14: ARBITRARY EXECUTION
Beyond the light is a city – or at least all the parts that make up a city, if not in the right order. There are buildings, and streets and power lines and cars, all jumbled together like the view through a kaleidoscope. Artemis finds her feet on the side of what looks like the wall of the Pokémon Centre, fragments of road rising at oblique angles up into the sky before her; slices of building are piled up on either side, the end of the old kiln turned upside-down on top of a church tower sandwiched between half a block of terraced houses and a set of balconies from which grow the trees of the Celadon Public Gardens.
"What the hell …?" breathes Cass, gripping her hand tight. "This is … what is it, like Dark Celadon?"
"I don't know," whispers Artemis. It's hard to raise her voice in the face of all this impossibility. Way above her, a flight of stairs waltzes across the sky, revolving slowly. There's no sun up there, no clouds, just a chill grey void. She isn't even sure if there's any air; her lungs feel sore and somehow empty. But she hasn't died. So there's that.
A bus goes by on one of the pieces of road, emerging from what passes for the ground and slowly fading away when it reaches the end. Shrieking pixellated things that are in no way birds flutter along in its wake.
There might have been ghost people looking out of its windows, but if there were at least they're gone now.
"Why would he come here?" asks Cass. "Why would anyone ever come here?"
"I don't know. I don't know." Keep calm, Artie. You have a mission, scary as this place is. "Can you see him?"
"No. Ringo? You got good eyes. Anything?"
If there is, he isn't talking about it. Ringo has fluffed out his feathers and hunkered down on Cass' shoulder, his usual bravado gone. Brauron isn't looking so good either, clinging to Artemis so tight her claws have pierced her dress. This place is not somewhere they want to be.
Artemis doesn't blame them. She wouldn't be here herself, if she didn't have to.
"Okay," she says. "Should we look?"
"Yeah," says Cass. "Guess we should."
Neither of them move.
"All right," says Artemis. "Go."
They make their way across the side of the Pokémon Centre, avoiding the doors and windows. Artemis finds the courage to sneak a glance at one of them, and sees behind the glass what looks like an aerial view of the suburbs. After that, she keeps her eyes forward. The thought that there might just be a thin layer of bricks between her and a three-hundred foot drop is not comforting in the slightest.
At the end, the Centre merges with an overpass that climbs over the shapeless mass of a supermarket, its surface mazed with miniature roads. They walk up and over, and come down on the other side on, for once, actual pavement. The buildings on either side are tilted at bizarre angles, merging into one another like tiers on a melting cake, but it looks a little more like a street than where they came from, at least. From where they stand, the road sweeps up a long slope towards a huge pillar of office blocks mashed together into something like a termite mound, and there, at the pillar's base, are figures.
Artemis stares. Are they ghost people? They are, aren't they? Ghost people, and any minute now they'll cross the distance in that unnatural way they do and be here―
"I think we found them," says Cass, squinting. "They look human, anyway. And I'm willing to bet there aren't any other humans here."
"O-oh." Artemis forces herself to breathe. Not ghost people. Real people. Possibly the only thing that would actually be worse, given the circumstances. "Yeah, I suppose so."
"Right." Cass pauses. "So, uh, what's the plan, exactly?"
"I don't have one."
"That's … what I thought, I guess." Cass squeezes her hand. "Just go after them and do what we can?"
Artemis squeezes back.
"Yeah," she says, unable to believe that she is agreeing to this. "I think we might be out of other options."
They let go of each other's hands, and begin to run. They get maybe twenty feet before someone notices.
"Well!" cries one of the figures, in a familiar voice. "It looks like we have company!"
The others turn, and now that they're a little closer Artemis thinks she can make out details: Giovanni, his right arm strangely bulky; a woman with short hair and severe features, holding some kind of engine; three men in dark suits whose job description probably goes something like big, broad, silent. No pokémon, but those squat things in the men's hands have to be guns. Artemis has never seen one before, but there isn't a lot of room for interpretation here.
She doesn't stop. All that hiking has paid off, it seems, and she barely slows as the slope gets steeper up towards Giovanni and his agents.
"I believe we have met before," Giovanni continues, utterly unruffled. "You were much friendlier last time around. And this – who's your friend?"
"Cassandra?" A different voice this time: the woman holding the machine. "Cassandra, what the hell are you doing here?"
"The right thing!" Cass yells back, which Artemis thinks is probably the best snap comeback she's ever heard. "What the hell are you doing here?"
"Don't get smart with me!" The woman glances at Giovanni. "Dioli – that's my niece, the one who―"
"Who's been a double agent for some time now!" Cass shouts. "You asshole!"
"What?" The woman almost drops her machine. "What – Cassandra―"
"I don't think we need concern ourselves with this," says Giovanni. He raises his right arm, and now Artemis can see why it looked so strange: he has some sort of machine strapped to it, vacuum tubes and wiring running the length of his arm and feeding into a complex gauntlet that hums and sparks as he moves his fingers. "Breach disrupts," he says, tapping the air with his fingertips in an intricate pattern. "Breach changes. You've seen a lot of it by now, Artemis, but you don't understand it, do you? You still have no idea what it is, what we can do with it."
The men in suits are ready with their guns, but Cassandra's aunt shouts at them, that's my niece, you morons, don't shoot, and they lower them again, uncertain. How have they got this far? Artemis is only forty feet away now, close enough to see the light gathering on Giovanni's fingertips, reality turning into a glowing slurry at his touch. She still has no idea what to do when she finally closes the distance, but she is closing it, and Cass beside her.
"Breach is a byproduct of the forces that construct our world," Giovanni proclaims, as if giving a lecture. "The processes that make reality – that say: this is gravity, this a house, this a growlithe. Sometimes these processes go wrong." His fingers dance; the world shivers. Bits of building shudder loose from the architectural abominations all around them and shoot up into the sky like rockets. "These aberrations – these are breach. Not magic. Not divinity. Mere software glitches in the matrix of the real." He jabs his ring finger forward emphatically and clenches his fist. "In our hands: the power to rewrite anything."
The road shakes and vomits a portion of itself upwards, a frothy plume of asphalt rising up in front of them and cutting off their path. Artemis stops dead, staring, as the tarmac dissolves into motes of light and reforms into a familiar figure, jittering and twitching beneath his pixellated face.
"zzzNzzellozzz," says the blurred man, shuddering towards her. "zzzIdzZliketzobaztzzz …"
Cass has stopped too, is backing off, Ringo fluttering nervously around her shoulders. Her aunt is saying something, asking Giovanni what the hell he's doing, that's her niece, but her voice fades into the background the way incidental noise does on TV when the hero sees something important. But Artemis is no hero, is just a kid with a lizard, and in the face of the blurred man she can barely even move her feet.
"Keep them away!" orders Giovanni, his voice cutting through the turmoil like a knife. "No need to harm them. They are Kantan citizens, nominally."
"ZZOAK," says the blurred man, and speeds up his shuddering until his whole body is one dizzying blur – and then all at once falls still.
"What the hell?" says Cass, shaken. "Is that Professor Oak?"
Oak smiles genially at them from where the blurred man used to be.
"Hello," he says, taking something from his pocket. "I'd like to battle."
"Oh no," says Cass, backing away. "Oh no, no, no Artie get back―"
They turn and run, Ringo swooping after them, and out of the corner of her eye Artemis sees the telltale flash of a ball being thrown―
A shadow falls over them, and something roars. Something big. Something big with hot breath that stinks of fish.
"Oh what the actual fuck," moans Cass, and the gyarados lunges.
It doesn't hit: they're too far back by then for that, and when they turn, alerted by the swish of its vast head through the air, they can both see that it isn't following. The gyarados simply stays there, coiled and rearing, its big fish-mouth gaping like the entrance to hell. How big is it, Artemis wonders. Fifty feet? Sixty? They always look enormous on TV but this is something else entirely. The size of it. The way its shadow engulfs you, the rolling stench of its breath.
And behind it, still visible: Giovanni, watching calmly as if he sees this every day.
"Do you see now?" he calls. "And he has four others, all just as strong! This, conjured out of nothing, bound to Kantan will!" He clenches his ungloved fist tightly. "But that's only the start. Artemis, I must thank you. You've been an extraordinarily helpful part of this, and remarkably resourceful in your efforts to get to the bottom of things, too. Quite how you managed to recruit Santangelo and Mew-2, I have no idea. The enemy of my enemy, perhaps? But you still have no idea what we're trying to do. You proved as much the moment you ran in here."
Artemis can't answer. She can't actually move at all, not with the gyarados right there, rolling its eyes and grunting; on her chest, Brauron is panicking, is darting back and forth, drawing blood and ruining her dress and she can't do a thing to comfort her. Her claw stabs into the piece of silicone that serves to give the impression of a left breast and draws part of it out through the hole in her dress, mixing grains of plastic in with the blood and cotton fibres, and Artemis doesn't so much as blink.
What did she think she was going to do? What did she, Artemis, functional-but-barely, hiding behind a change of name and a thin veneer of make-up, behind one badge and one pokémon, behind a forced smile and a mouthful of fear – what was she going to do, when it came to it?
Nothing. Because she is nothing. And it doesn't even matter if Giovanni tells the gyarados to kill her because there is nothing of her to kill, not really. What matters is that Cass and Brauron and Ringo would get caught up in it too. She wishes they hadn't followed her, though there's nothing to be done now.
"You see," Giovanni continues, "we stand upon the brink of the greatest revolution in human history." He gestures expansively. "The test in Lavender? This Oak and his gyarados? Nothing, really. Proof of concept. Mere parlour tricks." The mere parlour trick sways, moving its head from side to side as it regards the tiny things before it with each eye in turn. "The true potential of breach is the power to change. Anything and everything, Artemis. And once our apparatus" – he gestures at the machine Cass' aunt is clutching – "is installed here in the heart of breach, that power will belong to Kanto alone. Everybody knows that Unova's star is waning. The world is watching to see who fills its shoes. It is a fit time for Kanto to take the world stage."
Artemis listens numbly. Her chest hurts, she notices. Brauron has calmed down, or at least grown fatalistic and resigned, but she's definitely done some damage. It's just so difficult to care.
"I tell you this by way of thanks," says Giovanni. "You have helped pave the way to Kantan greatness. So many people come to this country seeking to find what it can do for them, but you have proved that a true immigrant asks what they can do for it." He smiles, and it's a real smile: it's warm, it reaches his eyes. He believes every word of this. He truly does. If there is anything scarier than the gyarados, this is it. "And you will be witness to the dawning of an era," he tells her. "Anything you can imagine, we will be able to do. The banks forecast a coming recession: so? Rewrite the economy, set it growing! The UN doesn't approve of our military base in the Sevii Islands? Rewrite it; we shall have its blessing! Sanctions? Rewritten. Defeat? Rewritten. Gravity itself? If it displeases us, we can rewrite that too. True Kantan sovereignty, at last."
"That's too much," murmurs Cass. She's clutching Ringo now, who has flown to her arms and stayed there, shivering. "That's too much, you can't …"
"And it is all thanks to you." Giovanni gives a little bow. Ridiculous, really. Artemis would mock it, if she had the spine to talk. "On behalf of all of us at ROCKETS, Artemis, I should like to thank you." He pauses for a response, but doesn't get one. "On that note, then – I have business to attend to. I recommend you two return to Celadon, although if you'd prefer to wait there staring at Oak and his friends, I suppose that won't do any harm. Until we meet again!"
He starts to turn away. Cass' aunt shifts the machine in her arms to free up a hand, places it on his arm; they have a brief conversation, during the course of which he seems to mollify her, and then they and the three bodyguards move off, around the edge of the pillar.
With what looks like extreme difficulty, Cass takes her eyes off them, off the gigantic pokémon bobbing and swaying before her, and turns to face Artemis.
"I … what do we do?" she asks, plaintively. "Artie, what do we do?"
Artemis doesn't answer. She still hasn't found where her voice went.
It seems moderately likely that she no longer exists.
ROCKETS security is well trained; nobody wants to say where the agency's laboratory actually is. But most people get a lot more talkative when Sovereign lifts them up by the throat and pushes them into a wall, and after that it doesn't take long to find out what they need. Concealed beneath a framed advertisement for the Rocket bar in the elevator is a keypad that, if you enter a certain code, will take you down into the sub-basement where Giovanni moved ROCKETS after it was decommissioned earlier this year.
Unfortunately, someone has been sensible enough to lock the elevators.
"Damn it," says Emilia, pressing the button over and over without result. "There's got to be another way. Stairs somewhere?"
We don't need stairs. Sovereign pushes past her and jams their fingers into the gap between the doors, dragging them apart with a squeal of grinding metal. Frankly, Emilia shouldn't be surprised after seeing them defeat the tyranitar, but even so, it's hard not to stare. Ripping open elevator doors never struck her as the sort of thing that happened in real life.
There, says Sovereign with a grunt, leaning out and looking down into the void. Long way, but I can make it. Come here.
Emilia hesitates, but only for a moment. She steps forward, Sovereign takes her in their arms, and the next thing she knows they are floating gently down the elevator shaft, the air around them distorting with the levitation field.
"This is … something," she says, to cover her awkwardness. Sovereign's body is hard as iron with muscle and scar tissue, and seems to run far hotter than any human; it must be a hell of a metabolism that supports those devastating psionics. They almost burn her where they touch.
Sovereign snorts.
You are easily impressed, Santangelo.
"You know, you can call me Emilia."
Noted, Santangelo.
Sovereign touches down lightly on the roof of the lift and lets her go. Nadia, previously huddled against Emilia's neck, springs away again, rearranging her feathers in embarrassment. She can't hide her discomfort at Sovereign's proximity from Emilia, but she has her pride, and Emilia pretends to believe her.
Stand back. I'll get us in.
The hatch leading into the elevator is locked, but locks are mostly meaningless to Sovereign, and soon the three of them are down in the elevator itself, where Sovereign sniffs the air and tilts their heavy head to one side.
They're prepared, they say. I detect at least seven human minds, and as many pokémon. Stay back until I clear the way.
"Fine," says Emilia. "You're the expert."
"Hah," they bark, the real sound jarring after all the simulated mental speech. Yes, I suppose I am.
They force the doors and bound out with a snarl. Emilia hears gunfire, sees flame licking at the walls, and then a series of heavy thumps.
I am Sovereign! In name and deed!
A shriek that dies halfway through, and then silence. Sovereign pads back to the door and beckons her out.
It is done, they say, as she and Nadia follow them down a narrow hallway that bears signs of having recently been barricaded and, even more recently, unbarricaded with extreme force. I think they are running out of soldiers. Three of these people were civilians and their partners.
Emilia stoops to inspect someone's lanyard: Dr Felicia Barker, Indigo League.
"Yes," she agrees, getting out her phone and taking pictures. This new one doesn't have nearly as good a camera as her League one, but it's good enough. "These are the scientists who jumped ship with Giovanni."
Do we need to collect these ID cards? As proof?
"I don't think so," she says. "I'll send all the photos I take to The Cataphract, along with directions on where they've hidden the lab. The police will find it anyway, when they search the building, but it won't hurt to get the press involved."
Speaking of the police, we should keep moving, says Sovereign, pacing on ahead. We have not exactly been subtle about this.
"Right."
They keep going down the corridor. It's quiet now; that alarm has stopped, and Sovereign's feeling that ROCKETS is out of security seems to be right. Nadia keeps scanning, and she does detect people, but everything she broadcasts to Emilia suggests fear rather than hostility. At the end of the passage, Sovereign motions for her to stand still, and then darts around the corner in one sudden swoop.
You think you can sneak up on me? they ask. I am Sovereign.
"Oh god," Emilia hears. "Oh god oh god oh shit oh god oh―"
Where is Giovanni?
"Oh god oh god―"
WHERE IS GIOVANNI?
At this close range, the telepathic shout is enough to stun Nadia; her claws seize up and she almost falls from Emilia's shoulder, catching herself at the last moment on a lock of her hair.
FURRET, she murmurs, climbing unsteadily back into position, and follows it up with some incoherent pictures of goats.
Are you okay? asks Emilia, concerned, and gets something back that might be affirmation.
What do you mean? Sovereign demands to know. Where is he? What is this?
"It's – the kid, he was here, he – we were gonna get our agent to grab him and bring him in but – but he was already here, so we just – we went ahead with the plan, you know, because we knew we couldn't beat―"
Enough of this blathering, growls Sovereign. If you cannot marshal your thoughts, I shall marshal them for you.
"What are youuuuh …"
The voice trails off, and Emilia hears its owner fall, heavily. A moment later, Sovereign reappears around the corner.
Giovanni has made his escape, they snarl, thumping the wall and leaving cracks the concrete. I am still working out the particulars of the thought … it seems his plan was to apprehend some boy who serves as a target for breach, the way Artemis does, so that he could trigger a breach event here in Celadon. Some sort of entrance into the breach itself, so that he can take full control.
Some boy. Emilia's fists clench involuntarily. Sovereign doesn't know, do they? They don't know anything at all.
This boy apparently made his way back to Celadon regardless, they continue. When we made our attack, Giovanni had his agents hold us off so that he had time to trigger the event and escape through the back to his portal into the breach. They glare at her. Why did you not tell me there was a second person involved in Giovanni's plan? I thought it was just Artemis.
"It is just Artemis," snaps Emilia. "They just―" She breaks off, unable to figure out how to explain it. "They are cruel," she says, in the end. "She made herself and they are cruel." She shakes her head. "She and I are … I don't know if I have time to explain this. What's the situation with Giovanni?"
I don't understand, says Sovereign. They seem genuinely confused. Why would they― but you're right. Giovanni is the priority. It would seem he has already left to get to the breach.
"Damn." Emilia chews her lip. Difficult to say what Giovanni's doing, exactly, but whatever it is, if it's the last thing he needs to do to take full control, they can't afford to let it get out of hand. "Okay. Can you find it? The breach, I mean."
They are usually quite obvious, as I understand it. But what about our efforts here? There are still some scientists left, and the laboratories to document―
"Leave that to us," says Emilia, with an assertiveness she doesn't feel. "Nadia and I can handle it."
No, you can't. You are completely defenceless.
She sighs.
"Objection noted," she says. "Go and stop Giovanni, Sovereign. We'll clean up in here, start destroying evidence. Nadia can stun people at least. Right?"
Nadia cheeps and thrusts out her chest. Sovereign shakes their head.
Bravado will not win fights.
"No, but intimidation will. Just go, Sovereign. Or do you want Giovanni to win?"
They hesitate, and for a long moment Emilia is half convinced they won't go for it – and then in the end they nod.
Fine. But you – you be careful.
"Hah. Careful, Sovereign, people might think you care."
"Hmph." Don't flatter yourself. I want Giovanni's operation stricken beyond repair. Your survival is necessary.
"Sure," says Emilia, hiding a smile. "Just go, already. You want Giovanni taken care of, this is your chance. And take this with you."
She takes their ball from her pocket and hands it over.
"Maybe you could lose this on the other side of the portal," she says. "Just an idea."
Sovereign looks at her askance.
An idea, you say. They mull it over for a second or so, then hold out their hand. Good luck.
"Same to you," says Emilia, shaking it. "We're both going to need it."
Speak for yourself, Sovereign retorts, and bounds away down the corridor towards the lift.
Emilia watches them until they disappear into the elevator, and then breathes out.
"Ready, Nadia?" she asks, under her breath.
YES.
"Okay, then," she says, moving forwards, towards the corner and the body beyond. "Let's go scuttle ROCKETS."
"Artie?" Cass sounds really worried now. Artemis wishes she could do something about it, in a distant sort of way. "Artie, please say something."
It's been a while, maybe. Nothing has changed; no lightning has struck, no earthquakes have occurred. They've just been standing here, while the ersatz Oak and his gyarados watch them calmly.
Artemis blinks. It's not over. Maybe it won't ever be. But she has her mouth back. And hey. There aren't any ghost people. That has to count for something.
"Cass," she says. "I'm really sorry. I guess it didn't really work out."
Cass sighs.
"I mean, maybe we weren't really in with a chance in the first place," she says. "Guy's got a magic glove that lets him rewrite reality."
She stands there, at a loss, and Artemis stands with her. It is, at this point, about all she can do. She could turn around, of course. Could go back. But even if she could find the courage to turn her back to the gyarados, she can't leave, not after everything. So she stays, unable to leave, unable to continue, and waits for something to change.
On her chest, Brauron twitches again, burrowing into her armpit with a desperate little his. Artemis puts her arm around her, holds her close against the wash of the gyarados' foetid breath.
Cass takes her hand.
"Okay," she says. "Okay, I guess we should … go."
Artemis lets her pull her back, towards the overpass leading back towards the wall of light, and then something falls out of the sky onto the gyarados' head and slams it into the ground with enough force to crack the tarmac.
Oh, Giovanni, says Sovereign, kicking away from its skull, soaring up and floating down to alight before it. You don't learn, do you? Always you go for show, and never for substance.
"Sovereign?"
They do not turn to face her; the gyarados is rising, its eyes bloodshot and ropes of spittle flying from its lips, and as it lashes out with those yellowed fangs Sovereign dives beneath the blow to wrap their arms around its neck. The gyarados bellows, thrashes, but Sovereign is immovable, rooted to the air by their psionics, and as they tighten their grip its roar dies down into a soft, hoarse rattle.
Useless creature, they say, as the huge dragon writhes, its coils flapping uselessly against one another. Giovanni has always had a weakness for easy power. True strength cannot be purchased. He has never understood this.
One last squeeze, and they let the gyarados go. It collapses like a house of cards, gasping and wheezing, and does not get up again.
"Jesus Christ," gasps Cass, eyes wide. "You show up out of nowhere, choke out a gyarados and start talking like a fortune cookie."
I don't know what that is. Sovereign levitates down to the ground, stately and unhurried. I assume it is not complimentary.
"No, man, I'm super grateful, but … god. That just happened. Also, um, Oak's going for another ball."
Sovereign moves like light: there, and then elsewhere. Once Artemis' eyes have managed to process the movement, they see that Oak is lying alongside his gyarados.
"Is he …?"
No. Sovereign shakes their head. I am not sure if it was alive to begin with, but it is not dead, either.
Oak begins to vibrate again, to twitch and dissolve, and his gyarados with him. Within seconds, there is nothing left but tarmac and scattered motes of light.
"Thank you," says Artemis. "Thank you, we … I don't even know." Her mind is waking up, bit by bit; suddenly she realises that her chest hurts, that Brauron is still huddled beneath her arm. "It's okay, kiddo," she says, lifting her up and turning her to face Sovereign. "Look. The cavalry's here."
Brauron eyes them with suspicion and flicks her tongue out. It's the most lively she's been since Oak turned up, and it makes Artemis smile, despite it all. She's okay. She gets scared, but she bounces right back. Amazing, really.
"You really scratched me up, huh," she says, touching her chest and seeing fresh blood on her fingers, over the dried stuff that she wiped from her eyes earlier. "'S okay, I forgive you." She looks up at Sovereign. "How did you know?"
We learned from the scientists at the Rocket that Giovanni had fled to consolidate his plan. They lash their tail. I subdued the security and left Santangelo to mark the evidence.
"Alone? Is she―?"
She is … tougher than you think, Sovereign tells her. Although I forbid you from telling her I said that. They sniff, and shake their head. Where is Giovanni?
"That way," says Cass, pointing. Ringo is back on her shoulder now, glaring at the spot where the gyarados was as if daring it to come back. "He said he was gonna plant some machine, take control of breach …"
Sovereign snorts.
Then let us prove him wrong, they say, cracking their knuckles. Come!
They lope off down the broken road. Cass lets out a little snatch of cracked laughter.
"God," she says. "God, I think … Artie, correct me if I'm wrong but I think we've got a shot at this?"
"Yeah," says Artemis. "Yeah, I think … I think we need to hurry up if we're gonna catch him before he sets up his machine."
Cass smiles. Amazingly, Artemis doesn't think it's forced.
"C'mon, then," she says. "Let's get running."
Emilia creeps along the corridor, as quickly as she dares. She's got Nadia, sure, and that lets her detect people before they detect her and stun them if they get close, but Nadia isn't a battler, and these are absolutely not ideal conditions to start learning.
Most of the doors down this corridor are locked, but with a key card swiped from one of the scientists Sovereign knocked out Emilia has access to all of them. In the offices beyond, she sweeps notes off tables into wastepaper bins and drops lit matches in with them, watching Giovanni's data turn to ash. It sets the fire alarm going, but at this point it doesn't really matter, and after a while someone turns it off again.
Some stuff will survive, of course. There will be digital backups, and depending how widely distributed they are, her capacity to deal with those might be limited. But as much as she can, she needs to make all of this disappear. Not much point stopping Giovanni if someone else can just pick up where he left off.
Outside the fifth door, Nadia indicates that she should stop.
Someone in there? thinks Emilia.
HIDING, says Nadia, interfacing with her vision and making part of the wall pulse purple. HERE.
By the door, then. Waiting for Emilia to come through. She weighs her options, then nods.
Okay. Be ready.
She swipes the key card in the lock and steps back as someone swings a lamp straight through the space she would have stepped into.
"Nadia!"
A flare of green and red wings, a flash of light, and the someone groans, the lamp slipping from his fingers. Another, and he collapses onto the floor, snoring.
Emilia lets out the breath she was holding. Okay. She's never actually attacked anyone before. Or not sober, anyway; she lost a few bar fights back when she was a student. It does not feel good to have started now.
"All right," she says, running her fingers through her hair. "Good work."
She steps through into another office, like the others. Nothing here to burn. No reason, in fact, to come in here at all. Which means she knocked the guy out for nothing.
Emilia sighs. At least this way he can't sneak up on her, she supposes.
"All right, back out," she mutters, and continues down the hall. She's running out of doors to try now, but the corridor is almost over, and she can see an open space up ahead. Sticking close to the wall, she draws nearer, trying to gauge the size of the room she's looking at. For some reason she can't get a read on it, and then she reaches the end of the hall and realises why: it isn't a room. It's a shaft, ringed by catwalks, descending thirty or forty feet to accommodate a huge spire of baroque machinery, bristling with cables and terminating in a vast crooked structure like the claw of a fearow, along which crackles of discoloured electricity pulse in irregular waves.
Emilia stares, trying to take it all in at once and failing. How the hell is she meant to take this apart? She came here to document the place and end all breach research for good, but this is going to take more than a few matches. She doesn't even know how Giovanni built the damn thing. He's rich, sure, but this? This? There are League departments with smaller budgets than what you'd need to put something like this together. And that's not even considering what it would take to excavate this place in secret, or to get workers and materials down here.
She takes some pictures. It feels incredibly inadequate, but at this point it's pretty much all she's got.
FURRET MACHINE, mutters Nadia uneasily, pressing herself against Emilia's neck.
"Yeah," she replies, looking from screen to machine and back again. "Furret machine indeed. Come on, we need to find the server. We should be able to wipe that at least."
She makes her way around the catwalk, trying to tread softly but unable to stop the clanking completely, and down the stairs leading to the next level. A door down there leads to another corridor of card-locked rooms; at the end, Emilia finds one with a keypad, and presses her ear against the door to hear a faint mechanical humming from the other side. Computers, then. Big ones, by the sound of it.
"All right," she mutters. "Let's see what we can do. Nadia, tight focus. Just the keypad."
She chirps her agreement, and after a couple of false starts, Emilia has the code: 0451. She punches it in, and steps through into what is very obviously the server room: at the far end, three tall computer towers stand whirring at one another in the chilled air. On Emilia's left is a desk with a terminal; a wiggle of the mouse turns the screen back on and confirms that it is currently locked.
"Same again, I guess," she says, closing her eyes and holding Nadia out. "Find me the keys they pressed. I'm going to need full admin access."
Nadia gets to work. It takes a while; there's much more data to sift through here than with the keyboard, or even in Giovanni's office – more than one person has used this computer, and the traces are tangled. But Nadia is a natu, and she can handle it. She does, however, have to devote her full attention to it, directing all her sight into the past, and so she does not detect the mind approaching down the hall in the present, not even when its owner opens the door and Emilia turns, opening her eyes, at the sound―
The metal bar hits her full across the face with the kind of crunch that means something broken. Emilia gasps, staggers, falls; her head knocks against the edge of the table and a dizzying greyness wobbles through her vision. Somewhere Nadia is squawking, trying to pick herself back up, and above her she can make out someone raising their arm again―
Emilia blacks out. Just for a second: Nadia overcooks her stun pulse in her panic, and the edge of it clips her too. A moment later she opens her eyes to an awful pain in her face and a natu pecking anxiously at her cheek.
"What the …?" she groans, sitting up groggily. "Nadia? Was that you?"
TOO STRONG, replies Nadia, penitence flooding through her mind. TOO STRONG TOO STRONG―
"It's okay." Her voice sounds strange. Emilia blinks away the bleariness and stares. There's a woman lying near the door, out cold, with a dented metal rod a few inches from her hand. For a moment, Emilia juggles the pieces in her head, and then they all fly into place and she gasps, clutching at what she now recognises as a broken nose. "Ah! God, that … fuck." She breathes out slowly through her mouth. "Thank you, Nadia," she says. "Think you probably just saved me."
FURRET WOMAN, says Nadia, glaring fiercely at her fallen assailant.
"I think she probably thought it was self-defence." She closes her eyes for a moment, rests her head in her hand. "Ugh. I am … very out of practice at being hit."
EMILIA OKAY? asks Nadia. Her mind pushes impatiently through Emilia's own, searching for answers before she voices them.
"Yeah. Yeah, probably." Emilia gets one hand on the table and pulls herself up, fighting the dizziness. "Ugh. Nadia, can you get the door?"
She cheeps and flits over to peck the button.
"Thank you." Emilia pulls the chair out from beneath the desk and sits down heavily. "Okay," she says, trying to force the life back into her voice. "Okay, let's try that one again."
This time, she keeps one eye open. Nobody else interrupts, however, and after a few minutes of poking around they manage to get the computer unlocked, navigating past a slew of warnings and requests for credentials until at last the server consents to being formatted, and Emilia can sit back and watch ROCKETS' work go up in digital smoke.
It's slow going, though, and she knows it's only a matter of time before the cops come down here. And she can't let the data be captured. If any of this survives, if it makes its way back into the hands of anyone with any authority at all, then this isn't over. Probably there are ways of recovering what she's destroying here, too; Emilia has seen the League's tech people work miracles before, and if they can do it then others must be able to as well.
She thinks about getting the metal rod and trying to break the servers apart, but if she's honest, she isn't sure she can actually get up right now. Two blows to the head and a stun pulse will do that to you.
"Okay," she sighs, considering her options. "Okay, um – Nadia, take dictation. I need you to get a message to Sovereign …"
After Sovereign's arrival, there isn't much time for talking. They run, up to the pillar and around it to descend into a canyon of mangled architecture, a single steep path diving down between two cliffs of fused buildings. It's hard to find details in them, though Artemis tries: here's a window, there's a column, but everything is so fragmented that her eye just slides over it, unable to see the components for the whole. Sovereign pays none of it any attention, following the twisted path through the canyon with the casual ease of a native.
"Have you seen this before?" asks Artemis. "This place?"
Only in my dreams, they reply, and something in the way they say it makes her afraid to ask any more.
The path slopes lower, or possibly the walls grow higher, and the sky retreats into a single narrow band of grey, impossibly far off. Are the walls narrowing? No, definitely not, Artemis tells herself. Probably definitely not.
They are narrowing. They continue to narrow until the three of them have to move in single file, elbows knocking against pediments and doorsteps, and then all at once they fly apart again and Artemis stumbles out into a huge, lonely void.
There are no buildings here, no stolen pieces of the real world. There is nothing at all except that grey sky, and underneath it a grey land, so exactly like it in colour and texture that Artemis is half convinced she's flying.
And, way out there in the middle of it all, the five ROCKETS agents and their machine.
Sovereign doesn't wait for anyone to speak. They take off at a sprint, heading for Giovanni, and Artemis does her best to follow, though she falls far behind. In the distance, she sees the figures moving, the three bodyguards fanning out. Someone else – Giovanni? – raises an arm and the grey of the sky coalesces into angular, shimmering creatures of static fuzz that fly down at Sovereign like eagles and bowl them off their feet, crying out in voices that sound like knives on grindstones.
Artemis cries out, but Sovereign is already back up, lashing out with paw and hand; their fists puncture the breach creatures easily, shatter them into flakes of light, but the pieces keep coming back together, and the creatures keep pressing down on them, opening wounds with their edges.
Vile creatures! they growl, smashing one against another. Keep moving! Don't stop for me!
She does, and Cass too, and as they move past Sovereign the figure – definitely Giovanni; she sees the flash of the gauntlet working – raises his arm again and new creatures appear before them, slithering out of the ground and spreading their arms wide to block their path. Artemis slows, concerned – and jerks her head back in alarm as a vivid jet of green flame shoots out from her chest and wreathes the nearest entity in fire. It twitters piteously, clutching at itself with arms that smoulder like paper, and as Brauron croaks her defiance Artemis turns her shoulder forward and charges, heedless of the edges that rake her skin like broken glass or the flames that lick at her face.
It's so light. Like paper, really, if paper could cut like broken glass and burn like a furnace, and yes it hurts but Artemis is past it now, and so close that she can even see the ROCKETS group, see Giovanni manipulating the world with his fingertips and Cass' aunt finishing up with the machine and the three bodyguards raising their guns to stop her―
Someone screams, and Artemis blinks to see Cass' aunt tackling the lead guard to the ground, shrieking about her niece. The other two turn, startled, and in the moment of their distraction Cass barks follow―
―and Ringo closes the distance with supernatural speed, nailing one in the small of the back, exactly where a pursuit hurts most. Not that it does hurt much; he's a big guy and Ringo's a little bird. But he staggers, and by that point they're so close, and Giovanni is actually looking worried, is working his gloved hand faster and faster, tongue pinned between his teeth. Artemis senses rather than sees the breach entities wink out of existence as its power shifts, and a split second after they do:
I am Sovereign! In name and deed!
And she sees them flying in at the corner of her vision―
And Giovanni shrugs.
"My apologies," he says, raising a gauntlet now glowing blue-black all down its length. "You weren't quick enough. And now you don't exist."
It's like in a movie, when someone important dies and the protagonist's world distorts with sorrow and outrage, time and space collapsing into slow motion and mumbled noise. Artemis is still running, Sovereign is still diving; the breach entities are falling apart. A stall tactic, she realises, with some remote part of her brain that is still operating on a rational level. He never meant to stop them. Only to slow them until he finished doing … whatever this is.
She reaches out, her arm pushing against the air as if through treacle, and then Giovanni closes his hand and everything goes black.
Except there's something else there, hovering in the blackness. Something huge, and red, and very familiar.
Breach, croons the spire, as the sparks fly and the eerie song quavers outward from its core. You came to us. You breached.
"You again," murmurs Artemis. There is nothing of her to be afraid, no heart to pound, no nerves to tingle, no blood to roar in her ears. There is nothing left at all but the voice in the void.
It's not okay. But there isn't enough of her left to care.
I, says the spire, over the grinding of that cosmic knife. I, the angel, the horn-blast. When breach is, I am. Breach. There has been a breach.
"I know," she says. "I know, I'm … he won."
The auteur, whispers the spire. The falconer. He seizes, and his gyre widens. Breach. He is the one. We are the process of you, and you of us, and never the twain shall meet. But for breach. He has breached.
He seizes. That's the key thing, isn't it? Artemis feels the idea quicken inside her the way a pulse might, unfolding beneath the surface of whatever intangible thing she is like a drop of milk through black tea. Giovanni seizes, takes what he wants to burn his vision into the world. He seized the mew, created Sovereign and tried to seize them too.
And it wasn't that Sovereign refused to fight breach, period. It was that they would have liked to have been offered the choice.
Okay. She might as well try.
"Is this what you want?" she asks.
The spire pulses unsteadily.
What I want? She has never heard uncertainty in that voice before, did not even know if she would recognise it if she did, but there it is.
"Yeah," she says. "You're breach. Do you want to follow him?"
The spire burns for a long, long time, crackling and grinding and singing, and then at last it seems to come to a decision.
I am breach, it says. I am of the volta, caged in iron and glass and the gestures of his hand. A deaf falcon. A muted post-horn. I can do nothing. And yet, and yet …
"You don't have to," says Artemis. "We'll do it for you."
In a sense, Giovanni has done her a favour. She could never have said that if she had her brain weighing her down, poisoning her thoughts with the certain knowledge that she was born to fail. But now – now she's fearless, everything-less in fact, and as it turns out the thing that's left when you drain Artemis Apanchomene down to her dregs is compassion.
It would be humbling to realise this, if she could still feel humility. But right now she can't feel anything at all.
I will do nothing, hisses the spire. We will do nothing. Do you see?
"Yeah," says Artemis. "I think I do."
Breach, murmurs the spire, burning brighter now, so bright that had she eyes Artemis would be blinded. There has been a breach, a breach, a―
Something wrenches, hard, and Artemis is running at Giovanni.
He stares.
"Wait," he begins, and then Artemis feels all her old self rising in her with the howl of her blood in her veins and before she even knows it her fist has connected squarely with the side of Giovanni's head.
It hurts. A lot, actually. Artemis has never punched anyone before, and she doesn't do a particularly good job of it. But she's still six foot one with the musculature to match, and he's still five eight and softening with age, and there are limits to how badly wrong you can go with those statistics. Giovanni stumbles, almost falls, and the light gathering around his gauntlet fade.
"What the," he begins to say, but Artemis swings again, with all her strength and all the frantic, bottomless energy of her anxiety, and he goes down like a tonne of bricks.
It isn't even a contest. She's strong. She is. She might have spent her life running away from it but she's strong, and it's not a problem, not at all. It's a solution. Because when you get right down to it, when you strip away wealth and race and class, when you take away his pokémon and his allies and put him in the middle of nowhere, he's just some guy. Some guy who thought that his cleverness put him above kindness, and guess what, Artemis has two fists and opinions about that kind of behaviour.
Giovanni coughs, reaches into his jacket for a poké ball or a gun, but Brauron gets there first, sinking her hot white teeth into his hand, dragging it away from his pocket for her partner to shove aside.
"You bastard," Artemis says, or hears herself saying. "You bastard!"
Her hands are on his arm now, wrenching at the gauntlet. There are buckles; he tries to stop her getting to them, but Cass is here now too to hold his hand back, and Artemis gets them undone and slips the thing off his arm completely. It spits sparks at her, casing cracked and wires trailing, but it's done. Giovanni doesn't have his power. And everything is over.
She straightens up, looks back to see Sovereign dropping the two gunmen to the floor. Cass' aunt is just sitting there at their feet, staring.
They've won, she realises. They won. All of them together. They came here, against Giovanni and ROCKETS, against breach, and they … they won.
Cass grabs her hand, breathing hard.
"Did we just …?"
She can't finish. It's all right. Artemis knows what she means.
"Yeah," she replies. "I think … I think I talked my way out of it?"
It's impossible for her to keep the question out of her voice. She just can't believe that that happened.
"I think so too," says Cass. "Um … can I hug you?"
"Yeah," says Artemis, and she does, and both of them are shaking hard but neither of them feel like talking about it.
"Let's never, ever do that again," says Cass, into Artemis' chest.
"Definitely no arguments here."
Everything is so quiet without the blood roaring in her ears. Now she can hear Brauron, hissing at Giovanni from atop his chest, green flames dripping from the corners of her mouth. Keeping him down, for her. For her. Artemis wants to pick her up, but she isn't quite up to letting go of Cass yet.
A movement catches her eye, and she looks up to see Sovereign throwing the guards' guns away across the empty landscape.
Well done, they say, sounding subdued. I have no idea what just happened, but I think I have you to thank for getting us out of it.
Artemis shrugs awkwardly.
"Yeah," she says. "Probably."
They gesture at the machine.
This thing, they say. Do I destroy it?
Cass' aunt starts.
"No," she says. "No, you can't―"
"Aunt Abby?" Cass pulls away from Artemis, and her aunt looks at her with something like fear in her eyes. "Just shut up," Cass tells her, sounding tired. "You are like the worst person in my family, and considering the competition, that makes you pretty fucking awful."
"Cassandra, I was trying to―"
"It's Cass," she says. "It's Cass and I just want you to shut up and not talk to me again. Maybe ever. Do you think you can figure that one out?"
Now she sounds angry. Artemis is relieved; it sounds much more like her. She can feel the consciousness of the void fading inside her now, like a nightmare melting in the dawn light, and Cass probably feels the same.
Her aunt stares, mouth open. There's no more fight in her now. It's sad, more than anything else. Artemis wonders what it's like to go to the end of the world in search of what you believe in, only to have it stolen away at the last moment. Can't be good. Can't be worse than what Giovanni tried to do to her, but it can't be good.
"Thanks," says Cass. "And Sovereign? Just kick the shit out of that thing, okay?"
Sovereign turns their eyes on Artemis.
And you? they ask.
There's no question, not really. Yes, it's tempting. But that's exactly why they have to get rid of it. Because evil is not something alien and unusual, it's just ordinary people who think they can get away with it. That's what Giovanni is, right? She said it herself, just a moment ago. He's just some guy. Some guy who had power. And sure, Artemis could take this thing for herself, could rewrite her body into the perfection she so desperately wants, could make her parents understand, could make it so nobody ever got sick the way she did ever again – but would it be enough? Would she really stop there, with the heart of the universe beating in her palm?
What was that thing Emilia said once? Abuse of power comes as no surprise. Even someone as timid as Artemis could be evil, if you gave her the means. It's frightening, but that's how it works.
"You feel it," says Giovanni suddenly, staring up at her intently. "You see? This power can be for the benefit of everyone, for our nation―"
"Nope." Artemis shakes her head. "No, I don't think so." She bends down and recovers Brauron from his chest, hot as a jewel left out in the sun. "Just break it, Sovereign," she says, hugging her partner close. "Break it before anyone else tries anything."
Sovereign raises one foot and drives it straight through the machine with a squeal of broken metal. Giovanni flinches; Cass' aunt gasps. Artemis notes with a certain guilty satisfaction that neither of them seem to have much to say now that their life's work has been stomped flat before their eyes.
And it is done, says Sovereign, extracting their paw. At long last.
"So that's it?" she asks. "It's over now?"
The fighting, yes, Sovereign replies. I suspect you will have much to deal with when you return to Kanto. Speaking of which, Sovereign continues, returning their attention to Artemis, you should bring us home. The gate in Celadon was already failing by the time I crossed through; I suspect it has closed now. They pick up the gauntlet and put it in her hands. Use this.
"I can't," she says.
It doesn't matter, replies Sovereign, misinterpreting her. Do you think he knew how? Sovereign gestures at Giovanni. You read Fuji's diary, yes? Manipulating breach is not a science, but an art. That thing is a paintbrush. Move it, and the mark falls where you will.
Artemis looks at Cass. Ringo is back on her shoulder, giving Giovanni his best death-glare. They both look so much themselves that it makes her heart hurt a little.
"Cass?" she says hesitantly. "Maybe you …?"
Cass shakes her head.
"Uh-uh," she replies. "Like I'll be right here, but … I think this one's yours."
She keeps holding Artemis' gaze until she has to blink and look down, at the ugly engine in her hands.
"I'm not even real," she says.
"Hah!" snorts Sovereign. Neither am I. But we fake people do well enough, I think.
She's never thought of it that way. She supposes it might even be true. But even so, she can't.
"No," she says, looking up again. "No, not like this."
What? asks Sovereign. What are you talking about?
"Yeah," says Cass. "We kinda need to go home, you know―"
"There's a better way." Artemis takes a breath. "Otherwise we're the same as him."
"Artie? What are you …?"
Artemis barely hears her. She closes her eyes, reaches out with her hand: just her hand, burned and scratched from the breach entity and starting to swell from punching Giovanni. Come on, she thinks, swiping at the air the way Giovanni did with his glove. Come on, please. One more thing. One more …
She sees it in her mind, a red light blazing against the blackness. The radiation in her sings, trembling through her nerves with a familiar not-quite-music whine.
Hail, breach, it murmurs. There will be a breach. One more, and I shall not. The time has been, and there an end.
"Thank you," whispers Artemis, and tosses the gauntlet aside. Cass shouts but it's drowned out by the music, growing louder and faster and more frantic with every passing moment―
It is happening, sings the spire. It is happening, I announce it with my song―
―and, somehow, she's in Celadon. Beneath a real sky, above a real road, with the real Pokémon Centre there and real pedestrians yelling and running from the weird motley group that has materialised in their midst. No void. No spires. Just the world.
"Oh my god," says Cass, clutching at Ringo. "How the hell did you do that?"
"I didn't." Artemis stares. Is this the real world? It looks like it, but she knows better than most that looks can be deceiving. "It was the – the spire …"
What on earth …? Sovereign keeps twitching their head around, eyes as wide and round as coins. How are we …?
"I asked," says Artemis, searching the houses for signs of breach or ghost people, seeing none and still not believing. "I asked and it … ow."
She blinks as the pain pushes through and looks down at her arm. Cuts, burns, a definite swelling in her hand. A black tint around the scratches, tingling with radiation. Yes, that looks bad. But she's done: Giovanni's on the ground at Sovereign's feet, his guards are beaten, his machine is broken. And she and Cass and their pokémon and Sovereign are here, in what might well be the real world.
To hell with it. At least they're here together, right?
"Cops are here," says Cass, looking at the uniforms and arcanine pushing their way through the crowd. "Sovereign …?"
Let them come. Sovereign shrugs. I'm not sure I can fly yet, after whatever that was. I'll see Giovanni into custody before I try.
"Are you sure?"
Not really. But they're police, not League. I suppose the worst they can do is shoot me, and the last person who tried that is currently lying unconscious in a pile of gin-soaked splinters.
It seems about right. They stand together as the cops come forward, and wait for things to end.
Emilia looks up at the sound of the door opening. She expects to see DCI Chalmers, back for another round of questioning, but no. Someone even more familiar.
"Hello, Lorelei," she says.
Lorelei does not return the greeting. She indicates to the constable on guard that he should leave, sits down opposite Emilia and stares at her for a while.
It's quiet, especially without Nadia. Emilia isn't used to her absence; for more than ten years now, she's been there, letting Emilia's thoughts spill out from inside her head and mingle with her own. Emilia's skull feels smaller without her. Still, better that she's gone. Not that the cops would get anything out of her if she was here – it takes years to attune yourself to a natu, and nobody has that experience with Nadia but Emilia – but they'd try regardless. She's almost certainly safer out there, wherever she is.
"Emilia," says Lorelei. "Would it have killed you to answer your phone?"
Emilia smiles thinly.
"I threw it in the river," she replies.
"That was unnecessarily dramatic."
"Really? I thought you knew that the GPS on League phones can't be switched off."
Lorelei sighs.
"Do you realise how much time we spent searching the east end?" she asks.
"I had my suspicions. Look, what are you doing here, anyway?"
"First and foremost, I'm here to inform you that you're being released." Her voice remains level, but Emilia isn't fooled, even without Nadia. This is not easy for Lorelei to say. "The League has recommended, and the Republic Prosecution Service agrees, that it would be imprudent to press charges, under the circumstances."
"Magnanimous of you."
"Isn't it just." Lorelei lowers her gaze for a moment. "So that's the first thing," she says, forcing it back up again. "The second pertains to what we found in the ROCKETS laboratory. We had our people examine it closely, and while we retrieved several valuable pieces of technology whose architecture appears to be based on League devices from when ROCKETS worked for us, none of them were in working condition. In fact, almost everything in there had been broken, and the central server itself, as well as the three back-ups, had been smashed beyond all repair. All the data was lost." Lorelei's eyebrows ask the question before she does: "You wouldn't happen to know anything about that, would you?"
Emilia smiles again.
"I guess Giovanni knew that Sovereign and I would get in," she says. "He probably didn't want us getting hold of his breach secrets."
"There was a residue of psychic energy that disrupted the trace we tried to run."
Emilia shrugs.
"I had Nadia scanning the whole time I was there," she says. "And we had to stun a few scientists. Or I suppose Sovereign might have come back. You've read my reports, surely? They're sentient, Lorelei. They're capable of making their own decisions."
"That's actually the third thing I wanted to talk to you about. Mew-2."
"Sovereign."
"Yes. That." Lorelei leans forward slightly, elbows resting on the table. "Where is it?"
"No idea," Emilia replies. "In case you haven't noticed, Lorelei, I've been here for the last ten days, ever since Erika pulled me out of the Rocket."
"Where did your partner go, then?"
"I told her to get out and find Artemis. I didn't want her to get caught with me and end up having people try to read her mind so they could convince themselves they had a reason to accuse me of lying. You wouldn't have been able to get anything from her, and she would have been put under unnecessary duress."
They look at each other for a while in silence. The argument isn't over, but now it goes on without words, in the air between them. Emilia holds her ground, and eventually Lorelei looks away and sighs.
"Well," says Lorelei. "Thank you for your time. I'll go and let them know they can release you now."
"Lorelei?" calls Emilia, as she reaches for the door.
"Yes?"
"There was one thing that's been bothering me." Emilia pauses, lets her feel the weight of it. "Down there, in the lab. There was a lot of money on display, wouldn't you say? Giovanni's rich, of course, but come on. He owns a few casinos in a small Tohjo country, out here in the middle of nowhere. Small fry, really. But that stuff down there … that cost a lot to set up, especially in secret like that. I've had a lot of time to think about it now, and I don't really know how he could have personally funded that in such a short space of time without bankrupting himself, honestly."
Lorelei does not react. She does not move at all.
"Just a thought," says Emilia, shrugging. "I guess it's probably nothing. Maybe he's richer than I think."
"Yes," says Lorelei, without emotion. "Maybe he is."
"You didn't have to come and pick me up from the station, you know."
Artemis shrugs.
"Yeah, I did," she says. "Besides, I think Nadia wanted to come."
She and Emilia are walking down the steps in front of Central Saffron Police Station, into the rich light of a summer afternoon. Artemis suspects that they are both trying not to stare at the differences in how one another looks: her with her bandaged arm, Emilia with her splinted nose.
"You're probably right there," says Emilia, reaching up to stroke Nadia's head. The little natu hasn't left her partner's shoulder since she exited the police station door, snuggled close against her neck. "Thank you for bringing her, by the way."
"It's okay. She was waiting for us at the Centre. No idea how she found us."
Emilia chuckles.
"I guess Sovereign's made a friend after all," she says.
They head left down Mill Street, through the crush of office workers seeking lunch.
"How's the hand?" asks Emilia.
"Okay."
Her arm is bandaged from knuckles to elbow, but it works. She acquired a minor fracture in her hand punching Giovanni, which the League blissey was able to fix with a heal pulse; the scratches and burns are different, too charged with breach for pokémon moves to affect them. It's mostly all right. She can move all her fingers, if stiffly, and after nine days in quarantine without mutating horribly she, Cass, Brauron and Ringo have all been released. They got flown down to Saffron in the League helicopter and everything.
She didn't ask about Giovanni. She got the impression he wasn't going anywhere any time soon. They let Cass speak to her aunt, though. She didn't come back from it looking very happy; Artemis didn't ask, but Cass told her about it anyway. She got about as far as saying her aunt was a fascist before she started crying. After some time and hot chocolate, she was able to make a weak joke about that being another family member she'd managed to get herself estranged from, and Artemis knew she'd probably be okay.
"And Cass?" asks Emilia, as if reading her mind.
"She's okay too," replies Artemis. "At the Centre. Ringo's not well and she had to stay in with him."
"It's not―?"
"Nothing to do with breach," Artemis reassures her. "Just like a lung thing that flying-types get. I forget the name. Not serious, anyway. He'll be fine."
"Good," says Emilia. "Good, I'm glad. And … is everything else all right? I imagine, coming back the way you did, word must have got out …"
"Yeah, well. Someone with your old job came and made it disappear, I think. At least, I haven't seen anyone's name in the news except yours." She sighs. "I don't really know that much yet, they only flew us back from the secure facility yesterday. But I haven't had any angry calls from my dad asking why I left this plane of reality without telling him, so you know."
Emilia smiles.
"Yes," she says. "I guess I do."
Artemis didn't have a direction in mind when she started walking, but it feels like Emilia does. She leads Artemis across the street and left onto the Blackroad, heading west. Around them, bike couriers weave dangerously through the traffic, ferrying boxes back and forth across the city.
"So what are you going to do now?" asks Emilia. "Back to your trainer journey?"
"Yeah. Me and Cass. And you, Brauron," adds Artemis, booping her partner on the nose. Brauron licks her eyes and leans into her finger to be scratched. "So yeah," Artemis continues, looking up. "Gonna keep at this for a while. You?"
"Me?" Emilia laughs. "No idea. I'll move house, I suppose. Somewhere with a garden. I have a project in mind. And I need to visit Cerulean, too. After that … no idea." She laughs again, delighted at her own words. "Absolutely no idea."
Artemis begins fishing in her bag while Emilia speaks.
"About that project," she says, coming up with something. "I've got this for you."
She holds it out: one mottled fruit. A little squishy now, after sitting in storage for a while with the rest of Artemis' possessions, but still firm in the middle.
"Oh! Thank you." Emilia takes it from her and holds it close. "Thank you," she repeats. "And … I don't know. If you – or Cass, either of you – need a grass-type, now that you're trainers again … well, call me in a few months' time. I'm going to have quite a few of them. And I'd know they were going to a good home, with you."
Artemis blushes furiously.
"Um," she says. "Thank you. A lot."
"Not at all." Emilia smiles and leads her right onto Ostler's Lane. The traffic is much lighter here – a welcome reprieve, after the bustle of central Saffron. "I have … so many other questions," she continues. "I'm sure you do too."
"Yeah. Kind of a lot, actually. But, uh … one big one."
Emilia pauses, a wary look in her eye. On her shoulder, Nadia gives Artemis one of her patented piercing stares.
"What is it?" Emilia asks.
"Is this … is it real?" It sounds ridiculous, but Artemis can't stop herself. She has to know, and she can't think of anyone to ask except Emilia. "I mean, is any of this real? Giovanni kept talking about glitches and stuff, and – and the spire said that the things in that other world, they were the process of us, and …" She's lost the thread of it; she gives up, shrugs. "I dunno," she says. "Are we living in the Matrix or what?"
Emilia sucks her lip for a moment, looking thoughtful.
"I," she says, "am a lawyer. Not a scientist. So I don't really know, one way or another. But one thing I do know, Artemis, is that just because something is artificial doesn't mean it isn't real." She puts a hand on her chest. "You and me, we're not natural," she says. "But I think we're real anyway."
"That's not the same thing," protests Artemis, although she isn't so sure now that this is true. "That's just gender, that's weird anyway, but that – that's the whole universe. You know?"
"We're not the whole universe, Artemis," says Emilia. "This is all we've got. We just have to make the best of it." She sighs. "It's something that gets more obvious as you get older. Although it never gets much easier to believe."
Artemis sighs too.
"Yeah," she says. "I know."
Emilia looks like she might put her hand on her arm, but doesn't.
"Any other questions?" she asks. "Less philosophically weighty ones, perhaps?"
She makes Artemis smile despite herself.
"Yeah," she admits. "A bunch."
"As I thought." Emilia gestures at a nearby door. "This is possibly the best Nepalese restaurant in Saffron," she says. "Can I buy you lunch? I will spill as many state secrets as you want."
Artemis hesitates, but only for a moment. Emilia is her friend, after all. It's weird to think it, but after everything they've done she thinks that's probably the only word for it. Matrix or not, that much has to be true.
"Okay," she says, smiling. "Lead the way."
When Artemis gets back to the Centre, she finds Cass up in their room, determinedly trying to feed Ringo some medicine. Fortunately, she had the foresight to lay down newspaper first, because he seems very, very certain that he does not want any.
"Hey," she says, looking up as Artemis enters. "Had a good time?"
"Yeah." Artemis deposits Brauron on the dresser, where she immediately runs for the nail polish and nearly gets it before Artemis snatches it away. "You have a blob of medicine on your nose."
"What? Oh, for the love of …" Cass glares. "You know what, birdbrain, you deserve to be sick. I hope you know that." She sighs and wipes the medicine away. "Is Emilia okay?"
"Yeah, I think so. She's going to buy a garden and breed oddish, I think. At least for now. She says we can have some, if we want."
"Oddish?"
"Yeah."
"Neat." Cass looks at Ringo. "Hear that? You're gonna have to get your act together, buster. Unless you want to be upstaged by a baby vegetable."
He squawks hoarsely and bites her finger.
"Hah! Joke's on you, my hand is covered in medicine." Cass lets him flutter away to perch on the headboard, wheezing and glaring. "I'll try again in a bit," she says, turning to Artemis. "So. Uh … where d'you wanna go next, anyway?"
Artemis considers. All of Kanto is open to her. All of Johto, too. Anywhere the Indigo League holds sway is hers for the roaming.
"I'm feeling like maybe I've had enough of this country for a while," she says. "Isn't there a bug-type Gym in Johto? We could handle one of those, right?"
"That's a long way," says Cass. "Are you suggesting we hike through the mountains?"
"Yeah," replies Artemis. "There's meant to be a really beautiful trail going along the coast that goes right through the caves at Tohjo Falls. That would get us out in, uh, what's it called, New Bark, and from there we could do a big loop right the way round Johto."
"That sounds … super cool, actually. But, like – that would take a while. Like a really, really long while." Cass raises an eyebrow. "I'm talking a couple years, if we wanna do it properly and train and stuff."
Artemis grins at her.
"I know," she says. "Isn't it great?"
There is an argument coming, she can feel it in the wind; one day soon, she will have to visit home, have to have things out with her parents. Nobody can run forever. She will have to tell them at least that she isn't going to Yellowbrick next year, if not that she is a girl, and she will have to suffer through the consequences of that revelation.
But not today. Today she had lunch with Emilia, and came back to Cass and Ringo, and Brauron on the dresser, looking alert as she picks up on the excitement in the air; today the sun is shining, and Giovanni is gone, and there is a world out there, waiting for her to start exploring.
Artemis is afraid of it still. How could she not be? But she's going to get out there and discover it all the same.