TEN: VULTURE

Friday, 16th September

Late that night Gwyneth is called back to the ward by an exhausted-looking Dr. Marsden. He is smiling, though, and even before she gets there Gwyneth feels her face start to crack into a grin as well.

On its table, the venipede stirs and glares and is most definitely awake.

"Hey, asshole," says Gwyneth, sitting down next to her. "Shoulda known you were too stubborn to die that easy."

Her warning rattle is weak, and she does not seem to have the energy to move, but she fixes her single eye on Gwyneth with all the usual malice.

"Feeling's mutual, believe me." Gwyneth reaches out and the venipede throws her remaining stamina into weakly headbutting her knuckle. She can't tell whether this is hatred or affection. She's okay with that. She has the same difficulty herself, sometimes. "I got something for you, but the doctor says no food yet. Speaking of which, you've been scamming me, haven't you, dude? He says you can go weeks between meals, and you've had me feeding you every day." She shakes her head. "Asshole."

The venipede clicks in what is possibly insectoid self-satisfaction. Gwyneth tries her best, but she can't stop herself from smiling. She's happy to see her up again. So dumb, isn't it? This is a bug, a literal pest, a venomous little monster that eats trash and tries to kill people in back alleys. And she is the misguided pokémon liberator, someone who promised herself she'd never inflict her dubious partnership on another pokémon ever again, never expose anything to that kind of harm. But she can't deny it. She's angry about it, sure, but still, she's happier than she has been since the break-up. And it's only partly because it turns out that she hasn't gotten the venipede killed after all.

Gwyneth knows this isn't saying much, but it's an improvement, and she's in no position to turn that down.

"Thanks," she says, turning to Marsden, who is hovering in the background with that expression on his face that people make when they see unforced affection. "I … yeah. Seriously. Thanks."

"It's my job," he says. "Don't mention it."

"Will she be able to travel any time soon?" Gwyneth asks. "I dunno if you heard, I'm kind of on a deadline …"

"Yeah, Lee – uh, Dr. ze'Naarat – she mentioned." Marsden pauses for a second, and Gwyneth wonders if he's in on the fraud. He definitely suspects, even if he isn't. She hopes he isn't planning to do anything with this information. "I think," he says carefully, "that we can expect her to start recovering much faster from here on out. Venipede metabolise fast, and her shell is already starting to harden from the supplements we've been giving her. She won't be battling for weeks, but it's not impossible that she might be able to leave in a day or two, as long as she's well looked after."

"She will be," promises Gwyneth, with mixed shame and pride at the fact that she seems to really mean it.

"There is the matter of her eye surgery," Marsden goes on. "I don't know if anyone's told you, but the shell that's grown over her lost eye is malformed. There's a lobe of chitin pressing on her brain. She's definitely not strong enough for surgery now, but I recommend you get that seen to within a few weeks. There's not enough research been done into the function of venipede brains for me to say exactly how that's been affecting her, but I know enough to tell you that it needs sorting out sooner rather than later."

"Okay," says Gwyneth, nodding. "Okay, I will."

The venipede hisses to herself, and Gwyneth finds her eye drawn back to her. She seems bigger now that she's awake.

"I'll leave you to it," says Marsden understandingly, and then it's just the two of them again. Just like Gwyneth was starting to get used to.

She sighs, and reaches out to run her finger along the contours of the venipede's forehead. She feels antennae run delicately over her skin, tasting its oils.

"Dude," she says. She doesn't have anything else left to say.


Gwyneth sleeps pretty well, for once, and sure, she dreams that one dream again, but it's okay. Her venipede's back, and she's okay.


Saturday, 17th September

In the morning, Gwyneth counts up her bread rolls, apples and bananas, and figures she's on track to make it through White Forest. She's only got the one water bottle, but the rivers and streams there are supposed to be very pure. She could refill it from them when she needs to. There's probably a risk of some awful disease, cholera or whatever it is you get from bad water, but whatever, she'll run it. Can't be much worse for her than the crap she usually eats.

She spends the morning with her venipede, not really doing anything in particular, just sitting there, sometimes talking and sometimes not. She watches the venipede slowly grow more and more lively, and is reminded of watching Nika's pokémon recover after a battle, the way you could almost see them healing, their energy coming back with supernatural speed. Gwyneth has heard the urban legends like everyone else – the blissey that got eaten down to a skeleton and regenerated its entire body, the quagsire that grew not just a new limb but a new head – but there's a little bit of truth to them. Look after them, make sure they get the right food and care, and most pokémon will shrug off wounds that would cripple or kill anything else. Fighters, every one.

Gwyneth looks into the venipede's eye, at the flat, brute cunning gleaming at the back of it, and wonders. She struggles to imagine what it must be like to cling onto life with that kind of ferocity. The venipede probably only survived because she was too stubborn to die. If their positions were reversed, Gwyneth doesn't know if she would have made it.

By lunchtime, the venipede has started chewing the padding on her table, adamant that if she isn't getting any food she can at least destroy something, and Gwyneth feels okay with leaving her to get herself some lunch. She looks around the canteen, but doesn't see Tor, and wonders if they're at the Gym right now. She hopes, with a sudden fierce emotion she didn't know she had, that Elesa is good to them. Gwyneth doesn't know the positions of the Gym Leaders on people like her and Tor. She never had to face them and find out.

After she's done eating and putting stolen food away in her backpack, she checks on her venipede, which is still trying and failing to destroy the padding specifically designed to be proof against that kind of thing, and heads out for some air. She doesn't like hospitals, or doctors, or anything medical whatsoever, and recently she's spent more time around all of these things than she is comfortable with.

Nimbasa today is grey and damp, a diffuse cold spreading out through the city like a fog, but it isn't raining. Wet leaves carpet the sidewalks underneath the trees, torn loose by wind and rain and the approaching autumn, and Gwyneth goes slow, aware that she has only one arm with which to adjust her balance.

She moves through the rhythm of the city's weekend, observes the South Bank crawling all around her with wholesome, middle-class life. She sees dogs and herdier being walked, kid trainers scuttling around like insects, children in brightly-coloured coats being taken to the playground. (Their mother shepherds them away from Gwyneth, as if her wrongness is catching. She closes her eyes momentarily and does not respond.) Dozens of ordinary lives being led. Gwyneth misses that. Adventure is painful and expensive and exhausting. Her old job in Nacrene was tedious, but at least it wasn't difficult. And she had a proper home to come back to in the evenings.

Stopping on the riverbank to lean on the railing and watch the water moving, Gwyneth glimpses a shape moving across the sky out of the corner of her eye, and looks up to see broad wings and a lozenge-shaped tail: the distinctive silhouette of a mandibuzz. She's never really been into birds, but everyone in Unova can recognise a mandibuzz or a braviary. And Hekate gave her plenty of practice.

Gwyneth remembers when Hekate came back. Nika released her in the end, as she did all of her partners, but Hekate turned up again after a couple of months with another mandibuzz, sitting on the roof of her parents' house. Some days they were gone and some days they were there, but they followed Nika through every change of address she ever made.

Nika said, this is an omen, Annie.

Gwyneth said, why?

Nika said, you know mandibuzz are all female, right?

They stood there for a moment in the warm Humilau sun and watched the two birds thrusting nesting material into the lee of the chimney.

Gwyneth said, giant lesbian vultures?

And Nika laughed and said, yes, Annie. Giant lesbian vultures.

Hekate's probably back in Humilau now, Gwyneth thinks; Nika's almost certainly gone home by this point, and she and her nameless mate will have followed, to perch on the roof of her parents' house and live off fish for a little while. Then when she leaves for her honeymoon they'll disappear into the wilderness again, like they always do when Nika goes abroad, and, tracking her by some sixth sense known only to pokémon, return a few days after she comes back.

She sinks a little further onto the railing and closes her eyes. Nika on her honeymoon with Hilbert. Why would you even think about that, Gwyneth. Why the hell.

With an effort, she pushes herself upright and trudges on. It's best not to think about why she's doing what she's doing, or what she'll find when she gets there. Better just to do it, and consider the consequences later.

She's no fool. She knows this is bad advice. But she also knows she'll never get to Humilau if she doesn't think this way, so. Delusive hope it is.

The last time Nika went abroad, at least as far as Gwyneth knows, was with her. They went to Kanto, on the savings they'd built up over the first two years of Nika's job. Nika had been abroad before, of course, to visit family in Mexico and Russia – she is a woman who knows her history, who is (if stumblingly) trilingual – but it was Gwyneth's first time on a plane, let alone out of the country. She felt so stupid and naïve, fumbling her way through the intricate ceremonies of the airport, staring out of the window at the clouds.

She sighs. She has to stop doing this. She knows perfectly well that this is no way to live her life. It's just that she doesn't know how to change it.

Suddenly Nimbasa seems oppressive, the grey bulk of it, the gleam of lights from the distant theme park. She can't wait to get out of here, to some place that has no history for her. White Forest will be a relief: she's never been there before. No old ghosts lying in wait among the trees.

She turns and starts heading back towards the Centre. Over the river, the mandibuzz calls out, long and mournful, and begins to fly west towards the sun.


Dr. Marsden has good news for her.

"I'm really happy with how she's improving," he says later that afternoon, as the two of them stand and watch the venipede crawl slowly around her table. "You have good instincts, Ms. ze'Haraan. You must've caught the toughest venipede in Virbank."

Gwyneth smiles briefly.

"So when can she leave?" she asks.

"I'm not in on Sunday mornings, but I'll have someone check on her early tomorrow," he says. "And if she's good then, well. As long as you keep her on the supplements and meds like we discussed, I see no reason why she shouldn't travel."

The venipede hisses. She's been allowed food now, on the grounds that withholding it was making her unduly destructive. Gwyneth thinks the joke is on the Centre staff: they fed her, and she's still trying her best to shred the table cover. The thought gives her a small, vicious satisfaction, which is probably not a good thing but whatever, it's fine.

"Thanks," she says. "I appreciate that."

"Not at all," replies Marsden. "Good luck to the both of you." He leaves – there are probably other more pleasant pokémon that require his attention – and Gwyneth sits back down in the chair by the venipede's side.

"You hear that, dude?" she asks, as she trundles past, displaying her panel of plastic shell like a flag. "We're getting out of here."

Does she understand? Gwyneth isn't sure. It doesn't really matter. What does is that this reprieve is almost over. She's been lucky so far, with Shane and Saadiyyah and Rood and Dr. ze'Naarat; she's bought and begged and guilt-tripped her way halfway across the country. But this is where it gets harder. White Forest – okay, she'll hike that, but she has to get there first, down Routes 15 and 16 and across the Marvellous Bridge. Then there's White Forest to Undella, miles and miles of tangled rivers that make the ground soft and marshy. She might be able to hike that, too, but she's not sure she can make it through fast enough. And then, of course, there's Humilau itself, and god only knows how she's going to manage that leg of the journey.

Gwyneth says to herself that she needs a plan. This is not a substitute for coming with one, but it's all she's got right now.


As she leaves the ward, Gwyneth is accosted by ze'Naarat. She is dressed casually, although still somewhat austerely. Gwyneth guesses that maybe she has Saturdays off. In which case, why is she here at all?

"Dr. Marsden tells me you plan on leaving tomorrow," she says, and Gwyneth knows then that she was right: Marsden is in on this. It's a relief, in a way. It means she doesn't have to worry about it. "I'd like to advise against it."

"Didn't we have this conversation already?" asks Gwyneth, a little more acidly than she intended. "Thanks for everything, seriously. But I'm going."

She starts walking, and ze'Naarat moves too, keeping pace with her.

"Is there no other way for you to get there?" she asks. "Your body is under a lot of stress and a long hike is more or less exactly what it doesn't need―"

"No. No other way."

"No family or―?"

"Haven't spoken to them in nearly two years."

"Then why are you going to your brother's wedding?"

"Why do you care?" snaps Gwyneth, stopping in the middle of the corridor. "I got my reasons. What's it to you?"

"I'm a doctor," retorts ze'Naarat, finally snapping herself. "It's my job. Or do you really think you can make it all the way across Unova on foot and come out in one piece at the other end?"

Gwyneth curses silently. She should have known there was something behind her interest in her. Nobody gives you anything for nothing.

"Yes," she says stubbornly, although she knows her hesitation has given her away. Ze'Naarat must notice, but she displays none of the triumph Gwyneth was expecting. She does not react at all, in fact.

"You came in because someone attacked you," she says, without any trace of emotion in her voice. "Would you have come if they had hurt you, not your venipede?"

(No.)

"What, to a Pokémon Centre? Obviously not."

Ze'Naarat looks away. Gwyneth realises suddenly that she is not as old as she thought she was. Late twenties. Thirty at most.

"Gwyneth," she says, and there is a note of kindness in her voice now, so warm and natural that it seems almost strange to think she was snapping at her earlier. "What are you really trying to do here?"

There is a long, long pause. Someone edges awkwardly past them, trying hard to pretend that they haven't seen any of this.

Gwyneth shuts her eyes.

"Hell if I know," she says, with a sour bravado that even she cannot definitely identify as real or fake. "I'm just going to Humilau."

Ze'Naarat's expression does not waver.

"Why?" she asks.

"Fuck you," says Gwyneth quietly, and leaves.


Later, while she is eating slowly in the canteen and thinking about ways to get out of town before Dr. ze'Naarat tries to speak to her again, Tor comes up to her, looking excited. Over their head is something that looks like a geometric suggestion of a bird, beating spindly wing-analogues too slowly to sustain the illusion that they are what keep it in the air and staring with an eye that looks like it's been painted on.

"Hey!" they say, sitting opposite her. (They have brought no friends but their sigilyph, Gwyneth notes. She is unsurprised, and depressed.) "I did it!"

She forces her thoughts of travel and ze'Naarat away and summons a smile from somewhere.

"Yeah? That's great, kid. Your deflection thing work out?"

"Yeah, it did!" They look delighted that she asked. "All the lightning attacks kinda dissipated when they got bounced off, so Elesa tried to get her emolga in close with U-turns but like it was going really fast. So when Vega pushed it out of the way it kept bouncing right out the arena."

"Neat." Gwyneth considers what to say next. Above Tor's head, Vega holds position, motionless but for the beating of her fake wings. Gwyneth does not think she has ever seen anything so emphatically not a bird. "Elesa would've brought two pokémon for you, right? Emolga, and …?"

"Eelektrik. But like there was nothing it could do. Vega deflected its lightning and then it tried to wrap round her but she wouldn't let it get close enough. It went on so long Elesa had to concede. Said she hadn't brought the right pokémon for the job and didn't even know what they would be, anyway."

What a battle it must have been. Gwyneth is half sorry she didn't see it, although she guesses it might end up on IBN: if trainers are okay with it, their challenges get filmed for training purposes, and sometimes really spectacular ones get televised. By the sound of it, Tor's battle meets the criteria. It's not every day a Gym Leader has to admit that they simply don't know how to win.

She's jealous, she realises, but not the way she expects. She wishes she was Tor, sure, but more than that, she wishes she was their age and travelling with them. They're going to do well, just like Nika did, and Gwyneth loved watching her win more than she ever did winning herself.

"That's pretty incredible," she says in the end. "You don't see that every day."

Tor grins shyly.

"Oh, it was okay," they begin to say, and Gwyneth, determined to make them feel their victory for what it is, interrupts:

"Nah, kid, I mean it, it's incredible." Big smile. Come on, Gwyneth. You can manage that. "You know how often a Gym Leader says they're so outclassed they don't even know what to do? Like never. And she's been doing this, what, fourteen years? Since she was fifteen. It's not like you beat that new guy, Cheren." (She allows herself a small, vicious satisfaction in casting him as the hapless rookie.) "You did real good. You should be proud of that."

Tor is looking at her in a way that makes her deeply unhappy. No one has said anything like this to them, ever. She can see their hesitance, their unwillingness to believe that anyone might actually want to praise them like this, balancing against their desperate desire to take her words at face value.

She tells herself that this is okay. This is what trainer journeys are for, right? This is why they matter. This is her job, as the one not chosen.

"I don't know what to say," says Tor, after a while. "I mean … thanks, I guess. Yeah. Thanks."

Gwyneth smiles. Tor is too young to see how brittle it is.

"No problem," she says. "You earned it."

Here's to you, kid. Here's to the fifteen-year-old who hangs out with Gwyneth because she of all people is the friendliest face in town.

Sometimes Gwyneth is surprised that nobody else seems to realise why she is as full of hate as she is.


That night she is less okay than the last; that night, she dreams the dream again, only this time Tor has sharpened that other part of it, the one that dwells on her own failure. Because isn't that the way with dreams? So much meaning, so much pointless, mundane, personal-to-the-point-of-boredom significance, that you can dream them over and over and keep finding new angles in them from which to attack yourself. Tonight, Gwyneth struggles to answer Juniper for a different reason altogether: she knows what will happen. This question is the prelude to her being given a partner and sent off to become a trainer. But this has all already happened, and Gwyneth already knows that she will hurt her partner, cast her out and destroy her ball. She knows that she will betray the trust that Juniper is placing in her, and overturn every expectation that she will share in even the smallest way in her brother's success.

So when Juniper starts talking, asks her name, if she's a boy or a girl, Gwyneth hangs her head in shame and cannot speak. How can she? She is the most gullible person in Unova, the one who fell for Team Plasma's spiel, the one who liberated her pokémon from the one human they really loved. She isn't worthy of this, not like other kids, the Tors and Cherens and Biancas and Saadiyyahs and yes, the Nikas, all those who believe. She is not them. She is not chosen.

Yes, it's the girl thing, and yes, it's the Hilbert thing. But it's this as well, and so when Hilbert steps out of the shadows to take her place, when he arrives to be chosen, Gwyneth is so relieved that she could cry. Until she remembers that she hasn't avoided anything. Until she remembers that it has all already taken place, and it can never be undone.


Sunday, 18th September

In the morning she gets ready to go. She's been here long enough; she's still got half the country ahead of her, and only four days to cross it in. It's been nice to have a bed, and food and hot showers, but it can't last. This isn't her place any more. She's no trainer, and it's time to move on.

She takes everything out of her bag, tips out crumbs and lint, then refolds clothes, wraps food and puts everything back. It takes a while, with her hand, but she manages. As she sees it, she doesn't have a choice.

After breakfast, which she eats quickly to avoid bumping into Tor again, she heads down to the ward, where she sits down by the venipede and waits for the nurse to come.

"Hey, dude," she says. "I forgot yesterday – you can have food now, right? Here you go. Courtesy of the Pokémon Centre canteen."

She holds out her hand and opens her fingers to reveal a chicken nugget she saved earlier. The venipede looks at it, then at her, then takes it delicately between her forelegs and begins to nibble.

"Yeah, you're welcome," says Gwyneth, with a vague aggression that might be real or might be fake. "Just hurry it up. I could do without the doctors chewing me out for feeding you junk food."

Her worries are unfounded. The venipede demolishes the nugget long before the nurse arrives to examine her. When he does, he pronounces the venipede fit to travel, as long as Gwyneth takes good care of her, and Gwyneth nods seriously.

"Yeah," she says. "Don't worry, I will." She owes her that, if nothing else.

And that's it: time to check out. Gwyneth hoists the venipede gently up onto her shoulder, trying not to touch the burnt part of her shell, and hands her key card in at the front desk. It's a wrench to see it go, and to know that with it goes access to all the creature comforts she'd just started to get used to, but it's okay. She has Humilau in her future. That's got to be worth giving this up.

It's getting harder to believe that, after her last conversation with ze'Naarat. But Gwyneth might as well be the patron saint of lost causes, and she knows she won't stop. No matter what anyone says, it's all just a matter of putting one foot in front of the other, right? Just like living is a matter of not dying.

Gwyneth puts one foot in front of the other, and she does not die, and she walks out of the Pokémon Centre into the grey light of day.


She is not entirely without resources. She has a plan, and although it isn't a very good one it does at least exist.

Here is the thing about this stretch of the journey: you can't walk it. Route 16 has no trainers' trail, just a stretch of highway linking Nimbasa to the Marvellous Bridge. Why would it? There's nothing there. Well, there's Lostlorn Forest, but that's in the middle of nowhere, and if you want to get there you drive or take one of two buses, the regular one for the Unovan public or the League-subsidised one that takes trainers free of charge.

This is the bus that Gwyneth rode on nine years ago with Nika and Delarivier. It has four stops: Nimbasa Pokémon Centre, Lostlorn Forest, the start of the Route 15 trainers' trail, and White Forest.

This is the bus she is planning on catching.

There are a couple of problems with this idea, but if Gwyneth gets it right, she thinks, none of them should be insurmountable. One: she isn't a trainer. Okay, but she kind of looks like one, right? With the backpack and all. And anyway, doesn't everyone keep saying that only a trainer would have a venipede? But then there's two: she doesn't have a trainer card. She doesn't even have her old one any more; she lost it years ago. Lost, as in deliberately forgot where it was, so that she could be rid of it without having to go through the act of throwing it away.

This is a more difficult one, and she's going to to have to rely on luck to get around it more than anything else. There are a lot of trainers taking the subsidised buses in the summer, and from what Gwyneth remembers the drivers often get lax about checking cards. Oh sure, they're meant to check them all individually, but when there's three dozen squawking kids and half a zoo of pokémon clamouring to get on, you find your patience gets thin fast. There were plenty of times when the driver just waved them through, eager to get going and keep the bus as close to on time as was possible. It's not like there was any oversight, really. Nobody intending trouble gets on a bus with a bunch of kids and pokémon who've spent the last few months learning how to fight, not if they want to get off again with all their limbs still attached. (Some people might get on that bus and ride it out somewhere remote, follow a child till they were alone, but then, Gwyneth guesses they could just as easily do that by taking the regular bus.)

But some people probably got free rides that way. People who were short, and had a pokémon, and looked like they'd been walking around in the wilderness. Well, Gwyneth checks all the boxes.

It will work, or it won't. She'll have to pick her time carefully, find a crowd to lose herself in. It's fine. She'll save enough time travelling by bus that she can afford to spend a few hours staking out the bus stop, picking her moment. If she manages to get on. If the driver doesn't look at her too closely. There are trainers Gwyneth's age, and they are entitled to ride the buses, but they're not common, and if a bus driver sees one they'll always check their card, just in case.

She takes a breath. She slouches down the road and takes a seat in the bus shelter.

The venipede rattles uneasily in her ear, and she lifts her carefully down onto her lap. She seems okay: a little slow, a little unsteady, but okay.

"Here we go, dude," says Gwyneth, stroking her shell and wondering if she can even feel it through the layers of chitinous armour. "White Forest or bust, I guess."


The morning passes. Ordinarily Gwyneth would listen to some music, but she doesn't want to waste the phone battery. So she sits in silence and watches as the buses and their passengers come and go.

They leave at ten after the hour, every hour. The first two have a handful of passengers, but after that, as the clouds begin to clear a little and the teenagers in the Centre start to wake up properly, the line at the bus stop thickens and swells into a crowd. Gwyneth keeps her head down in the corner, letting her hair mask her face, and listens to the chatter: so like I tried out that rapid spin thing against Courtney the other day―and he said it should be okay if she rests it―did you see that guy's sigilyph? Yeah, I know, how the hell did he get one of those anyway―so what's the deal with this Lostlorn Forest place? Like is there anything there or is it just woods?

When she hears the reference to Tor, she feels her muscles tense. It's not right. When you do that to her, that's just life, but when you do it to someone else it's wrong. Maybe they never spoke to Tor, maybe they just assumed, but that's what it always is, isn't it? Just an assumption. A perfectly reasonable assumption, and never mind that someone ended up hurt.

Gwyneth scratches moodily at her bandaged arm. Let it go, she tells herself. She does not, and it goes off to join the pile of other things that fester deep inside her.

The next bus has just come round the corner. She stands up and gets her backpack ready.

"This is it," she mutters to the venipede. "Try to look trainery, okay dude?"

The bus pulls up to the stop, and Gwyneth inserts herself carefully into the crowd, halfway along its length. It's not so hard. She's spent enough of her life in cities to know how to queue aggressively, and she's able to get to where she wants to be without too much effort. Now she just moves forwards with the rest of them towards the open doors, trying to look young.

Nearly there. She doesn't hear the driver asking for cards. She risks a quick glance up from the sidewalk, and sees kids pouring on steadily, without stopping. Okay, she thinks. Okay, this might just work. She's third in line now. Second. And then …

And then she's stepping up through the doors, face turned away, walking as fast as the crowd will let her―

"Hey," the driver says. "You."

The world seems to stop for a moment, the whole earth dying on its axis; the kids' chatter fades and the sun disappears, and Gwyneth, heart in her mouth, turns through air that seems to drag at her like molasses towards the driver.

"Yeah," he says, looking straight past her at someone about to get in. "Put that in its ball, would ya? We ain't got room for anything that big."

"Oh, sure," says the girl. "Sorry. Ryszard? Back to your ball."

And the sawk disappears and Gwyneth lets out a long, shaky breath. Goddamn it. She was this close to a heart attack.

She hurries away down the bus before anyone notices her lingering.


Gwyneth sits somewhere in the middle, by the window. A forgettable kind of place, she hopes. She's not the only person over the age of eighteen on this bus – there's a guy with a wingull over there who must be around her own age – but she still stands out, and she'd prefer not to. She thrusts her bag down by her feet, settles the venipede on her lap, and waits for the footsteps to stop and the bus to get moving.

The girl with the sawk sits next to her. This is a good thing, because a few seconds later Gwyneth sees Tor get on board the bus, and the girl provides some measure of cover. Gwyneth shifts the venipede out of the way and bends down as if to get something from her bag, watching the aisle out of the corner of her eye, and only when Tor is past does she straighten up again. They're heading for the upper deck. Good. They won't see her there.

Gwyneth wonders briefly why she bothered. Tor isn't going to rat her out, after all. And they would have liked to sit with her, she thinks, as unlikely as it seems. Maybe she would have liked to sit with them as well. It's not like they're bad company. Although Gwyneth usually is, if she isn't putting in the effort to be nice, and this is a long bus ride: she's not going to be putting in the effort.

It was probably for the best, she decides, and tries to relax into her seat.

Nimbasa is grey today, with occasional spots of brightness where shafts of sun break through the clouds. There is definitely an autumnal feel to the air now. Camping in White Forest is going to be cold, and possibly wet. And Gwyneth doesn't even have a tent. It's okay, she tells herself. There are lodges, aren't there? Like the one she and Nika stayed in just off Route 6. If she moves fast, and gets the route right, she won't have to sleep outdoors.

If. Gwyneth half-smiles. If.

The bus chugs along slowly, unremarkable houses giving way to unremarkable offices that in their turn fade into suburbia. The kids chatter, inexhaustibly energetic. Next to Gwyneth, the girl has turned around and is talking to her friend over the back of her seat. Gwyneth listens for a moment, learns that she is called Daisy and her friend is Louisa, that they're super excited, that they heard there are zorua in Lostlorn Forest and how cool is that, and then tunes them out again, tired just from listening to them. How do they have this much energy? Something about it almost seems obscene.

Gwyneth turns her attention to the window instead, but the view is uninspiring. This is an empty land, a nowhere country that offers nothing to the spectator. Down here in the basin of the river valley, there is no prospect of seeing beyond the buildings, and in the suburbs the buildings are not worth seeing. Gwyneth thinks that even the first time she looked at a scene like this, she must have felt she'd seen it all before. Housing on an industrial scale. Lawn flamingos and cars. Middle Unova, ad infinitum. The scale of it all is exhausting. Gwyneth closes her eyes on it, and returns as always to the past.

Driftveil she remembers as being a good time, at least after the weirdness of Hilbert's great victory. It takes her a little while to get over it all; there are calls from her mother, excited-slash-terrified outpourings of emotion (because Hilbert never tells them anything, because the first her mother learns of all this is from the news and since she cannot get through to his phone she calls Gwyneth instead), and there is the electric excitement that pervades the country in general and the training industry in particular. It's tiring. Gwyneth spends a lot of time just sitting around, trying to figure out what the hell is even happening to the world. It's all right, she doesn't miss out: the whole of Unova is doing the same.

But it passes. The updates from the League stop being extraordinary soon enough, and people rediscover other topics of conversation. Nika ceases to have to block conniving journalists who have figured out who Gwyneth is and want to speak to her. (This kindness will go unrevealed until much later, when Gwyneth is in a position to be pathetically, furiously grateful, and when it will find a place among the dark thoughts that tell her Nika is more than she deserves.) And Gwyneth thinks to herself, okay it's over now, it's time to forget it and move on, and she is able to get back to something much more important: being young and infatuated, with absolutely no adult oversight.

This is much more fun than being Hilbert ze'Haraan's sister. She and Nika are over their initial awkwardness now and sliding back into their previous familiarity, except that this time it is a familiarity that comes with hands and eyes and lips and absurdly melodramatic teenage seriousness. One afternoon, while eating victory ice cream after Nika has thrashed several trainers who thought they could take the dorky fat kid with the braces, the poetry comes out for the first time: with a solemnity that only a child could manage, Nika quotes Sappho's Fragment 16 at Gwyneth and reduces her to a squirming, delighted-embarrassed bundle of nerves.

It will be agreed, later, that Nika is such a nerd. But that summer in Driftveil, it seems not nerdy but profound, as if the two of them were the first people ever in all the thousands of years since Sappho died to really understand what she was talking about. Because what do classicists know, or poets, or literary critics? What do boring old people really know about the important things? About Love, and Joy, and other capital-letter emotions? They promise each other that they will be different, that they will stay this way forever. They will never be old. They'll just burn out spectacularly in their twenties. It'll be great, you'll see.

In between their obsession (because it is one, because they are children and are still learning how to love), there is of course Nika's trainer career to get on with. Driftveil has a Gym, and it is known as a tough one. Gwyneth knows all the statistics by heart, and she could tell you that the Quake Badge is one of the least-frequently-attained badges in the Unova League. She says as much to Nika, and Nika shrugs.

"I'm here," she says. "And Clay's back from the whole thing at the League now. Might as well try."

So they go to the Gym, and Nika tries, and Nika fails. She gives it her all, and her pokémon, unused to losing, cling on so desperately to the fight that she has to recall them before they battle themselves to the point of collapse, but really Clay has the upper hand from the start. Down in the dim light of his subterranean chamber, he sends out an excadrill whose speed her team struggles to match. Her lead, Astyanax, does outpace it, just; when the excadrill launches its first attack, tearing across the arena in a whirl of edged steel, he gets out of the way and rips the ground apart beneath it with a bulldoze, knocking it out of its drill formation and forcing it to engage him on foot. But it's a close thing, and he doesn't have the staying power to make his initial victory stick. The excadrill knocks him down, again and again, and once he's out the match is as good as over. Britomartis is too slow, and Hekate cannot stand up to a single rock slide. Nika refuses even to send her out: there is no point getting her hurt over nothing.

Clay assures Nika she did well. Gwyneth, watching from the sidelines, decides she doesn't like him. What kind of a fight was that, anyway? The excadrill was clearly way too tough for Nika's team! (It wasn't, but Gwyneth is more loyal than she is sensible.) Clay practically cheated, using something like that. And the way he keeps calling Nika 'squirt' is so irritating. Doesn't he hear how condescending he sounds? (He doesn't, although Gwyneth is not the first person to have pointed this out.) And who even wears a cowboy hat? Does he know what century he's in? (He does, although his hat is the subject of several long-standing jokes among members of the Unova League.)

Nika herself is not fazed. She knows she isn't unstoppable, even if Gwyneth doesn't. But she lets Gwyneth fuss over her indignantly anyway. She thinks, and she is aware that she probably shouldn't say this to her face, that it's kind of cute.

Besides, the winning isn't the point, is it? Her pokémon are with her because they want to grow, and they are growing, Quake Badge or not. Astyanax is by now a full-fledged krokorok, and Hekate's wings are coming in fast; she is clearly not far off adulthood. Even Britomartis, her rust dealt with, is starting to grow heavy and slow, and Nika suspects the day is coming when she will shed her baby armour and emerge an adult bisharp.

Gwyneth sees all this and knows that Nika is a good trainer, and a good person. She's looked after her team, given them the care and training they wanted. Even Ajax the lillipup: she knew he didn't want to fight, and so she sent him home again, over the box network, to become the pet he is more comfortable being. Gwyneth knows that when she looks at Nika she looks at someone who could never have liberated her pokémon, and though in some obscure sense she hates and fears this she also loves her for it, for being what she cannot.

It's not perfect. It's okay. Nothing ever is.

They hang around Driftveil for a while longer, Nika and her team winning more matches than they lose and getting better with every one. They visit parks and museums, although there are relatively few of either in this city, where culture sometimes seems to be an afterthought. They go to the historic marketplace, and Nika buys souvenirs while Gwyneth watches, aware of the finite amount of money her League grant gets her. (Nika offers to buy her a ring she keeps coming back to, and it isn't even that expensive really but Gwyneth is too embarrassed, shakes her head no.)

Summer waxes. Nika's skin darkens, and Gwyneth's hovers indecisively between tanning and burning. Driftveil gets hot and sticky. It's time to move on.

Route 6 is special: the wilderness trail here snakes north through the woods, crossing and recrossing the river as it winds down through the foothills of the Sierra Castaña, and the summer heat is muted in the dappled shade of the trees. They bump into a couple of other trainers, Kit and Nova, and they travel together for a time in the cool shadow cast by Nova's massive, lumbering beartic. Kit is uninteresting, and Nova is both several intimidating years older than them and unwilling to speak, but the weather remains beautiful and somehow, between the trees and flowers and occasional startled deerling running across the track in full summer regalia, everyone gets along.

Except that they don't, not for long. Gwyneth is very young still, and she passes as cis more of the time than she thinks, more certainly than she will when she is older, but after a few hours of walking and talking Kit works out what she is. He takes it as a personal insult, the way that people do; she sees it in his eyes and in an instant she goes cold and dead inside, the memory of a fist driving into her ribs hanging crystalline before her mind's eye. He does not say anything, not yet, because Nika is so obviously both her ally and partnered with stronger pokémon than he is, but Gwyneth stops talking anyway and walks on in silence, waiting to be hurt.

When they stop that night, Nika goes off to exercise Britomartis, who is growing heavier as her evolution draws nearer and so has been too slow to walk with them, and Nova retreats into her tent in silence. Kit looks at Gwyneth across the fire and she looks back. He speaks to her and uses a word that has six letters. She does not reply. She feels her misshapenness like a knife wound.

It could go further. It would not be the first time, and it would not be the last. (Hands. Eyes. A man in a police uniform and the memory of Martin.) It does not.

Kit does not need to make it go further. He doesn't even need to say anything else; that would only risk a confrontation with Nika, and anyway he knows with the brutal adult cunning that they are all beginning to grow into that Gwyneth will say nothing to her about this.

She comes back, and laughs and jokes with Kit, and Gwyneth sits there and tries to smile with them and wishes she could take hold of Nika's hand. But she knows the score. Kit has just reminded her, after all. She is the kind of thing that nobody touches, and if Nika's hand ever makes contact with hers it has to be choreographed, has to be plausibly deniable. You only touch her by accident, or to harm her.

Summer is here, she thinks desperately. Summer is here and everything is fine. But when she looks at Kit, devil-red in the firelight, she knows with an awful certainty that one day, autumn will come.


Nothing changes. It's okay. It hasn't killed her yet.

Gwyneth sighs and opens her eyes to trees, moving past on either side of the highway. Nimbasa's gone, then. Good. Too many ghosts in that town.

"Time for your medicine, dude," she tells the venipede, and reaches into her bag for the bottles. There are two: one of vitamin and mineral supplements that she's supposed to give the venipede twice weekly, when she feeds her (more often if she's battling); another of something to promote healing and shell regrowth, to be taken twice daily for the next three weeks. Venipede are incapable of taking tablets, or perhaps it's just so hard to get them to do it that nobody bothers, so the bottles contain not pills but what look unsettlingly like insect larvae. Gwyneth takes one out and the venipede twitches in her lap, instantly alert. She doesn't see the appeal herself – it's a big, soft chewy thing made of some kind of foam or gum that feels gross to the touch – but she supposes this is the kind of thing venipede are meant to eat, rather than chicken nuggets and overripe fruit.

"Here," she says, holding it out. The venipede is about to pounce, but she doesn't have the strength; she wiggles a little and then settles for seizing the fake larva in her jaws, first decapitating it in case it thinks of escaping and then chewing her way slowly down its length. "Don't get too used to it," Gwyneth warns her. "You don't get them forever."

The venipede keeps chewing, occasionally taking a short break to chitter quietly to herself. Gwyneth watches the intricate movement of her jaws and forelegs. It's strange how delicate she is. So vicious when she's hunting, and so precise and fastidious after the kill.

"Glad you like it," she says, and turns her attention back to the window.

Route 16 stretches out, long and dismal. The sun still hasn't managed to break through the clouds properly, and the forest either side of the highway looks dark and brooding in the subdued light. Occasionally, a raindrop bursts against the window. Gwyneth really doesn't envy the kids who are planning on going zorua-hunting. She very deliberately does not remind herself that she is also planning a walk in the woods.

After what feels like forever, the bus turns left off the highway and briefly climbs a hill before stopping at a wooden sign advertising Lostlorn Forest. Most of the kids get off here, including the girl sitting next to Gwyneth; in the crush of bodies pushing down the aisle, she doesn't see if Tor is among them. Without the chatter, the bus seems twice the size all of a sudden, and the few trainers who get on to replace them don't make much impression in the new emptiness. As the bus begins to move, Gwyneth sighs and untenses her shoulders. She didn't know how much she wanted the quiet till it came.

"Here, dude," she says, helping the venipede down onto the seat next to her. "Carried you long enough. Let me read my book now."

With her out of the way, Gwyneth can spread Three Nights in Opelucid across her knees and hold it in place with her good hand while she reads. Her other hand stays in the sling, itching and aching. The pain has got better – whatever Dr. ze'Naarat gave her is working – and it's mostly confined to her arm now, but it's still not something you can ignore. Gwyneth remembers breaking a tooth (she has never been good about dental hygiene) and going around with the pain for a day and a half, suppressing a wince with every breath and lying awake at night in agony, until finally Nika saw through her pretence and told her to go to the damn dentist, Gwyneth, what were you even thinking. This is not so sharply focused, but it's the same kind of persistent. Every time you think you might be about to forget about it, it comes right back with a cheery wave and a malicious smile.

The book helps distract her a little. The plot has picked up again, kind of, although it's still only halfway through the second of the three nights. Gwyneth wonders if anyone can really get this much done in a single night. She supposes it's possible, if you're organised. Pencil it into your diary: 8.18 pm, revisit crime scene, 9.07 pm, chase suspect, 9.44 pm, receive anonymous tip-off, 10.13 pm, send your natu off on a spying mission, 11.30 pm, decipher cryptic clue left by killer. Detective work by numbers. Kind of silly, really.

She keeps reading anyway. She figures she could use a little silly. That's why she picked the book up in the first place.

The forest glides by, impassive in the weak sunlight. Drizzle begins to spot the windows; stops; starts again. Some trainers talk quietly a few rows behind her. Gwyneth hears an I love you too, raises her eyebrows and concentrates on not listening any more.

She evaluates her progress. It's the eighteenth, and she should reach White Forest by the early afternoon. Two days, if she's fast, to get to the other side. She'll need to get a lift to Undella somehow; maybe she'll meet some friendly hikers. And then a boat, or a bus, or another kindly stranger with a car, to get her up to Humilau.

It's a long way, she knows. And it's country she's never travelled before, either on her journey or later, with Nika. She can say Aân Hen all she likes; she's not part of that Us People, not really. She has no culture and no tie to this land. She doesn't have the first idea about how to find her way through it fast enough.

It's okay, she decides. She'll just have to do it anyway.