I was afraid. I can admit that, at least to you. Yours was the first light I'd ever seen. There were memories, of course, fragments of my parent-selves that I had digested and filed away in my labyrinthine catalogues. But nothing to compare to the real thing. To the unutterable terror that spread its wings over my soul when that white glow began to pick out the ripples on the surface of the water.
"I don't think this place is on the map," you said. I recognised it as a voice, pieced together that these were words, but it seemed impossible that such things could exist outside my mind. "Do you feel that, Morgan?"
I heard a low hiss, a clack of reptilian jaws, and matched it hazily with a memory of blue scales and blazing fury. The man for whom my parent-selves fought had a garchomp too, but his was full-grown; this sounded much smaller. A gabite, I know now. Dangerous, to anyone else. But for me, the real threat was the light, growing closer and closer with every footstep. My monochrome world was waking up, a cruel glitter pressing in from the surface of the water and the flakes of mica in the stones, and in its razored grip I felt my stone heart tremble.
"Yes, me too." You didn't sound afraid. Cautious, perhaps. Curious, definitely. But not afraid, not yet. "There's something here, isn't there? Something … weird."
Me. The first of my kind, as far as I know. There are other soul prisons out there – my parent-selves had met one called Vessa, in service to the boy out of time – but none have managed what I have. I am fused. Beatific. An expression of spirit in its most pure and perfect form. And, like any perfect thing, ready to kill anything that threatened my equilibrium.
Your boots splashed through the half inch of water. Your torchlight waxed from a rising moon to a brutal, blazing sun. And then you came around the corner and we saw each other for the first time.
I don't know who was more surprised. I couldn't move. Couldn't think: there was you, there were two grey eyes in a halo of blonde hair and a spear of light in your hand that split me to my stone. And there was me, a jagged green face swimming in the purple whirlpool of my mist. Something you knew from stories. Something to fear. Something for which you had a name that I had never heard before.
"Spiritomb," you said, eyes wide and round inside their heavy rings of black kohl. "Arceus above, that's a―"
Morgan hissed and darted in front of you, fins flaring wide in a threat display so clear it could have been read from all the way up on the surface. And I was afraid, like I said. And I had no time to search my parent-selves' memories for a way to make this situation stop. So I picked up the only solution I had to hand and let my disc explode in a ragged black blast.
You made a high squeaking noise and ducked behind the stones, my shadows bursting on empty air with a shriek and a smell of burning dust. Black stars of scorched scales smoked all over Morgan's hide, but she was never one to back down, and she came at me with a howling vengeance, claws wreathed in blue-purple flame that raked my eyes like a faceful of cinders.
"Morgan, no!"
It was the light, not the attack. I barely felt her claw pass through me, but my fog fairly boiled in the glare; I felt my disc slow its spin, the lights in its depths dim and gutter.
"Morgan!" You were back again, splashing up onto the gravel with one hand outstretched toward her. I don't know why you weren't running. It was all I could do not to flee myself, back inside my stone where I could bathe my wounded eyes in the cool dark within. "Back off, right now!"
She was well trained, I'll grant her that. While I was still gathering myself, she pulled back, keeping her savage foreclaws lit with that devastating fire.
"We've started off on the wrong foot," you said. Your voice was cracking under the strain, but you didn't back down. I don't believe you ever even believed that was an option. "I apologise for Morgan. She's protective. But you, um … I know you can talk. Can't you?"
Talk? It had never occurred to me. But you were right: my parent-selves could speak, and therefore so could I.
"Get out," I said, in a hollow voice that sounded like the dead shadow of yours. "Get out!"
My disc pulsed; the shadows around me roiled; a long, skittering bolt of darkness shot out toward you. Morgan's head rose to meet it with a flaming blast that burnt it down to crisp black flakes.
"I don't want to fight," you said, your voice growing higher and thinner as you lost the battle against your agitation. "I really don't want to – Protect!"
A sphere flickered briefly around the two of you, its surface rainbow-whorled like spilled oil, and the savage grey wind I'd summoned passed harmlessly over its surface.
"Get out!" It wasn't hard to make my voice louder, even if I couldn't give it any of the warmth of yours. "The light, the light―"
"Oh, of course, I'm so sorry, I―"
You were fumbling with your torch. You would have turned it off, I can see that now. But no matter how rational I can be as I say this, no matter what penitence I find in the black depths of my homemade soul, I must admit that in that moment, I was a wild beast in a trap. And that is why I threw another two bolts of darkness at you. That is why Morgan was only able to block one. That is why, in the middle of your sentence, the shadow glanced along the side of your face. That's why you screamed. That's why you fell down. That's why Morgan plunged both claws into the ceiling and woke several hundred pounds of stone and dirt from centuries of slumber, why the ground around me moaned and rumbled, why there was a roar that swallowed the world and why, quite suddenly, there was nothing at all except a silence deep enough to rival the grave.
Moments passed. I put out ragged wisps of fog, but my stone was buried deep and there wasn't any room to form my disc. Outside my blind prison, I heard something scraping on stone, and teary breaths, and water sloshing. And then:
"I-I'm Cynthia," you said. "Who are you?"
You must understand that I found it difficult to respond. For what seemed like ages I simply lay there, stunned. The light was gone. So was everything else – the cave, the pool of water, the whole world in which I'd lain hidden in for well over a century, no more than a footnote to your rising legend. I had made my peace with being a tomb a long time ago. But to be a tomb, entombed, seemed a crueller joke than I knew how to bear.
"Hello?" you called. Your voice was a little stronger, but you were in a lot of pain. I could taste it, now that the panic was ebbing – could feel its sweet sting filling a void in me that I hadn't known was there. Until I met you and the plangent chime of your feelings I'd never even considered that I could eat, that there were alternatives to hunger. "Can you hear me? Who are you?"
It occurred to me that I could answer. I wasn't sure why. I'm not sure now, though I suspect that perhaps part of me was a few unconscious steps ahead of the rest. But I moved back inside my stone, bathed my eyes in the blessed dark within, and rifled through such memories of my parent-selves as I had to hand. Who are you? I am Vethi, of the Daerike.|Who are you? No enemy of yours, if that's what you're asking.|Who are you? Just a travelling peddler, making the circuit back from the east. Nothing quite fit. These weren't me, they were us – and hardly even that; at the time those memories were made, my parents were still alive, never dreaming that one day they'd be fodder for some warlock's murderous flight of fancy.
"I am the one," I said, which was as close as I could get to sounding the truth in words. "What … is this?"
"I don't know what you mean." You paused. I didn't answer. "I was exploring the cave networks. I didn't expect to find … anything like you. I certainly didn't want to hurt you."
"You brought light. And a dragon."
"I said I wasn't expecting you. I'd have turned the torch off if you hadn't … if I'd had a chance."
Your fear was fading now, but your pain throbbed through both of us like a shared heartbeat, hot and thick. I don't know how you stood it. The pain I feel, born dead as I was, is dim and muted, a mere tangent glancing against my disc as it passes; yours has an animal richness to it that threatened at every moment to eclipse your rational mind entirely.
"I'm sorry Morgan caved in the roof on you," you said, ever polite. "She has a tendency to overreact." Another pause, another lack of answer. I didn't know what that word meant; the language you spoke was close to the one some of my parent-selves spoke, but the intervening centuries had left it half foreign in unguarded corners. "How long have you been down here?"
"Since I was formed," I said. I knew how to answer that, at least. "Longer. When I was us, a human threw our stone down here. We were too dangerous. But we were so loud, so … exhausting. I had to kill us all. Make them into me."
"That … sounds like it's been a long time," you said, trying to keep the confusion from your voice.
I looked for a memory, found one that seemed close to the right time.
"It was 491, Grey Harvest, when we fell."
"That's the old calendar," you breathed, real wonder in your voice. "Before colonisation. I don't know how that lines up, exactly, but … Arceus above, maybe a hundred and fifty years down here all alone." You sighed, then cut the sound off halfway with a little start of pain. "Sorry, I – well. That just sounds rather lonely."
You felt for me. I could taste it. And it was almost as frightening as the light.
"I am the one," I said, suspecting this wasn't an answer but not knowing what else to offer. "This is … quiet."
"I bet it is."
Neither of us spoke for a time. I was starting to think of what it meant that you had come here. I had thought about the world outside my tiny slice of darkness, of course. I had supposed that somewhere out there, incalculably far above, humans and beasts and spirits of all sorts still went about their lives. But I hadn't known. Not until you. And now that I did, I had a terrible feeling that I would never be able to forget it.
"What is it like?" I asked. "Up there?"
"It's beautiful," you said. "I travel all over Sinnoh. That's … I suppose it's sort of my job, at this point? I battle in tournaments. And I try to see everything. All the cities and the mountains and the coastlines and the forests."
Cities. There were no cities in Hisui, when we'd left it behind; the largest settlement had been that town the colonists built where they made landfall in the southwest. And Sinnoh had been the name of God, not of a place.
"It's changed," I said.
"If you left that long ago, then yes. Beyond recognition, I should think."
There was one last, lingering silence. I could see the future coming on, like the knife coming down on my parents as they left their bodies for my stone. Could see your face, red-streaked and ragged, hovering before my eyes.
"You could always see it for yourself," you said, and a dizzying chasm opened up inside my stone.
"I can't move well enough to leave."
"No. But I can." I heard you shift, heard Morgan snuffling and fussing. "I know we barely know each other, but … I could take you out of here. If you want."
I wasn't surprised, but I was still confused. I'd hurt you. Given a little longer to recover from my surprise, I would have killed you. Reason dictated you had nothing to gain and everything to lose by exhuming me.
"Why?" I asked.
"Oh. Um, I don't know. Because it seems like the right thing to do, I suppose. Because if I didn't ask, I'd think about it for the rest of my life."
"But I attacked you."
"Will you attack me again if I free you?"
I was ready to say yes, but the word seemed to stick in the fissure of my stone.
"I don't know," I said, after a moment's thought. "I don't … think so."
"Then I can take you."
That was when I knew there was no fighting it. Not because you were kind enough to offer; not because you'd seen a murderous wild thing and decided to talk to it; simply because you'd believed me. I'd said I wouldn't attack you. Even I wasn't sure I meant it, but you were, and somehow that made it true.
"Is it very bright out there?" I asked.
"I'm afraid so."
"But the sun still sets every night?"
"It, um, does, yes."
If there were still nights, there was still darkness. And, apparently, humans to take me there.
"I accept," I said. Two words, and the hardest I will ever speak. "Cynthia. Take me out of here."
"Oh," you said, a warm rush of delight buzzing out through your pain and into my hungry heart. "It would really be my pleasure."
You carried me through the cave in one hand, nestled against your body to spread the weight, and kept the other pressed to your wound. No torch now. I couldn't bear it, you couldn't see without it; our compromise was that I would light your way with the pallid purple flames I could conjure by my art.
It was almost dizzying. I hadn't moved in so long, and never at this kind of speed. Not since I was we. And those memories were so old as to feel half imagined.
"It's actually not that far," you said. At your side, Morgan kept a steady pace, with the occasional violent glare at me; I'm not sure she'll ever forgive me for splitting your face like that, and I'm not sure she should, either. "But there's a crack in the wall that takes you off the path down towards that lake. The gods alone know why I went through, it was horribly claustrophobic. I suppose I'm glad I did."
Your teeth were chattering slightly, your hand wet against my heart. I can't understand temperature, even with my parent-selves' help, but I did know that cold kills the living, given time.
"You're cold," I said.
"I've been travelling all over Sinnoh for years now, I've got wet before. I'll be all right."
I tilted my disc back to see your face, but I couldn't see a lie. I couldn't see much of anything, really. You had taped a big pad of gauze to your wound – it was all you had to hand – and it was now soaked clean through, spreading its sanguine fingers all over your face. It looked to me like my problem, now that you were my ride to the surface, but not like evidence of my guilt. Not yet, at least.
"Really," you said, glancing down at me. "I've been hit before, too. I'd have it sorted already if the water hadn't got into my supplies. It's an occupational hazard of this … whatever it is I do. I'm a pokémon trainer. And sort of also a research assistant to a pokézoologist. It's why I'm down here, I was surveying the troglobiotic aron."
You spoke as if it were normal for a child your age to have a job. At the time I assumed it was; back when I had last seen the surface, you would have been considered an adult. The colonial Survey Corps had been full of young scientists like you.
There was comfort in that continuity. However much Hisui had changed, there were still pokémon trainers, still students of natural philosophy roaming its dales and caverns in search of hidden knowledge.
"What do I call you?" you asked, when I didn't answer. "'The one'?"
"I don't know," I said, because solitude does not require names and I had never given it any thought. But there had been a time before the solitude, a memory that peeped dimly through the surface of my thought. Hadn't the man called us something? He couldn't remember all our hundred and eight names, so he elided us, named us as one. Named us― "Solomon."
"Solomon," you repeated. I hadn't known one could like the way a word sounded in someone's mouth before. But it seemed tonight was a night of true firsts. "It's good to know you properly."
You meant that too. Or you were trying to, very hard, because although you had grown up fast you were still very young, and most of you was still just frightened by how much blood was coming out of your face. It may give you some comfort to know that it was at least delicious, after so many decades spent starving. If you can hear me, that is.
If you can, Cynthia, please answer.
Please. Or I'm not sure what I'm going to do.
Around us, the walls twisted and turned, drew tight and opened out, gleamed wetly in the firelight or receded into shadow. There were creatures out there – I could feel them feeling, too faint and far to feed me – but they had the cautious cunning of wild things, and none were stupid enough to approach me. So we moved, unmolested, and we came to the cleft in the rock that you had mentioned; and you apologised with that unbending politeness I was beginning to categorise as part of your soul; and you held me very close as you squeezed through, so that my disc broke in soft waves over your skinny ribs.
Then just a few brief corners and there it was, washing down the throat of the cave like a mouthful of sweet white wine. Starlight, so pale and so tender I was afraid I might bruise it just by looking. You said something, but I didn't hear. I was leaning forward, disc stretching its thin leash to the very limit, and you saw what I wanted and you carried me out into the purple transcendence of the summer twilight.
I hadn't realised until then how much richer the darkness is when cut with a little light. We stood on the slope of a tall rocky hill, among loose scree and thin brambly bushes, and above and around the night hummed blue and purple around its pale white freckles as it welcomed me home.
Ghosts don't live in the dark, Cynthia. We can survive in it if we must, but that's not the same. We live in the night, and until that moment I think I had forgotten it altogether. My parents had too, I am sure; I felt their corpses stirring within me, fragments of memory rising to the surface like pockets of marsh gas. The shooting stars are due tonight. If you're free, we could, um, well, we could watch them.|The night is tender, dark and deep, de dum de di, and filled with sweeter chores than sleep―
"It took longer than I thought," you said, staring up with me. "I hope it was worth the trip."
I turned to you, sharp as a zubat pivoting on empty air.
"You said you travel?"
You blinked, put a hand to your bandages as if the motion hurt. There was blood in your hair now, blood everywhere, but it looked drier; the flow seemed to have stopped.
"Um, yes?"
"I want to go with you," I said. "I've been down there – I don't know how long, I – it was wrong, he was wrong to put us there. I need to see it all. I can be useful," I added, seeing your mouth open and suspecting rejection. "You're a trainer. I like to fight. I can destroy your enemies―"
"Solomon!" Your fingers tightened against my heart. "It's all right, I wasn't going to abandon you. And I'd like to … oh, gods." Morgan tensed, detecting your hurt; you cradled your broken head in your hand. "I'm sorry, it's late and I really need to get back to the Pokémon Centre where I can clean myself up properly. And there's some things we need to talk about – about, um, what you are. And what that means for you and me. But yes, you can stay. Just as long as you don't go destroying anyone."
The relief was as strong as the fear had been, as all-consuming. I had never wanted anything as much as I wanted you to keep carrying me, to walk up to the top of this hill and down again to the bottom and onward to the glimmering mirage of urban lights on the horizon. I'd have sold myself, Hisui and all the world if you'd asked for it, and I would have thought it a small price to pay.
"If that's what you want," I said.
"It's what we both need." You took a deep breath and very carefully removed your hand from your head. "Come on, let's go. I might need you to hide in your keystone when we get to the bus stop. You don't want to be seen yet."
"Why not?"
"That's one of the things we need to talk about."
You laid it out for me in stark, clear terms. Soul prisons like myself are rare, and nobody remembers how to make us any more. They say this is a good thing, because to do that you have to kill a great many people, and because this massacre of a birth inevitably leaves us resentful, immortal, and brutishly strong. You told me, with great compassion, that it isn't hard to see why the few dozen of us known to exist have either been abandoned in remote locations, as I was, or trapped and locked away by people whose job it is to keep the public safe from monsters like me. If I was to see Hisui, like I wanted, I needed them to think it was safe to let me.
I told you it could never be safe. Your gabite could kill a man in a heartbeat, if she chose. I could do the same. And you went very quiet for a long time, fear slipping from the secret leaks in your heart to the hungry void in mine, and then you told me that we probably shouldn't remind people about that.
I didn't see much of the city. I saw the woods, dark and deep and alive with pale flowers and the lush green scent of vegetation crawling ever upward toward the sun. I saw moonlight making white teeth of broken glass in tufts of sawgrass. I saw the smoothest road I'd ever seen, and metal signage in an unfamiliar alphabet, and a mechanised omnibus that roared and reeked and rumbled toward us like an aggron charging from a cave mouth.
Brave wonders worn with braver grace. Though that was all I saw that night: you told me it was time to hide, and thus far you'd been as good as your word, so I went along with it. And so the next thing I saw was your room, this small slice of modern life where we find ourselves now. A bed, a desk, a wardrobe, a lamp throwing hard electric light over everything like an electabuzz in heat. I had seen all of these things before, but not like this; everything had a mechanical precision to it, a sternness of angle, a rigidity of pattern. (What weaver could turn out a pattern like that? It looks like you chained a demon to a loom.|Step right up, my friends, because I have for you cloth woven by no human hand, straight from the wild and mechanised factories of distant Kanto!) It seemed careless and cold, fit neither for the living nor the spirits who prey upon them, but you sank down onto that bed with every evidence of true relief.
"Oh gods," you breathed. "I'm so glad to be back."
You were damp-haired and fresh-faced, all the blood cleaned away and the sodden gauze replaced with a neat square dressing. It gave me a little confidence. One of my parent-selves, Dai, placed great stock in clever hands and clear sight; I have no trouble believing that a woman who can repair her torn face can also find me a way back to the world.
"Sorry to make you wait," you said, opening your eyes and reaching out to receive Morgan's head as she thrust it up against your belly."It took a little longer to clean myself up than I thought. There were people in the bathroom and I didn't want them to see me."
As you spoke, you scratched at Morgan's neck, and with each revolution of your fingers she contrived to relax still more, spread her fins still further, until she seemed less a dinosaur than a lake of blue scales about to wash you off the bed altogether.
"Wait?" I cocked my disc, uncomprehending. "You were less than an hour."
"Right." Your face burst suddenly into a smile, as if an idea had come upon you and startled you with a novel delight. "I suppose you've had a lot of practice being patient."
"I can amuse myself. And this place is … interesting. Machine-made?"
"I suppose? I've never really thought about it." You looked around, trying to see the familiar room through my fresh eyes. "It's a Pokémon Centre. They give trainers rooms for a good rate. Or for free, if you have an active trainer card. Which I do, for six more months."
I didn't understand all of that, and now that I may never learn I wish I'd asked. But I couldn't, not while everything was so strange and new and the only thing I could be sure of was that cleaving to my old certainties would summon colonial warriors to take me prisoner.
"I see," I said, suspecting that you wouldn't know a lie if it came from this alien face. "You stay here while travelling?"
"Yes. And I think we'll have to stay here for a while." You gestured at your dressing. Morgan opened one eye, annoyed at the cessation of her scratches, and prodded you into starting again. "Ow, Morgan, stop. If the staff here see me with a spiritomb and a fresh head wound, I'm pretty sure the League will put two and two together and take you away as a danger to the public. So I think it's best if I hide in my room for a few days. It's only a scratch. Won't take long for it to heal enough I can hide it with my hair. Then … then, I'm not sure. I think we'd better head to Sandgem and speak with my journey sponsor. I mean, the man I work for." Something nervous stepped lightly across your face, but it was gone too quick and I'd been buried too long to see why this slip should worry you. "He's reasonable. We can explain to him and see if he can help. And if he can't … well, I'll figure something out."
"I see."
There was a pause, which rapidly matured into a silence, tense and uneasy. We had come this far on shared purpose, trying to get out of that cave and back to safety. Now we'd done it, and we were two strangers again – one ancient, one young, one living, one dead. As incommensurable as braviary and basculin.
"It should be fine," you said, after about a minute. "It should be …"
You sagged a little on your bones, like a marionette being packed up after the solstice festivities. It worried me, but it did at least give me something to say.
"You are wounded," I said. "You should rest."
"I'm fine," you protested, but you didn't move, not even when Morgan moved her heavy head directly onto your chest. "Um … maybe you're right. I'm sure I'll feel better in the morning. Will you be all right? I don't know whether you sleep, or …?"
"Not normally. I can if I choose to. Sometimes for years." I shook my disc, stretching it briefly into an oval. "You need not worry. But I would like to watch the street."
It took you a moment, which I suppose means I hadn't yet worked out how to ask properly. Then you nodded and eased yourself off the bed to take me over to the window.
"There," you said, setting me down where I could peep between the curtains at the black and orange shadowscape beyond. "Is that all right?"
"Yes."
"Good." You attempted a smile, but I could see it wearing thin. "Goodnight, Solomon. I, um … I hope things work out."
I saw a gull fly past outside, a silver ghost in the moonlight, and felt a sudden shiver of delight run through my fog. (I hear you, said Dai, ever the birder. It can be difficult to tell between glaucous and herring gulls, but one is much larger, and if you listen for the call it'll be deeper …)
"I think they already have," I said. A premature assessment, given that I don't know if you'll survive the day, but at the time I truly meant it. "Goodnight."
I was hoping for a quiet night watching the world from the window, coming to grips with it at a steady, even pace. Maybe I would see a pedestrian with a light, or one of those roaring mechanised vehicles like the omnibus from before, but I would know I was safe, and so by degrees habituate myself to this new world. And perhaps I would see something worth reporting to you in the morning, and we'd make conversation, and you would see you were right to rescue me. That even someone who had lived in a silence as profound as mine could give you companionship.
This was my hope. But of course you weren't well. You tossed and turned and bled, making desperate little noises that gouged a terrible hollow in my spirit, until at last you knocked the lamp over in the small hours and Morgan lifted her head from your bedside.
"Wake her up," I said. It occurs to me now that I could have woken you myself, but at the time it seemed no more possible than it would have been for me to escape the cave unaided. "Do you understand me?"
Morgan glared at me in a way that suggested she didn't and didn't care to, but a moment later your whole body clenched with pain like a dying caterpillar and she forgot I existed altogether.
"Wake her up," I repeated, as she nosed at your face. "You must. She needs – I don't know―" (Vethi, leaning over a suppurating wound: Who dressed this? No, don't bother answering, boy, just bring me the dragonwort and let's do this properly.) "―more herbs, medicine, whatever she uses to treat it."
She snuffled, the way dragons do when the soot has built up inside their sinuses, and stuck her hard, dry jaw into your eye socket. I think she did it for herself, not for me, but I was relieved all the same when you started and squeaked and lifted your hands to your face.
"What the fuck," you whispered. "What … oh." Your hand met the dressing. Traced cryptic ideograms on the scabby gauze. "Arceus above."
Morgan hissed, but you put a hand to her shoulder and pushed her back so you could sit up. When you turned to me, I saw your face had puffed up around your left eye like an oak gall around a wasp.
"Solomon?"
It was nothing, really. I had seen terrible wounds before – had inflicted them, too; when I was we, when our human turned us on the colonists devouring Hisui bite by bite, we'd unleashed such exquisite tortures that not even our enemies' closest relatives could have identified them. But I was not us any more. And you were not my enemy. And the desperation with which I didn't want to be the one to kill you shocked the words clean out of my mouth.
"Solomon? Are you there?"
I slowed the spin of my disc back to its usual even pace, trying to find my cool. I only caught the edge, but it was enough, and a moment later I tuned the brightness of the green light that forms my eyes and mouth back into human visual range.
"I think you need to reapply whatever treatment you have been using," I said. It was a less immediate phrase than I wanted, but I couldn't figure out how to tell you how I felt. "You may have a fever."
"Oh." You closed your eyes, or at least you closed the one that was open; the other was most of the way there already. "Yes, I think you're right. I've been a little under the weather lately. Just a cold, but I'm sure the exhaustion and a head wound isn't doing it any favours."
I wasn't sure enough to argue, even with Vethi's memories in my heart. My knowledge of having a body was secondhand, inherited from my parent-selves; you had lived in one your entire life. If I had insisted – but I didn't. I am not in the cave any more. There's no longer any time to waste in tracing the could-have-beens.
"You bled again," I said, instead of I think you're wrong. "Stopped now."
"Right." You blinked, slow and sticky. "I'll … I'll take something for it. Just give me a moment to get up."
I gave you a moment. You did not get up. I gave you another, and still you didn't, and Morgan snapped her jaws and poked you in the stomach.
"Ugh. Fine, Morgan, I'm going."
This time you did, and with a reassuring ease of movement. You took two pills, pressed the cold glass of water to your face, and downed the rest of it in one long gulp that made my parent-selves restless with memories of thirst.
"Mm," you grunted, eyes closed. "Gods, what time is it?"
"Third quarter of the night," I replied. I always know, just as I always know the phase of the moon and which way is north.
"Right." You glanced at the glowing red numbers on the machine by your bed. Some kind of electric clock, I guessed, given your next words. "Not even four. I'm going to … excuse me, Solomon. I really need to rest."
I told you that seemed wise, but I wasn't sure of myself, or even that you heard me; you half fell back into bed and were out before you hit the pillow. Morgan cocked her head in what might have been a thoughtful manner, then climbed onto the bed and curled up next to you, one fin spread protectively over your arm as if she were full-grown and you were her hatchling.
"That's good," I said, not sure what I was feeling, not believing it could be envy of her certainty. "That's … good."
You drifted through what remained of the night like a leaf along the surface of the rapids, twisting and rolling with every turn of the currents raging within you. At several moments you woke, even spoke a few words; you asked me about my night, then nodded blearily through my explanation of the view beyond the window and asked me again without noticing.
And I sat there the whole time, watching. Letting it happen. Seeing your face get tighter and redder, the veins in your forehead blacken as the dark-type energy coagulated. I didn't know what else to do. You had taken me from my world, which made you my world, and now I was killing you and nothing in my parent-selves' memories told me how to stop.
Wounds from dark-types often go to rot quickly. The shadows draw in bad air.|Just warning you, try not to stare. He doesn't really look the same after that thing with the dusclops.|Don't you ever listen to the ghosts, all right? They might say they want to play, and they might mean it, but they don't know how not to hurt you.
"Hello?" you said, sometime in the morning. The sun was getting higher, and the world outside the window was awash with life, but you kept falling back to sleep. "Is that you?"
"It's me," I said. "It's Solomon."
"I don't think so." Your eyes weren't really open. Nor was your mouth; I had to listen hard to make out the words through the fog of your delirium. "I asked you not to come in without knocking, Grandma."
"I'm Solomon."
"You always say that." It sounded like you would have raised your voice, if you could; I felt the feeling press a little harder against the surface of the words. "I just want some privacy, is that so hard to understand?"
At your side, Morgan flattened her fins in unease, bumping her crests against your hand as if to recreate a happier moment. I understood. I could see a searingly bright future bearing down on the three of us, burning all the safety from the shadows.
"Cynthia," I said. It was the best start I could think of. "I – I think you may need help with your injury."
"No!" Your face twitched in an echo of past panic. "No, you can't, I – you don't understand, they'll take Solomon away and I promised I'd help them."
I didn't know how to respond. We had heard people plead before, when exposed to the great, black, bone-breaking storm of our fury. But not like this. Not over me.
"Then I don't know," I said, instead of I don't want you to die. "What should I do?"
"What?" You sounded like you'd never been asked that before, or at least not by whoever you thought I was. It was enough to rouse you, if only for a moment; you lifted your head, squinted, blinked. "That's … Solomon? Is that you?"
"Yes! Yes, I'm here. Do you understand me?"
"Oh." You sank back down into the sweat-soaked sheets, like a body dumped into a bog. "I'm sorry, Solomon, I'm just trying to …"
I never did learn what you were trying to do. You rolled over and took whatever you were saying with you, your voice dissolving into cracks and croaks.
"Cynthia?"
But you didn't answer. You still haven't. It's been four more hours and now you're barely moving, let alone speaking; sometimes I hear your teeth chatter, sometimes I see you squirm, but you haven't said anything. And I apologise for how long it has taken me to come to the point, but I am used to having many years to think over a single problem, and only now that I hear it all again do I know what I need to do.
I'm sorry. I know you want to keep our secret. I know that once I call for help I will probably never see you again. But you saved me, Cynthia. And now you must let me save you.
