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Glen awoke. In a flash, he had his pocket knife pressed hard against the throat of the... woman, from the look of the breasts hanging in front of his preternaturally alert eyes... who likewise had a blade on his throat. She gasped, but grinned, purple-dyed hair hanging low like vines over her bright, green eyes. "You're beautiful," Glen breathed, but didn't relax his grip.

"I know," she answered in a silky, soprano voice. "Which means I have the upper hand on two marks."

Glen smirked. If she was willing to play, so was he. "I'm flattered. Go on."

"You see, my bellsprout is positioned perfectly to sever the stem of your bulbasaur's bulb from its back, crippling and probably killing it."

He received a quick visual update from Allanon. "Thanks for the anatomy lesson. That would be interesting and I'd be concerned if my abra weren't prepared to rip your bellsprout's head off."

Her well made-up grin didn't falter. "Interesting is right. Just as long as he's aware that my scyther is prepared to turn him into a shishkabob."

The black-haired boy just lowered his eyelids wryly. "Also interesting. Then it should be warned that my raichu in the tree above it wouldn't take kindly to that in the least and might act out... eclectically."

She frowned. This was starting to get ridiculous. "Well... likewise interesting. Your raichu might be deterred by the drowzee who's ready to separate his lungs from the rest of him."

"Seriously?" She nodded. Glen sighed, and said, almost as though he was admitting something, "Well, that's even more interesting, because my bulbasaur is prepared to snap her neck."

The girl looked behind her incredulously. The anteater-like neck on her pokemon was collared by muscular, verdant vines. "Damn it," she exhaled exasperatedly. "Well..." She tried to come up with something else, rolled her eyes, and muttered. "I have that kid tied up in a tree with a remote explosive duct-taped to his hands. I can assume his pokeballs are...?"

"... in my pocket, yeah." The two of them shifted the grips on their knives, angrily renewed whatever pressure had slacked, then calmed down again. Glen tried to find something to look at other than her eyes. And her breasts. A revealing body suit didn't help the second endeavor. "Well, this is awkward. Want... to do introductions?"

She smoothed her hair with her free hand, bobbing in her crouch over him. "Um... sure. I'm Rachel, and these are Demetre, Heracles, and Ceres." She pointed to the grass type, bug type, and psychic type, successively.

"Roman mythology? Nice. I'm Glen, and these are Ambrosia, Allanon, and Synapse."

"No pattern?"

"Not really."

A voice slipped into Glen's mind. The child is distressed. Allanon didn't sound too concerned, though.

"Okay... how about this? You let me up, and we'll both put our knives away. Then, we'll call off our pokemon, one by one, until everyone is safe." She shot him a sardonic look. "Well, relatively, I mean."

"Fine. Then, I'll untie the kid and you can give him his pokeballs back, but I'm keeping his hands bound."

Glen glared at her indignantly. "He's ten years old, and he'll listen to me if I tell him to keep them contained."

"Which means you might have him set loose whatever pokemon he has. I wasn't born yesterday," she hissed.

The boy narrowed his gaze yet further. "Fine." In a series of movements not unheard of in ballet, Glen thrust himself away from the tree and to his feet while keeping his knife in position. She flowed backwards and away, and then they both put the knives in their respective pockets. Locking eyes with his attacker, Glen said, "Amber, let the drowzee go."

"Demetre, get off the saur." The two pokemon slowly and warily complied. One by one, they disentangled themselves and took up defensive formations around their respective masters. Glen finally had a chance to see Zach. The boy was hanging from his feet with his hands bound tightly around his middle and strapped to a blinking device of some kind. The assassin walked briskly over to him and cut him down, spinning him as he fell to undo the bonds and setting him on his feet before immediately wrapping his hands back together as Glen put the pokeballs in the boy's pocket. "Don't worry about things; it's all under control. Just stand aside, and I'll take care of it." Zach nodded uncertainly, stiffly refusing to acknowledge how much it had hurt to be tossed around like that. Even a ten-year-old has an ego that can be hurt.

Everyone was back in position. A slight breeze shifted around the two combatants as they spoke. It was a cool, morning breeze; the type that reminds you that you shouldn't have slept on the dew. The leaves whispered. "So," Glen began, "what brings you here?"

She was quite frank in her reply. "There's a bounty on the boy's body and your head."

This did not surprise Glen. He had known it was coming. "And the reason you didn't kill me in my sleep?"

"Is my own."

"I'll have to admit, I am one sexy son of a gun. So you're not working for the Rocketeers, then."

"Nope."

"Which means that Pokenomics has a Rocketeer contact." It was the only reason the corporation would be finally sending someone after all this time.

"That's news, but it doesn't exactly surprise me."

"So you clearly left me alive to talk. Why?"

"For other reasons, as well, but those can wait. Why are you travelling with the boy?"

Glen's gaze hardened. "Because he's been manipulated by his father to become a genetic experiment for an evil corporation and I feel like he needs a guardian."

Damn it, Glen, is it worth it? Allanon seethed. Glen would have caught his breath in other situations. Why did he tell people the truth when it sounded cool and he wanted to make an impact statement? The truth is only for those who need it. And she was not one of those.

Her eyes became steel. "Fair enough. Where were you taking him?'

"With me," he shot defensively, offensively, combatively.

"Fine. Does he know, or do you know, that his father is in prison awaiting a trial that's been rigged by a corrupt jury and judge, will be sentenced to a maximum-security facility to avoid outside contact, and then will be brutally tortured until his son is returned to Pokenomics' laboratories?"

If possible, Glen's eyes became darker. Storms were birthed and destroyed in those deep, sapphire eyes. Diamond could not have scratched them. "I was not aware, although I suppose I should have suspected it."

"My dad?" Zach cried. Both combatants put up a hand to silence him. He clenched his fists in their bonds. "No! I wanna know!"

"He's safe for now," Rachel said, "and when I get you back to him, he'll be even safer, and free."

"Take me back!" the boy shouted.

Glen rounded on him. "No! She's lying."

No, she's not.

"She's not telling you everything."

That's better.

"Your father won't appreciate having been put in captivity just for letting you out of his sight for a few days. He'll threaten to expose the company, and they will have him assassinated, no doubt by this very woman. The further away from your dad you are, the safer he is. And if you go to them unwillingly, they'll kill him out of coldhearted indiscrepency for human life. It's who they are."

"What give you the right to judge a corporation?" Rachel asked fervidly. "Who says that's how they operate?" she demanded.

"I do! I do, because I know about their research. Have you read any of it, or are you just a hired killer? What's your motivation for being here? Bounty? If you get off our case, I can give you something you've never had in your life."

The space between them would have vaporized steel. "And what is that?"

Slowly, so as not to startle her, he went to his shoulder bag and withdrew his pokedex. It was a shimmering, neon blue-on-black contraption, meticulously shined despite the scratches from years of use. It was much larger than the one he had given Zach, nearly the size of a folded sheet of paper. This was clearly an item of great personal value. "I can give you knowledge about the origins of life, details about pokemon behavior that has eluded science for centuries, and all of the most recent findings about the limits of ether." He looked at her significantly and offered the device.

She shot him a dead-eyed look. "So you can give me what you've observed about your little trio here and some Big Bang fan-fiction?"

His ears burned, but he switched his tone to something cruel. "That, too, but I was trying to more subtley communicate, with the whole 'limits of ether thing' that I know why your brother is dead. I suppose that's of no interest to you."

She sucked air through her teeth and snarled. "How could you possibly know about him?" She shook her head and threw her hand out in front of her like she was cutting his words. "That doesn't matter. I know why you were kicked out of your lab, murderer!" He hadn't killed her brother; it was a different man, but the hit was no less potent. He fired back just as fiercely.

"I can tell you that he tortured children!"

"I can tell you your family never forgave you!"

"I can describe the looks in their eyes as he put needles in them!"

"I can remind you of the all the pokemon you put down who witnessed it!"

Every accusation was like a blow to the stomach of those speaking. The ensemble around them was affected, as well. Each sentence meant a step back. Each word meant wider eyes. For the fighters, every incrimination was an icy, ugly finger prodding their hearts. It was an icy dance between agony and cold rationale.

"I can..." He seethed through empty eyes, remembering.

"I can..." She choked on a sob. Normally, they would have been questioning one another's knowledge. Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately, each had a psychic pokemon constantly analyzing the truth behind what was said. Niether put up a red flag. Everyone who was not the two of them was staring, confused, no longer certain of the full identity of the ones to whom they had bonded.

Rachel spoke first, through the tears running down her cheeks. "I hurt people to defend his honor! I killed someone who challenged it!"

"I... They were all just lab animals," he muttered quietly. "They were going to be killed anyway," he tried to reason. "I mean... they shouldn't have died, but... I... It was an accident." He shook his head, but for once, it didn't clear his mind. He was explaining to his pokemon and Zach, but didn't look at any of them. "I didn't mean to kill him. We were just... playing around, you know?"

"He used to tell me, before he stopped talking to us, how great it was in the lab. And he would smile. Like he enjoyed it." She was disgusted and repulsed, by herself and by the brother she would never be able to castigate for his sins.

The two of them stood there, panting in the pale, gray dawn, demanding control over themselves. Someone watching could see the walls of thought in the clearing; the circle around the two of them, and the line between them. It was a strange kind of isolation, from everything else in the world. Maintaining integrity at the cost of intimacy.

It had always been this way, for Glen. He considered himself to be an impenetrable fortress, with hesitant drawbridges, few windows, and a keep set in steel. Even Amber had trouble getting in when the two of them first met, despite the saur's personable nature. Glen had learned not to let people in. When you let people in, he knew from experience that they would repel you for their own good and use you while they could. So here, surrounded by these walls, he felt comfortable. In his memory, in his isolation, he was strangely soothed.

Zach turned his head one way, then another. "Glen?" he asked hesitantly. "You... killed innocent pokemon?"

He nodded. "It was... standard laboratory procedure for creatures who had undergone too much mental stress. The guy's death... wasn't pretty."

"You didn't have to do it," Rachel reminded him maliciously. "It was a subjective decision, based on your personal testimony alone. You didn't want it to ever get publicized that you killed him; just that he died. And it didn't. But I know, Glen."

"How?" he shouted suddenly, ripping his head back around to her. "How could you possibly know?" Zach was afraid of the fire in that voice. He took a step back. Amber, though, had heard it before. He ambled over, watched warily by every eye, and gently wrapped a vine around the boy's leg in a hug. The killing had never bothered Ambrosia. He just loved Glen, and that was all. Their bond was one that had broken down castle walls, and it was not one easily severed.

She sniffed indignantly, trying to ignore the snot in her nose from weeping. "I saw you kill him."

"It was an accident," he insisted darkly.

"It wasn't that bad. Not many of them saw it. But you panicked. Initiated the codes for termination. Could have hurt your reputation." She was trying to smile at him, to be superior, and he would have none of it. He held out a hand; immediately, vines wrapped around it and the bulbasaur hoisted himself into his arms, then encircled his chest with vines. Glen stroked the flat head gratefully. He had someone, here, and so far, none of her pokemon had moved to her.

"Could have put me in jail for manslaughter," he mumbled.

She was obviously hurt that her companions wouldn't comfort her. Don't be fooled, came Allanon's calm voice as he noticed. She has help; she's only acting. The drowzee. Glen retracted his assumption. Clearly, she had a reason to want to falsely engender sympathy in him. Probably just for the psychological hit. What a jerk. "I was spying with a magnemite, because I wanted to break in. The electromagnetic pulse sent out to deactivate the electric pokemon in the room killed it. I saw you do it."

"So what do you want me to do now? You know your brother was working for Pokenomics. You know what they do to creatures, to children. Are you going to feed them another child for some money? How much are they paying you?"

"Five hundred thousand," she answered without hesitating. "More than your life." She glanced at Zach. "More than his. They're just an employer to me."

Glen raised his eyebrows. You seem to be worth quite a bit. "Well, you know you won't get him today. Leave. Get out of here, go, get lost!" he commanded in his most deathly tone. It sent chills down Zach's spine and at least got Rachel to hide a flinch. "You won't have him! I'll see you the next time you're too cowardly to kill me!"

"I knew you worked with him!" she said, collecting her three pokemon in their pokeballs and readying a smoke bomb. He crouched defensively around Amber and his pokedex. "I kept you alive for that! Next time, you're dead!" She threw down the bomb and was gone, the only sign of her leaving a rustling in the leaves.

Slowly, angrily, Glen put his pokedex back in his bag. He then stripped the tape off Zach's wrists, making the kid whimper quietly. "I'm sorry about that," he said. "She'll be back, though, and we need to gain as much ground as possible before our next encounter. If we're lucky, she'll hold off until we get to a city."

Zach nodded, but watched the older boy unsteadily and fingered the pokeballs in his pocket. It was very difficult for him to know what to think at that point. He had never seen Glen honestly angry in the few days he had known him, and he was sure he never wanted to see it again. The older boy could apparently go from playful banter with an assassin to being close to tears from a memory to a frozen, murderous rage. And he was a killer. And, apparently, a liar.

They went back to the main road, now that both the trees and the open air were equally dangerous. There were a few other travellers, and Glen was perfectly willing to stop now and then for Zach to battle, especially because he won more than he lost and the older boy had stocked up on various potions, so even when he did lose, it wasn't game over for his pokemon.

Though they both put on a mask of having a decent relationship, doubt and fear were festering in Zach's mind. He trusted Glen with everything he had. He had to trust Glen, because Glen was the only person he knew who wouldn't hurt him, because the boy had promised that. But... Glen frightened him, at the same time. He was not mentally stable, and the tension between them that engendered was thick.

It took nearly the entire day for Zach to get up the courage to ask his question. Glen had recovered unnaturally quickly from the verbal onslaught he had taken from Rachel, which only added to the younger boy's reticence. His pokemon, when he had them out, could sense it. Jerome stayed closer to him than usual and would occasionally cast a suspicious glance at Glen or one of his pokemon. There was a definite schism in the group.

Finally, though, Zach could contain himself no longer. "Why did you lie to me?" he asked suddenly, as the sun was beginning to set behind the mountains far, far in the distance. He didn't ask it angrily; he asked it because he was hurt and confused. Such had seemed to become the norm for him over the past few days.

Glen seemed as though he had been expecting this. "I..."

Zach pressed before he had a chance to answer. "You... you said that you got kicked out of your lab 'cause you were using lab stuff for yourself and... Amber. But you didn't." Niether looked at the other. Glen was staring straight ahead as he waited for Zach to finish, and the younger boy was looking down at the ground. "You got kicked out 'cause you..." His voice fell to a whisper. "You killed a person and... pokemon."

Despite a quick glance from Ambrosia and a mental tap on the shoulder from the abra on his back, Glen said, "I didn't lie," he said quiescently, remembering. "I really did get kicked out for the materials."

"Yeah, but no one cared by that time, did they? That was just... something else, as long as they were kicking you out."

"No," Glen corrected smoothly, "that's wrong. I was officially fired for using lab materials for my own, personal interests. There was no reason to fire me. Technically, I had committed manslaughter, but it wasn't my fault, and the lab coordinator and manager both knew that. However, they couldn't keep me on." Zach watched him and listened quietly while Glen explained himself. Even while he did, though, Zach wondered how much of it he could trust. Despite that, he let the older boy continue. It was all he could do.

Is it worth it? "The papers just said that my partner... my friend... had been killed in a horrible accident and a bunch of pokemon had been put down as a result, but too many people in the lab knew the details from the surveillance tapes, and they could not afford to keep me on in case word ever got out. They had to fire me for some reason, and I had left some of the powder from crushing a couple of Amber's seeds on my bench the day they told me." He was still staring straight ahead. He was not pleased with how things had turned out. "I don't know whose idea it was to turn the sequencing method I invented into a research project. That was just a parting shot, I think, to remind me of what they could do to me. One of a few."

Zach nodded to himself after a little while. It was a lot for him to take in, and what's more, something was tickling the back of his brain. "You... said you worked with Rachel's brother, right?" Glen nodded. "And... he worked for... Pokenomics, right?" Another nod, this one somewhat stiffer. "So then... did you work for Pokenomics?"

And, finally, a slight jerking of the head down. "Yep. Kind of. I was supposed to intern for them the summer after the accident, so I had been going over there occasionally to see how things were run. They really liked me, so... I saw some things they probably weren't happy about me seeing, once I was fired." It had clearly been a long time since he had thought about this at all. "I didn't take the internship, though, and that made them even angrier. I got blacklisted from ever working in a lab." He quivered slightly with rage, then got calm again. Allanon was good at what he did. "They didn't want me sharing their secrets, or what they did. They made me swear not to expose them. Signed papers and everything. I spent the first year out running from their agents with Amber and then Syn, here. They're dangerous.

"Eventually, they gave up on me." He was lost in the reverie, and Zach listened like a little boy would to the adventure tales his dad told. "They figured out that I wasn't going to expose them. They figured out that I had actually kind of appreciated what they were doing, even if it was disgusting. I mean," he laughed ironically, "I'm a scientist. To me, it makes sense that they would do these things, even to kids. I mean... yes, they were children, but these were all children who weren't going to have any other place in the world. Street urchins. Dumpster babies raised in the lab. Unwanted children, that's what they were. So we gave them a reason to be wanted, and..."

"You told Rachel they screamed. Did you... did you even mean all that stuff about... you know, saving kids?" Zach said, shivering as the approaching night turned cold in the shadow of the far-off mountains.

"...kind of." He stalled significantly before sighing and deciding to give his answer. It was worth it. This kid had to trust him. "Look, I know it sounds cold, and I know it's terrible to do to another human being, but I'm a scientist. I have to learn things somehow. I looked at children kept in prison cells while I was there. I watched Rachel's brother come into the cages from the other side, grinning at those of us who were watching as the child screamed about the size of the needle he was carrying. I talked to the kids. They said they hated it there, but they didn't want to leave. They were afraid to leave, because in every case, what they had there was better than what they had come from. Either that, or they didn't know an ‘out there' existed. They had been trained and taught that this was their life, and the way I saw it, that was fine. You aren't depriving someone if they're ignorant. I mean, think about it. If you never knew a grocery store existed, how could you possibly feel oppressed because you couldn't get to a grocery store? It's not torture to the children, because it's not as though they wanted to escape. They were allowed to play when they weren't being tested, they had a chef cooking fairly decent meals for them, and they even had a caretaker who I talked to. She really loved them; she looked after them, wiped noses, you know. Mothered them.

"I wanted to experiment on them. I wanted to because you can't really learn about human beings using rats and machops. Say what you will, they're too far phylogenically removed for anyone to get really accurate results. Think about it. Whenever scientists want to test something, they have to use either normal-type pokemon or rats or chimpanzees or what-have-you, because a normal-type pokemon and a human being are so closely related. But remember that whole thing with LSD a few years ago?"

Zach shook his head. His attention was rapt on Glen while he talked. It hurt to listen, but he wanted more. He wanted to know about this; it was fascinating, and painful, and wonderful, and horrible. Children saved from the streets to be used to help people? It sounded like such a great thing. Maybe not the children born and raised in captivity... he had heard that term before, as it jumped out of his subconscious. That sounded too much like a zoo, but the other ones... surely that was a good thing?

"Well, anyway, scientists tested LSD, which is a very powerful, very dangerous, psychedelic drug, on a bunch of rattatas and mankeys, and figured out that besides making them randomly evolve and devolve on very rare occasions, it made them immune to pain and didn't do much else. The best part, though, was that they were fully functional. Their nervous system wasn't shut down; just pain receptors. It was an experiment in the name of war. Scientists reasoned that they could inject soldiers with LSD and make them impervious to pain, thus far more able to keep fighting after being wounded in battle." He grimaced slightly, remembering the reports he had read. "Unfortunately, it also causes hallucination and a loss of coordination. At the doses some of the soldiers were given, their brains never recovered. Most are in mental institutions, waiting to finally die. Sure, they couldn't feel pain, but a soldier without depth perception and who's busy talking to his fingers is no good in battle, especially if he doesn't recover afterwards. They managed to get better results with lower dosages, but no one responded like the pokemon had. It's not the first time science has failed so epically, but it was a terrible thing."

All of a sudden, Glen stopped talking. He had been going at a steady pace, speaking distinctly as they went and trying to explain things properly to Zach, who was still enthralled by all he was hearing, but when he stopped, a look of dawning realization and black terror swept briefly over his features. Had Allanon moved? Zach couldn't tell. He was pretty sure the abra had spoken to Glen, though. "Of course," the older boy whispered. "I knew it. I knew... Holy damn."

"What?" Zach said, concerned. "What is it?"

Glen glanced over at him, then back to the road, chin held in a hand, mouth slightly agape as he thought. "Should I tell him?" he whispered. His three pokemon looked at him. All of them nodded.

"Tell me what?"

The older boy hesitated, his blue eyes troubled. He pulled Zach over to the side of the road and sat him down, sitting down next to him. "I would suggest getting someone to hold onto for this," he said. There was a darkness in his vision unlike the darkness Zach had seen before. It was one of doubt, hatred, and pain, all mixed into a miasma if recalcitrance and discomfort. Jerome came over without even being called and crawled into Zach's lap.

"What... am I?" he asked. He knew it had to do with that, somehow. It was the only thing that could have Glen so distraught.

"That, I'm still not a hundred percent sure on, though I have a better idea, now. But..." he trailed off. "I don't get it," he said, talking to himself. "You read all these books and watch these movies about creating super soldiers, and every time, it's like, ‘Why do they use kids and prisoners of war? Why don't they get consent? Surely these people wouldn't all be turning on the scientists if they had been told beforehand.' It makes sense to tell someone what's happening to them, and I don't get why people don't do that. It would make everything so much easier."

Zach put his arms tightly around Jerome. Super soldiers?

"This is... this is so cliché, it's gone beyond not being funny back into being funny again. I had thought, at first, that you had been targetted and experimented on so that Pokenomics could just try to figure out how to draw out a human being's ether. It would be incredibly useful, so I wasn't against it, even if it's a huge violation of privacy. It would be pretty cool, actually, like you said." He grinned suddenly and made a theatrical gesture like he was shooting someone. "Just to be able to shoot fireballs like that. It would be pretty freaking awesome. But that's the only reason they want you " the fireballs part."

"What... do you mean?"

Glen looked at him significantly. "They want to make you into something you're not, Zach, and I don't know how far they'll go to do that."

Zach began shivering and hugged Jerome even tighter. Something was clawing at the base of his heart; an icy feeling that had built up without warning and made him more afraid than he had ever been in his life. What was Glen talking about? "What do you mean? I don't wanna change! I like this!"

"I know, I know," Glen said soothingly, reaching over and putting a hand on Zach's trembling shoulder.

"Don't touch me!" he shouted suddenly, and shrunk away. Sam came down and landed on his shoulder, glaring at Glen. The younger boy didn't understand. What was he? And Glen had said he wanted to experiment, hadn't he? All of his excitement about hearing about the older boy had faded as swiftly as a dream, and what was left was anger, cold and bewildered. What if Glen had ended up working on him? What if he had never been fired? Would he be the one grinning while Zach was screaming?

Glen flinched, taken aback. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. Syn came over and stood between them. Amber had trundled over to sit beside Glen. The black hair swung back and forth as he shook his head. "I shouldn't tell you. They should have asked you before doing anything, but then again... they really couldn't." He drifted back to speaking to himself. "They would have had to inject probably before birth, if they really wanted it to work. None of the kids I saw had any signs of change. They needed kids at different stages of development."

Zach swallowed nervously. That was strangely comforting, though, to know it would have happened before he was born. He was still shivering, but he was recovering from his outburst. He really didn't know why he had shouted. It just... felt right. He was scared of Glen, and he had wanted Glen to back off, so he shouted. He didn't realize how much like a bark it had sounded. "So I'm not... I don't get it. I'm sorry I yelled." He wouldn't look at the older boy. Instead, he stroked Jerome as the small animal nuzzled against him.

Glen offered him a small smile in the failing light. "It's fine."

"I want to know." The young boy finally looked at him, fighting to keep a determined expression as he looked with his deep, deep blue eyes into Glen's.

The older boy caught his breath, then sighed and scratched at his head. "If that's what you want..." Zach nodded. It was. Therefore, Glen was willing to share. "You're turning into a super soldier, if you've been injected, which by now is about a ninety-eight percent chance in my eyes. Since human beings can't use ether, but pokemon are too unreliable in most cases to send into battle, especially with the advent of guns and the variability of pokemon body shapes, which, you know, keeps the military from having a good way to protect them on the battlefield, the next step is to put a human into battle who can use ether." He stopped and seemed to roll an idea around in his head, then nodded to himself. "Specifically, one who could use any of the elements interchangeably. Maybe one who could carry a set of stones with him and activate the different elements, then reactivate the stone and go back to normal." He looked to see if Zach had gotten the hint.

He had. "They're turning me into an eevee?" he breathed. Every pokemon but Allanon reacted in some way to that.

Glen nodded slowly. "I think so."

Zach swallowed. "So that... they can make me kill people... the way your pokemon can." One unexplained facet of pokemon battles is that in general, attacks that should kill and maim usually do not, especially when used on other pokemon. Science had decided this also was due to ether, using the phenomenon kind of like physicists use dark matter " anything unexplainable must be the result of ether. The fighter can hurt the opponent very badly, but not permanently, and the number of deaths in trainer battles is less than the number of people killed by lightning in a year. Not counting the ones Glen had caused, anyway.

Another nod. "Exactly." Glen's mind was back to the papers, and his expression faded to anger the more he remembered. Subject 46-A was one of three who survived in that set of experiments. The others who lived were subjects 31-B and 13-G, not that it mattered. His mind was just going through the results. Science rarely used such large numbers, but these had been expensive experiments that reportedly learned a lot. Twenty members of each of five groups. One hundred subjects. One hundred children. Or, as the paper called them, eevees. Ninety-seven had died. Ninety-seven bodies. Ninety-seven children's bodies. Ninety-seven tiny graves.

Don't break down in front of him. Don't talk out loud, either, you idiot! Al chastised as he started to open his mouth. I didn't mean cry, dumbass. I meant don't look like it. Keep him comforted. He's more important than you, and you know it.

Glen quickly schooled his expression. Allanon was right. He couldn't let Zach see how upset he was. His mind was at war though. Test subjects sometimes die. Children sometimes die. These children had been saved from lives of hate, or from death. They had nothing, they got nothing, except maybe a few years of free food, kind treatment, and sometimes, friendship. That's not so bad, right?

Amber could tell, despite his expression. The saur wrapped a comforting vine around his arm, and Glen rubbed it absentmindedly. He cleared his throat in the silence as the earth's shadow wreathed them both in darkness. "It may affect your mind, but I don't know how much. They'll want to keep you smart, but not too smart, and there's no preliminary way to test that. I don't know when you'll start changing; I would have thought it would have happened by now. I don't know the details of the drugs they used; it's really complicated." He was really just filling the air. "There's no way to reverse it, that's for sure. Your father, I think, wanted to make sure they couldn't get their hands on you. Somehow... he knew you'd be a success." Glen couldn't imagine the circumstances that had led one of the researchers to offer up his own son to such an experiment. "You need to be kept away from Pokenomics, whatever the case. They won't be kind if they recover you."

Zach had finally stopped shivering as his mind digested all of this information. He didn't want to believe it. It seemed unreal. Testing children... and his dad testing him, and sending him away, to save him. And he was supposed to be a soldier! He didn't want to fight in wars; he just wanted to train pokemon and battle and win championships. And when he got really good, maybe he could open a school for trainers, or something, but he didn't really think too far ahead; little kids aren't supposed to.

He kept squeezing Jerome, who kept holding him tight as well as the little creature knew how. He didn't want to change. He wanted to stay human. He liked himself the way he was. And Glen said it might affect his mind somehow. Was that why he had shouted? Was that why he was so good at befriending pokemon? Was... was that why he had let Syn kiss him the night before? Was he going to turn into a pokemon in his brain, as well? Sure, pokemon could be smart, but... he didn't want to be just eating and fighting all day! Eevees were just like dogs. They could follow simple commands; he knew! Then they ate and slept and pooped until they were called up again. Would he be like that?

He wished he hadn't snapped at Glen. He wanted the older boy to touch him again. He felt safe with Glen, even though he still wasn't sure why. At least Glen had told him the truth, even if he wasn't really sure he was happy he knew. What would he look like while it happened? It was scary, and he wanted someone to hold him and tell him it would be okay. That was one thing Glen hadn't said yet. He hadn't said it would be okay.

In a small voice, speaking into the rattata's fur, he asked, "I'll be safe with you guys, though, right? If that girl comes again, you can... you can protect me?"

Glen made the mistake of hesitating. "Of course." He smiled reassuringly, but Zach didn't feel reassured. Not in the least.

"How... strong is Pokenomics? They couldn't beat you, could they?"

Glen kept smiling. He didn't know how to recover from that mistake. "Really strong. Strong enough that if Rachel comes again, I'm going to do my very best to get her on our side. I think if I talk to her again, I might be able to do that. She's dangerous, though, so I can't say for sure. We want as many allies as we can get. Which is why we're still going to go to the mountains and get an absol."

While he was talking, he watched Zach gently put Jerome on the ground, stand up, and then sit down in his lap, all without looking at the older boy. "Wha... oh." He raised his eyebrows in surprise, but quickly understood. The boy needed human touch. It was partially because he was very slowly gaining animal characteristics and he had developed an instinctual, pack-mentality loyalty to Glen, the alpha, he knew, but it was mostly because people need to feel that other people are there for them. The older boy wrapped his arms around Zach's smaller body, and Amber softly let his arm go so he could.

They sat like that for several minutes. Everything in the world was silent except for their breathing. It was a ghostly night, with clouds drifting lazily across the moon that cast a purple glow on the billowing puffs as they rolled. A delicate breeze ruffled the boys' unkempt hair and brushed whatever exposed skin there was. Amber had to take Glen's hat to protect it, and he and Syn got the two humans to smile by wearing it and dancing around.

What Glen had not counted on was how cathartic it would be for him. He had gone a long time, he realized, without human contact. After being kicked out of the lab, his family had thoroughly shunned him - Pokenomics' display of power had been to show them what he had really done to get fired from his job. None of them forgave him for lying to the world, except his father, who would not forgive him in front of the family because his mother was so convinced of what he had done. She had never approved of his work, anyway. So as he sat there, he held Zach tight and rested his chin on the boy's head, both of them staring forward into nothing while thoughts drifted chaotically through their minds, each slowly soothed by the presence of the other. It was a slow crumbling of another wall, and Glen felt it like a burden relieved.

They didn't speak for the rest of the night, except when Glen had to eventually get up to do his shift on watch. But Zach had finally felt safe, while there. He had to stay with Glen, he knew. He couldn't leave him, now, because Glen knew what was wrong with him and maybe, maybe he could help him. Besides, all of Glen's pokemon were really, really smart. Amber was almost as smart as a person. If anyone could keep him thinking like a human, it was Glen. So as he went to sleep that night after taking his pokemon into their pokeballs, that thought was what he held onto to keep him warm.