11: THE MONARCH OF THE BREACH

Artemis has had some unpleasant conversations. Coming out to Chelle's mother for the sake of the deed poll was pretty awkward; trying to talk to her parents about her future is always stressful. Or about her past, actually. (You said to us: Roald Dahl died of leukaemia, and it was the scariest thing we ever heard you say.) Or her present, for that matter. (You're okay, aren't you? Yeah. You're okay. Functional, anyway, like they say.)

So she has experience of bad conversations. But this – this is a bad, bad conversation, a conversation that starts off poorly and spirals down to even darker places, and even though Emilia assures her that she's doing all she can, that she's leaking this to the press to try and attack Giovanni from whatever angle she can find, she isn't sure she can drag herself back up into the light.

"I'm sorry," Emilia says. "I wish I had better news. Giovanni somehow got hold of your mental health record, and he used that to convince Lorelei your testimony was worthless. And since they didn't find any evidence of wrongdoing at the old Rocket site …" She sighs. "I'm repeating myself," she says. "Sorry. I'm – it's been a rough week."

It happened, then. Like always: nobody has to believe Artemis if they don't want to, because it's all in her head, because she's delusional and recovering from a psychotic episode and all the rest of it. Because she's crazy.

She's used to it. She is. It doesn't mean it doesn't hurt.

"Okay," she says softly. "Okay."

The silence has an almost physical weight. Artemis can hardly breathe through it, let alone speak, and she is glad when Cass finally speaks for her.

"So what do we do?" she asks. "We can't just let him get away with all this."

"I know." Emilia straightens her back, and something about this tiny movement seems to draw all her energy back together. Artemis is impressed, despite herself. She knows well enough how much it takes to recover after this sort of thing, to sit back up and keep on going. Emilia is tougher than she is, by a long way. She might have lied (and what else has she lied about, asks the voice in her head, before Artemis pushes it away again), but she's tough at least. "That's why I'm going to the press. I've got a meeting with the editor of The Cataphract this afternoon; you should check the website later today. I want your permission before I follow through, though. I'll keep your name out of the papers, but if there's an investigation, you might be called on to testify. Is that okay?"

Artemis starts, feels Brauron tighten her grip on her clothes.

"I mean – um – absolutely, if it'll help, but …"

She doesn't finish. Nor does Cass, although she gets a little further:

"But won't the League …?"

"Yes. Probably." Emilia's eyes give nothing away. "Don't worry about me," she says. "Whatever happens, the important thing is that Giovanni is stopped."

Won't the League what? How was Cass planning to finish that sentence? Artemis can't be sure, but she's got an idea. She recalls her own arrest, back on Cinnabar, and imagines what it would be like if they had real proof she was working against the League. What's Lorelei's position on traitors, anyway? She always seems so cold and scary on TV.

She's telling the truth. Artemis is sure of that; it just doesn't make sense for her to lie, not like this, not in a way that Artemis can verify so easily. But truth now doesn't make up for lies earlier, even necessary ones, and though Artemis is humbled by Emilia's courage she still doesn't know how to feel about her.

She believes Artemis. There's that. Obviously she found out about her mental illness, too, and she's been treating her exactly the same regardless. (Unless she's lying, unless she's using her perfect poker face and all her League training to conceal her distrust and her loathing. But she isn't. Probably. Artemis hopes.)

"But," says Cass, and Emilia shakes her head.

"Don't worry," she repeats, more firmly. "Nadia and I can look after ourselves. And at this point, we need to attack Giovanni from every angle we have. I don't think an exposé will stop him, necessarily, but I'm hoping it will slow him down."

"Your job, though," says Artemis, the first thing she's managed to say and not at all what she wanted to, and Emilia looks at her, her eyes full of understanding. (Or judgement.)

"Artemis," she says. "I'm tired. I've done a lot of bad things, okay? I wanted to work with the League because my trainer journey helped me at a time when I really needed it, and I believed in its goodness for a long time, really, that everyone deserves that chance to escape" (that word: Emilia knows, Artemis thinks suddenly; she knows exactly what it is to have to run away, and this realisation is crippling in the horrible mixture of relief and sympathy and terror that it brings) "past the point where I should have quit, honestly, and …" She breaks off, turns her palm upward in a what can you say? kind of way. "Look, at this point, it doesn't matter. I'm tired. I don't want to do this any more. I used to hang out in anarchist bookshops, and now … this."

It feels like her words have run away with her, like she has revealed more than she intended. Artemis and Cass sit there, uncomfortable, until Nadia nudges Emilia's ear and suddenly she seems to recover herself.

"The point is, I'm through," she says simply. "That's it. I don't want this job any more. Not if it's a choice between that and Giovanni. He goes down, no matter what. You know?"

Artemis thinks of sneaking out of her tent in Viridian Forest, of breaking into Cinnabar House. Of risking arrest, and then its actuality.

"Yeah," she says. "Yeah, I know."

Emilia sighs.

"I wish you didn't," she says, with feeling. "I'm sorry. This is more than you should have to deal with – either of you. That it's come to this is frankly criminal. But we're out of options at this point."

Criminal, is it. She means that, doesn't she? She believes that this should never have happened.

She lied. But.

"So what's the plan, then?" asks Artemis, with an effort. "I mean, there's Mew-2 …"

"Mew-2 is dangerous. I don't think I need to tell you this, but it bears repeating. Under no circumstances should you go anywhere near it." Emilia pauses. "I can't stop you trying, if that's what you decide. But I have to say that I don't believe you should even consider going after it."

"We can't sit here and do nothing," says Artemis. The words hang in the air, coming back to her ears as if spoken by someone else. She can hardly believe she said them. "I … I can't. Cass, your aunt said they were nearly done."

"Huh? Oh yeah, yeah." Cass fidgets; Ringo darts up onto her shoulder, lithe and loyal as a terrier. "My aunt," she says. "She works with Giovanni, we think."

"Abigail Grahame," says Emilia. "Yes, I've run into her before. Twice, actually."

Cass blinks.

"Oh. Yeah, I guess we told you already, back on Cinnabar. So she called me up again earlier, and she kind of said that like she and her team had almost solved everything. Like soon they were gonna be able to stop all this for good."

Nadia glances at her partner; Emilia nods.

"Yes," she says. "Yes, I thought … Nadia ran a trace on the site of last night's attack. We thought that the entity looked like it was listening in on an earpiece, or to a telepathic message. And I brought in a reporter too, who tracked it down just outside town. He thought it was listening to something too."

It's like ice water exploding through her veins. Brauron's warmth seems suddenly a million miles away, the Pokémon Centre walls spiralling off into the void that has opened up around her. He's done it. Giovanni has control.

And if Giovanni has control, then―

"Artemis?" She turns, sees worried eyes. After a second, she fits them into a face, and recognises it as Cass. "Artemis, are you okay?"

"I'm fine," she says, because it's just two words, right, and it's not so hard to get them out. "I'm fine." Breathe, Artie. Breathe.

Emilia watches. Her eyes are clouded with sympathy, and Artemis doesn't know (except she does) (except she doesn't) (except) if it's real or if it's fake.

"What will he do?" asks Artemis, and Emilia shrugs helplessly, making her partner flap her wings for balance.

"I don't know," she admits. "His organisation – it's called ROCKETS, the Research Office for the Consolidation of Kantan Economic and Technological Superiority – and the emails I've seen …" She sighs. "It's some nationalist thing. Pro-Kantan agenda of some kind."

Which is code, of course: everyone knows what a pro-Kantan agenda is. Everyone except Kantan nationalists, it seems, who think it means that they have the good of the nation in mind. There is a brief, uncomfortable pause, during which the one woman in the room who is white avoids the gaze of the two who are not, and then Artemis shakes her head.

"So I have no choice," she says. "Do I?"

Emilia waits for as long as she can before answering, but Artemis has seen the response in her eyes long before it comes.

"Abuse of power comes as no surprise," she says, half to herself. It sounds like a quotation, although Artemis doesn't know where it's from. "I'm sorry, Artemis. I'm sorry."

Artemis is sorry too, really. But penitence is only going to go so far here.

They don't get anywhere with the conversation. The three of them talk the ideas through a little longer, back and forth, back and forth; and Artemis says she won't go in search of Mew-2 and Emilia pretends to believe her, and both of them know that they are doing something unforgivable even as they know it is the only thing they can do.

When Emilia leaves to catch the train back to Saffron, Cass and Artemis look at each other, and then without saying anything they go to pack their bags. Half an hour later, they are boarding the next train west.

At least Cass is probably on her side after all. No one would come after Mew-2 with her if they didn't really mean it.

Honestly, that doesn't really make her feel that much better.

Cerulean is Cass' town; she spent half her childhood here, before Silverleaf, and after that she spent a good portion of her summers there. She knows it pretty well, has been dragged out on a bunch of family walks in the hills north of town by her parents, and she has a pretty good idea of where it is that Mew-2 might be hiding.

"There's a whole bunch of caves out there," she explains, on the maglev north to Cerulean. "Most of 'em are meant to be dangerous, y'know, wild pokémon, unstable rocks, all that jazz, but of course people still like go in anyway."

"I sense an 'except' coming here," says Artemis, which feels out of character for her as soon as she says it but what the hell, so is actively seeking out the most dangerous single creature in Kanto, and Cass nods.

"Yep," she says. "Except for one. Devil's Hollow."

"Seriously?"

"Yeah, well, it doesn't have a real name, but that's kinda what kids call it. You know what it's like, right? There's this cave that no one can go in because anyone who tries gets overcome with terror, all the teenagers try to go in anyway just to see if they can, boom, you end up with a ridiculous name like that."

Artemis coughed, startled. In her lap, Brauron stirs at the sudden sound but does not wake.

"I feel like you kinda buried the lead there," says Artemis. "What the hell?"

Cass shrugs.

"Like I said, you go in, you get scared and leave again. Everyone just assumes there's a really territorial ghost-type in there, and since it never leaves, Misty at the Gym is like okay, I guess if it doesn't bother us we won't bother it and hasn't had it relocated. You know? Anyway, point is, put that up against Fuji's idea that an incredibly powerful psychic-type is hanging out just north of Cerulean …"

"… and you start to see the correlations. Okay." Artemis shifts in her seat. Brauron sticks her head up out of her lap, awake and irritated about it, and Artemis' hands move automatically to her as she speaks, rubbing her head and neck and the delicate spot in between her fins. "So you know how to get there?"

"I can figure it out. I've, uh, never been." Cass looks a little embarrassed. Artemis feels for her; she herself would never go, if it weren't for this. For one thing, ghost-types and anxiety don't mix, and ghost-types and whatever it is she has really don't mix; her head is sufficiently messed-up already that if something messes with it further, things could go very badly wrong. For another, she is completely bloody terrified. But it's mostly the health risks, or so she tells herself.

"It's okay," she says, wanting to put Cass at her ease. "I wouldn't have either."

"No, it's not like that." Cass' face begins to redden. "Like … I never went 'cause no one ever invited me. I don't, uh, I don't really have many friends in Cerulean. 'Cause like I only really knew people in Silverleaf."

"Oh." Right. Of course. How could Artemis forget? It's all Silverleaf, all the way down; the last eight years of Cass' life have been lived in its ornate, moneyed shadow. She hopes that Cass did at least have friends there. She suspects that she didn't, but she hopes that she did.

"So yeah. No one in town to dare me to go into Devil's Hollow." Cass shrugs. "'S okay," she says. "I never particularly wanted to, anyway."

She is a very bright red now. Both of them choose to ignore it.

"Okay," says Artemis. Cass isn't telling her everything; she said before that she spent her last few weeks in Cerulean staying with a friend while she waited for the League paperwork to come through. That's at least one person she was reasonably close to in town. But fine: Cass owes her no answers. She'll tell Artemis about this if and when she's ready. "That's okay," Artemis repeats, and then hesitates. "Are you … are you okay going back to Cerulean so soon? I mean, um, I mean I'm not sure I'd want to go back to Pewter."

Cass shrugs again. It isn't any more convincingly nonchalant than the last time. On the back of the seat next to her, Ringo chirps and hops closer, eyeing her closely. Artemis doesn't know if birds can be worried, or what it looks like if they can, but if she had to make a guess she'd say this was it.

"Dunno, Artemis. I … like I'd be lying if I said I really wanted to be there, but you know. I'll manage."

"I promise we won't be long," says Artemis, hoping that she sounds as sincere as she feels. "Just speak to Mew-2 and be out of there."

Cass smiles, touched and a little embarrassed by her earnestness.

"Thanks," she says. "Really, though, I'll be okay. Might even get the chance to visit like the one friend I do have there."

"All right," says Artemis. "Just making sure."

"I know. You're super sweet."

Artemis blushes, squirming a little as the compliment hits her.

"Thanks," she mumbles, feeling clumsy and inelegant. "I was just making sure."

"Well," says Cass. "Still. You know."

Artemis does know, even if she's not any better at articulating it than Cass, and so she says okay, and as the train speeds through the city outskirts to its centre the two of them settle into a quiet kind of calm.

Cerulean is small, as cities go. Compact, bright, cheerful; it's a world away from the concrete moonscape of Viridian or the dingy sprawl of Pewter. The city centre is full of all the usual Kantan chains, Moon's, Oleander, a Silph outlet, a Hungry Knight, but they are all housed in what Artemis thinks of as upmarket kind of buildings, nineteenth-century windows looking out from the upper floors at the glass shopfronts below. She kind of likes it. A reassuring mixture of the cheap and the classy, neither as grindingly poor as parts of Pewter nor as intimidatingly wealthy as parts of Viridian.

Still, she's nervous. By this evening, she will either be dead or have a new ally of horrifying strength and savagery, and frankly she isn't sure which is worse – and that thing is still running around in Lavender. She wonders if she should have stayed, if the police will want to speak to her again and be angry at her absence. For half an hour or so, she sees pursuing cops everywhere, in pedestrians walking a little too fast and shadows that look a little too dense, and then they arrive at the Pokémon Centre and she manages to calm herself in the now-familiar ritual of checking in. The thought does strike her that the Lavender police might have asked the staff of the Centre there to to contact their counterparts here, that at any moment the receptionist might ask her to wait here for the police to come and collect her (and then, dizzying, breath-stealing: an interrogation, tears, hallucination, no Emilia this time to save her), but she just about manages to keep it under control. No one's coming for you, Artie, she tells herself. It would be a huge waste of resources when they're already so busy. What's more likely: that the receptionist is looking at an email from Lavender, or she's just seeing what rooms are available? There are always other explanations. There really really are.

"Sorry," says the receptionist, looking away from her computer and back at Artemis. "It's summer, so you know. Busy time. Are you okay to share a twin room?"

Artemis smiles. Nobody but her can tell how difficult she finds this, she reminds herself.

"Yeah," she says. "That's fine."

They dump their stuff, plug their phones in to charge, and go down to the computer room to, as Cass puts it, Google Maps this shit up. There's a quiet kid in there whose chansey Ringo immediately singles out as a worthy opponent, and he begins to fly in circles around it, shrieking his head off; the chansey stares, the kid looks on the verge of tears, and then Cass yells at Ringo to cut it out and he flaps back over to her shoulder, looking entirely unapologetic.

"Sorry," she says on his behalf. "He's, uh, well, I think I need to exercise him after this. Tire him out a bit."

"I-it's okay," stammers the kid, and turns resolutely back to the computer, ears red. Cass looks at Artemis, makes an exaggeratedly guilty face.

"Oops," she whispers. "Hey birdbrain, why can't you be more like Brauron? Look at her. She doesn't go round trying to murder people."

On her usual perch below Artemis' clavicle, Brauron licks her eyes in what is possibly, for a salandit, a regal kind of way. Ringo squawks and nips at Cass' ear; she sighs, calls him a birdbrain again, and gives him his toy kabuto to shut him up. While he busies himself throwing it on the floor so he can divebomb it like he's hunting caterpie, Artemis logs on to one of the PCs and navigates to Google Maps.

"Okay," says Cass, resolutely ignoring whatever it is that Ringo is doing at her feet. "So – this is Gadaran National Park, biggest in the riding, right, and like the trails are here and here." She wiggles the cursor around two lines amidst the sea of green. "Gadaran cave network goes all the way through the hills. This is – oh cool, that one's labelled, that's Big Cave―"

"Big Cave?" asks Artemis.

"We're not very imaginative in Cerulean," replies Cass. "You wanna hear a good Cerulean joke about it?"

"Um, okay, sure."

"Sorry, nobody's thought of one yet." Cass pauses, then smiles at Artemis' lack of a reaction. "See what I mean? Whole city full of people and that's the best we could come up with. Anyway, that's Big Cave, which means I think that that there is Little Cave, so … I guess we take that trail there on the right?"

"All right," says Artemis. "You're the one who lives here."

There is a pause, during which they both try to think of something else they can do in order to avoid immediately heading out to Devil's Hollow, and then Cass sighs.

"You, um … wanna get lunch first?" she asks hopefully.

"Yeah," says Artemis. "Let's do that."

An hour later, they're out of excuses and walking up the road from the bus stop to the national park. Neither of them feel much like speaking, although Ringo at least is delighted to be on the move again; he flies on ahead, flitting from wall to sign to branch as the road wends its way out of town and through a copse up to the car park.

"Someone's happy," says Artemis, as he loses steam and crashes down atop a speed limit sign. It's the first thing she's said since they got on the bus out of town.

"Yep," replies Cass, though even she doesn't sound as cheery as usual. "He really needed to let off steam, I guess. Haven't done any training since – actually since before that storm. Wow. Okay, yeah, that explains it."

Artemis and Brauron haven't done any either, although Brauron has not displayed any of Ringo's antsiness; Artemis gets the impression that she is, more than anything, worried about her partner. Certainly she's spent a lot of time insinuating herself between Artemis' fingers and coiling around her hands, hissing and emitting occasional bursts of sweet scent even when not ordered to do so. Artemis is touched, and guilty. Her weakness is poisonous, she knows, an insidiously manipulative vulnerability that forces those who care about her to waste time and effort in making her feel better. All Brauron's attention proves is that Artemis has suckered another poor soul into slaking her endless thirst for reassurance.

Or, you know, that Brauron really cares and that Artemis is succeeding as a trainer. One of the two, for sure. Artemis is finding it a bit hard to decide which one exactly.

"I guess it makes sense," she says. "We've had other stuff on our minds."

Cass snorts.

"Hah. Yeah, we really kinda have."

They turn off the road, cross a mostly empty car park, and emerge on the other side into a sparse, open wood of silver birches. The ground here slopes, and Artemis can see the hills beyond the trees, rising and falling all the way to Mt Moon.

"Path forks up there," says Cass, pointing ahead. "It's the right, I think? That'll take us round to the northeast, where the caves are. The other way sort of loops around towards Route 4."

Artemis nods. They walk on for a while without speaking, the only sound the clatter of Ringo's wings as he crashes inelegantly from perch to perch.

"Peaceful, huh," says Artemis.

"Yeah," replies Cass. "Weird, though. Haven't been here for a long time."

Artemis glances at her out of the corner of her eye. She looks on edge, and Artemis doesn't think it's just the prospect of meeting Mew-2 that's doing it.

"You used to come with your parents?" she asks.

"Yeah, and my little brother. Family walks. I dunno, we're not a very walky kinda family." Cass shrugs. "Guess my parents wanted to do something as a family and couldn't think of anything else. There's that Cerulean lack of imagination for you."

"You don't sound thrilled," says Artemis, mostly just to let Cass know that if she wants to talk about this Artemis is happy to listen and do her clumsy best at being supportive, and Cass laughs. It is not the kind of laugh that gives the impression that Cass finds anything very funny.

"Yeah, well, I'm not massively into family time. My parents named me after a prophet nobody believed who also got raped, enslaved and murdered with an axe, and then honestly I think things just went downhill from there."

"Yeah," says Artemis, falteringly. "You, um … you said."

A short pause. Ringo crashes through the trees up ahead; Brauron stretches and relocates from Artemis' chest to her shoulder.

"And like Silverleaf was their idea," Cass continues suddenly, unprompted. She's looking dead ahead now, face expressionless. "They said I was smart and I should try, and then I got the scholarship and they were like that's so good, well done, sweetie, and then I went there and hated it and they ignored me for like seven years till I came home with my crappy results and they decided to fight about it and then―" She breaks off suddenly, wavering, and for a moment Artemis wonders if that's it – but then she presses on. "And like I didn't know what to say, 'cause I wasn't used to them taking any interest, and – and they got mad that I cut my hair short and dyed it, because I guess their idea of Cassandra Grahame wasn't this, was someone smarter, I mean in terms of appearance, and … and …"

A longer pause this time. Artemis can sense the unspoken words, whatever they are, boiling viciously beneath the surface of her reddening cheeks. And then Cass swallows and stops walking and says it.

"And not like me," she says. "Not someone who got the special scholarship to the best school in Kanto and came back with a shitty results card and a girlfriend."

So that's it. Artemis sees how it was. Something like her own story, except that Cass actually had the nerve to tell her parents about herself, to face that confrontation head-on. Or maybe that wasn't it; maybe there were rumours at school, maybe Cass' parents got called up about their daughter's behaviour and so in their heads her atypical affections were simply part of her failure as a student.

Or maybe her parents are just not nice about that kind of thing. God knows they wouldn't be the only ones.

"I'm sorry," says Artemis, after a few seconds. "I … that sucks. My parents would kill me if they knew about me."

She hopes this comes across as here's why I understand rather than I have it worse. She has a horrible feeling that it doesn't, but it's said now, and there's no taking it back.

"I guess you know, then," says Cass, and Artemis lets out the breath she has been holding. "Yeah. I wanted to say, 'cause … well, 'cause I figured you'd understand. And you told me all your stuff, so― and like 'cause it's … it's been so fucking bad going around carrying this with me. I just … I don't even know if I can go home again."

She sounds close to tears. Ringo drifts back to her shoulder from up the trail, tugs on her ear with his beak. Artemis wonders if she should do something, then wonders if wondering about it instead of doing it makes her a bad person, then tells herself screw it, Cass is hurting and you're meant to be her friend, and steps closer to put an arm around her. Cass tenses for a moment, surprised, but she does not pull away, and after a moment she relaxes and leans in against her side.

"I'm sorry," says Artemis awkwardly. "You probably didn't want to come back here."

Cass shrugs, and for once Ringo doesn't seem to care. She doesn't say anything. Artemis suspects that she doesn't trust her voice.

"Was it your girlfriend you stayed with before you left?" A little nod, half buried in Artemis' ribs. Cass feels so small, pressed up against her like that. "Maybe you can visit her before we go. If you want to."

Smile. Small, strained, but a smile.

"Yeah," says Cass quietly. "Maybe." She sniffs and pulls back, wiping her eyes quickly with the heel of her hand. "Christ. Ugh. Sorry. About all this. This is like the climax of your heroic journey to stop the secret government conspiracy and save Kanto, and here I am derailing things with my shit―"

"Cass." Artemis catches her eye, and she stops speaking. "Cass, it's okay. It's still important."

"Compared to like eldritch nasties smashing through the fabric of reality? I dunno, I think―"

"Cass. I mean it. It … it hurt you, right? So it matters."

Cass blinks. Artemis can see the revelation dawning, the way it did on her, way back in that one therapy session. That what happens to you really matters, no matter how small it seems in the grand scheme of things. Because guess what, you aren't the grand scheme of things, you're just one person, and your life might be small but it's all you've got, and if it's not working out for you then you can't afford not to do something about it.

Probably Cass won't believe it yet. That's okay. It usually takes a while.

"Yeah, maybe," she says. "Thanks, Artemis. I … like I said. You're cool. I hope you know that."

Artemis blushes, but manages to not look away, to keep offering Cass a friendly face to see.

"I dunno," she says. "I'm trying to. But you're pretty cool too." She'd like to say that she doesn't think she would have got this far without her, but somehow she can't quite manage that.

Cass smiles weakly.

"Thanks," she says. "I do my best." A sigh. "Kinda funny, really. I go to school at the other end of the country and still end up meeting a girl from my hometown."

"Maybe it's that Cerulean lack of imagination again," suggests Artemis, and is amazed to see Cass actually laugh.

"Yeah," she agrees. "That's probably it." Ringo tugs on her ear again, and she reaches up to stroke him with one hand. "You're cool too, birdbrain," she says. "Dunno what you see in me, 'cept maybe a source of free mealworms, but I'm glad you stuck around." She breathes out, and looks back up the trail, towards the top of the hill. "Okay," she says. "Okay, let's forget about what we do after this for a while. We got time, right? Assuming we don't, y'know, get killed by Mew-2 or anything. So. Time to go?"

Artemis smiles.

"Time to go," she says. "And, uh, Cass?"

"Yeah?"

"My friends, or friend, I guess, they – she – I mean, people call me Artie. You can too. If you like."

"Okay, Artie," says Cass, kindly ignoring how pathetic that sounded. "Let's go talk to a big old psychic monster."

"Let's go do that," agrees Artemis, and they walk together up the trail, out from the forest into the sunlight on the hill.

It's a long way back home, even if you go by car. Emilia isn't, and that makes it even longer, several long hours on a train snaking through the hills towards the capital, and then a further half hour through the subway to get back to her apartment. She could have taken a cab, but after last night, she sort of feels she should ease up on the spending for a while. That was expensive, even coming from her salary.

By the time she sets foot in her apartment, it's almost twelve, and she is suddenly aware of how tired she is, how little sleep she got and how much travelling she did last night. She hovers in the doorway for a moment, stupefied with fatigue and unable to decide what she should be doing, and then Nadia nudges the edge of her mind and the moment is over.

"Yeah," says Emilia, yawning. "Right."

She kicks off her shoes and goes into the kitchen to get herself a glass of water; she hasn't had anything to eat or drink since last night except that coffee in Lavender. The first half she gulps, and the second she takes slower, letting the cold water take the edge off her fatigue and sharpen up the senses dulled by the boredom of the train ride. Leaving the glass on the counter, she goes back to the living-room to find the documents she promised Mark, and stops dead.

Effie.

How could she have forgotten? She didn't even say goodbye when she left last night. She just walked out, her head full of breach and Giovanni, and left her partner, her oldest friend, wthout even a single word to say where she was―

BUSY, says Nadia, by which she means that Emilia was as always compartmentalising, was simply shutting out that which would have stopped her doing her job properly, but Emilia doesn't want to hear it. The why of things isn't the point. What matters is that she still bloody did it.

"Effie," she murmurs, kneeling by the plant pot, bending over the fat, ripening fruit. "Effie, sweetie, I'm so …"

In the wild, gloom gravitate towards leafstone deposits, old rock formed of crystallised energy from the bodies of long-dead grass-types. The radiation from the stone triggers their evolution – that final push, over the course of a month, into their mature form. Leafstone is mined in controlled quantities, little nuggets of it passed around from trainer to trainer to evolve their pokémon until its energy fades. Emilia, however, never got her hands on any; this just isn't how it worked out with Effie. She evolved four days before Emilia's sixteenth birthday, in that uneasy time after Emilia had come home from her journey, taller and tougher than she had been when she left, making things strange and different.

But not so different, really. Because she'd been in that house years and years, and while she had escaped for a little while coming back to it once more brought everything back, crushed all the strength that had been growing in her back down to its roots. The walls closed in, heavy with her parents' presence, and in just a few days Emilia was as small and meek and scared as she had been before she left, driven to hide quietly in her room or stay out of the house, to be polite and deferential and hopelessly, sickeningly afraid when it was time to eat and she had to sit there with her parents; and things were the same as ever, and they could never be different, she knew, it had been ridiculous to ever even dream that they could be otherwise; and she kept Effie hidden up in her room, afraid of what might happen if she ever saw Emilia interacting with her parents and decided in her simple vegetable way that she should intervene; and then one day her father followed her up there, still angry, and he raised his hand in the old familiar gesture and Emilia closed her eyes like always and with a sound like a forest exploding there she was, Effie, a vileplume, her huge toxic flower spread like a shield against the blow.

Her father told the doctors that he'd spilled some herbicide on his hand, and he never spoke a single word to Emilia ever again.

That was Effie. That was what she was, her uncomplicated animal-vegetable love and her fierce, deathless loyalty. Emilia had to take her to the Pokémon Centre after that for treatment; vileplume aren't meant to snap-evolve like that. It's how it works for some pokémon, but not for them. She had to be kept in overnight while they blasted her with a sun lamp and infused her with some special medicine through her roots, and Emilia stayed too. Partly because she was afraid to go home without her, but also partly because she was awed at the love on display. Effie hurt herself doing that, but she did it anyway. For Emilia. For her bruised, cowardly little partner.

And Emilia didn't say goodbye before she left.

"Effie," she says again. "I'm sorry."

No response. Of course. Just a wrinkled stem and a bright, mottled fruit.

It's time. It really is. If she's going to save anything of Effie, if she's going to take this fruit before it becomes overripe and goes bad, she has to do it soon. All the literature says so. That book, and Wikipedia, and the oddish enthusiast forums she stumbled across while searching for anything that would give her permission to put it off just a few days longer.

It's time. She has a bag of compost, some little flowerpots, even a trowel. She's never owned a trowel in her life but she has one now. It's time.

Emilia swallows, gives Effie a kiss, and retreats to go and dig out the files to copy them for Mark.

At least she's not the callous monster she was afraid she was, but right now she finds it sort of difficult to take much comfort from that.

Devil's Hollow is some way off the trail, down by the north bank of the Cere, the river that curls around Cerulean's north edge and eastwards up to the sea. Cass points it out from the bridge that takes them out of the woods and over the water into the hills.

"There it is," she says. "Scariest place in Kanto."

Artemis stares. It doesn't look like the home of a hybrid breach pokémon. Then again, what would that even look like, anyway?

"Shouldn't there be, like … a sign or something? Maybe a locked gate?"

"There is a sign," says Cass. "It's … somewhere. Maybe behind that rock, from this angle."

"But no barrier?"

"Nope. No barrier." Cass glances at her. "Kind of a good thing really. We do want to go in, after all."

"Yeah, I know. I just – I mean, you know."

Cass gives her a strained kind of smile.

"Yeah," she says. "I know."

From the other side of the bridge, where they turn off the trail to descend the slope down to the cave, the sign is clearly visible. DANGER, it warns. POWERFUL GHOST AHEAD. There's an emergency phone number for Cerulean Gym ("Who you gonna call?" asks Cass wryly) and an explanation in smaller type that a strong and very territorial ghost-type lives here, and is best not disturbed.

They stand there for a moment, looking at the sign, and then Artemis puts one hand on Brauron and Cass calls Ringo back to her shoulder, and they go down to the riverbank and enter Devil's Hollow.

It's dark here – very dark. The sun is bright today, but all the light does is make the dark darker by contrast, and standing there at the entrance Artemis and Cass both stop to switch on their torches.

"Diving into a cave in search of a rare pokémon," says Cass. "Checking off the trainer journey clichés, huh?"

Artemis doesn't answer. She'd like to – Cass is making an effort to break the tension and she'd like to encourage it – but somehow she can't. It's all right; Ringo has just realised that they actually intend to enter the cave, and Cass' attention is diverted to him as he squawks uneasily and huddles close against her head.

"I know," she says, stroking him. "I know, Ringo. I know."

Artemis keeps her free hand on Brauron. She isn't sure, at this point, if she can take it away again.

"Okay," says Cass, as Ringo settles down. "I think he's okay. But I might recall him anyway. When he gets scared he flies off, and I don't want him to like get lost when the fear hits."

Artemis still says nothing, though this time for other reasons; she knows enough to recognise when someone's talking for their own benefit, not that of the person with them. She waits while Cass returns Ringo to his ball, and points her torch ahead, into the dark.

"You ready?" she asks, reaching for her voice and finding it again.

"Um, hell no," says Cass. "But I guess we don't have much of a choice."

She makes Artemis smile despite herself. It's a gift, thinks Artemis; whatever Cass' failings as a student, she is a very talented human being. This is something she would like to tell her, but honestly she wouldn't even know where to start.

"Okay," she says instead. "Let's go, then."

They walk. In the narrow passage of the cave, the torchlight picks out rocks, walls, nothing of interest.

Six paces in, it hits.

It's bad. Artemis knows fear well, is something of a connoisseur of it, even, has tasted it in forms from mindless panic to the numbing terror of life in the twilight of the fossil fuel era; she knows fear, and she knows bad when she feels it. And this is it: throat-clogging, breath-stealing, gut-wrenching; it's ghost people, breach, the blurred man and the spire. She feels ice-cold, nauseous and shivery and on the verge of passing out – but she doesn't, can't, because it's just fear, Artie, and you've done this so many times before, have survived every encounter and walked away with nothing more than arm scars at the very worst; she's done it before and she can do it again, can reach past the panic and Brauron scratching desperately at her chest and call out:

"What's your name?"

And it's over. Just like that. The fear fades as quickly as it came, and Cass lets go of Artemis' arm with a sheepish look on her face.

"Sorry," she mumbles, but Artemis isn't listening: there's another voice there, deep and dark as a well in midwinter:

You didn't run.

Cultured. Sexless. It hangs in her mind like icicles off the underside of the railway bridge in winter, before the trains shake them loose and send them stabbing at the frozen earth below. An intelligent voice, and a dangerous one.

"No," Artemis manages to croak. "We didn't."

Strong! The voice sounds approving. Strong enough not to run, and to keep your friend from running too. That is strength indeed.

"I've had a lot of practice at being scared," says Artemis. "And anyway, we want to speak to you."

While she talks, she hugs Brauron close, ostensibly to comfort her after the fear, but of course Brauron is not the only one who needs comforting.

Do you now. It is not inflected as a question. You asked my name. This suggests to me that you already know it.

"No, we know what they called you," says Artemis. "But like … we both, all of us here, we know that what they call you isn't always who you are." She takes a breath. This was as much of a plan as she could come up with, and now she'll know if her hunch was right, if Mew-2 really is close enough to human for her to understand. "So," she says. "What we'd like to know is your name."

Silence. For the longest time. Long enough for Artemis to feel the cold sweat of her panic congealing on her brow, for Brauron to retreat nervously into the depths of her arms, for Cass to shrink visibly against the cave wall.

Somewhere very far away, water drips.

And then:

You are serious, says the voice. Well. There is strength too in wisdom. And you have the savour of the self-created about you. I will tell you that when you professed a desire to talk, you had my attention. Now you have my interest. A pause. Artemis isn't sure whether she's meant to say something or not. Very well, human. You may come and learn my name. Or you may leave.

They say it in such a way as leaves no doubt that this is an either/or kind of deal: if they go in, there is no guarantee that Mew-2 will let them out again. Frightening – but honestly, what isn't, at this point? And anyway, Artemis gets it, kind of. She hasn't enjoyed being part of Giovanni's breach experiments any more than Mew-2 has.

A look at Cass. A shared nod.

"Okay," says Artemis, not knowing why she is their spokeswoman but feeling, somehow, that it is right. "We're coming."

I will look forward to it.

A sense of something withdrawing, and then at last Artemis knows they are alone.

Cass breathes out.

"Ohhhmygod," she mutters. "I mean, fuck." She looks at Artemis. "Sorry. I mean about grabbing you. I just – that was intense."

"It's okay," says Artemis. "It was pretty bad."

"Yeah. Is that what a panic attack is like?"

"Kind of. Sometimes." Artemis does not comment on the fact that Cass is assuming she has experience of panic attacks. She does have that experience, but she'd prefer it if Cass didn't assume. "Are you all right?"

"Yeah. Think so." Cass swears again, then tosses Ringo's ball up in the air and releases him, the flash blinding in the dark. He settles onto her shoulder, entirely unperturbed. "Heya, buster," she says, rubbing a knuckle along his neck. "You dodged a bullet there. We wouldn't ever have found you again if you'd been around to feel what we just felt."

Squawk, he goes, in a fearless sort of way, and Cass smiles.

"Sure," she says. "Like you'd have stayed. Okay, Artie. Ready to go meet our host?"

"Nope," replies Artemis. "Let's go."

The cave is not Artemis' idea of a good time. It goes back a long way, getting narrower and darker, twisting back on itself in tight, claustrophobic knots. The further in they go, the more Artemis is aware that she is standing in a thin finger of air in the midst of all that stone, so much of it she thinks she can almost hear it creaking under the strain of its own weight, the pillars of rock and the jagged walls forever on the verge of collapsing inwards. Like being in a bubble underwater and trusting it won't burst. Except, of course, Artemis is no good at trusting anyone or anything, really, and she cannot make herself think that this bubble is not about to be crushed.

Brauron seems okay, clinging motionless to her chest, but Cass and Ringo both seem uneasy too, and Artemis takes a selfish sort of comfort in this. It's not just her, then. She's not being unreasonable and it's okay to be afraid.

(Or, comes the answering thought with chilling certainty and sideways logic, it's okay for them but not for you, because they have so much strength between them and you are a helpless piece of dead weight hanging on their backs, being carried by a salandit whose expertise covers for your own hopeless inadequacy.)

Artemis swallows, and presses on.

They see no wild pokémon. Ordinarily there would be zubat in a place like this, and geodude and possibly a small clan of pale, wiry cave machop, but there's nothing, no life here at all. Everything knows to stay away. Everything except Artemis.

She tries not to think about this, but even if she had that kind of willpower, she doubts she'd get very far. This is the kind of place that inspires regrets.

After a while, Cass speaks.

"Long way," she whispers, subdued. "Sorry, didn't mean to make you jump. Just, like, did we miss a turning, or …?"

"Dunno," says Artemis, hoping her voice can actually be heard over the frantic pounding of her heart. "Don't think so."

"Okay," says Cass. "Okay, I guess we keep going."

"Yeah," says Artemis. "I guess."

Not long afterwards, they see a different shade of darkness up ahead, a dark that doesn't resolve into a wall when they shine their torches on it, and, with a brief look in each other's direction, they step through into what they can feel is a much bigger space. The air is different, slightly colder and less still, and while their torch beams can't seem to find the far wall they do pick out pieces of junk piled around them on the floor: bit of car and bikes, a small boat, engine blocks, smashed furniture, bones. (They don't look human, but.)

"Do … do you think this is it?" asks Artemis nervously, flicking her torch back and forth, looking for something living among the piles of refuse. "I mean, someone put all this here …"

"I dunno," says Cass. "I guess we―"

Snarl of a motor, and then with a harsh clunk a floodlight hidden behind a pile of lawn furniture turns on, blindingly bright; Artemis throws up a hand to shield her eyes, wincing in pain, and just as quickly takes it away again, too afraid to look away. Squinting through the glare, she looks down the cavern to its other end, where the floodlight is pointed – and sees it.

Throne of mangled steel. Dead cow hanging from a hook. And, in front of both – Mew-2.

Tall, lithe, brawny; they are something like the pictures of mew Artemis looked up online, like an embryonic cat, but taller and tougher, built with the wiry strength of a human, muscles shifting beneath dull grey skin. They stand upright on two legs, thick tail waving slowly behind them, and on their horned brow they wear a crown of iron barbs.

This would be intimidating enough, but Artemis cannot help but notice that they also hold in one three-fingered hand what looks like it was once a stop sign, but which now has been cut and sharpened until the only word that really fits is battleaxe.

You stand where none have stood before, they say, their face motionless but their voice darkening Artemis' head like the wings of a thunderstorm against the sky. I am Sovereign, synthetic monarch.

Long pause. Even from forty feet away, Mew-2 – Sovereign – feels dangerous. Artemis has no doubt that if they wanted her dead, they could cross the space between them and make her so in less time than it would take to blink.

"Um," she says. They're not attacking, Artie. They're here to talk. Right? Right. "Hi. I'm … I'm Artemis. And this is Brauron."

Sss, says Brauron, glaring. Artemis is amazed. She has no idea how it is that Brauron isn't scared out of her wits.

"And, uh, we're Cass and Ringo," says Cass. "I'm the first part."

Artemis, Brauron, Cass, Ringo. Sovereign tilts their head slightly to one side. They have two necks, Artemis realises: one that supports their head, and another running like a cable from between their shoulder blades to the back of their skull. Something about the gap between the two makes her skin crawl. Living creatures aren't meant to have holes in them. Well. What is it that you want with me?

This is it, then. The moment when she has to explain herself.

Okay.

"It's Giovanni Dioli," she says, and sees Sovereign's fingers tighten on the handle of their axe. "He's … he's doing something bad. Triggering breach events. And there are more and more of them, and I think he might have almost figured out how to control them, and―"

You would use me as he would have done, says Sovereign. A weapon against the breach.

"No!" cries Artemis. "No, I – I know what he did, what he's trying to – I mean, he's trying to use me too. I, I'm not … the kind of person who can do that to someone. I'm asking for alliance, not … not servitude …"

She trails off in the face of Sovereign's overwhelming silence. They maintain it for a moment longer before they reply.

What would you know? they ask coldly. You are free.

Is she? For one long, dizzying second Artemis almost thinks she is, that this is all in her head, that nobody has irradiated her or arranged her life or ground down her will with quiet condescension until she has no more space for dreams left in her; that there is nothing wrong and she isn't a girl and she isn't even here, she's a shade camped out in the husk of a body that belongs to Giovanni, parents, ghost people, League, law, cops with eyes like broken glass and fingers like the leathery tails of subway rats. It boils in her, the old fear, foaming over into dissolution, turning her to ash in her borrowed skin―

Sss.

Brauron is here, climbing up and around her neck like a scarf of living flame, and her touch brings her back. Her name is Artemis Apanchomene. Her injuries are real. Sometimes she imagines that people are trying to hunt her down and kill her but the shackles on her exist as solidly as if they were steel and not ideology.

She touches Brauron briefly with her fingers, scratches gently at her tiny neck, and imagines that the warmth she feels flowing through her is life, resurrecting her like the breath of Ho-oh.

"Can you read minds?" she asks.

Yes. If I must. I consider it distasteful.

"Read mine," she says. "Read mine and tell me what I know."

Another of those silences. It's still scary, of course, but Artemis can see through it now. Sovereign is uneasy; they're not used to people finding their way here, let alone people who know about Giovanni's breach project. They aren't sure if they want to kill her or not, and they don't like it, of course, because they are obsessed with strength and this to them can't feel like a position of strength at all. So they're trying to intimidate her. And all right, it's working, but she understands, and that helps.

Very well, says Sovereign, after a moment. Approach me.

"Wait," says Cass, alarmed. "Are, uh, are you sure about this?"

No, thinks Artemis.

"Yes," she says. "I've, um, I have a plan."

She counts to three, and on two she starts walking so that she can't chicken out, down between the piles of junk, towards where Sovereign waits. They're taller than her, she realises as she gets closer. By about half a foot. It feels weird. Kantans tend towards shortness; ordinarily, Artemis is the tallest person in the room. But then, nothing is ordinary about this particular encounter.

Closer. Past some battered circuit breakers, a coil of barbed wire (and an unpleasant memory), a smashed rowing boat with rotten oars. Closer, Sovereign growing clearer, the slitted pupils of their colourless eyes now clearly visible. Closer. And closer. And then―

There.

Sovereign looks down at her, just a few feet away. There are scars on their brow, where the jags and points of their barbed crown have cut into their skin. Something about this feels unbearably sad.

Ready yourself, they say, and without further preamble reach out with their free hand to grasp her skull. Artemis tenses up―

―leukaemia university Dad engineer functional psych ward Yellowbrick Giovanni spire radiation breach breach breach breach breach breach―

Sovereign pulls away, and Artemis stumbles back, gasping. For a long moment, she thinks she might be dead, and then she remembers that usually when she thinks that it isn't true and finds her way back into herself. Sovereign doesn't look any better; they reel, shaking their head as if to dislodge the memories they have shared in, and a strange yarring sound like the cry of a fighting cat bursts involuntarily from their lips. The two of them stare at each other for a moment, each fighting their own inner panic, and then, quite suddenly, it's over.

You have known cages, Sovereign says, avoiding her eye. Blood trickles down their forehead, from where their crown cut into them as they shook their head. Your mind is … alarming.

Perhaps it's the remnants of the psychic link, but Artemis can just about detect a hint of the emotions beneath their words, consternation roiling in their skull. She's surprised, but then, she's spent nearly twenty years living with her brain now; maybe she's just used to the weirdness.

"I know," she says.

A silence. Sovereign recovers their composure and watches her for a long moment, ignoring the blood running into their eyes.

Very well, they say at length. And you?

"Me?" asks Cass, startled. "Uh, what about me?"

What are you?

"What am …? Oh. You mean like … like that." She hesitates. Artemis turns and catches her eye, trying to look encouraging. Cass' mouth pulls up at one corner into a transitory smile. "I guess – I guess I'm here because Artemis is," she says, after a moment. "I dunno about cages or whatever, nobody's ever tried to experiment on me, but …" She shrugs. Ringo seems to forget to object; he just stares at Sovereign, wide-eyed and rigid. "It's the right thing to do," Cass says. "And I kinda owe Artemis a bunch anyway."

It's the right thing to do, repeats Sovereign. And you – you're serious, aren't you?

"Uh … yes?" Cass looks uneasy. "Is that a trick question? I feel like that's a trick question."

They don't answer. For a moment, they say nothing at all, and then they turn and take several long steps back towards their throne of junk.

Very well, they say, facing them once again. Fight me.

Artemis blinks.

"What?"

Fight me. Sovereign's eyes are unreadable, like chips of lifeless quartz. You are trainers. I am a pokémon. Fight me.

"We're asking for your help …"

Then earn it, says Sovereign. Fight me. They kick gently against the ground and float into the air, legs dangling, the air around them blue and rippling with the vast strength of their psionics. Now.

"But," says Artemis, meaning to say that this isn't the time, that they're beyond the point where pokémon training has any relevance, that if they don't stop Giovanni soon something unspecific but undoubtedly terrible will happen; Sovereign raises a hand and silences her with a look.

Now, they repeat, and punctuate it with a sharp, downward swing of their axe. Artemis flinches, all too aware of the impact of sharp objects on flesh, and takes a step back – but suddenly Cass is there, not touching but there, a comforting presence at her side, ordering Ringo down into the space between them and Sovereign.

"Okay, dude," she says, as Ringo flares his wings and screeches. "You wanna do this, we'll show you what we got." She looks up at Artemis, eyes bright and hard. "C'mon," she says. "Listen, we're like twice as old as he is. We have totally got this."

They, says Sovereign, tonelessly. And we shall see.

Artemis looks from them to Cass and back again. She breathes in, and out, and holds up her hand for Brauron to climb onto.

"Okay," she says, chest tight but voice just about still working. "Okay, Sovereign. Let's do this."

She bends down and lets Brauron down on the cave floor, next to Ringo. She glances at him for a moment, then hisses and flares her fins – actually flares her fins at Sovereign, at Mew-2, at a legendary pokémon hovering before her like an angel of death. Artemis doesn't know how she does it.

Sovereign looks down at her – at both of them, the two tiny little creatures whose eyes are barely level with their floating feet – and bares their teeth in something that might as easily be a grin as a snarl.

Ready, they say. And: Begin.