06: A GUIDE TO AMATEUR SPYCRAFT

Artemis does some research. Every Pokémon Centre has a computer room, wired up to the specialist apparatus that gives access to the box network, and, telling Cass she has some emails to write, she holes up in a corner here and logs on with the number on her trainer card.

"Okay," she mutters to Brauron, perched atop the monitor. "Let's see if we can figure out what the brad thing was all about."

Brad, unsurprisingly, gets her nowhere. She tries adding it to other terms from the instructions, tries doing it minus all the results for people, but still, she learns very little other than (a) there's a kind of nail called a brad and (b) the name Bradley means 'broad clearing'. She stares at the results for a while, wrestles with and tries to refine them, but doesn't get anything even remotely helpful.

"Damn it." She sighs and looks at Brauron. "Okay, scratch 'spy' off the list of potential things to do with my life, I guess. I'm terrible at this."

Brauron licks her eyes, and Artemis rolls hers.

"That's what you always say," she says. "Okay. What about …"

She tries searching for breach, then breach + brad, then breach + brad + Giovanni. The resultant mishmash of out-of-date news and League registers doesn't tell her anything except that the last-but-one Leader of the Viridian Gym was named Brad. Part of her leaps on this like a cat after a laser pointer, but the bigger part shakes its head and writes it off as coincidence. Giovanni's headed the Gym since 1995. Isabella Black ran it for eight years before that, and that means Brad Wickman hasn't had anything to do with it for over thirty years. He might even be dead by now. Or no, wait, his stub of a Wikipedia page says he's retired to Olivine in Johto.

"Damn it." Artemis scratches her head. "We're missing something here, kiddo. But what?"

Brauron slips sedately down the side of the monitor and climbs the side of the computer itself, pressing herself against the warm plastic.

"Please don't break that," Artemis says. "What are we not getting here?"

It might just be that there's nothing available online. That is eminently possible. But Artemis still has the feeling that she hasn't exhausted this avenue of investigation yet, that if she just puts these pieces together in the right order, part of the jigsaw picture will suddenly leap out at her.

She glares at the screen, and searches again. Except this time she mistypes slightly, B being right above the space bar, and searches b rad instead of brad – and though the results are more or less the same, she blinks and stares, transfixed. B rad. What if it wasn't a word at all? The instructions were so truncated and cut down, they must have been written out in a hurry. What if it's short for something? And come on, Artie, what would rad be short for?

B radiation gets her a Wikipedia page on beta radiation – and, a page or two deeper down the rabbit hole, the information that rad itself is the name of a unit of measurement for dosages of absorbed radiation. Which actually makes an unpleasant amount of sense, although she's not convinced that the B really stood for beta. A scientist would write β, right? And though of course Artemis can't be sure, not without the note here in front of her, she is mostly certain that it didn't say that. It said B.

Which leaves one other option. There is of course another word that begins with B, and which has haunted this whole series of events, right the way back to when that spire appeared to her on the hill.

Breach. Breach radiation. The scanner that Giovanni brought to those woods was designed to detect the traces of a breach.

Artemis hunches in her chair, obscurely afraid, although there is nothing she can point to as an immediate threat. No one has come after her. Nobody has done a damn thing since Giovanni scanned her for breach radiation in the middle of the night. It might be that she isn't irradiated enough, or that all they wanted to do was test whether she really had been as close to the spire as she claimed. But if so, why like that? Why in secret, in the middle of nowhere, after everyone else told her that all of this was over and she was free to get on with her journey?

She can't answer this. She can say, however, that she was right to be suspicious. Giovanni was playing games after all.

She has never before in her entire life been this unhappy to be proven right.

Brauron puts a forefoot on her hand and Artemis looks down to see her crouched over the keyboard, eyes fixed on her trainer's face.

"Hey," she says, picking her up, holding her close. "Don't worry about me. I'm okay, I promise."

But she's not. And no matter how much she strokes her salandit, the question still remains: what is Giovanni doing? And whatever it is, why can't she just walk away?

There are a few really spectacularly bad ways to be proven wrong, and 'live on national TV' is pretty high up there. Lorelei was not happy with Emilia last night. Nor was anyone else up on the Plateau. About an hour before the Tohjo Regional News broadcast went out, she called them up to say that she'd vetted the photos and videos and found nothing in them but the gyarados. Needless to say, this did not go over well.

"Talk to me, Emilia," Lorelei said, and if her tone didn't give it away the full name definitely did. "Tell me what the hell happened here."

So Emilia did, she said Mark Trelawney happened here, and then Lorelei asked who and she explained. Journalist. He was at the hospital, although nobody she spoke to admitted to giving him anything (and Nadia confirmed that none of them were lying.) Either he stole a phone at the ward or there was another witness who he got to first. But it's fine, she said, we can deal with this.

"Press conference, now," said Emilia. "Ask why this video wasn't brought to our attention; play it concerned, indignant. We ask for anyone who has any information about this person to come forward. No one's going to have any, but we do it anyway, go through the motions. We'll have to work with the police on this, since we have to approach it as a crime rather than a natural disaster, but I think we can handle that; the super at Viridian North already suspects Oak isn't human. All that buys us some time. Then after a few days, during which we turn up no leads because of course this really was a wild gyarados, we get the cops investigating to come forward and say, based on their questioning of the people at the scene and any experts we can dig up to examine the footage, they think the person in the video is one of them, trying to get away."

And Lorelei went quiet for a bit and sighed and told her she was too damn good at her job, and went to get Bruno on the press conference while Emilia brought up news websites on her laptop and compared timestamps. The very first one to break the news was The Cataphract: Mark Trelawney's usual employers. Other sites followed soon, but The Cataphract was first – and its article has clearly been cannibalised by some of its less scrupulous competitors. Mark made waves that night.

An hour later, Giovanni called to let her know that according to their tests, it really was breach. Emilia thanked him politely, wondered why she ever thought he'd give himself away with written data, and swore violently as soon as he hung up.

All this was a little over ten hours ago. Now, Emilia is stepping from her taxi out into the mud around the ruined farm, into the clear light of early morning. The skies have been clear since about half one in the morning, leaving Viridian slick and shiny in the dawn light. Emilia stares. She's seen pictures, of course, but that was with the rain. Now, set against the hills and the dark swell of Viridian Forest, the devastation is much more apparent: shredded fields, levelled buildings, a burned-out husk that up until very recently was some kind of tractor. Everything stinks of fish and scorched oil.

She thinks she sees a severed foot and for a minute her heart stops, and then she looks again and sees it's just a piece of broken plastic.

Okay. She definitely needs to get some sleep at some point.

She picks her way through the mud towards the police line. There is an art to being immaculately well-dressed in crisis situations, and after all this time Emilia has it pretty much down. She does not slip and does not splash, and reaches the cops looking almost as good as she did when she got into the taxi.

"Emilia Santangelo," she says, holding out her card. "Legal advisor to the Indigo League, with special investigatory powers."

The constable nods and waves her through, clearly expecting her. Emilia smiles her thanks, ducks under the tape and crosses to where a couple of detectives are standing, drinking coffee out of polystyrene cups and staring morosely at the scattered pieces of brick and wood.

"DCI Park and DS Rodriguez?" she asks. "Emilia Santangelo, Indigo League. We met at the station."

"Hey." Park nods. He is much friendlier than Harkness, although also deadened by the scene before him, and by what he knows took place here yesterday. Rodriguez is subdued as well. Emilia can tell they both count some of those in the hospital among their friends. "Are you here to run your trace?"

"That's correct," says Emilia.

"We ran one of our own. Espeon. High sympathetic fidelity." Park shakes his head. "Strangest thing. Nothing but static."

Emilia nods.

"Did you get a direction?" she asks. "Any clue where Oak came from?"

"Nothing, ma'am," says Rodriguez. "It's too scrambled. Might be able to get something with a natu, though."

Nadia puffs her chest out, full of avian self-importance. Emilia's fairly pleased herself, despite the grim business ahead. She and Nadia do a lot of thankless work. It's nice to have their abilities recognised for once.

"That's why I'm here," says Emilia. "Do we have anything else? Tracks? The storm can't have washed out the gyarados' trail, can it?"

Park steps back and gestures out past the collapsed house to a line of shattered sheds and the remnants of a wheatfield beyond.

"Came from over there," he says. "Northwest corner of the farm. Up till then, it must've been in its ball. The trail doesn't go back any further. And Oak, or whoever he is …" He shrugs. "Nothing, not after that storm. We suspect he came south from the woods or east from the hills, but there's no evidence now. Even the dogs are stuck."

Emilia nods. She didn't expect anything else. BB97 would probably be able to detect breach radiation here, but at this point it feels redundant. In the middle of last night, Lorelei called her to say that Oak had reached containment safely, and also that he caused an electrical fire when they took him through the metal detector. And while Emilia might still have no idea what breach really is, she knows that it disrupts, that it mutates pokémon and glitches computers, breaks machines and disintegrates psychic emanations and physical matter alike. The one thing she has on her side here is that Nadia has encountered its fractured trail three times now, on the hill, in Oak's head and clinging to his pokémon. Hopefully that will be enough for her to make an attempt at pinpointing where it is that the doppelgänger originally manifested.

"I understand," she tells the two detectives. "I'll let you know immediately if I find anything."

She doesn't have a choice, of course; given that this is now a criminal investigation, the League is obliged to work with the police on this. But the polite thing to do is to pretend she's doing this of her own free will, and Emilia is nothing if not polite.

"Thanks," says Park. "We appreciate it."

"Not at all." Emilia transfers Nadia from shoulder to finger. "Okay, Nadia. In your own time."

She takes her a little closer to the farmhouse, and closes her eyes. Almost immediately, the darkness behind her eyelids is filled with random crystalline blocks of light, bits of spacetime shredded by the attack. She turns, takes Nadia back and forth across the site, but it's much, much worse than on the hill near Pewter; even the traces of the victims have been erased. The gyarados moved a lot more than the spire, and seems to have spread the interference across the whole area.

Still. There's something to work with, just. Both she and her human partner have a headache within minutes, but if she really concentrates Nadia can detect the intensity of each individual section of static. Here, a huge concentrated thicket of broken space, spars of mindstuff and jumbled fragments of time piled up atop one another: the gyarados was motionless on this spot for a time, perhaps recovering after a hyper beam. Here a place with little more than a few zigzag cracks across it: somewhere neither Oak nor his dragon ever stood. Emilia opens one eye and finds herself by a mostly-undamaged toolshed.

There is a pattern to this. The dense zones of interference form an outline of the attack, a long meandering curl of a trail that veers northward from the farmhouse across the fields, back southwest to the sheds, and then up north again to the place where the farm gives way to the uncultivated moorland. Here, it gets much weaker very suddenly, and Emilia realises they have found the spot where the gyarados was released.

She opens her eyes. They are a little sticky, and the light hurts. That was a hell of a trace. She's surprised she hasn't got a nosebleed.

"All right," she sighs. "Nadia? Five minutes."

Nadia broadcasts her agreement in a vague, undirected wave, wilting visibly. The trail is difficult to get hold of, and even more difficult to actually track, like pulling yourself up a rope made of smoke. Emilia puts her back on her shoulder and feels her little heart thumping hard next to her cheek.

"We're nearly there," she tells her. "You're doing very well."

No response. Either Nadia isn't satisfied, or she wants to save her energy. Emilia can't really blame her either way. Unless they find where Oak first manifested, they haven't uncovered anything that the police don't already know.

She looks around. Behind her, the destroyed farms stretch out in their fields of ruined earth. Ahead, beyond the gate at the farm's edge, the hills begin to rise up in waves of scrubby grass and stunted shrubs against the backdrop of the Tohjos. If she squints, she thinks she can see the gatehouses on Route 23, sectioning off the road to the Indigo Plateau. But that's obviously impossible, at this distance, so she tells herself she's imagining things and turns instead to Nadia.

"Ready to go again?" she asks, and gets a determined chirp in response. "All right. Let's go."

The gate is locked but low, and even dressed as unsuitably as she is Emilia can climb it. It occurs to her that Oak must have done the same thing before releasing the gyarados: there is no break in the hedge to mark the point where the dragon burst through. The information is not terribly useful, but she files it away along with everything else and closes her eyes.

Here is more of the same: long, angular sarcomas in the psychic plane, wobbling away up the slope. Faint, but unmistakeable, if you know what you're looking for. Emilia climbs the hill, one eye in the past and one checking for obstacles in the present, and on her finger Nadia glows purple and gives off rich, violent waves of determination as she concentrates.

After a little while, Emilia stops and closes both eyes. Something isn't right here. The trail should be getting weaker with age, but it isn't. More jags and arcs of colour; more broken shards of light. If anything, this is getting stronger.

"Nadia?" she asks. "What am I looking at here?"

CLOSE TO NOW, she replies.

Meaning – well, Emilia would be inclined to say 'closer to the present moment', but how can that be? This is the path Oak took to get to the farm, not to get away from it.

CLOSE TO NOW, repeats Nadia stubbornly, sensing her thoughts. FOLLOW.

"Okay, okay."

Emilia keeps walking, reaches the top of the hill and begins to go down the other side. The trail thickens, the space around them growing dense with interference. Here it crosses a footpath and seems to follow it southwest into the hills, growing stronger all the time. Emilia wonders uneasily if Oak managed to release another pokémon, if she is simply walking directly into an ambush. All the poké balls he had on him were occupied. But who's to say he didn't have another on him, one that got opened and then lost in the chaos?

No, she decides. No, that doesn't work: Oak is incapable of losing his poké balls. As Colbert said, they keep returning to his pockets when taken away. This is in some ways reassuring – Emilia is most definitely not a trainer, and she has no desire to come face to face with one of his monstrously powerful breach pokémon – but in another way it's just disconcerting. Because if that isn't true, then what on earth is she following?

Then, quite suddenly, the trail begins to fade. She stops for a moment, asks Nadia to double-check, but it's true. Halfway up this path, for whatever reason, the interference trail reaches peak intensity, and then begins to taper off.

Emilia looks around and sees nothing. No disturbed grass, no sign that anyone has been here for a long time.

"Nadia?" she asks.

THIS IS THE NOW.

Emilia sighs. There is a reason that natu aren't more commonly used for psy tracing. Their prophetic prowess means their sense of space and time is skewed, making their thoughts alien and cryptic. It takes years of working together for a natu and its trainer to understand each other properly, and even then there are times – like now – when the communication barrier gets in the way.

"Do we keep following the trail?" she asks, hoping to come at the issue from a different angle, to make Nadia reveal something new in her response.

YES.

Less than eloquent, but all right; it's clear enough that Emilia can work with it, at least. She tells Nadia to lead on, and together they follow the fading trail further up the path into the hills.

It lasts for about a quarter of a mile, and then peters out into nothing. Emilia opens her eyes to find herself standing at the edge of a broad, flat area projecting from the side of one of the Tohjo foothills, lined with a short wooden railing and scattered with picnic tables. A nice enough place to stop for lunch on a walk through the hills, and totally devoid of any life at all, breach or otherwise.

Emilia looks at Nadia, clinging weakly to her fingers and breathing hard. She hasn't seen her this tired in a long time.

"Is this it?" she asks. "Or have you lost the trail?"

Nadia glares, as only a natu can.

NOT LOST, she maintains stubbornly. ENDS HERE. IN THE SOON.

Emilia pauses.

"In the soon," she repeats slowly. A trail that gets stronger until it hits 'the now', and then grows weaker until it fades out in 'the soon'.

And breach disrupts …

The penny drops, and Emilia's eyes widen.

"He hasn't appeared yet, has he?" she asks. "He's going to, here, and somehow he walked – will walk – whichever – backwards through time to get to the farm."

It sounds impossible, even by her standards. There are pokémon capable of time travel, Emilia knows, but as far as she understands it that's a simple teleportation thing, a near-instantaneous translocation from one point in spacetime to another. This is far, far stranger. Oak's trail begins here, in the future, and gets stronger and stronger as it approaches the present moment – Nadia's 'the now' – after which it grows weaker until it hits last night, at the farm, where somehow he reconnected with time as Emilia knows it and started moving forwards again as he began the attack.

She snaps her fingers.

"The spire," she says. "It didn't just make it dark, it made it night. It broke time. And – wait. Nadia, how soon is 'soon'?"

SOME TIME, she replies. MAYBE NOON.

It's not very specific, but it's as close as a natu can come to expressing a set time in human terms; it took three years of work together before Nadia could say anything like this or Emilia understand it. It also raises a hell of a lot of questions. Emilia's first instinct is to tell Lorelei immediately, to have people stationed here to capture Oak before he has a chance to sic his gyarados on anyone – but what happens to last night if she does that? And the trail: if he never goes back to make it, how would her past self have followed it up here? And if Oak is caught before he can be taken into custody yesterday, then what happens to the one the League currently has in containment?

Nadia blinks and flutters weakly down onto the railing, lacking the energy to engage with the knot of paradoxical thought swirling around her partner's head. Emilia wishes she could do the same. But Nadia's done her part, and now she has to do hers. Only it's no longer apparent what hers actually is, at this point.

She sighs. Perhaps it's time to delegate. She can give this information to Lorelei and let one of her scientists figure it out. Nobody is supposed to know it, but Emilia is almost entirely sure that the League has at least one world expert on time travel on its books.

Emilia turns and looks back down the slope, over the hills towards the ruins of the two farms. From up here, the wreckage seems tiny, like scattered Lego bricks in fields of mud.

She sighs again and shakes her head.

"Well," she says, holding out her hand for Nadia to hop onto. "I don't know how we're going to explain this to DCI Park, but I suppose we'd better go back and try."

Artemis has a strange night.

Not a bad one; no hallucinations, and, for the first time in a while, no nightmares either. But she hasn't shared a room with someone since … well, it's hard to be sure. Since she was fifteen, maybe? There was a trip, some school thing, at a camp of some kind in the woods near Mt Moon. She spent three nights away from home in a dormitory full of teenage boys, miserable and afraid and unsure why, and then next year she tore up the permission slip and the letter to her parents and burned them with Chelle's lighter on her way home from school.

And between that trip and this one is four years and a period of hermitage, as well as a sudden wrenching change of self, so Artemis is in many ways somewhat out of practice. She has to steel herself, to be seen unready, without make-up or breasts. In her pyjamas, Cass looks like Cass. In hers, Artemis looks unfinished.

It's okay. Cass catches herself staring before it becomes obvious enough to be aggressive, and does her best to go on as if nothing is different. Artemis is painfully grateful. She shouldn't be, she deserves this, but the thing is that everybody knows they can refuse it to her with society's blessing and so she is grateful anyway.

They switch off the lights and lie there in their beds, listening to the rain doing its best to tear the window out of its frame. On Artemis' bedside cabinet, Brauron's markings glow gently in the dark.

"Artemis," says Cass.

Artemis looks across at her. She is staring directly up, into the ceiling.

"Yeah?" she replies.

"I never said exactly why I'm doing my journey now." Cass pauses. Artemis hears her draw in a steadying breath. "I didn't do so good at Silverleaf. Not really my kinda place. They paid for me to come and then I did and I almost didn't even pass my exams at the end of it."

Artemis says nothing. She understands, in some way, that this is Cass apologising for her behaviour on the bus. A weakness traded for a weakness. Sins cancelling each other out.

"That kinda upset some people," Cass continues. "People who were like expecting me to have a very different future to what I'm looking at now. Teachers. Parents."

Pause. Sound of rain sluicing across rooftops.

"Yeah," says Artemis. "My parents were expecting something different from me too."

Cass looks at her. Artemis can't see her face clearly in the dark but she can see that her head has moved.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

Cass moves her head back again.

"Yeah," she repeats. "I guess you'd know all about that kinda thing."

Another silence. A shadow moves and makes Artemis tense up, but it's just Ringo shuffling on his perch.

"So anyway, I decided I should clear out for a while and think some things through," says Cass. "And, uh, here we are."

"Yeah," says Artemis. "Here we are."

Lightning makes the gap around the curtains flare brilliant white. Immediately after, thunder rolls out overhead.

"Cass," says Artemis.

"Yeah?"

"You know it was okay. On the bus, I mean. It happens."

"Yeah, well, maybe it shouldn't." Cass sighs. "Thanks."

"Night, Cass."

"Night."

The storm rages. Artemis imagines the world outside, a maze of running water and dripping roofs, of pigeons squished up against pidgey beneath cornices as animal and pokémon alike flee the rain, and lets out a breath that she was unaware that she was holding.

The first leg of the journey is over. Tomorrow – well, tomorrow there are adventures to be had, and also terrifying mysteries to investigate, but tonight, it's time to take advantage of civilisation while she's here, and to rest.

Artemis closes her eyes, and does not dream of anything at all.

Cass wants a ditto.

"How cool would that be?" she says, over breakfast the next morning. "The pokémon with a thousand faces! Or, okay, it's just got that one face, I guess, with the weird little smile, but a thousand shapes, anyway. If you can teach it to memorise like, let's say five different shapes, that's pretty much a pokémon for every situation. Right?"

Artemis peels an egg for Brauron and waits patiently for her to stop talking.

"Okay, you don't have to convince me," she says. "You want a ditto, you catch one."

"Well, that's the thing. Ringo, no, that is most definitely people food. Ringo! Okay, where was I? Right. So the thing is, according to the Pokédex, there are some wild ditto up on the moors near the Tohjo Mountains. You know, around Route 23? And like I know you're heading for Cinnabar, but I was wondering if maybe …"

"You want to detour to the hills?" asks Artemis.

"Yeah."

Cass looks a little concerned. Wondering, maybe, if she blew it yesterday, if Artemis will now abandon her. Or maybe Artemis is just projecting. Either way, she's not about to leave behind the one trainer she's met so far who's her own age, and she has a whole year, right, so what's the harm in stopping off? Maybe she'll find something to add to her team, too, although to be honest she feels like one pokémon is enough for now, given how early in their career she and Brauron both are.

And anyway, this lets her put off looking for answers on Cinnabar Island for one more day.

"So," says Cass. "Is that like okay?"

"Sure it is," says Artemis. "Why not? It's a nice day for a walk anyway."

The air is still cool from the storm, although it feels like it will be hot again by this afternoon, and Viridian drips all around them as they walk down to the bus stop. One of the pedestrianised streets is at least fifty per cent puddle, and it takes some thoughtful footwork to get to the other end with dry socks. But the sun is bright and the breeze fine, and they walk lightly, backpacks left in the room at the Centre, and all in all it's just a good day to be out and moving and alive. A man walks by with a growlithe and a regular puppy that chase each other around through the puddles, splashing uproariously, and Artemis feels her heart lift a little. Why shouldn't she detour to the moors, anyway? It's not like anyone has done anything since Giovanni. Maybe the League is done with her. Maybe she doesn't even need to do any investigating; maybe everything is over; maybe now she's just looking at the year of freedom she'd been expecting, without breach hanging over her like the sword of Damocles.

It's a nice thought. She tries not to get too attached to it, because nice thoughts so often turn out to be just that, just thoughts, but it lingers in her head all through the bus ride, unwilling to depart.

Outside the window, Viridian rolls by in waves of unprepossessing concrete. According to its Wikipedia page – which Artemis read before setting out from home, because of course she did – the city centre was more or less eviscerated in the sixties and rebuilt with a great deal of enthusiasm and substantially less architectural talent. The buildings are monumental and cast long, solid shadows across the streets; the ground floors have all been remodelled, walls ripped out and replaced with glass for maximum store frontage, but above that the concrete stretches on, grey and unbroken till the rooftops. It has its own charm, in a brutal kind of way, but there's far too much of it. Artemis turns away after a while and flicks through her phone while Brauron watches the screen carefully, interested and confused.

Cement gives way to suburbia gives way to grassland, and then they're as far out as the bus will take them and it's time to get off. Artemis stands there by the roadside and looks back at the grey bulk of the city, then forward, at the blue shadow of the mountains rising above the hills. She thinks that distant shape there might be Mt Silver, where the skarmory and tyranitar breed. Isn't that cool? She thinks it's cool.

Cass stretches her arms and lets go of Ringo, who has been itching to spread his wings all morning and now immediately flies on ahead across the field in that stop-start way that spearow do.

"Not too far!" she calls, without getting a response. She rolls her eyes and turns to Artemis. "Okay," she says. "Let's get going before he manages to get himself into trouble."

"Does he do that a lot?" asks Artemis, walking with her, feeling the wet grass slithering across her legs. Brauron is motionless beneath her clavicle, just like normal. She isn't sure her nerves could take it if she ran around out of sight the way Ringo's doing.

"Only when he hasn't flown around much." Up ahead, Ringo explodes out of the long grass, drops of water spraying from his wings, and manages to fly a full twelve feet before descending back to earth in a clatter of feathers. "But like, spearow aren't very good at flying, so I think it's okay. He can't go far."

The field slopes up towards a stand of trees, where the two of them climb over a stile and find Ringo scrabbling around the dirt track beyond, pecking at bugs. He seems to have worked off some of his energy, and settles readily back onto Cass' shoulder when he sees her. His feet leave grime on her t-shirt, but she doesn't seem to mind. Artemis understands. Brauron tracks soot everywhere herself, and yet she wouldn't have her any other way.

Cass talks excitedly about ditto. She seems taken with the idea of a shifting, mobile response to any given opponent. Artemis doesn't have the heart to suggest that it might be difficult to get a ditto to memorise so many different shapes. Don't they normally just turn into things they can see in front of them? And okay, she's not an expert, but she's only ever seen one or two in the televised tournaments. She has a feeling these are the exception rather than the rule.

Still. Cass is a nice person and she'll be good to her ditto, so if she finds one that wants to work with her then who is Artemis to get in her way? This makes her think about how you would find one, given their incredible skill at camouflage, and actually that's kind of a big issue so she summons up her courage and points it out to Cass.

"Oh," she says in response, looking nonplussed. "I, uh, didn't think of that. Oops."

"Kind of important if we're gonna go looking for ditto," says Artemis.

"Yeah," agrees Cass. "I see that. Um … I guess we wander around and hope one jumps out at us? Like there's no point trying to catch one that doesn't want to be trained."

Artemis guesses so too.

The path winds its way in long loops through the hills, rising steadily westwards. Cass says it's pretty inefficient, and maybe they should just go straight over the top of the next one. Artemis looks at the banks of thick grass and vividly flowered gorse, and invites her to try. Two steps in, Cass makes a face and comes back again, wincing as the thorns drag at her legs.

"How'd you know it would be like that?" she asks.

I saw gorse in a book and looked it up online, thinks Artemis.

"I mean, it looks pretty spiky," she says, and Cass sighs.

"Yeah, looking before I leap isn't exactly my strong suit," she says.

Artemis smiles politely. She has spent more or less the whole of her life up till this point looking, readying herself for the leap.

"Right," she says, and with an effort keeps the bitterness from her voice. It's not Cass' fault that her brain is wired the way it is, after all.

They climb. Around their feet, the trail gets narrower and narrower; above them, the sun climbs and begins to heat the air. The mountains ahead don't get any clearer, but the hills get higher and higher and, looking back, Artemis sees Viridian diminish into a distance-dim toy city, grey and indistinct.

She smells burning, and feels the beginnings of a headache gathering at her temples.

Sometime around mid-morning, Ringo swoops low over a patch of long grass and flushes out a nidoran, its dark fur thick with spines and poison. Seeing humans, it turns and issues a challenge in guttural chucking sounds, levelling its horn and scratching at the dirt.

"Never seen a black one before," says Cass, staring. "Is that a colour morph or a different species?"

"Not sure," replies Artemis. "Maybe concentrate on beating it first?"

Like most battles against wild pokémon, the fight is short and decisive: Ringo flaps around, squawking and shrugging off the nidoran's attempts to kick him until, confused and annoyed, it feints with its horn to drive him off and flees into the undergrowth.

"Neat!" says Cass, as Ringo returns to her shoulder. "Nice work, buster."

"Yeah," says Artemis. "Nice work."

The black nidoran isn't the only wild pokémon they meet, but it's one of relatively few: this place is much more sparsely populated than Viridian Forest. There's a clump of knotty grass that gets up and reveals itself to be a heath mankey, long dun fur blending in among the vegetation; there are a pair of spearow that flee at the first jet of Brauron's fire; there is a fat purple ekans that they disturb in the middle of swallowing a crow and which shrinks down among the bushes, trying to avoid being seen.

Artemis' headache gets worse.

She can't shift that weird burning smell. It's not Brauron, and when asked Cass says she can't smell anything at all. She might just be imagining it, only it's so damn vivid, and she's never hallucinated a scent before – sights, yes, sounds, most definitely, but not scents.

It feels familiar, but she can't place it. Artemis kneads her aching temples, takes long drinks from her water bottle that don't help in the slightest, and bites down hard on her irritation. Keep it together, Artie. You're in the process of acquiring a friend. No need to screw that up by complaining.

The sun hangs above them and glares like a snake hypnotising a rabbit. They stop and reapply sunscreen, and then, when they see a fork in the trail and a sign explaining it, agree without speaking to take the right-hand path down to the rest stop.

It's a nice enough spot: a place where the hillside might have slipped millennia ago, creating a sort of plateau below the peak. Above them, bare chalk and granite rise up to the hilltop. Below, the grass goes up and down in waves, all the way down to Viridian and the farmland above it. In between, there are picnic tables and benches, laid out in the meagre shade of the hill itself.

Artemis sits with a sigh and holds her head tightly in one hand. It's the kind of headache that feels like mechanical trauma with a blunt object. Like someone is responsible for it.

Cass perches on the edge of the table, swinging her legs.

"Okay, so we haven't found anything so far," she says, petting Ringo absently. "But I'm sure we will soon. Ditto don't mind the sun, right? They don't even have skin, so it's not like they can get sunburn."

"Mm," says Artemis. She drinks more water, but it's not a dehydration thing. The headache remains, intensifies even, as if a vice is being tightened twist by vicious twist around her skull. Her nostrils are clogged with the smell of burnt things.

"And like lots of animals stay in around midday to avoid the sun, so it stands to reason they might be … hey, are you okay?"

Artemis looks up. Cass is watching her, concerned.

"Fine," she mutters. "Just a headache."

"Have you had some water?" asks Cass, and Artemis would interrupt with a curt yes but she can't, she just can't, so she waits and then nods and says politely:

"Yeah. It's not that."

"Oh." Cass clicks her tongue. "Sorry, I had some paracetamol but I left my first aid stuff at the Centre."

Artemis forces a shrug.

"Me too," she says. "I …"

Somebody gives the vice another twist, and Artemis gasps, half certain now that her skull is actually about to burst, that the pressure on her temples is a real physical thing, and then she hears Brauron hiss in alarm and Cass cry out that she's bleeding and then impossibly the pain gets even worse and then―

Somewhere cold and dark, somewhere deep within herself, Artemis opens her eyes to see a burning red light.

Breach, it says. There has been a breach.

And Artemis opens her eyes again and sees the sky and hills and everything else, exactly as before. She's still sitting on the bench. Her face is wet and Brauron has climbed up around her neck, peering at her in concern.

"Are you okay?" Cass asks. "You're – that's quite a lot of blood …"

Artemis stands up. It feels like there's a half-second delay between making the movement and realising she wants to. She ought to be terrified, and in a minute she thinks she will be, but right now there is too much distance between her and the world.

"Who is that?" she asks, and Cass looks and they both see him. The blurred man. Walking backwards away from them across the grass, jittering and flickering out of focus like a bad TV picture, face blotted out with interference. He looks like a jpeg artefact brought to life, some freak accident of digital nature. He skitters backwards like an old VHS tape being rewound and leaves no impression on the turf as he moves.

He makes a sound like a giant knife being sharpened, and he smells like burning.

Ringo squawks and bolts for the long grass. Artemis feels Brauron's blunt claws digging into her chest, hears her hissing in her panic.

"Who," says Artemis again, and then the blurred man stutters and grinds his way to the edge of the picnic area and fades slowly into nothing.

There is a long moment of awful, unearthly silence, and then the birds begin to sing and the crickets to call, and Artemis sits back down heavily, hands shaking and heart beating so hard she feels certain it must be about to catapult Brauron right off her chest.

"Breach," she whispers, as the panic finally arrives. "Oh my god, breach."

"Artemis? Artemis, are you okay?" Cass grips her arm, trying to get Artemis to look at her, but she's far too solid to be moved. "What the hell was that?"

"I," says Artemis, and chokes on her fear. "I – oh god. Damn it. Gimme a minute."

She sits there and shivers and holds Brauron in her trembling hands, and then after a little time has passed the worst of it is over.

It's not as bad as before. The blurred man is strange and terrifying, but he doesn't compare to the spire. He's alien, but recognisable: human shape, digital decay. The spire is not like that. The spire is completely and utterly unlike anything else in the world.

"Are you okay?" Cass asks again, and Artemis nods. Her face feels wet; she touches it and takes her fingers away bloody.

"What …?"

"It's your eyes." Cass looks uncomfortable. Artemis supposes she would too, if she saw someone bleeding from the eyes. "They were … I think it's stopped?"

Artemis nods.

"My headache's gone," she says, unable to find any other words.

There's a period of quiet. Ringo flutters back, looking faintly embarrassed. Brauron's breathing slows, and she coils herself around her partner's forearm, warm and comforting.

"I think maybe we should go back to the Centre," says Cass.

"Yeah," says Artemis. "Okay."

Emilia thinks about doing some crimes.

It's not entirely new territory for her. She was young once, and she was also depressed and anxious in a way that made her angry and impulsive. Some things got broken, a couple of people got hurt, a few breath tests were failed. But this was all a long time ago, and anyway that was petty crime, the yelling risk-taking sort you commit in the fury of desperate near-suicidal youth, whereas the crime she's considering now is much more white-collar and for considerably higher stakes.

She sits in the bar of her hotel, drinking lemonade and mulling over the options. Lorelei has told her that she's sent Giovanni and company to the spot up in the hills, to watch for the doppelgänger's manifestation and do whatever it is that needs to be done; that means he'll be gone for a few hours at least. By now, he ought to be on his way out of the city. Leaving his Gym, and his office, unattended.

She can't even believe she's thinking this, but if she did want to dig around in his files, this would be the best time to do it.

On the table by her hand, Nadia straightens up from her dish of water and gives her a look.

"What?" asks Emilia.

FURRET MAN, she replies.

"Yeah, furret man." Emilia takes another sip of her lemonade and wishes it was something stronger. "Are you encouraging me? Because that's … very unprofessional."

Nadia radiates nonchalance. If she was human, she'd have stuck her hands in her pockets and started sidling away, whistling loudly.

Emilia sighs.

"Okay, drink up," she says. "We don't have much time."

Half an hour later, she walks into the Viridian Gym: a cool, solid building, faced unattractively with concrete panels but on the inside sleek and modern, all pale wood and glass screens. She may not like the man, but Emilia can't deny that Giovanni has good taste. She's seen pictures of the Gym back in Isabella's day, and while she might have been a better Gym Leader she had much worse taste in interior design.

Emilia approaches the front desk and presents the receptionist with a calculated smile.

"Hello," she says. "Is Mr Dioli in?"

"No," replies the receptionist. "He isn't. Can I take a message? He should be back later today."

"I'd rather not. League business." She shows her card and waits for the receptionist to finish staring. "I have documents from the Plateau that require his attention," she says, taking a sealed brown envelope from under her arm. "Do you think I could take them through to his office?"

The receptionist looks at her, and then at the envelope. It's quite thick. The edges are crisp and new. It could contain anything.

What it actually contains is a fifth of a stack of blank printer paper that Emilia bought on the way here, along with the envelope itself. Later today, Giovanni will open it and be confused, and word will get back to the Plateau, and Emilia will be able to deny everything because she was just a messenger and no, the packet was just in her pigeonhole, not sure who from, but you know what the League's like, the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doeth, and Emilia will spend a couple of favours and the whole thing will disappear. And maybe Giovanni will suspect, and maybe he has the power to do something with that suspicion, but guess what, so does Emilia, and Emilia is willing to bet she has more allies in the League than he does.

That's then. Right now, Emilia stands her ground and does her best to hold the envelope in a tantalising sort of way.

"I should probably just hold that here for him," says the receptionist. "I can pass it on …"

Emilia shakes her head.

"I'm afraid not," she says. "I have my orders. From the Plateau," she adds, with a subtle emphasis that flies straight into the back of the receptionist's subconscious and sticks there. "Mr Dioli's eyes only."

The receptionist hesitates.

"Well …"

Emilia smiles.

"Well?"

"If it's really important …"

"Oh," says Emilia. "Very."

It's not a lie. If yesterday's hunch is even half right, then it really is important she get into that office. If not – well, probably best not to think about that.

"Okay, then," says the receptionist, reluctance battling with excitement for control of her voice. "It's at the end, on the second floor. Can't miss it."

"Wonderful," replies Emilia. "Thank you so much."

She sweeps off with her best aura of Leaguely self-importance, and maintains it all the way down the corridor to the elevator. There are still people watching her here, the clerks and bureaucrats who run the parts of the Gym the trainers never see. And the best disguise, Emilia knows, is to simply walk straight past them as if she has every right to be there.

Alone in the dim light of the elevator, Emilia glances sideways at Nadia. Nadia glances back.

CRIMES, she says.

"Yeah," agrees Emilia, feeling eighteen again, angry and nervous. "Crimes."

Ding, and the doors open. Emilia steps out, face once again composed and commanding, and walks past a group of office workers without giving or receiving a second glance.

She does pause when she gets to the door, but only for a second. She reads the nameplate, knocks once, and lets herself in.

Emilia breathes out.

All right.

Giovanni's office is like the rest of the Gym, light and airy. The desk is pale wood and the bookshelves are glass. A few stray motes of dust eddy lazily in the sunlight streaming through the blinds.

On his desktop computer, a light blinks on and off, and Emilia lifts Nadia off her shoulder.

"Right," she says, in a low voice. "Something different here. Tight focus, just the keyboard. All right?"

YES.

Emilia puts the envelope down on the desk and leans over the computer, wiggling the mouse to wake it up. As she suspected, she is prompted to enter a password.

"Ready?"

The glow rises from Nadia's feathers, Emilia closes her eyes, and as they slip back with Nadia into history the keyboard reappears in shaky silver lines, hanging there in the dark. The keys are stained with purple light, to varying degrees: E and the spacebar are a vivid burgundy, while Z and X are just a faint lilac.

"Narrow it down," mutters Emilia. "He would have logged in this morning. Find his fingers for me."

Nadia's feathers rustle in a wind that Emilia cannot feel. There is a pause, the purple stains on the keyboard waver and wobble, and then quite suddenly almost all of them disappear. Emilia opens one eye, sees the light overlaid on the keys, and memorises the letters.

"2,4, O, I, D, G, K," she recites. "And – two Ns? Yes, two Ns. Thanks."

The lights disappear and the unearthly nimbus surrounding Nadia fades to nothing. Emilia transfers her back to her shoulder, muttering to herself.

"2, 4 … dig … going … king …" She snaps her fingers. "Nidoking24," she says, typing it in. The computer informs her that this is incorrect, and invites her to try again. "Nidoking42?" she asks – and the lock screen gives way to Giovanni's desktop. "Yes."

FURRET MAN, says Nadia, with a distinct tone of satisfaction.

"Absolutely. Thank god he wasn't paying attention when IT sent out the safe computing memo." Emilia clicks through files, speed-reading with the gaze she uses to process paperwork. "Let's see … no, I didn't think so. I'll try his email. More likely to find something here …"

Her eyes flick back and forth, cursor carefully skipping unopened emails, leaving everything just as she found it. Gym Leader bulletins. League announcements. Casino business. (Sending work emails from his League account? Tsk, tsk, Mr Dioli.) And on and on, and then, in the middle of it all …

Regarding Recent Events. Now there's a subject line to furrow the brow. Emilia clicks, and reads:

Dioli,

If you want my advice, we'll continue. I really think we're getting close to figuring out a reliable trigger here – and honestly, once we've done that, that's the hardest part in the bag. It's going to be a matter of months after that, tops, and then we'll have it. You and I both know that this is more important than petty League politics. This is the future of Kanto we're talking about; we let this go because the bloody ice queen's grown a conscience, and it's not just us that pays the price, it's our children, and their children, and our children's children's children, all the way down the line. Anyway, come talk to me. I have some ideas about where to go from here.

―AG

The reply is much shorter and blunter:

The decision isn't ours to make. I won't hear any more about it. Consider yourself warned.

―GD

For a moment, Emilia doesn't react. Then, very quickly, she takes her phone from her bag and photographs the screen. It's not a great image, but it's legible.

"Okay," she says. "Okay."

She closes the email program, locks the computer, straightens up and leaves. She walks out the same way she walked in, with the confidence of someone who is exactly where she is supposed to be, and she gives the receptionist a friendly nod, and she walks out into the sunlight and finally starts to breathe again.

CRIMES, says Nadia.

"You said it," replies Emilia, running her fingers through her hair. "Now let's get the hell out of here."

Nadia doesn't have anything to say to that. She grips Emilia's shoulder tightly in her claws, and the two of them hurry back to the hotel, to wait for the news about Oak and to put together the pieces that are even now starting to form a horrible kind of shape.

At the Centre, a consummately professional doctor examines Artemis' eyes and tells her that it sounds like she might have been being haunted.

"Oneirophage," he explains to her. "It's difficult to categorise ghost-types, they don't play by the same rules as animals, but some forms of haunter and gengar don't feed on fear or energy. You've heard of drowzee and hypno?" (Artemis has.) "Some ghosts are like that, too. Dream eaters. It sounds like one got in your head and manifested a nightmare to eat."

"But I saw it too," protests Cass.

The doctor shrugs.

"Psychic feedback," he says. "Had you ever seen this thing before? In a dream or anything?"

Artemis nods. She isn't willing to expose the truth.

"Then it's almost certainly possession. If the ghost is strong enough, bystanders do sometimes experience the illusion too."

The doctor asks if it's okay if he reports the incident to the Viridian Gym. Dangerous pokémon this close to town need to be monitored, and if necessary temporarily captured and relocated somewhere they are less likely to come into contact with humans. Artemis thinks of Giovanni in the firelight, and suppresses a shudder, and says okay.

Up in the room, she washes her face and reapplies her make-up and stares into the mirror, gripping the sink hard with both hands. She sees through her face to the boy she is running from; she sees midnight at three pm; she sees an eye-watering red light among the stars.

BRAD COUNT 1 = POSITIVE, 5 = ++ATTRACTION.

Attraction to what? Well, Artie. Why don't you think about it for a moment.

She can't run, can she? It's going to follow her. It's scored into her irradiated flesh, into this improvised hacked-together excuse for a body. It's in her, and wherever she goes, breach is going to follow.

A movement in the mirror: Brauron has climbed up onto her shoulder to stare with evident fascination at her own reflection, moving her head and watching the other salandit move hers. Artemis smiles without feeling it and prods her affectionately.

"It's you," she says. "See? I'm there too."

Brauron looks at the mirror-Artemis, and then back at the real thing. She reaches out, feels the cold glass beneath her toes, and retreats again, puzzled.

"Okay," says Artemis. "Never mind."

She goes back out into the room, where Cass is finishing up a phone call.

"… okay," she says. "Buh-bye." She lowers her phone. "'S my aunt," she explains. "She likes to check up on me, make sure I'm all right." Pause. Frank look. "You okay?"

Artemis shrugs.

"Not really," she admits. "Do you want to get a drink?"

Cass' face cracks into a grin.

"Glad you asked," she replies. "'Cause I really kinda do."