chapter 31
The Pokémon Centre on the east side of Violet was a quieter affair than the big main one near the gym, squat, single-storey, tucked between a bakery and a closed-up bookshop with a hand-painted sign in the window. Kai had been in there twice already this week, and Nurse Joy at the desk now gave him the small recognising nod of a person who'd started clocking him as a regular.
He slid the tray of Poké Balls across the counter. Five, today. Sandshrew rode on his shoulder rather than going in.
"Quick heal?" she asked.
"Quick heal, please. I've got somewhere to be."
She raised an eyebrow at him without quite asking the question, took the tray, and disappeared through the side door.
Kai sat down on one of the benches by the window. Sandshrew clambered down off his shoulder and into his lap, settling there in the easy proprietorial way it always did when it had decided that sitting was the order of business. Kai scratched behind one of its ears with his thumb. The morning sun came through the front window in a slanted yellow bar that ran across the linoleum, and somewhere behind the counter, a kettle was working itself up to a boil.
He hadn't realised, until now, how tired he was.
Not the body kind. He'd been tired in his body since Cherrygrove. This was something else — a low buzz sitting just behind his eyes, the kind that came from running an engine high for too many days in a row. Fist had been the training incident with Mankey, and then the battling with Marcus and the others. Now he was going to take on Bellsprout tower, knowing he would sleep for a week after.
Sage Li, he thought, watching dust motes turn in the bar of sunlight.
The bell above the door jingled. Two trainers came in, a girl and a boy a bit younger than him, talking animatedly about a Geodude. Kai looked away, thinking about the challenge ahead of him.
"Kai?"
He looked up. Nurse Joy was holding the tray out across the counter, all five Balls back in their slots.
"All sorted. Good luck out there today." She said with a gentle smile.
"Cheers," Kai said, nodding his head.
He clipped the Balls back to his belt — five of them now in their neat row, with Sandshrew making the sixth on its own terms — and stepped back out into the morning sun.
The bakery next door was doing decent trade. Kai stood looking through the glass at the trays of bread and pastries for slightly too long before his stomach grumbled.
"I guess a snack wouldn't hurt." He said, knowing he had enough money at the moment.
Kai paid for two egg-and-bacon rolls and a pastry he didn't recognise, but the old woman behind the counter assured him it was very good with cheese, and got himself a cardboard cup of strong tea to help wash it down.
He ate one of the rolls while walking. Sandshrew got a corner of the second, held carefully between two clawed fingers, and chewed it with the deep solemn appreciation it brought to everything edible. The bacon was salty and a bit burnt at the edges, and for about ninety seconds while he was eating it, Kai forgot to be nervous about anything.
The bells of the tower started up again as he turned onto the road that led toward it. Half ten on the dot. Kai swallowed the last of the tea, found a bin, and lengthened his stride.
Sprout Tower stood at the north end of the city on its own raised stretch of ground, with a wide stone path leading up through a couple of gardens to its base. The closer Kai got, the less it looked like a building.
Five storeys of dark wood, narrowing as they went up. Each tier had its own sweep of curving roof, the tiles green-grey with age. The whole thing leaned a little, in slow motion, exactly the way the great reed at its centre swayed — too gradual to call movement, too constant to call still. He'd thought about it from the wall in the park yesterday, and it had seemed picturesque then. Up close, it was different. Up close, it looked alive.
There were people about. Far more than Kai had expected. Two big knots of trainers stood off to either side of the main path, kitted out in proper hiking gear with belts full of Balls and serious looks on their faces — older than him, most of them. Adults. A third group, smaller and louder, was clustered around the base of one of the lanterns, taking turns at something Kai couldn't quite see. Off to the left, behind a low wooden fence, was what had to be the academy lot — twenty or so kids in matching dark green blazers, lined up, with two adults at the front of them giving instructions.
Kai scanned for Marcus but couldn't see him.
He reached the foot of the path and started up.
There was a wooden gate at the top of the steps where the path met the tower's outer porch — not really a gate, more of a frame, ceremonial-looking, with a wooden bell hanging from a beam off to one side that the wind was nudging just enough to make it click against its own clapper. Two monks stood inside the gate. Old men, both of them, in plain ochre robes, sleeves cinched at the wrist. One was leaning on a long wooden staff. The other had his hands folded in front of him.
The one with the staff stepped forward as Kai approached. Not aggressively. Just into his line of sight, in a way that made it clear the conversation would happen here or not at all.
"Good morning."
"Morning," Kai said.
"Are you here for the challenge?"
"Yeah." Kai pulled his trainer card from his back pocket. "Yeah, I am."
The monk took the card with both hands. The other one leaned in to look as well. They studied it together for a moment, in a quiet that had nothing of suspicion in it but a fair amount of habit. Kai noticed the lined skin around their eyes, the very slight shake in the staff-monk's free hand. They looked old in a way that the Nurse Joys and the gym-leaders-on-posters didn't — old in the way the tower itself was old. People who'd been in this exact spot doing this exact thing for long enough that it had carved a groove into their day.
The staff-monk handed the card back.
"Kai," he said.
"Yes, sir."
"You've come a way to be here, haven't you?"
"New Bark," Kai said. "Originally."
"A long way." The monk's face creased at the corners. Not quite a smile, but the shape of one. "Welcome. The first floor is open. The wild Pokémon inside will not harm you if you do not press them — if they decline to battle, please respect that. The monks on each floor will challenge any trainer who wishes to test themselves further. If you reach the top, Elder Li will see you."
"If you reach the top," the second monk repeated, very quietly, in the tone of someone saying something he'd said a thousand times and still meant.
"Understood," Kai said.
"Good luck, young trainer."
They both bowed slightly. Kai bowed back without thinking about it, which got a marginally bigger curve out of the staff-monk's mouth, and then he stepped through the frame.
He didn't go in immediately.
The porch ran the full circumference of the tower, a wide wooden walkway under the deep eaves of the lowest roof. The boards were worn smooth in two parallel grooves where centuries of feet had crossed them. From here, he could see down across the city — slate roofs, the green smudge of the park and the white peak of the gym in the distance, his ultimate goal here in this city.
He could also see the academy group.
They'd come up the side path while he'd been talking to the monks, and were now arranged in a crescent around their teacher at the corner of the porch nearest the entrance. The teacher was a tall, pale man in a long brown coat, with a scarf round his neck despite the warmth of the day, gesturing up at the curve of the second-floor roof while he talked.
Kai picked Marcus out at the back of the group, half-turned toward the city view rather than the lecture, scanning — and his face brightened the moment he caught Kai's eye.
He waved him over with a sharp little jerk of the head.
Kai threaded along the porch toward them, trying to do it quietly so as not to interrupt the teacher, but the teacher had clearly already clocked him; he gave Kai a small civil nod without breaking stride in his explanation, and carried on.
" — built in the year of the second great famine, so something like four hundred years ago, give or take. The carpenters of the time were unable to fell the central Bellsprout that was already growing here, partly out of religious objection and partly, more practically, because they could not. The thing was already as thick as a man's torso and was reported to have struck two of them with Vine Whip when they tried. So they built around it instead. The pillar you'll see when you go in is not a piece of timber. It is a living plant. It has been a living plant for the entire history of this building, which is why the upper floors sway with the wind in a way no carpenter's frame would. The whole tower breathes with it. Now — "
The girl from yesterday had spotted Kai and was elbowing the others without looking away from the teacher. The coin-trick boy half-turned and grinned at him. The tall boy gave him a short, formal sort of nod. Marcus mouthed, You made it, and Kai mouthed back Of course I did, and they both grinned.
The teacher was still talking.
" — and the question of why a Bellsprout grew this large in the first place is, of course, the more interesting one. There are theories. The most popular is the simplest: that something nourished it. That something has been nourishing it, in fact, for the entire span of recorded history in this region. Whether that something was a Pokémon or something else has been the subject of enough debate among my colleagues to fill several rooms with paper. We will not get into it today."
He clapped his hands together once, gently, as soon as he had finished talking.
"Inside, please. Stay together now. Voices down."
Going inside was like stepping into a different temperature.
The first thing was the smell — sap, old wood and something earthy underneath, like a greenhouse that had been left to its own devices for half a century. The light dropped to a golden gloom, filtered through paper screens set high in the walls. The second thing was the sound. The wind didn't reach in here, but the building still moved with it; a long, low creak, and then another, every six or seven seconds, the way an old wooden ship sounded when you stood below deck.
The third thing was the pillar.
It ran up the centre of the tower, floor to ceiling, and through whatever hole in the ceiling led to the floor above. It was as thick as Kai had expected from the teacher's description — maybe a metre and a half across at the base — but he hadn't been ready for the colour of it, the same yellow-green as a young Bellsprout's stem, only darkened with age toward the bottom into something almost mossy. Tendrils curled out of it at intervals, pale and questing, and as Kai watched, one of them flexed slowly and retracted again, the way a sleeping cat's paw twitched.
The whole pillar was moving.
Not violently. The sway was so slow you had to look at it next to the surrounding walls to even see it — a degree or two off vertical, then back, then a degree or two the other way, on the same long rhythm as the creaking of the wood. The walls of the tower were creaking because of the pillar. The pillar was the metronome, and the building matched it.
Kai stood very still for a few seconds, taking it in.
He'd known. He'd known intellectually since the bench yesterday, and known again when the teacher had said it on the porch, and yet — Christ. He'd really known nothing.
Sandshrew, on his shoulder, was holding very still too. Its small claws had gone a tiny bit tighter on the fabric of his jacket.
"Mental, isn't it," Marcus murmured next to him.
"Yeah," Kai said. "Yeah. It's pretty crazy."
The teacher had moved his crescent of students to one side of the room, where he was pointing out something on one of the wall panels. Kai and the others hung back near the entrance, in a loose huddle, voices low.
"How long do we get?" the coin-trick boy asked.
"In here? Twenty minutes," the girl said.
"He said on the way over. They walk us through the ground floor, then it's back outside. No upper floors for us today." She added.
"That's bollocks," the coin-trick boy said, not loudly but with feeling.
"It's not bollocks," the tall boy said. "The wild Pokémon in the tower are too strong for us."
"It's bollocks anyway."
"It is a bit of a let-down," Marcus admitted. "I mean — fair enough, like, I get the safety thing. There's Hoothoot up there and Bellsprout that aren't tame, and apparently, something happens on the third floor that the teachers don't even tell you about. Fine. But we're trainers. They could let one or two of us — "
"They couldn't, though, because then everyone'd want to," the girl said.
"Yeah." Marcus exhaled. "Yeah, alright." He said, finally giving in.
He turned back to Kai then, and the slight petulance in his face went out of it, replaced by something more direct.
"Right," he said. "You. What's the plan?"
"Try not to die," Kai said. "Maybe catch a Bellsprout if I can, and get to the top."
"Not necessarily in that order," the coin-trick boy said.
"Probably in that order," Kai said, clearly joking.
Marcus laughed once, then went serious again. "Listen, mate. He's not joking, the head monk. My teacher mentioned him on the way over — said he doesn't go easy on outside trainers and he doesn't go easy on academy ones either. Whatever you think you're walking into, double it."
Kai nodded his head, having already prepared himself for this.
"I know."
"You've got this, though." This was the girl, quieter than Marcus's pep talk, and it landed in a way Marcus's hadn't. She was looking at Kai with the same unreadable measuring expression as yesterday morning. "Yesterday, with the Magnitude. That wasn't a fluke. You've been working with that Sandshrew. Properly working with it. It's going to be in your corner up there."
Sandshrew, on his shoulder, made a small chuffing noise that was probably acknowledgement and possibly just something it was clearing out of its nose.
"Thanks," Kai said, meaning it.
"Tell us about it after, yeah?" the coin-trick boy said. "All of it. Every floor."
"Every floor," Kai agreed.
They wished him luck again, all four of them in a slightly clumsy chorus, and then the teacher was calling the academy lot back together at the far side of the room. Marcus held Kai's eye for one more second, gave him a thumbs-up at hip-height where the teacher couldn't see it, and turned away.
Kai watched the back of his head for a moment. Then he turned the other way.
The stairs were on the far side of the room, a steep wooden flight rising up around the central pillar, twisting with it. Another monk stood at the foot of them — younger than the two at the gate, maybe forty, broad-shouldered, with the kind of stillness that suggested he'd spent quite a lot of his life doing exactly this.
His eyes flicked to the trainer card already in Kai's hand.
"Floor one," the monk said. "Two of our brothers are up there. They will challenge you if you wish to be challenged. Pokémon are sapient inside the tower as outside; treat the wild ones with respect. The pillar is sacred. Do not strike it."
"Got it."
"Good."
Kai got the impression of someone running through a checklist that included, among other things, whether this kid was going to do something stupid. Whatever the answer was, the monk seemed to land on something acceptable. He stepped sideways out of the line of the stairs.
"Go up, then," he said.
And Kai did just that.
Right, he thought. Here we go.
With that, Kai headed up the stairs to the first floor of Bellsprout tower, ready to face his first challenge.
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That's the end of this chapter. I hope you are enjoying the story so far!