I am A-ME—3.

My name is Yuri.

I am named for the man who was first to reach space—first of any other man, at least. And I was made to don this title as if I could somehow live up to it.

She was A-FE—3.

Her name was Shrike.

She was named for a little bird with a wicked beak. She had unfortunately been too little and not quite wicked enough to survive.

He is Orson.

His name is and will always be Orson.

What it means and why he has it will forever be a mystery to me.

Yuri was a vast sort of creature—even for a latios.

Beyond the one-way window, he hung limp in the leather harness linked with steel buckles, a green-cyan juggernaut bowing his head to the floor in submission, his sleek muzzle barely an inch from the surface of the isolation tank's phosphorescent water. Orson watched it slosh against the wall between him and it, noticing the smeared edges to every shape beyond it and deciding it must be simply a screen, that Yuri was likely far away from him, yet still he wondered—if Yuri wanted to, how much force would it take him to tear out of the harness and smash through the screen and the distance between them? He would never know the answer to that, but he believed in it, he could picture it, a shower of pixels and electric light in harsh Technicolor clarity.

Something like that couldn't be too difficult for a creature like him, but Yuri would not wake up. If he could, he might accidentally kill Orson and half the staff of the JDR, catching them in the crossfire of his built-up and uncontrollable power.

So he only hung there, still like he was dead, like the wires and tubes snaking out from beneath his massive wings and crown were sucking his life away instead of keeping his heart pumping as the injections screaming through his blood dulled all nine of his senses. They aimed to make him a lifeless husk, to render his body useless dead weight and his mind an instrument of godlike creation or destruction to make up for the strength he lacked—a tool, as he thought but never said.

"Dad," Orson rasped, shifting back in the dark room, shouldering away from the arm his father had draped across his son. There was panic boiling in his chest, bubbling and popping and reducing the Anxiety to an evil steam inside him. "Dad, I can't—"

"Orson, please," his father murmured, catching him again and pulling him deeper into the blue-stricken darkness of the room, his hands casts of iron, his voice stiff and brittle like balsa wood.

"Y-you were supposed to call," Orson rasped, finding his legs were too weak to resist as Dr. Dröge steered him closer to Yuri's dead-asleep silhouette against the aquamarine light that blazed through the unsteady currents and bubble streams under the water, reflected by its curved mirror wall opposite his father's isolated room. "You have to tell me when you're about to put him under, Dad," he croaked, his eyes falling on a dark shape rising from the floor ahead of him, lit up by the mini flecks of light spanning across the length of a control panel set against the thick screen wall. A chair—tall, metallic.

"I know," came his father's hollowed response.

"Atticus."

Orson didn't have the strength to jump at the sound, a word spat alongside a stream of static from a transistor radio set into the panel. His father tensed, hurrying his son towards the chair, his breath clouding near Orson's ear.

"Atticus, acknowledge."

"Here," Dr. Dröge barked before murmuring to his son, "Hurry now. Sit up here."

"We have to move or the drugs won't retain their potency—etorphine doesn't work so well with this one. Tell me you've got him."

"I'm well aware of the situation—and Orson is here. Celia delivered him. Give me a minute."

"He's agitated, Doctor. You need to—"

Orson didn't hear the rest. His father pushed him towards the chair—he realized it had been brought to the room, not set into the floor with bolts and a hammer. This place was merely a makeshift observation room; it had to be. Not like they could take Orson into the actual Valhalla wing where they kept all the eons.

"Dad, no," Orson whispered, wishing he could sprint, but the Anxiety always found a way to rob him of all his energy to keep itself alive and blazing through his veins. Maybe he thought he wanted to run, but all he really wanted to do was collapse. He locked his knees, swayed on his feet.

Dr. Dröge tapped his son on the shoulder and there was barely an ounce of force behind the gesture, but he fell back and back until gravity took over and crushed him into the seat. Orson could move nothing but his mouth. "Don't do this—don't put him in the tank."

"I have to know," Dr. Dröge whispered, grabbing his son by the wrists and buckling them against the leather armrests, then his ankles, then his neck, then a thick belt around his waist. Orson was a husk, his blank eyes focused on the pixelized image of Yuri and his smeared reflection in the mirror walls, noticing absently how high-quality the picture was, how the water that sloshed against the other side of the wall nearest to him was so realistic.

"Know what?" Orson choked out. "Know what? Dad, let me go home. Please. Don't do this—I'm begging you."

It was around this moment that Orson noticed—the screen was not a screen. It was very thick glass, unbreakable to anything but Yuri.

"I have to know," Dr. Dröge snapped, standing directly behind his son, his callused hands fixing tiny sensor pads onto Orson's temples, his forehead, pushing back his unruly bangs. "I have to know why this creature is hurting my son!"

"Yuri!" He had to breathe in hard to make the sound, and it was born of nothing but the panic that was strong enough to poison his thoughts, yet too weak to pump any adrenaline into his muscles. "Wake up! Break free! Wake the fuck up!"

"Orson." His father's hand flattened against his head and pushed it against the headrest, sealing another sensor onto his skin with his other hand, just under the collar of his t-shirt. The wires snaked around his neck, up his arms, to somewhere unseen. "He can't hear you."

"Let me go, Dad. Please let me go." His voice cracked and rasped.

Dr. Dröge ran a hand through Orson's hair like he did when he was younger. Much younger. "What are you afraid of? There's nothing scary here. Everything is going to be fine."

"He's not hurting me, Dad. You have to leave him alone."

"Just relax. Breathe. You'll be okay."

But Yuri won't, he wanted to scream. He said nothing.

"It won't be more than two hours, Orson. I'll drive us home."

"Why now?" he whispered. "Why not years ago?"

But his father was leaving him. He strode across the room, a tall, dark shape cutting through the blackness with practiced precision, bending over the panel by the transistor radio.

"Rusakova. We're ready."

There was a burst of static, then, "He's secured? Everything hooked up?"

Dr. Dröge gave an irritated snort. "Yes—"

"Hooked up to what?" Orson asked loudly. "I'm not hooked up to anything."

His father's head snapped in Orson's direction, his face still swamped in the flickering darkness of the room.

"Dad, you said we were leaving," Orson continued, choking back the lump in his throat, eyes wide, avoiding the sharp but unseen gaze of his father. He could feel it. "So let's go."

"Atticus—that's him? What's going on over there?"

"Ignore him," Dr. Dröge growled, leaning close to the radio. "He's trying to stall. I've got him secured; you should be getting his vitals by now."

"Secured to what?" Orson called. "I'm standing right here." He tried to force some strength into his bones, his muscles—he had to shake off the sensors, he had to break their immobilizing and serpentine grip on him, he had to burn through the leather clamping him against the makeshift seat.

And he had to stop his heart from sinking at the futility of even trying to resist.

But then he saw the coil of wires and how close they were to his face—and if he could just turn his head, he could tear them with his teeth, he could—

"We're receiving. Got his readings up on the main screen. It's odd—they're matching with—"

"Good," Atticus murmured, but there was something dark in his voice.

"Do me a favor," the radio spat. "Turn on the video feed for your side."

Shit! No!

"You don't trust me?" Atticus snorted, but Orson felt the anger in his voice.

"There's no time for this. Turn on the damn feed and let's get moving."

Atticus was silent, but he reached across the panel and let his hand fall on a few switches with such violence that Orson had to flinch.

A tiny red light set into the upper right corner of the room flicked on. Orson stared into it, feeling his face fall and go numb, frozen in something like defeat.

"You should know to trust me," Atticus muttered.

There was a sudden metallic whistle, an echoed scream of unoiled gears grinding into motion.

Yuri had begun to move—not his body, minus the swaying of his ear tufts, but the hydraulic steel arms suspending him above the isolation tank.

"Even when your own son doesn't?" came the voice, void of anything but static. Then, to him, "Nice try, kid. Another minute or so and we would've had to reinject the big guy."

"Maybe you should," Orson rasped. "Just to be safe."

A noise came from the speaker, a fuzzy burst of sound that was over in half a second. He thought it was a laugh.

I should be dead. Eons don't survive alone.

There is only one moment in the billions that make up the span of time I've been alive in which I remember being at peace. In that moment, Shrike was alive.

It was enough to know she died. It was too much to know I killed her—I had crushed her inside our shell and obliterated whatever remained but the condensing ingredients of her soul dew with the wave of energy that freed me.

I remember fleeing. I remember searching for something to fill the void in my mind and finding Orson.

He'd never been quite sure what would constitute a normal day in island Jheriko's forests. Orson had only just turned seven but already his four-times weekly trips to the woods with his mother were becoming so natural and familiar to him, whatever odd things happened day to day, that it made him wonder if before he was born, when he was barely an embryo in his mother's stomach, she had traveled to the forests by herself to make sure he'd be used to the place when he grew old enough to come with her again.

They used to take walks through the trees. Or, before he learned how, she would walk, and he'd be perched on her shoulders or pinned to her side.

One day after a few birthdays he didn't remember, they veered off course and hit a small clearing deeper through the trees. She'd taken out what he'd later learned was her father's old shotgun and let him try and hold it. He guessed years later it hadn't been loaded, but there was nothing he could put past his mother.

He spent the next year of his life watching her fire it, and the next couple learning to do it like she could. That was before he knew she had cancer, but not before she knew herself.

At seven, he had a few expectations for their forests hunting trips. One, his mother had to be with him. Two, they each needed to be carrying at least five knockout bullets. Three, they had to beat Daddy home and get there before Noah finished microwaving dinner.

It was a Saturday. Orson was alone when it happened, and all was right. His mother was… somewhere. He'd tried to start a tag game with her, bet her three dollars that he could take down a pidgey before she could tag him back, but he never expected himself to outrun her so easily. It was his stubby, unbalanced legs against hers, long and lean—yet he'd left her in the dust, before stopping and leaning against a thick oak trunk and switching off the homemade safety his mother had fashioned when she'd started teaching him to shoot. Back then, the Ruger had a professionally-crafted scope with a clear plastic lens—through it, he focused on a tiny pidgey picking around the roots of a great, sprawling tree, foraging a mere thirty or forty feet from him. His ears were pricked for the malicious sound of approaching footsteps, but he never would have guessed how far from him his mother had trailed. The sound that met his ears instead was nothing like he'd ever heard—a mangled, choking scream, a wordless, inhuman noise, and the feeble whistle of jet wings not quite breaking Mach 1, accentuated by a crescendo of snapping twigs and branches and a hail of wood from above.

The pidgey was long gone when he looked up, suddenly so afraid of the wild and untamed world around him, now that his mother wasn't here to make it seem like he belonged in it.

But he saw the monster that'd stumbled upon him and the fear was gone. In its place was a crazed sort of joy, unnatural excitement in the face of something that could, if it chose, kill him with just a flicker of its immense psychic energy.

But he must've been the first of his family since Great-grandpa Drew to stumble upon an eon in the wild—and oh, it was a beautiful creature, an angel of some kind, its silver down glimmering like water where it caught the lazy yellow light of past noon, its eyes blazing amber like the sun when it rose, its jet body writhing where it hung in the canopies. Whatever instinct that had made his grandfather raise the barrel of his shotgun and shoot the creature down had abandoned Orson, if it'd ever been part of him in the first place.

It had to be a latios. He'd never seen one himself, though just by looking at it he knew his father could probably tell him exactly how old it was, the kind of brainwaves it was most likely emitting due to the expression on its face, its region of origin—anything. Orson didn't know what his father did in the JDR all day, except that eons like the thing in the famous Great-grandpa Drew photo had something to do with his daily work. He'd tried to ask Dr. Dröge instead—he just liked to say, "I'm making the holes for the donuts," or "We're designing the lights for the fireflies." Obviously, he meant the volbeat and illumise, but his father tended to prefer the archaic words for certain pokémon.

He would call the latios a male eon, nothing more. And looking at him, Orson marveled at how his father could think a creature so graceful, so finely formed, was undeserving of even a name.

Much of what happened next was a blur. He thought the latios had touched him, though what his eyes remembered told him that he had remained in the canopies throughout their encounter and all Orson had felt was a blaze of pure power through the fabric of his mind, a cathartic rush in his chest and a sudden feeling like he'd filled with helium and now it was struggling against the weight of his bones, trying to drag him higher.

He thought his mother finally found him and bustled him home, wheezing all the way. He thought he didn't eat much that night, aching to tell Noah what he'd seen, but unable to get past his mother's leery, blue-eyed stare.

He wasn't scared, not like she was. How would she have reacted if she knew the latios had been near him, not just loose in the woods that night? What would his father have said if he knew A-ME—3, the missing eon he told his wife about when he returned home early next morning, had been close enough to his son to hurt him?

Surely then, he wouldn't have driven out with the search parties and gunmen only to track it down. He would have been out to kill it.

Orson knew this: to tell his parents would bring him or the latios no good, though he wished with every atom of himself to let them know just why he was so indescribably happy those following weeks, why he kept staring out the window, why his questions about his father's work had escalated from their usual irritating constancy to relentless barrages of inquiry and the farthest-fetched of speculation.

His first seizure was three months later.

He had been outside a little past 5:15 some summer evening. He and Noah were standing on opposite sides of the road playing catch with a football—they knew they had little time before cars would start rolling down their street. Noah wanted him to get at least one good throw in before they went inside. That he remembered clearly. He'd started the evening standing in the yard, facing Noah across the street, but gradually he realized his arm strength couldn't match his brother's, not quite. He'd shifted closer every throw, once in a while casting glances to his left or right for oncoming cars.

"One more," Noah had called, knees bent in a ready catching stance. If cars came from the right, he probably wouldn't see them—the glare of the sinking sun was a bit much. That had been worrying him since they'd started playing.

No. Something had been worrying him all day. Something he couldn't put a finger on.

Orson had gripped the football hard, swallowing, hiking his elbow back. If he didn't make this one, if he wasn't close, he would tell Noah he'd been feeling sick and cold all day, and that was why he was too weak. He wound back, flexing his shoulder for the throw—and then he couldn't, he froze; his muscles seized and locked, a shiver coursed through his bones as he realized he lost control, and it was a terrifying thing to feel. His kinesthetic sense was gone. His legs didn't move, but he lost his balance and crumpled heavily onto the warm tar, the air hiccupping in his throat when he felt it scrape a few layers of skin off his knees.

"Orson?"

And then it got worse. He felt the cold in him burst and freeze the sweat in his hair, on his bare arms, he felt himself shiver like it was winter and getting colder, and with every degree it dropped he would tremble more violently till all of him was shaking—his teeth, his heart, his glazed eyes in their sockets. The pain hit and it coursed through him, riding his nerves up and down his body, pulverizing his limbs, his thoughts—

"Orson!"

His brother must've ran to his side. That's what brothers do.

He'd thought there might've been an obnoxious blaring of a car horn, but it phased rather nicely into the roar in his head, some ugly, evil roar.

He would've screamed but it hurt too much. It took him over. It forced his consciousness to cower in the back of his mind, to shut off everything it could, to do anything to protect him, and he remembered a moment in which he found himself aware that thinking wasn't possible anymore—there was no processing of the pain. Just pain. And anything his mind could do to shut itself off could not get rid of the fear.

His first seizure was the worst one.

"You practically caused an accident," Noah told him later.

His parents didn't let him outside for the rest of the summer. Every doctor in Jheriko, even those that worked in the JDR, thought it was heat stroke. Even though the temperature that day hadn't breached a humid 85.

Later, he'd learned that day was Yuri's first in the isolation tank. No one thought anything of it.

When his second seizure hit, it was half a year later, and he was home alone. He'd crouched on the floor of his room and tried to brave through it—much later, his father came home. At work that day, he'd monitored A-ME—3's melatonin and adenosine levels during his second tank session since his birth about ten months before.

That's when he knew.

And that's when he decided he hated the cold—no, he feared the cold. It meant it couldn't be long till he crumbled again. It meant the hours he had to be himself were waning.

Sitting strapped to the chair, watching with empty defeat, groundless anger as his friend was lowered into the vile, gleaming water—he didn't understand how his father had figured it out. His father, the man only home for brief hours at a time, who'd never even seen one of Orson's seizures, who had no reason to notice the connection between his son and one of the hundred eons, give or take, he kept at the JDR.

Eons don't survive alone. The fact Yuri had lost his sister had been enough for the Valhalla research team to consider euthanizing him immediately, but Orson knew if they found the link between him and his seizures, he would have hours to live.

Dr. Dröge would leave the job to his assistants. He'd drive Orson home as soon as he knew he was stable.

And he would be free.

Orson curled his fists around the armrests, flinching at the spikes of fury that impaled him from the inside. He didn't know if they were his or Yuri's—but they were the last thing he felt before those thin, blissful moments during which he felt nothing.

And then, the contents of his mind seemed to implode.