05: SUMMER LIGHTNING

Over the next few days, things start taking shape. Artemis still hasn't had an official battle yet – she hasn't even spoken to another trainer so far, although she has run into a few of them – but she's getting better at the rhythms of hiking and camping. Her tent stops fighting her when she puts it up. She finds a walking pace that even she, city girl that she is, can sustain for hours without stopping. When wild pokémon appear, defy her to defeat them or win their trust, she and Brauron see them off as one.

There are other rhythms she has to master. Her body fights her at every step; she learns the difficulty of having hair that grows as coarse and fast as knotweed in a season of sun and bare flesh. She struggles to manage her face, her muscles, her absurd, outsize limbs. She is sickened by the way she holds herself.

But Brauron likes her. And Artemis made promises, long ago, not to do anything with the urges spiralling wildly beneath her skin. So she breathes deeply and resists the urge to shred herself and wears long skirts. And anyway, she comes to like them, to appreciate the value of clothes that have a satisfying swishiness to them.

Nobody ever said that this was going to be easy, did they? Pretty much exactly the opposite, in fact. And still you did it, Artie. That's important, that means that either this is real or she believes it's real, which she guesses are more or less the same thing anyway, and that in turn means that all of this is (probably) worth it.

She walks. Her skirt goes swish. Brauron clings to her and follows her watchful eyes.

It's all right. Terrible things are happening elsewhere in the world, but here, in Viridian Forest, between her and her salandit, it's all right.

This is, Artemis feels, more or less as much as you can hope for out of life.

Half a day or so out from Viridian, she has her first battle.

She's stopped for some water, checking her giant map of Kanto and noting with some pride how many miles she's covered these last few days, when she hears the rustle and stomp of someone approaching and looks up sharply, eyes pointed north up the trail. Her encounters with others haven't all been disastrous, but none so far have been encouraging. If past performance is anything to go by, Artemis will either say hi and be forgotten, or simply get up and walk silently away.

Neither of these things happen. A short, bouncy young woman appears around the corner, singing loudly and extremely badly, and Artemis can tell right away what kind of person she is because when she sees Artemis she sings even louder until she reaches the end of the verse, and then stops with a dramatic flourish.

"Hi," she says.

"Hi," says Artemis.

Pause. Brauron climbs the side of Artemis' head, fingers hooking into her hair, and peers over the top at this newcomer. White. Artemis' age or thereabouts. Violently pink hair and artfully torn jeans. A blackwing spearow on her shoulder, larger and more pugnacious than the common redwings that throng the Pewter rooftops.

"I'm Cass," says the woman.

"Artemis."

"Cool!" says Cass, with the sort of enthusiasm that Artemis finds kind of overwhelming. "Are you a trainer?"

"Yeah."

"Neat! You're like the first other trainer I've met who isn't half my age. Did you just start out or have you just been doing it like for years? Oh wait, wait, lemme guess. You're … a pro. Right?"

A lot of words, and they come at a speed that makes Artemis want to shrink down among the plants and disappear, but she can't help but smile a little at how wrong Cass is. What about her exactly looks like a pro trainer?

"Nope," she says. "I just started out."

Cass snaps her fingers and shakes her head. Her hair waves like tinted flames in the sunlight.

"Damn it. That was gonna be my second guess."

Artemis laughs dutifully and wonders if she ought to stand up. It will be very apparent that she's half as tall again as Cass if she does, but it seems a little weird to just stay sitting here on this log while she talks to someone standing.

"Anyway," Cass continues, while she's still absorbed in the politics of her own movements, "since we're both here and all, and I'm like a rookie too, how about we battle? I'll go easy on you," she adds quickly. "I'm gonna say that right now so I have an excuse for when I lose."

"Oh," says Artemis. The joke is right there but she can't quite respond as she'd like. "Um …"

"I mean it's okay if not," says Cass. "You probably have stuff to do, so―"

"No," says Artemis, trying to squash her nerves. She can do this. She'll have to, at some point, pokémon training being what it is, so she might as well start now. "No, let's … let's do that."

She stands up. Cass' head visibly tilts as she tracks the rise of Artemis' face.

"Wow," she says, childishly tactless. "You're tall."

Artemis swallows.

"Yeah," she agrees. "I noticed."

She and Cass move to one side of the trail, behind the log where Artemis was sitting, where a stretch of browned grass forms a makeshift arena. Artemis plucks Brauron from her blouse and gives her a look.

"Okay, kiddo," she mutters. "Crunch time."

Brauron licks her eyes, which seems to be her default response to most things, and Artemis puts her down on the grass in front of her. Cass watches with open curiosity.

"What is that?" she asks. "Never seen one before."

Okay. That gives Artemis some advantage here at least.

"Salandit," she replies. "I got lucky at Pewter Gym."

"Neat. Okay, buster, it's your time to shine." This last is directed at her spearow, which is looking at Brauron in that intense, slightly murderous way that spearow do. Artemis is – well, not confident, exactly, but hopeful. Spearow fly at things and peck at them, right? But putting your mouth on a poison-type is an objectively terrible idea. She might be able to do something with that.

The spearow flutters down onto the turf at his trainer's feet, turning his head this way and that, viewing Brauron with alternating eyes. She stares back, cool and motionless. Amphibian calm versus avian twitchiness. Artemis hopes Brauron's nerves hold better than her own.

"Okay?" she asks, and Cass nods.

"Ready when you are," she says. "Start … now."

The spearow kicks away from the ground in a clatter of feathers, wings hammering furiously at the air; he flaps, banks, gains height, and―

"Peck!" calls Cass, and with a thin piercing cry he falls. Artemis was expecting this, is even to her surprise ready for it, and she calls out in turn:

"Curl! Cloud!"

Brauron does not hesitate, squashes the urge to dart away and coils in on herself, a dense green fog rolling in lumps and waves from her mouth and blackening the grass around her. The spearow has just enough time to squawk his surprise before he ploughs straight into the heart of the cloud, wings flailing. For a couple of seconds, both trainers are frozen, trying desperately to see beyond the mist of poison – and then there is a sharp hiss and the unlikely sound of a bird coughing violently, and the spearow staggers back out of the cloud, kicking uselessly at where he thinks Brauron might be.

"What?" says Cass, staring, baffled. "What?"

Press the advantage, Artie. Salandit poison is flammable, that's the whole damn point, right? And you can't waste it, not when she's just spat out half her whole stockpile in one go, and the spearow is right there still, dazed and trying to beat his way through the poison with gusts of wind and little slashes of his hooked beak, so if there was ever a time …

"Ball!" she snaps, and somewhere in the slowly dissipating cloud of gas there is a little green flash―

A soft whoomph, and then both of them have to look away from the sudden glaring brightness. And then, when they look back: Brauron, croaking triumphantly in a circle of burnt grass, and a somewhat scorched-looking spearow hopping weakly back in the direction of his trainer. As Artemis watches, he glances back at his opponent over his shoulder. She isn't all that familiar with birds, but she's pretty sure that particular look says screw this.

"What the …?" Cass bends down towards him, but her gaze is still fixed on Artemis. "What even was that?"

Artemis doesn't respond. Her mind is still stuck half a minute ago, even as her eyes watch Brauron hissing and making her tail markings burn with the last of her fuel. Did she …? She did. She actually – and Brauron really – holy crap. They did the thing. Artemis had a strategy and Brauron executed it and they …

It seems impossible. But it's true. Artemis really is a trainer.

"So what was that freaky lightshow?" Cass asks, swinging her backpack off her shoulder while her spearow perches on her foot with an air of wounded dignity. "I – hello? You still with us?"

Artemis blinks, and feels herself realign with reality.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I am. Sorry. That's, um, that was my first battle."

"What, really?" Cass pauses, one arm halfway into her bag. "But that was great! You're― ow, okay, Ringo, sheesh, it's coming." She rubs her shin where the spearow pecked it and pulls a potion from her bag. "Here you go."

While she tends to him, Artemis crouches and looks seriously at Brauron. She doesn't seem hurt at all, although Artemis is pretty sure a couple of those blows must have connected.

"Not as squishy as you look, huh?" asks Artemis. "C'mere, kiddo." She holds out her hand, and Brauron climbs her arm, still hot from the fire. Her sharp eyes glitter with self-congratulation – and respect. Artemis isn't sure how much of what just happened Brauron understands, but she clearly knows that this was a proper fight. Which they won. The two of them, together. "God, you're good," Artemis says, stroking her warm little head. "Someone's eating well tonight."

Brauron hisses happily and winds herself around her arm, a bracelet more gorgeous than anything you could buy in a store. Artemis smiles at her, grins really, for a long time, before she realises Cass is talking to her again.

"That was really your first battle?" she's saying.

Artemis hesitates, feeling ugly with embarrassment.

"Um," she says. "Yeah, I guess it kinda was."

They get talking. Cass started in Cerulean, actually, but she took a train to skirt Mt Moon instead of hiking the long trail through the caves and crevasses within the mountain itself. Too many rock-types, she says. Not her idea of a good first outing for a spearow.

"I started in Pewter," admits Artemis. "I'm like completely new to this."

"And you got your crazy poison/fire lizard there, huh?"

A tiny invisible hurt. Artemis does not like that word. It has more bite than people know. Everything's just in her head, right? Crazy person that she is.

"Sure," she says. "Lucked out at the Pewter Gym."

"Neat." Cass prods her spearow gently, and he snaps at her finger without rancour. "My brother caught Ringo for me."

"Ringo?" asks Artemis, and Cass shrugs.

"As in, Starr. He's got a prominent beak," she explains, and Artemis surprises herself by laughing.

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

They walk on a little while in the thickening heat. It's the sort of day that you know will end in summer lightning: dark clouds forming in peaks and banks at the edges of the sky, air so still and warm it takes real effort to breathe it. The forest is quiet, expectant, dappled with light.

Cass skipped the Pewter Gym after a brief training session there, which Artemis agrees was probably for the best. Is she going to try in Viridian? She's not sure. Probably not, if that last battle was anything to go by. She and Ringo need more practice if they're ever going to have a decent shot at a Gym challenge.

"That was really clever, the way you didn't even like say what moves you were using," she says. "I never even thought of that."

Artemis smiles self-consciously.

"It's what they do on TV."

"Huh. Guess I never noticed. That sounds like something I'd do." Cass makes a face. "Anyway, so where are you going? Pallet to Cinnabar?"

"Yep."

"Me too!" Cass looks way more excited by this than she has any right to be. "Mind if we travel together for a bit, then? Nice to have someone my own age around, you know?"

Artemis considers. Cass has said absolutely nothing about the way Artemis is so obviously not cis. And she's not ten. And she seems pretty capable of filling any awkward silences on her own without any help from Artemis herself. Still, she thinks, and then interrupts herself: still what, Artie? Come on. Make a friend.

"Okay," she says. "I'd like that."

"Yes!" Fist pump, bracelets jangling. "I was beginning to think that every single trainer in Kanto was under the age of twelve."

"It feels that way," agrees Artemis. "You're the first one I've met who isn't. 'Cept Brock, I guess."

"You met him?"

"Well, he was there while I was getting Brauron here," lies Artemis. "You said your brother got Ringo for you?"

"Yeah. He's also on his trainer journey right now, which means I got Ringo as charity from a ten-year-old, but I guess that's fine." Cass shrugs. "I didn't go when I was a kid 'cause I had a scholarship I couldn't turn down. Now I got me my edumacation, I'm making up for lost time."

Artemis detects sharp edges underneath the bubbly wit: there's something raw and painful there. Cass has screwed up somehow, or she thinks she has at least. It's strange, but it makes Artemis like her more. Failure is comfortingly familiar.

"Where was the scholarship to?"

"Silverleaf."

Silverleaf: an ancient fortress of a place, somewhere way up in the mountains near the border, and the number one destination for the children of politicians, business magnates and moneyed technocrats. Also a small but formidably smart number of less well-off scholarship kids. Cass is clearly better at studying than she is at pokémon battles.

"Impressive," says Artemis. Cass shrugs.

"'S okay. So what about you?" she asks, evidently wanting to change the subject. "Any particular reason you didn't go as a kid?"

Acute lymphoblastic leukaemia, Artemis thinks.

"I was sick," she says.

"Oh. Must've been bad, then."

"It was pretty bad, yeah."

Cass falters, looks at her uncertainly.

"Sorry," she says. "You know you can always tell me to shut up. My mouth just runs away with me."

Artemis smiles. It's okay. Cass is being nice, isn't she? And Artemis doesn't mind, really. She doesn't bring the topic up herself, but if it comes up, she doesn't complain.

"It's fine," she says. "It's just not really very interesting, is all. I was sick for a few years, and it took me a while to recover after that."

"A few years? Wow. Yeah, I bet it took a while." Cass shakes her head. Ringo shuffles irritably as clouds of pink hair brush his face. "Okay, I'm gonna take my nose and pull it firmly outta your business now."

She makes Artemis smile, and that eases the tension. Artemis can't tell whether she's a conversational grandmaster or just naturally cheerful. She supposes either would be fine.

They walk. Overhead, the clouds thicken; around them, the forest quiets, birds and bugs retreating to their boltholes as the air grows taut and charged. The sun's still bright, but the storm clouds cast a long, dim shadow, and underneath the trees in Viridian Forest a kind of eerie not-quite-twilight prevails. Ringo, who has been fluttering on ahead from branch to branch, returns to his partner with an uneasy chirrup.

"How far are we from the other side?" asks Cass, rubbing a knuckle against his neck. Artemis gets her map out and gauges distances with finger and thumb.

"Uh … let's just say we should probably hurry up."

They look up. The sky is bruised with water.

"Yeah," says Cass. "I think that's probably a good idea."

It's a close thing. When they make it out the other end of the forest, Cass and Artemis have about twenty seconds to enjoy the sight of rolling hills and sunlit farmland before the first fat raindrops come hissing down, and maybe fifteen more to reach the bus shelter before the clouds tear open and the storm breaks in earnest. They sprint down the path towards the road, Artemis stumbling slightly in her unfamiliar clothes, and as the first peal of thunder rolls out overhead they fling themselves beneath the curved glass roof, laughing at themselves and at the rain now hammering the shelter like an angry god.

"Oh man," says Cass, pulling off her sunglasses, running her fingers through rain-slicked hair. "That's intense."

Artemis has to agree. Brauron is wriggling around on her chest, tugging at the pocket of her bag where her poké ball lives; most salamanders like the wet, but clearly the storm is stressing her out, so Artemis gets the ball out and sends her back into its climate-controlled sanctuary. She can't really blame her. It's a hell of a storm, rain driving so thick and fast that Artemis can hardly see to the end of the canola field behind the bus stop. As she watches, lightning strikes twice, somewhere far out on the horizon, and the thunder follows more or less instantly.

"Right in the thick of it!" yells Cass, over the sudden tumult, and Artemis nods, unwilling to raise her voice and put its bass depth on display. Right in the thick of it, indeed.

Ringo doesn't like it any more than Brauron, but he's a spearow, and spearow are vicious little bastards. He hops up onto Cass' head and fans his wings at the rain, puffing himself up, hurling twittering invective into the teeth of the wind. The two women watch, Cass going almost cross-eyed in her attempt to see him, and laugh. They don't mean to, but there's just something so endearing about such a tiny animal blustering so passionately at such a massive force of nature.

The shelter fills up with the smell of rain and battered plants, bleeding the heat and tension from the air. Artemis shuts her eyes for a moment and holds out one hand, beyond the lip of the roof. She is soaked to the elbow instantly in crisp, cool water, and she feels something inside her melt at its touch.

Kanto summers. Storms and searing sunlight. All of this is so familiar, something she's seen a thousand times before from the window of her bedroom, but not like this. Not at all like this.

The smell of it is everywhere. The feeling of it on her skin. And a friend, and a pokémon, and the plants in the field tossing like an ocean of yellow water.

"You okay?" asks Cass, seeing her standing there, swaying a little with the impact of the water on her arm.

Artemis opens her eyes and smiles, for once, without any consideration at all of what it looks like.

"Yeah," she says. "Better than okay. You know?"

Cass grins.

"Yeah," she says, as Ringo flutters to her wrist, the better to spit his fury at the storm. "Yeah, I know."

The bus comes a few minutes later, the glare of the headlights setting fire to a thousand raindrops as it rumbles through the storm, and Cass volunteers to jump out of the shelter and flag it down. When it's stopped, Artemis follows her aboard, where the two of them show their trainer cards for the discount and take seats on the upper deck, right at the front, where the wind and rain howl on three sides and isolate them in a strange frozen moment, cut off from the reality of the world.

Artemis hesitates, then takes off her wet cardigan, slings it across her bag. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Cass looking at her arms, at the pale lines that are so visible against the brown, and she takes a deep breath and composes her mind.

"What happened?" asks Cass, as tactless as ever, and because Artemis is ready for it she is able to tell herself that it doesn't hurt.

"Tried to unlock my car with my clavicle," she says lightly, and Cass smacks herself on the forehead with the heel of her palm.

"Shit," she mutters. "I'm sorry. My mouth just went off before I even thought."

Artemis nods.

"Okay." She does not say that the apology is accepted. She feels bad about that, but she's always stuck to her guns on this point: forgive insensitivity too easily, and she'll be even more of a doormat than she already is.

They sit in silence for a while, even Cass struggling to fill the gap. She scratches Ringo's head gently and watches the storm while he sits on her thigh, rage spent.

Through the streaming rain, the ruins of a building come into view on the right, surrounded by the yellow flicker of police tape, flipping and snapping wildly in the wind. Some psychic-type has put up a barrier over the rubble, diverting the rain across the walls of an invisible dome. Rivers run through midair and splash in the dirt, and beneath them water-blurred shapes that look like cops are combing through the wreckage.

"Wow," says Cass, staring. "Wonder what happened there."

"Yeah," says Artemis, staring along with her. "I wonder."

You don't have to be Emilia Santangelo to know that this is bad, but it helps.

She goes over her information as her taxi takes her through streets that are currently halfway to becoming canals, towards Viridian North Police Station. What she's heard is that Oak – or the thing posing as Oak – has five poké balls on him, only one of which has actually been opened; that one, unfortunately, contained a gyarados that seems to rival Lance Harding's in size and power, and it is this that swept down from Viridian Forest over the outlying farms north of the city. The other poké balls somehow broke the scanner when the police tried to figure out what was in them, and are now being held securely while they question Oak himself.

This hasn't gone well, as far as Emilia can see. Oak appears to have a very limited vocabulary. Mostly, he's been challenging his interrogator to a battle, and then looked faintly confused when he can't find his poké balls.

Emilia sighs. It's a mess, is what this is. Giovanni was out of town on business, so only his Gym trainers were left to back up the cops as they tried to stop the gyarados – and Viridian has never had strong Gym trainers, not since Giovanni's attention has been divided between the League and the casinos. Gyarados don't back down, even when they're on the verge of death, and though the Gym and police pokémon combined did in the end knock the damn thing unconscious there have been injuries. In addition to the eight farm labourers caught in the initial round of hyper beams and thrashing coils, seven police officers and two trainers have been hospitalised, as well as nine of the pokémon themselves.

It's the worst gyarados attack that Emilia can remember. Usually, they can be temporarily caught with reinforced poké balls and moved out to sea or up into the mountain lakes where they can rage until the fury leaves them. But Oak's gyarados already had a ball, of course. And that meant it had to be stopped the old-fashioned way.

"I'm not sure we can bury this one, Nadia." Emilia flicks through papers, thinking out loud. Her voice is half-drowned out by the rain. "Not completely. You can't hide a forty-foot dragon like that. We'll have to work on suppressing the Oak angle, spin it as a straight gyarados attack. If it had just come from the south we could've said it beached at the isthmus; I know that's happened before. Remind me to get a map of the mountains south of the Plateau. There are definitely lake gyarados up there, and they do at least sometimes come out on land …"

Nadia nods and stores away information, filing like with like, creating the bones of a story. The League will need an official explanation very soon, and the responsibility for it rests with her and her partner. Technically the Elite Four are supposed to okay it before the line goes out, but in practice this tends to slow things down too much, and anyway Emilia has by this point been working for the League for longer than any of them except Agatha. There aren't many people who can say that, and the fact that Emilia can gets her a certain degree of leeway. If she comes up with a good cover story, nobody is going to second-guess her back at the Plateau.

The taxi pulls up. Emilia folds her papers back into her bag, pays the driver and shelters Nadia inside her jacket as she darts across the pavement and through the double doors into the station.

"All right?" she asks, as Nadia hops back onto her shoulder. "Okay."

Her League ID gets her a suspicious look from the receptionist and summons a tough-looking woman in her fifties to the front desk. When she sees Emilia, she nods in recognition.

"Ms Santangelo? I've heard of you. Superintendent Ashley Colbert."

Emilia shakes the hand she offers.

"Good to meet you, Superintendent."

Colbert motions for her to follow, and starts walking at a brisk pace down a dingy corridor.

"We've got our so-called Oak down in the cells for now, but I'm not convinced we'll hold him," she says, without preamble. "He's managed to somehow get one of his poké balls back at least twice now. Fortunately we took them back again both times before he was able to release anything."

"Get them back? How?"

"I don't know." Colbert pushes open a door and holds it for her. "He just takes them out of his pocket and then they suddenly aren't where we left them. I've had people actually physically holding them for the last half an hour, and that seems to be doing the trick."

Emilia is impressed. She's dealt with cops of all stripes in the past, and many of them have a disconcerting tendency to go to pieces in the face of the supernatural. Colbert is made of sterner stuff, it seems.

"I appreciate all you've done," she says. Colbert shrugs and leads her down a flight of steps.

"The Gym says Giovanni is on his way," she tells her. "I think they mentioned something about secure transport?"

Emilia nods. Lorelei briefed her on this, albeit not in great detail; although no one has said it, everyone suspects that the doppelgänger is breach, and that means he has to be moved to a containment facility immediately, as a matter of public safety. Her relative ignorance doesn't matter, however. Colbert needs someone who knows what she's doing, and since nobody else is around to step up to the mark Emilia will have to be that somebody, whether she has all the facts straight or not.

"Yes," she says. "He'll be bringing a specialist team with him. We'll be able to move him then and work out what exactly happened."

The corridor here is windowless and lit with fluorescent bulbs. Colbert pauses just before the corner and draws Emilia to one side, out of the stark light.

"Off the record," she says, in a low voice, "this isn't just an imposter, is it?"

Emilia shakes her head.

"I'm afraid not," she replies. "Honestly, I'm impressed you caught him at all."

Colbert looks grim.

"We nearly didn't. He almost threw another poké ball before Officer Hawke managed to tackle him. Shrugged off a hypnosis from our psy officer's partner without even yawning." She glances over her shoulder, around the corner. "All right," she says. "Thanks for your honesty. This way."

Emilia follows her around to the cells, and to Oak.

He stands there behind the bars and guardian constables, lab coat a little dirtied but otherwise exactly like every picture she's ever seen of Kanto's leading pokémon researcher. Height. Build. Eyes. There's nothing at all wrong with him, and somehow this itself feels very, very wrong indeed.

He looks at her, and Emilia shivers.

"Hello," he says mildly. "I'd like to battle."

That voice. She met Oak once at a League event, and this is definitely his voice, his precise, slightly fussy 'hello'. It is him. It really is. Except that Oak is currently being intercepted by League agents in Goldenrod, taken from the radio tower to the Gym in case of trouble, and the man in front of her almost certainly did not exist a few hours ago.

He reaches into his pocket, and scowls when his hand comes back empty.

"Excuse me," he says. "Excuse me."

There's something off with his repetition, something inhuman. His intonation and inflection are exactly, uncannily matched between each sentence. Like he spoke, and then rewound the tape to speak again.

"Hello, Professor," says Emilia cautiously. "My name is Emilia Santangelo, legal adviser to the League. We've met before. Do you remember?"

Oak's eyes are lively and intelligent. He seems to understand her. And yet, when he opens his mouth, all that comes out is:

"Hello. I'd like to battle."

Emilia glances at Colbert.

"He hasn't said anything else," she says. "That's it."

Oak reaches for his pocket and frowns again.

"Excuse me. Excuse me."

"All right, Professor." Emilia flicks her eyes at Nadia and holds out her hand for her to hop onto. "I just need to run a quick test …"

Nadia draws a blank: Oak's mind, if he has one, is impenetrable, a shifting mass of blotched squares and interference patterns startlingly similar to the impression left in the trace by Artemis' spire. BB97 is currently on another assignment, but Emilia suspects she knows what it would make of this already. She has Colbert show her Oak's poké balls and gets Nadia to peer into them for form's sake, and has her suspicions confirmed. Each ball's occupant is as brokenly mindless as Oak himself.

Emilia taps her pen against her teeth, thinking. Soon Giovanni will be here, and then he can take over with Oak. What she needs to do now is go through the testimony, see if anyone saw Oak himself at the scene, eliminate any photographs or video, cut him out of the narrative. Phone calls to the mayor's office, to sympathetic journalists, to Lorelei. After that, a visit to the farms, maybe, see if she can pinpoint from the trace where exactly Oak came from. Colbert hasn't been able to give her any information other than 'from the north'.

Her ideas about what she should do well up and up and spread out through her head, concealing the bigger question of how. Emilia does not want to admit it, but even now it's clear that this is breach again, if of a different kind. Second time in as many weeks, after ten years of nothing. And now in Giovanni's city.

"Hello," says Oak, his broken-record voice drifting down the hall towards her. "I'd like to battle."

Giovanni Dioli arrives in an immaculately tailored black suit and a grave mood, trailing in his wake several carefully nondescript men and women who are probably not to be found on any official list of his Gym's employees. While they sweep downstairs to deal with Oak and his pokémon, Emilia insinuates herself among them and introduces herself to Giovanni.

"Santangelo, isn't it?" he asks, pausing. "You work for Lorelei."

As, I suspect, do you, thinks Emilia.

"More or less," she says aloud, nudging Nadia with her mind. "Would you mind coming with me a moment? I think your team have things in hand here."

"Of course," he says. "Abby, you're in charge. Make sure Steve doesn't screw anything up."

"Yes, sir," says a woman carrying a machine of uncertain function, and as she hurries off after her colleagues, Emilia takes Giovanni aside into an unused conference room.

"The official line is a rampaging gyarados," she tells him. "The mayor and key journalists have already been informed. It shouldn't be hard to stick to it. As far as I can see, there are no photographs to deal with, and the only people who have seen Oak are currently in hospital; I'll be heading over there when I'm done here, and after that I'll leave them in your hands."

Giovanni nods, immediately picking up the thread of her thoughts.

"I'm having copies of the contracts made up at the Gym right now," he says. "You're very efficient, Ms Santangelo. I had heard good things, but I confess I didn't expect to find the situation quite so well contained."

"What I've done is the easy part, Mr Dioli." Giovanni isn't like Brock; Emilia can tell he's a surname kind of man. "We still have our superfluous Oak to deal with." She gives him a frank look. On her shoulder, Nadia tenses. "Mr Dioli, I'm not going to pretend that either of us doesn't know what we're looking at here. Lorelei is going to ask me, so please, make my job easier and tell me: is there a possibility that this could be breach?"

Giovanni does not quite stare. He's too good for that. But he stands very still for a moment, and then smiles broadly.

"Well, you're as good as they say you are, eh?" He chuckles. "I'm curious: I'm sure you know through Lorelei, but how did you know that I knew?"

Emilia thinks. Best not to give too much away here.

"Your equipment," she says. "You didn't just turn up here yourself with some guards, you brought half a laboratory with you. That's the response of someone who knows what he's looking at. And from what I've seen already, I think that what we're looking at is breach."

Giovanni nods slowly.

"Very good," he says. "Very good. Yes, Ms Santangelo. Yes, I believe this almost certainly is breach." He gestures elegantly at the door through which they entered. "My team is equipped with instrumentation roughly analogous to that porygon they always send, what's-its-name―"

"BB97."

"Yes, that's the one. BB97. If our Oak was created by, or arrived in Viridian by means of, breach, we will soon know." Giovanni watches her with sharp, dark eyes. Nadia rustles her wings a little: a little signal to be careful, that the appraisal here is going both ways. The reminder is unnecessary, but welcome all the same. "If you know enough to see that this is breach," he continues, "then you must also know that this conversation is not happening."

"Of course," says Emilia. "The League does not study breach."

Giovanni is silent for a moment.

"No," he agrees. "It doesn't."

LYING, says Nadia. And then, unexpectedly: WAIT. NO. TRUE. NO. … NOT SURE.

Emilia bites down hard and just about stops herself from jumping. This is unprecedented. In all their years of working together, Nadia has never, ever been uncertain. She either knows something or she doesn't. And yet now …

"Something the matter, Ms Santangelo?" asks Giovanni. He is smiling very faintly, and Emilia is suddenly gripped with the conviction that he knows, that he walked into this room and unlike everybody else did not forget the natu, in fact was counting on her, was waiting for this moment at which her unfailing psychic feedback suddenly and spectacularly failed.

None of this shows. Emilia is a professional, and she gives Giovanni a professional smile.

"No," she says innocently. "Not at all." She clasps her hands together in a final sort of way. "Well, that was my only real question for you," she tells him brightly. "Thank you. It makes my job much easier if I can be certain."

"Not at all. I can let you know what results our scans get, if you like."

Emilia really does have to struggle not to stare now. Something's gone very wrong here. First Giovanni denies everything – and somehow throws Nadia off, too – and now he's offering her the results that would demonstrably prove his denial was false? What kind of game is this?

"That … would be very helpful," she replies. "Thank you, Mr Dioli."

"Don't mention it," he says, a little joke at their own weird half-world of secrets, and Emilia smiles briefly. "Now, is there anything else I can do for you, or …?"

"No, that's it. I'll let you go now; I'm sure your team needs you."

"Oh, I'm sure they're fine. You'd be surprised at how competent the League's got these days," he says. "I'll see you later, Ms Santangelo."

"Goodbye."

He leaves. Emilia leans against the table, trying to process what just happened.

"Nadia," she says.

?

"I think he won that one."

YES.

"God damn it." Emilia sighs and raises a thumbnail halfway to her mouth before realising what she's doing and letting it fall again, unbitten. "What was that, Nadia? You weren't sure if he was lying or what?"

NOT SURE, mutters Nadia sulkily. FURRET MAN.

"I can't disagree there." Emilia sighs again. "Something's not right with this. More than the second Oak, I mean." She paces up and down the room, prodding her brain into gear. "Think. What did I say? The League doesn't study breach. And he said no. And you weren't sure whether that was a lie or not."

There is an explanation here, she's certain; it's right there, hovering just beyond her reach. There is a story that makes sense of the strangeness in Giovanni's manner. Emilia has been in this business a long time, and she's developed a nose for these things. She is no longer entirely convinced that this is just the League pretending not to do dangerous research; that wouldn't explain Nadia's uncertainty about the lie. Something else is going on here. Something deeper, and correspondingly darker.

Emilia feels herself sag. What a conclusion. She doesn't want this. She's a League woman, through and through. Eight out of ten, right? And this is just one of the remaining two. No institution is perfect, and that goes double when it's governments you're talking about. And she has a vileplume at home who is dying and taking with her the better part of Emilia's life.

Just do your job, she tells herself. Just do your job and go home to Effie.

But if it isn't the League doing something it's pretending not to, then maybe it's a threat to the League. And as she just said, she's a League woman. Through and through.

And the fear in Artemis' eyes …

Nadia cheeps and shifts, made uneasy by the discomfort radiating from her head. Emilia reaches up, lets her hop onto her hand where the psychic vibrations will be quieter.

"Let's do our jobs, Nadia," she says, with a decisiveness she does not feel. "Let's just do our jobs and see what happens."

Nadia broadcasts a thin wave of assent. Emilia stops pacing, adjusts her hair, breathes.

"Okay," she says. "Back out there."

Technically, visiting hours are over at the hospital, but when the League came up with ID cards for its lawyers the brief to the designer was intimidate into submission and it's never failed Emilia yet. She flashes it at several people, one after the other, and watches their varying reactions: uncertainty, irritation, even fear. Nobody likes being visited by a League lawyer. It's okay. People have never liked being visited by Emilia. Her choice of career was at least in part a way to capitalise on that.

She checks in briefly with those of the cops and the trainers who are conscious, makes them aware that the League is on their side, that medical bills are covered and the investigation will be uncompromising. It's basically a matter of looking grave and talking quietly, of downplaying her race to become a reassuring presence, and Emilia has had a lot of practice at that kind of thing. Most of them go for it; one, a cop who clearly dislikes the League in general and Emilia in particular and who is on a dose of painkillers high enough have stripped away a few of his inhibitions, tells her to fuck off. She smiles blandly and leaves him to his broken ribs.

After that come the farm labourers. The doctors really don't want her disturbing them, but Emilia is nothing if not persistent, and she talks her way into getting five minutes in the ward. She's about to go in when she spots a familiar face lurking down the corridor, texting frantically.

"You know you're supposed to switch your phone off here, Mark," she says, and the man looks up guiltily. Long face, lantern jaw. Ginger hair doing its best to escape from a tight haircut.

"What? Oh." He flips his phone case closed and holds it close to his chest. "It's you."

Emilia isn't supposed to like Mark Trelawney. Investigative journalists allied to various left-wing publications are exactly the sort of people who burrow under the surface of League cover stories and end up exploding secrets. But she's always believed in the freedom of the press, even if her current job sometimes makes this a difficult principle to uphold, and so despite their opposing viewpoints she has a certain amount of respect for him. He makes her life harder, sure – but those in power should never be comfortable. Heavy is the head and all that.

So she tells herself. When she's dealing with a two-out-of-ten case, like this one, it doesn't do much to put her misgivings to rest.

"What are you doing here, Mark?" she asks, stepping out of the way of a passing nurse. "A gyarados attack doesn't seem your thing. Aren't there any corporate evils that need vanquishing?"

"Sure there is. There's one standing right in front of me, with a League badge and three-hundred-florin shoes." It's all in fun. Nadia is watching carefully, of course, but Emilia hasn't tuned her mind to hers: this is more a social call than an interrogation.

"You're losing your touch, Mark," says Emilia, shaking her head. "Twenty-five, from a flea market in Galkirk Village."

"Still bankrolled by the Man," he replies, cutting his crisp Fuchsia accent with an exaggerated hippy drawl, and she laughs.

"I think it's a woman, actually," she tells him, thinking of Lorelei. "What are you doing here?"

Mark grins.

"Gyarados attacks farmsteads north of Viridian, nobody even tries throwing a poké ball? That's not a wild animal, Santangelo. That's a terrorist attack."

He's good. These are the sort of details that Emilia fudges expertly, burying beneath evasions and circumlocutions, but Mark has a kind of dogged sensibleness about him. No matter how elegantly Emilia claims two and two make seventeen, he'll always put them together to make four.

She admires this. She really does. It's important for the Kantan people to have people like Mark Trelawney on their side. But it's also bloody inconvenient.

"I suppose you've got proof of this wild claim?" she asks, and Mark tuts, wagging a reproving finger.

"Now what kind of a journalist would I be if I just up and told you that?" he asks. "Nah, I'll let you work it out yourself. Put those taxpayer florins to work, yeah?"

Emilia raises an eyebrow. It's exactly the kind of evasion that gets around Nadia's particular skills: a rhetorical question can cover a truth, but isn't definitively a lie.

"I'm hurt, Mark. Nadia's not even listening in. Are you?"

Nadia cheeps. It isn't a definite yes or no.

"Never trust a League goon," says Mark. "Anyway, why are you here, Santangelo? The League doesn't send its terrier to bark at a random gyarados with the fury."

Emilia smiles.

"Well, you'd have to ask my bosses that," she replies. "I'm just the attack dog, after all."

Mark utters a short bark of a laugh that draws a disapproving look from a nearby doctor.

"You willing to set me up? That'd be the interview of the century."

"Call me later," she says, injecting a precise quantity of irony into her voice. "We can work something out over a romantic candlelit dinner."

He grins and shakes his head.

"Man," he says. "And I thought you didn't like me."

"I'm sure I don't know what you were thinking with." Emilia feels Nadia's mind pressing at the edges of her own, reminding her of why she's here. "Anyway, Mark, I have some people to talk to. Don't make too much trouble now."

"What, and leave you out of a job? I can't believe you think I'd hurt you that way."

She makes a face at him and then turns to the door, composing herself. Time to be serious, now. Injured people to talk to, information to extract. Hopefully Mark hasn't done too much damage here already.

Ready, Nadia? she thinks, and as the answering bubble of confirmation reaches her mind she pushes open the door to the ward.

Eight men and women, attendant anxious family members. Calming words to be uttered, assurances to be given. Emilia does it all herself, the old-fashioned way. She's come to accept Nadia's help in reading people, over the years, but she refuses to use her psychic powers any more actively than that. People deserve better than that from her. The day she starts pushing thoughts is the day she's no longer to be trusted with her position.

In among the kindness – and it is kindness; Emilia does feel for these people, caught up in horrific random violence that is no fault of theirs – there are questions. Gentle encouragement. Did you get pictures? Video? We need information. We cannot overlook any evidence in this investigation. We want to get to the bottom of this. We owe it to you.

Most people were just trying to run. Three lost their phones in the chaos. One woman, a girl really, just eighteen (and Emilia thinks of the other girl whose life breach has touched, Artemis, with a sudden explosive rush of guilt) – she has a few seconds of blurry video, recorded from her hiding place in an old coal cellar before the gyarados thumped the ground above her and the roof fell down on her leg. Emilia watches the clip carefully, and sees only the dragon. No Oak.

"Thank you," she says sincerely, handing the phone back. "Someone will come to collect a copy of this soon."

"Is it helpful?" asks the girl, wide-eyed, bloodless with pain. "I wanted to … I hoped it would help someone."

Emilia nods her most solemn nod.

"Yes," she says. "You've been very helpful, Claire. Thank you."

By the time she leaves, Mark is gone. Briefly, she considers the possibility that someone else might have had information that he persuaded them not to divulge, but Nadia has been watching everyone she spoke to and detected no evasions. If he has got anything from these people, it must have been without them knowing what it was. It's a remote possibility, and even if it's true, there isn't much she can do about it. For now, she can be certain at least that there aren't any images of Oak to find their way onto TV or the news sites.

She walks down corridors whose windows show darkness and lashing rain. The storm is still raging out there – harder now, if anything. Emilia shakes her head. Kanto in the summer. She'd say there's nowhere else like it, but of course there probably is, somewhere.

Her mind turns back to, of all things, Artemis. She must be at least a week into her journey now, surely? She got the salandit, after all. And the way she looked at it when it crawled into her hands, Emilia has a feeling that she really, really wanted to leave town. (She has theories about this, about why a young trans woman might ask that Emilia meet her at the Gym rather than her home, about why she would want a way out of Pewter, but she tries not to think about it. There is more than enough pain in the world already.) By now, Artemis is probably at Mt Moon, or deep in Viridian Forest.

"Stay dry out there," murmurs Emilia, allowing herself a moment of sentimentality, a moment of fear, a moment more than anything to remember where she came from, and then she puts Artemis from her mind and walks out to her waiting taxi, dialling Lorelei's number. She has an update to report.

The Viridian Pokémon Centre is in the middle of a tight warren of pedestrianised streets, grey and empty in the pouring rain. Cass and Artemis have to run a block from the stop to get there, water cracking across them like whips; when at last they plunge through automatic doors into the pool of warm electric light, they are completely soaked, but laughing. The way Artemis sees it, you have two choices if you have to go out in a summer thunderstorm: you can grouch and sulk at the way the heavy rain pulverises your umbrella and flattens you into the earth, or you can laugh at how ridiculous it is, at how completely powerless you are to not get wet, and come away feeling strangely fulfilled. And she's not one to turn down fulfilment when it comes her way.

She gets lucky. Because of their age, which surrounds them with an unspoken awkwardness in this hive of children, she and Cass get a twin room with an en suite bathroom. It's intended to spare them the ordeal of sharing the public bathrooms with the kids (and the kids that of sharing it with them, for that matter) but it also lets Artemis sidestep the two doors, M and F, through which those bathrooms are accessed. She is deeply, slightly pathetically grateful for this, aware as she is that she would not be welcome in either, even among people her own age.

The downside is that, well, she's sharing a room with Cass, someone she only met this afternoon. But Artemis has already committed to travelling with her, so she's going to have to get used to her sooner or later, and anyway there's no way that Cass doesn't know what she is by now. So. She manages. And Cass, for her part, does absolutely nothing to dispel the polite fiction that lets Artemis go through the motions of her life without sudden debilitating self-disgust.

Artemis reflects that she's pretty lucky, really. Of all the people she could have bumped into on the road to Viridian, Cass is one of the better ones.

Cleaner and more comfortable, moving for the first time in a while without the weight of their backpacks to slow them down, they go downstairs to get something to eat from the cafeteria. Pokémon Centres are not known for their food, but it's free, and even if it wasn't it beats going out in the rain to find something elsewhere in town. The hall is bustling with activity: children, yes, most ten or eleven but some as old as fifteen, and all around them pokémon, slithering and scuttling and flapping and gnawing and creating a thousand different smells and noises. It's a thick enough commotion to be crushing, to press heavily at the edges of Artemis' skull, but she breathes and blanks it out and retreats into a corner with Cass to eat in relative peace.

"Never really felt old before," says Cass, staring out at the hall. "This is weird."

"Yeah," agrees Artemis, pouring some of Brauron's insect pellets into a saucer. "Very."

Ringo eyes the pellets, gauging how quick he'll have to be to snatch one without Brauron stopping him, and Artemis gladly moves her attention away from the chattering kids and onto him.

"You don't want those," she says. "They're made of ash."

Ringo caws. Brauron crouches, makes her markings glow, and he flutters across the table to perch on Cass' shoulder, where he preens himself in an unconvincing imitation of nonchalance.

"Birdbrain," says Cass affectionately, petting his little head. "Probably thinks they're seeds or something."

She and Artemis eat quickly, wanting to get out of the low-level chaos that seems to reign in here, and take Brauron and Ringo out through the lobby into the lounge, which is at the very least slightly quieter. Some kids playing with handheld consoles on one sofa, their nidoran and growlithe staring intrigued at the colours on the screens; a couple of older trainers watching the news on TV. Artemis sits down and starts watching too, while Brauron finishes off her meal in her lap.

"… is that this is a rare instance of a lake gyarados coming down from the Tohjo mountain range," a voice is saying, over footage of a shattered building, the rippling walls of a psychic barrier in the background. "There have been no casualties reported, but seventeen people and nine pokémon are in hospital, three of whom are said to be in a serious condition."

"Hey," says Cass, leaning on the back of the sofa. "Is that the place we saw when we were coming into town?"

"Looks like it," replies Artemis. "Apparently it's a gyarados."

It happens sometimes, especially during summer storms like this: some switch will flip at the base of a gyarados' brain, some ancient dragon instinct flare into life, and they'll rear up out of their lakes or oceans and go berserk. Artemis has never heard of one coming into Viridian, but there's no reason why it couldn't happen. Gyarados are pokémon, and there are weird forces lurking deep inside them: when the fury strikes, they can cover land distances that seem impossible for creatures of the water.

"Weird," says Cass. Artemis doesn't answer. The screen now shows the studio, where the newscaster is sitting behind her desk, backed by a photograph of the unconscious gyarados. It's difficult to say without any point of reference, but it looks like a big one.

"Reports have surfaced, however, of a trainer working with the gyarados," says the newscaster. "Video footage from an undisclosed source purports to show this individual directing the dragon's efforts."

Cut to what has to be a phone camera: howling rain, terrible visibility, and a huge grainy shape rearing and thrashing dimly in the middle distance. The sound of the storm, of thunder and pounding raindrops. Harsh, panicked breath and occasional bleeped-out curses. The gyarados curves its neck, a pixellated ghost in the rain, and then for a split second the gloom of the rain vanishes in a screaming burst of white light and by the awful glow of the hyper beam Artemis can just about make out a figure at the dragon's side, dwarfed by the vast bulk of its throat.

It has one arm out, pointing. The pose is strangely familiar. Artemis used it herself earlier that day, when she directed Brauron to victory in her first battle.

The footage freezes, and the voiceover continues.

"It is unclear at this time whether this is as the rumours claim the gyarados' partner or a bystander caught up in the attack," says the newscaster. "The Indigo League has as yet issued no statement about this footage, but assured representatives of the press that its investigation was ongoing, and that every possible angle was being considered."

Cass stares.

"What the hell? Why would someone do that?" she asks. "There isn't even anything there, it's just – just a farm."

Artemis holds Brauron closer to her chest, where she can feel the warmth of her inner fires. For some reason, she feels cold and weak.

"I don't know," she replies. The TV zooms in on the little silhouette, pixellating it into an indistinct morass of colour. "I don't know."

She has a feeling she does know. But she's aware that she is paranoid, she has delusions, and so she tells herself that she does not know, that there is no reason to believe that she is right. There is no conspiracy in Viridian.

Except that just denying it isn't the way you make it go away, and so it all sits in her and festers, the gyarados and the pixel figure and shapes in the night and scanners and Gym Leaders and spires of singing light, and as the sense of a conspiracy deepens she finds herself coming back to that one word, again and again.

Breach.