Chapter 35
(Mara POV)
The lodge room was small and the window faced a wall and she'd stopped noticing either of those things after the first day. Mara sat at the desk with her communicator open and waited. It always took a few seconds to resolve. She'd never asked why you didn't ask why with these things, that was just how it worked, and after long enough you stopped thinking about it the same way you stopped thinking about the hum of the filter that made the voice sound like no one.
The figure resolved. Backlit. Always backlit.
"Report."
"Ryan left Jubilife this morning." She kept her voice even, the way she always did. "Route 204, heading north. He knows about the Windworks it's been on every news screen in the city for six days and he's going anyway." A pause. "Alone. His travel companion stayed behind in Oreburgh after the first gym."
"Afraid?"
"No." She thought about the east gate, Ryan turning and walking without looking back. "Definitely not afraid."
The figure didn't respond to that. Another decision being made about what to share.
"Rowan," the voice said.
"Clean." Short, because that was all it needed to be. "No involvement, no knowledge of anything we're tracking. He's not a problem right now." She paused, because the next part mattered. "But he notices things. He's been noticing things for a while. I don't know what he does if he starts asking the right questions to the right people, and I don't want to find out." She set her pen down. "Better to wrap up Sandgem and move on. Create distance before he has a reason to look closer."
"Agreed." No hesitation. "Go."
"Already planned."
Longer silence this time. The kind that meant something was coming that hadn't been in her briefing.
"The Deino," the voice said.
Her pen stopped.
"Still with the trainer?"
"Yes. Recovering." She kept her voice the same even, unhurried, the way she kept it for everything. "Is there something specific about it I should be tracking?"
The figure didn't answer that directly. It never did, not really. "There was a report from Unova," it said. "Several months ago. A clutch of Deino from a particular lineage one went missing during transport. The others are accounted for."
Mara waited.
"The lineage is notable," the voice said. "That's all."
That's all.
She wrote it down anyway. Deino Unova notable. Three words that weren't three words, that were everything she was going to get and she knew it. You learned not to push. You wrote down what you were given and you thought about it later, alone, when there was no one watching you think.
"Anything else?"
"No," she said. "That's everything."
The hologram dissolved and she was alone in the grey Jubilife light with her notebook and the three words.
She'd watched Ryan with the Deino that first day in Rowan's lab the small trembling thing in the doorway, Ryan on one knee on the floor, completely still, just there. She'd filed it away as interesting and moved on. But a lineage notable enough that someone two regions away was tracking a single missing juvenile that wasn't interesting. That was something else.
She thought about Ryan at the gate this morning. Steady. Like careful was a decision he'd made long before she'd said anything about it.
Manageable, she'd written a month ago.
She opened her notebook to a fresh page. His name at the top. Pen hovering.
Something had changed in him between Sandgem and now. She didn't know what. She just knew the shape of him didn't match what she'd written down anymore.
She wrote one line.
Reassess.
Then she closed the notebook and went to bed.
Two days later — Floaroma Town
(Ryan POV)
Floaroma smelled like flowers.
That sounds obvious but I genuinely wasn't prepared for it. Not just a few flowers, not a garden somewhere nearby the whole town. Like someone had decided that if you were going to build a place you might as well commit, and then committed so hard that the smell hit you about ten minutes before the town itself came into view and just kept getting stronger.
I stopped at the gate and stood there for a second.
Pretty. Really genuinely pretty, the kind of pretty that makes you feel slightly suspicious of it, like something this nice has to be hiding something. Flower beds everywhere, low wooden buildings, a market near the center with stalls selling things I couldn't identify from here but that were definitely also floral. A woman walked past me into town with a Roserade at her side and neither of them acknowledged me and I chose to take that as a good sign.
The Pokémon Center was easy to find. They always are.
I got a room, dropped my bag, sat on the edge of the bed for a moment. Two days on Route 204 and I hadn't been bothered by anything worse than mud and a Bidoof that had very strong opinions about me walking past its patch of grass. Compared to Route 203 that felt almost suspicious.
Rhyhorn came out of her ball and immediately started investigating the room with her horn.
"There's nothing in here," I said.
"Rhy." There might be.
"There isn't."
She ignored me and checked the corner by the window anyway. Found nothing. Looked slightly disappointed.
"Told you."
"Rhy rhy." Whatever.
The two days on Route 204 had been quiet in the way that made you nervous at first and then just good. No smugglers. No incidents. Just route, and trees, and the team, and enough space to actually breathe for the first time since Oreburgh.
We'd trained where we could. Deino worked on Dragon Breath range he was getting it, finally, the blasts landing further out without losing shape. Prinplup ran Whirlpool every time we passed water, which on Route 204 was constantly, and each time it was a little cleaner, a little more automatic. She didn't need to think about the adjustment anymore. It was just hers now.
Rhyhorn was the one that surprised me.
It happened on the second day, late afternoon, a Staravia that had decided we were too close to its tree and was making that very clear from about eight meters up. Rhyhorn had watched it for a second, done something with her feet a shift in stance I hadn't seen before and fired a rock straight up that caught the Staravia's wing and brought it down hard enough that it reconsidered its whole position on the situation and left.
The rock hadn't gone up at an arc. It had gone up flat, fast, like it was meant to hit something in the air specifically.
I'd stared at her. "Was that Smack Down?"
"Rhy." Obviously.
"I didn't teach you that."
"Rhy rhy." You didn't need to.
I had no idea where she'd learned it or how long she'd been sitting on it. That's Rhyhorn. She figures things out and then produces them at the exact moment they're most useful and acts like it was never in question.
Floaroma was going to be one night, maybe two. Rest, restock, and then Route 205 and whatever was waiting at the Windworks.
I sat on the bed and listened to Rhyhorn finish her inspection of the room.
She found something under the bed. A bottle cap, from the sound of it. She pushed it around for a moment, decided it wasn't worth keeping, and left it.
"Done?" I said.
"Rhy." Done.
"Good." I lay back. "We leave tomorrow morning."
She settled near the door with the air of something that had made a thorough assessment of the space and found it adequate. Deino's ball was warm on my belt, the way it sometimes got when he was dreaming something active. Prinplup's too, though hers was always warmer she ran hot, always had.
Tomorrow. Route 205. The Windworks.
I stared at the ceiling and let Floaroma smell like flowers through the window and tried not to think too hard about what came next.
Didn't entirely work.