07: WE MONSTROUS FEW
Daytime drinking is probably not a good thing, but Artemis has so far been having what is technically known as a fuck of a bad day, and honestly under the circumstances she feels the rules can be relaxed. She and Cass have a late and slightly liquid lunch in a bar recommended by a somewhat surprised Pokémon Centre receptionist, and carefully blunt the edges of their recent experience with quantities of inexpensive alcohol.
"To never getting possessed ever a-fucking-gain," says Cass, raising her glass, and Artemis smiles and clinks hers against it.
"Yep," she says. "Cheers."
They did get ID'd, buying the drinks, but for the first time in a while it was okay. Artemis is used to nights out in Pewter with Chelle and her friends, where her only ID was a provisional driver's licence bearing an old face and older name; now, of course, she has a trainer card, and that's got her date of birth on it. So she showed it, proved she was over eighteen, and that was that. Sure, the barman definitely still clocked her, but at least she didn't have it rubbed in.
Cass sets down her glass with a sigh.
"Y'know," she says, "I'm having second thoughts about going to catch a ditto now."
"Yeah?"
"Yeah. I'm thinking maybe I never go up on the moors again. Like there are ditto all over the southeast, aren't there? Harringham Riding especially, you know, round Fuchsia. So … maybe I'll just wait." She covers her glass as Ringo hops off her shoulder to investigate it. "Ringo, no. You're enough trouble already without getting drunk. So yeah. I figure I can just get a ditto later."
"Probably sensible," says Artemis. "You can like focus on training Ringo for a bit."
"Hm? Oh. Yeah, I guess I probably should. You and Brauron beat us pretty easily." Cass sips her rum and coke. "Which I guess leaves us with the question, what now?"
Artemis has been thinking about this. Now that she has a certain amount of gin and tonic inside her, some of the awful tension that wound itself up in her chest back at the Centre has come unstuck again, and it's a little easier to try and put together some kind of response to what she's learned. It's not exactly the best way to self-medicate, but to hell with it, sometimes you just need a damn drink.
So: her thoughts. She's soaked up some breach radiation, and that's why Giovanni scanned her – to see whether or not she was over that five-rad threshold, the point at which future breach stuff would begin to be drawn towards her. That means Giovanni is doing, well, something to do with breach, at best tracking it and at worst actually invoking it, and also that she's now kinda screwed. Because if witnessing a breach makes you more likely to be sucked into another one, then that second breach is going to make it even more likely, and so it'll happen again, and then that will make it even more likely, and so on, and so on.
Maybe this isn't how it works; maybe breach radiation fades over time, or maybe Artemis has just put the pieces together wrong here. Either way, she needs answers. And while Giovanni and the League may well have them, they won't give them up just because she asks.
Which means (and breathe in here, Artie, because this is the scary part) she's going to have to find them herself. There are two places she could try: the Viridian Gym itself, where Giovanni works, or Cinnabar Island, which he mentioned in his phone call. Breaking into a Gym is possibly the most terrifyingly bad idea she's ever had in her life, and that leaves her with just one other option: go to Cinnabar, and try to figure out what happened there.
She tells herself she's playing it cautious, taking the safer approach. She is not just putting off the moment where she has to actually do something. She isn't.
"Well," she says, toying with her glass, "I was kinda thinking maybe we just move on. I know we haven't really seen any of the sights or anything, haven't done much training, but …"
"But you kinda just want to get out of town," finishes Cass. "Yeah. Yeah, I get that." She nods. "Honestly, I was sorta hoping you'd say that. Okay, we haven't had the full Viridian experience, but, uh, at this point I'd rather not be here any more. That thing was …" She breaks off, shudders. "Well. You know."
Oh, Artemis knows. Better than Cass does, even. He's there inside her, with the spire: the blurred man, moving around beneath the skin of reality like a maggot in dead flesh. He belongs to a special kind of wrongness that Artemis doesn't know any word for. Something grotesquely out of step with the actuality of the universe.
"Yeah," she says, realising that she will have nightmares again tonight. "I know."
By the time they make it back to the Centre, it's a little late in the day to set off for Pallet. It's not a long trip – much quicker than the week-and-a-bit it took to get through Viridian Forest – but still, it would be best to start out in the morning. Artemis does her laundry in a dim room at the back of the Centre made hot by the ceaseless motion of dryers, and practices some moves with Brauron in one of the courts behind the main building. There are other trainers there, but she is the oldest and the biggest and nobody challenges her.
It's okay. Cass comes out after a while and they have a practice match themselves. No real hits, just sharpening up their pokémon's grasp of their commands. Cass is starting to teach Ringo cryptic orders like Artemis uses with Brauron, and the two pokémon dance around each other on the patchy grass, darting backwards or to the side as their trainers direct, flicking dilute moves at one another. Artemis experiments with sweet scent, and is gratified to find that Brauron can manage it easily. Cass makes breakthroughs too: once, after an ember splashes across his chest, Ringo glows with an eerie light and the flames contract back into a ball that fires itself straight back at Brauron, much to her surprise. Both Artemis and Cass are very impressed, but neither can get him to repeat the trick, and end up suspecting that Ringo doesn't know how he did it himself. Mirror move will have to be something of a long-term goal.
They eat late, fiddle with the internet (they have secured the Centre's all-important wifi password), and go to bed early, in anticipation of tomorrow's hike. Artemis' predictions about nightmares turn out to be right on the money, but hey, at least she doesn't hallucinate, and anyway it's okay: from the sounds Cass is making, she's having a few bad dreams about the blurred man herself. In the morning, they very casually ask each other how they slept, and then agree that they both had an excellent night.
And then, finally, it's time to go. Breakfast, tea (coffee for Cass, true Kantan that she is), and out the Centre to the bus stop, to make their slow way to the edge of town.
"Nice day," says Cass, looking out at the sunlight turning the windowpanes to sheets of fire.
"Yep," agrees Artemis. "Gonna be hot."
Neither of them mention the blurred man. Artemis would like to pretend as far as she can that he didn't happen, and while she can't speak for Cass she suspects she feels the same way.
Beyond the concrete shells of the city centre, Viridian is less monumental and intimidating. The bus takes them through the Old Town, where from the windows they see some really beautiful old buildings: temples, townhouses, something that might once have been an inn. Artemis is impressed, but suspicious, in the way that someone like her is when confronted with a sight like that. Beautiful old buildings mean money and power, and since she doesn't have much of either of those things she is instinctively distrustful of both.
Artemis is reminded of Chelle, of her enthusiastic but undirected appetite for class struggle, and realises she misses her. This is the longest she's gone in a while without hearing her voice. Sure, she sent her some messages back at the Pokémon Centre, but she really should call her sometime. Let her know she's doing okay. It won't be completely honest – Artemis' definition of 'okay' does not include ruptures in the fabric of reality and secretive League agencies – but she should say it anyway.
She should call her parents too, says the voice of filial duty deep inside her, and Artemis feels her stomach turn. That's a much harder ask. All this was meant as an escape, after all, and something in her is violently against the idea of involving her parents in it for even one minute more.
Still. She knows she'll do it anyway. Maybe this can't last; maybe there will come a point where either it will break or she will. But for now at least, she's still a good son.
The thought bites at her in ways she can't articulate. She closes her eyes, feels the comforting warmth of Brauron in her hands, and waits for the bus to leave Viridian behind.
After the Old Town, it's not much further before their stop. Technically, it's possible to walk from Viridian to Pallet without ever leaving civilisation; Viridian's commuter satellites are pretty much jammed up against Pallet's northern suburbs. But Kanto's a big place, and the League, under one name or another, has scrupulously maintained its wilderness for nearly a millennium. There are still pockets of wilderness, and through them run the trainers' trails south to Pallet.
Artemis and Cass are taking one of the easier routes, intended for rookies who started in Pallet and have chosen to go to Viridian first rather than south to Cinnabar, and their bus drops them off on the wrong side of a big sign welcoming trainers to Viridian with directions to the Pokémon Centre. They stare up at it for a moment and feel out of place.
"Maybe we'll run into someone coming the other way," says Cass. "Maybe two people. We were pretty good yesterday evening, right? We could totally pull off a double battle."
"Sure," replies Artemis. "I guess so."
It's not as emphatic as she intended, and her hesitance kills the conversation. Guilty and silent, she turns south with Cass and begins to walk.
Pallet is a low-lying town: Route 1 and the trails that wind up and down its length zigzag down a long series of slopes and cliffs, broken up by occasional patches of woodland. Mostly it's open ground, grass and scrubland flattened out by wind and baked by the burgeoning summer.
It's rougher going than Viridian Forest: the earth is stony and loose, and prone to sudden changes in inclination. But it's not too bad, and anyway at least it's not like the hill west of Pewter, or the moorlands near Viridian. Here's a kind of landscape that doesn't hold any memories at all. All it has is openness, and that in quantities that make Artemis slightly uneasy. She guesses it was open up on the moors too, but with the hills you didn't notice it. This is just … uncompromising. Empty space, stretching out south to the horizon. It's strange, for someone who has never really stepped outside a city before. Anything could be out here, with this much space to hide in.
But, well, she's going to have to live with it, and anyway it comes with new pokémon: collared pidgey that wheel across the sky, cooing and flapping hurriedly away when Ringo launches himself at them with his signature torrent of twittered abuse; slim field rattata, elegant flashes of purple that appear momentarily in between the stems of the long grass; even, around midday, a furret that sticks its fluffy head out from a clump of something spiky. Cass points and it flinches and disappears.
"Oops," she says, looking stricken. "I didn't mean to … oh, well. I guess it probably wasn't interested in a partner anyway."
"It woulda jumped out if it was," agrees Artemis.
They stop for lunch in the shade of a thick, tenacious oak that looks very out of place on the windy hillside but whose knuckled roots clutch the earth too stubbornly to be blown away. There are a few pale flowers around its base, one of which Brauron reaches for and which Artemis picks for her to burn. She wishes she knew what they were called, but nature has only ever been the backdrop to TV shows for her.
"She likes flowers?" asks Cass.
"Some of them," replies Artemis. "I don't know why those ones particularly."
Later, in the afternoon, a very persistent rattata turns up: Brauron drives it back easily enough, with her range and burgeoning strength, but it won't run, keeps darting back and forth between her fireballs, looking up at Artemis herself. It's the weirdest damn thing. She's heard of this, of certain pokémon that aren't just trying to test their strength and maybe consent to partnership but are determined from the get-go to find someone to attach themselves to. It's kind of flattering, but more than that, it's intimidating. Artemis isn't ready for a second pokémon, and the rattata's persistence makes her nervous. Eventually, it seems to pick up on this, and with one last hopeful glance at her scampers away into the grass.
"You got a fan," observe Cass. "He's gonna go home and tell all his friends about the cool trainer he met."
Artemis thinks about correcting her and saying she, because the rattata had light-coloured fur and short whiskers, but decides that would be kinda hypocritical, and anyway what do rats know or care about gender, right? And on top of that, it's just the wrong thing to say. Be nice, Artie. Cass is being nice so you be nice back.
"Hah," she says, trying to laugh, partially succeeding. "Yeah, I guess so."
She picks up Brauron and they get moving again. As they walk, a few clouds scud across the sky, their shadows shifting huge and eerie on the grass. Artemis thinks she's imagining things until Cass points it out.
"Neat," she says. "Cloud shadows."
"Oh," says Artemis, not wanting to say she didn't know that was a thing. It seems painfully obvious now that she's had it pointed out to her. That's literally why the light's dimmer on overcast days, after all.
She tries to keep the conversation going, and while she doesn't do a very good job of it Cass is more than capable of finishing the job. As they make their way down the steep banks of the hills, past rills and windswept bushes, Artemis listens to a story about another walk Cass once took, up in the mountainous grounds of Silverleaf, where she saw some really freaky shadows. She looked across to the opposite hill and saw a gigantic human shape there, looming against the cloudy sunlight. When she got back (which happened pretty quick, as you'd expect of someone who just saw a ghostly colossus on the far hillside) someone told her that that was her own shadow projected by a kind of optical illusion.
"I think it's called a bracken spectre," says Cass. "Still, it's pretty freaky. I thought I was being haunt― oh. Right. Um, maybe not the best anecdote for today."
Maybe not. But Artemis smiles and almost nudges her in a friendly kind of way, before the desire to make her body as unapparent as possible reasserts itself and she decides against it.
"It's okay," she says. "It's a pretty cool story."
Cass furrows her brow.
"What, really?"
"Really." Looking at her, Artemis suddenly has the uncomfortable feeling that one of the reasons Cass talks so much is that nobody actually listens. "Really," she says again, more emphatically, and Cass looks – well. Gratified, if Artemis had to pick a word. Which bothers her, because she shouldn't, not over something as little as that.
She supposes she understands. She herself is grateful for all kinds of things that she should take for granted and yet never can.
"Well, then," says Cass, visibly perking up. "I think I got one or two more weird stories where that came from."
"I'd like to hear them," Artemis tells her, and as Cass starts telling her about how she once met her own doppelgänger in Saffron she realises to her surprise that she's looking forward to having her company on this trip. Somehow this is more startling to her than any number of breach events. Maybe it's the paranoia talking, but for some reason, getting sucked into some terrifying government conspiracy seems so much more likely than making a friend.
In the dimly-lit bar of the East Hill Hotel, Emilia stares at a glass of lemonade and comes unwillingly to conclusions.
One. There was some form of League project going on – possibly, even probably, breach research – and Giovanni headed it.
Two. Lorelei ordered it closed, and it's still running.
Three. Emilia really, really wants a drink.
But she doesn't drink, hasn't since she was twenty and experienced the revelation that turned her life around and made her the woman she is today, so she stares ferociously at her lemonade and forces herself to think.
Giovanni received an unorthodox email from a colleague on the project he was overseeing. He responded oh-so-correctly, and didn't delete the email, so that if anyone came asking he could provide proof that he was in full compliance with his orders from the Elite Four. There's always the possibility that he really did disagree with AG, whoever they are, but Emilia would be willing to stake her life that he didn't.
Which means, and goddamn it why is this even happening, that the only thing worse than the League running dangerous projects has happened: one of those dangerous projects has gone rogue.
This is the explanation she was reaching for earlier. No wonder Nadia was confused by Giovanni's statement that the League doesn't study breach: it's both true and untrue at once. Giovanni would have believed what he was saying at the same time as disbelieving it. And no natu understands the human mind well enough to penetrate that kind of prevarication.
Emilia could kick herself for uncovering this. Life was so much better when she thought this was just the usual eight out of ten stuff. But now? Now she's going to have to talk to Lorelei. Now she's going to have to actually do something, because while she's willing to give the League the benefit of the doubt now and then, Emilia is not turning a blind eye to this. The zapdos thing? Understandable. Awful, ridiculous, utterly unforgivable, but understandable. This? No. This she won't countenance.
Some time after she got back from the Gym, she got a call from Lorelei. Giovanni and his agents were in place over the ridge and saw the whole thing: Oak manifesting, all broken and jittery, and fading away into the past as he made his way back to last night. At exactly the same time, the Oak currently in containment disappeared, along with all his poké balls. It seems he only exists in one twenty-four-hour period. Before and after, he is absent.
This was all right. It was weird, but it was all right. What came next was not.
"We've got a report of two witnesses," Lorelei went on to say. "Two trainers who were hiking up there at the time. They went straight back to town, obviously – Giovanni had them tailed – and then reported it to the Pokémon Centre staff as a haunting. Giovanni will be sending a couple trainers out to relocate a nonexistent ghost-type tonight. So it looks like they did your job for you there." Pause. "There's more," she'd added. "One of the trainers is a familiar face. It's the girl from Pewter. Ap― I don't know how you pronounce that. Is it Greek? Apanchuhmeen?"
"Apanchomene," Emilia had replied, voice operating automatically while her mind reeled. "Artemis Apanchomene."
It's not a coincidence. She doesn't know how or why, but she damn well knows that it isn't. If it had been someone else – even if it had been the same someone else twice – well, Emilia likes to think she would still have reacted the way she did, would still have decided that something has to be done.
But it's not someone else. It's Artemis. And so Emilia doesn't even get the option of not acting.
Here is the thing about Emilia: she is still, seventeen years on, in awe of young trans women. She had a relatively easy time of it herself – no real friends, an estranged family, a face and physique that lent themselves to going stealth – and she still does now. Nobody clocks Emilia, ever. Which suits her fine, even if it does also fill her with a certain ravening guilt at the way she conceals what she is, because after all she will never be anything else and claims in the privacy of her own head to be proud of it, and to let others believe otherwise for the sake of a quiet life feels something like class treachery. But she doesn't complain, because it is easy for her and for girls like Artemis it is so very, very far from that, and she watches them and is staggered by their beat-up, unbroken resilience.
She'd like to believe that she would have been capable of that. And perhaps she would have been, but she will never know, and anyway what is more important than her conscience is that there are people in high places on the side of those in low ones. So: whether it's guilt that motivates her or real compassion, Emilia won't be letting this go. She has a debt, the obligation of the powerful to defend the weak, and that means that sooner or later she's going to have to stop staring at this lemonade, get her phone and actually talk to Lorelei.
Emilia sighs. It's time to go. She has nothing left to do in Viridian. Oak is more or less dealt with, the League strategy for managing the news has been created and put into action, and there is nothing else here in town that requires her attention. And this isn't a call she wants to rush into, anyway. It's going to take planning and forethought. Lorelei won't want to talk about Giovanni, and Emilia will have to work to get her to even admit he ever ran a project at all.
And at home, there are probably more petals on the floor.
Emilia stands up and shoulders her bag, abandoning her lemonade to the flies.
"Come on, Nadia," she says. "Time to go. Effie's waiting."
Effie is not, in fact, waiting. Effie is not doing anything at all.
Emilia comes home to find her remaining petals on the floor around her pot, leaving her a dark stub of a creature, naked and small. She stares, and she waters her, and then she goes to unpack her bag and put her things away.
Nadia hops in through the doorway, projecting questioning thoughts.
?
"I'm," begins Emilia, before deciding that actually she is not, and slams her hand down on her dresser. "Not now, Nadia."
Nadia weighs her options and decides that retreat is the order of the day. Emilia continues unpacking in silence, and then drags out the can of plant food from under the sink and takes it through to Effie.
She doesn't smell of old meat any more. She has no odour at all that Emilia can detect.
"Here you go," says Emilia, pouring the can out into the pot. "You'll need this, sweetie. You've … got some growing to … some growing to … to …"
She puts down the can. She needs both hands for her face.
Nadia returns, claws scritching on the wooden floor. She tugs at Emilia's sleeve and pushes soothing sentiments towards her mind.
Emilia swears, voice quiet and choked. This isn't her. None of this is her at all. She is Emilia Santangelo, thirty-seven, defined in every way by her perfect competence. But there was a time when she was not, when she was a drunk bastard of a kid who drove too fast because she didn't care whether she made it back home alive or not, and a time before that when she was a terminally anxious pokémon trainer, and a time before that when she was a very miserable child hiding in her room and hoping to be unnoticed, and the only thing in the world that connects all of those selves together is currently dying a slow and drawn-out death in front of her.
She takes a deep breath. It stutters a little, but all of it does get into her lungs. She thinks of Effie filling her room at university with coloured petals, trying to cheer her up. Of teaching her that Emilia had a new name. Of her early work in the civil service, Effie standing around proudly beside her, passing her papers with the solemnity of one who believes with all her heart that her task is capital-letter Important.
Emilia looks at Effie now, and breathes out again. Five Gym victories. Three careers. One true friend in all that time. One weird-looking seed she planted in that patch of dirt behind the bus depot where she went a lot, because it wasn't home and only a child could fit through the hole in the fence to get in so she knew nobody would bother her.
Another breath. Nadia looks at her questioningly.
"I'm okay." Her voice sounds more normal now. "I'm okay," she repeats, as if by saying it enough times she can make it true. "I'm okay." She catches herself then and forces herself to stop talking, to gather herself back together before speaking again. "Nadia, I'm going to take tomorrow off," she says. "Can you take the names and email addresses of everyone I'm scheduled to meet with? I'll have to tell them I'm ill."
Nadia stares at her for a moment with more than usual intensity. Attuned to her mind as she is, Emilia can sense her surprise. It's not unfounded: Emilia hasn't missed a day of work in a long, long time. Apart from one two-week holiday six years ago, in fact, she has not taken any time off at all since she joined up with the League. It is not quite legal, but then, Emilia does a lot of things that are not quite legal, and nobody has stopped her yet.
Then Nadia chirrups and moves away in long, fluttering hops, to find Emilia's laptop and tap out the relevant information for her. Once she has left the room, Emilia lets herself sag again, slouching against the wall. Carefully, with both hands, she lifts Effie's heavy ceramic pot from its dish and holds it up in front of her.
"Effie," she begins, and then immediately runs out of words. She looks into the place where Effie's eyes used to be for few seconds, searching for more, but none are forthcoming. "Effie," she repeats instead, touching her forehead to the bark. "Effie."
Half an hour later, Emilia is back on her feet, planning. Okay. Effie is dying. That hurts, and it's also not something she can fix. But some rogue League element is summoning dangerous entities into this plane of existence, and that hurts many more people than just Emilia, and it's something that she might actually be able to do something about.
The thing is, she can't just call up Lorelei and ask her what Giovanni was doing. She's the closest thing Emilia has to a friend, after all this time working together, but she's a professional, as Emilia herself is, and she is also extremely proud. The straightforward approach just won't fly, especially without any concrete evidence of wrongdoing.
So. Other options. Emilia paces back and forth, towards Effie and away again, and kneads her hands like dough as she tries to force a revelation.
"If I had the name of the project, I could …"
"What about telling her that he knew about breach …?"
"Assuming she knew about the shutdown …"
No. Nothing. Emilia imagines the conversation, again and again, works out likely responses. Every time, she comes to the same conclusion: Lorelei will either insist that there was never any breach project, or that it has been cancelled and that there is no evidence to suggest anything else. Because – and Lorelei would hate to hear this but it is in fact the truth – it's easier if that's what happened. Nobody wants the difficulty of dealing with black ops gone bad. And besides, Lorelei does not respect hunches. The reason she and Emilia have worked so well together is that, in her eyes, Emilia is a dealer in hard fact and calculated possibility. If she ever figures out that Emilia is more or less always winging it, operating on intuition and instinctive ideas about what is probable – well, either she'll have to admit that sometimes improvisation works, or she'll just be offended. Given that this is Lorelei she's talking about, Emilia is inclined to believe the latter.
She sighs and thinks again. Is this the wrong tactic? Should she be approaching someone else – Bruno, maybe, or Lance? But they'd only go to Lorelei, and then when she asked where they got the information they'd tell her that it was from Emilia, and she would be hurt and angry that her former mentor had gone behind her back. And that really wouldn't do anything to help the situation at all.
"What's the problem?" Emilia asks herself, and comes right back with the answer: "Lorelei. Lorelei won't like it. So we force her to take it seriously. How do we do that? Either we argue with her hard enough to ruin our relationship, or we present her with data. First one's not an option, so where do we get data?" This one puzzles her for a while. It isn't the sort of information that she's going to be able to get through the usual web of contacts: anything to do with the League's anomalous resources is strictly controlled information, and Lorelei and her team are careful not to let those involved cultivate relationships with people like Emilia who have a nasty habit of figuring things out. Nobody she knows is likely to have any information on the project itself, whatever it was.
She walks up and down a while longer, trying not to clench her teeth, and then suddenly stops and takes out her phone to look at the picture she took of the email.
"AG," she reads. "And the address – .kt." She lowers her phone with a short, decisive movement. "A. Grahame," she repeats. "A. Grahame …"
They won't be on any of the usual lists of employees, but as much as it likes to obfuscate things, the League does mostly have to abide by Kantan national law, and somewhere there will be some registers full of people whose roles are listed as benign, meaningless things like 'civilian contractors' or 'technical consultants'. There's always a chance A. Grahame is too secret even for that, Emilia supposes. But if they have a League email, they have to be on the system somewhere or other.
Okay, then. That's the angle. There's the in she was looking for. Find A. Grahame, find the organisation they belong to – and find out what Giovanni was supposed to have stopped doing six months ago.
Emilia looks at Effie. Her past wells up inside her like blood from an open wound.
Yes, she thinks. Time to start snooping.
After a while, Artemis gets used to the wind. Route 1 is wide and open, leaving plenty of space for a good stiff breeze to get up speed, and honestly there comes a point where you have to stop fussing about your clothes and just accept that you're going to come out of this looking somewhat windswept.
She and Cass stop for the night in the League campsite that marks the halfway point between Pallet and Viridian: this really is a short route. It's already occupied by four kids coming north, but they stick to their side of the fire and the two women stick to theirs, and anyway Cass wants to camp here because of the trees planted as a windbreak along the side and Artemis can't find the courage to argue with her. So they set up their tents, and it's true that the wind is much less fierce here, with the spreading tangle of elm and hawthorn along the south side of the site, so Artemis holds her tongue and smiles awkwardly at the kids who look at her with mute suspicion.
She'd heard that children were meant to be better about these things than adults, but maybe ten is old enough to have begun learning the rules of society. She considers herself at that age: how did she feel about this then? It's hard to be sure. Her past slithers by her like sand passing through the neck of an hourglass, impossible to pin down. Most of the time between nine and thirteen is lost to her, a numb void of hospital rooms and IV lines, interspersed with the occasional pain of specific days: mouth ulcers there, nerve damage here, partial paralysis, liver infection. If she had any opinions about trans women then, she doesn't remember them now.
Probably it's for the best. Artemis has always suspected that there's not much from that time worth remembering.
She has Brauron spar with Ringo on the trampled-down turf, practising the clock-face directions format that Giovanni mentioned. (He might be the bad guy here, but she can't deny, he did give good advice.) Cass manages to coax another mirror move out of Ringo, and he flings back a sweet scent in Brauron's face, although it does nothing more than make her sneeze: it seems she's immune to her own clouds of pheromones and toxins. Artemis is more interested to discover that sweet scent doesn't seem to deplete her store of poison at all. That seems like useful information.
The battling display arouses the kids' interest, and Artemis senses them watching from the opposite side of the firepit. So does Cass, and since she's bolder she invites them to join in. This makes Artemis' heart lurch uneasily, but it's okay, it really is, because these kids are rookie trainers and nobody in the world is as excited about pokémon as they are, and for the hour and a half in which the air is thick with the smells and sounds of training, race and gender seem to evaporate, transfiguring Artemis into something fresh and new. One of the kids, Kaidan, has a charmander that learns a lot from fighting an opponent similar to itself; when he looks up at Artemis after the session, she is suddenly aware that all he is seeing in her is a pokémon trainer.
She nearly cries at the thought. As it is, she pretends some of the smoke from Brauron's battle against the charmander has got in her eyes, and wipes them with a finger.
Later, lying back in the grass with Brauron curled up into a warm comma on her chest, looking at the stars and the first few summer fireflies making new constellations between them, Artemis finds herself wondering what she was afraid of. The kids are quiet, some withdrawn to their tents, some still out, looking up on their own side of the fire; Cass is next to her, Ringo snoozing atop the pole of her tent. Everything is calm and cool and beautiful. Even the wind has died down, and the whole of Kanto seems to be coiled loosely around her in a great affectionate spiral, as if even she, cultureless self-created mongrel that she is, is worthy of its love.
In a world like this, rich with possibility and pokémon, how can anyone hate anything? There are no men like Giovanni, no creatures like the spire or the blurred man, no anything that cannot take place around a campfire with a water pump and an excited nidoran. There is no difference between brown trans girls and their white cis counterparts. There is nothing between immigrants and Kantans. There is no language other than the coded communications of battle.
It won't last any longer than this one night, Artemis knows; there will be a nightmare or a ghost person, or someone will look at her or she will see her reflection, and in the uncompromising light of morning she will see the history engraved in her skin without the comfort of fireflies.
But tonight she's done what she wanted to: tonight she really and truly has escaped from Pewter, and even if it can only last an hour or two that's more than good enough for her. Artemis has never expected salvation. All she ever wanted was a little respite.
The blurred man returns in her dreams, flickering like the light playing over a broken CD, and Artemis wakes with ragged breaths back into the normal world. She thinks she sees a ghost person in the corner, but if she does then it's only for a second; she sits up and it is gone.
She lets out a long breath and looks at her hands. Something about them seems wrong, like they have been badly photoshopped into her vision, but it's okay. This is a familiar feeling, and it will pass.
Artemis decides to buy nail polish in Pallet, and wriggles out of her sleeping bag to get on with her day.
A little while after she has finished making herself ready, Cass wakes. Artemis knows she has, because her tent rocks and emits a series of extraordinary noises before disgorging her, hair wild and eyes sleepy, onto the grass.
"Morning," she mumbles, absently holding out her arm for Ringo as he flutters down from the tree in which he slept. "Huh. Man, you do this camping stuff better than me, huh? I get up looking like this and find you looking like that."
She waves a hand in Artemis' direction. Artemis blushes furiously, torn between taking it as a compliment and wanting to tell Cass that she looks like this because she puts in effort, because she has to, because if she doesn't then she opens herself up to even more trouble than otherwise.
"Oh," she says. "Well. Um. Thanks. I … wake up early."
"Yeah, I can see." Cass yawns. "Okay, lemme make some coffee and then let's go."
The kids sleep even later than Cass does. They are still asleep when the two of them leave, tents repacked to varying degrees of neatness, pokémon perched about their persons. It's all right. Artemis doesn't really want to have the magic of last night spoiled by a second encounter.
Setting out from the trees around the campsite, they walk back out onto the long downward sweep of the hills, and feel the wind tear at them with renewed force. They fight it long enough to check Artemis' map and agree that they should be able to make Pallet by sundown, and then they get going.
The sun climbs. The grasshoppers chirp relentlessly. The wild pokémon watch from the shelter of the long grass and the straggly trees, and now and then come out to test their mettle. Around mid morning, Artemis smells burning and stiffens, but she can see the smoke above the trees to the east. Not breach, then. Just a fire.
An hour or so later, the attack comes.
The first one to notice is Brauron. She curls away from Artemis' chest suddenly, eyes wide and alert, shoulder fins flaring like stumpy wings. Her head twists back and forth, looking for something, and Artemis is just about to ask her what when she hears the footsteps through the rushing of the wind.
Irregular. Heavy light, heavy light, heavy light – and a dragging sound, like a sledge being drawn through the dirt.
Artemis' first instinct is to disbelieve herself, but Brauron can obviously sense it too, so instead she looks at Cass. On her shoulder, Ringo is shuffling from foot to foot, uneasy.
"Do you …?"
"Yeah," replies Cass. "What is that?"
"Dunno." Artemis listens some more. Off to the left? But she sees nothing but the grass, waving in the wind. It grows long around this part of the trail, waist-high even to Artemis, and if they ventured off the path Cass would be up to her chest in it. Most animals that are normally found around this area are easily small enough to hide in that – and none that Artemis can think of would make that weird lopsided noise. "It sounds … big?"
"Yeah."
Heavy light, heavy light. Drag. Grass rustling. The wind changes direction; the blades twitch and dance. Artemis' eyes go back and forth. There! No, there! No – wait.
Heavy light, heavy light.
Is it―?
"Getting faster," observes Cass, nervously. "Ringo? Ringo, you might want to get ready …"
On Artemis' chest, Brauron suddenly stops moving, eyes focused on one particular spot in the grass. Artemis follows her gaze and sees, suddenly, a hazy white eye staring back―
Heavy light heavy light heavy light ―
The thing leaps with a screech, clearing the grass at a bound and swinging its arm in a long blurring arc. Artemis shouts and steps back, stumbling over the hem of her skirt, and before her brain has caught up with her eyes she sees fire splashing and the thing crashing into the grass on the other side of the path, twisting, shrieking, a monster of flickering shapes and movements.
Then it turns for a second, slowed by the weight of its misshapen arm, and she sees it: a scyther, or scizor, hard to say. Something has gone badly wrong with its moult; the old green shell hangs half off one side in cracked shards of chitin, the red iron showing through like blood. One arm is mostly free, a huge glinting red pincer pinned to the ground by its own weight; the other is still a scyther's hunting blade, mazed with cracks. Its wings flutter within cracked cases, jaundiced and ragged. Its head is a mess of shattered carapace, bits of its old shell falling away with every movement, one half-blind eye staring through the gap.
A heavy metal leg drives into the earth, pulls the lighter green one forward. The pincer-arm drags in the dirt.
Artemis smells burning.
The scyther swings its head around, glaring. It knows, she thinks. It knows that she brought breach here, it knows that this is all her―
It lurches forward, scizor-arm trailing, scyther-blade flashing, and fortunately its lopsided weight and poor vision means the blow goes wide, biting deep into the dirt between her and Cass. Something comes unstuck in Artemis then and as Brauron leaps forward she leaps back, calls out ball and sees the fire burst against the huge bug's chest. It screeches and swings its blade, and though Brauron starts moving even before Artemis orders her back the scyther is much faster than any rattata or pidgey, and Artemis cries out as the edge of its arm scores a red line into Brauron's tail. The salandit croaks and tries to withdraw, stumbling over her feet, and the scyther lunges again―
―only to be brought up short by the weight of its other arm, anchoring it to the dirt. The blade hits the earth hard enough to send shards of green chitin flying, and the scyther shrieks in fury, spitting breath that stinks of charred things in Artemis' face.
Inside her, the spire and the blurred man rise and fall with the relentless pounding of her heart and the frenetic humming in her nerves. Think Artie, she tells herself, as Brauron slithers back towards her feet. Think, it might be part steel or it might not yet but either way Brauron―
"Cloud!" she cries, and as the scyther yanks its pincer up out of the earth again Brauron spews dense green mist into its path. It stops immediately, exposed patches of red shell growing pitted and dull in an instant, and as it swings its head back and forth, trying to figure out what it is that is hurting it, Artemis reads confusion in its one white eye.
"Beak!"
Cass is over her shock: Ringo slams into the back of the scyther's head, bill first, and the its face makes sudden vicious contact with the ground, body pivoting around its pincer-arm like a pendulum. It makes a thin, strangled sound, thrusts its blade into the earth to try and lever itself up, but the chitin cracks and it slips back again just as Artemis orders another ember directly into the cloud of poison still hovering around it. There is a brilliant green explosion―
―and then the scyther is still and sooty in a circle of scorched earth.
Artemis looks up from it to Cass, white-faced and shaking on the other side. Muted after-images flash on her vision with every blink.
"Are you okay?" she asks Artemis.
Artemis nods.
"Okay," says Cass. "Okay."
Long silence. Artemis kneels over Brauron, feels the heat rolling off her. Her purple eyes meet Artemis' brown, full of a confidence that Artemis finds staggering. She really had no doubts at all, did she? Not a bloody one.
"Let me see your tail," says Artemis, because she doesn't know what else to say, and Brauron holds still while she applies a potion to the cut, the medicine steaming on her hot skin. It's not deep; the scyther's blade might have been sharp, but its aim was not.
"Do you have a poké ball?" asks Cass. "I think we need to get this thing to a doctor."
"Do you?" Artemis wants to pick Brauron up, but if she touched her now she'd burn her hands.
"Yeah. But … uh, I kinda think that's your capture."
Artemis straightens up slowly, looks at the injured scyther. Stretched out on the ground like that, its size is much more evident: if it wasn't hunched over from the weight of its metal shell, it would be at least as tall as Cass, possibly bigger.
"It'll break out of the ball," she says.
"I think it has to be conscious to do that," says Cass. "Isn't that how they relocate rampaging gyarados? Knock 'em out and capture them?"
Artemis sighs. The smell of burning is stronger now, and she wonders if she was imagining things earlier, if this has nothing to do with breach at all. She's not reliable, after all, she knows that.
"Okay," she says, with a reluctance that shames her. If it was up to you, Artie, would you leave the poor thing out here to die? She'd like to say she wouldn't, but her cowardice runs deep and Artemis cannot say for certain. Every cell in her body is yelling at her to run, every atom in every molecule, but she clamps down, makes herself aware of Brauron cooling gently by her foot, and rummages in her backpack for a ball.
Her first capture, and it's an easy one: the scyther couldn't resist if it wanted to. Artemis drops the ball onto it and watches as its misshapen bulk dwindles into white light and disappears. Give it twelve hours and it might start to feel like a victory. Right now, she feels like she might break if anyone touches her.
She picks up the ball, feels the warmth against her palm of its mechanical innards working.
"All right," she says. "We better get moving."
So what was that, Cass wants to know. It takes a little while for the shock and danger of the attack to fade – not coincidentally, this happens around about the same time as the grass thins out and gets shorter – but when it does, the questions come. Artemis shrugs, making Brauron rise and fall with her shoulders.
"Don't know," she says. "A sick scyther, I guess."
"Well, yeah, but you know." Cass makes an unclear gesture with both hands. "Like what was it?"
"It got stuck trying to shed its shell and evolve?"
"I mean I guess." Cass sighs. "Jeez. I got all the way to Viridian Forest without anything weird happening, then I bump into you and suddenly there's ghosts and storms and mutant bugs everywhere."
Artemis shrinks a little, hunches her shoulders as if to protect her head.
"I'm sorry," she says, before she can stop herself. Cass looks up from the path with a sharp movement of her head.
"Oh," she says. "Uh. No, like … it's okay, I'm just – I just meant it's weird."
Artemis doesn't respond, cowed into silence by the weight of her own shame. She knows that's not what Cass meant. And now look, she's forcing Cass to go the extra mile and reassure her. It's okay to be scared but Artemis draws the line at emotional manipulation. Maybe she didn't mean to do it, but that doesn't mean it didn't happen.
Cass looks like she doesn't know what to say either. The silence grows, curdles, becomes awkward and uncomfortable. They walk on without looking at each other, eyes fixed on the growing grey blur of Pallet in the distance.
Of course, there is always the chance that this was Artemis' fault. She smelled burning. And okay, she might have imagined it, but it seemed pretty real, and she's never hallucinated a smell before. And while there's a chance that what happened to the scyther was just an accident, a horrible evolutionary malfunction that made it blindly furious with pain, Artemis can't deny that an awful lot of weird things have been happening to her recently.
She fights the conclusion as best she can. No evidence, Artie, remember that. No evidence, and you have a past history of delusive thinking. Sometimes things happen without fitting into a wider pattern. They really really do.
On her chest, Brauron can feel her heart pounding through her ribs and the warm silicone of her breasts. She climbs up Artemis' dress and curls herself delicately around the back of her neck, pressing her head against her jaw. Artemis blinks back tears and reaches up with one hand to run her fingers along the ridges of her marbled back. She wants to say thank you, but she's afraid to speak.
The landscape moves around them, sloping towards the town below and narrowing as it goes. If you look carefully, you can see a couple of buildings off to the right, behind the trees; this end of the Route 1 trail is pretty tightly packed in among the expanding Pallet outskirts. Not much further to go, anyway. Soon the trail will end and they'll be able to get the bus to the Centre.
In Artemis' hand, the scyther's ball feels hot and damp with sweat. She would put it in her bag, but she has a nagging fear that it will suddenly regain consciousness and break its way out, and if that happens she really wants to be able to throw the ball away as quickly as possible.
She shifts her grip on it and breathes out. The sooner she can give this thing to the doctors, the better.
They make the end of the trail at around four o'clock. It's easy to tell, because there's a point at which the field just ends, right up against a road with a bus stop and smart little houses. On either side of the path, the houses are half-hidden by trees, but the League foresters weren't able to hide the traffic sounds. It's probably no coincidence that Artemis hasn't seen a single wild pokémon since the scyther; this end of Route 1 isn't really wild at all.
"Hey, civilisation," says Cass, breaking the silence at last with a chirpiness that makes Artemis wonder if it was only her that was feeling awkward. "All right. Nice to be back after that scyther, huh?"
"Yeah," agrees Artemis. "Nice."
"Bus or walk? I think the Centre's near here." Cass pokes at her phone. "Oh yeah, it's just a couple blocks away. I guess that makes sense. Near Route 1 and all."
"Let's walk, then," suggests Artemis, and Cass readily agrees. This part of Pallet is nice enough, big stuccoed houses each standing in their own patch of garden. It's a world away from Artemis' house among the terraces crammed into Pewter's Greyside, a square of city between the rail line and the highway that houses several thousand more aspirations than it does people. Coming from there, Artemis finds this place a little intimidating, but she can't deny, it's fun to gawk.
The streets are quiet, and it isn't until they turn the corner onto the approach to the Pokémon Centre itself that they start to see any real traffic. Even then, it consists of three cars and a few kids heading out towards Route 1 with bulbasaur and growlithe scampering along at their heels.
"Sleepy town, huh," says Cass.
"Yep," says Artemis. "Cerulean's pretty big, right?"
"Yeah. I mean I live in the suburbs really. And I spent most of the last eight years in the middle of freakin nowhere, so y'know." Cass shrugs, which jostles Ringo and makes him peck at her ear in irritation. "Ow. Okay, Ringo. Uh, point is, I guess I'm used to quiet."
"Oh."
"You're not?"
"Nope," replies Artemis. "Pewter girl, born and bred." (The usual little frisson of excitement: yes, she said girl, and Cass believed her.)
"Ah," says Cass. "I guess you wouldn't be, then."
Inside, the Pokémon Centre has the same clean, crisp hospital feel to it as the one in Viridian, but the colour scheme is brighter and cheerier, and the receptionist is trying very badly to conceal the fact that she's reading something on her tablet under the desk. Artemis walks up to her and receives a startled look that melts into a kind of nervous twitchiness, an obvious unease at having to deal with someone as patchwork as Artemis.
"Hi," she says. "I, um, my friend and I, we ran into this … weird hurt scyther on Route 1? And it tried to attack us and I think it really needs a doctor."
"Okay," replies the receptionist. "Did you, uh, did you catch it?"
"Yeah. Yeah, I got it here …"
Ten minutes later, she's free of it, at least physically. A couple of very interested doctors have taken the scyther away, and all that's left is the memory of it in her head, that furious eye, that broken blade. The way it moved. The way it hunted.
Artemis looks at Cass.
"I think I'll get Brauron's tail checked out," she says. "You know. While I'm here."
"Okay, sure," replies Cass. "See you later, then."
"See you later."
Cass goes one way and Artemis another. In the dimly-lit corners of her mind, the scyther joins the spire and the blurred man, and follows.