Yeehaw my dudes we're BACK and because my life is full of comedic irony this chapter is very much about truth/secrecy ugh

I didn't end up doing NaNo bc I'm busy and exhausted rip

Anyway let's do a chapter

As the five of us sat silently in the Pokemon Center lobby, waiting for our pokemon to heal, I got the distinct sense of waiting in the principal's office. I'd only been sent there once, in elementary school – I think I punched this one kid I didn't like? I didn't remember it too well, but I'm sure he deserved it. This was like that, except five of us had punched the kid together, and Dawn was bleeding lightly from where the kid had cut her neck, and Lucas was sitting right there next to her but still looked haunted, himself.

The plan had been for the International Police to stay up top and wait for us to teleport an admin out. When the first person to arrive was a bloodied sixteen-year-old, though, they charged down. As if they could have helped at all.

The real difference between now and elementary school might have been that back in second grade, neither of my parents were summoned. This felt like waiting outside while our dad talked to the principal, except our dad was also in trouble for letting us punch the kid, and the idea of a parent in trouble was unfamiliar and a little terrifying.

I stood suddenly. "I'm gonna check on Thomas," I said, walking quickly down the hallway just for a distraction.

Thomas was sitting in bed, still looking quite sick, but his pokemon were all out of their balls, eating canned pokemon food for lunch. It seemed he'd found a way to satisfy his desperate need to take care of someone else without leaving the room.

"Hey," he said, weakly but cheerfully. "Where've you been?"

He frowned as he caught sight of my expression. "Are y–"

"I'm fine," I said before he could ask. "Do you need anything? Did you eat yet?"

"I– What happened?"

"I'm gonna get you food," I said, heading out. "Any soup preferences?"

"Evelyn."

I stopped midway out the door.

"Tell me what happened first."

I sighed softly, but slipped back into the room. "Been a long morning," I said.

I told him all that had happened at the Snowpoint Temple. "Mew, is Dawn okay?" he asked.

"She's all right. Lucas was pretty stressed about it, too, but he's recovering."

"How's that make you feel?"

"Pretty good about my acting abilities, to be ho–"

"I mean about Lucas's reaction, but…"

"Oh." I hesitated, then told him the truth. "I'm… I got over Lucas."

"Oh! Congratulations!" he said congestedly. "How'd you do that?"

"Uh…"

I thought of the conversation about stepping stones we'd had the month before. I knew that had something to do with it, but Arceus, I couldn't tell Thomas that.

"It just happened," I said untruthfully.

Thomas frowned. "Really?"

"Yeah."

"Huh." Thomas nodded thoughtfully. "So… A net zero outcome? No one won?"

"I mean, no major casualties," I allowed, glad for the change of subject. "But the IP found out Looker's been asking the Sinnoh League for help."

"Oh no."

"Anyways, soup?"

I ran around a little, fetching lunch for Thomas and then my friends in the lobby. Dawn helped me out, which seemed silly because of all people, Dawn had the most reason to take a break, but she insisted.

"How's your neck?" I asked her.

Dawn's hand fluttered up to touch the dried blood. "It's doing okay. It's pretty shallow. How's your ear?"

"My ear?" I said, confused.

"I saw you started wearing a hearing aid?"

I'd adjusted so thoroughly to the steady stream of time-anchoring music in one ear that I kept forgetting it was there. I'd made a full-on playlist for it, but usually I just looped the same song endlessly. It was the same optimistic–melancholy one I'd played to calm down before battles at the Lake Valor Tournament.

"Oh, I…" I paused. "It's… Do you wanna sit down?"

We found a table, and I told her, finally, what I'd been hiding from her and Lucas since the very beginning of our trainer journeys. I hadn't told anyone in months, but the fact that I'd done it before still made it easier now.

Dawn sat there in silence, her jaw just kind of hanging open. She kept looking in different directions, as if all the facts that hadn't lined up before were strung up around the room, and now she was finally seeing the connections between my knowing things I shouldn't have and being closer to Looker and–

"Oh, Arceus," she said, covering her mouth. "Is that why… Way back when… Kenna?"

I nodded. This was indeed why I'd asked if she'd trade Kenna for Trust, back when they were still Bree and a chimchar I didn't know.

"Arceus, I'm so sorry."

"Oh, don't be," I said, shaking my head. "Kenna doesn't know me anymore, anyways. And it's not your fault."

Dawn stirred her mug of hot chocolate.

"What exactly went down with Galactic?" she asked me. "The three of us weren't enough?"

For a second, I just stared at the piece of bread in my hands. I wasn't even eating it so much as ripping it to shreds. "We, um… they… Galactic took us out one at a time," I said. "We split up when they blew up Lake Valor. We… Saturn and Jupiter took out you and Lucas."

"Meaning what?" Dawn pressed.

I gestured desperately with the bread in my hands. "Do you really want the gory details? Saturn used Azelf to murder Lucas at Valor. Jupiter shoved you off a cliff at Acuity, and you didn't recover in time to climb Mount Coronet."

Dawn silently took that in. "Do you think we're ready this time?" she asked. "For the lakes?"

"I don't know," I said honestly. "We've been so busy trying to prevent the lakes, I haven't… And we've been successful, like, the bomb is gone, the Red Chain is gone, Galactic's definitely been set back. We haven't had to worry about actually going to the lakes."

"We should have a plan, though, right?" Dawn said. "Whether or not they gang aft agley."

I nodded a little sadly. She was right, as much as I didn't want to think about reattempting the lakes incident. We did need a plan, in case Galactic somehow made it happen anyways.

"We can bring it up with Looker," I said.

Dawn nodded. There was a part of me that was glad we had another person to strategize using what we knew from last time. Someone who didn't still have nightmares about it.

In a personal sense, I was glad I'd told her. I no longer felt a wall of secrecy looming between us. And at the same time, some of it was still there – she didn't know about my past feelings for Lucas, or how close he and I had gotten last time – but the barrier was thinner now.

I didn't intend to tell her about him. I didn't want to risk tainting our budding friendship. Maybe truth was just inherently and perpetually incomplete – maybe there was always something new to choose to hide or tell, and maybe that's just how it was.

She wasn't the only one, either; I was hiding things from Megan. I was hiding things from Thomas. Did I owe them the full truth? I don't know. At any rate, I'd finally gotten around to telling Dawn a lot, and even though I hadn't told her everything, it felt like enough right now.

Lucas entered the cafeteria, looking around for us. "Oh, we were gonna bring people food," I said, springing to my feet. Dawn laughed and jumped up, picking up her tray. When Lucas reached us, he took it from her to carry back to the lobby. She turned a little red when I looked her way.

The events of the last few hours made me want to think he couldn't be a part of Galactic. The fear in his eyes had been too real. And even if that was flimsy and Jupiter was too sadistic to care about an ally enough to not murder someone he cared about, I realized something else:

Looker tended to tell Dawn and Lucas less than he told me, while the spy in our midst – whoever it was – seemed to know more. None of us had known the Key was in Snowpoint before it started trying to fly off towards the Temple, despite the trap Galactic had actively set up here. Either we'd found them by coincidence – unlikely – or the spy knew that Candice had the Key. Lucas hadn't known that.

Lucas wasn't the spy.

There was definitely something wrong with Looker when he returned. He acted like everything was normal, but I couldn't be fooled. I'd spotted the dead look in his eyes.

We reconvened in the gym's lecture hall and had a fairly normal recap of events. There were a few positive discoveries from the day: one, since Galactic hadn't been trying to scan Mount Coronet when we were there, either they'd done it already and just left their machine out in the open or else the non–Spear Key–using method they'd employed last time no longer worked. Two, we'd learned about Commanders Caelus and Neptune. Caelus, we'd figured out, was just Cyrus – the boss, and the one whose real name related to the sun.

"Caelus is the ancient Johtoan name for the god of the sky," Candice mentioned. "Same dude as Uranus. Most planets were given the names of ancient Johto gods, but Uranus was given the ancient Sinjoh name."

"Cyrus would probably want to fix the inconsistency," I mused.

Looker gave me an expression of mirth (briefly, layered over the exhaustion). "And then break it again by calling himself Cyrus instead?"

"Probably. It's the thought that counts; whether or not he actually uses the name doesn't matter, but if he has it, he'd want it to be consistent. He probably thinks he's smarter than whoever named the planets in the first place."

"Okay, that does sound like him," Looker admitted.

Neptune, meanwhile, was a total mystery. All we knew about them was their existence. It made sense that all the planets between Mars and Pluto – or Charon, anyways – would be covered, but despite the grunts saying that everyone knew Neptune, there wasn't anyone else we could think of.

"Okay, well, I'll work on that," Looker said. "If you run into any grunts, see if you can get them to slip. Otherwise, I just need to talk to Evelyn."

The others headed out. "All right, spill," I said. "What's up with you? What happened?"

Looker hesitated. "You don't… you don't want to know about the Spear Key?"

"Oh, no, yeah, I wanna know that, but what's a few minutes in the face of several months?"

Looker winced. "Yeah. Um… I… My supervisors have put me on probationary status."

Oh no. "Because a couple of gym leaders were there?"

He nodded.

"What's that… What's that mean for you?"

"Well," he said, "they're watching my case more closely to make sure I don't step out of line again. I'll have to go through a lot of paperwork to do much of anything. I'm down to one natu, but I only kept the one because technically she's my own pokemon to begin with. Access to other IP resources has been limited… Mainly it's just strike one of a two-strike system."

"Meaning…?"

"The second strike would end my career."

I slumped back in my seat. "I'm so sorry."

"What for?" Looker asked, genuinely confused.

"I'm the one who encouraged you to involve the Sinnoh League."

"And you were right. I don't regret that."

Confused, I said, "So, wait, are you not gonna…?"

"Stop involving them? Officially, yes. Unofficially, I'll have to be more careful about it, but we still need them for the Spear Key, if nothing else."

"What have they been doing with the Spear Key?"

"They… I, um… the Spear Key hasn't been with Cynthia," he said. "Or, well, it was for about a week. Then she passed it on to Volkner. I took it back when I was scanning for the Orbs, but otherwise, the intention has always been to pass it between gym leaders, rather than keep it in one place."

Fragments of memories flitted through my mind – Looker saying he'd worked with Volkner before the Jubilife blackout, Thomas and I waiting outside Cynthia's apartment while she and Looker discussed the keeping of the Key. The gym leaders who'd had it, Looker now said, included Volkner, Fantina, Crasher Wake, Maylene, and Candice.

"I didn't tell any of you because the information would be dispersed among too many people as it was," he said. "Even the gym leaders haven't known who holds the Key before or after them – aside from Maylene and Candice, due to their closeness."

I nodded slowly, taking in this new picture of things. "Okay. I see."

"Are you angry?"

I thought about it, then shook my head. "Not really. I get that you did what you had to do. And even if you just got in trouble for it, I'm glad you've been asking the gym leaders for help all this time. I can't believe you let me yell at you for not involving them enough," I said, laughing a little at the end.

He was quiet.

"I don't regret keeping the information from you," he said. "In the case that you were interrogated, it would have protected the Spear Key or the gym leader guarding it. It was necessary."

I nodded. Yeah. Reasonable.

"What I am sorry for is deceiving you," Looker continued. "There were… so many times that I told you something misleading about the Spear Key – not lies, technically, but deception all the same. I want you to know… I do trust you. It wasn't a lack of trust that made me keep this from you. I trust you deeply, Lyn. I hope you know that."

I smiled. "I know."

I was surprised by how okay I felt about all this, even though it all checked out logically. Looker had been keeping things from me, and there were good reasons for it, but knowing he trusted me was what made it all right.

The secrets I kept from my friends were meant to protect friendships, to give me time to figure out what was going on, and to avoid sparking change before I was ready. They had purpose, but didn't mean I didn't trust them. If that was the case, then maybe it was okay for me to keep secrets, after all.