SEVEN: OLD SCARS
Wednesday, 14th September
Ask, and ye shall receive. That's from the Bible, Gwyneth thinks. She's not sure. Bits of Catholicism rubbed off on her from Nika, but not much. Gwyneth is more interested in this world than the next.
Anyway, Rood agrees. He's surprised, of course, although after a moment it fades; he looks at her again and puts the pieces together. This is someone who has spent all her resources, he thinks. This is Gwyneth's breaking point. If he was standing where she is, he might be desperate enough to ask strangers for rides too.
Gwyneth can see this, or thinks she can. (She cannot see that Rood is recalling his own breaking point, nearly a decade ago, when Plasma came crashing down around his ears and his friend Ghetsis turned out to be a monster, and Rood himself ran blindly until he reached Route 18 and bumped into an enigmatic smile and an International Police badge.) It's pity, she's sure of it, and it makes her stomach turn, but she does not say anything. She can't afford her stupid damn pride now.
"One of our people needs to go into Nimbasa anyway," Rood tells her. "Returning a liepard to his partner. I can arrange for them to take you along." He clicks around on his computer. "It's … Jackie, all right. I'll let him know."
"Thanks," says Gwyneth, trying to sound heartfelt. "Thanks so much, dude, I really needed this."
Some of the intensity in her voice must be genuine. Rood looks up and smiles briefly.
"It's all right," he replies. "As I say, he'll be going there anyway. And we do owe you. Quite considerably, in fact."
Gwyneth shifts uncomfortably. In her lap, the venipede hisses disconsolately at the disturbance.
"Uh, yeah," she says. "Guess so."
"I believe he'll be in at around two," Rood informs her. "Come back then, would you? Tell Concordia you're here and she'll be able to point you in the right direction."
"Right. Thanks." Gwyneth stands up, nearly dropping the venipede. Rood watches with obvious unease as she fumbles to catch it, left hand stiff and awkward. "Uh – yeah, so thanks again," she repeats, grabbing her bag. She just wants out of here now, as fast as possible. "I'll, uh, I'll come back at two."
Rood stands to get the door for her and she staggers out, trying to juggle bag, jacket and venipede and almost dropping all three. In the lobby she forces herself to stop and sort everything out, and then, venipede on bag on back, she leaves.
Well. Could have gone a lot worse.
Gwyneth sighs and runs her fingers through her hair. She's found a way forward. Isn't that the main thing? It has to be. Forget closure, forget history: she has a ride out of Driftveil. It's more than she had this morning. More than she had any right to have at all, she knows. And yet she has it anyway.
"We're doing all right," she tells the venipede, to make it sound more real. She is not convinced. It's okay. She doesn't have to be.
She wanders down the street, unsure of what to do now. There are a couple of hours to go until she needs to be back at the shelter, and she's tired as hell after walking all the way here. What she'd like is somewhere to rest, maybe get a drink and something to eat, but it's fairly clear that this is not on the cards. She could afford a meal, just. Some junk food or something, cheap and filling. But she'd rather wait until this evening. If she's going to burn the last of her money, she has to make it count.
So: aimless wandering again. There's nowhere to sit here, really. In places there isn't even any sidewalk. These suburbs weren't built with pedestrians in mind. Gwyneth walks, takes rationed sips of her water, feels the heat of the sun ratcheting up as morning gives way to afternoon. The venipede clicks on her bag and tries to climb down her arm, but Gwyneth is ready for it this time and catches it before it does any damage, lifting it down to the ground where it can scuttle between patches of shade, avoiding what light it can.
"Sun's not your thing, huh," says Gwyneth, watching it. "You're gonna have fun in Humilau then, dude."
This is not very funny, but it makes her smile, at least until she realises that she's just predicted a future in which it is still with her by the time she gets there. Then she stops. Abruptly.
"C'mon," she says, harshly. "Can't hang around in the shade all day. We're moving."
So she moves, and the venipede with her. She thinks that maybe she could walk up to the edge of the city – she can't be that far off it now – and do some liberation all over again, but she knows she can't. It isn't a question of whether or not she likes it, or it her; it's a question of what is possible and what isn't. And it's not possible for Gwyneth to do that again. She's amazed that she managed to do it the first time. It messed her up for weeks afterwards.
These are strange weeks in her recollection, with Nika hauling her by inches and raw willpower out of her fugue back into life. She remembers being dragged around Nimbasa, Nika determinedly chattering on and on about the rioting in the 1850s and the historic fashion houses; she remembers the theme park and the Musical Theatre, sitting with Nika in the dark and seeing a different sort of trainer coach their pokémon to a different sort of mastery. It's like that first journey together from Striaton west to Wellspring Cave. Then and now, Nika responds to the pain of others with feverish activity, burning herself up to make their lives just a little better. It's an instinct she will never learn to suppress, and which Gwyneth will come to be both thankful for and afraid of: what will happen to Nika if she pours all her energy into maintaining Gwyneth? Because by then Gwyneth will be a black hole, capable of taking everything you give her and still sucking in more, and she will know with cast-iron certainty that you don't throw people like Nika into black holes like that.
Still. Nika is sixteen and Gwyneth is fifteen, and at that age you are fumbling your way through a whole host of new types of interaction you have not yet learned to deal with. They do okay, for their inexperience. And little by little, Gwyneth comes back to herself. She's not the same. She never will be. But she's back.
She realises that it's happened one afternoon in the Pokémon Centre, in the practice court round the back of the building. Word has got around that Nika's pretty good, and there are three or four hotheaded kids who want to beat her; Gwyneth is sitting on the bench at the back, ostensibly watching Astyanax battle a watchog but really watching Nika, the height and grace of her, the way she puts her weight on one leg and her hand on her hip, a perfect image of casual power – and then she realises all at once that she hasn't thought about Blossom or Corbin even once today. And more than that, she realises that she is okay with this.
That evening Nika says she thinks she's tough enough to take on the Gym now, speaking diffidently in case organised pokémon training is still something that might upset her, and Gwyneth agrees enthusiastically. Let's go tomorrow, she says, and Nika stares, then smiles.
Okay, she says. Sure thing.
The next day, they go back to the theme park in the East Bank, where Elesa's Gym is built up around one of the rollercoasters. It's possible to get to her without riding the coaster, of course, but after registering Nika and Gwyneth ride it anyway, for the full experience and for fun, and they get off at the end where the arena is, lit by shafts of coloured light and ringed by trainers and fans here to see the battles – or, although they might not admit it, to see Elesa. She is one of Unova's most famous models, and surfs through life on a wave of her own glamour. Nika and Gwyneth are by no means immune: though they watch the three battles that are due to take place before Nika's, neither of them can actually remember anything about them afterwards.
When Nika's turn comes, it's a close thing. Elesa faces a lot of sandile and krokorok, and she has ways of dealing with their immunity to her electric-types' moves; her emolga only ever land for a split second, keeping themselves well out of range of Astyanax's ground-type moves, and shuffle in and out of combat with U-turn, striking repeatedly at his weaknesses much too fast for him to counter. Nika recalls him before they beat him unconscious and sends out Britomartis, against whom the emolga struggle to make much impression. The pawniard waits, tanks hits, and when the emolga get close smacks them out of the air, one by one.
"Oh hey, now I remember Lenora saying something about you," says Elesa, smiling so beautifully that Nika very nearly loses her concentration and throws the match then and there. (She doesn't admit to this, but Gwyneth can tell, because it has more or less the same effect on her.) "You're the smart one with the dark-types, aren't you?"
Nika admits, stumblingly, that she is, and Elesa looks pleased.
"Looking forward to how you deal with this, then," she says, and sends out a zebstrika that snorts sparks and sets itself aflame with static discharge, crashing into Britomartis and sending her flying with one perfectly-executed flame charge. She gets up again, just, but Nika knows when to back down and recalls her, sending out Hekate instead. By this point, Gwyneth's heart is sinking – one pokémon left, and a flying-type? Nika has as good as lost – and at first it does look like everything is over. Hekate isn't even attacking, just tottering around on her little legs, rolling between the zebstrika's hooves as it tries to pin her down with bolts of lightning. It's having a hard time of it, with her being so small and its equine eyes not suited for this, but Elesa's voice keeps it steady and Gwyneth knows it must only be a matter of time before one of its blows finds its mark.
But Nika isn't done yet. She keeps this up for a little while, just long enough for Elesa to raise a quizzical eyebrow and the zebstrika to start whinnying and lashing out wildly in discontent, and then out of nowhere she has Hekate whip up a whirlwind, right between the zebstrika's legs. Its hooves fly out from under it in four different directions and, scrabbling around like a spider on rollerskates, the big horse staggers away, back towards Elesa; snorting furiously, it gathers lightning around itself, and though Elesa shouts for it to stop the command comes too late: the zebstrika launches itself at Hekate in a thunderous wild charge that completely misses, taking it out of the arena and into the back wall with a crash and a strong smell of burning paint. It's not badly hurt – pokémon are tough, and frankly the wall looks like it came off worse – but it's confused, and it takes long enough getting back to the arena that the match is forfeit.
It's an object lesson in the inadvisability of trying to charge something as small and bouncy as a soccer ball. Elesa stares at Hekate, preening calmly like she does this every day, and bursts out laughing. Okay, she says, she'll allow it. Why the hell not. Well done, Nika. She asked how she'd deal with a zebstrika and she got herself an answer.
Outside, after Nika's got her badge and TM, Gwyneth tells her she was amazing, that she didn't think it was possible to win, and Nika smiles, ecstatic. She wasn't really expecting to win herself. The idea of pissing the zebstrika off enough that it ignored its training was not something she actually thought would work. But she doesn't say any of this; she's light-headed with the elation of unexpected victory and the delight of seeing Gwyneth laughing and smiling like nothing is wrong, and in her head wheels are spinning without, for once, any of her fears and anxieties to weigh them down, and she suggests that they should do something to celebrate. And the two of them look around and see, rising above the park like an electric giant, the Ferris wheel.
This is where it happens. Up there, with blue sky on all sides. Summer is coming, they said, and now it's here, now it's all around them, light and heat and joy that blanks out even the pain of what happened three weeks ago, hiding the bleeding stump of Gwyneth's trainer career beneath a cloak of bright summer magic.
So, Gwyn, says Nika nervously. (All this seemed like a much better idea when she was high on victory.) Pretty cool view, huh?
Yeah, agrees Gwyneth, although she isn't looking out, not really. Her whole being is focused in this spot, inside this gondola with this girl.
There is the longest pause, as they reach the top of the wheel and then start to come down again, and then Nika realises that they'll soon be back down on the ground and starts gabbling uh, so Gwyn listen I wanted to say but Gwyneth already knows, is starting to think that maybe she's known since Wellspring Cave, even, and she turns to Nika and smiles and smiles and when they walk out of the gondola back into the crowds thronging the park, the two of them are holding hands. It's tentative. It's awkward. It's perfect.
We should go take your pokémon to the Centre, says Gwyneth.
Yeah, agrees Nika.
And they go, together.
In a way, nothing has changed. Gwyneth will still have guilty nightmares. She still can't see Harmonia on TV without shaking and coming close to tears. She is still punching herself over and over, on the inside where nobody can see. But now she has Nika, even more than she had her before.
Summer is coming, they said. And now summer is here.
And after summer comes autumn. Nika's favourite day: the autumn solstice. Enough sun left for the old magic to linger; enough cool coming for the new to edge in. The day she chose for her wedding.
It's a fact, and Nika doesn't know that Gwyneth knows this, but it's a fact that Nika would have asked Gwyneth to marry her. She'd been planning it for weeks, and the only reason she didn't follow through is because she was waiting for the unpleasantness to blow over. This was not an unreasonable assumption to make; it always blew over before. But though it didn't that time, if it had and she had got her chance, she would have set the same date.
The impending offer was another reason why they split up. This is another thing that Nika doesn't know about.
If she does make it to Humilau, thinks Gwyneth, she has a lot of explaining to do.
First, though, she actually has to get there. Right now, she's sitting on a low wall bounding the parking lot of a grocery store, taking measured sips of water and wallowing in the past. It's not attractive, she knows that, but what the hell, it stops her going crazy. Assuming she hasn't already. She has always remained wilfully ignorant of anything to do with mental illness, but she doesn't need to know much to know that whatever state of mind she was in yesterday is not something typically associated with good health.
It's okay. She's not dead. She sees this as enough for now.
"Think it's time we headed out, dude," she says to the venipede, in the vague hope that talking might snap her out of this. "C'mon. We got twenty minutes."
She gets up and it follows, clicking irritably at the hot tarmac beneath its feet. This side of midday, the heat that was building earlier has soaked into Driftveil like red wine into a white shirt, indelible and impossible to ignore. Heat haze shimmers above the roads to the west. The sky is so violently blue it's almost painful to look at.
Well. There are still six days of summer to go, after all. Maybe Unova's just trying to fit a little more sun in before autumn officially begins.
Inside the Team Plasma shelter, an electric fan is whirring back and forth, making Concordia's hair and the pages of her book shift and rustle. A purrloin has appeared from somewhere and is lying splayed out across the floor directly in front of the fan's breeze. It looks up, heat-sluggish, as Gwyneth enters.
"Hey," she says, as Concordia transfers her attention from the book to her. (Seeing – what, exactly? Her gaze is as opaque as lead.) "I'm here to see Jackie? Rood said you'd be expecting me."
"Gwyneth, right?" Concordia's voice is soft and careful, from a lifetime of Harmonia. That's where Gwyneth recognises her from, she remembers: she was one of the two girls he adopted alongside N. Was she arrested with the rest of the team? It seems harsh. Gwyneth doesn't think being roped into something by your abusive asshole of a father ought to be a crime. "Yes, he mentioned. Follow me."
She gets up, notices the purrloin and sighs.
"You got out again? Oh, never mind. I'll deal with you later, Sam." She smiles shyly at Gwyneth, who is unprepared to be smiled at by someone as pretty as Concordia and so is momentarily stunned. "Sorry. This way, please."
"Uh. Okay, sure."
Concordia leads her through the door at the back and down a noisy corridor that smells strongly of animals, to an exit into the parking lot behind the building. Someone that Gwyneth assumes is Jackie is leaning against a red car that looks like it's in slightly better shape than Shane's.
"I'm sorry, by the way," says Concordia, as they cross the lot.
"Huh?"
"For what we did to you." She looks genuinely apologetic. Even Gwyneth can't find it in herself to take that as condescension.
"Oh," she says, unsure of what to feel if not anger. "Um. Thanks, I guess. It's … it's been a while. Water under the bridge."
She isn't sure if Concordia believes her, but if she doesn't, she doesn't say so. Instead, she calls out to the man by the car.
"Hey, Jackie! This is Gwyneth."
He raises a hand in an elliptical kind of greeting. Gwyneth nods. She can deal with laconic. She's no good at talking to people anyway.
"Hey," she says, and Jackie nods back.
"Hey," he replies.
"Rood tell you what you need to know?" asks Concordia, and Jackie nods. He's tall and young and dark, in jeans and a short-sleeved shirt that shows the little burn scars on his arms. When he looks at Gwyneth, she knows, he sees the matching scars on her arms, sees a person who knows more than one use for a cigarette. It's okay. She's over it now. It's just that even if you are, you have to carry the marks around for the rest of your life.
She supposes that this applies to everything else in her life, too.
"So, I'm taking you to Nimbasa," says Jackie. He's careful. He keeps his eyes on her face, same as Gwyneth keeps hers on his. Neither of them knows whether the other is sensitive about these things, or how much. Gwyneth doesn't like people looking at her face, either, but she's long since accepted that she doesn't get a choice about that.
"Yep," says Gwyneth. "And, uh, my venipede, I guess. I hope that's okay."
Jackie grins. One of his teeth is quite obviously fake.
"We're Team Plasma," he says. "We love all pokémon. Although if you've got a druddigon, I'd appreciate it if it stays in its ball."
It's not the best attempt at breaking the ice Gwyneth has ever come across, but it gets the job done. She smiles and so does Concordia, relieved.
"Okay, well, I'd better get back to the desk," she says. "Do you have the address, Jackie?"
"Yeah."
"Good." She smiles at Gwyneth again. "Goodbye, Gwyneth. Good luck!"
"Thanks," says Gwyneth, and really means it. (She was ready for the smile this time, but it still packed a hell of a punch.) She and Jackie watch Concordia go for a moment, and then look back at each other, faintly awkward.
"So," says Jackie, after a second. "You ready?"
"Sure, dude," says Gwyneth.
"You can put your bag in the trunk," he says. "Stevie's on the back seat."
Gwyneth looks in through the open window and sees an elderly liepard yawning in the sun. She always forgets how big those things look when you get this close to them.
"Okay," she says, and goes to dump her bag.
A few minutes later, Gwyneth is installed on the passenger seat with the venipede and Jackie is pulling the car out onto the road, the wind starting to pick up as they get moving. Gwyneth had almost forgotten what this was like, driving along with the windows open on a hot day. The memory of summers past comes back to her with a sudden surprising force.
"I figure you've probably had apologies already," says Jackie, "but I can't not, so. I am sorry, for what we did."
"Thanks," says Gwyneth. The venipede shuffles on her lap. It's listening to Stevie, she thinks, with the wariness of a small predator sharing space with a big one. "It was a while ago."
"Stays with you, though." Jackie takes them round the corner and down another line of interchangeable houses. "Stayed with me." He shakes his head. "Hell of a shock to find out that more than half the team were there for Ghetsis and not for the pokémon."
Another long pause. In this bright light, and with time to reflect, Gwyneth is becoming aware of how dusty her clothes are after coming through the tunnels. She probably should have changed before coming back to the shelter.
"Still," says Jackie. "It was a while ago, like you said. Hope Rood and Concordia showed you Plasma's different now."
Gwyneth thinks of the unfezant with the burns. She thinks very strongly that she would like a blunt object and the name of the person responsible – but that doesn't help the bird, does it? And that's the difference between her and people like Rood and Concordia. Her instinct is always to fight or to run. Theirs is to help the wounded.
There are various conclusions you could draw from this. Gwyneth's, as usual, is vehement and not very flattering.
"Yeah," she says. "They did." She hesitates. "Gotta say, I'm surprised you kept the name. Don't people mind?"
"At first. Not so much these days." Jackie shrugs. "We figure it's up to us to make Plasma mean what it was supposed to. Though I guess we got competition now."
Gwyneth freezes. Her heart starts to pound like it wants out of her chest.
"Competition? Plasma's still going?"
"Huh? Yeah. You didn't see the news? Roxie and some kid trainers ran into a cell near Virbank. Harmonia's people. Bad stuff." He sighs. "Former friends of mine, some of 'em. They called me up and asked me to sign back on. Don't know what they're planning, but none of us at the shelter want anything to do with it."
Again. It could happen again. Oh, it won't be the same plan, Gwyneth knows that; not even Harmonia could make it work twice. You only get one shot at something like that. After the first time, everyone knows you're not just a pokémon rights activist. But that's not enough to stop someone like him, is it? Harmonia is only human, and Gwyneth knows better than most what that really means.
"Goddamn." She doesn't know what else to say, so she says it again. "Goddamn."
"Yeah." Jackie laughs humourlessly. "Some people just won't quit."
"Guess they don't know when they're beaten," says Gwyneth, feeling hypocritical but not quite good enough at irony to know why.
"Guess not," agrees Jackie. And they drive on.
The suburbs of Driftveil go on for a long time, longer than seems reasonable or sane. Gwyneth wonders how anyone who lives here gets to wherever it is they work on time. She hasn't seen so much as a convenience store for at least half an hour; it's all just houses, row after row after goddamn row.
"Dull part of town, huh," she says.
"Yup," Jackie says. "Rent's low at least."
"That why you're based out here?"
"Yup."
After a while, Jackie clicks the radio on, tunes around. News, soft rock, pop, period drama with exaggeratedly English accents. He tunes back to the rock and leaves it there, which suits Gwyneth just fine. If you're riding in a car with the windows down on a sunny day, you should probably be listening to rock music, she thinks.
In the back, Stevie yawns and rolls over to curl up the other way. The venipede, which had just started to relax, tenses again at the sudden movement.
"Chill, dude," Gwyneth tells it, not caring if Jackie hears. "He's not gonna eat you."
"He doesn't have the jaws for it any more," says Jackie. "Or the energy. He's sixteen and doesn't hunt anything more lively than cat food."
"Pretty old for a liepard."
"Yeah. Took us a while to track down his previous partner, unfortunately. Normally people come to us, but in this case she's bedbound. Hence the house delivery."
"Right." Gwyneth looks down at the venipede. "You hear that? He's harmless."
It rattles at her and she sighs.
"Fine, then, be that way."
Jackie takes them east, back towards the real Driftveil. It's a city of two coasts, really; the square of land in between is just a wilderness of housing estates, places where the factories and commercial hubs store their workers at night. From the drawbridge down to the docks, the metalworks and foundries stand shoulder to shoulder, belching out smoke that stands out blackly against the electric sky. In amongst them Gwyneth sees huge, dark buildings like enormous barns, giant yellow hazard signs plastered on every wall. They have industrial garbodor in there, massive things with bodies of slag and radioactive waste, capable of eating anything from charcoal to depleted uranium. On their second visit to Driftveil, when they were eighteen, Nika insisted they take the tour, and Gwyneth stared from behind a protective psychic barrier as a garbodor the size of a bull elephant shovelled cinders from the factories into its mouth with fingers like railway sleepers. She remembers imagining dozens of them eating the building, eating Driftveil, eating the world down to a nub of molten metal like a time-lapse of worms collapsing an apple to the core.
"Been to Driftveil before?" asks Jackie, almost as if he's read her mind, and Gwyneth nods.
"On my trainer journey," she says. "And then again as a normal tourist."
"Not a lot of those around here."
Gwyneth shrugs.
"We went everywhere."
Jackie doesn't ask who 'we' means. Gwyneth appreciates that. She appreciates everything that makes these things go even a little bit smoother.
"What's in Nimbasa for you?" he asks. "Rood said you had to get there urgently."
"Nothing, really. I just have to get to my brother's wedding in Humilau, and Nimbasa's the next town."
Jackie gives her a long sideways look, appraising and calculating. It's subtle, but you don't look at Gwyneth without her noticing. He sees more now, sees someone desperate enough that she has to resort to this to get where she needs to go. Sees Gwyneth for what she is.
"That's a helluva trip," he says. "You two must be close."
Gwyneth almost laughs.
"Hell, no," she replies. "I can't stand him. But I like his … I like his fiancée." She smiles, and possibly the pain shows and possibly it does not. "We got history."
"Right," says Jackie. If he sees anything he doesn't show it. He has a face as motionless as a piece of lead. "The good kind, I hope?"
"The best." Gwyneth pauses, aware she's said more than she meant to. The pause lengthens into a silence, and Jackie drives on through it, bringing the car to rest at the back of a queue at some traffic lights. It's getting busier now that they're out of the suburbs. They got here from the shelter in maybe half an hour, but it'll take twice that just to get from here to the bridge, Gwyneth can tell.
Without the wind of movement to cool it, the car gets hot fast. Stevie lolls and makes grumbling feline noises. The venipede crawls down into the shadows in the footwell. Gwyneth rests her arm in the open window and feels the sun turn her bandages into an oven.
"Here we go," says Jackie, with a sigh. "They keep saying they're working on fixing the traffic round here but they never manage it. Open a dozen new roads and they fill up just as fast."
"Driftveil seems like that all over," ventures Gwyneth, thinking of the congested streets she fought down earlier, and Jackie nods.
"Yeah, it's a mess. Streets ain't big enough for all the crap that's in them."
They move forward, foot by foot. Car horns blare. Someone walks by with a seismitoad and a plant mister, occasionally spraying the one with the other to stop its sensitive skin cracking in the heat. Every time, the seismitoad croaks a heartfelt thanks and rubs its oversized hands all over its warty body.
"That should be in its ball," says Jackie, scowling. "Cruel to make it walk around town on a day like this."
Gwyneth doesn't say anything. She thinks of suggesting that maybe the seismitoad likes to walk, or has a problem with poké balls, but she believes she has no right to talk about what's good for pokémon or not. Leave that to the real activists. Leave it to Jackie.
Her guess about how long it would take to get to the bridge is more or less perfect: an hour or so after hitting the traffic, they drive up onto an overpass and come around a corner to see the orange bulk of the Driftveil Drawbridge shining like a dawn stone in the afternoon sun. Gwyneth can see all the way across the bay to the other side and the forests either side of the highway leading east towards Nimbasa. She sees the cargo ships and ferries, the gulls wheeling high above, the city sprawling along the coast like a concrete lion lounging in the sun. She sees the water and realises with a wonder that just about touches her even through her cynicism and dissociation that she was walking underneath that only yesterday.
"I came to Driftveil through the … well, they call it the Relic Passage," she tells Jackie, and the name only slightly spoils the magic of it. "The tunnel that goes under the bay to Castelia?"
"What? You're kidding me. How's that even possible?"
"Nah, dude, it's real. Old Henuun thing. There's all these caves down there and they just cut corridors in between them."
Jackie whistles. It's a good whistle, sharp and clear. The kind you could cut paper with.
"Incredible," he says. "Right under the bay?"
"Yeah. An escape tunnel from Hil'Zorah. One end at―"
"Hilzawhat now?"
Gwyneth refuses to take the bait. She doesn't know if Jackie's fishing, but she refuses anyway, on principle.
"Hil'Zorah," she repeats. "Big fortress in the middle of Hilaan."
"Oh. The Relic Castle." He says it like someone satisfied to have got to the answer, like someone who doesn't know what he's saying. Okay.
"Yeah," says Gwyneth. "That." She takes a breath. They're coming up on the bridge now, the highway full of massive trucks standing shoulder to shoulder and grumbling like bouffalant protecting their calves. It's still hot even in their shadow. "The tunnel's an escape route. One end comes out in Castelia, one in Driftveil."
"I had no idea." Jackie drums his fingers absently on the steering wheel. Stevie looks up sharply in the back, hissing, and he stops. "Those Relics sure were good at building stuff," he says blithely. "Makes you wonder why they didn't put it all back up again after the dragons blew it up."
Not even indigenes. Gwyneth briefly imagines herself having that conversation, possibly that argument, if it came to it, and then because she knows that even if she wins she will lose in all the ways that matter she decides to let it go.
"Mm," she says. "Maybe they figured there wasn't any point after all the farmland got turned into a desert."
Jackie nods, eyebrows raised, a perfect portrait of oh, I never thought of that before.
"Yeah," he agrees. "That tracks."
Gwyneth asks herself what Jackie sees when he looks at her. She's forced to admit she can't tell. His is not the kind of face that gives much away, or possibly it's just that there is nothing behind it to be given away. It might be that he never even looked past the burn scars to see the colour of her skin or the nauseating geometry of her face.
She supposes that's okay. She probably gets more of his sympathy this way.
The pace picks up once they're actually on the approach to the bridge; this part was built with the demands of heavy industry in mind, and the highway is so broad in either direction that Gwyneth gets only glimpses of the sides in between the passing trucks. She wonders how many lanes. Then she decides she doesn't care.
She leans back in her seat, completely out of conversation ideas, and they drive wordlessly out over the gleaming waves to an all-Unovan fanfare of radio music and snarling motors.
Jackie is good at silences, clearly, but every so often he'll ask a question. What's with the venipede? (She bumped into it last week and now they're stuck with each other.) Where's home for you? (Hesitation – Nuvema? Nacrene? – then: Aspertia.) Sometimes Gwyneth asks him something in return. He lives and works in Driftveil, obviously, but he's from Opelucid originally. He hasn't been home in a long time. His parents, sister, old friends, all prefer to keep him at arm's length, after what he's done. He understands, but Gwyneth sees that it cuts him up inside. Maybe it even burns his arms. It's not her place to guess.
Traffic thins out after the big junction after the drawbridge: most of these trucks aren't going dead east to Nimbasa, along the Route 5 highway; it's narrow and densely intermeshed with the trainers' trail, and there are strict limits on what's allowed to go up and down it. Some arcane agreement brokered between the League and the Unova Transportation Authority. Gwyneth watches the trees lining up on either side of the road, catches glimpses of kids walking the paths beyond, and aches for the past.
She digs her fingernails into the palm of her hand. Don't be stupid, Gwyneth. You got things to do.
Ahead, the outskirts of Nimbasa come into view: satellite towns and commuter villages, tennis courts and squares of parkland. This area is nicer than its equivalent across the bay in Driftveil. Nika's Aunt Natalya lives here. It's why she avoided coming here on the first leg of her trainer journey – she wanted to get away from her family, not walk into another branch of it. It was an unnecessary precaution. She turned out to be far more open to the idea of Nika having a girlfriend (and Gwyneth in particular) than Nika's parents were.
Gwyneth wonders if Aunt Natalya (it is impossible to separate her from her auntness; she bears it like a title) would be willing to put her up for a night. Probably not, she decides. That's okay. Gwyneth will survive. All you have to do is not die, right?
Jackie asks where he should drop her off. Gwyneth takes a very, very long time to answer.
They stop at the west side bus depot. Jackie probably doesn't believe that Gwyneth has the money for a ticket, but she's got her pride, useless though it might be, and she won't admit to being stuck. Besides, she's halfway there now, isn't she? She's been lucky, she's nearly died and has no more money, but she's halfway there. She's going to make it the rest of the way too.
"Well, this is my stop," she says, as Jackie pulls over. "Thanks, dude. It's real good of you to do this."
"Ah, no problem," he replies. "Gotta make up for that misspent youth somehow, huh?"
She smiles politely and gets out, the venipede surging up over the lip of the doorway and down onto the sidewalk.
"Thanks anyway," she says, and goes to retrieve her bag. She hoists it and the venipede back onto her shoulders, then raises a hand in response to Jackie's wave as he pulls out and away down the street.
Gwyneth takes a big breath of car exhaust fumes and lets it out again. She looks at the depot across the road, the buses coming in and out between the concrete pillars.
The heat is starting to fade. She should put her jacket back on but it's too much effort to take her backpack off. She feels like a lot of things are too much effort right now. She feels like static.
"Sharks gotta keep moving," she says, and starts walking.
