Pokémon Azure

Chapter 27: The Black Box

(Jason Fremont)

"I mean, if I'm any kind of judge of 'shattering tech' sounds," Blake said, running a hand through his dark hair, "and I kind of am, dad in IT and all… it's all pretty hardcore wrecked."

"I believe you," Gav said, eyes scanning the distance in perpetual, slow sweeps. "You're right, then. We won't prioritize trying to salvage anything."

Jason couldn't feel his legs. He had a choice between pacing, standing still, sitting his ass down on the freezing stone, or crouching. He'd chosen crouching.

Zahlia's Gengar had been gone for two hours. All around him the others chose their own options, pacing, standing, sitting, crouching. Nine people existed in flavors of tense discomfort. Orion and Tim were the only two still missing. The rest of them had stopped to wait for Gengar's return, choosing an alcove off the main path. It was at least a mile away from where they'd been split up by teleportation, just in case.

Beth had reiterated that wild Psychic-types were almost certainly not the cause of this split. They had to have gotten close to something the syndicate didn't want them to find. After a brief and horrible argument about a potential bait-and-switch ("But what if that's only what they want us to think?") they'd finally put the topic to rest. Wyland's visions led them this way, so they had no choice but to trust what intel they had.

The current situation was all they had to talk about. In between long lapses of silence, people spoke up with new theories.

Gav was the next one to do so. "If it were me," he started slowly, rising from a crouch and shaking out his leg, "I wouldn't have a trap that only breaks up big groups of people who get too close. I'd have a trap that did that, sent me a notification whenever it went off, and if possible…" he kicked his leg against the frozen earth as if to wake it, "counted the number of people it teleported so it could send me that data, too."

Blake groaned like the very idea of such treacherous technology had just shaved years off his life. Gina cracked a tired, raw smile.

"I'm really glad you're on our side, then."

There were a few chuckles, but they were weak. Jason rubbed his nose and mouth with one hand, letting his eyes drift shut from sheer mental fatigue. If that sort of tech was possible to create, and if it had occurred to Gav within only a few hours as beneficial, they might very well be up against enemies who already knew they were coming.

Kaylee moved into Jason's line of sight, and he privately thought she looked how he felt. Her normally energetic, open expression was worn down and strained, a darkness behind her brown eyes.

It was no wonder. Her boyfriend was still missing, and beyond that, Orion too. The two of them might have had their differences after Orion returned, but Jason knew they were close.

She settled down next to him, opting for the ass-on-the-cold-ground method of passing the time. Jason watched her and waited for it, and sure enough, a second later she grimaced and joined him crouching instead. That made him utter a sound almost like a laugh, and the huffed exhalation drew her attention.

"You look how I feel," she said, and this time Jason did actually laugh, however weak a laugh it was.

"Back at you," Jason murmured, turning back to the others who were still busy being the opposite of busy.

"You holding up okay?" Kaylee asked him out of the blue. Jason turned back to look at her at once, but Kaylee was nodding a small greeting across the way to Zahlia.

Jason contemplated both his answer and the person who had asked. Dimly, as if recalling flashbacks of a different life, Jason imagined how he would have handled this question earlier. He wondered if Kaylee, always neck-in-neck with him for his title as top problem child, would ever have even asked.

"Alright," he said, not quite the truth, not exactly a lie. "You?"

"Meh," Kaylee said, apparently in more honest a mood than Jason was. It made him smile.

He turned back to face front and saw that Zahlia was crossing to join them. While he watched her approach, and Victoria huddling in concert with Gav, Beth and Blake, something occurred to Jason and was out of his mouth before he had time to polish it.

"Is it weird that what I mostly feel right now is proud of us? Because I do."

Kaylee frowned at the side of his face, and Jason finally gave up crouching, settling on the frozen stone and battling off a shiver. His legs screamed as he stretched them out.

"What I mean is… we are assuming there are enemy forces on the move right now, to head us off at the pass. Right?" He glanced to Kaylee, who nodded, some understanding crossing over her face now. "We probably completely borked our element of surprise. We don't have the recording equipment. Gotta almost wonder if it's worth it."

Kaylee's expression twisted into one of wry humor. "So you're proud of us for being clinically insane?"

Jason's chuckle was a little off-center. "I guess?"

"I understand," Zahlia said from over Jason's shoulder. He looked up at her, and her smile was so much like one he imagined an older sister would give. "We might be idiotic for pushing on. But it's what we do."

"Stupid brave," Kaylee summed up neatly.

Zahlia smiled and Jason huffed out another small laugh. The girls lapsed into slow, easy conversation, and Jason half-listened to them, part happy for the distraction, part unable to be completely distracted.

His mind kept wandering. The time crunch was on now, but they couldn't think of that. Priority one was finding their final two team members.

After that, though? Even without their camera equipment, Jason knew they still had to operate with the same goals in mind. They had to take as much evidence from this place as they could. They had to apprehend actual people, if they could.

If they couldn't—and only if they couldn't—then they could focus on wrecking everything so it could never be salvaged. At one point, Jason would have wanted the destruction above all else. But here in the cold, listening to the slow and measured talk of people in as much emotional turmoil as he was, Jason understood what it meant to prioritize the long game.

When Gina shouted, "Look!" Jason was on his feet so fast it was like his legs had never been asleep at all. He stared where she pointed, his heart in his throat, holding his breath, and after a wild second of scanning to see what she meant, he spotted them.

Galloping toward them from across the ice, Jason could just barely make out a Pokémon. After a second, he saw the tiny violet smudge that streaked along in front of it as well—Gengar.

But Jason's elation careened sideways through his body and crashed into pieces on the ice. He counted one Pokémon following—and he could only recognize Tim's trademark black and yellow jacket from this distance.

Jason's legs shook and nearly dropped him to the frozen floor. Tim was coming back to them alone. Gengar had been searching for over two hours, and now he was returning with Tim and only Tim. Jason had assumed Orion and he were teleported away together—none of the rest of them had been split up alone.

All at once Jason was not standing in the Seafoam Islands on shaking, trembling legs, watching panicked breaths turn into white steam before him. He was back in a clearing just outside Saffron City, waiting for Orion, the only one left still trapped inside the psychically-locked Gym.

"Oh god," Kaylee gasped out beside him, and when Jason looked back up, he understood why she sounded so suddenly, bonelessly relieved. He could see it now—there were two people on the Pokémon.

The strangled sound that burst from Jason's lungs was half a shout, half a laugh. He was running before he could reason out how dumb that was. Sure enough, he'd barely made it fifty paces when Tim's Arcanine caught up to him, and his brother mostly fell sideways off the Pokémon instead of actually disembarking. Jason was on him before Orion had his feet properly under him, and the Fremont brothers went down in a wreck of long limbs. Jason heard Kaylee's hard impact against Tim a second later from a few steps to his right.

Orion squeezed Jason tight for just a moment. Then he pulled himself upright, and Jason caught sight of the stark, stormy cast of his eyes, a promise of bad news on the horizon under the fading smile he wore.

"We found something," Tim told Kaylee, and the news traveled to the others as they arrived around them, changing expressions of relief and joyous exclamations into sobering focus everywhere it went.

Tim and Orion debriefed their group while the others got them water, quietly forced protein bars on them. They were ragged and rough, looked like they hadn't gotten any sleep, but soon that was the least of anyone's worries.

There was no camp to break down. They had a direction, they had an objective, and their team had never been ready to go so fast. Flashes of red preceded the release of all their riding Pokémon: both Kaylee's Arcanines, Gina's and Amaris' Pidgeots, Jason's Fearow, Grumpy, Charizard, even Starmie.

Blake counted off mounts and riders, frowning as he did so. "I could try Fearow," he suggested, but from beside him Beth gave a strangled little laugh.

"I know Fearow decided not to let us die when you accidentally let him out instead of Grumpy… but do you really think we should ride him toward an active aggro device?" she asked.

Blake looked like he'd just been pantsed. "You… are absolutely right. Why was I being so optimistic?" He turned a playful glare her way. "I blame you."

With a bare minimum of delay and some jostling, their teams were off. Jason felt how his Fearow struggled to carry him in this dead air, but this didn't need to be a smooth ride, and based on the route Tim and Orion had mapped out for them, it wouldn't be a long one, either.

They'd been riding for barely fifteen minutes when Jason spotted the blue fractals that spilled across one wall—shattered mineral lights, one of the images Orion had painted.

Tim slowed on his Arcanine, and the others pulled to staggered stops behind him. "Here's where we should go forward on foot," Tim explained. "It won't hit for a while yet, but… just in case."

Jason climbed off his Fearow, but his eyes caught on his brother. Orion and Zahlia had just slid off one of Kaylee's Arcanines, and Jason caught the stony, stricken look on his face. He tried to imagine what it would be like to be left behind, kept from helping his friends by an invisible wall made up entirely of pain. He could not. Jason hadn't even been able to handle staying put with the majority of their group during the League challenges at the Plateau.

They rushed along the new tunnel, as quickly as they could with their packs on. The clatter and nylon swish and thumps of their progress felt deafening to Jason, but as they drew nearer to their destination, he understood why that didn't matter.

It started faint. By the time Orion slowed, tested his limits at the intangible boundary, and stopped with a growl of frustration, it was hauntingly clear what it was.

Jason had a shelf full of Pokémon merchandise and books back home in Saffron City. One item was a tiny speaker box with a number pad and a small LED display in it. As a child he'd punched in the three-digit number of whatever Pokémon he could dream up, and an approximation of its roar or chirp filled his room. He still had his favorites memorized, along with those digitized cries that got more and more wobbly until the device died altogether.

Jason didn't know if it was because of the way those horrible sounds echoed in this cavernous place, but he thought if he strained he could make out almost all of those distinct cries now. The creatures being subjected to this torture and abuse had shrieks that ranged from bassy to shrill, barks, whines, caws, howls.

Nearly every single one of their group looked ahead, down the stretch of caverns that led to those gut-wrenching sounds. For a time, Jason was one of them. Then, with effort he would gladly expend for him time and time again, Jason made himself look back to Orion. To his slight surprise, he saw Tim was doing the same.

The Champ asked before Jason had the chance to. "Are you going to be alright?"

"No choice," Orion gritted out, but a moment later he gave a terse nod. "It's fine."

It wasn't, but there wasn't anything any of them could do. Jason threw one last miserable, conflicted look at his brother, then dropped his pack. All around him the others did the same.

Gav lifted a hand for everyone's attention. "Our priority is switching off the aggro devices." There were grim-faced nods. Then their team, minus one, began to run.

The first sign of human interference with the landscape came in the distance after almost ten minutes of running. Something too geometrically perfect to be part of the icy rock jutted skyward. As they slowed, favoring stealth now over speed, Jason could make it out. It was a flimsy structure with white mesh over a metal frame.

The others slowed to a halt around him. Tim pointed at the building. Jason read his lips more than heard his actual whispers. "There wasn't anyone there when I passed by before. We still need to check."

As one they stared at the distant building, and he thought he knew what they were all wondering. Was that a human silhouette within, or just a tall cabinet? They were too far to tell.

The hesitation would have become unbearable if it lasted much longer than that crawling ten seconds. Then Tim and Gav inched ahead, Gav branching left, Tim right. Jason fell into step with Tim and dimly registered some of his fellows doing the same.

The screams were louder now, but still distant somehow. Jason squinted, but something about the distance addled his eyes. It was like the world dropped off after that little structure. There had to be a dip in the rocky landscape, past which lay some nightmarish hell most of him didn't want to see.

Their two teams crept forward, flanking the building and moving now in crouches. Jason's lungs burned from the cold, his eyes stung, but he was boiling alive in his heavy winter coat. One hand was at the pepper spray at his belt. The other was bent before him so he could ward off anything or anyone who suddenly charged him.

There wasn't a cue, but they didn't need one. Gav's team rushed forward a split second before Tim's team did, and together they ripped back the mesh door flap.

The tall silhouette was a blinking machine next to a coat rack. Jason's eyes only lingered on it long enough to disregard it as a threat. Two seconds later he'd visually cleared the rest of the structure as well.

The collective sag of relief was short-lived. Jason, Kaylee, Tim and Gav had been the first four through the door, with most of the others clustered around them and ready to rush in as backup.

But Beth's voice was no more than a choked sob when she spoke from outside. "Oh god."

Jason rushed to get to where she stood. As he did, he passed by Tim. The Champ's eyes had lost something vital, and his blank, unblinking stare deeper into the little building gave Jason a chill of premonition. Tim had already seen whatever Beth just had.

The warning wasn't enough. Jason registered two things through the numb, choking ache of the haze of gray static in his head. He'd been right about the landscape dropping off into an area down below. And he was never going to be able to burn the sight from his eyes again.

Jason's brain felt like it was seeing two things simultaneously. A part of him looked down on the sloping rockface to an expansive site below, taking in rows and columns of cages in a sprawl that made little sense. Another part of him could only see the creatures within each pen, and only comprehend how different each Pokémon coped with the senseless pain of their miserable existence. Some were so still he feared they were dead. Some bashed their faces forward against reinforced bars, and in them all Jason could see was Venusaur. Here alone there were dozens—there might be over a hundred.

His throat burned. Jason clued back in to his own body late—he pulled in a ragged breath he badly needed. While he blinked furiously, trying to accept what he was seeing, Tim slid down the rocky slope to his left.

That was enough of a "go ahead" for Jason. He crouched to follow the Champ, half expecting Gav's hand to close around his arm and stop him. But it didn't. All around him the others moved, following Tim and Jason down to the hell stretched out beneath them.

Jason landed in a crouch and stood on tense legs. The layout of this awful place didn't make any more sense down here than it had from a birds eye view. The pens and cages at the edges seemed like they'd been tacked on as rushed afterthoughts, expansion projects put down in a hurry when this project got too big. Jason's stomach soured and a hot feeling ached up his throat.

No one tried to stop to make a plan of attack. They just spread out, searching quickly and with single-minded focus for the aggro devices. Jason couldn't bring himself to look at the creatures in the pens he passed by. Even if he could have, he wouldn't have wanted to. Eye contact couldn't possibly do any good here. More likely it would just further incense them.

Jason rounded bends in the messy rows of cages, passed work tables and machines that he paused by briefly before discarding. He wasn't one of their tech geniuses, but even he seriously doubted any of those blocky, cabinet-sized installations were the ADs.

He nearly tripped over it when he found the first one. Jason reeled back to stop from falling, staring down at the stout obstruction in what he thought was an empty space between two tall shelves.

The aggro device had shrunk since the one they'd come across in the hidden area in Silph. The glass tube up top was gone, leaving just a sturdy conical shape that plateaued off at the top and was capped with a speaker. The whole thing was so compact it looked more like a piece of modern furniture than a device responsible for so much pain.

Jason crouched near it so he was eye level with the speaker that topped it. He reached out, then hesitated. A sense of surreal disbelief settled over him like a waking dream. This thing before him would have his brother writhing on the ground, or screaming out all the air in his lungs, or attacking whoever got closest to him. The Pokémon all around him were a filthy, foaming wreck over it. And it didn't even look like it was flipped on. No audible noise issued from it. Jason couldn't feel a damned thing.

Breaking out of his trance, he reached out and pressed a palm against the speaker. No vibrations, no static crackle. These hellish things probably didn't even need much power to run. Jason felt around the base. Then he crawled on all fours and circled it. He tried to pry the speaker up and off. Nothing happened.

His hands were shaking, and even later than that, Jason realized he could feel his heartbeat roaring up his neck. He stood and blood pounded in his temples, He took a slow, measured breath.

When he glanced up, he locked eyes with Blake. The youngest Nakawa's face was calm as ever but the pallor of his skin made his dark eyes darker. He looked as sick with this as Jason felt.

"No off switch on the one I found either," he said, his voice nearly drowned out by the screams all around them. Jason had to rely more on lip-reading again than anything. "We're looking for a control panel. Generator. Something."

Or a fucking hammer, Jason thought savagely. What he said instead was, "Okay."

In an unspoken moment of understanding, Blake and Jason branched off together. Jason kept clenching his teeth so tightly that only sharp pains warned him to stop.

When Blake reached out and stopped Jason with an arm across his chest, Jason jumped. Hot adrenaline raged through his skin, but Blake wasn't dragging him to safety from an attack. He was looking to his left, and after a crackling second, Jason caught what had stopped Blake short.

Sandwiched unceremoniously between two empty Pokémon cages stood two taller enclosures. These would have been unremarkable except for two details. They had hard, short metal beds, and a pair of what were unmistakably metal basins meant as low-tech toilets.

Anderton and Mason had been sent for "reconditioning." But if this was where they'd been sent, they weren't here any longer.

Jason didn't even have time to react to this stomach-turning knowledge. In unison, Blake and he saw through the human cages to movement beyond it.

There wasn't even a second where Jason mistook this newcomer for either Anderton or Mason. The dark-haired man was slight and small, bundled up in a parka and carrying a clipboard. His ears and most of his temples and cheeks were covered by enormous earmuffs.

Jason and Blake crouched, but slowly, so as not to do what the researcher had just done and alert him to their presence. Blake didn't take his eyes off the only other human they'd seen for weeks, but Jason craned his neck around and silently scoured the frozen site for any sign of his other friends. They'd been the first to realize they weren't alone, but it wouldn't stay that way for long.

Blake seemed to realize what Jason was thinking before Jason even put the finishing touches on the thought himself. Zahlia's brother grasped his forearm, but it wasn't a warning look he gave him. Instead Blake jerked his chin to the left and tapped his chest with his free hand. Jason, catching on, pointed himself in the other direction.

Without a word, they split, circling the perimeter of a long row of cages at a shuffling, rushed crawl. Was this man the only person stationed here? They had no way of knowing, but the longer they waited, the more likely it was that he'd catch sight of one of the others first. If ever there was a time to seize the element of surprise, it was now.

When Jason peered carefully around the edge of the cages, he saw that he had the man's back to him. How good were those earmuffs at blocking out sound? Or were they solely to keep his head warm?

Blake, it seemed, had a plan. Out of nowhere from the other side of the row of cages came a loud, carrying clang. The researcher jerked, head snapping up from his clipboard. He stood still and stared, and Jason didn't waste a second.

He was on his feet and racing for the man's back long before the echoing ring had stopped. The man had barely enough time to half-turn toward him, clipboard falling, his hand reaching for his belt. Then Jason collided with his back and they slid to the floor.

Blake was there in a second. Two seconds later, so were Gav and Kaylee. The man beneath Jason squirmed, but Jason was taller, stronger, and outweighed him. Together he and Blake flipped the man over on his back, pressed him into the ground, and pinned his limbs.

Jason's eyes tore down to the man's belt. For a second he didn't recognize the black, boxy shape with the two prongs protruding from its tip like a pair of forward-facing fangs. Then it clicked, and he snagged the taser and threw it.

Blake, catching on to what Jason was doing, took over. While his friend expertly stripped the duty belt down of all machinery, chucking items out of reach, Jason snatched the earmuffs off the man's head and threw those with vehemence. The second they were gone, the researcher's pale, startled face pulled into a grimace. He winced against the sudden sound and a red flicker of sickening, powerful hatred cracked to life in Jason's chest like a breaking branch.

"Tell us how to turn them off!" he demanded of the man, an inch away from his face.

Blake was done with the belt, and now patted down the man's sides, looking for anything else on his person. Their quarry had been understandably distracted by the rough tackle to the ground, but now Blake's continued search seemed to dawn on him. At once the man thrashed, with surprising strength for someone so slight, and Jason was almost knocked over for a precarious second. Then Kaylee was at his side, helping to keep the man down.

"You're not going anywhere," she snarled. "So tell us how to turn them off."

"Get off me!" the man wheezed, his first words so far. Jason fought the urge to lift him off the icy ground and slam him back down to drive his point home. That wouldn't help the man to gain his coherency any quicker.

The others hadn't joined them yet, and Jason could only assume it was because they were holding a perimeter and scouring for backup. Yet this interrogation wasn't going at all the way Jason thought it would. The man bucked and twisted, his eyes wide with fear, but slowly Jason realized it wasn't fear of them.

"Please, let me up!" he shouted, and the wild terror on his face and plea in his voice stoppered Jason's fury. The man seemed to see the transformation on Jason's face and latched onto it. "My belt! There was a device on it—he threw it, I need it!"

"Will it turn the machines off?" Jason asked, but even as he asked he knew that wasn't it. Gav, barely close enough to overhear over the continued shrieking din, took that cue to start gathering far-flung belt items. "Which one?" Jason asked, suspicion flaring in him again. Yet it died as quick a death as the first anger had at the persistent, continued petrification written so clearly on their captive's face.

"The black box!" he said. "It's heavy. Orange stripe—oh god, pick it up pick it up!" His voice pitched higher at the end, and that was all Jason needed to hear. He hauled the man upright, unseating Blake, but Blake was already on his feet and moving toward the items that he'd stripped off. Kaylee had the taser, a radio, what looked like a chunky cell phone. Gav had a black Velcro kit and a small silver case.

Jason spotted the black box with the orange tape. It trembled on the ground, traveling in short, jerky bursts from its own vibration. He lunged for it and his fingers closed around it a second too late. He was just in time to feel the last of the tremors still under his fingertips.

Then the nearest row of cages swung open.

Author's Note: I'll try to make a meaningful post explaining what my plan is, and my hopeful timeframe soon. I apologize for not having much more to share right at this moment, and review replies will be a little late.