Chapter 19: Finals |

By midweek Aracely knew she would never see Toril again.

Suddenly Saturday. Twenty-four hours remained. The week burst apart like air. Illusory time. One million obligatory interviews promotional shoots fan interactions and every other moment spent on battle preparations, Red Akahata's eight known Pokémon, one hidden all this time, and Cely thought: Yes, it must be exciting somehow. Though hard to top Shedinja. Shuckle, Smeargle, Eiscue, Pyukumuku, Pachirisu—she compiled a list of niche goobers just in case.

Then she was in a helicopter. Kanto passed below and Mom, seat opposite, stared under the overpowering whirr of the rotors. Red watched out a window and said nothing.

They landed atop a skyscraper in Saffron. Blinding light rose off the towers and it was a tough choice whether to shield eyes or ears as they escaped down a staircase. Mom led the way, striding, but when she wheeled sharply at a bend to grip Cely's shoulders, Red kept going, already aware of his direction.

"You let the Old Man speak."

"Sure, Mom. Why wouldn't I?"

"No. You don't get it. You let him speak. You don't say anything. He may sometimes sound like he wants your input. He doesn't. Every question is rhetorical."

"Then why am I here?"

"He needs someone to listen."

On a whim Cely said, "Dad's doing better."

Mom took in air. She put on a smile. "Good. I'm glad. It would be a better world if everyone in it... did... better."

In the penthouse, all glass walls to float over the city, a long table was set with three plates of luxurious but sparse seafood. Red already sat at one, and the Old Man, withered, crumbling to dust, at another. At the head.

"Fiorella Fiorina," he said, his voice a recording on burning film. "Charming and lovely, as always. They still send you on these errands?"

"I do anything necessary, sir," Mom said.

"They ought to have made you broadcast director years ago. Why on earth not?"

Mom said nothing, but smiled, ingratiating and self-effacing.

"I'll see what I can arrange." The Old Man unfolded a lace napkin and tucked it into his neck to protect his bowtie.

Mom glanced potently at Cely and left.

The Old Man was encased in a stealth designer suit beyond even Aracely's capacity to brand-identify, but it didn't conceal the decrepitude of his body, the skull showing through skin, the translucent hair, and the triangular patch of discoloration from eyebrow to temple. Pinned neatly to his lapel was the IPL's original logo, from a time before logos became the world's first form of expression: a golden circle, an hourglass shape within dividing it into four segments, three reading I \ P / L, and the bottom, much smaller, ⅂ԀI.

Though the Old Man didn't fit this century, Red didn't fit the room. Amid every conceivable finery—finest wood, finest cloth, finest decorative plants, finest china, finest food, finest carpet, finest chandelier—he sat hunched, head down, dirty baseball cap covering his eyes, stubble on his chin, filth on his jacket, filth on the fingers sticking out his fingerless gloves, filth under his fingernails. Only Aracely belonged here, a fact she knew and that she thought both of them knew.

"Satoshi," the Old Man said, "this is, I believe, the seventh time we've spoken."

Red's caked layer of dirt seemed to spread out from him, curdling the room's beauty inch by inch.

"And Aracely. I spoke to your father, once, twenty years ago. Of course, I'm well acquainted with your darling mother, whom you resemble so strongly. My blessing—some say curse, I say blessing—has been to watch time change."

Aracely shifted her fork. Neither the Old Man nor Red ate; the food sat like offerings. The Old Man contemplated space and time, and no matter how dead he looked, his voice remained alive. Kindly, even, the universal grandfather. Aracely never met her grandfather, but the tape of Dad's finals began with this Old Man. Still old, even then, but not impossibly so, he gave a dedication: Here age relives fond memories of the past... and here youth may savor the challenge and promise of the future.

"I don't believe I've ever spoken to the child of one to whom I've spoken before. No, I do not believe. This world always gives something new, doesn't it?" That sepia-tinged form of him transposed onto this one, compounding the brown smear that emanated from Red. The Old Man cleared his throat horrifically and adjusted his lapel pin. "That's why I've called you here, of course. I always insist on meeting my finalists. It's important, I feel, to gauge how the world has progressed. To ensure it's moving along the correct path.

"I, too, was young once; I too was young. Then, the future of the world was still so, uncertain. So many hands pulling so many directions. So many directions seeming so dark. Which way would the world go? Everyone with a voice bellowed: I see the future! History was a line, and its direction ordained. Of course, they all saw a completely different direction. So who was right? Was anyone?

"After the War, and my service ended, I came to this region to help it rebuild. I saw people blinking, looking around at their broken homes and lives, their broken dreams and ideals. People in despair. Disillusioned. Those who once believed themselves to be, uh, chosen by fate, now cursed their bad luck. Had the whole thing been luck? Was there no true order, no grand narrative, no universal truth? Things I saw in the War... no. No, I'm traveling the wrong boulevards.

"Amid the rubble I saw two young children. Too young to understand why their world was now this... waste land... they simply accepted it as 'the way things are.' They were playing a game, with Pokémon they caught scrounging the rubble, rope leashes around their necks. A Pidgey and a Rattata, I believe. They'd devised a game, with rules, to determine which was stronger, and rather than a fight to the death, they pulled away at the pivotal moment, to cradle and nurse their tired Pokémon, with the tender mercy children always feel.

"That image, stirred my soul."

The Old Man took a breath. A hard, rasped inhalation.

"There was a world, I saw in that moment, shining brightly, the future. A world where, the violent impulses, that led to so much... squandered life... could be aimed another way. A way of peace and progress. Where children would grow old, remembering only that world, would love it, and strive to maintain it in their adulthoods. That's the meaning and purpose of nostalgia... I, too, was young once; I too was young. Long may it last."

Breath. Breath.

He regarded the glass band that enveloped the penthouse, as though the towers of Saffron were the full scope of the world.

Breath.

"Now, I understand everything. During the War, winners and losers weren't chosen by chance. Now I see... everything... was meant to be this way. Because this world is better than all others in human history. It can't be luck. No. It was industry, creativity, vision, and a spirited drive to do what was right. Good prevails. Those I speak to must all be good, because they are the ones... who share my qualities. That is the meaning of the sport. To create those who may love even those they master. When the powerful love, then the world will always be made better."

Breath. Breath. Breath. Slowly, the Old Man reached under the table. He pulled up a mask, which he pressed to his mouth, and breathed. He returned the mask under the table. The entire time he stared fixedly at Aracely.

"You do not belong here," he said.

Cely was unable to stop herself from smiling. She looked from the Old Man to Red and back, Red having no recognition at all of the words said. Only Mom's warning kept her from immediate response, which allowed the Old Man to continue:

"Oh but they love you. Those parasites, the ones who never belonged themselves, those advertising agents and financiers. They come to me and say, viewership is skyrocketing! As if that alone matters, as if we built this world to make money, when we make money to build the world. They come to me and say, this is how we crush that Battler's Union once and for all. HAH. Who do they think made the Union? And why? A unifying philosophy! People and Pokémon! Working together! Warrior-philosophers, warriors of the spirit. People with power who choose not to use it. Only that way... only that way..."

He tugged his mask to his face. Cely took fork and knife and cut into the flesh of the fish on her plate, still smiling.

"Your father failed you," the Old Man said. "He learned all the wrong lessons. It was never to win at all costs. Never. It was never to grow old and bitter. But to learn, that your love for your Pokémon... that love...! Is more important... Our trainers learn the lesson and surrender willingly, in the end, rather than discard their loved ones to try again. Perhaps it was the circumstances, how close he was, robbed, one might say, by bad luck alone... Then the divorce, plunging him into a world where he could only live in the past... His nostalgia became corrupted. They failed you, your parents. They created a monster."

Cely actually didn't eat fish. Of course they didn't ask for dietary restrictions beforehand. So she simply cut it up. An abstracted Magikarp.

"Is that so?" she said. "I'm the only one at this tournament who seems to even have parents."

She motioned at Red, to give him chance for rebuttal, and took his silence as agreement. Mom told her not to talk, but what would the Old Man do? Disqualify her?

He breathed into his mask. One, two, three times.

"A whole parentless world," she said. "Isn't it unbelievable? Everyone gives me shit, and for what? Because my Dad helped me? As if there can't be any sort of, of, of continuity? Everyone leaves home at ten to relearn everything from scratch, on their own, every time? That's what you call progress? Or is that by design, too. A world of perfect stasis, because nobody can ever grow past a certain point before they reset? A world where present and past are the same. That's what you mean by nostalgia, right? A field of flowers, blooming, repeating. Yeah it's always pretty but... you've eliminated the line of history, you've turned it into a point."

The words came out strangely angry. Cely was so good at controlling herself, but these words bounced out of her head the moment she opened her mouth, and she couldn't tell how many of them were hers and how many MOTHER's. Why did it matter, anyway, when the world ended tomorrow?

"Ignorance," the Old Man said. "Stasis? Haven't you seen the leaps technology has made? On timetables nobody imagined! That's progress! Bill Masaki, and those scientists at Silph Co., and the other great corporations, the things they've done... Interconnected digital storage systems. Poké Balls so cheap even a child can afford them. Devices that heal Pokémon in seconds. Technical Machines, move tutors. We can go into a Pokémon's DNA and alter their IVs, EVs, abilities, natures. We created a Pokémon! Porygon, we created something from nothing! And you think there's no progress? You can't tell me that. I lived it. I saw what this world was before. I saw this world laid bare, the cruel hard world lurking beneath this one I've created. It's a utopia compared to that hellfire!"

He, too, was young once; he too was young. And the world progressed according to his vision. And science developed gadgets useful to that world's maintenance. Looking back at the past, the line seemed to have always been destined to lead where one stood. There was only ever one possible outcome, this one. Long may it last.

The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

But the Old Man, sucking his mask, was weary. Aracely peered into his mind and saw him, so weary, propping up a dam with his feeble body, praying that all his efforts in life weren't simply so that, once the dam broke, it burst forth even more ferociously than before.

She didn't need to respond.

The Old Man lowered the mask. Breath. Breath. His eyes flitted to an arbitrary corner of the room, as though something awaited him there. Then he loosed a desiccated, threadbare chuckle. "They say they can't do without you," he muttered. "And all the money you'll make them. I'll show them I mean what I say about money. I'll show them how much I'm willing to pay." His chuckle descended into a cough. He gripped the table and waved her away with the hand that gripped the mask. "Now go. I've said all I want."

Immediately, Red rose. He tucked his chair into the table and left, Poké Balls jangling on his pocket. Which was interesting, because they confiscated Cely's Pokémon (yes, she actually started carrying them) before she boarded the helicopter, citing "regulation."

What happened next was insane, but somehow she expected it. In the anteroom outside the Old Man's chamber, three people waited, plus Mom. Red was already vanishing around a corner. Two of the three moved toward Cely. They were men, one middle-aged and one younger, wearing ties but no jackets.

"Cely, you don't have to tell them anything," Mom said.

"Aracely Sosa, would you come with us for a minute," said the middle-aged man. Under his bushy mustache, he maneuvered a toothpick left and right.

"No, I don't think I will," Cely said.

The younger guy, tactically nondescript, shook his head. "Wrong answer."

"You don't have to say a word to them Cely. Not a word. What they're doing is completely out of line. It's a violation of rights."

As the middle-aged man placed a hand, firm but not brusque, on Cely's shoulder, she stared at the third person, who sat in a chair more decorative than functional. A woman with dark hair and a severe expression, though levied at a pattern in the carpet rather than at Cely. She wore a close-fitting maroon tracksuit and she was terrifying, because Cely knew exactly who she was. As if she read Cely's mind—no, there was no "as if"—she turned her eyes to Cely, gripped the armrests of her chair, and stood.

"Good," the woman said. "I don't need to introduce myself. That saves time."

"This way, Sosa," said the middle-aged man.

"Cely. Don't tell them anything. Don't let that woman scare you. Nothing she says is admissible in a court of law. They can't break all their own rules. Cely! They want to intimidate you. Don't say a word to them."

Mom followed the carpeted path the men led her down, shouting all the while. The younger man turned and barred her way. "You'll need to wait there, ma'am. If your daughter's innocent, there's nothing to worry about."

"Bastard! Goosestepping fascist! You can't do this. Do you have any idea who I fucking am? The people I know?"

"Don't worry, we know you, Miss Fiorina."

"I'll have your fucking jobs. I'll have them, I swear. Even yours, you fucking fraud bitch!" She fired a finger at the back of the woman in the tracksuit.

"We're just doing our jobs, ma'am. You should be sympathetic. Didn't you get caught up in the last terrorist attack?"

"My daughter isn't a—Cely! Cely!" Although the middle-aged man led Cely around a corner, she still heard Mom screaming. "Cely don't say a word! I'll get you out of there Cely. Cely!"

They sat Cely in a small, gray, windowless room that was ostensibly still on the penthouse floor. The two men did a classic good cop bad cop routine (middle-aged good, younger bad) that Cely tuned out as they paced back and forth. Her eyes remained riveted to the woman, who stared back.

What would the Old Man do, disqualify her? That thought exposed itself as pathetic naivete, the only consolation being they planned this trap regardless of how she acted at dinner. It was Saffron City of all places, why didn't she see this coming the moment she got on the helicopter? In this soulless room, under the bare buzz of a lone light, the throbbing intensity of her fear pervaded every cognizant inch of self.

It had to be her. Nobody else, certainly not these two IPL secret police, provoked even a flinch. But her, this woman Cely knew so well, because for six years between age eleven and seventeen she hung on Cely's wall, a glossy poster where she posed in a white tuxedo with purple trim, one arm extending a top hat, from which confetti burst to form a word: READ. The pose and colors were meant to look whimsical, but the woman wore the same severe expression then (she'd been a teenager when they took the photo) as now, which made the image somehow unnerving, as if even that flat copy was READing your mind. Charlie gave Cely the poster as an overture of earnest friendship at a pubescent time where such things still seemed possible, a point of common interest that tethered them despite the growing rift in their respective personalities. Psychic powers. If anyone in this world was truly psychic, if anyone's existence kept alive the hope that you, too, might be able to read minds, might be special, then it was this woman, the woman who presided silent over Aracely's adolescence, the woman who waited for the two men to finish their spiel before taking her turn:

Sabrina, gym leader of Saffron City.

"Girl's not talking," said the middle-aged agent.

"You're here for a reason," the younger said to Sabrina. "Work your magic, if you've really got it."

They stepped aside. Sabrina pulled out a chair at the small table and sat staring into Cely's eyes. On her bangs, there was something that didn't exist on the poster: a single gray hair.

The problem with facing a mind reader was that the more you tried not to think about something, the more you thought about it. From the videos Cely once watched, Sabrina was only capable of scraping surface-level thoughts, not delving into the abyss of memory. ("A human has a lifetime's worth of memories, whether they consciously remember them or not. It would take a lifetime to parse.") Nor could she read the subconscious, the unconscious, dreams, any psychological strata beyond the waking world.

That made everything doable. Because Aracely—

"Well? What's she thinking?" the younger agent said.

"Nothing illuminating, yet," said Sabrina.

"What baloney."

Because Aracely had practice. Years of visitations to Dad's condo, where Brittany poked around her mind. Years shutting her out entirely, or modulating what exactly she—

"Gardevoir is an empathic psychic type," Sabrina said. "It reads emotions, not rational thoughts. It is different from me."

"Huh?" said the younger agent. He was about to say more, but his partner stopped him.

"It seems you can control yourself in a vacuum, at least," Sabrina said. "Tell me about RISE."

Unlike the agents, Aracely was too afraid to simply ignore her. An associative image appeared: MOTHER, parasol, veil, office—

And she abruptly rewound, sharp and straight to the thought that once sent Brittany sobbing to Dad, of razor blades across wrists, blood flowing out, all over the bathroom tile, back then it was only fantasy, now she drew on memory and left her past self dying on the ground before Sabrina, an offering bleached and corpselike.

Sabrina's eyes shut slowly. "One of my colleagues was a soldier. He fought in secret wars that aren't supposed to exist. Though he doesn't try, sometimes corpses bubble to the surface. Now tell me, does MOTHER plan to attack the stadium tomorrow?"

"No," Cely said quickly, maybe too quickly, though her carefully collated suicide self lifted her head off the tile to say it's true, absolutely true, there is no plan, Cely knows of no plan, that was the whole point, why she did it the way she did.

"Did what?" Sabrina asked.

Cely led her to a dark room, the only light streaking in a single ray between the curtains, the ghostly form of a woman sitting on her bed, and then as Sabrina tried to puzzle this image Cely came at her from behind with an axe, the blade cleaving into her skull, splitting the brains of that woman in the white tuxedo, spraying the poster with blood as Cely stood heaving over Charlie's corpse, bringing the axe back up for a second swing—

"Juvenile," Sabrina said. "Let's return to that room. What did MOTHER tell you then? What is RISE planning?"

Sabrina circled closer and closer to some truth. But the truth was—Aracely didn't know the truth. MOTHER never told her. It was Nilufer who'd know. Nilufer. That name conjured a new image of a loading dock, Cely gagged and bound, while Toril Lund stared down a bizarre device with two barrels.

Sabrina's eyes opened. "Did that really happen?"

"Yes," Aracely whispered.

"Hm." The intensity of her gaze angled into the table. Her brow creased, revealing a face more wrinkled than it first appeared. Aracely focused on the single strand of gray in her bangs. How old was she now?

"Thirty-five," Sabrina muttered aimlessly, then looked up. "Please understand that I am not an agent. I do not typically conduct interviews such as these." A stilted, deliberate delivery; she weighed each word before speaking. "I am here because I was told I may prevent a catastrophe akin to IPL 51. I decided preventing something like that would be something I want. I am uninterested in punitive measures. If you are truly a victim of RISE—"

"Victim?" the younger agent said. "That's MOTHER's right-hand girl. Some victim!"

"Shut up," said the middle-aged agent.

"Forget this crap. Ask her who stole Bill Masaki's flash drive."

A yellow Azumarill flashed in her mind before she had a chance to tamp it down.

"She did," Sabrina said. "Using her Pokémon." Did the character of her stare change?

"Hear that, Sosa? You're cooked. Property theft, oh boy."

"I said shut up," said the middle-aged agent.

The flash drive wasn't what they cared about. The middle-aged guy didn't say it, but he knew Mom was right: statements Sabrina claimed to read off someone's mind wouldn't fly in court. Wasn't Cely better aware than anyone? Half the world thought Sabrina was a faker, Mom and Dad included. Her powers—mind reading, small weight telekinesis, horoscope-tier precognition—were indistinguishable from any TV magician.

"Why did you steal the flash drive, Aracely."

The IPL promoted Sabrina to gym leader when she was twelve, two years after her abilities supposedly manifested. (Details from a Wikipedia article once read, reread, read again.) Either she was a marketing gimmick or they knew exactly what she was, and if they put her in this room now that answer was clear. Yet they never made an effort to conclusively prove to the world she was real. In fact, dressing her up in a stage performer's tuxedo and top hat for literacy posters, did they want people to call her a fraud all along?

"Aracely. Answer my question."

Even these agents think you're full of crap, Sabrina. Isn't that interesting? What has the IPL been doing with you? Keeping you on a leash? The way they've kept Bill, and Silph Co., and all those so-called innovators? Aracely knew what you truly meant because she once believed it herself: the next step in humanity's evolution, a genetic mutation proving a direction the world would one day go, someone special, and that's why they put you in the gilded box of Saffron City, one block away from their headquarters, the perfect place to keep you contained.

"Aracely!"

Thirty-five. Unmarried. No children. They're just waiting for you to dry up inside. To let those special genes die with you. Because you threaten their order. Like Aether Foundation, blackballed the instant it became clear what that technology could do. How lonely are you, Sabrina?

Sabrina stared, and stared, and stared.

What life do you live? Alone, in some nice home they let you own, with Pokémon that unnerve you because so often you seem more like them than your own species, a feeling you can't stand. You can't even be righteously angry at your situation. The IPL has been magnanimous. An earlier era you're burnt at the stake, a witch. A less peaceful or egalitarian epoch and they spirit you away into some lab to be vivisected and weaponized. This world is the best possible world, like the Old Man said, and the tragedy for you is that even in utopia you're alone, so pathetically alone. Isn't it true? Because I felt that way too. I took a step and fell out this world and realized. That's why I slashed my wrists. Have you ever tried to hurt yourself, Sabrina?

"She's in my head," Sabrina said, stunned.

"What the fuck? You're gonna say she has psychic powers too now?"

"I don't know." Sabrina rubbed a temple. "I don't—I don't think she does. But..."

The middle-aged guy stepped forward and slammed a palm hard on the table, startling Sabrina to a jolt, startling Cely too. "Answer her fucking question! Did MOTHER make you steal Bill's flash drive?"

She didn't. And it was true.

"She didn't," Sabrina said. "It's true."

"No it fucking isn't. Why else would she steal it?"

Cely didn't know. A whim, a sense; serendipity.

"She doesn't know," Sabrina said. "S... serendipity..."

"The flash drive's a distraction anyway, what is RISE doing tomorrow? How will they attack the stadium?"

They won't.

"They won't," Sabrina said.

"They're gonna do something. We know they are. What happens tomorrow? What happens on October 12?"

The world ends.

"The world ends," Sabrina said. She awoke from her daze and pierced Cely with a questioning stare. "What does that mean?"

Cely had no idea. MOTHER never once told her.

The younger agent scoffed. "I can't believe this."

I can.

"She can," Sabrina said. When both agents gave her a death glare, her eyes went straight down into the tabletop.

"Alright, out of the chair."

"Let the professionals handle this."

And they handled it, the way they knew how, with shouting and intimidation, pacing back and forth while she spoke not a single word. Sabrina remained in the corner, watching her feet and only sometimes turning eyes toward Cely. As the agents' words became a meaningless drone, Cely imagined the READ poster, the face in that tuxedo still so severe, so alone, no matter what guise they wrapped her in. Wasn't that why Cely eventually tore the poster off her wall?

Tragedy. One special flower, cut and displayed under a glass dome. Cely wasn't like that. She wouldn't end up that way. None of them, not the IPL or Mom or Dad or MOTHER, none of them would control her. She alone, shining, as the story ended forever.

Eventually, Sabrina excused herself for a drink of water, and never returned.

Hours of yelling passed before a pounding came at the door. It opened a crack, someone whispered, the agents grimaced. With terse, pissy flicks of their hands, they told Aracely to scram.

Mom met her in the hall. She gripped Cely by the arm, dragged her close, and walked shielding her from the eyes of the agents at their backs. "That Old Bastard thinks he's all-powerful," Mom hissed. "It's not twenty years ago, buddy. I called every single member of the politburo. Even his loyalists. You should've heard them when I explained he was trying to sabotage his own finals! HAH."

Hand clenched around Cely's wrist, she led her to an elevator. The sun was down and all windows they passed were full of city lights that twinkled like stars.

"The helicopter left, so I had to bring the car. It's in the garage." She said this like bringing the car was what took her so long.

Buttons lit up in sequence to track their descent down the skyscraper's hundred floors. In silence Mom and Cely stood together, watching.

Suddenly Mom turned and wrapped her arms around her. She drew Cely in, bony body all angles as her chin touched Cely's forehead. "Promise me," she whispered, "promise me this is the last battle."

"I promise," Cely whispered back. She slid her phone out of her pocket just in time to watch 11:59 tick over to the next day.