for Plasma victims, but I do not know if it still exists. I can try to get in contact with the relevant authorities, if you wish."

Compensation fund? Even if it does exist, it wouldn't pay out in time to help get her to Humilau. Still, Gwyneth supposes it's worth a shot. They must have run out of worthier people to reimburse by this point, so she wouldn't feel too bad about taking their money.

"That'd be good of you," she says. "Thanks."

Rood inclines his head, all calming solemnity.

"Not at all. Can I take down your contact details? I will get in touch when I know more."

"Hm? Oh, sure, I guess." She writes down her phone number and email address on a scrap of paper he offers her and hands it back to him. "Here."

"Thank you so much." Rood inspects it for a moment, then puts it in his desk drawer. "If there is anything else we can do, Gwyneth, then do please let us know."

Gwyneth is about to say no, is about to just get up and leave. And then she remembers who and where she is, and she thinks: sharks have to keep moving or they suffocate.

Hell, she might as well try.

"There is something," she says, slowly, fighting the urge to swallow her words and run. "Kind of weird, but … I desperately need to get to my brother's wedding and – can any of you give me a lift to Nimbasa?"