Hayley released Sen alongside her as she raced down the streets. He was the only one of her team who could keep up with her at a run, and he was psychic, so maybe he'd be able to find Connie before she did. The Meditite tilted his head in puzzlement as he materialized in front of her and she sprinted past him without stopping, but he caught on a moment later. Then he was at her side again, keeping pace with airy, loping strides.

"Sen, I… We have to find Connie. She…" Hayley struggled to find the words for a situation even she didn't understand, but came up empty. Then there was a psychic pressure at the base of her skull—why hadn't she felt that the whole time Marcie had been reading her mind?—and Sen's face creased in comprehension. He nodded, Hayley nodded back, and then she turned her eyes back to the streets ahead of her and continued to run.

When they hit Camphor Street, Hayley stuttered to a stop, looking left and right as she tried to figure out where to go. Sen paused with her for only a moment, eyes glinting with foresight, before he took off running again. Ahead and to the left, around a building, down an alley, all the way at a dead end, there was Connie. And she wasn't alone.

Hayley spotted Clarissa first. She was crumpled on the ground, unmoving, her limbs twisted and splayed out around her. The beads that were still woven into her hair glittered in the dim light like diamonds. A Machoke similarly lay limp on its back, clearly dead, sprays of clotted blood caking its eyes, nostrils, and mouth. Reese—that was Reese—was facedown and still, one arm outstretched towards Connie. And at the head of the scene, Connie huddled against a dingy slate-brick wall, hunched over with her legs folded in close. Marcie was curled against her in her lap—but she was different from before. Bigger. She'd evolved.

"Connie," Hayley choked out. Connie and Marcie both lifted their heads, and as they locked eyes with her, an incredible psychic pressure clamped down around her skull. Hayley reeled back and choked as something heavy and sharp dove into her brain and began shuttling back and forth. It tore up furrows where it went, unearthing and cataloguing every memory it could find. Hayley and Connie in elementary school, sitting together in class. Hayley and Connie in the spring, planning out their teams. Hayley and Connie in the conversation they'd had an hour ago this very night, and here Marcie focused and sharpened—

"Don't hurt her!" Hayley felt the plea rather than hearing it as it echoed through the psychic link. Marcie's clinical excavation of Hayley's innermost thoughts paused for just a moment as her own thoughts echoed back—half in words, half in pointed feelings. Caution. Liability. Keep you safe.

The psychic link shuddered. Dragging her attention back to reality, Hayley saw, through watery, unfocused eyes, Marcie turning her attention towards Sen. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground with his face screwed up in concentration. He was trying to break in. Marcie's anger flared. "Intruder—"

"Don't!" Hayley and Connie shouted at the same time, and that was finally enough to shatter the link Marcie had established between them. Her presence tore from Hayley's mind with all the grace of an arrowhead being extracted, leaving agony and mangled thoughts in its wake. Hayley clutched at her head and cried out, unable to think, unable to breathe. Her knees struck the cobblestones as she went down, and the rest of her would have followed, but Sen caught her just in time. Unbelievably strong for his size, he propped her up by the shoulders until feeling returned to her limbs and air once again began to enter her lungs. The whole time, he kept his neck craned to stare at Marcie, eyes narrowed in warning.

"I'm sorry," Connie was sobbing. She'd curled her entire body around Marcie once more, clutching the Kirlia's face to her chest. "I'm sorry, she was just trying to protect me, please don't be mad—"

Hayley pushed herself back to sit on the uneven ground. Sen eyed her meaningfully; she shook her head, then shakily put a hand to her lips and moved it down in a gesture she knew he'd understand. Thank you. Sen nodded slowly and backed up to avoid attracting more aggression from Marcie. Still, Hayley could feel the prickle of his eyes.

"What happened?" Her voice came out in a rasp, like her throat still wasn't ready to work again.

"She was protecting me. I'm so sorry—"

"Not that." Hayley groped out blindly to her side to find the dirty gray wall. Bracing her hand against it, she began to stagger back to her feet. Her knees were bleeding. "Reese. He came back?"

Connie fell silent and wrapped in on herself further. "It was my fault," she whispered. "Clarissa found me after I left you, and she was trying to convince me to go back to the hotel, and—I kept running away, and she kept following me, and we ended up here, and I don't know if he was following us or if he just happened to be here, but the second we turned in here he—"

Marcie lifted her head from Connie and stared down Hayley from the corner of her eye. All at once, the scene unfolded in front of Hayley, rendered in bright colors and fuzzy abstract shapes like a child's crayon drawing. Connie, haloed in violet, and Clarissa, wreathed in blue, took a wrong turn down the alley. Marcie wasn't in the picture—she must have been in her ball, and was reconstructing this now from what Connie remembered. Connie and Clarissa turned and argued with each other, though no sound came through, and then, from the mouth of the alley, Reese emerged. His aura blazed red and black, swallowing up the light, as he stepped forward to trap them. Clarissa jumped in front of Connie to defend her, but Reese dropped a Pokéball to the ground, and a Machoke emerged, its aura just as vile as its trainer's. With motions so quick they weren't even rendered, it slammed Clarissa against the wall, and the abstract depiction of her body twisted and shattered into a dozen pieces that all fell to the ground. Reese advanced on Connie and grabbed her, and Connie had been too afraid to move, but Marcie had sensed the danger from inside her ball and broken out and—

The scene broke into a chaos of fragmented color that whorled and spun, figures melding into each other and being thrown back out as if tossed by a raging whirlpool. The feelings of danger and fear crashed over Hayley so strongly that she almost fell again. This time, though, Marcie wasn't trying to hurt her, and just as the sensation became unbearable, the scene and its emotions vanished into nothing. The alley was solid and real again, and Connie was crying quietly.

Three bodies. One dead, two—Hayley swallowed and dropped down into a crouch, grabbing Clarissa's wrist. It took a long, breathless minute to feel it through her own hammering heart, but there was a pulse, thready and faint. Fear ebbing just a bit, Hayley reached out to move Clarissa so she wouldn't be splayed face-down—only to freeze when she remembered the image Marcie had shown her. Shattering. Broken bones? If she'd fractured her skull, or hurt her spine…

Hayley shot up, grabbing her phone from her pocket. "We need to call an ambulance."

"No!" The second Connie said it, Hayley's phone flew from her hand and clattered down the alley. Hayley stared after it in disbelief, then turned back to Connie, who was wobbling to her feet. "Don't call anyone. Please."

"But Clarissa needs to go to a hospital—"

"If anyone finds out what happened, they'll take Marcie away!" She gripped Marcie even tighter, like she was a rag doll that provided the last bit of comfort Connie had in the world. "She attacked someone, Hayley. She ki—killed his Pokémon. She might have killed him too!"

"It was self-defense. They won't take her away if it was self-defense."

"You don't know that! I can't let them take her, I—"

"They won't take her. I won't let them. I promise."

And as irrational as it was, as unlikely as it was that Hayley could take on the laws and League enforcement and win, she meant it. If someone tried to separate Connie and Marcie now, after all of this, she would fight until she was in the ground. Marcie must have felt her conviction, because she pushed free of Connie's grip to look up at her and give a tiny nod. Connie shut her eyes and pulled her close again, but after a minute, she finally nodded too.

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Several agonizing minutes later, a pair of ambulances screamed to a stop outside the alley. Three paramedics and an Abra wearing a paramedic's uniform strapped Clarissa and Reese into gurneys, communicating in quick, brusque sentences Hayley couldn't understand. A fourth paramedic interrogated Hayley and Connie about what had happened, and as Connie was by now slipping into shocked unresponsiveness, it fell to Hayley to recite what she'd learned. As Clarissa and Reese were loaded onto the vehicles, a third ambulance rolled up, this one for Connie. They insisted that Connie recall Marcie back into her ball, and this was when the test of Hayley's promise began.

"Can't she stay out? Connie needs her."

"No. She's a traumatized, unstable, newly-evolved psychic; she's a risk to all of us right now." The paramedic's tone implied no room for argument, but Hayley pushed anyway.

"She just wants to keep Connie safe. She won't hurt you if you—"

Connie screamed, and a wave of psychic pressure swept through the alley. A paramedic who had reached down to pull Marcie away from Connie stumbled back, clutching her head. Connie screamed and screamed like she was being murdered until her lungs finally gave out, and then she lapsed back into silence and closed her body around Marcie once more.

"You can't take her," Hayley pleaded, once her ears had stopped ringing. "Something… Something bad's going to happen if they aren't together. I don't know what, but—I know it will. Please."

It wasn't a lie. She'd felt it, deep in her bones, hearing Connie scream. And the paramedics must have felt it too, because after some hushed discussion among themselves, they brought Connie and Marcie into the ambulance together. Connie moved stiffly, like a marionette doll, but when Hayley or any of the paramedics tried to help her, she shrank away from their touch. She sat on the bench, and Hayley sat beside her, as the paramedics resumed asking questions, writing notes, and looking at each other with uneasy glances.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

The Machoke was left to lay where it had fallen. It was dead, and its body was a crime scene. Police cars were already lined up and waiting by the time their ambulance left.

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Hayley couldn't go with Connie into the exam room, no matter how much she begged. She didn't understand why—Connie was awake, she wasn't badly hurt, she probably just needed a few tests, so why couldn't she be with her while they ran them? But the nurses were unyielding, and finally Connie whispered that it was fine, as long as she had Marcie with her. So Hayley was forced to stay in the waiting room and wait.

The chairs were uncomfortable and a little too high; her feet dangled an inch off the floor. She crossed and uncrossed her ankles as she scrolled mindlessly through the apps on her phone and counted each minute that passed. This was a human hospital, not a Pokémon Center, so she couldn't even have her team out with her. Not even Ceres, or Sen, even after she insisted to the receptionist that they were as well-behaved as any human. Half an hour went by. What was taking them so long? It wasn't like they were busy; the waiting room was practically empty, aside from her. Surely someone would come out and tell her what was happening any minute now—

The air in the center of the room rippled and folded, and suddenly there were two figures standing there. A five-foot-tall Pokémon that stood on two legs like a human, but had the intricately patterned wings and green feathered head of a bird—a Xatu—and an older girl who was holding on to one of its shoulders. She wore a black tank top and loose khaki cargo pants, and her curly, dirty-blonde hair was pulled into a messy ponytail. Her skin was dingy with dirt and sweat, but even so, the thick, discolored scars that raked across her right cheek and arm were plainly visible. Hayley blinked, wondering why she looked so familiar—and then she remembered.

The girl took barely a second to get her bearings before she charged over to the reception desk. Her Xatu stood still, watching her out of the corner of one eye—its right eye. The left was missing. The receptionist barely spared her a glance before rubbing her temples and sighing, as though people teleporting into the waiting room was a daily occurrence. Maybe it was. "Miss, this isn't an approved teleportation zone. Please recall your Pokémon."

The girl didn't move. "I'm here for my sister. Clarissa Banks. She's here, right?"

"Please recall your Pokémon—"

"Just tell me if she's here or not!"

The receptionist signed again and shifted to her keyboard. "What's your name?"

"Gloria Hart. So she's here? What room is she in? How is she?"

The receptionist's fingers flew over the keys. After a moment, she shook her head. "I'm sorry, but we can only release patient information to family members and approved contacts."

"I'm her sister, you ass!"

"You're not on her file."

"That's bullshit!" Gloria slammed her hands down on the desk. "You can't just—"

"Miss." The boredom drained all at once from the receptionist's face as she sat straight up and fixed Gloria with a hard stare. "I have to ask that you control yourself, or I'll have you removed from the premises."

Gloria lifted her hands again, then dropped them, balling them into fists at her side. Her face cycled through a dozen different expressions. "Clarissa…"

"I understand that you're concerned. You can wait here for the time being if you like, but I cannot offer you anything more than that. Are we clear?"

Gloria's eyes flashed, but her shoulders sagged. "Fine. All right."

"Good. And recall your Pokémon. This is a hospital, not a zoo."

Gloria turned and shoved her hands, still balled into fists, into her pockets. She nodded to her Xatu, who blinked and disappeared into red light, recalling itself back into the ball. Then, she began to slink towards the other end of the waiting room.

"Gloria?" Hayley couldn't stop herself from calling out. Her voice was smaller than she wanted it to be, and felt smaller still when Gloria whirled around and glared at her.

"Do I know you?"

"I—no," she stammered. "But I saw you at the, the exhibition battle, in Petalburg." Under Gloria's relentless gaze, Hayley fought the urge to hug herself tight enough to pop into a singularity. "I'm—I'm friends with—I mean—Clarissa's my friend's training partner."

Just like that, all of Gloria's sharp edges disappeared. "Oh."

"I didn't know you were her sister." Even with Gloria's threatening aura gone, Hayley struggled to keep her voice above a whisper. Gloria gave a bitter snort and came over to take the seat next to Hayley. Hayley turned to look at her, but Gloria kept her eyes forward, trained on the opposite wall.

"Yeah. You wouldn't know. It's a whole thing, and… Never mind." She ran her hands through the hair on her scalp, loosening her ponytail further. "Is she okay? Do you know? Rune—my Xatu—saw her staying here, but he couldn't tell me anything more than that."

"I just know she got hurt. Maybe pretty bad. I think she hit her head—she was unconscious when I got there." Gloria cursed, and Hayley shrank further into herself. "Sorry."

After a long, painful pause, Gloria asked, "And your friend? Is she okay?"

"I think so. She didn't get hurt as bad, but I think they're still running tests, and—" Her voice faltered, and she dropped her eyes to stare at her bandaged knees. "Why… Why won't they tell you anything about Clarissa? If she's your sister?"

Gloria leaned forward and crossed her arms over her knees. "It's a long story. And I probably shouldn't say anything, but…" She exhaled. "Fuck it. Our mom and her husband are probably going to be here soon, and you'll hear us screaming about it anyway. Basically, I'm disowned."

"Oh," Hayley said, and a beat later, added an awkward, "I'm sorry."

"You want to know why," Gloria guessed, correctly. "Well, here's the short version. Clarissa might be a rich kid now, but our family didn't always have money. We grew up dirt-poor, actually, in the ass-end of Oldale—me, Clarissa, our mom, and our dad. But when Clarissa was six, and I was eleven, our mom caught the eye of her current husband, and, well. He had money." She laughed darkly. "I don't hate our mom for remarrying. She and our dad hated each other; I'm glad they split up. What I hate her for is the stuff that came after. Julian—her new husband—wanted us all to start over, to have this new fairytale life in Petalburg, and as part of that, he wanted to cut our dad out of the equation. So he got his lawyers and dragged him to court for full custody. They dragged his name through the mud, they said he wasn't fit to raise kids, they followed him around and got evidence that they used to make up all sorts of lies…"

She broke off and shook her head. "Clarissa went along with it. I don't blame her, she was six—seven, by the time it was finally over. She saw that our mom was happy with Julian, and that the new house had toys and plenty of food and all sorts of other things she'd never had before. So when she had the chance to stay with Julian forever, of course she said yes. But I fought to stay with my dad, because I hated what they were trying to do, and in the end, Julian and our mom only managed to get me on weekends." Her lips twitched up in a smile, but it quickly soured. "It felt like the right thing, to stay with him. But I think it only made everything worse. Julian kept trying and trying to force me to stay in Petalburg, like I was the one splitting our family apart. Clarissa didn't understand my side of it and thought I was making everyone upset for no reason. Julian's lawyers kept harassing my dad and trying to bring him back to court, so that whatever money he did get in the divorce settlement, he had to spend fighting them off. By the time I turned thirteen I realized, this was never going to work. But I wasn't going to give in and live with Julian after all that, so instead I took Braith and ran off to be a trainer—Braith was my Mightyena," she added, seeing Hayley's questioning expression. "Poochyena, then. Dead now. Route accident."

"I'm sorry—"

"It's fine. It was a while back, anyway, and worse shit's happened since." Gloria sighed. "Anyway, I've been traveling through the regions ever since. I'm not great at training, but it makes me enough money that I can support myself and don't have to keep ruining my dad's life. I try to reach out to Clarissa now and then, but she never responds. She didn't even look at me after the exhibition battle. She probably barely remembers me at this point, and anything she does remember, our mom and Julian have poisoned by telling her what a terrible person I am. But… She's still my little sister. And I want to know that she's okay."

They lapsed into silence again. Hayley wrung her hands together, still looking down. "Clarissa's going to be okay," she finally whispered. "She has to be. And… I'm sure she'll be happy you came to see her."

"It'd be nice if you're right," Gloria said. "But I've been around long enough to know that things never work out the way you want them to."

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Nearly another half-hour passed before a nurse came out to get Hayley. Hayley was on her feet before he'd even finished saying "You can see your friend now, if you'd like."

"Is she okay? And—is Clarissa okay?" At that, Gloria raised her head, but the nurse's expression gave nothing away.

"I can't tell you anything about that right now. Please, come with me."

He led her down the winding hallways, stopped in front of one of the exam room doors, and gestured for Hayley to go ahead. Steeling herself, she gripped the handle and pushed. Inside, the light was so dim that for a moment, Hayley couldn't see. She reflexively felt for a switch—

"Don't." As her eyes adjusted, the first thing she saw was a pair of glowing red eyes. Then, the dark shape of Connie appeared around them. She was huddled on an exam table, legs dangling off the edge, with Marcie still on her lap. Her clothes had been switched for a hospital gown and robe. Without lifting her head, she spoke again. "Don't turn on the light. Please. It hurts Marcie's eyes."

"Sorry." Hayley let her arm drop, and she took a tentative step forward. "Are you… okay? I mean, how are you feeling? They haven't told me anything."

"I'm fine. Mostly fine." She spoke in a whisper, and still, she didn't meet Hayley's eyes. "They want to do more tests. They said… They're worried something might've happened to my brain when Marcie evolved. That she might've hurt me."

"Your brain? What…" Hayley's voice died off as she failed to supply it with words. Connie shrugged.

"Psychic fusing. Something like that. I tried to tell them she'd never hurt me, but they wouldn't listen. At least they stopped trying to take her away from me."

Hayley's mind went back to the scream she'd made in the alley, when the paramedics had tried to separate her and Marcie. The feeling that something had been wrong. "Did they figure it out? Whether it happened or not?"

"Not yet. They want to check some more things." Her fingers gripped tighter at Marcie. "And, the police came too. They said they're going to ask me some questions when my parents get here, and that there's—there's probably going to be a hearing. Because of what Marcie did to Reese."

Hayley's stomach dropped to her shoes. "What? It was self-defense, they can't—"

"It won't be for a while. And they said I might be able to keep Marcie while they're investigating, as long as—as long as I work with them. But." She swallowed roughly. "We're on suspension until then. So I can't do any more contests, and I have to go back home and stay there until everything's done."

"It wasn't even your fault!" Hayley began to shout, but broke off when she saw both Connie and Marcie wince. In a lower voice, she said, "If they're making you do this, then—I'll come with you. I'll go back to Petalburg too."

Connie shook her head. "You can't. You've got your team to think about, and—"

"—And we can train just fine in Petalburg. There's even a gym." Before Connie could protest again, she marched over and pulled herself up to sit on the exam table next to her. A sense of eerie displeasure radiated off of Marcie, but Hayley stayed put. "I'm not going to let you do this alone. Okay? I promised I'd help you."

"I won't be alone. I'll have Marcie, and my parents. And I don't want you to ruin your whole journey because of me."

"It's not ruined," Hayley said firmly. "Nothing is ruined. Not for you, not for me. We'll go to Petalburg for a while, and I'll get my Balance Badge, and you'll win your hearing, and then we can travel again together like nothing ever happened." When Connie didn't say anything, she continued, "Come on. You're the one who's always telling me to stay positive."

"I guess." The tiniest, frailest smile flickered onto Connie's face before disappearing again. But it had been there; Hayley had seen it. "If you're sure."

"I'm sure," Hayley said. "We'll get through this together. Trust me."

Down the halls, in the direction of the waiting room, yelling and shouting started to rise. From the few words Hayley could catch, it sounded like Clarissa's parents had arrived, and the promised ugly confrontation had begun. Connie flinched and pushed her chin down onto the top of Marcie's head, and Hayley reached out to put an anxious, comforting hand on her arm. They would get through it together—no matter what happened.