It's been a while since I hung out in a car park. Probably not since we were students, hanging out through the summer break when your friends had gone home to their families and we were left behind in the realisation that we might never get to do that again. Loitering by the railing outside Redfields shopping centre, smoking and drinking those disgusting milkshakes you could get at Blue Top Club before the health inspector shut the place down.

That was pretty fun. Standing around in the rain outside the containment facility while I waited for Nat to get done being told off was somewhat less so. I stood there under the covered entryway, rolling Nat and Achille and Solomon through my head like dice across a tabletop, but even my forty-minute wait wasn't long enough to turn up the sixes I needed to figure this out.

"Tacoma?"

I started out of my thoughts and turned toward the door to see Nat emerge at long last. He actually looked like he was having a worse day than the ghost he had locked up in sub-basement two. Real wet puppy vibes.

"Sorry about the wait," he said. "Achille does like the sound of his own voice."

He reached out toward his rotom as he spoke, trying to calm her; I guess she thought she'd escaped the scary ghost lady, because when she saw me out there she started buzzing and jittering like she'd swallowed half a pint of hornets.

"Figured as much," I said, doing my best to ignore her. "He's one of those Champions, huh?"

"You could say that." Nat sighed. "I was hoping to avoid this. He wasn't due back from holiday for another two days, but his mother-in-law had a fall. Emily, calm down, it's just Dr Spearing."

The rotom looked at him, then at me, then shrank herself down as small as she could go and darted behind his shoulders.

"Good enough," he murmured, exasperated. "Anyway, his mother-in-law's all right, so I suppose he thought he might as well get back to the office."

"And interfere with your investigation?"

"Well, um … he is the Champion."

"Which makes him your colleague, not your boss." I was starting to get a little annoyed now; I took a steadying drag on my cigarette and concentrated hard on not clenching my fists. "You're on the Indigo League model, right? You answer to a board, not to him. But you just let him throw me out and tread all over you."

His wet puppy vibe intensified, but one benefit to being an ageing dyke is that I'm immune to pretty boys, so I just stood there and looked at him until he stopped squirming and coughed up an answer.

"Um. Well. Achille is … he's opinionated. And once he starts, it's very hard to make him stop. If I went to the board about him, he'd talk at them until they agreed to anything he wanted just to get him to go away."

"Hm. Right."

I shifted my weight onto my back foot, tilted my head back a little. It was only a moment later that I realised just how bitterly unimpressed I must look, and how crushing that must have been for an avowed fan like Nat. By then it was too late, of course. I changed my stance, but when he replied he still sounded pretty desperate.

"Besides, he's very well respected," he added, leaning in a little. "He's led the League well, so – I mean – I've, uh, only been in post nine months."

Which obviously made me feel like a bitch. He was twenty-eight at most, a recent hire, being yelled at by a man twice his age who'd been behind the wheel for years. No wonder he felt like he couldn't stand up to him.

"Right," I said, putting out my cigarette. "I get the position you're in. But you brought me here to evaluate Solomon, and Achille is doing his best to stop me."

"I know." Nat sighed again; Emily peeped over his shoulder at me, then bolted for the collar of his coat and pressed close against his neck, giving him what I'm sure she thought of as a comforting minor electric shock. "I'm afraid I don't have an answer to that just yet."

We stood there for a moment, the silence pooling in the rain puddles all around us. Credit to him, Nat held my eye for most of it, until his nerve failed him and he busied himself in popping his umbrella.

"The day's done," he said, striking out across the car park. "I'll drive you back to town. We've booked you into the local Lodgepole Inn – Maurice is there too, I think. As for what next …" He dithered for a moment, then shrugged. "I'll have to get back to you tomorrow. Hopefully Achille will have got back to Gibbous Isle by then. Challenge season is coming up and there's a lot of preparations to be made; I'm sure he'd rather be interfering with that."

"Hm." I walked alongside him, mostly underneath his umbrella but not quite. Didn't mind; the rain was light enough that it mostly just fizzled through my mist where it touched me. "Maybe. He seemed pretty invested."

"He doesn't like phantoms of any sort, and dark-types in particular. Bad experience with a darkrai a few years ago."

"Doesn't bode well for Solomon or Cynthia, then."

"No. I, um, suppose not."

We got in and pulled out, heading along the winding road through the hills back down into the bog. The containment facility is on higher ground, insulated from the city by miles of wetland and sparse forest; I wouldn't like to guess at the cost of building a road through it all, but I have to admit, it's a good location. Nothing like a moat to keep visitors out and monsters in.

"You've seen more of Solomon than I have," I said, watching dripping branches recede into the blur of the rain. Figured it was time to break the silence and get Nat back on track; he needed a bit of encouragement. "What's your read?"

Nat sat up straighter in his seat, like he was back in school and the teacher had just singled him out.

"It can hold a conversation," he replied. "Very well, for a spiritomb. And it seems much calmer and better able to control its passions than even other imperial spiritomb."

"Because they aren't one."

He gave me a sharp look.

"You believed that?"

"You didn't?"

He couldn't hold my gaze, but I suppose he had the road as an excuse.

"Well, it's never happened before," he said. "And if I was in a situation that desperate, and I was shown an expert in my species who might be able to finagle me some advantage, I'd say anything to keep their interest long enough to find a way out."

I hated that, obviously. More than that, I hated that he was right, because I would've done that too, if I was Solomon. But you'd tell me to keep my cool, to stay calm and figure this out, so I held my breath a moment and massaged my anger until it softened enough to be moulded into an answer.

"Fair enough. Guess I would too. But you and I have a human way of looking at it. Solomon doesn't. Didn't you get that sense, talking to them? The way they spoke, like their thoughts had to be cut up and restitched to fit the language."

Nat was silent for a moment, studying the road beyond the windscreen.

"Galish isn't my first language," he said carefully. "I'm not sure what I heard."

All so politic, so annoying. I could see why he said it. Achille wanted this case shut down, Solomon caged and probably Cynthia stripped of her licence; Nat himself had read enough about spiritomb to know we have a reputation for lying, deceiving, promising anything and everything to get someone to take us where we want to go. And yet it seemed impossible to me that anyone could have exchanged three words with Solomon and not immediately recognised the alien intelligence moving behind their eyes.

"But you can be sure they felt for Cynthia," I said, instead of arguing. "You saw them too. Don't think you needed to fly me out here to tell it hurt them to know how badly they injured her."

He didn't answer, in a way that made me think it was because he couldn't figure out how to deny it. I gave him a minute – never say I'm not fair, love – then pressed on:

"It's fine if you really don't believe me. But I'm not fond of being lied to. Hope you can understand that."

The silence continued. But now it felt like a silence that was going somewhere, so I sat and watched the rain until it came to the point.

"There was something," he said, eyes on the upcoming corner. "After you'd left, I wanted to ask more about something Solomon had said. And when it spoke, I thought …" He shook his head. "I'll grant you, it – they – care. They weren't lying about that."

"No. They weren't."

I didn't ask what they'd discussed; it seemed clear it wasn't something to be shared. In the end, I didn't have to, anyway. He swung the car around the corner, rubbed his forehead, and sighed us out of our silence.

"You don't make these things easy, do you?" he asked.

"What, did you think they let me set up my clinic because I asked politely?"

"I … suppose I assumed that they recognised the groundbreaking nature of your work." He stole a glance at my face, which gave him all the response he wanted and a bit more he didn't. "I'm willing to admit that that might be considered somewhat naïve."

I had to laugh. I mean, the only other option was to tell him he was an idiot, and that seemed sorta counterproductive.

"Just a little," I said. "Anyway, look, we're off the clock now. Got a more pressing question for you."

"Yes?"

"This hotel. Smoking room or not?"

Not, more's the pity. Apparently when all you know about someone is what she's written for medical journals, you miss important details like 'would take advantage of her lack of lungs to smoke a pack a day if it didn't make her wife so jealous'.

(…)

Yeah, actually, every time I'm away for work I spend the whole trip chaining them, just to feel alive.

(…)

You can't possibly know I'm lying over the phone, love. Anyway, the hotel: to be honest, once you've stayed in more than six hotels, you've stayed in all of them, except that really fancy one in the Sevii Islands where I still think we should go for our anniversary. This one is grey, made greyer by the rain, and on the inside is a sort of Sinnish clone of those Green Door Inns they have all over Kanto. Profoundly middling, but instead of coffee and a shit biscuit the room had tea and some sort of weird bittersweet candy that would've wrapped my tongue up in knots if I still had one to taste with.

Anyway, I didn't call to talk through my accommodation. No, not because I miss you, either. Or, well, not just because I miss you. I'm calling because helping kids in trouble is your day job, and helping ghosts in trouble is mine, and I'm hoping we might be able to put our heads together here and figure out a way to help this kid and this ghost at the same time.

(…)

Oh, love. Knew there was a reason I married you.

The bed was all right, though. After my hour bouncing around the local dreamscape in search of Solomon's mind, I fell straight into it and slept for ten hours straight. First time since the investigation, actually. Guess it all seemed so far away from over here, an ocean and a rainstorm away.

Next morning I got to the hotel restaurant early, set myself up for breakfast. I know, I know, it's not like me – but as long as the Sinnoh League were paying, I wasn't about to let it go to waste. I sat in the corner nursing bad coffee and an unidentifiable Sinnish pastry, watched the businessmen eating toast in their shirtsleeves and the staff refilling the juice urn, and – finally – caught Rowan as he came in.

"Morning," I said, waving him over to my table. "Must've missed you last night."

"I was checking in with another of the trainers who works with me." He sat down, with a whole pot of tea and a full cooked breakfast. Made me think of that guy I once met at a conference who told me, entirely without irony, that most of the modern world's problems were down to the fact that people didn't start the day with a proper breakfast any more. I wouldn't be surprised if Rowan was that exact guy, to some other person at some other conference. "He's looking after Cynthia's pokémon while she's in the hospital."

"Yeah? How are they?"

"Nervous. They're not used to being parted from her, or to such disruption to their usual training routine. Her gabite in particular is causing quite a bit of trouble; Cynthia raised her almost from the egg and she's very strongly attached."

You know what a gabite is, love? About five years away from being one of the most dangerous dragons on the planet. The kind of pokémon a trainer might pick up in their twenties or thirties, once they have a good decade or two of experience under their belt – and only then if they're bloody confident they can keep a ton of angry dinosaur in check. I'd never heard of a teenager partnered with one before. But maybe I should've clocked by then that Cynthia wasn't exactly a normal teenager.

"Yeah, I bet," I said. "Gabite? Really?"

Rowan gave a little hint of a smile, the same way your dad always did when he introduced you as his daughter.

"I told you she was a formidable talent," he said, his pride palpable even through his ironbound reserve. "It wasn't just to convince you to come out here."

"Starting to see that." I sipped the coffee, felt it swirl around inside me. Caffeine doesn't help as much as it did when I was alive, but honestly I barely remember that any more. "She and Solomon have something, it's clear as day."

"Nat did tell me a little about your visit to the containment facility yesterday." Rowan paused, fork halfway between moustache and plate. "You believe Cynthia's right, then? The spiritomb really is …?"

"It was obvious enough that Nat saw it too. He just didn't want to admit it, not with Achille breathing down his neck. Solomon is a perfectly reasonable person who genuinely cares about Cynthia. As well you might, if you were trapped alone in a hole for over a hundred years and then some nice kid came along and rescued you."

Rowan leaned back in his chair, laying his fork down on the plate with its morsel of sausage untouched. Looked like a thoughtful movement. Too thoughtful, like he'd rehearsed it in the mirror for maximum effect, but I'm trying to not be so annoyed by all his pompous little gestures.

"I did think he seemed a tad out of sorts," he said. "And I believe in listening to the experts―"

"Thank God someone does."

"―so let's say I concur," he continued, so obviously pretending I hadn't said anything that I almost laughed. "For now, at least. Where does that leave us?"

"In need of a plan."

"And do you have one?"

"No, but I have something we can start with. Tell me about Bain and Sophia."

Rowan's heavy white brows collided like two icebergs fucking.

"Bain and Sophia?" he asked, confused. "Why …?"

"However this goes, they're gonna be in Cynthia's life at least another year, till she's sixteen. Even more so if she gets her licence revoked. They don't have to accept her, they don't even have to like her, but they have to be able to stand back and let her transition. So." I pulled a piece off my pastry, tiny enough that I thought it would dissolve in my mist, and popped it in my mouth. "Tell me. Are they hurt that she lied to them? Do they genuinely hate her for what she is? Are they just scared that she's making life harder for herself?"

We both set to chewing, me on the pastry and Rowan on the questions. Thanks for that, love. Normally when I find a kid who needs help, I send them your way; you and your team at the refuge are better at this kind of negotiation than I ever will be.

"They," said Rowan, after a few ponderous moments, "are from Celestic. A very traditional village in central Sinnoh. I suppose in their eyes, Cynthia is the firstborn son of their only son. With him gone, that places a certain pressure on her."

You know how much I love shit like that. Honestly, I thought we'd left that particular bit of idiocy behind us decades ago. Can you believe we're in a whole new millennium and people are still banging this same worn-out drum?

"So help 'em see that," I said, instead of the substantially less polite thing I was thinking. "You told me about her prospects. Tell them too."

"Me? I hardly think they'll listen to―"

"Well, I don't speak Sinnish, and even if I did, they're too scared to talk to the ghost lady who put the wind up them yesterday." I paused. He didn't look all that convinced; somehow all this is way less persuasive in my mouth than in yours. "Besides, you just have to keep 'em calm enough to listen. Stop 'em shouting and screaming like yesterday, get Cynthia involved, see what you can do. You won't change their minds any time soon, but you know what they say. Second-best time to plant a tree and all that."

Rowan stirred his tea for a little while in thoughtful silence. He hadn't put anything in it, but sometimes a proud person needs an excuse for hesitation.

"I confess, I'm … not very well acquainted with the topic," he said, a whole universe of uncertainty walled up behind one cool understatement. "I don't know how persuasive I can be."

"You know Cynthia?"

"Well, yes."

"You know she's got talent?"

"Yes …?"

"You know that this is her whole life, and if they take it away from her she'll leave them as soon as she can and never come back?"

"I – hm. Yes. I suppose I do."

I shrugged.

"Sounds like you have most of what you need right there. Leave the details aside. Not like you'll win 'em over by presenting a thesis on gender nonconformity."

"Hm." Rowan furrowed his brow, though whether it was down to confusion, thought, or because he just had a grumpy face, I have no idea. "Have you, ah … done this before, Dr Spearing?"

"Tacoma. And not exactly. But my wife has, more times than I can count."

"Your …?"

"Wife. I assume you're familiar with the concept."

"Yes, of course. I – I didn't know Johto had such … legal provisions."

Which would've been a good save, if I wasn't already achingly familiar with the class of person who could handle a doctor being dead but not her being gay.

"Oh, it doesn't. But there's no law against calling her that."

He'd literally never even had the thought before. He didn't actually tell me that, but he didn't have to; I saw the thought pierce his head like an arrow and stick, quivering, in the centre of his brain.

"Well," he said, after a moment or two of serious contemplation. "All I intended was that you've more relevant expertise in this case than I knew." He gave me a serious look, just a couple shades shy of desperation. "Is that your plan while Achille blocks you? To use your, ah, shared experience, shall we say, to work with Cynthia?"

'Shared experience'. Talk about euphemy. I bit back a withering reply that he didn't really deserve and offered up a small smile instead.

"Yeah," I said, finishing my coffee. "Something like that."

It had just been overcast when I got up, but by the time I left the hotel it was raining again, so hard that I could barely see the world outside the windows. Apparently Pastoria really puts the wet in wetlands. Thought about figuring out the bus system, gave up in seconds, had reception call me a taxi and got to glide to the hospital without the discomfort of water pouring straight through my head.

Cynthia was awake when I arrived, curtains pulled close around her bed to ward off the attention of the other teenagers on the ward. Within them, framed in the light from the window above her bed, she looked like you did all those years ago after your accident, thin and wan and brittle as a blown egg.

I didn't want to think about that. But there are some memories inked too deep to ever scrub out.

"Tacoma," she said, sitting up a little as I ducked through the curtain. "Did you speak to Solomon?"

Made my heart ache that that was her first question. I wondered if she'd slept at all, or if she'd been up all night worrying and trying not to scratch the itches burrowing through her infected eye.

"I did," I said. "They're okay, for now. You gave 'em good advice and it's kept 'em safe so far."

She sighed, sinking back down onto her pillow as if the held breath had been all that kept her upright.

"Thank the Creators." Her hand went to her eye, almost made contact before she remembered herself and took it away again. "They're not too worried about me, are they? I bet no one's told them."

"No one had, but I did. Put their mind at ease a bit, I think." I resisted the urge to flip through her chart – it was all in Sinnish anyway – and sat down by the head of the bed. "How are you feeling?"

Cynthia shrugged as if it wasn't obvious that she was tired, pained and terrified.

"A little better for knowing," she said, and I think she meant it. "The – I don't know the Galish, the bug juice? It's working, I think."

"Bug juice is a good enough name," I said, smiling. "It's a synthetic glucocorticoid derived from the signalling chemicals that tochukaso use to keep from being rejected by their host paras' bodies. Anti-inflammatory with enough bug-type energy to neutralise the dark in your blood."

She always does her best to look very grown-up, but just then the look on her face was pure, uncut teenager.

"Paras mushrooms," she repeated. "The doctor never mentioned that."

"People don't usually like to think about where it comes from."

"I wonder why." She sighed, made a limp gesture with one hand. "It's working, anyway. I suppose that's the important thing."

"Healthy attitude to have. Try to keep hold of that cool, because we've got a bit of a problem."

She tensed, a stray cat caught in the shadow of a fearow overhead.

"What kind of problem?"

"Ever heard of a guy called Achille Rose?"

The curl of her lip told me all I needed to know.

"That's how I felt, too," I said. "I'd barely got started with Solomon when he turned up at the containment facility and started yelling at my contact there. Pretty sure he'd have had me in one of those cells there if he could've done, but as it was he shut down my consultation and threw me out. Not sure if or when I'm getting back."

Her calm cracked, but she did her best to hold the pieces together.

"I suppose I should've expected that. At this point everyone in Sinnoh must be waiting for him to be unseated." She swallowed. "What happens now?"

"I don't know yet. I can still contact Solomon through their dreams, but―"

"Sorry – their dreams?"

"Never worked with ghost-types before, have you? We have a way of getting around. Point is, if I come up with more information that way I won't be able to tell the League where I got it. And I get the feeling that with Achille back and throwing his weight around, nobody's gonna listen to me anyway. But," I added, sensing what little energy Cynthia had left draining from her like cold bathwater, "it does mean that I was able to speak to Solomon without being overheard. They gave me a message for you."

That perked her up a bit; she leaned towards me with a kind of twitchy, avian intensity.

"Yes?" she asked, her wide eye a full moon starting through the storm clouds her fatigue had laid around it. "What did they say?"

I hesitated. I'll admit that, if only to you. But it was just for a moment. I've had to say uncomfortable things before; I know well enough that drawing it out just makes it worse.

"They said they were sorry they didn't act sooner, and for partially blinding you." Cynthia tried her best, but she couldn't keep from flinching when I said it; we'd danced around the subject so far, and I was willing to bet so had most others, but she knew. We both did. "And they said they hoped to treat you better in future."

As I spoke, I could see Cynthia's shoulders shrinking, her body curling in on itself like she was a piece of paper and I was holding her over a match. I can only really feel your emotions, but I didn't need any supernatural powers to see the emotion trying to shake its way out from inside her, rattling her ribs and clawing up her throat.

"Oh," she said, in a cracked whisper of a voice that seemed too frail to bear even that one word's weight. "Thank you, Ta … coma …"

She pressed the fingers of her closed fist against her mouth, like that would hold it all in, but I was a kid once too, and I know how hard these things hit before you have the experience to roll with the punches.

"Hey," I said, standing up. I didn't really know whether I should put a hand on her shoulder or something – you know me, I'm not so hot on the touchy-feely shit – so I just sorta hovered, hair lashing nervously at the air around me. "You, uh … you know it's okay, right? Guessing you don't feel like you can let it out, not with your grandparents or Rowan. But I've been there. And you won't beat it just by―"

I'd hesitated too long. Cynthia's emotions had climbed all the way up to her face, and it had cracked wide open, and now everything was flooding out of her so thickly it felt like it would flood the whole hospital. Didn't make a sound; her sobs were wound far too tight around her chest and throat to let anything out, curling her whole body into a tense, trembling comma.

"Ah, shit," I muttered, reaching out too late. "Uh – hey, it's – it's all right." She was startlingly warm beneath my arm, a tiny bundle of bones shaking hard against my side. "Better to, you know. Not bottle it or – uh, whatever."

I gave up there, just kept my arm around her for a bit while she let it out. Wasn't long. Thirty seconds, maybe. Then she took a long breath that scraped hard against the sides of her throat and pulled away, wiping her eyes on her wrist.

"Kizch," she muttered, which even I know is Sinnish for 'shit'. "I'm sorry, I―"

"I have a strict policy of not accepting apologies that didn't need to be made," I told her. "You're hurt. Gonna hurt a lot more if you pretend you're not."

"I barely know you, I shouldn't―"

"Cynthia, don't ask me to be mean to a kid with a fresh head wound, because I'm gonna be honest, I don't wanna do that."

"I," she began, but I'd set that up so she couldn't argue, so what she did in the end was sniff and shake her head. "I lost my eye."

And Christ, when she put it like that, I felt it too. Fifteen years old, trying hard to do right by someone the world abandoned, and she wakes up three days later with a hole in her head and one eye gone. Hard not to feel something at that. Harder still when you've seen a child receive a life-altering injury before, in a way that took years to fully leave you.

"Yeah," I said, putting my arm around her shoulders. "I know."

"And I forgive them!" she said, twisting free and turning her cold, desperate eye on me. "I really do, because – because they didn't mean to, and I know that, but they still – I lost my eye." Her face crumpled a little at the corners. "And I can't even say, I can't say anything at all, because if they knew it hurt they'd never let Solomon go."

Because if Rowan saw Cynthia break, if her grandparents did, if anyone who she should have been able to be honest with saw any hint of a distressed child underneath that iron reserve, nobody would ever believe Solomon was anything but a monster again. I wish I could say I was surprised. Wish still harder that things were different, that the world wasn't so cruelly shaped as to lay all that weight on the shoulders of a child.

"You can say it to me," I told her, instead of any of that. "I won't pass on a word of this to any of them."

She nodded. Closed her eyes. When they opened again, the passion in them had faded back behind the mask.

"You must think I'm quite stupid," she said. "I only knew them for a few hours, really."

"They only knew you for a few hours too," I pointed out. "And yet they care about you, as much as you do about them." I shrugged. "How long did it take you and your gabite to warm up to each other?"

She blinked, not expecting me to know.

"Um … not long."

"Then you know. Take it from someone who's been on both sides of the equation: when the right person meets the right pokémon, something clicks."

"You have a partner?"

"Had. Kangaskhan don't live as long as dragons. But we loved each other from the start."

"Ah."

She breathed in deeply through her nose. I thought she was preparing to say something, but she wasn't, so I sat with her a little longer. Just inhabiting the space, like two old hippies trying to work through their problems.

"Well," she said, after a couple minutes of silence. "I hope Solomon gets the chance."

"Huh?"

"To treat me the way they want to. Like they said."

And I'll be honest, I didn't have a whole lot I could say to that.

It wasn't looking great, but things can always get worse. I met up with Rowan a little later in the hospital cafeteria, and wouldn't you know it, he didn't have good news. Nat had called the hotel – yeah, of course Rowan doesn't have a mobile, he called the hotel for his messages like it was 1990 – and left us confirmation. Achille had put his foot down. Thank you for your time, Dr Spearing, but that'll be all. Your services are no longer required.

Rowan asked me if I was going to go home. Am I fuck, I said. No, of course not to his face, I said that in Johtoni to get the anger out. I told him I had four more days' leave and I wasn't going to give them up unless Achille wanted to try his luck getting the real politicians to deport me.

He won't dare, of course. Men like him never do. If he tried to get the Foreign Office or whatever it's called here to do something, he'd come up against the fact that he doesn't have any real power, and that'd just be too traumatic for him. So I'm not going anywhere just yet. Only problem is, neither are Solomon or Cynthia.

It's something to think about, anyway. And that's what I've been doing, while Rowan tries his hand at mediating between Cynthia and her grandparents. Had myself a good long ponder up there on the hospital roof, sending my little plumes of smoke up in defiance of the rain coming down. Kept coming back to what Cynthia said, what Solomon wanted. To treat her better.

I think I have an idea. It's sort of risky. A little stupid. I don't think anyone will get hurt, but if I fuck up, I don't think I'll get a second shot. It's just that Nat seemed so close to hearing me out. A bit more pressure, a way to force his hand … I dunno, love, I think it's worth a go. But I want to hear what you think of it first.

(…)

Appreciate it. Now, here's the deal.