04: PARTNERS

It's been a long couple of days. By the time Emilia arrives back in Saffron, she feels like she could sleep for about a week; she got a few hours of rest in a hotel room on Sunday night but not nearly enough. She had her report to write up for Lorelei – nothing major, more or less yes, this is breach and yes, I've contained the story, but still, it has to be composed just so, attached to the data output from BB97 and everything else. It took her a couple of hours, and after that she found herself too restless to sleep much. Sometimes this happens. Emilia can wind herself up into staying awake for days at a time, but getting herself out of that state of mind is significantly trickier.

Still. The long flight back to Saffron International did the trick, knocked her right back to normal, and now she's about ready to collapse face-first onto her bed. It takes her two tries to even get her key into the door.

"Effie? I'm home," she calls, stumbling in. Nadia flutters off her shoulder, cheeping indignantly at the instability of her perch, and hop-flaps her way off into the kitchen to get herself something to eat. "Effie?" repeats Emilia, dumping her bag and entering the living-room. "How are …?"

She stares.

There is a huge, blotchy red petal lying on the floor by Effie's pot.

"Effie?"

She kneels and picks the petal up. It's thick and slightly furry, already beginning to brown and shrivel at the edges. Laying it aside, Emilia turns the pot until the part of Effie that she knows contains her face is towards her.

"Effie, sweetie?"

Emilia bends right down to the floor, trying to find Effie's eyes. She can just about make them out, clamped so tightly shut they are barely even wrinkles in the bark of her thick bole.

"Effie," she says again, helplessly. "Effie, please. It's me. It's Em."

Nothing.

Emilia lets her head fall, forehead almost to the floor. She stays there for a long time, concentrating on her breathing, listening for any movement at all.

She wasn't here. How could she have not been here? She thinks of Effie as an oddish, younger and nimbler. Of that particular oddish instinct to wander at night. Emilia recalls her on the very edge of the firelight, almost lost in the dark, turning to look back beneath her topknot of leaves. Making sure her trainer was still there. Because if she was then it was okay.

But not this time. Because Emilia wasn't here.

Nadia finds her there a few minutes later, and tugs anxiously at her sleeve with her beak. Emilia sits up, slowly, careful not to accidentally brush against Effie's remaining petals with her head, and pushes her hair back across her scalp.

SLEEP, says Nadia, and Emilia nods and makes her silent way to bed.

In the morning, she eats her first full meal since Saturday and catches up on emails, trying to keep herself from staring at Effie. She knew this had to happen. Flowers don't last forever, and vileplume are strange flowers but flowers nonetheless. It's basic biology. When a plant is done with its flower, it dies back and the ovary at its base swells into a fruit. Emilia read up on this a couple of years ago, back when Effie first began to spend more time rooted than walking around. She knows that by this point, Effie will have disconnected her brain from her nervous system and started to digest it, to give her the last burst of energy she needs to grow her fruit.

This isn't a bad thing. It's just what vileplume do. Effie feels no pain. But she's been Emilia's partner for twenty-seven years now, and that's not a length of time you can ignore. Trainer journey. Transition. First relationship. Law school. The League gig. Everything she did since she was ten, she did with her.

And now …

?, asks Nadia, from her perch on the back of the couch. No words, exactly; just concern, with a questioning inflection.

"I'm all right," replies Emilia, returning her attention to the screen of her laptop. "Thanks, Nadia."

Nadia chirps. She doesn't sound all that convinced. It's all right. Neither does Emilia.

Artemis isn't sure what wakes her, but when she opens her eyes she sees a ghost person crouched at the other end of her tent. It is in its pressure suit monstrously, uncannily large, far too big for the enclosed space. Hunched. One hand on its knee. One hand held out, fingers spread. Three and a thumb, one missing, bleeding from somewhere inside the glove.

Its respirator goes click and hiss. Artemis stares, and stares, and with a huge effort wrenches her mind away to something else, to things she knows are really and truly real: sleeping bag, groundsheet, Brauron (Brauron? No, she can't speak right now, can't even call her name), backpack. Dull glow of firelight through the fabric of the wall. Nightingale. Crickets. Smell of woodsmoke and green things.

The minutes pass. The ghost person holds out its hand, accusing.

Artemis breathes out.

It's over now.

She sits up, heart pounding. The tent seems very empty all of a sudden, very open, but not in a bad way.

"Brauron?" she whispers. "Brauron, are you there?"

The red markings on the salandit's back glow for a second in recognition of her name, forming a spiral of light in the dark. She doesn't wake up, but Artemis doesn't need her to. She just wanted to know she was there.

"Okay," she whispers. "Thank you."

Something moves in front of the fire outside, casting a shadow on the tent, and Artemis freezes, thinking that there might be another ghost person out there; it can't be, though, they never interact with the real world that subtly, are always just a little too out of place, and she forces herself to lie back down. It's probably just Giovanni. Even Gym Leaders need to pee.

The shadow moves away again, and Artemis hears footsteps crunch the dirt. Okay, then. Giovanni it is. Maybe she doesn't trust him entirely, but she doubts he's here to kill her in her sleep.

His footsteps move away, and then come back. He's not quite in front of the fire, but she can see him doing something, she's not sure what, that involves picking things up and moving them around. There is a quiet curse – definitely his voice – and then an exasperated sigh.

"Hey," he mutters, so quietly Artemis has to strain to catch it. "Yeah, yeah, I know it's late. Look, the scanner isn't working." Pause. "Yes, Abby installed the porygon before I left." Another, shorter pause. "The blue one? Okay. Then …? Green and then the system button. Right. Now it wants an input code … Look, I'm not feeling very patient here, Steve. You were supposed to set this thing up before I―"

He cuts himself off abruptly before his irritation gets his voice too loud. Artemis lies down, as quickly and quietly as she can. She has a horrible feeling that if Giovanni realises she's awake, something bad will happen. It doesn't matter how strong you are when you're up against someone whose nidoking has in the past outfought one of Lance Harding's dragonite.

"Okay. 4-4-7-2. Got it. Ah!" He sounds satisfied. "Right. That'll do for now, but we're not done talking about this, Steve. I haven't forgotten about Cinnabar. My office, ten am. Dioli out."

His shadow shifts, gets bigger and clearer, and Artemis realises with juddering gasp of panic that he's coming over to her tent―

There is a quiet click, and then he goes.

She lies there for what feels like forever, unable even to let herself blink, until at last she feels half sure he must be back in his tent and releases the breath she has been holding.

Okay, Artie, she tells herself, squeezing her hands into fists to stop them shaking. Okay, you were right. He knows. He's here for you.

She wants to get out and see whatever is out there to be seen, but she can't bring herself to do it. For a long time she lies there, slowly working her way back down out of the panic, and then she frees one hand from her sleeping bag and reaches out to Brauron.

"Hey," she whispers, running her fingers over her back. "I'm sorry, I need you for a minute."

Brauron stirs and cracks open one brilliant purple eye. Like yesterday, she stares at Artemis warily for a moment, and then again remembers that this is her new partner and relaxes.

"I have to do something kinda scary," Artemis tells her. "Will you come with me?"

She feels silly asking, but there's no other way to get herself to do this. Brauron hops up onto her arm right away, of course, not even knowing what they're doing or why, and after a few deep breaths Artemis unzips her tent just enough to form a gap she can peer out through. No one out there. All right. She unzips it the rest of the way and crawls out, Brauron climbing up to her shoulder. The fire has burnt very low, but it's still warm and bright enough to see by. Giovanni's tent looks exactly as it did earlier. Of the man himself, there is no sign at all.

Artemis licks her lips, trying to moisten them, but they refuse to cooperate. She takes some more breaths, and then as quietly as she can she stands up. She did her best to work the zip on the tent-flap silently, sliding it down just one notch at a time, and if she keeps the fire between herself and Giovanni's tent, and if she treads lightly, and if …

She forces herself to stop. Breathe, Artie. Use your eyes. Just stand right where you are, and look.

Okay. She sees … fire, tent, darkness. The suggestion of trees all around. Sticks. Leaves. And, right there by the fire where Giovanni's shadow was―

Artemis stretches out, very slowly and carefully, and with the tips of her fingers picks it up. She examines it and sees – a receipt. For a chicken salad sandwich and a bottle of off-brand cola, to be specific. It must have just fallen out of Giovanni's pocket as he took his phone out or something.

She stands there for a minute, feeling ridiculous, and then some hunch makes her turn it over and see on the back a messy scrawl in ballpoint: BLUE BUTTON GREEN BUTTON SYS 4472. POINT AND SHOOT. BRAD COUNT 1 = POSITIVE, 5 = ++ATTRACTION. ―STEVE

Okay. It's not junk after all. It's … well, if she's honest she's not sure what it is, but it's something. These are clearly instructions on how to operate the scanner Giovanni was talking about, but Artemis has no idea what a brad might be. Unless it literally means a person named Brad, in which case the scanner is a needlessly complex way of determining something incredibly simple.

About the only thing Artemis can be sure of is that Steve probably doesn't deserve the chewing out he's going to get from Giovanni in the morning. She almost sighs, except that she can't because what if he hears, and after committing the note to memory replaces the receipt as close as she can to where she found it. It's probably pointless, since Giovanni didn't seem to even realise that he'd dropped it – but maybe it's a trap, right, maybe the scanner is a blind and the real test is whether or not she comes out and takes the bait, and because of that maybe, slim as it is, Artemis has to give it a go. Then she has to pick it up again and quickly wipe it across her top because she's just realised what if fingerprints, and then she has to get it back in place.

Then she wonders if maybe Giovanni will know it's been tampered with because his fingerprints were on it and now aren't, and then she closes her eyes and says silently, go to bed, Artie.

And then she takes her advice, gets slowly back inside her tent, puts Brauron down far enough away that she can't roll over and crush her, and lies down in her sleeping bag. She can't do this without a little rustling, but she guesses that's okay. People move in their sleep, after all.

Artemis lies there in the dark, listening to the thin hiss of Brauron's breath as she settles back into sleep. The spire was right. It's an omen, isn't it?

Something's coming. Something that League lawyers cover up and the most secretive Gym Leaders track down. Something that Brock knew about but couldn't explain.

An omen of what, Artemis remembers asking, and she hears the answer again now, as clearly as if the spire has returned:

Breach.

Later, Emilia has to call Lorelei. Whatever half-baked rumours have filtered down to Brock, they need to be nipped in the bud, and while dealing with the Gym Leaders is for the most part not Lorelei's concern, she's the one who Emilia's worked with for the past seven years, and who Emilia has, in a hundred tiny ways, coached through the steep learning curve the Elite Four position requires. If Emilia speaks to her, she might argue, but she'll listen.

Still, there's a real risk Lorelei's not going to make it easy for her. She leaves it until after the emails are sorted out and the appointments made, and then Emilia makes herself a fresh cup of coffee and takes it into the living-room to make the call. Then, after a few seconds of staring at Effie and not dialling, she decides that maybe she should do this somewhere else and goes back into the kitchen.

"Em?"

"Hey, Lori." Emilia glances at Nadia, perched on the counter, and feels the relevant memories returning to mind: Brock's anger, doubts about Giovanni, the fact that the entity was called. Evidently Nadia hasn't given up on pushing that particular agenda. "How's the Pewter case going?"

"Badly. Beebs pretty much confirmed it. This is … I can't say exactly, but it's not good, Em."

Nadia can't get a line on a mind at the other end of a phone call, but Emilia doesn't need her to tell that Lorelei isn't lying. She sounds like she hasn't slept since she called Emilia on Saturday. She sounds like someone who didn't summon a giant monster into the woods near Pewter.

"Yeah, I'd gathered. It seemed … dangerous."

"That's putting it lightly." Lorelei sighs. "We're going to have to tell Rigadeau at this rate. Not looking forward to that meeting."

The Indigo League Champion is really more of a figurehead than anything else, mostly because anyone can challenge them and take their position – a holdover from the oldest of the old days when the League was simply a band of the toughest warriors in the clan and the most powerful ruled over them all. Since the office changes hands so regularly, and those who claim it rarely have the same very particular skillset that the Elite Four look for when recruiting, the Champion is not typically involved in League business outside of battling and PR. Casey Rigadeau is one of those Champions: peerless trainer, hopeless politician. They've held the title for six years and been involved in exactly two of the eighteen major operations the League has undertaken in that time.

"That's rough, Lori," says Emilia sympathetically. She's had to present to Rigadeau before. They're very nice, and in many ways very clever, but tend to miss the subtleties of a situation unless she spells them out slowly and clearly. "I guess there's no way you can keep it within the E4?"

"No, I don't think so. You didn't hear this" (and Emilia, with over a decade of experience, easily does not) "but this is the first breach event in ten years. Last time this happened – well, you worked on the M case back in 2007, right?"

Yes. Yes, she did. That was what made Emilia's name with the League, and got her into her current senior position. The M entity killed a lot of people – League affiliates, mostly; Emilia had always assumed that it had encountered the League before in some capacity and had a grudge. Now she wonders if there was something more. If it was a breach entity, and if it targeted the League …

Enough, Em. That was then, this is now. Correlation does not equal causation. Just answer Lorelei already.

"Yeah," she says. "I did."

"That was breach." Lorelei sighs again. Emilia can almost see her pushing tetchily at her glasses, the way she does in this kind of mood. "Pokémon mutate easily, you know that. And breach disrupts. I'm going to have to tell Rigadeau about M and explain we might be looking at that again. We've already got that rhyhorn in quarantine."

The implication is that the M entity used to actually be a terrestrial pokémon of some description. Emilia can't even imagine what it might have been before; the mutation must have been staggering.

"Is he going to be okay? He and his trainer have been through enough already, I'd say."

"No idea," replies Lorelei. Her irritation at her own ignorance is clear. "I hope so. For everyone's sake, as well as the kid's. If it does change I don't know if containment will hold." Clatter of keyboards in the background. She must be at her desk. "Okay. Thanks for listening, Em, I … it's been a difficult weekend."

"Sure." Emilia feels for her, she really does. Her own job is the easiest part of this, and even that's not exactly a walk in the park; the task facing Lorelei is a whole lot worse. "Of course I didn't hear any of it."

"Naturally," agrees Lorelei. "Sorry for distracting you. What did you want?"

"Staying off the record for a while longer, I got why Brock was so pissed. Did he call to apologise yet?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, yeah. Said he was upset at Jerry being in the hospital, which I guess is fair enough."

There's something in that I guess that suggests Lorelei thinks otherwise, but Emilia as ever is tactfully oblivious to it. Lorelei is one of those people who is always in control and takes it a little personally when other people aren't.

"It's more than that." Emilia glances at her notebook, mostly out of habit; she hasn't actually forgotten anything. "He seemed to think that one of your anomalous resources might be responsible."

"What?" Genuine alarm. Emilia is annoyed with herself for being so suspicious, but some habits you can't switch off. "Why would he think that?"

"Because the entity said it was called, and he couldn't think of anyone else who'd be able to call it." Emilia sighs. "Look, this is what I wanted to talk to you about, Lori. He's heard some ridiculous rumours that you've set up a secret laboratory in Viridian Gym and Giovanni is heading some mad scientist nonsense in there."

"That's absurd," says Lorelei. Too fast, too defensive. Emilia feels it like a blow to the chest. She looks at Nadia, who is hearing the phone call through her partner's ears, and the natu looks back, smug.

"I …" Emilia closes her mouth, composes her face as if Lorelei is in the room with her. "Lorelei, I was going to say you need to maintain better communications with the Gym Leaders to stop rumours like this spreading, but you denied that very quickly."

There are several seconds of silence.

"Em, I can't tell you anything, you know that," says Lorelei in the end. No emotion now in her voice. Emilia always did try to tell her that that's not the best way to do this, but she didn't seem to get the lesson. "There's nothing in Viridian Gym, I can tell you that. If we ever were researching breach – and we aren't, for the record – I wouldn't allow it to take place in a major city. I can't believe you'd think that of me."

Good tactic. Probably mostly true, and she's successfully deflected attention from Giovanni. It's just a pity that Emilia's the one who taught her how to talk like this in the first place.

"I don't," she replies. There's no point pressing Lorelei about Giovanni; she'll just say that he's busy with his casinos, and all Emilia will manage to do is alert her to the fact that she's seen through the deception. "I'm making a point, Lori. That is why otherwise sensible people like Brock are falling for these ridiculous conspiracy theories. Just ease up on the knee-jerk blanket denials, okay? Talk to people. They understand you can't tell them everything, but they appreciate not being left alone in the dark."

"I … yeah," sighs Lorelei. "You're right. As usual. Are you aware how irritating it is that you're always right?"

"Yes," answers Emilia, making it sound like a joke although it is in truth anything but. She doesn't just work hard at being nice to get people to lower their guards; it's also because people tend not to like her, because a visibly foreign woman who always knows better than you gets on people's nerves, and so she has a lot of bruised egos to soothe if she wants to stay on their good side.

"Of course you are." Lorelei chuckles. "Fine. I'll ask Bruno to set something up. Leader liaison is his department, really."

"Thanks, Lori. I think it's for the best."

"Yeah, probably."

"Well, I'm sure you're very busy at the moment," says Emilia. "I'll let you go."

"Thanks, Em. And – thanks again, I guess, for everything else. I don't know what we'd do without you."

"Hire another lawyer," she replies, as always. "Bye, Lori."

"Bye, Em."

Emilia puts her phone down carefully on the table and looks at Nadia.

There is a long silence, made up of quiet city noises.

"Okay," says Emilia at last. "Maybe you have a point after all."

In the morning, when Giovanni emerges from his tent, Artemis is already up. She didn't sleep well, and anyway she really had to be up before him, so that she could prepare herself. (Meaning: shaving, plucking, make-up, everything that she has to do to make at least some people extend to her the courtesy of politely referring to her as a woman even though they do not, deep down, believe she is one.) So: she gets up early, makes a remarkably okay cup of tea on the fire that she has Brauron reignite, and by the time Giovanni is up and about is already starting to dismantle her tent.

"Good morning," he says brightly. "How was your first night as a trainer?"

"Pretty good," lies Artemis, rolling canvas around tent poles. "It's peaceful out here."

"It is, it is," agrees Giovanni. He starts filling a pan with water and is about to put it on the fire when he notices Brauron inside it, crawling around among the cinders and hissing with contentment. "Excuse me," he says politely, and she slithers out of the way to watch from the sidelines, smoking gently and rubbing soot into her skin with her hands.

Artemis is watching too, out of the corner of her eye. She sees Giovanni, bent over the fire, noticing the receipt; she sees his momentary jolt of realisation, the quick sidelong glance in her direction, a deft transferral of paper to pocket. She sees it all, and she is at once comforted and disturbed to know she didn't imagine any of what she thought she saw last night.

"Are you leaving?" he asks her, as she tightens the straps around her tent and puts it back into place on her pack. "You have all the time in the world, you know. No need to rush."

Which may or may not be code for if you run off right now it would be very impolite, so just to be safe Artemis shakes her head and sits down again.

"In a little bit," she says. "I'm just getting ready." She finds an apple in her pack, rubs it on her sleeve and takes a bite. Brauron, who has by now cooled down enough to touch, crawls up her arm to investigate, but turns away at the smell. Salandit don't like fruit. Artemis has been feeding her little pieces of dried meat and some supplementary pellets she got from the Pokémon Mart near the Pewter Gym that are a mixture of ground insects, added vitamins and ash. Apparently pretty much nothing apart from a salandit or charmander will touch them, let alone be able to digest them, but they seem to be going down well with Brauron.

"I guess you must be eager to get going," says Giovanni, watching her over the boiling water. "How have you been getting on with training, anyway? It's not as easy as it looks, but it's not as hard as you might think, either."

"I've got Brauron using ember," replies Artemis. "Brauron? Ball."

Green fire splashes against the earth and dissipates into soot and noisome smoke. Giovanni nods and smiles.

"Very good," he says. "You'll have to forgive me, I've never raised a salandit – what else can she do?"

"Poison gas, I think." Why did she say that? She knows. But, well. "I haven't taught her to do that one yet."

He nods.

"It'll be useful," he says. "Don't forget to work on movement, though."

Artemis feels a little cold claw of self-doubt seize her chest.

"Movement?"

"Yes." Giovanni waves a hand back and forth, miming jumping. "Most pokémon do try to avoid being hit, but you can't rely on it. Sometimes you'll be able to see where the next attack is coming from when they can't, and you'll need to have a way to tell them what direction to dodge in, do you see?"

"Oh. Right." She really should have known that. She's seen the televised matches on the International Battle Network. She's heard the trainers shouting their cryptic commands: two o'clock, S-air, downcurl. And she's seen the pokémon responding. By all rights, Artemis should have worked out by now that some of those directions are to do with, well, directions. "Okay," she says, trying to cover her dismay and mostly succeeding. "We'll work on that."

Giovanni nods.

"A good plan. Most people use a clock face. Twelve o'clock, right in front of you, six o'clock, directly behind, and so on. It's more precise, and a little harder for your opponent to figure out which direction exactly you mean than if you just say left or right."

"Right. Thanks."

"Just thought I'd mention it."

If he detects her unease, he doesn't show it. He pours boiling water into a tin mug and adds what must be the world's worst instant coffee, creating something that smells indescribably awful. Artemis watches in horrified fascination as he proceeds to drink it with every evidence of pleasure. Okay, so she's not a coffee drinker – her mother's family is from Ahmedabad, and brought with them to Kanto a tea habit that formed a cornerstone of Artemis' childhood – but she's willing to bet that even the most hopeless caffeine addict would turn their nose up at the stuff in Giovanni's cup.

Artemis crunches stolidly through her apple. She'd like more, really; giant that she is, she always seems to be hungry, always trying to keep her outsize body ticking over. But there's a limit to what she can carry, and anyway she'd rather leave sooner and eat later. So she finishes quickly, throws the core away for the birds and ants to pick over, and stands up.

"Well, thanks for all the advice," she says, moving Brauron and shouldering her backpack. "But I really need to get going if I want to make Viridian any time soon."

Giovanni smiles. Evidently she has stayed long enough to satisfy the demands of courtesy.

"Of course," he says. "Nice meeting you, Artemis. Maybe I'll see you again at the Gym someday, eh?"

"Maybe," agrees Artemis. "Maybe don't hold your breath, though. One baby fire-type isn't gonna cut it in a ground Gym."

He chuckles.

"I suppose not. Goodbye, then! And safe travels."

She leaves him sitting there with his awful coffee and hurries back to the path. For about twenty minutes, she concentrates only on putting as much distance between her and Giovanni as she possibly can, then the tight fist of tension inside her unclenches, and she slows to a gradual halt.

She breathes out. She closes her eyes and lets the thousand natural shocks of a summer forest rise up around her: sound of crickets, birdsong, lush scent of green things. Rustling leaves and the distant drone of a huge bug pokémon in flight.

Okay?

Okay.

Artemis opens her eyes, glances at Brauron, and moves on. She's a trainer now. She's got a journey to make.

Here are the conclusions that Artemis has drawn: one, Giovanni is involved in whatever shadowy bit of the League is investigating breach; two, that shadowy bit has done work on Cinnabar Island; and three, she isn't going to be able to escape this.

None of this is very comforting, but when you're hiking through a forest, you have a lot of time to think. And Artemis is very good – too good – at thinking.

Giovanni came to scan her because of what she saw on the hill near Pewter. That's clear. She doesn't know what the results were, but she stood right next to that thing, heard its awful song and its voice echoing across the void between stars. Whatever a brad is, it's clearly a unit of measurement, and if it's to do with the spire, she's probably soaked some up. So: probably he got positive results. And probably therefore Artemis is stuck with League spooks and G-men on her tail.

Which gives her a choice. Capitulate (and oh, that is tempting), or investigate. And since Giovanni mentioned Cinnabar, and she was planning to go there anyway … well, the way Artemis sees it, she can't pass an opportunity like that up. You can spend the rest of your life being terrified, Artie, or you can spend it being terrified but also aware of what it is that's scaring you. Not a great set of options, but that's kinda how this works. Artemis is always scared. But life keeps happening anyway, and so she keeps on having to do things, and so, despite her innate and deep-rooted cowardice, she keeps on going regardless.

She traces this line of thought over the hours it takes her to make her way down the trail towards her first official League campsite, where the warmth coming off the firepit argues for recent evacuation. Here she takes a break for lunch, refills her water bottles at the pump and pokes nosily around in the aluminium trailers set up for any travellers whose disabilities might make tents a difficult option for them, and then continues on her way. She's getting into the rhythm of this now. Walking. Sip of water. Wild pokémon, seeking to intimidate, fleeing when confronted. Trees and flowers and feral parakeets escaped from the Viridian zoo.

And, under the surface, the knowledge that somewhere out there people are doing terrible things and somehow she has got herself involved.

It makes sense, right? Brock said he knew who was responsible for calling the spire. Giovanni shows up to scan the woman who spoke to it. Ergo, Giovanni is the one responsible, or at least part of the same organisation.

Artemis tries to let it go, to relax into this beautiful summer's day and her new freedom, but letting things go really isn't one of her strong suits. She walks, and worries, and only when she is physically interrupted does she manage to turn her attention elsewhere. A wood rattata, sleek and big around as a cat, bounds out of the undergrowth and crouches in front of her, demanding a response; she lets Brauron down from her perch and takes a step back, heart racing. This isn't a weedle: the rattata is bigger and bulkier than Brauron. If she gets hurt – but she's a pokémon, right, this is her thing―

Maybe actually start the battle, Artie, she thinks, and calls out:

"Ball!"

Brauron's head snaps forward and the rattata, squeaking, dives forward, flattening itself under the fireball passing overhead; it surges up again and lunges for Brauron, jaws wide―

"Again!"

―and catches the second ember across the jaw, breaking up its leap into an uneasy stagger. The rattata sways and twitches to one side, shaking out its smoking whiskers, and Artemis sees its confusion, realises that life in the forest has left it unprepared for the dazzling light of fire attacks, and in the same second goes for the opening with both hands.

"Now!" she cries, not actually remembering in her haste to specify a command, but Brauron gets the gist of it and piles into the rattata's flank, claws first, hissing with amphibian fury. After the ember, this is too much for it, and as soon as she makes contact it breaks away and scampers off into the woods.

Brauron croaks hoarsely in triumph, a sound Artemis didn't know she could make, and raises her tail behind her, its red markings flaring with inner light. After a couple of seconds of posturing, she collects herself and looks over her shoulder at her trainer, eyes glittering.

"Yeah!" Artemis crouches and reaches out to pet her. She's still hot from spitting fire but it's not too bad. "That's it," she says encouragingly. "You did great!"

Brauron licks her eyes and accepts the attention with a dignity that suggests that victory was only to be expected of someone as great as her. Artemis smiles and lifts her back into her usual spot hanging from her top. She did it. She can do this, she really can. The second and third times she didn't even say 'ball' and still Brauron knew what she meant. How amazing is that? She's no Casey Rigadeau, but she's a trainer. She really really is.

It's a relief, and a triumph. And for a little while at least it squashes her fears. Cinnabar Island is a long way off, after all. Right now, she's a trainer, and she's winning.

Later, she bumps into some kids going the opposite way. They're ten or eleven, with a hoppip drifting after them like a tame balloon and a growlithe sniffing around the path ahead of them. It finds her first, yapping and jumping around her with that particular overwhelming joy that only dogs feel, and Artemis smiles and scratches its head while the kids emerge from among the trees down the path.

They stare, silent and fearful, and Artemis straightens up, feels her smile grow faint and cold on her face.

"Hi," she says, but she doesn't get an answer, so she tries unsuccessfully to smile a goodbye and hurries on past them, clenching her hands into fists to stop them shaking.

Six foot one. Built like a Doric column, broad and solid and capable of holding up a roof without assistance. Scarred, beak-nosed, badly made-up. No, Artemis can't blame them. What she saw in the kids' eyes is only a shadow of what she knows she harbours in herself.

"It's okay, kiddo," she says to Brauron, because she'd feel ridiculous talking to herself. "We're gonna be okay."

She doesn't attempt to calculate the odds of this sentiment coming true. She has a feeling they probably aren't in her favour.

Anyway. It's mostly okay. She passes a few more kids that day, and it doesn't get any easier with repetition, but she keeps her head down and just walks on by and very soon they vanish into the woods behind her. And then she can forget about them, until the next time it happens.

That evening she does reach a campsite, but as she approaches the turning she sees the light of the fire and hears voices and she stops, unable to make herself go any further. What's she going to do? Sit there by the firepit with all the rest of them? Three times the size of any of the ten-year-olds and so obviously fake she might as well have it carved into her forehead with a knife? Make them quiet and uneasy and ruin their adventure? Nobody wins in that situation. Not the kids, not Artemis. Better that their journeys don't cross. Better that Artemis sit by herself and enjoy the peace, and they sit with each other and enjoy the camaraderie. They don't want grown-ups ruining their fun, even if Artemis feels pretty far from grown up herself. They want whatever the hell she is even less.

She turns away and continues down the trail for another half an hour, till the light starts to fade. Then she picks her way through the shrubbery to find somewhere else to pitch her tent.

It's okay. She isn't, exactly, but it's okay. Didn't she change her name? And hasn't she run away? You chose this, Artie. You knew exactly what you were signing up for. No point whining about it, no matter how much it hurts.

Artemis sits outside her tent and tries to teach Brauron to spew poison gas on command. It's tricky; Brauron's fire and venom are both fuelled by the same stockpile of corrosive gas inside her, and she's only little: she can't store very much of it at any one time. In battle, they're going to have to be economical, or Brauron will be out of juice and have to rely on her claws – and they aren't really all that sharp. Brauron's been climbing all over her the past few days, and Artemis has barely felt it.

But Artemis is determined, and Brauron is smart – more than smart, even, actively interested in being taught: she saw something in Artemis before, of course, that's why she wanted to partner with her, but the victory against the rattata, small as it was, proves that she's onto a good thing. You can see it in her eyes, in the way she follows Artemis' gestures and stares intently at her face. She wants to figure out what Artemis means, because she really thinks that Artemis is the one who's going to get her stronger.

So she works out that 'cloud' means poison gas, and Artemis for her part feels a kind of mingled pride and panic rising in her: she's doing the training thing, she really is – but on the other hand, now Brauron has expectations. And, well, Artemis doesn't have such a good track record when it comes to those. Her parents used to have lots of them. They put all their hopes in her, after all. Both of them came from their separate poverties and fought tooth and nail to rise out of it, to place their child a few rungs further up the class ladder. They put the money together. They dreamed. She's meant to go to university and become something better than them.

This is another reason why the scars bother them so much. They were already disappointed and afraid, after the cancer; that showed them that their child was maybe not as perfect as she was meant to be. The second, more nebulous illness, that existed only in her head and yet left physical wounds – that just made matters worse. Her parents aren't cruel enough to say it outright, but Artemis feels their disappointment like a cold wind that gusts between them and her, preventing more than cursory closeness.

She's going to disappoint them even more when they learn she's not their son. Whatever she does about university, Artemis knows that that's one expectation she's never going to be able to meet.

But. Brauron doesn't want anything nearly so difficult of her, she reminds herself. Brauron just wants to fight things and get tougher. That's a much easier ask than becoming a functional, respectable adult.

So. Artemis smiles, and rubs Brauron's head with one knuckle, and feeds her a couple of her insect pellets.

"You're getting good at this," she tells her. "You are."

Brauron licks her eyes in self-satisfaction. And Artemis goes to sleep that night not content, exactly – it's harder to shake off home than she thought, and Giovanni still hangs over her with scanner and spire – but, at the very least, not actively afraid.

Given everything that's happened to her recently, she's inclined to take it.

Emilia does some digging. Not a lot – she has work to do, and anyway she doesn't officially have access to all the files she'd need to see – but some. She has an unofficial chat with a Gym clerk in Viridian and one of Erika's trainers in Celadon, both of whom owe her a favour; she gets a contact among the Plateau archivists to show her a couple of documents off the record. Nothing concrete turns up. The Celadon Gym trainer doesn't see much of Giovanni, and as far as the paperwork indicates to the Viridian clerk, he really does go to his offices above the Rocket, his flagship casino. (He claims his taxi fare as a business expense and charges it to the League. This irritates Emilia immensely, but she can't confront him about it without revealing that she's accessed his files illegally, so she has to let it go.) And the documents show that, if the League records are to be believed, Giovanni holds no office but that of Gym Leader. No payments for other services, no 'consultations' or anything else listed that might be cover for a secret breach research wing.

It figures, really. Emilia's an old hand at this game, and she knows better than to think that Giovanni wouldn't have covered his tracks. He's been a Gym Leader for over twenty years and has run the casinos for fifteen. The man's a political veteran, and even in his private business must have a whole army of lawyers on his books; if he really is running one of Lorelei's labs on the sly, then he'll have all of her resources too, and Emilia knows from experience how powerful those are. She herself is one of them, after all. Point her in the direction of a supernatural cataclysm and she'll disappear it, just like that – and the League has several others just like her. If Giovanni doesn't want to leave a trace, he won't.

All of which adds up to a big, seething knot of unease, somewhere underneath her breastbone. It's happened before that the League has done bad things and the public has paid the price. The zapdos roosting in the old power plant, for instance. Some asshole actually rubber-stamped the plans to reopen the place, knowing full well that a pair of highly territorial legendary pokémon were laying eggs in the attic, because battle data on zapdos is very limited and wouldn't it be interesting (scientifically speaking) to provoke just a small fight? Except there are no small fights where zapdos are concerned, especially when those zapdos are defending a nest, and so Emilia got dragged in to fabricate electrical faults in the old equipment to account for the carbonised workers, and Lorelei distanced herself from the whole thing and swore blind that she had no idea this was even happening.

The worst of it is, Emilia believed her. That's the horrible thing about the particular conjunction of power and secrecy. Someone can be so far removed from the consequences of their actions that they can do something like that, and the people who might stop them don't even know it's happening. Emilia knows that this is the system she has made a career out of supporting, but she's always told herself, eight out of ten, right? Eight out of ten times, the League gets it right, saves lives and prevents mass panic. People don't want to know that there are zapdos in the power plant, or that someone calling himself Cryptstalker Corvax once dug up a few corpses in a Celadon graveyard and incited haunter to possess them in an attempt at creating an undead army. Eight out of ten times, Emilia is doing the right thing. She's always believed this.

But that leaves the other two times. And this … well, Emilia has no hard proof, but Lorelei's evasions more or less clinched it for her. This is one of those times. The League has done something wrong, put one kid in the hospital and traumatised another, and Emilia has made sure that nobody notices.

Eight out of ten, she tells herself. Eight out of ten. It still doesn't sit easy with her. It never does.

She doesn't go any further with this. There's no point risking her neck over it; she won't find anything, after all. And besides, the reaction to the breach event near Pewter has been big and dramatic enough that Emilia feels sure the League will have to shut down whatever it was that Giovanni was doing. The Champion's involved now, and the kadabra and alakazam commune. They won't stand for it, for sure. People are not so keen on smashing open the fabric of the universe.

So she tries to forget about it, tells herself eight out of ten, and carries on with her week. It's the usual stuff: liaising between Parliament and the League, being an approachable face for civil servants intimidated by the bizarre wing of national government that lives up on the Indigo Plateau instead of down in the capital with everyone else. Consultations, meetings, the maintenance of a careful peace between various factions whose only common ground is that they all have their own petty agendas. She gets the occasional call from a very stressed Lorelei, asking for advice on how to deal with one group or another, but for the most part she is kept out of the loop, as she expected, and just has to hope that the League is doing the right thing.

Besides, she has other things to worry about. Effie has lost another petal, and the others are starting to look dry and wrinkly at the edges. More than once Nadia has come to remind Emilia of an appointment and found her sitting there in the corner, watching her old partner, face blank and mind a monotone signal that Nadia struggles to interpret. She pecks at her ear or tugs on her sleeve, utters what human platitudes her bird brain can manage, and most of the time she rouses her. Sometimes she does not, and simply stays with her instead.

Emilia digs around under her bed and finds the slim leather case that contains her Indigo League badges. Five: three from Kanto, two from Johto. All but two of them are no longer in circulation, the Gym Leaders that gave them out having retired or died or moved on to other work and leaving successors who claimed the right to design a new one. She polishes them, restores the grubby enamel to its original sheen, and pores over them, next to Effie.

Charge, Wave, Soul; Fist, Rising. Five fights. Five memories dissolving inside Effie's wooden skull. Five of many.

Emilia recounts the story of each one in an undertone, not knowing if Effie hears, not caring. The point is not that Effie has forgotten, she tells herself. The point is that Emilia will remember for her.

She gets up each day. She goes to work, smiles, talks, brokers. She eats healthily, goes to the gym, gets exactly as much sleep as is necessary.

Everything is fine. Everything continues. Except that very soon, Effie won't.

Lorelei's next call comes during one of her fugues, when she finds herself unable to look away from Effie's pot, mind locked into a loop of thoughts that run through the life cycle of a vileplume, over and over again. It takes a few seconds for Emilia to realise her phone is ringing, and a few more for her to actually lift it from the table to her ear.

"Yeah?" she says, distantly.

"Em? It's Lori." Low voice. Urgent. "Something's come up."

Emilia's automatic professionalism kicks in with an efficiency that almost disgusts her, burying her horror beneath a clean, crisp blast of calm.

"All right, Lori," she hears herself say. "Tell me what happened."

"You need to get the next flight to Viridian," Lorelei replies. "The cops have Samuel Oak in custody at Viridian North."

"What? Professor Oak? What's he done?"

"Hospitalised seventeen people and destroyed a couple of buildings."

The world grows cold and narrow for a moment. This makes no sense in a particular kind of way that gives Emilia a very, very bad feeling.

"Has he now," she says, betraying nothing. "That's … definitely strange."

"You think that's strange, wait for the next bit," replies Lorelei. "Oak is also currently doing a show about the next stage of the Pokémon Index Project on JBC Radio One, broadcasting from Goldenrod. Live."

Emilia wishes she was surprised.

"Two Oaks," she says.

"Yes," says Lorelei. "Two Oaks. One of whom just levelled a farmhouse with a gyarados."

For a moment, Emilia says nothing, just stares at Effie and breathes. Two Oaks. A dying vileplume. A League in crisis.

I am omen, said the entity.

They didn't stop, did they. Not even after Pewter.

"Okay, Lori," she says, bowing her head. "Tell me everything."