Hoenn had been green to the point of indecency. Orre was the price the world paid for it.
The change came an hour past the border, and it came all at once. The green didn't fade so much as give up — the trees thinned, the grass went to scrub, the scrub went to nothing, and what was left was a country the color of old rust. Dust and cracked flats and bare rock. Roads that ran straight for miles and then simply stopped, as if whoever built them had run out of reasons. There were no Gyms out here. No League worth the name. No Nurse Joy at the edge of a clean little town with a smile and a machine that took the hurt away — out here you bought your healing from whoever owned the equipment and had the nerve to overcharge for it, and you paid whatever they asked, because the alternative was worse.
The deeper the road went, the thinner the rules got, until there was only the oldest one left, the one that had been running things long before anyone thought to write laws down. Be useful. Be feared. Or be gone.
The man crossing it was not Enzo. Not on the surface.
He had put the mask on before he ever reached Orre — Giovanni's mask, the same one that had carried him clean through Galar. It changed his face completely, and it did it so seamlessly that no one who looked at him found a thing to question. Not a man wearing something. Just a different man. That was the entire point of it, and in all the time he'd owned the thing it had never once failed him. The only piece of himself it left untouched was his voice.
The car had been driving for hours.
Whoever was behind the wheel hadn't said a word the whole way, and Enzo hadn't asked for one. He watched Orre slide past the window instead — the green long gone, the land run down to rust and dust and distance — and let the silence sit. When the car finally slowed and stopped, in the middle of nothing in particular, the driver spoke for the first and only time.
"Out," he said.
Enzo got out. The car was already pulling away, back the way it had come, when the call came in.
His device buzzed against him — an unknown channel, no name and no number on it. He answered without speaking. A man's voice came down the line, calm and unhurried, run through something that flattened it beyond any hope of recognition, the kind of voice that could have belonged to anyone.
"You'll get a message," the voice said. "Coordinates. Be there by sixteen hundred. Your partner will pick you up. "
The line went dead before he could answer, which was the point. A moment later, the message arrived: a set of coordinates and nothing else.
He stood alone on an empty road in a country with no rules and looked at the dot on the screen for a second. Then he took Corviknight's ball from his belt, sent the bird up into the wide, empty Orre sky, and climbed onto its back to let it carry him there.
No one beneath them for miles would see a black shape cross that sky, and he didn't waste a thought on it. He set down outside a town that looked half-abandoned, recalled the bird before anyone could wander close, and walked the rest of the way in on foot.
The bar was the only door in the place still open.
Inside, it smelled of diesel and dust and coffee that had been burning on its plate for hours. The light was bad on purpose. The clientele matched the light — a handful of people who didn't look up when the door opened and didn't look up when it closed, the kind who'd learned that in Orre the safest thing your eyes could do was stay on your own glass. Behind the counter a woman polished one that was already clean and watched nothing at all, with the practiced blankness of someone who'd decided years back that seeing things was how a person got hurt. A Bonsly sat on the bar top near her elbow, squat and drowsy. It was the one thing in the whole grim room that looked like it belonged to someone who cared whether it lived.
Enzo took the table in the back corner, the one with its spine to the wall and a clean line on the door, and ordered something he had no intention of drinking. Then he checked the time and found what he'd expected to find. Early. He was always early. He'd take being the one waiting over the one waited for any day of the week.
So he put the hour to use. The TR Device woke under his hand, and through the buried Rocket channels, he bought a briefing package on Orre and began, quietly, to learn the region he'd just dropped into.
It made for grim reading. Black markets that didn't bother to hide, because there was no one left to hide from. Colosseums where the only law that applied was the one that said the winner kept walking. A League presence so thin it was a rumor more than a fact, stretched to nothing across a region nobody with power had ever decided was worth the trouble of governing. And threaded all the way through it, named only in the gaps between other things, the reason he'd come. Cipher. The briefing didn't have much to say about them directly, and that told him plenty on its own. The whole region read like a blind spot — a place the rest of the world had quietly agreed not to look at — and the longer he read, the more obvious it became that a blind spot was exactly where something like Cipher would choose to grow.
At ten to four, the door opened, and a woman walked in without ordering anything.
He noticed her before he placed her, the way you notice a predator before you've worked out what kind it is. It was in how she moved. She came through the room without hurry and without hesitation, took it in with one unbroken sweep that pretended not to be a sweep, and crossed to a table well away from his — the opposite corner, her back to the wall, a clean line on the door. The same seat he'd picked, for the same reasons. She sat the way professionals sit, settled and easy, hands where she could use them, already finished reading the room before most people would have finished walking into it.
Then the bad light caught her face, and the day dropped out from under him.
He knew her.
Elanor Grace. Elise's older sister.
For a moment, he did not allow any part of his body to reach, the whole shape of it landed at once. One of the strongest squad leaders in all of Team Rocket — that alone would have been a problem. But it was the rest of it that turned in his chest like a blade.
Her rank had been the thing, once, in a life only he remembered. The permission slip that hung over a spoiled girl's cruelty on an island where a defective material grunt had no rank, no protection, and no one at all. Her sister was a Squad Leader. Ariana's faction. That single sentence had meant Elise walked the base like gravity was something that happened to other people, that staff looked the other way when she crossed a line, that her cruelty came stamped and approved before she ever raised a hand. It had meant that when a friend stepped between Elise and a boy who couldn't fight back, and took what was meant for that boy, nobody came. He could still hear his own voice breaking on it, all these years and one whole life later. Please. Help me carry him. He could still see her turn her back and walk away. Ronnie had died on that plateau, grinning through the pain with a single word left in him — Run — and Enzo had carried the body across the ice alone, and that had been the last thing the old world ever taught him about who got helped and who didn't.
He had fixed it. In this life. Ronnie was alive now, alive and loyal as bedrock, and Enzo had taken Elise apart with his own two hands for what she'd done in a past she would never know had happened.
And now the older Grace — the one whose name had signed all of it into being — was sitting twelve feet away in a dead-end bar at the edge of the world, and she was his partner.
Lucky me, he thought, flat and dry and entirely without humor.
Not a flicker of it touched him. There was nothing for it to touch — the mask handled his face, and fifteen years of practice handled the rest. To her, he was a stranger she'd been told to expect, and that was all he was ever going to be.
She didn't get up. She didn't look at him a second time. She took a device from inside her jacket, worked it briefly, and a heartbeat later his own buzzed once against his chest — a message routed clean through the link Ariana had handed her.
At the rendezvous point.
He let a moment pass, the way a man who hadn't already been watching her would have. Then he stood, crossed the room, and sat down across from her without being asked and without a word of greeting.
She let him settle before she said anything, studying him over the table the way you'd study a tool someone had handed you without asking whether you wanted it.
"Elanor Grace," she said at last.
"Nox," he answered.
She nodded. The name went into whatever ledger she kept behind those eyes, and the subject moved on. "They told me you were from Shadow Unit," she said. Then, she looked at the coffee cup Enzo brought, which he hadn't touched. "So tell me, Nox," she added, almost to herself. "A man orders a drink and doesn't touch it, he's either nervous or careful. You don't look nervous."
"Careful," Enzo said.
"Then maybe we'll get along." She didn't sound like she believed it. "For the record, I didn't ask for a partner. I've been working on this alone, and it's going well. The boss decided I needed company, Ariana agreed, and here you are." Her eyes finally came up to his and stayed there. "I don't know what you can do. I don't especially care. What I care about is that you don't get in my way and you don't get me killed — and where we're going, those turn out to be the same sentence."
"Then I'll make it simple," he said. "I'm here for one thing. We take the data Cipher's sitting on, and we get out of Orre. Everything else is noise."
For the first time, something in her shifted — not warmth, nothing so soft as that, only the small recalibration of one professional catching the outline of another. She held his eyes a beat longer, hunting them for the lie, and didn't find it, because for once there wasn't one there to find.
"Good," she said. "Then we understand each other."
She pushed her chair back but didn't stand yet.
"Next stop is Pyrite," she said. "There's a market. We buy you a way in — a pass, something that puts you near Cipher without anyone stopping to ask what you actually are. You don't just walk up to people naked. You get invited, slowly, and then you try to survive the invitation." She stood now, and her voice dropped a degree colder. "One thing before we go. If you make a mess in there — if you panic, or improvise, or do anything I didn't tell you to do — I will not blow my cover to pull you out. The second you stop being useful, you're a stranger I've never met. Are we clear?"
"Clear," Nox said.
"Then let's go," she said.
Outside, the light was thin and grey, a sun hung in the dust without warming a single thing under it. Elanor took a ball off her belt and threw it, and a Tropius unfolded into the open — broad-backed, calm, the heavy fruit at its neck swaying as it settled.
Enzo's hand went to his own belt out of pure reflex. To Corviknight. To the fast black wings that had carried him always.
And stopped.
It came over him. He could not use Corviknight. The logic ran ahead of him in a cold straight line, and he hated every step of it. A Corviknight that size was rare, and it was memorable, and the woman standing three feet away forgot nothing. If she saw the bird now, she would remember the bird. And if she ever saw it again, she would put it together in a single heartbeat, and the whole thing would come apart at once. Not Corviknight. Not Houndoom. Not Krookodile. Not the Gengar folded down invisible in his shadow together with Sableye. Every Pokémon that had ever made him a thing worth fearing had, in the space of one woman walking into a bar, become a confession he could not afford to make.
His hand drifted, and came back with a different ball. Zweilous spilled out into the dust instead — two heavy heads, dark armor, blinking up at an unfamiliar sky. A Pokémon she had never seen the real Enzo use, so she couldn't trace him.
Elanor watched him take a beat too long over a single Poké Ball and read it as exactly the wrong thing. "You've always been this slow?" She was already swinging up onto the Tropius, unbothered. "Forget it. Get on — we'll lose the whole afternoon if you ride that thing. Mine's faster."
He recalled Zweilous and climbed up behind her without a word, and let her go on thinking it had been hesitation. Better that than the truth.
For the first time in longer than he could remember, he felt the real cost of this job settle onto him, and it wasn't his strength. It was the freedom to use it. He still had every weapon he had ever built. He simply couldn't draw a single one of the good ones without handing her the one answer that could get him killed out here.
The Tropius climbed, and Orre opened up beneath them and kept opening. Brown went to browner. The half-dead town was gone within minutes, swallowed whole, until there was nothing left in any direction but rock and dust and the occasional bone-white road running out to places no one had any reason to be.
"Different from Kanto," Elanor said over her shoulder, not really to him.
"Yeah," Enzo said. "It is."
He didn't give her more than that, and she didn't seem to want more. They flew in silence until the emptiness finally produced something — a hard edge breaking the horizon, buildings wedged into old played-out mine country, and rising over all of it, impossible to miss, a wide white dome catching the dead light like a tooth in a grey mouth.
He knew it. Not from the life he had already lived, he had never set foot in this region, in any version of himself. He knew it the way he knew far too many things — from a screen, in a different world, a lifetime and a universe ago. An old mining town, where mining had long since stopped being the worst thing happening in it. The dome gave it away before anything else could.
Pyrite.
They came down short of the gates and walked the rest.
The town had more life in it than the dead road had promised, and not one piece of it was the good kind. People moved heads-down, hands close, eyes that swept across a stranger and priced him out in a single pass — threat, or profit, and nothing in between, because nothing in between had ever done anyone here any good. There were children who should have been somewhere else, and the plain fact of the place was that there was nowhere else to send them. It was the underside of every clean city he'd ever worked in, laid bare with no city built on top to hide it.
"Follow me," Elanor said, low, not turning her head. "Don't talk to anyone. Don't look at anyone too long. Don't give a single one of them a reason to remember your face."
He followed. He didn't talk. But he looked — not at the faces, at the place itself — at a whole town that had been left to grind itself down to nothing with no one ever once coming for it. No League. No Joy. No Jenny. No one. He knew exactly what this was. He knew it from the inside. He had been one of the people a place like this used up and thrown away, and the only reason he was walking through it now was that he was wearing another man's face.
Elanor stopped at a building that announced nothing about itself — a slab of grey concrete with a door like every other door on the street, which was the point. Inside, a stairwell descended, and it went farther than the building above had any business allowing. Past one sublevel, toward a second, the air changing as they descended: warmer first, then suddenly cold and processed, threaded with the low hum of equipment that did not belong anywhere this poor. Somewhere below them a heavy machine cycled and went quiet. The deeper they went, the more the cheap, abandoned skin of the street above peeled back to show something underneath it that was neither cheap nor abandoned at all.
At the bottom of the last flight, Elanor lifted a card to a reader set into the wall.
The lock released. A steel door waited past it. She knocked. Two, then three, an interval that meant something to someone. A slot scraped open at eye height, and a pair of eyes appeared in it, pale and unfriendly, and moved over her slowly, unhurried, the look of a man with all the time in the world and nothing to lose by taking it. The eyes dropped to the card she raised. Then they slid past her, to him, and stopped.
"And him." It wasn't a question. The voice behind the door was flat and bored, with not a gram of warmth in it. "Where's his card?"
For a long second, nobody moved, and Enzo understood, with perfect clarity, that there were a great many ways this went wrong from right here.
"He's with me," Elanor said.
The eyes stayed on him. They held a beat past comfortable.
Then the man behind the door let out a slow breath through his nose.
"Fine," he said, and the bolts began to draw back, heavy and final, one after another after another. "Your funeral."
The door swung inward on the cold, the hum, and a low red light beyond it.
Elanor stepped through without a backward glance, already someone else, already gone into the part she'd been playing long before he ever arrived. Enzo took one breath of the dead Pyrite air at his back and followed her in.
Behind the mask, behind the borrowed face and the borrowed name and the team he couldn't use, Enzo felt the long con of the next month close around him like a door of its own.
No way out now but through.
It had started.
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