ELEVEN: DOGGED
Sunday, 18th September
A little before noon, the forest falls away on either side and the bus pulls out into the sudden emptiness of the Marvellous Bridge. Below, the Arat empties out into the bay, millions of gallons of water rippling greyly in the dull light; above, the footbridge is deserted, dripping at its edges. On the right, just visible through the opposite windows, is the flat ocean horizon, further away than even seems possible. On the left, right outside Gwyneth's window, the Arat slowly carves out its canyon, a huge gleaming slash dividing the forest on the west shore from the hills on the east. Far off, some pale dots that might be swanna bob up and down on the water. Just as far beyond them, something big is moving across the sky, a light plane or braviary or visiting dragonite.
Gwyneth feels something lift inside her. She glances at the venipede, but she has fallen asleep on the seat, so she says nothing.
Okay. It's not all Aân Hen. But it's Unova, and it's beautiful, and from up here you can't even see all the people who make it into something worse.
It's a good thought, and she needs it right now. She holds onto it for the full ten minutes it takes to cross the bridge, and then, as the bus descends onto the plain and the view slips away behind her, she surprises herself by letting go with only the slightest touch of regret.
The land is different here. This side of the river, the soil is poor: no trees here, or almost none, just clumps of pampas and other grasses. Shrubs. Mostly just space, and the huge pale bluffs that rise out of it like ruined temples. Gwyneth has seen pictures before, has in fact been shown pictures by Nika, who has always meant to visit this place but never done it; still, it's something else to see it in person. The highway bends south, to go around the national park, and that puts the plain on her left, right outside her window. There's a thin mist here today, and the bluffs are monumental shadows in its depths. Gwyneth stares, and tries to remember what she knows about this place. Fossil-bearing clay. She has the phrase 'fossil-bearing clay' in her head. She doesn't know if that's what she's looking at here or if she's thinking of something else.
What she does know is the route taken by the trainers' trail. It hugs the north end of the plain, even winds up and down some of the bluffs. Gwyneth has seen the pictures online and in the magazines. She imagines walking it in the mist, a huge wall of something that might be fossil-bearing clay at her side, cold and grainy to the touch. And on the other side – what? Empty space. The plain, the shrubs. Spikes of pampas piercing the mist.
This is Unova too. There are the cities, the sprawl and the high-rise, and there is the space. A country wider than it is old. Millions of square miles and only a couple centuries of history.
There were people here before then, of course. But it wasn't Unova for them. That was someone else's history.
Gwyneth feels this is significant somehow, the relative size and youth of her country, but she has never been able to explain why. She always has had trouble putting big thoughts into words.
She closes her eyes, shutting out the vastness, and leans back in her seat. She's got a lot of walking to do. Probably rest will be more useful to her than philosophy.
The bluffs don't go on forever. On the other side, a few more hours away, is the slope down into White Forest, where the scale of the country is hidden behind an endless sea of gorgeously autumnal trees. Gwyneth actually starts when the bus gets close enough for her to see. Even on a grey day like this, the light picks out a million and one colours among the leaves, shifting and changing with every gust of wind. She hears a few gasps and some breathless muttering from the kids. It is beautiful, she concedes, and then, irritated at catching herself thinking it, she tells herself to see how beautiful it looks when it's midnight and she's shivering under a dripping tree.
"See that, dude?" she asks. The venipede is awake again now, sitting in her lap for the warmth. She might be looking out of the window, or she might not. Gwyneth isn't really sure how good insect eyes are. "'S our stop."
The venipede rattles quietly. She decides to take it as a response.
Eventually, they arrive. It's later than Gwyneth was expecting; four o'clock has come and gone by the time the bus finally turns off the highway and comes slowly to a halt in a grove of ash trees. She feels she ought to be ready to go by now, but even with her legs numb from sitting all day she can barely find it in her to get up. Apparently it takes more than a couple of square meals and some sleep to fix everything that's wrong with her.
Still, there's no choice, so she gathers her stuff and disembarks, keeping her face turned away from the driver. The air is cool, but not unpleasantly so, and it feels damp on her skin. She stands there and breathes it in, slowly, and then when she hears the trainers from the upper deck coming down she walks away behind a stand of trees. It's a good decision: from her hiding place she sees Tor among the kids getting off, silent and withdrawn. She watches until they and the others have disappeared down the trail, flashes of blue light popping in their wake as they release their partners, and then counts to thirty, just to be safe.
When she's certain she'll be travelling alone, she emerges and stands there for a moment in the empty road. It's so quiet: there's no wind, and almost no birdsong. The rumble of the bus has long since faded away.
Gwyneth exhales into the silence, and feels it settle on her like snow across the shoulders of a statue.
"Neat," she says, or breathes really, not wanting to spoil the calm, and starts walking.
At first it's good going. This was always her favourite part of the trainer journey: the woods, in the autumn when everyone else had gone home and nature was winding down towards winter. Silence like you don't get in cities. Sometimes Gwyneth thought she could hear Nika's heartbeat, but she's sure she was just imagining things.
And it's good, even now, to be here, moving forward beneath a canopy of fire-coloured leaves in the stillness of a dying season. For a few minutes, Gwyneth almost forgets why she's here, even where she's going. She walks, and listens to her footsteps and the tiny hiss of the venipede's breath, and the knot inside her, for a little while, unclenches.
But she can't walk away from the pain. It nags at her, gnawing on her hand and spreading with each repeated movement, grating in all her joints, and soon the spell breaks. She's tired, she realises. All she did was sit on a bus but it's true all the same. She's tired, and she still has so far to go.
She thinks about singing, but she can't remember the words to anything. Not even that Mountain Goats song that Nika played on repeat for three goddamn months that one time, until Gwyneth finally snapped and threatened to throw her speakers out of the window.
Probably it's for the best. She doesn't like her singing voice anyway. Too many cigarettes and not enough practice.
Gwyneth keeps on walking. The light fades faster than she thought it would; when she looks up between the branches overhead, she sees the clouds are thickening and growing dark. Rain, she predicts, and tries to hurry up for a while before her aches grow unbearable and she has to slow down again.
She supposes it doesn't matter. She's going to get wet either way.
Half an hour later, she reaches a fork in the path, and a big, cast-bronze map on a wooden stand that holds it up at an angle. It's pretty cool, really. More like a model than any kind of map Gwyneth's seen before. She can reach out and run her fingers over bronze treetops, imagining that the shadow overhead is being cast by her hand doubled into the sky by cartographic sorcery. She does not do this, but she does think it, which is close enough for her.
The map shows several ways she could go from here. Trails snake north and east, travelling in a broad loop through the middle of the forest. If she takes a left here, there's another trail a little further on that winds away at a weird angle and continues off the edge of the map; she guesses that's how you get here if you're a trainer walking all the way across the Route 15 plains, or a really dedicated hiker. There are a few others, but the one she's interested in is on the other side of the loop: the path going northeast towards Route 14.
Gwyneth looks at the scale at the bottom of the map. She measures it with her fingers, then moves them to the path, gauging the distances involved. She does some math, and winces.
The one saving grace is that there are designated places to stop. White Forest is a nature reserve, and you can't just go where you like, not least because a huge number of wild animals rear their young here, including grizzly bears and staraptor, and that means that there are also fiercely protective mothers. So there are rangers and lookout towers, and more importantly, campsites and lodges placed so as to limit people's wandering. Gwyneth can see several of them marked on the map around the edges of the loop, and a couple on the other trails, too.
"'S where we need to get to," she says over her shoulder, at the venipede. "Unless you feel like sleeping in the rain tonight."
The venipede doesn't respond. Gwyneth can't see her, but she thinks she might be asleep again. The thought makes her vaguely envious.
"All right," she says, shifting the weight of the pack on her shoulders. "Let's go, dude."
She takes the east path. It looks slightly shorter, although there probably isn't much in it. Less than twenty minutes after she starts down it, the wind starts gusting, tearing leaves from the branches by the handful, and then the rain begins. Not heavy, but persistent: the kind you almost don't feel landing on you, but which after a few minutes leaves you soaked right through.
Gwyneth swears, and then again, with feeling. She stops, disentangles her arm from her sling and takes the venipede off her pack, ignoring the blunt teeth of the pain in her hand.
"You probably shouldn't be getting all wet, in your condition," she says, tucking her inside her jacket. "Try not to stab me in the lung with your stupid pointy feet, okay?"
Click, replies the venipede. Gwyneth grunts and zips up her jacket as best she can. It's not really very waterproof, but it's the best she's got.
She keeps going. The birds have shut up and gone home now; there's no sound but the wind in the branches and the relentless patter of raindrops. When she breathes she inhales the rich, earthy smell of moist soil. It's a good smell, but you really need to have some shelter to appreciate it. Gwyneth remembers a rainstorm in Kanto that caught her and Nika by surprise; they stood beneath the canopy outside the restaurant, holding hands and cocktails, and watched Viridian Forest melting into sheets of water. In that twenty minutes, the smell was perfect. Today, in the fading light of an evening shower, it's just irritating.
Gwyneth remembers there was a bird that landed on the table, sheltering from the rain. Nika said look! and she looked, and it just pecked at someone's crumbs without even caring they were there.
Her hair starts hanging into her eyes, limp and rain-heavy. She tries to flick it away, but it just falls back again. Her good arm is busy holding the venipede; she thinks for a minute about taking her arm out of the sling to push it back, but somehow she can't face making the movement, so in the end she just leaves it.
She keeps going. It's cold in her wet clothes, especially now the sun is setting. Cold and soon to be dark, too. Why didn't she pack a torch? Because she didn't have one, she reminds herself. She didn't have one and she didn't think to buy one, either. Great planning, Gwyneth. You're doing a real good job.
The shadows lengthen. She's very wet now, jeans heavy and jacket ruined, and the venipede is starting to shuffle uncomfortably under her arm, her legs jabbing Gwyneth's ribs. Her bandages are soaked and her fingers feel like icicles jammed point-first into her knuckles. None of this is helping the pain at all.
But she knew this was going to happen, and she still came here, and whatever she does from here she's not getting any drier by stopping, so she carries on, even when she starts to limp. Between the mist of rain and the dying light she can barely see a yard ahead of her, and slowly the world shrinks, grows small and cold and dead. There's nothing out there, no forest, no campsite. There's a tiny bubble of cool air and water and she is stuck at its centre, limping and swearing and apparently unaware that the land beneath her is simply rolling like a treadmill, trapping her in place.
Gwyneth thinks of Humilau, of hot sand and a sky as blue as an untuned TV screen, and briefly finds herself laughing. It isn't the kind of laugh you enjoy.
In the dark she misses the turning. God knows what instinct makes her stop and turn back, questioning, but it does, and Gwyneth thanks it vehemently as she drags herself into a clear area of flat ground where you could, in better weather, pitch tents. At the back are two tin trailers with low, broad steps and ramps, intended for the physically impaired but tonight dark and abandoned, and Gwyneth almost falls into the unlit fire pit in her haste to reach them.
She half-falls against the door and finally, finally she is inside. It's still dark, still cold, but the rain is out there now, and she shuts the door on it with gratitude.
"Okay," she mutters, through stiff lips. "Okay, dude, we made it."
She fumbles across the wall, finds a light switch and flips it, to no effect. Right. There'll be a chargestone generator or something, somewhere outside. She swears again, loudly and passionately, and then sighs and starts the process of getting the venipede out of her jacket.
"Stay here," she tells her, trying to hold her by the undamaged parts of her shell. "I gotta go back out there, because apparently I have a goddamn death wish."
Leaving the venipede on the floor – she can't find a table in the dark – Gwyneth turns and limps back outside. After what feels like forever, she manages to trace the trailer's cables back to a metal box around the back; somehow, she prises open the cover and turns the switch, and suddenly light shines out over her head from the trailer windows. She doesn't know if she's ever seen anything more inviting.
Back inside, she drops her pack, leans against the door and breathes out.
"Goddamn it all to hell," she says, conversationally, and starts trying to get out of her wet clothes.
The trailer contains one electric heater, one chair, two beds, and a counter along one wall. Gwyneth turns the first item on, hangs her clothes across the second and fourth, and collapses onto the third, breathing hard. Everything is numb, and at the same time everything hurts, and she is so tired that neither thing seems to matter. But she can't sleep yet, so she forces herself back up onto her feet and begins to sort out her pack. The blanket and sleeping bag, strapped to the top, are soaked through; she drapes them over whatever she can find, and hopes they'll be dry by morning. The rest of her stuff is okay. It's a good backpack, tough and waterproof: she's had it since her trainer journey and it's still in decent shape.
She didn't bring a towel, so she sits there and waits for the slowly increasing heat to dry her off. While she waits, she picks at the sodden bandages on her left hand and sighs. Probably this is terrible for her injury. But there doesn't seem to be anything she can do about it.
That reminds her to take the tablets Dr. ze'Naarat gave her. She does this, eats some stale bread, and sits back, leaning against the cold wall and listening to the whisper of the rain. What irritates her most is that it's not even coming down hard. It didn't put in the effort and come down heavy, it just got through her clothes anyway, by persistence. This strikes her as somehow unfair.
The venipede shuffles around, sniffing the room with sweeps of her antennae. Gwyneth watches her, wondering what she thinks of all this. She's a city creature, like Gwyneth herself. Is the forest a paradise she never dreamed of, or some alien hell?
Gwyneth makes a face. The question annoys her, although she can't quite say why.
She feels her hair. Still wet. She could fall asleep right now, easily, but she refuses to until her hair is dry: this isn't her pillow to ruin. So she sits there, watching the venipede and listening to the weather, and thinks about another cabin, many years ago. She thinks about a forest at the other end of the country, about getting up the morning after Kit drew a diagram of her life with a six-letter word, about packing up the tents and washing the pans at the pump, and walking through the Route 6 woods in the direction of Chargestone Cave.
It is a beautiful morning. Nika in particular is feeling good; in a quiet moment when Nova is off somewhere and Kit has not yet emerged from his tent, she spontaneously kisses Gwyneth and smiles at her embarrassment, delighted to be alive and have lips on a day as wonderful as today. Her enthusiasm is catching, and right until Kit gets up Gwyneth feels fluttery and devoted. Years later, she will wonder if Nika knew what she was doing, and judge her innocent. Nika will not come to realise how little Gwyneth thinks of herself, how easy she is in her self-loathing naïveté to buy with any casual sign of affection, for many years. By then it will be too late. She will have already made Gwyneth love her more than anything else in the world.
It's okay. It isn't entirely ethical, but neither of them know yet how vulnerable Gwyneth really is, and neither know what's going on. And while Gwyneth will, when she is eighteen, work it all out, Nika will not until the very end; and so she, not knowing how much power she has over her, never abuses it.
It's a dangerous balance. They are both very lucky that nobody gets hurt.
When everyone is ready, they get going. Even this early in the morning, it's hot; Nova's beartic pauses what feels like every couple of minutes to puff out more ice and refresh its beard. Nova stops with it, silent and unapologetic. Kit asks if it really needs to keep doing that.
"Yes," says Nova curtly, and even he has nothing to say in response to that. Later Gwyneth will look beartic up online and learn that their beards are important to them, that the size and shape of the masses of ice crystals identifies each beartic to others in complex ways that nobody yet understands and that without them they get nervous and irritable; right now, she is simply cowed into silence by the force of Nova's statement.
But it's okay. She doesn't mind stopping; every stop makes the journey a little longer, and she never wants this to end, especially after last night's realisation. Okay, it would be a better journey if Kit wasn't here, and if maybe Nova would say something without intending every utterance to be the end of the conversation, but still, she's got Nika, and anyway she's lucky to be here at all, after what she did in Nimbasa. She should be grateful.
So Gwyneth keeps going, looking at flowers made strange by the greenish lenses of her plastic sunglasses, and concentrates on being grateful. Most of the time, she even manages it.
In a couple of days' time, the group splits up. Kit, eager and restless, wants to press on to Chargestone Cave; Nova wants to wander. Gwyneth suggests to Nika that wandering might be nice, because the woods are so pretty, and (she does not say) because she cannot wait to be free of Kit. Nika, who has herself come to sense that Kit is maybe not such a nice person, agrees, and that's that: Kit goes one way, west past the research lab, and the girls go another, meandering vaguely eastwards into the forest.
Ten minutes after the split, Nova smiles for the first time since she joined up with them.
"Been waiting for that for a long time now," she remarks, in her accented Unovan. "God save us all from teenage boys."
Gwyneth agrees, rather quickly, and Nova raises her eyebrows in a way that means she suspects but will say nothing. Nika just looks awkward. She feels like she has missed something, and she is right.
It transpires that Kit has been following Nova around for a while, and grating harder on her nerves every day. This is one reason why she has been so guarded. The other, as they find out later in the hikers' lodge that they come to in the evening of the third day, is that she is ex-Team Rocket.
She tells them this after discovering a bottle of bourbon someone left behind in one of the cupboards and drinking slightly more of it than she intended. (She offers them some, forgetting their age or not caring, but they are too nervous and anyway it smells terrible.) Her life story is less a narrative than a series of bad decisions: dropping out of high school, a stint dealing drugs in south Goldenrod, getting in with the Rockets and thinking the money and organisational rigour was a way of sorting her life out, realising she was wrong after a botched robbery saw her skull fractured by an angry pupitar, discovering too late that Rockets don't accept letters of resignation. Fleeing Johto. New name, dyed hair, an application to become a trainer. And here she is. Wandering around on a League grant with a cubchoo she stole too young for it to remember she isn't its original partner.
Nika and Gwyneth sit and listen in silence, a little afraid and a lot ignorant of what to say in response, and Nova pours herself more bourbon.
She gets these headaches, she says, although she peppers her speech with a few more expletives. Like someone's squeezing her head in a nutcracker. She's going to have them forever. Forfuckingever.
Nika mumbles some kind of a response that Nova doesn't acknowledge, and Gwyneth shrinks in her chair, unable to speak. She feels like she might explode.
Fortunately, someone else arrives to take the pressure off: a clown, apparently, although he just looks like an ordinary guy. He is as jolly as Nova is morose; at first Gwyneth thinks he doesn't see her despondence, and then she thinks that maybe he does and simply knows, through the years he has had to practice his art, how to keep on laughing in the darkness. When Nika asks if he's really a clown he does a routine with a couple of bottles and Gwyneth as an assistant that has even Nova laughing. Modern clowning has apparently come a long way since the pratfalls and custard pies that the kids know from old movies.
He smiles, as casually as anything taking Nova's bottle away from her, here give me that would you I need another one, and he juggles so very badly with it and a few others that Gwyneth can tell he must actually be very good. He is somehow forever on the verge of dropping everything and never actually doing it, and then he starts losing the bottles in midair, looking increasingly distressed as they cease to fall back into his hands but soldiering on with four three two and finally one, tossing it disconsolately from hand to hand before slowly and sadly putting it down on the table. It is very, very funny, and nobody even notices that the bourbon bottle is among the ones that have got lost.
In the middle of the night, Gwyneth wakes to strange noises, and in the morning Nova is gone. On the table are five glass bottles, one half empty, and a baltoy spinning on its axis like a top. Sometimes it spins a little faster and one of the bottle blurs out of existence for a moment.
The clown, whose name is Pat, comes in just then and smiles to see her up.
"She said she was in a hurry," he says, in response to the question visible in her face. "Also to say thank you for the company."
Something about the way he says it makes Gwyneth aware that what Nova was trying to do was apologise. She nods, and decides to accept it.
Pat can't stay. He and his baltoy have to be in Driftveil by the end of the week for a clowning convention. Gwyneth imagines a whole conference centre full of people like him, people for whom ordinary objects cease to function as they do for everyone else and instead maliciously fall over or trip them up or disappear only to reappear behind their backs, and shivers. It's part excitement, part fear. All those clowns in one place seems like a recipe for slapstick disaster.
Only a while after he has gone does Nika sit up sleepily in her bed, yawning and stretching like a cartoon of someone waking up. Hey, she says, blinking. Where is everyone?
Gwyneth thinks about how to answer this for a while. In the end, she just tells her the truth.
They're gone, she says. It's just us.
Oh.
They are silent for a moment, the quiet and loneliness of the empty space around them settling on their skin, and then Nika smiles shyly.
Just us is okay, she says.
Gwyneth smiles back, and offers to make her coffee. And she stays smiling while she goes and makes it, but underneath it she is still thinking about Nova.
Monday, 19th September
Gwyneth wakes slowly and stares at the ceiling above her. The light's still on. She fell asleep sitting against the wall, and now she is twisted uncomfortably across the bed. This is a bad position; her back and neck hurt like hell.
She doesn't move. She keeps staring at the ceiling, at the burning white lightbulb that stings her eyes, and doesn't blink.
This goes on for some time.
In the end, it isn't the pain that forces her to move: that is too distant, and it cannot really reach her where she is right now. Nor is it the venipede, which has sensed her wakefulness and started rattling loudly from the floor, demanding to be moved. She is only even dimly aware of the noise. Instead, what makes her move is Nova, getting up and leaving before dawn with a hangover pounding her temples and inelegant sutures in her skull.
Gwyneth blinks at last, eyes watering, and eases herself stiffly back into a sitting position. She looks blearily out of the window whose curtains she never bothered to draw, sees no light out there. The thought occurs to her that she could check what time it is, but somehow she can't make herself care enough to do it. It's not morning. That's all she needs to know.
She bends down, her body protesting like that of a much older woman, and picks up the venipede, which seems annoyed.
"What is it?" she croaks. She is reminded of talking to Shane a week ago in Aspertia, how she was so many miles away from her voice. It's the same here. She's on the verge of going somewhere bad, she can feel it, but it's okay. She's not okay, but it's okay. "What do you want?"
The venipede clicks and rattles at her, legs wriggling in midair. Gwyneth stares at her and sees a bug, a little machine, something alien and inscrutable. She sees the shapes that make her up, the interlocking segments of her shell and legs. Planes, angles. Geometry, not life.
"What do you," Gwyneth begins, but this time she can't finish. The venipede hisses; she puts her on the other bed, drops her face into her open hand and rubs furiously at her forehead. "Stop it," she whispers, but the venipede keeps hissing and rattling. "Stop it. Stop it. Stop it."
She wants to shout. It doesn't take. In the end she reaches for the light switch, trembling now for some reason she cannot quite identify, and climbs back into bed in the dark, where she closes her eyes and tries not to hear the venipede's insistent anger until, hours later, she falls back to sleep.
In the morning she is a little more level. Not much, but Gwyneth takes what she can get, and right now what she can get is a vague grasp of reality. It will have to do.
The venipede is asleep, antennae twitching restlessly as she dreams of prey or violence or whatever it is that venipede dream of, and Gwyneth leaves her that way while she drains her water bottle and forces down a banana. She is still a little afraid of her, or more accurately how Gwyneth saw her last night. It has happened before, this dissolution of living things into meaningless shapes, and the results were not good. She doesn't want it to ever happen again.
She sighs and climbs back into mostly-dry clothes, keeping her eyes off the venipede. There will be time to think about this later. Right now, she needs to fix her face and get more water.
Outside, the rain has stopped and the sky is mostly clear. Gwyneth breathes in the air, cold and incredibly fresh, and tries to summon up that fierce love that sometimes buoys her up, but it's not the kind of feeling you can force. She shakes her head and goes instead to look for a stream or something.
Fortunately, she doesn't have to go far. There's a sign by the campsite entrance that she missed in the dark that tells her the water in the stream slightly to the north of here is of excellent quality and safe to drink, but advises boiling it first to be safe. Gwyneth looks from the sign to the wet, dripping fire pit, and wonders if there was a hot plate in the trailer that she missed.
There is, and a battered saucepan in a cupboard under the counter, too, although the chargestone in the generator is depleted from having the lights on half the night, and Gwyneth has to switch it off and wait nearly an hour before she can get the hot plate to work. She's losing time here, she knows, but what the hell. She's already going way too slowly. An extra hour isn't going to make much difference now.
But she gets it done in the end, and eventually she's ready to pack her bottle of fresh and unpleasantly warm water in her bag and get going. Her sleeping bag and most of her clothes are dry; her blanket and jeans aren't, quite. It's going to have to do. Gwyneth puts everything away, gently tucks the sleeping venipede into the crook of her arm, and leaves.
It's a long walk, and it feels that way before even the first twenty minutes are past. Gwyneth might have started feeling better at the Pokémon Centre, but Dr. ze'Naarat was right; she really wasn't ready for this. The pack is so damn heavy, and her arm hurts so damn much, and she is so damn tired she could fall over right now and not find it in her to get up again.
She doesn't fall over. She doesn't stop. She may not have strength or health but she has raw, stubborn-as-hell willpower, the kind that gets you to twenty-four without dying, the kind that makes and then also breaks relationships, and it has got her more than halfway across Unova on the stupidest road trip anyone has ever made. It's going to get her through this, too.
When she hears herself think this, Gwyneth almost smiles. Really now, Gwyneth? You must be getting desperate.
Around her, White Forest drips and squelches and emits staccato bird calls from far away among the branches. Once, she hears something that might be a wolf, or it might just be her imagination. Another time, she hears what is definitely a magmar: low, mournful honking, too big and too deep to be a goose.
Gwyneth thinks briefly about being incinerated. It's probably kind of unpleasant, she decides, but it would dry her clothes out at least.
After a while, the venipede wakes up, and looks at her with a sleepy kind of malice. Whatever was wrong with her last night, she doesn't seem to have forgiven Gwyneth; she wriggles and pokes with her legs, and Gwyneth, biting back irritation, stops and gets out her gross medicinal gummy worms. It's about time anyway, and she could use some peace about now.
"Here," she says, tossing one into the leaf litter and watching the venipede attempt a limping kind of lunge at it. "Dunno what your problem is, dude, but get off my back, okay? I don't have to carry you, you know."
Whether it's the treat or the attitude, the venipede seems to quieten down. She lets Gwyneth pick her up and put her in her usual spot on the backpack without anything more than token hissing, and the two of them continue in a silence that is, if not exactly companionable, at least free of active hostility.
Her feet ache. She has crappy boots, she knows, worn down at the heel and shedding flakes of lining inside, but it's not like she can do anything about it. Right now she has literally no money at all. She did get three cents' change from her meal in Nimbasa but she lost it. Probably it fell out of her pocket when she tossed her jacket around trying to extinguish the venipede.
Gwyneth sets her jaw and keeps moving. One foot in front of the other. Simple, right? Right. Except that it's not, except that she can almost hear her sinews creaking, every little movement an agony of exertion, but still. Simple. Right.
She doesn't know when she stops. Her phone has been off since she left Nimbasa, to save the battery; the campsites might have power, but the tiny chargestone generators have limits, and there's nowhere to plug anything in. So when Gwyneth finally gives in to the pain and fatigue and stops, all she can say is that the sun is high and it feels like it's been forever since she left the campsite. She sits on a nine-tenths dry log, drinks some water and eats ageing food, and tries not to think about how much more of this there is to go.
It used to be fun. It really did. But that was when there were no stakes: back then, a walk in the woods was just that, a walk in the woods, and if she went slow it didn't matter because it was fun and she had all the time in the world. Now she's sitting on the other side of the table with the bottle of bourbon; now, she's Nova, travelling not for pleasure but because she has no other options except running. Now everything is riding on this. Everything, meaning – what, exactly? Gwyneth doesn't know, but she knows that it is riding on this, even if she isn't sure what it might be. There had to be some reason she gave up everything she had to get here.
She tosses the core of her apple away into the bushes for the ants to pick over and stands up.
"Less thinking, more walking," she tells herself, and gets on with it.
Sometime in the afternoon she sees a deer. Four of them, even, or three and a sawsbuck. They're standing there on the trail ahead of her, cropping the leaves from everything they can reach. Two white-tailed does, a big sawsbuck stag whose antler-leaves are browning with approaching autumn, and a hybrid fawn, dun coat flecked with green leafy hairs like a deerling.
Gwyneth stares. She remembers reading in her magazine, years ago, that pokémon are weirdly good at making hybrids, at interbreeding especially with each other but also with regular animals. Something something labile DNA or whatever. She is conceptually aware that this is something that happens, but she's never seen it before in real life.
The deer stare back at her for a while. The does tense as if to run, but they know the sawsbuck is a pokémon and won't flee if it stands to defend them. It sniffs and eyes Gwyneth warily, and then turns and walks away, dull fur and leafy antlers merging into the surrounding forest. Its companions follow, with substantially less composure.
Looking at the empty path, Gwyneth feels the spell break. She blinks, and finds she's holding her switched-off phone in her hand, as if she was going to take a photo.
"Huh," she says, because she feels she should say something and yet also has nothing to say, and shoves it back into her pocket.
Behind her head, the venipede clicks quietly to herself.
"Yeah, okay," says Gwyneth, and moves on.
She sees some more animals. A couple of birds she can't name, and one she can: northern cardinal, a cheerful splash of red against the browns and fading greens. It flies off when she gets close, which seems reasonable enough to her.
There are a few other clues that animal life is around. As the day wears on, the clouds break up and the wind dies down, and when the bushes rustle now Gwyneth can tell there must be something moving around in there; she never sees what it is, though. Patrat. Voles, maybe. What is a vole, anyway? She thinks it's like a rat, but she isn't sure what she's basing that on.
"You probably eat voles, huh," she says to the venipede, although she doesn't get any answer.
The trail goes on and on and on. She becomes half convinced that it's somehow connected up to itself in a loop, that she's going past the same twenty trees over and over, and then suddenly she sees a sign saying CAMPSITE 10 MILES and feels relieved to know that the laws of physics still apply.
It gets easier after seeing the sign. Not for very long, fifteen minutes maybe or however long it takes for the pain to eat through her optimism, but for a little while at least. Gwyneth feels grateful to whoever put the sign up, and then obscurely resentful.
"Nearly there, dude," she tells the venipede. Still no answer. She may have fallen asleep, or maybe Gwyneth is just imagining the sound of her own voice and she didn't actually say anything. Either option seems equally plausible at this point.
Somewhere between the sign and the campsite, she starts to drift again, the pain and the fatigue floating off to some strange place where they can tangle her limbs and make her stumble but not quite reach her mind, because she no longer has one. She has instead – is, instead – a series of tubes and cuts of meat that operate in uncertain unison to propel themselves forward. Gwyneth holds up her hand in front of her and wonders without any sense of wonder at the strangeness of it, at its baffling shape and inexplicable motion.
If she feels anything at all, it's that she's okay with this. The alternative is pain, and she is sick to death of that.
The forest grows dark around her. The birdsong changes, then goes silent. Once or twice something does call, but Gwyneth does not think it is a bird.
She keeps walking, and keeps walking, and somehow keeps walking, and then she sees a light through the trees that seeps through her dissociative haze and tells her that civilisation in some form or another is ahead. She keeps walking, past bushes that seem intent on reaching out to poke her, past the pools of moonlight and spreading patches of darkness, past puddles and rocks and at last around a corner and into the warm light of a cheerful campfire.
"Hey, someone's here," she hears, and blinks until the kids around the fire come into focus. Three or four. Between sixteen and eighteen. Experienced ones, then. "Hey, man, how's it going?"
Gwyneth sways a little and counts again. One two three four. A watchog on the periphery, standing guard over a cooler; a honchkrow doing what honchkrow do best: skulking in the shadows, but somehow stylishly.
"I'm okay, dude," she says, voice cracking slightly with fatigue. "Had a long walk."
"Well, time to sit down then," says the guy who greeted her. "C'mon. Fire's great and we got beer."
They are obviously, even spectacularly, underage, but okay. Gwyneth doesn't really care. She stands there, looking, and the kids start to get restless and uneasy.
"Are you sure you're okay?" asks a different one, a girl whose arms are thick with woven bracelets. "You seem, um … kinda out of it."
"Rough day," croaks Gwyneth. "Week. Whatever." She manages to unstick her feet from the ground and take a step forward. "Uh, I might join you in a minute. I think I need to lie down a while first."
"Oh sure." The girl nods at the trailers behind her. "They're both empty."
"Cool. Thanks."
Gwyneth gives herself an internal shove and staggers forward, past the staring eyes that are beginning to parse her, to read the marks of injury and gender on her body and come to certain conclusions. She does not let herself look back at them. It's just as well; even watching where she's going, she nearly trips over the guy ropes of the kids' tents, and makes the honchkrow hop away with an air of disdainful majesty, making a noise that sounds uncannily like disapproving tutting.
On the low step up to the trailer she stumbles and catches herself noisily against the thin metal wall. The kids, who have just started talking amongst themselves again, stop, and Gwyneth feels their eyes boring into the back of her head; she grits her teeth and forces herself upright, draws back the door with a vicious jerk of her hand and stumbles in.
The lights won't come on, but she's damned if she's going back out there to flip the switch on the generator. She suppresses her anger long enough to get the venipede off her shoulder without hurting her, then lets her pack fall to the floor with a savage thud and climbs onto the bed.
"Ugh," she grunts, dragging off her boots. "Damn kids."
She lies down, or maybe she just stops holding herself upright and lets gravity do the work. She doesn't know if she's ever been this tired before in her life. It's worse than last night by a long way. And it's only going to keep getting worse.
She should eat something. She even says it aloud, to try and get it into her head: "I should eat something." But the words seem to get jumbled in her throat, coming out of her mouth all soft and barely audible, and almost before she's finished speaking them she can feel herself drifting off to sleep.
It's probably okay. Nothing much right now seems worth staying awake for.
