Chương 62

Milo had moved from behind the yellow curtain to a room with a window. The former ferry office overlooked Vermilion Harbor. Someone had covered the lower half of the glass with paper so passing ships could not be mistaken for approaching threats. Above it, masts and Wingull moved through a strip of blue sky. Two chairs stood inside. Neither faced the door. Milo sat on the floor between them with his back against the wall. Zubat hung asleep from the underside of a desk, wings wrapped around her body.

Iona occupied the nearest chair, hands open on her knees. The social worker who had introduced herself as Nessa remained beside the exit. Rine stopped in the doorway. Veyra stood behind his leg. Milo's gaze found her first. He was nine, although malnutrition made him look younger. His hair had been washed and cut around wounds left by old adhesive sensors. A clean green sweater hung from his narrow shoulders. He wore evacuation socks instead of shoes.

"The muzzle," Milo whispered. Veyra did not wear one. Rine understood anyway. Eli's drawings had shown a black dog with a strapped snout because that was how Veyra had appeared in Rocket surveillance images.

"She does not need it here," he said. Milo looked at Nessa. She did not tell him what to do.

"Her name is Veyra," Rine continued.

"She will stay by the door unless you ask her to move. You do not have to touch her."

"Does she bite?"

"Yes." Iona's head lifted. Rine kept his eyes on Milo.

"She bites enemies in battle, food, wooden training blocks, and one Raichu's breakfast wrapper. She will not bite you."

"How do you know?"

"Because she said yes to visiting, and I explained the rules." Milo studied the Houndour's face.

"Pokémon don't talk."

"Not with human words." Veyra sat. Milo tapped the floor once with one finger. Iona's breath caught. Veyra tilted her head.

"One means yes," Rine told her. He sent the meaning across their aura bond without turning it into a command. Veyra lowered herself until her stomach touched the floor. Milo tapped twice.

"No," Rine said. Three taps.

"Are you still listening?" Veyra's ears rose. She struck the floor once with her left forepaw. The sound was too loud. Milo flinched. Veyra immediately flattened her ears and touched the floor more softly. One. Milo stared at her paw. He did not smile. He did not crawl into Iona's arms or discover that animals repaired what humans had broken. He only moved one hand from his chest and placed it on the floor. Three taps. Veyra answered one.

They repeated the exchange until the room no longer felt arranged around a wound. Rine took the second chair when Nessa indicated it was permitted. He kept both feet visible. No knife rested at his ankle now. The old Rocket blade remained sealed in an Iron Talon evidence locker, although his hand still remembered its handle whenever a room became quiet enough. Milo looked at his grey-white hair.

"They called you Frostfang."

"Yes."

"They said you found runaways." Iona closed her eyes. Rine could have explained that Team Rocket lied. He could have said he had never hunted children. Both answers would have protected a version of him that no longer existed.

"They used my name to frighten you," he said.

"Are you Rocket?" Nessa shifted slightly. Not to interrupt. To remind Rine that the visit could end.

"I was raised in one of their bases," he said.

"They made me work for them. I escaped."

"Sable escaped." Milo did not look at Iona.

"Yes."

"But she did things first."

"Yes." Iona accepted the word without defending herself. If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it. Milo picked at a loose thread on his sweater.

"Did you?"

"I did things that hurt people." The sentence fit badly in a room built for a child. It fit better than a lie.

"Eli said the pictures were wrong," Milo whispered. Rine's pulse changed. Nessa noticed.

"You may ask whether Milo wants to continue. You may not question him about Eli." Rine nodded.

"Do you want me to leave?" Two taps. No. Milo crawled toward the desk. Zubat opened one eye but did not move. From beneath a folded blanket, he pulled a piece of paper. It had been drawn on the back of an electrical maintenance form. Green crayon formed an island. Grey loops surrounded it like waves. Six small figures stood inside a box beneath the ground. Above them, a black dog bit through a chain. Its ribs were yellow. A boy with red eyes held the chain's other end.

"Eli made it before they took him," Milo said.

"He said the dog was real because they were afraid of her." Veyra stood. Nessa raised one hand. Rine did not touch her collar. Veyra walked halfway across the room and stopped. Milo could choose the remaining distance. He looked at the yellow marks beneath her fur. The Static-Link mutation had made them permanent, but their brightness rose and fell with her internal load.

"Do they hurt?"

"Sometimes," Rine said. Veyra gave him an offended look.

"Less now," he corrected. Milo held out the drawing. Not to Rine. To Veyra. She approached slowly and sniffed the corner. Milo let go before her nose touched his fingers. The page fluttered to the floor. Veyra placed one paw beside the black dog Eli had drawn. One tap. Milo covered his mouth with his sleeve. The ten minutes ended without warning. A soft alarm sounded on Nessa's watch, and Milo's shoulders locked.

"Time," she said.

"You may request another visit later." Rine stood immediately. Milo caught the drawing before he could turn away.

"Are you going to get Eli?" There were six missing children. Three routes. Eleven days since the transfer. Rine felt the old instinct reach for a promise large enough to bury uncertainty. I will bring him back. The words would make Milo feel safe for several seconds. They would also make a frightened child responsible for believing in a result Rine did not control.

"People are looking for him now," Rine said.

"I am helping them."

"That isn't what I asked."

"No." Milo's face tightened. Rine accepted the anger.

"I do not know if I can get him," he continued.

"I will not stop looking because the answer is difficult." Milo tapped the floor three times. Veyra answered once. Outside the room, Iona leaned against the corridor wall.

"You could have said no," she told Rine.

"To the visit?"

"To telling him what we were."

"He already knew."

"He knew what they taught him." Rine watched through the narrow door window as Milo returned to the wall. Veyra's absence had left an empty space near the center of the room.

"So did we," he said. Iona looked toward her brother.

"He kept the name Sable today."

"Names take longer than people."

"Is that something your doctor told you?"

"No."

"Then it was almost comforting." She walked back inside when Milo's advocate signaled. The investigation occupied the terminal's old customs hall. Three wall maps divided the southern Kanto coast. The first marked Fuchsia's freight yards and the roads running past the Safari Zone toward Route 19. The second showed the Seafoam Islands, ferry channels, cave mouths, and abandoned League weather stations.

The third covered Cinnabar Island's harbor, research district, thermal plants, and warehouses built above volcanic service tunnels. Mara had assigned a team to each destination. Iron Talon's Fuchsia cell would audit freight records with local Rangers. A League maritime unit would approach Seafoam from the north and survey the listed receiving station. Cinnabar authorities had been asked to inspect the thermal annex without announcing why.

"No team enters a suspected holding site until we establish where the children are," Mara said.

"Cassian wrote the destinations because he expected us to find them. Every visible route may contain an ambush." Rine stood before the evidence table. The Kestrel Crown ledger lay inside a transparent sleeve. Beside it rested packing straps, insulation fibers, flakes of hull paint, a damaged refrigeration seal, and material collected from the empty bunks.

"You wanted Identify after cataloguing," he said.

"Everything has been photographed, sampled, and examined by two specialists. Proceed." He began with the ledger. Item: Commercial cargo ledger Material age: 4 years, 2–5 months Recent alterations: solvent removal / pressure transfer / thermal erasure Residual imprints detected: partial Identify did not recreate erased ink as a clean confession. It showed indentations where a pen had compressed paper and a chemical difference where solvent touched the page. Rine angled the ledger beneath a lamp.

"There are marks before each destination," he said.

"Not letters. Punched dots." A harbor clerk named Mrs. Pell adjusted her spectacles. She had spent thirty-two years processing refrigerated cargo before retiring and becoming intolerant of everyone who used computers badly.

"Old routing notation," she said.

"One dot for documentation office. Two for transfer handling. Three for final receipt." Mara looked at the ledger. Fuchsia carried one faint indentation. Seafoam carried two. Cinnabar carried three.

"Not possible destinations," Lyra said.

"Stages."

"Possibly," Mara corrected.

"We still verify." Rine moved to the refrigeration seal. Item: Compressor gasket — damaged Model compatibility: Polar Transit 8 / 8B Primary residue: saline water, machine lubricant Secondary residue: volcanic silicate / white mammalian keratin Probable species source: Dewgong Confidence: 71% He read the information aloud. Mrs. Pell swore.

"Useful?" Mara asked.

"Seafoam crews use trained Dewgong to guide cold barges through the cave channels," Pell said.

"Not exclusively, but more than anywhere else in Kanto. They can sense currents under ice and tow without fouling a propeller."

"Volcanic silicate indicates Cinnabar," Lyra said.

"Or a ship that previously carried Cinnabar aggregate," Mara replied. Rine examined a strip of insulation. No origin. The hull paint matched hundreds of coastal vessels. The bunk material contained skin cells, wool, cheap detergent, old blood, and green wax from Eli's crayon. Information multiplied without becoming direction. He pressed two fingers against the evidence table. Aura offered less detail and more life. Fear did not remain conveniently inside objects.

Only the faint emotional pressure of many hands persisted—the clerk who wrote the routes, workers who tightened straps, children who gripped bed frames when engines started. One sensation differed. Cold. Not temperature. Anticipation. Someone had stood near the ledger imagining a place where the sea entered stone. Rine withdrew his hand.

"Seafoam was real to whoever wrote this," he said. Mara's gaze sharpened.

"Evidence or impression?"

"Aura impression. Not reliable enough for a warrant."

"Good distinction." The Seafoam team transmitted before noon. Their patrol boat had reached the receiving station and found it abandoned. The doors stood open. Refrigeration units still ran, preserving empty rooms. Six child-sized thermal coats lay folded on a bench. No children. No bodies. Inside the loading tunnel, a security camera had captured twelve seconds before its storage core was destroyed. The image showed a refrigerated crawler leaving the station two nights earlier.

A Dewgong pulled the lead line through shallow water while two masked handlers walked behind it. Three destination plates had been fixed to the crawler. Fuchsia. Seafoam. Cinnabar. Cassian had painted all three roads onto the same vehicle. Then Morrow emerged from Rine's shadow and stared at the frozen image. His grin vanished. The Ghost drifted closer to the screen, red eyes fixed not on the handlers but on the black space inside the crawler.

"What?" Rine asked. Morrow's gaseous body tightened. A thread of memory passed through their bond: darkness, confinement glass, the taste of medicine, and another Ghost somewhere beyond sight. Identify found what ordinary video analysis had missed. Spectral distortion detected Likely cause: Ghost-type concealment technique Pattern family: Haunter Someone had hidden the crawler from psychic surveillance. Someone with a Haunter had traveled with the six children.

Lyra's Kadabra watched the distortion and lifted his spoon.

"Cassian knows the Gym is searching," she said.

"This screen is another message." Mara enlarged the final frame. For less than a second, the crawler's rear lamp illuminated a road marker cut into volcanic rock. Route 20 lay behind it. The vehicle had already passed Seafoam. It was moving east. Toward Cinnabar. The three roads had narrowed to one. Rine looked back toward Milo's room, though two walls separated them. He had not promised to bring Eli home. The absence of a promise did not make the next distance easier.