TWO: FAMILIAR SPIRITS
TACOMA

Tacoma is lost.

She really doesn't see how any of this happened. As far as she can remember it – and there is some haziness around the crucial moments – she was just on her way home. Got off at the station, said hi to Harry. He said hi back, refused to let her carry her case across the station, because he's just like that. Asked if her parents were coming to pick her up, but they weren't. Neither could get the day off work, and Nick hadn't arrived yet; his flight was supposed to arrive at Goldenrod at more or less the same time as her train arrived at Mahogany. He'd be up later that evening.

Nick. Did this have something to do with him? She was carrying that parcel in her bag. Take it to your Uncle Nick, said Keith, and Tacoma had to bite back her irritation at his overfamiliarity. You don't get to call him that, she thought. He's been telling me not to call him that for years, so you sure as hell don't get to do it. Makes him feel old, he says. And you're an adult now, Tacoma. No reason for you to be giving me epithets like I'm any better than you.

Anyway, she had that parcel in her bag, and she has a feeling that might have had something to do with it. Keith did say that it was to do with her uncle's research, and Nick is researching other dimensions, in his lab at Yellowbrick University. She remembers being irritated about it, even aside from the fact that she'd been roped into doing this for Keith. (She refuses to call him Professor Allbright. She is, after all, an adult now. No reason for her to give him epithets like he's any better than her.) The damn thing was heavy – really heavy, even. That was why Keith didn't just put it in the mail. When he handed her the parcel, at the end of that tutorial, she felt the heft of it in her hand and asked him what it was.

"A rock sample," he said.

"Since when is my uncle interested in rock samples?" she asked. "Or you, for that matter?"

Keith did that annoying thing he does where he smirks and adjusts his glasses, and Tacoma thought to herself, oh, just get to the point, you jumped-up little prick.

"It's a special rock sample," he said. "Related to your uncle's dimensional studies. I'd leave it at his lab, but I think he'll want it before he comes back from his sabbatical."

Obviously she tore the parcel open as soon as she got back to her room, but it really was just a piece of rock: a smooth, vaguely conical piece of stone about twice as big as her fist. Heavy, too. She spent a while examining it, trying to figure out what was so special about it, but other than a crack on one side she couldn't find anything. The brief note that came with it didn't give any details: Nick, here's that sample we were talking about. Think you'll get a kick out of it. ―K. As far as Tacoma could see, it was just a rock.

A rock that, for some reason, the Professor of Ghost Studies at Kanto's top university wanted to send to the Senior Reader in Extradimensional Research. So urgently that it couldn't wait until Nick got back from his sabbatical. You'll see him at Christmas, right? asked Keith. I wonder if you could do me a favour.

And, well, Tacoma needs to pass his ridiculous little course to keep on track for her degree in pokémon medicine, despite the fact that if ghost-types get sick or injured there isn't much a doctor can actually do, so she said yes. Which is why she was carrying the mysterious, possibly extradimensional rock with her as she tried to manoeuvre her suitcases down the icy streets of Mahogany towards her parents' house.

Which, in turn, might be why she appears to be in one of those extra dimensions right now.

She really doesn't see how it happened. One moment, she's cutting through the park in the fading light, cursing the fuck out of ice in general and this path in particular, and then … then she's not sure, but after that not sure comes this.

Tacoma looks around again. It's night, or it's dark at least; the air is still in a way that makes her think she's inside, but she can't see any sign of a window. Can't see anything at all, in fact. She bends down, as she has a hundred times before, and feels the floor: smooth tiles, rectangular, worn. Impossible to tell the colour or the material.

She takes a deep breath. It tastes of dust and age.

At some point, she's going to have to move. But in the darkness all around her, in the cave-like stillness of the air, she feels like she can see that ravine in the Silverblacks again, its awful, impossible depth. Anything you dropped in there disappeared forever. No trace, no sound. Even after she saw people climb down to the bottom and back, she couldn't shake the feeling that there was simply nothing down there but void.

And faced with that, Tacoma finds that she cannot move at all.

Another breath. This place is so quiet. She's used to quiet – she's from Mahogany, for Christ's sake – but even in her sleepy little hometown there are night noises: wind, noctowl, nightingales, the hum of electricity in the wires. Here in this unnatural dark, there is absolutely nothing at all. And that is something Tacoma has no idea how to deal with at all.

She breathes in again. She wishes Nikole was here, but she was in her ball when this happened, and none of Tacoma's bags have come with her. Suitcase, shoulder bag, rucksack: all presumably still in the municipal park, lying there in the snow with her uncle's goddamn mystery rock. And Nikole's poké ball, at the bottom of her bag.

Hell. If only she'd put it in her pocket. But no. Nikole had a cold, so Tacoma refused to let her help carry the luggage, and so she stayed tucked away right at the bottom of her bag, as far away from the freezing December air as Tacoma could get her.

So. No Nikki, no company, no light, no anything but a boundless abyss.

Okay, then.

She stretches out her arms in front of her: nothing. Slowly, carefully, she edges one foot forward, and is relieved to find that she doesn't immediately fall into a bottomless pit. Another step, and still the floor stays firm beneath her. Another, and another and another and another, and―

Her fingers touch something. Tacoma leaps back, breath catching in her throat, but then her brain catches up and she realises what it is.

Oh. Right.

Sheepishly, she puts a hand out and feels stone beneath her fingers. Yes: it's just a wall. Big blocks, smooth with age. Like the old city hall in Saffron. There's nowhere like this in Mahogany, as far as she knows.

"All right." It's the first thing she's said since arriving here. Her voice sounds thin and weak in her ears. The air, she tells herself. It's just a weird atmosphere. Bad acoustics. That kind of thing. This is much easier than admitting that it's probably all down to her. "All right, so … follow the wall."

Step after careful step through the dark. How long has it been now? Long enough that she'd have expected her eyes to have started adjusting, but she can't even see her hand on the stones, six inches from her face. She tries not to think about it, and keeps following the wall as it curves around the room.

A minute passes, or maybe an hour, or maybe ten years, and then at last her hand meets something flat. She reaches up, feels first one edge and then another. Almost like …

Stairs. Stairs! Of course, she's just underground! So if she can just take the stairs up, she'll be able to get out of here, back up into the light. Tacoma leaps for what she thinks is the bottom, cracking her shin against the step in her rush, and then yes, thank God, there it is: a staircase. She scrambles up as fast as she can, stumbling as the stairs curve around, and falls over the last step into a dark every bit as deep as the one she just came from.

"No!"

It slips out before she can stop herself. The sound of it sickens her. Tacoma Spearing, whiny little asshole. She grits her teeth, shoves herself back up onto her feet, and moves around the wall again, looking for a door, more stairs, anything; there are stairs, yes, on the far side of the room, and she climbs them more slowly than the last set, telling herself that she doesn't expect to find anything at the other end, just more darkness.

She finds more darkness. She's disappointed anyway.

But she's not going to give up, not now that she's psyched herself up like this; she's going to keep going, find more stairs, find an exit. So: around the edge of the room again, and up the next flight of stairs, and the next, and the next, and somewhere along the way around what is either the eighth or the ninth identical room in a row she lets her hand fall from the stones and sinks down onto her knees.

It's the same place, isn't it? Looping over and over. A circular room, stairs at each end. The same place, sucking her back whenever she tries to leave.

She's shaking now, the kind of shakes that come from deep inside your bones and work their way out in heavy, painful waves. Like there's something vital broken inside her and without it her body is just going to shiver into pieces.

"Help me," she whispers, arms wrapped so tight around herself they hurt. "Someone. Please help me …"

And then, quite suddenly, someone does.

Alex. It has to be. Who else has a pokémon called Lothian? Nobody that she knows. And, well, wherever she is, she's pretty sure that it would take extraordinary powers to reach her. Which, though Tacoma has never seen much evidence of it, Alex is supposed to have.

"Alex!" she calls, trying to find his voice again, somewhere in the back of her head. "It's Tacoma! Where are you?"

No response.

"Alex?" Please don't let him be gone, please for the love of God don't let him be gone and her alone in the dark again―

T-Tacoma?

He sounds upset. Shocked, even. Tacoma supposes she can understand that. She's not doing so hot herself.

"Alex!" She turns around and around, glaring into the dark as if he might somehow be there. "Alex, where …?"

Oh my God, Tacoma …

"What? What is it?"

The atmosphere in the room shifts suddenly, grows thick and dense as the muggy air of a summer night in Saffron. Tacoma's breath sticks – she coughs – feels the air collapsing in on her from every side―

―and suddenly there he is, looking down at her from between his hat and scarf, pale face blindingly bright after the concentrated dark of her prison.

"Tacoma," he says, a real voice now, not a hum in the bones of her skull. "Oh my God, Tacoma …"

"Alex!" She leans forward to grab him, trying to make sure he's really there, but something goes wrong; she just bumps her head against his shoulder. "Wait, what the …?"

"Hold still," he says, eyes wide. "Just – just hold still a minute, okay?"

Something's not right. How is Alex this tall? She's looking up from the height of his chest, somehow. And what's up with her body? Why can't she move anything?

"Alex," she asks, observing the fear in her voice and despising it, "what's going on?"

"I don't know." He bites his lip. "I, um … Tacoma, do you know what you … I mean, uh, can you see …?"

She turns her head. Her neck feels strange, elastic. If she pulls like this, and if she looks down …

There's Nick's mystery rock, in Alex's hand. And there's a thin ribbon of dirty purple mist, rising up from the crack in its side and into―

Tacoma looks up again, fast.

"Alex …"

"I know," he says.

She can't think of a response. She looks at him instead, all pale and fearful in the moonlight. He looks cold. How come she can't feel it? Or do ethereal severed heads not have that power?

"Alex," she says. "Am I dead?"

He's crying. Tacoma doesn't remember ever seeing him do that before, even when things were at their very worst. Seeing it now is almost as unsettling as being a disembodied head.

Almost.

"I just got home," he says weakly. "I just got home today and they told me your … they told me Aaron Lockwood found your body in the river."

It doesn't hurt, she tells herself. You knew this deep down, right? You must have done. So it doesn't hurt at all.

Tacoma is usually a pretty good liar, but tonight she can't seem to make it work.

"No," she whispers. "No, I can't be …"

But she can, and she is, and she can see it all on Alex's face, in the pain of this boy she hasn't spoken to in years. His face is an awful grey rag of a thing, barely recognisable. He still cares, she realises. He still cares, and he came home to find …

To find that she was dead.

She swallows.

"Alex," she says, straining towards him as best she can. She can't pull very far away from the rock, but she can get a little closer. "I'm sorry."

He wipes his face on the back of his glove, gives her a look.

"Not your fault that you got killed," he mutters.

"That wasn't what I was apologising for."

Alex looks at her for a little while. Somewhere beyond the little slice of night that she can see, Lothian's wings are rustling, and Tacoma imagines him pressed up against his partner's good leg, transmitting his soothing vibrations.

"It's bloody freezing," says Alex, in the end. His expression is unreadable. "Let me get back inside and I'll find you a mirror."

Alex moves more softly than Tacoma expects; he manages to get the door open silently, despite having both hands full, and though he's limping a little from the walk in the cold he still takes care to place his cane on the strip of carpet running down the centre of the stairs with each step, masking its click in the thick pile.

She watches him manoeuvre himself up to his room, quiet and efficient as a Swiss watch, and then raises her eyes to the wall, ashamed. Tacoma Spearing, making assumptions. Aren't you supposed to be Alex's friend, she asks herself, and gives a bitter answer: yeah, the key word there is supposed.

In his room, Alex places Tacoma carefully down on his desk and sits down heavily on his bed, rubbing his leg. Lothian crouches by his feet, ears locked in position to focus the sound waves from his nose into Alex's calf. Whatever they're doing, it feels like something private, so Tacoma drags her eyes away and looks around the room instead.

It's not like she remembers. Desk, bed, bookshelf – all right, that stuff's been there as long as Alex has, but there's a travel typewriter next to her on the desk, and serious-looking books on the shelves where there used to be comics. Different chest of drawers, different wardrobe. No posters any more, just a single framed picture of a landscape she can't make out clearly in the dim light.

There's a photograph on the desk too, on Tacoma's other side, but she's too afraid of who might be in it to look.

"Thanks, Lothi." Lothian chirps; Alex scratches between his ears and gets up again, flexing his leg slowly. "Okay," he continues, speaking to Tacoma for the first time since he said he'd take her home. "Are you ready?"

No, not really. She's dead. She's a ghost, maybe, or a ghost-type, possibly. She's trapped in a rock whose inside is a terrifying void and her only alternative is to stick her head out into this unfamiliar room and see all the ways in which Alex's life has become something she no longer recognises. No, she is not bloody ready.

"Yeah, okay," she says, and Alex picks up a mirror from his suitcase and shows her what she is.

A disc of grimy purple mist, swirling around the point where that thread connects her to the rock. Little bursts of green light eddying through it like drowned insects circling the drain. And there, drawn in thick, ugly lines of the same sludgy green: a crude approximation of the face of Tacoma Spearing, recently deceased.

She stares for a long moment. Wisps of purple smoke break off from the edge of her disc and dissipate around her.

She wants to tell Alex to take the mirror away, but she seems to have forgotten all the words she needs to make that sentence. As soon as she thinks it, though, he turns it away from her and puts it down regardless. Of course. Empath. Strange to feel it at work, after hearing about it for so long.

"I'm sorry." He sits down in front of her, not breaking eye contact for a second. "Tacoma? How are you feeling?"

She tries to shrug, but of course she has no shoulders. The failed movement is embarrassing, and more embarrassing still is the fact that she finds it embarrassing, when Alex is sitting right there and looking at her so calmly.

"I mean you know," she says, in the end. "Right?"

He has that look in his eyes, like the faintest suggestion of a sarcastic okay. It's comforting to see that that at least has remained.

"Yeah, well," he says. "I feel like it's polite to at least pretend that I can't read other people's emotions." He leans back and starts to take off his hat and scarf. When did his hair get this long? "Do you want me to tell you what I know about … what happened?"

"No," she replies. At least she has the guts to say it this time. "I'm, uh, I don't think I'm – ready."

It sounds pathetic, but Alex nods like he understands. He probably does, as well.

"Okay," he says. "Do you mind if I eat something, then? Because otherwise I think I'm gonna faint."

"Sure," says Tacoma. She knows this much, at least. ESP takes ridiculous kinds of energy; there's a reason Alex has always been hungry. He doesn't look as thin as he used to, though. She supposes – hopes – that after the diagnosis his parents must have stopped thinking he was greedy and just let him have more to eat. "Go right ahead," she adds, hoping that that sounds casual but encouraging, and not just like someone awkwardly accommodating her friend's unexpected needs.

He digs out a slab of chocolate from one of the bags on the floor and starts to demolish it, piece by piece. Lothian rears, gripping the arm of the chair in his claws, and Alex holds the chocolate up beyond his reach.

"Uh-uh," he says. "This'll kill you. You know that." Lothian stares up at him, a perfect picture of chiropteran innocence, and Alex makes a face. "Go on. Shoo." Lothian withdraws, curls himself into a ball at the foot of the bed. His ears fold right the way down over his eyes, Tacoma notices. So damn cute.

She tries not to think of Nikole, still out there somewhere all by herself instead of sprawled on her bedroom floor, and almost succeeds.

"So," she says. She has to say something. This silence is going to kill her all over again. "How's uni going?"

Alex pauses with a piece of chocolate halfway to his mouth.

"Really?" he asks, incredulous, and Tacoma feels something in her shatter.

"I just … I'm dead, Alex," she says, and now she can't stop, her voice rolling on without any input from her brain. "I'm dead, I – I don't want to be dead, don't want to be whatever the hell I am now, I'm dead, I―"

"Hey." He leans forward and puts his arms around her, fingers sinking a little into her fog. "It's okay, Tacoma. It's okay."

"No, it's not―"

"Okay, you're right, it's not." He's so warm. Tacoma never realised how warm living people were before. "It's not okay, and I don't know what's going on, but … tomorrow we can go to the library and do some research, try and figure what happened to you. I could take you home―"

"No." He's doing the thing, isn't he? The psychic thing? Tacoma feels a glow, deep in the body she does not have. Like his hug is going right through her down into her soul. "No, I can't, Alex, not like – not like this―"

"Okay." His voice stays level, no matter how much her own cracks and wavers. "We'll do what you want."

She takes a deep breath. A fake breath, even, because she has no lungs, because she's just a weird ghost head―

No. Another breath. Focus on Alex's psionics, she orders herself. Let him help you.

A third breath.

Okay. She's dead. She's dead, and in defiance of everything she has ever been told about the afterlife it seems she now has a choice between being a misty ghost head or trapped in an endless void tower. This is bad. Probably the worst, actually. Tacoma can't actually think of a worse situation right now, though at least part of that's down to the fact that her mind isn't really bringing its A-game tonight.

So yes. Bad. But – she's not alone. And if anyone in Mahogany has a chance at understanding her enough to be able to help, it's probably the psychic.

She sighs.

"All right," she says. "Okay. I'm … I dunno. Okay, I guess."

Alex sits back in his chair. The glow of his psionics starts to recede.

"You were really upset when I started tracking you," he says, after a moment or two. "Where were you? In that rock?"

She nods. It's about the only gesture she has left available to her.

"I guess it's not good in there?"

"No. No, it's … it's dark, and there are stairs that don't end."

"Stairs in the dark. My worst nightmare," says Alex, with a wry look at his leg, and manages to make her smile. "No way you can light it up?"

"I don't know," says Tacoma. "I, um, didn't try."

God. She is so damn thoughtless, isn't she? Should have at least had a go at it. You're a ghost, Tacoma. Spooky lights are sort of your thing.

"Hey," says Alex, maybe picking up on her thoughts, maybe just seeing them in her face. "You didn't know."

"I should've."

"But you didn't. And that's fine." Something about the way he says it makes it so much more persuasive than it would be in Tacoma's mouth. "Look," he says. "It's been weird. That's gonna make you feel weird. But none of it's your fault."

"I guess so," she says, only half convinced. "Thanks, Alex. I don't even know if I'd have got out of the rock if you hadn't … you know."

He shrugs awkwardly, like he doesn't know how to take the compliment.

"It's okay," he says, in the end. "It's okay."

Pause. He looks tired, Tacoma thinks: deep circles under his eyes, head slumping. He said he only got back today, didn't he? So still tired from travel, and then on top of that he tracked her down from a block away.

Time for her to do a good deed in return.

"I think we need to sleep on this," she says. "Like, we can't even look whatever I am up till the library opens, right? And maybe I'll feel better in the morning."

"Are you sure?" asks Alex. "I can talk now, if you―"

"No. It's fine." She does her best to smile, and finds it comes more easily than she anticipated. "Dying really takes it out of you," she says. "And I had to take the overnight train to get back to Johto. Never get much sleep on that thing. So. You know. I could use a rest."

Alex looks at her carefully for a long moment, but doesn't argue.

"All right," he says. "Are you okay there? You don't want me to move the rock somewhere more comfortable?"

"No, I'm fine. I think." She can't actually feel the desk beneath her. Whatever sort of ghost she is, the rock isn't a part of her the same way the purple fog is. Like a shell, maybe. Or a cage. "But thanks," she adds, wishing she hadn't thought of that. "You're handling this way better than I am."

That veiled sarcastic gleam in his eyes again, as comforting as fireflies on a summer night.

"I'm not the one who died," he says. "Okay. Night, Tacoma."

"Night, Alex."

He pauses partway through getting up, like he's thought of something else to say, but whatever it is, it remains unspoken. Alex gets back into bed without another word, and just a minute or two later, Tacoma hears a change in his breathing that probably means he's asleep.

All right, then. She did her good thing. Now she has till morning to get at least a modicum of her shit together.

Tacoma takes a deep breath, and withdraws back into the rock.

It's good to have a body again, even if it is stuck down here in the dark. Tacoma flexes her fingers, shuffles her feet, and, satisfied that all her limbs are still present, glares into the blackness.

"Okay," she says. Tacoma Spearing versus the void, round one. "I want lights."

Nothing. Okay. Maybe you need to focus more. She concentrates, imagines sunbeams and torches and bonfires, and then again she says lights, and this time―

Whoosh!

Purple flames roar out of nowhere and drift up to the ceiling, filling the room with an eerie light. Tacoma stares at them for a moment, then at her hands. These are definitely her gloves. The ones she was wearing when … well, when she died.

"All right," she says. "Getting somewhere."

She can see the room now: circular, maybe thirty feet either way, with a staircase at either end and a huge slab of stone on a dais in the middle. Grey stone walls, dull green tiled floor. She's seen this somewhere before.

"Pokémon Tower," she murmurs. "Lavender."

The last leg of her trainer journey took her up into North Kanto, into the huge stretch of wilderness that occupies the northeast coast. There's a little town called Lavender up there among the foothills, with a historic grave tower containing a thousand years' worth of cremated pokémon spread over seven floors. When she visited, it looked a lot like this, although it had oil lamps instead of spooky ghost flames, a rare fragment of Kanto left behind by the rush to modernise. What's that thing Keith said about the illusions ghost-types make? That they're mostly drawn out of the victim's memories? Maybe this is something like that.

Who'd have thought that Ghost Studies would turn out to be useful after all, huh. Tacoma tries to smile at the thought, but it get lost somewhere in the transition from brain to mouth, and after a moment she gives up.

Instead, she turns her attention to the big stone thing in the centre of the room. It's pretty clear what it is, even before she takes a closer look: a sarcophagus. There's a name on it too, engraved at one end. It isn't her name. Or possibly it is; it's in Chinese and completely illegible to her Johtonian eyes.

Although it does give her an idea. She stares at the name for a second, trying to commit it to memory, then goes up the stairs to an identical circular stone room to look at an identical sarcophagus there. Except no, not quite identical; that's definitely a different name. This one looks Italian: Mauro Pavone. So it's not a loop, then. There are other floors. Unsure whether to be encouraged or dispirited, Tacoma checks the next floor (Lucy Black), and the next (something in Arabic), and the next (Flavie Lavoisier). And up, and up, a new name on every floor, until she finally reaches a room where there are no more stairs and one final sarcophagus.

She reads the name. Tacoma Spearing. Right.

Well, at least she has the penthouse suite.

One hundred other floors. One hundred other names, from all around the world. Presumably, one hundred other people who are all just as trapped here as Tacoma. So where are they? Why is it her that can wander around, turn the lights on and off, push her face out into the real world, and not them?

She thinks about calling out to them, but the last time she did that Alex heard in his sleep, and she doesn't want to wake him. There's always just going downstairs and trying to open a coffin, she supposes, but somehow she can't face it.

She takes off her gloves, then her hat and coat; it's nowhere near as cold in here as it is out in Mahogany. She sits down, back to the sarcophagus with her name on it, and closes her eyes.

There's no coming back from this, is there? Tacoma takes Ghost Studies; she's read the books. There are no proven cases of ghosts ever returning to their bodies, despite the million and one novels and films claiming otherwise. When you die, if you are unfortunate enough to stay here instead of whatever the hell is supposed to happen, you're stuck like that. Until you run out of energy or another ghost eats you.

So that's it. She's lost her body for good, and what she has instead is … this.

God. Her mother and father are out there somewhere, trying to deal with the fact that she's gone. Nick. Her brother Everett. Everyone waiting for her to come home for Christmas, thinking her train was delayed, until the next morning they got the knock on the door and saw Con standing there with a grave face. Did they know then, when they saw him? Or did it happen a little later, when he asked if he could come in, his voice all low and quiet? Even then, maybe they still thought she was just in trouble, that they'd see her soon. Maybe they kept on denying it right up till the moment when Con sat them down and told them she'd been fished out of the river.

Tacoma meant it when she told Alex she didn't want to go home. She has already destroyed her family, by getting herself killed. She doesn't need to make things worse by showing them the monster she's become. That face she saw in the mirror – it's hers, yes, but it's approximate, ugly, like a drawing done in blunt crayon with bandaged hands. Show that to someone who loves her and it will only look like a defacement of her memory.

She's sorry she had to show it to Alex, even. The look on his face when she first appeared out of the stone just kills her, now she knows what it was he saw.

Maybe she should just get in the sarcophagus and disappear to wherever all the other dead people are. She almost gets up to try it, but in the end she lets the thought go. She can't do that. Not now Alex has seen her. Die a second time and she'll kill him too.

These are bad thoughts, Tacoma, she tells herself.

Yes, Tacoma, she answers. I fucking know that.

In the end, she gets a little sleep curled up on her coat with her hat for a pillow, and pushes her face back out of the rock as soon as she wakes up, unable to stand lying down in the tower for one more second. Back in Alex's room, the world is light again, suffused with that special winter kind of sunlight that looks as bright as summer but without any warmth whatsoever. Alex himself is still asleep, a tuft of tousled dark hair protruding from beneath the bedspread, and Tacoma makes no attempt to wake him. He got up in the middle of the night to follow a weird dream and rescue her. The guy's earned a lie-in.

Lothian is asleep too, although he has migrated further up the bed than he was when he curled up last night; now, he's almost sitting on top of Alex. Tacoma is reminded of Nikole, of the way she would go to sleep at the other end of the room and by morning be pressed right up against the side of the bed. So close that Tacoma couldn't get out without stepping on her. Which was exactly the point, of course. Nikole wanted to be woken as soon as her partner was up.

Ugh. Not a line of thought she has any interest in pursuing. Tacoma blanks it out and looks around the room instead. By daylight, she can see that the landscape is a painting of Mahogany, from the hills northwest of town. She thinks nothing of it, until she sees Ella's signature in the corner. After that, the fact that it's so good becomes less normal and more of a surprise. Tacoma knew she painted, but it's been years since she last saw one of her pictures; apparently Ella's got a lot better now.

After a moment of hesitation, she looks at the photo on the desk as well, and is relieved to see that it's just a picture of Alex's parents, with a young Ella. Figures. He probably doesn't want photos of Ash or Helen just lying around in the open like that. She's a little hurt that there's no evidence of her here, after well over a decade of friendship, but she's aware that this isn't a reasonable reaction. It's her who broke off contact, after all.

Lothian tenses and uncoils in one sharp, swift motion, and as he yawns Alex stirs and sits up too. He blinks, stares at Tacoma in something like a panic, and then seems to remember last night and relaxes.

"Morning," he says, rubbing the stubbly skin around his mouth. "Have you been there all night?"

"I went back inside the rock to sleep," she answers. "Figured out how to get the lights on."

"That's good," he says absently, still probing around his lips. "Hmph. Um. Gonna … have a shower. Get dressed. Then after breakfast I can take you to the library and we'll look up ghost-types." He looks up suddenly, taking his hand away from his mouth as if just now becoming aware of what he's doing, and smiles stiffly. "Is that okay? Sorry, I guess you'll have to hide in the rock for a while."

"Sure, Alex." Whatever he wants. Tacoma owes him, after all. And anyway, given that she doesn't seem to be able to move the rock by herself, she really can't afford to alienate the guy who can carry her places. "I really appreciate you doing all this."

"It's fine." He pauses, takes a quick, nervous breath, and says, "You know, I … I kind of changed my name. Earlier this year."

Tacoma tries not to look shocked, but it isn't easy. Alex is … well, he's Alex. Why would he change that?

"Oh," she says. "Oh, uh, okay. What – what should I call you now, then?"

A long pause. Tacoma hears the creak of floorboards in another room, the clunking of a cupboard door from downstairs.

Slowly, not quite looking at her, the fingers of his left hand fiddling with the thumbnail of his right, Alex answers.

"… Jodi."

This time she definitely doesn't manage to hide her shock. Like she could hide anything from an empath, anyway.

"Oh," she says. "Oh, I … see."

She does. She does see. She's heard of this before, vaguely. There was an article in that magazine, wasn't there? About that one trans― what even is the right word, anyway? Transsexual? Trans …. something else? It starts with trans, she's sure of it, but the article was a year ago; she can't even remember it properly now. At the time, it didn't seem important. Not something she'd ever actually come face to face with.

Something else to feel bad about. You hear about things and you never realise that they matter, that you're not reading about some distant curiosity but the lives of actual people. People like Alex. No, Jodi. Jodi. Get it right, Tacoma.

"You do?" asks Jodi.

"Yeah," says Tacoma. "I guess I do." Pause. Got to be careful. What she says here matters, really matters, and Tacoma really doesn't trust her mouth not to fuck it up without close supervision. "Okay, Jodi," she says, and sees her friend's shoulders untense in relief. "Um … I would hug you, but, well."

Jodi smiles weakly.

"I guess it's the thought that counts," she says. "Lothi?"

Lothian, who has been watching the conversation with interest, bounces off the bed and retrieves her cane from where it fell during the night. Jodi takes it, levers herself up, and comes over to put her arms around Tacoma.

"I really missed you, you know," she whispers, her voice thick with unshed tears. It feels like a stake hammered through Tacoma's chest.

"Yeah," says Tacoma, bowing her head against Jodi's arm. "I missed you too."

Neither of them make any move to explain. It isn't the time, yet. But they're back again, same town, same lives, and even if Tacoma is a ghost and Jodi is a girl that still counts for something.

Counts for a lot, actually. Tacoma doesn't know how to say it, has never been all that articulate about feelings, but it's there, and it matters. And that's going to have to be enough for now.

It's a little awkward being stuck in the background while Jodi gets on with her morning, but Tacoma manages. She hangs around in her room, trying to read the titles on the spines of her books – mostly non-fiction, which Tacoma finds sort of surprising; she thought Jodi liked novels – and waiting for her to return. When she does, popping back in after her shower to do her make-up, Tacoma is startled by how pretty she is. You can tell that she is what she is, but― wait. Is this prejudiced of her? It probably is. Why shouldn't she expect Jodi to be pretty, Tacoma asks herself, and is forced to admit that she can't come up with any answer except that Jodi wasn't a girl before.

Or was she? Was this always in her, waiting for the right time, the right knowledge, the right whatever it is that lets someone take the plunge and go public? Tacoma imagines the secret inside her, choked and stunted with ignorance and fear. Jodi will be twenty on the seventeenth. That's an awfully long time to have carried something like that. If that is how it happened.

Tacoma has no idea what to think, or even if these are things that she is allowed to think. She retreats into the rock to hide her embarrassment, promising herself she'll get better at this in future, and when she comes back out Jodi is gone again, along with Lothian. It's a relief, even if it is lonely here by herself, and it gives her time to try and recover a little of her composure. No need to make this more awkward for Jodi than it already is.

Don't worry, it's me, she hears in her head, just before the door opens and Jodi comes in, looking elegant in her sea-green dress and chewing the crust of a piece of toast. "Hey," she continues, aloud this time. "Sorry to abandon you. I told everyone that I'm gonna stretch my legs and get some Christmas reading out the library, so I guess we're good to go."

"Is that okay?" asks Tacoma. "You're going to go out like … this?

So much for not making it awkward; she regrets saying it as soon as the words have left her mouth. Jodi pauses mid-chew, eyes clouding for a moment, then swallows her toast and forces a smile.

"Yeah," she says. "People are gonna find out. Might as well let 'em know on my own terms."

Tacoma manages to not tell her how brave she thinks this is; that feels like it would be condescending.

"Right," she says instead. "Makes sense."

"Yeah." Jodi pauses. "So, uh, unless you want to explain to my family and everyone what's happening, I guess maybe you'll have to go back in the rock. Then I can put it in my bag."

This suits Tacoma just fine. Back inside she goes, to sit on her sarcophagus and kick her heels for a while, until she hears Jodi's voice in her head again.

Okay, coast is clear.

"Gotcha," she says, and pushes her head back out to find herself on one of the low tables at the back of the Mahogany Public Library. Yellow light, grey shelving units, a window looking out onto an icebound car park in which the lone car has been buried up to the wheel arches in drifting snow. Tacoma hasn't been here in months, but she knows where she is; the layout is as familiar to her as if she'd only left yesterday. Down that aisle and to the left is Lorna Rosemont's desk, where all searches for books begin; opposite her are the microfiche machines, last port of call for so many high school local history projects. At the other end of the library, perched in her chair hidden behind the stacks, Simone Weller will be reading one of the same three books on beekeeping, cover to cover. Time doesn't touch this place; Tacoma imagines that in thirty years' time, she could walk in here and still see Simone reading her books, still see Lorna showing teenagers how to read microfiche.

Actually, she decides, she really doesn't want to think about the future right now.

"You speak to Lorna?" she whispers, to distract herself. Jodi nods.

"She asked about uni," she replies. "Then pointed me to where the Pokédex is. And …" Her cheeks redden. "And she complimented my eyeshadow."

"That's cool of her," says Tacoma. "No, wait, that's not what – I mean, it is good. I don't even know how you blend it like that. I suck at that kind of thing. And now I'm talking too much." She sighs. Jodi is even redder now. Great job, Tacoma. "Sorry," she says, but Jodi shakes her head.

"No, it's … thanks." A little smile, awkward but unforced. "I'm glad you like it."

She sits there for a while, fiddling with her thumbnail again. Behind her chair, Lothian twitches his ears, listening out for who knows what; elsewhere in the library, Lorna says something to Simone in her low librarian's voice.

"Shall we look at the Pokédex, then?" asks Tacoma, after a moment.

"Oh. Yeah, sure."

They turn their attention to the thick, well-thumbed book on the desk before them: Pokémon Index, Fifth Edition. The library doesn't have the latest one yet, but hopefully this will do for their purposes. Jodi opens it at the section on ghost-types, then flips through, past informative factoids and years of annotations from kids dreaming of their journeys, until she finds a picture that she recognises: swirling mist, cracked stone, jagged faux-human face.

"Spiritomb," she reads. "Mercifully rare, both for the sake of those who encounter it and the spirits consumed in its creation, this artificial ghost/dark-type pokémon is the result of trapping anywhere between seventy and two hundred human souls within a spiritually conductive stone."

Spiritomb. So there's a name for this. That makes Tacoma feel a little better. If this is a thing that's happened before, if someone's written scholarly articles about it, then it exists, in a way that waking up in a spooky void tower does not. It has history and depth. She tries out the words in her head: I'm a spiritomb. Doesn't sound great, exactly, but she'll take it.

It's messed-up, though. Who exactly creates a spiritomb? Who believes they have that kind of authority over other people?

"That's gross," she says aloud. "What asshole invented that?"

Jodi raises her eyebrows, keeps reading.

"The method of their creation appears to have been discovered independently in many different countries; spiritomb have been found, composed of varying numbers of spirits, all over the world. The oldest appears to be an entity dating from during China's Song dynasty, composed of the spirits of one hundred and eight outlaws, and currently held for research purposes at Fudan University's Handan campus in Shanghai.

"Spiritomb vary in disposition; many are unpredictable, their personalities changing as the different spirits within seize control in their turn, while others are dominated by one spirit alone, the others lying dormant for reasons that have not yet been determined. In all cases, they are generally uncooperative, the circumstances of their creation having understandably soured them towards humans. This misanthropy and unpredictability, combined with their ability to club a man unconscious with pieces of his own shadow, makes them generally unfit for training, and dangerous to deal with. This contributor cannot recommend engaging with them under any circumstances."

Jodi looks up, biting her lip.

"Sorry," she says. "It's … well, I guess it was written by a dude. A dude who didn't particularly trust spiritomb."

"It's fine," says Tacoma. "Wish I knew how to beat someone up with their shadow, though. That sounds cool."

She isn't sure if she means that, but it sounds vaguely funny in her head, so she figures it might help the mood at least. Jodi smiles nervously. Maybe it isn't funny after all. Or maybe Tacoma's forgotten how her sense of humour works.

"I was carrying this rock home, by the way," she adds quickly, wanting to move on. "One of my professors – he teaches Ghost Studies – he gave it to me to take to Nick. You know, my uncle?" Jodi nods. "Said it was for his dimensional research. So that was in my suitcase. I don't remember when I … how I ended up in there."

"But I found it in the skip outside Rick Fawkes' project." Jodi's face twists into that familiar scowl, the way it does when she's thinking. "So whoever, um, you know, whoever it was, they knew about it. They dug it out of your bag and made sure to dump it there with all the other broken stones, where nobody would find it."

"Except they weren't counting on Psy Officer Ortega over here," says Tacoma. "Because you did find it."

Jodi shakes her head.

"Lothian found it," she corrects. "I just helped."

Lothian shuffles his foreclaws and pushes a few stray locks of hair back into place in his mane, unclear about what's being discussed but certain that he is being praised, and Jodi rests an absent hand on his head as she continues.

"So that might be it," she says. "That might be why you were … why you were murdered."

Heavy words. They fall into the space between them and sit there, as disturbing and enthralling as a traffic accident. Someone killed Tacoma for a reason. They knew about the spiritomb rock, they knew she had it, and they knew exactly how to make it disappear.

But Jodi found it. And if the murderer finds out – if they ever discover that this thing they were willing to kill to keep secret is, in fact, not secret any more – then she'll be on their hit list too.

Tacoma swallows.

"Do you, um …?"

She doesn't need to finish. She can tell that Jodi has worked it out too; it's in the lines of her face, in the way her hand has tensed on Lothian's head and made him look up at her with concern in his jaundiced eyes.

"We need," says Jodi, pronouncing each word with deliberate care, "to find out why your professor sent your uncle this rock."

Tacoma wants to ask if she's sure, to tell her this is dangerous and she should know that she doesn't have to do it just because she feels an obligation to the asshole friend who walked out on her because she couldn't travel any more, but when she opens her mouth what comes out is:

"Yeah. I guess we do."

They look at each other across the table for a long moment.

"We're gonna find who did this," says Jodi, closing the Pokédex with a decisive snap. "I promise."

Tacoma remembers being a kid, striking out fearlessly in search of trouble while Jodi hung back and mumbled excuses. The depressing thing is that she knows how they ended up switching places like this. You grow up. You see the light, at first in pieces and then in its awful totality, the blistering white glow of a nuclear explosion on the horizon, and with it the knowledge that by the time you have finished thinking this the wave of death will have arrived to wipe you and your town off the face of the earth. And that's the moment of truth: are you strong enough to take it, or do you fall?

Tacoma fell. She's been falling for years. And, well, it seems Jodi didn't. Anyone strong enough to come home to Mahogany and say, by the way, I am a girl now – that person is strong enough to see the light and stand to meet it as it roars across her face. Strong enough to go hunting murderers, too.

To hell with it. She needs to know who did this, and what's the worst that could happen? If it gets too dangerous, they can always back out. And Con and the cops will probably wrap this up before they get anywhere near the truth, anyway.

"Yeah," she says, hoping she sounds more confident than she feels. "Let's go catch us a killer."