NINE: WOUNDS

Thursday, 15th September

Gwyneth falls asleep for a little while. She wakes up embarrassed and self-critical, feeling herself an ageing intruder in this place, and is glad to find it's nearly four o'clock. Hoping no one watches, and knowing that they do, she levers herself out of her chair and goes off in search of Dr. ze'Naarat's office.

"Good," says the doctor, when she arrives. "You're here."

"Yep," agrees Gwyneth. "I am."

Ze'Naarat tells her that the blood tests have been run, and she was right, Gwyneth's hand is infected. Not badly (although she implies with her tone and her viciously mobile eyebrows that this is nothing short of a miracle) but still, infected. She needs to rest, and to keep taking those antibiotics for a while.

Gwyneth listens calmly. None of this is really news to her; she's known for a long time now that her hand was much worse than she pretended.

"Okay," she says. "I have to be in Humilau by the twenty-second."

Ze'Naarat looks at her with an expression that says she was waiting for Gwyneth to say something this ridiculous. For once, Gwyneth can't find it in her to be angry. She's right. It's exactly as stupid as it sounds.

"And I guess you're walking there, aren't you," she says. It is not a question.

"Yeah," replies Gwyneth anyway. "I am."

Ze'Naarat takes off her glasses and polishes them with a small cloth and quick, deliberate motions. They soften her face; she looks meaner without them. Gwyneth finds this obscurely comforting. She knows all about unfortunate appearances.

"Not that it's any of my business," she says, "but what is there in Humilau that's so staggeringly important?"

"I have a wedding to go to."

Ze'Naarat blinks in surprise. It's hard to imagine Gwyneth having friends, family, the kind of people who drag you to weddings. Gwyneth has seen this reaction before. She understands. Sometimes, she's surprised herself.

"I see," says the doctor, slowly. "Yours, or …?"

"No. My brother's. And my … a close friend." Gwyneth could kick herself for the hesitation. When is she going to learn to figure out what to say before she starts speaking? "I can't miss it," she says, to cover her awkwardness. "That's not an option."

"I have to advise against it anyway," says ze'Naarat, returning her glasses to her nose. "Even if you do go, your venipede is in no condition to travel, as I understand it."

"I'll go when she is."

"That might not be any time soon."

"You can't change my mind," says Gwyneth simply, tired of this game. "I'm going to Humilau."

Ze'Naarat gives her a long, searching look. She looks like she is starting to have misgivings, or like she had some already and is now allowing them to come to light.

"It's a long way," she says. "You aren't well."

"I'll make it." Gwyneth hears how hollow it sounds even as she says it. She'll make it, will she? What possible evidence does she have to support that claim?

"Will you now."

It is not a question. Gwyneth doesn't answer.

"All right," says ze'Naarat. The words seem off to Gwyneth. Something about the way she says them. Maybe the tone isn't right. "I'll mark you down as taking that under advisement."

"No," insists Gwyneth, and she knows she's being childish but she comes out with it anyway. "Don't."

Ze'Naarat raises her eyebrows.

"I see," she says again, although neither she nor Gwyneth is entirely convinced that she does. "Well then, Ms. ze'Haraan. I think that covers everything."

"Okay. Thanks, then."

Gwyneth is about to get up and go when the doctor speaks again.

"You can stay here until you leave, of course," she says, without looking up from her computer. "Try to act young. And when Heaney's on duty at the desk, stay out of his way. He doesn't like us and I don't think he'll take kindly to you being here fraudulently."

There it is again: that grudging, graceless kindness, spat out almost as an afterthought. Gwyneth thinks that this is how she herself would offer help if their positions were reversed. She thinks she gets it. She is wrong, but still, the thought is calming.

"Thanks," she says.

Ze'Naarat waves her words aside with professional coldness.

"Someone has to think about your health," she says acidly. "It's just my job, Ms. ze'Haraan."

Gwyneth isn't sure she believes that, but it doesn't matter. If she thinks about it too much she'll only feel guilty that it was her who ended up in the Pokémon Centre and not whoever it was that she saw sleeping in the alley last night.


She spends some time up in her room, feeling drained. No reason, particularly; she hasn't done anything more strenuous than sit and watch the rain. Ordinarily she would be irritated at what she sees as this weakness, but today she can't be bothered. She is, she knows, a very angry person, but only sometimes. Other times, she's barely even a person. Today is one of the other times.

There's a clock on the wall whose hands go round and round. Gwyneth watches it from underneath heavy eyelids, and falls asleep again around half five. She wakes crumpled on her bed, starts to drag herself upright and then decides it isn't worth the effort. Her eyes close again, and the next time they open the room is dark and cold.

She shuts them again, but she can tell right away that sleep has fallen away from her entirely. It's okay. This is nothing new. She's amazed she's slept as much as she has done. Normally she's up half the night, staring at her window and wishing she had curtains. It isn't that she's not tired, it's just that she is awake anyway. She's been like this for years, although it like everything else has got worse since the break-up.

Gwyneth sighs and gets up. She closes the curtains, like she always wants to back in her apartment, then draws them again when the hanging folds of fabric start to unnerve her. There's her face in the lamplit glass, hovering in front of the rain. Hello, Gwyneth, she says silently, and watches Gwyneth say it back.

She doesn't want to be here right now. She gets her key card and goes downstairs, prowling around aimlessly like a street cat. Someone that Gwyneth suspects is Heaney is at the desk, so she avoids the lobby, creeps into the lounge like the world's crappiest ghost. Some kids are still up, although she was expecting that, really; she stayed up too late herself as a trainer, like everyone else, just because her mom wasn't there to make her go to bed.

Gwyneth stands there for a few minutes, watching them talking and playing with sleepy pokémon. A watchog tugging at the sleeve of a girl who's fallen asleep. Two boys playing rummy, a krokorok trying to imitate them by holding a fan of cards in its claws. A couple hidden away in a corner, whispering with the quiet intensity of teen lovers.

Aân Hen. Except it's not any more, is it? That's over. And none of this is hers any more, and it never will be again, because she proved that she can't be trusted with it. She's still proving it now. Still getting innocent creatures hurt.

She cannot stay here. She tries to turn and go back to her room but she finds she cannot go there, either.

She hangs there in the doorway for a long time, and then, defeated, goes back upstairs to her reflection and a fruitless attempt at sleep.


Friday, 16th September

In the early morning, when the dawn light is just beginning to show over the rooftops of the East Bank and the rain has slowed to a vague drizzle, the lounge is emptier. Gwyneth has slept a little and stared at her window a lot, the way she does when she can't sleep back in Aspertia, and she is more than ready to change her surroundings for something else. And now she can: most teenagers don't get up all that early, and Gwyneth has the lounge all to herself.

She makes her way over to her armchair and sits down, opens Three Nights in Opelucid. It looks like she's going to get a chance to read it after all. She isn't enjoying it as much as she was before: she liked the mystery and the magic, but now a vacuously heterosexual romantic subplot is rearing its ugly head and taking up more space on the page than Gwyneth believes is necessary. It was already a very cis novel. It didn't have to be so damn straight as well.

She supposes Shauntal Grimes is only writing what she and her readers want of their fiction. There must be someone out there writing something that allows, even if only fleetingly, for Gwyneth to exist. But who?

Gwyneth continues reading anyway, page after slow page, to see if the protagonist will put her damn man aside for a second and get on with finding the killer. After a while, she becomes aware that she is not alone. She looks up, and sees a face watching her over the back of the sofa.

There are options here. Gwyneth's initial impulse is to ignore the kid, as she does with most of the many people who watch her, but something makes her hesitate. An angle. An expression. A sudden understanding.

She puts the bit of paper she's using as a bookmark in between its pages and rests Three Nights in Opelucid on her knees.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi," says the kid.

Neither of them move.

"I'm Gwyneth."

"Tor."

"Cool name," she ventures, offering Tor an opening for that one joke, and to her relief Tor takes it.

"Thanks, I chose it myself."

"Same." It's a little early in the morning for it, but Gwyneth tries to smile. Tor smiles back, showing shyness and much better teeth than hers.

"What are your pronouns?" asks Tor, which is a question nobody has asked Gwyneth since she hung out with some of Nika's university friends and which she hopes Tor knows better than to ask of most people, for both Tor's sake and that of the other person. She could take it badly, and she nearly does, but Tor is young and so she does not. Besides, it is not the question it sounds like. It is a request that Gwyneth ask the question back.

"She," answers Gwyneth. "You?"

"They." Tor unfolds. They are taller than Gwyneth, which she feels is frankly embarrassing, and just as bonily shapeless. There are coral colours in their hair, big glasses on their nose and an expression of vague disbelief on their face. Gwyneth doesn't even need to think about what Tor sees when they look at her. They see an adult trans woman in a Pokémon Centre; they see a trainer. They see a future that they did not know was open to them.

Gwyneth thinks back to the kid at the bus stop in Floccesy. She can do this, right? She can be the woman with the ultra ball. She has to be, this time. There's no margin for error here. She thinks briefly about just getting up and leaving, to escape the pressure, and immediately knows she cannot. Tor's here, and whatever the hate says to her, whatever the envy, Gwyneth can't walk away from that fact. It's the duty of the adult to the kid on a trainer journey, and it's another, deeper and more compelling even than that.

"You a trainer?" she asks, as Tor perches on the edge of the sofa. They feel awkward, Gwyneth can see it in them, but they aren't. They are so much better at this than she was. She loves them for it, and resents them. "Stupid question, I guess," she adds, and Tor smiles again.

"Yeah," they say. "I am. Are you?"

"Kinda," says Gwyneth, carefully careless. "I'm travelling across Unova with a pokémon. Going to a wedding and I figured I'd walk." Smile, goddamn it, Gwyneth, smile. "I'm kinda rusty but I'm getting there."

"That's so cool," says Tor, eyes wide. "Are you like doing Gyms on the way, or …?"

She shakes her head. Keep smiling.

"Nah, I got a deadline. Got to be there by the twenty-second, so not a lot of time for sightseeing. Besides, I wasn't very good at that stuff. My" (and she hesitates, because she never describes her this way to strangers, but with Tor she thinks she wants to) "girlfriend was better. She got four badges, I got none."

"Yeah?" Tor looks amazed. Gwyneth is moved, partly to sadness and partly to affection. "I'm not so good either …"

Gwyneth makes a dismissive gesture with her good hand.

"Ah, I wouldn't worry about it," she says. "'S not about winning. Or okay, it kinda is, but the journey's the really important thing." She knows that will sound convincing: it has the force of all her faith in trainer journeys in it. "That's why I'm doing this again," she says. "It was the journeying bit I missed."

"Yeah! I mean, I started in Striaton and it's been so cool just getting here. Even if I haven't managed to beat Elesa yet." Tor looks sheepish. "I thought my sandile would be enough, but, uh, I guess you don't get to be a Gym Leader without figuring out how to cover your weaknesses."

"Yeah," agrees Gwyneth. "My girlfriend, Nika, she led with her sandile in that fight and he lost right away. In the end she had to try to take down a zebstrika with a vullaby." Inspiring. Encouraging. Make them believe.

"And did she?"

"Huh?"

"Take down a zebstrika with a vullaby."

"Oh, hell no, she's good but she's not that good. She won on a technicality. Got it so annoyed it ignored Elesa's commands and charged out the arena."

"Wow. It's like … thirty seconds out of the arena, right?"

"Ten. They changed it in the fifties, after Liat Morgenstern and that weavile."

Gwyneth is not sure if that's right, but she wants to seem like she knows. Not for her own sake, though. For Tor's.

"What pokémon do you have?" she asks, and Tor's eyes light up like Saadiyyah's when she asked her the same question.

"Well my sandile Belle, like I said," they reply. "And a sigilyph from the – the desert."

They look suddenly nervous, and Gwyneth does her best to reassure them.

"Neat," she says. "Takes a lot to distract them from their patrols."

No one is sure if the Henuun made the sigilyph or not, the way they made the golett and golurk; too many records were destroyed when the library at Hilaan burned. What's clear is that there is nowhere else in the world where you find them, and they patrol the streets of the dead city without apparently realising that it has fallen. Sometimes if they see a trainer, usually a Henuun one but not always, they try to report to them; sometimes they even agree to work with them like any other pokémon. One reason Gwyneth never went to Hilaan is that she was afraid that the sigilyph would not recognise her, and also afraid that they would.

But one recognised Tor, clearly. She makes a conscious effort not to be bitter about it, about this white kid who is chosen, and she almost succeeds.

"Yeah, I heard that," they say, clearly brimming with pride. "I'm trying to see if I can use her barriers like directionally, to deflect attacks? 'Cause you know, if you just put up the barrier someone can break it, but if you try to like bounce them off it, that's – well, you know."

"That's cool," replies Gwyneth encouragingly. "Sounds like you got a way to beat Elesa then, if you can make it work."

"Yeah."

A pause. Enough? Enough: she doesn't want to make things weird. Gwyneth gets up.

"I'm gonna be here a couple more days while my pokémon gets healed," she says. "Say hi sometime."

"Yeah, I will!" says Tor eagerly. "See ya, Gwyneth."

"See you, Tor."

Gwyneth leaves. She has not asked why Tor is lurking around in the lounge before dawn. Probably the same reason she is.

She smiles to herself, bittersweet. This is what it's all about. Tor must know by their age what things are like. What Gwyneth can offer them, all she can offer them, is the hope that they might survive anyway.


Thursday, 8th September

Gwyneth does not sleep well, the night before she gets the news about the wedding. This is not unusual for her. Very often, she will wake in the small hours, for no reason she can name. For a while she will lie there, trying to get back to sleep, and sometimes it works. Mostly it doesn't. Mostly she gets up, in the end, and walks across the room to get a glass of water and stand by the window, looking out. In the electric light, she sees almost nothing except her reflection, and the impression of darkness all around it, and she cannot help but realise how perfectly she is framed there in the square of light, for her shadow-self out there in the mirrored room.

It watches her as others do. It makes her. It teaches her the same old lesson, the one carved into her bones from twenty-four years of being shown her place.

Other children did not like Gwyneth. They didn't know what was wrong with her, but they knew that something was. (It is best, in matters of education, to get to kids young.) They avoided, mocked, bullied. Ordinary hardships in an ordinary life; nothing for which Gwyneth lets herself feel pity. Later on it got worse. When she was twelve she got beaten up by some boys a year or two older. They were not clear about their reasons. Some slurs were thrown around, some homophobic nonsense, but then, that kind of thing always is. Probably they didn't know why they did it themselves, but Gwyneth could now, twelve years on, go back and tell them: she's Henuun (even if she isn't), and she's a trans girl. Never one or the other, but always and damningly both.

It's like a chemical reaction. These things come together and make something new, something singular. Its name is Gwyneth and it is poison.

Gwyneth tried to be a person, she really did, but even back then nobody believed her.

The light isn't good enough for her to see the eyes of her reflection, for which she is always grateful. In the clear light of day, when their gaze is unavoidable, she sees how nauseous she makes herself, just as she does everyone else. She's lost jobs over this. (She's too aggressive, they say, uncomfortably, although she is careful to be as polite and deferential as she can force herself to be.) She was nearly expelled after being beaten up that time, and she wasn't even out then. When people hurt her, it's her fault. Just by existing she is provocative, unnerving; how could you blame someone for reacting? Just look at her. Just look.

Gwyneth looks. From outside, in the ghost-room beyond the glass, Gwyneth looks back.

Her mother wasn't okay with it. She pretended to be but Gwyneth overheard her crying. She doesn't know if she ever came to terms with it; she never asked.

Hilbert never said a goddamn thing.

Tonight, as so many other nights, Gwyneth looks from the window to the glass of water in her hand and imagines hurling it to the floor, imagines the broken shards scattering across her bare feet. She imagines bloodstains on the carpet.

She drinks her water and puts the glass in the sink and goes to watch TV until she falls asleep.


Friday, 16th September

After breakfast (where from her corner she sees Tor, eating on the periphery of someone else's group of friends), Gwyneth returns to her venipede. She looks much the same, although the nurse tells her she is doing well. Gwyneth nods and stares. She thinks she sees the venipede wave one of her antennae, but she might be imagining it.

The machines beep; the ventilator hisses. Gwyneth stands there until she feels like her head might burst with guilt and the thousand tiny noises of the ward, and then she leaves again.

For a while she reads some more of Three Nights in Opelucid, but it's starting to depress her, so she leaves it alone after twenty minutes or so and goes outside instead for some air.

The drizzle is the very fine kind that makes the air clammy and seems to get under your skin. It's colder here in Nimbasa than it was in Driftveil or Castelia; not as bad as Aspertia, but still, Gwyneth shivers a little in her thin jacket and clumsily zips it up one-handed. It wasn't a particularly warm jacket to begin with. Now, after losing a substantial amount of its lining to the fire, it's even worse.

She walks down the street, concentrating hard on the sensation of her feet on the ground. It might stop her drifting and it might not. Given how unreal this all feels still – the bed, the medical care, the cripplingly injured venipede – she has her doubts. But she tries anyway.

Huddled under a dripping rooftop, pigeons and unfezant alike fluff out their feathers and stare sullenly into the grey air. Two seagulls tear at trash and take off suddenly, mad-eyed and shrieking: the trash bag has stirred, opened anaemic eyes and rustled softly away down an alley.

Trash bunny, thinks Gwyneth, with a sentimentality that surprises her. She was going to catch a trubbish, back when … well. Back when. Something about their cutesy ugliness appealed to her, although she doesn't know what she would have made of the smell. Maybe it wouldn't have mattered. She's fine with the venipede, after all.

There aren't a lot of people out, although the streets aren't deserted, either; what pedestrians there are walk with purpose, shoulders hunched and heads down: people who have somewhere to go and are braving the rain to get there. Gwyneth is the only one idling. It's kind of nice, actually. In weather like this, everyone withdraws into their own little world, and no one has even a glance to spare for her.

She walks the block or so north to the river, then makes her way east along the South Bank, watching the water. Today it looks black and writhing, surface stirred up by the impact of a million tiny raindrops. At her approach, a group of ducks drift towards her, hopeful, and then when it becomes clear she has no interest in feeding them they disperse across the river.

It's pretty wide, really, reflects Gwyneth. If you'd asked her a week ago how big the Calnorna was, she would have underestimated its size by a long way. It cuts a swathe through Nimbasa, creates a corridor of clear space down which she can look and see the theme park, dull and dark behind a mist of raindrops, and on the northern bank a couple of the Coldside theatres. She thinks that if she went out onto the bridge and looked east, she might even be able to see the forest.

Not today, though. Visibility is awful.

She stands there for a while, feeling the weight of the rain in her hair and her jeans, and then decides she's had enough. Fresh air is overrated anyway. All the good things in life are indoors.


In the Pokémon Centre lounge, Gwyneth makes some tea to warm herself up and feels stupid for going out at all. You're not well, Gwyneth. You get lucky and someone lets you in here and then you go right back outside again? Yeah, okay. Sit down, stay warm, rest. Idiot.

Her armchair is occupied by a kid and the fluffiest growlithe Gwyneth has ever seen, and there are no other free seats except for a few on the sofas; since going there would involve actually sitting next to some kids, Gwyneth avoids them all and takes her tea up to her room instead, where she lies on her bed and tries to read her book. When this effort fails, she plays a game on her phone where there's a coral reef and you slowly populate it with fish and water-types. There isn't actually any gameplay as such, it's just soothing. The slow movement of vibrant tropical wooper back and forth across the screen is almost hypnotic.

Gwyneth used to be a video games kind of person, but not for a long time now; she doesn't know where her computer is any more. She thinks she probably sold it, or maybe it broke, or maybe it just got left behind with the stuff that never made it out of the apartment when she got evicted. It's difficult to say: she wasn't really in the right frame of mind to keep records. Much of that time she barely remembers. Besides, that was always Nika's job. She organised things, and Gwyneth muddled along in her wake, feeling guilty about not being able to corral her life the way Nika did hers.

In retrospect, Nika was unusually good at that kind of thing, Gwyneth thinks. She kept a diary – actually wrote in it almost every day, week after week, for as long as they knew each other. Who does that? Gwyneth likes sometimes to think she could keep a diary, but she knows she can't, really. What would she say? Dear diary, today I went to work and was more of an asshole to people than I should have been. No, she has nothing to say. But Nika always does.

She remembers her filling the pages in her round, looping writing in Pokémon Centres and on buses, moments when there was time to sit and reflect. That is in fact her memory of the bus ride to Driftveil: Gwyneth sitting by the window, watching the bay go pass with wide eyes, and Nika scribbling all her teenage secrets next to her. She'll cringe, rereading it a few years later – dear diary, let me tell you about the coolest girl in the world, Gwyneth ze'Haraan – but she'll reread it all the same. And Gwyneth will reread it with her and laugh and call her a dork, which Nika will agree is, based on all the available evidence, very true.

But on that bus ride Nika writes all her clichés down with the fervour of real belief, only looking up when Gwyneth points out particular points of interest: a pelipper tipping its head back, a fish flashing silver as it struggles in its beak; a dark shadow high up in the sky that might be a hydreigon (and wouldn't it be cool if it was?); the view of the Sierra Castaña to the northwest. Only some time after the bus has crossed the bridge and the views have faded to the asphalt wasteland of the multi-lane highway does she click her pen closed and put her diary away in her bag, and Gwyneth is silently impressed by how much writing she has managed to squeeze out of the last couple of days. She isn't sure she could make a whole page out of it, not even in her big, scratchy handwriting.

It's okay. Gwyneth is starting to see a pattern in all this, in her persistent failure and Nika's effortless success. She is starting to think that maybe it's okay if she gets it all wrong, because she could help Nika get things right, instead. Some people are chosen and some are not, but there's nothing to stop those not chosen from being sidekicks, even if they can't be heroes.

She says nothing about this. She is afraid that people will think it's sad, and she doesn't think she could bear to be so misunderstood: this isn't a tragedy, it's a relief. Rather than chosen, she can be free. And while later she will come to the conclusion that freedom is not uncomplicatedly positive, that if anything is possible then awful things can happen just the same as good ones – while all of that looms in her future, here and now, on this bus moving slowly through the suburbs of Driftveil, she is conscious only of a weight lifting from her shoulders.

It doesn't last. Some shadows are too long to escape from so easily, and Hilbert's is longer than most. At the Pokémon Centre, while Nika is busy fussing over Britomartis whose irritation, it turns out, is partly down to having picked up a kind of parasitic rust that infests steel-types, Gwyneth overhears someone talking about something happening at the Pokémon League. For a moment, she stands there, unsure she wants to know, and then, because even if she doesn't want to she has no choice, she has to know, she goes to the computer room and brings up the Pan-Unova News website.

And there it is. Live updates: Unova League Under Siege. The Gym Leaders are being called in right now; some kind of structure has been photographed rising out of the ground around the League building; N has been seen, along with a huge black pokémon not known in Unova for three thousand years. There's a photo right there of him landing at the League entrance, dismounting, looking back towards the person taking his picture, guilelessly photogenic. He looks grave; he looks like a king. And that there, hunched so that he can slip from its massive shoulders to the ground, its swollen tail crackling with arcs of blue lightning, is a thing out of legend.

He has been chosen. The country is gripped by indecision: Gwyneth sees it playing out in the comments. What do we do? This is Unova, right there. The legendary dragon that stands, in an iconography inherited (or stolen) from the Henuun of three millennia past, for all the ideals of Unova itself. It has selected a champion. What do we do? What can we even do?

The military is mobilising, along with the Gym Leaders, but there is opposition, hesitation. This is only one dragon, but it is still half of the pair that created Aksa. It is not something to be engaged lightly. And more than that, how can we be sure whose side is right?

It could go one way or the other. Gwyneth abandons the computer and sprints to the lounge, where what feels like half the trainers in Driftveil are clustered around the TV. There's helicopter footage of the League, and the strange building clamped like a parasite onto its flank. Nobody can see N; the commentators are repeating the same meaningless facts over and over, trying to understand what it is they're looking at. Everyone knows that what they're really waiting for is for someone to win. Alder or N? Hardly anyone has even seen Alder for the past few years. Didn't his main partner die? What kind of a trainer is he, compared to N, to someone chosen?

There are muttered arguments and no conclusions. Everyone is waiting, in the Centre, in Driftveil, all across Unova, and in this tense, strange in-between time, the nation does not know any more what is right or wrong. All it would take is a victory, one way or the other, and the world might turn upside-down. If Zekrom chooses Plasma, how can anyone deny their right?

Gwyneth feels sick and exhilarated and shivery, all at once. The thought comes to her, watching the news, that she might have been right – and at the same time, she feels equally strongly that nothing as horrible as what she did in Nimbasa could ever be right. She looks at her hands and sees them trembling violently, chipped orange nails jumping like crickets across her field of view, and she wishes Nika was here to hold them.

When the Gym Leaders arrive, the cameras go inside. All the famous pokémon are there: Clay's excadrill, Stanton; Brycen's beartic, Saskia; even Lenora's ancient stoutland Rex, mostly retired from battling now but evidently the only one she trusts for a mission this important. And there too (Gwyneth realises with a shock of what feels like terror) are Hilbert and Cheren, their serperior and emboar waiting by their sides with the wary patience of old soldiers. Drayden of Opelucid speaks to them – something Gwyneth cannot hear – and signals for the news crew to back off. Before they stop filming, Gwyneth sees Hilbert taking something from his bag that gleams white as hot metal in his hands.

She does not yet know about the light and dark stones. Nobody does; the information won't be released for some time to come. But she doesn't need to know that to get the significance of it. N and Hilbert; black and white; Zekrom – and Reshiram.

In the interim, while everyone is watching and waiting and listening to the people who are on computers shouting out the live updates as they come, Nika arrives, reading the instructions on a bottle of unguent for Britomartis, and Gwyneth latches onto her immediately.

"Oh, okay," she says, sensing her desperation and hugging back. "What's going on?"

"It's my brother," says Gwyneth, shaking in her grip. "And Team Plasma. They're at the League."

The wait is awful, but it's easier now. Nika does not – perhaps cannot – know exactly what is going on in Gwyneth's head, but she can tell that this is even bigger for her than it is for everyone else. She stays close and holds her hand without caring what people will think. As it happens, nobody even notices: everyone's attention is on the news, and what will come next.

It takes an hour and a half, and then the presenter visibly starts, pressing his finger to his earpiece. There are reports coming in. They are going live to the inside of the Plasma building.

And then there they are and there he is, Hilbert, his serperior slumped with awful stillness on the tiles of some great hall but his hand on Reshiram's side, Zekrom sprawled before them with its eyes closed. N is clinging to it, eyes low and wounded, and Ghetsis Harmonia, earnest, avuncular Ghetsis Harmonia, rages and screams beside him like a captive demon. He shoves N out of the way and the boy falls without a word; he throws a poké ball and releases a hydreigon, an actual goddamn hydreigon, and the camera jumps as the news crew tries to back out. But Hilbert smiles and points and Reshiram flicks its head forward like a snake, unsettlingly fast, and the next thing anyone knows the hydreigon is on the floor, raising a cloud of soot laid down by the battle between the dragons. It whines piteously, heads flailing. It does not look or sound like Unova's apex predator.

Harmonia does not give in. He never gives in. He rants and rails and glares in different directions with his mismatched eyes, and he releases more pokémon, bouffalant and bisharp and more, and perhaps they are more afraid of him than they are of Reshiram because they obey his command to swarm it; and though the great dragon dispatches them all in seconds the distraction works. When the smoke clears, he is gone.

There is a long, terrible moment where nothing happens and nobody knows what to do. And then Hilbert steps forward and offers N his hand.

The camera does not show his face but Gwyneth knows he is smiling his fucking enigmatic smile.

Someone says something and the video feed cuts back to the presenter outside. He looks as stupefied as everyone watching at home.

"Ladies and gentlemen," he says, in a slow, wondering voice, "it would appear that we have a new Champion."

It's over. Plasma is shattered. Nika touches Gwyneth's face and Gwyneth realises for the first time that she has been crying.

"It's okay," she promises her, holding her hands tightly so they cannot shake. "Hey, Gwyn, it's okay. I'm here, okay? I'm here."

Gwyneth lets herself fall into her arms, and together they leave the room and this strange, awful day for somewhere and somewhen else.


Well.

Gwyneth sits up and sighs. She rubs her forehead. (Feeling: a spot, a scar, the ring in her eyebrow.) She glares out of the window at the rain as if it is responsible for everything that she just thought of.

"It's lunchtime," she tells herself, to break the silence, and goes back downstairs.

She eats a little and steals a little more, then goes back to check on her venipede. There isn't much change, but Gwyneth thinks her shell looks maybe the slightest bit more solid, although she has to admit that it might just be that all the flakes have come away now. The nurse – the same one from the first night she arrived – tells her that she's the toughest venipede he's ever seen, and they're planning to try to wake her soon.

"When?" asks Gwyneth.

"We'll let you know," he replies.

"She's going to be okay, right?"

He hesitates. The answer, when it comes, is honest.

"If we can wake her up, she'll make it," he says. "If not … I don't know. I'm sorry."

Gwyneth thinks of saying something like I can't lose her, except that's a cliché and anyway she doesn't know if it is true. She hopes it is, but despite what Shane thinks of her she has always been sceptical of her own capacity for loyalty.

She thinks, this is my fault, and feels the hard knot coil a little tighter inside her.

"Okay," she says instead, a reply as monstrously inadequate as she is, and she leaves.

Back in the lounge, Gwyneth evicts a trio of cottonee from her favoured armchair and applies herself to Three Nights in Opelucid again. She likes stories, but this has never seemed to her to be the best way to tell them. She didn't know what that way might be, until Nika told her about Troy. And then she knew: she wanted to hear them told. Not just read out; Gwyneth finds it as hard to concentrate on audiobooks as she does on their paper counterparts. Told, half remembered and half improvised. Told, like Nika tells her myths.

Gwyneth knows that these are unrealistic expectations. It's okay. Most of the time, she makes do with memories: late nights, torchlight, the shadow on the wall of Nika's big, expansive storytelling gestures. Romans and Greeks. The light of passion in her eye.

The rest of the time, she reads books and feels bad for being dissatisfied with them. She's twenty-four, after all. She should have figured out how to enjoy reading by now.

She pushes through Three Nights in Opelucid, sentence by sentence, and does not think of Nika or Team Plasma or the venipede, and with a vast effort of will she forces time to pass.


That evening, she eats with Tor. She doesn't mean to, but she sees them sitting alone at a table in the otherwise bustling canteen, and though she tells herself that this is none of her business something in her refuses to let it go. So she sits opposite them, hi kid what's up, and they smile in such obvious relief that Gwyneth feels terrible for even considering sitting anywhere else.

"I'm okay," says Tor, and probably they think she is fooled, so she decides not to disillusion them. "I was working on that barrier thing with Vega, and I think she figured out what I wanted. She popped a reflect open in between Belle's teeth right as she was biting and bounced her across the room."

"That sounds neat," replies Gwyneth. "Belle okay?"

"Yeah, she was just startled." Tor looks excited. "I think maybe I'm gonna go challenge Elesa tomorrow. We can do the same thing with light screen, so I oughta be able to flick off the lightning."

Gwyneth considers. It could work. She's never seen anyone do this before, and she has watched a lot of IBN over the years, seen hundreds of trainers with hundreds of pokémon, but she doesn't see why it wouldn't work. She tries to force her brain back into old habits: think, Gwyneth, what are the weak spots? Why might this fail?

"I think that might work," she says slowly, the trainer's part of her mind creaking from long disuse. "But you got to think about two things. One, can Vega react fast enough to raise the barrier against an electric-type? And also I guess does she have the stamina to keep putting them up and taking them down again. And two, that might let her shrug off the electric attacks but how's she actually gonna take the other pokémon down?"

Tor chews thoughtfully for a little while, then swallows.

"Uh," they say. "I guess I wasn't as prepared as I thought … um, hang on, lemme think …"

"'S okay," says Gwyneth, clumsily chopping a sausage in half one-handed. "No rush."

"I mean her psychic powers are pretty strong," says Tor. "She put barriers up and took them down again all day today while we were practising."

"Yeah?" Gwyneth wonders, privately, how powerful Vega is. How long do sigilyph live? How long has she been out there in the desert, protecting the city? Sigilyph are known for their iron discipline and dedication, but it's still always a risk when a rookie trainer ends up with something too strong for them. People tend to get hurt that way.

"Yeah." Tor ponders the matter a little while longer. People pass behind them, taking trays to and from tables, and Gwyneth senses eyes on the two of them. It bothers her, much more than if they were only staring at her. "There is this one thing," they say eventually. "Do you know a move called stored power?"

"That's … the one that gets stronger the more your pokémon's powered up?"

"Yeah. It like detonates the energy you've built up. So you think I could have her use it on the barriers?"

Gwyneth blinks. She feels hopelessly un-trainer-like. What was she thinking, trying to coach Tor? They must know so much more than her, just through doing the damn thing.

"I don't follow," she says. "Sorry."

"Blow the barriers up," clarifies Tor. "Like parrying with a stick of dynamite."

"Oh. Uh … well, I dunno. Never used that move myself. Guess it's worth a shot."

"Great!" Tor beams. "I'll give that a go after this, I guess. If it doesn't work I still got her regular psychic attacks. Those are pretty strong too."

Gwyneth takes a sip of her water and smiles.

"Sounds like a plan," she says. "Good luck, kid."

A short silence, made up of the clatter of cutlery and the babble of teenage voices. Gwyneth eats, as slowly as she can. She has a bad habit of bolting food that she's been trying to kick for years.

"What pokémon do you have?" asks Tor, after a while.

"Venipede," she says, swallowing. "Haven't had her very long. I … let my old partners go at the end of my journey. Had to. They were too used to battles to want to hang around while I went to school and work."

It's uncomfortable, for all sorts of reasons: the improvised lie, the reminder that the trainer journey doesn't last forever. Again, that sense of shame returns, again like a millstone grinding at her gut. Couldn't she think of anything better to say?

"She took a bad hit from a darmanitan the other night, though," she says, trying to cover her awkwardness with more words. "'S why I'm hanging around here. She'll be okay, she just can't travel yet."

The confidence in her voice surprises even her with its plausibility. She sounds like she has it all together. She kind of wants to laugh, but not in a good way, and she has to hold it back to avoid startling Tor.

"Right," they say, a little nervously. (Thinking, perhaps, that maybe this will have to end after all, someday.) "What did you have when you went on your first journey?"

Gwyneth does laugh then, but only a little, and as lightly as she can.

"A minccino and a munna," she says. "Blossom and Corbin. Never evolved. Like I told you, I wasn't all that good at training. I didn't get any badges."

"This will be my first," admits Tor. "If I can get it."

"Did you try in Striaton or Castelia?"

"No way. You know like eighty per cent of trainers fail their first challenge? I mean, so did I, but like I wasn't gonna go for the first Gym I got to."

"Yeah, they said that back when I was your age too." Gwyneth scratches her head. "I think you'll be okay. They're not too hard on you if it's your first Gym. And you've done your homework. You'll do fine."

"Yeah?" Tor looks hopeful, excited. Gwyneth has the impression of someone who is not used to receiving encouragement. She wonders, briefly, about their parents, and grits her teeth. There are ways in which even a supportive family can choke you.

"Yeah," she says. "Elesa's probably only ever faced a couple of sigilyph before. She won't know what hit her."

"You really think so?"

Gwyneth smiles. She feels faintly sick with the knowledge that Tor really believes in everything she tells them. But how can she take it away?

"Yeah," she says. "I really think so."

Tor smiles back, and then above their heads the PA system chimes.

"Gwyneth ze'Haraan to ward 2," it says. "That's ward 2 calling Gwyneth ze'Haraan."

She's dead, thinks Gwyneth for one heart-stopping moment; and then she curses herself for being so jumpy. The venipede's not dead. Didn't they say she was doing well? She's fine. She's the toughest venipede they've ever seen.

Gwyneth takes a deep, slow breath. Okay.

"I better get over there," she says, getting up. "See you around, Tor."

They wish her luck. She thinks about that as she walks away, pockets full of bread rolls, and repeats the words to herself. "Good luck, Gwyneth." It doesn't sound as good when she says it.

In the ward, Dr. Marsden is waiting. He greets her by name and tells her he'll get right to the point: he wants her permission to try to wake the venipede up.

"Done," says Gwyneth, before he's even finished speaking. "Do it."

"Just a minute, Ms. ze'Haraan, I need to make sure you're making an informed decision here―"

"The nurse said if you could wake her she'd be okay," she says stubbornly. And, silently: if you can wake her I haven't killed her.

"Yes, it's very likely she will, but it's a risk, and as her partner we need your permission before we can attempt it. Which I can't ask for until you know enough to make the decision."

"Okay," says Gwyneth, resisting the urge to snap at him. "So tell me what you need to tell me."

He speaks, and she waits, and she does listen, even though it doesn't really matter to her what he says, and when he's done Gwyneth speaks again.

"Okay," she says. "Wake her up."

Marsden hesitates for a moment, and nods briskly in response.

"All right," he says. "We'll begin preparations. I can have someone let you know when we're done, or―"

"I'll wait," says Gwyneth. "I'll just go outside."

He does not argue with her. Probably he has worked out by now that Gwyneth is an irritating person with whom to argue. He nods, and says okay, and Gwyneth goes. She sits on the chair out in the corridor that she sat on the night before last when she drank cold coffee and cried, and she chews her thumbnail with short, savage movements of her jaw.

"C'mon," she mutters. "We got a wedding to go to, asshole."