The day breaks easy, as if the city’s hungover and not ready to get up yet. I watch the yellow of it spread slow across the blank walls, stretching shadows over the laundry’s scuffed linoleum like the ghost of a sunrise from somewhere less ruined. On the counter, Muse hums a tune I swear is half lullaby, half warning. His lily pad vibrates with a sustained C, never quite resolving into anything cheerful. I listen, counting the notes the way I count bills—slow, deliberate, waiting for the pattern to announce itself.

  I dump the cash from the Trubbish job on the busted folding table, fanning the bills with the kind of reverence some people use for prayer cards. It’s a week’s rent in singles, and even that’s generous. The city pays for its garbage problems, but not its garbage people. I thumb through the stack, sorting edges, plucking out the ones torn or marked with something that might be blood. I set those aside as “inconvenient evidence.” The total, after subtracting for food, Beldum fuel, and whatever Luna’s honey addiction is going to cost me, is a joke—barely enough for a burner and a day’s worth of fallback. It’s not even close to what I need.

  On the blanket by the radiator, Luna sprawls with all four paws in the air, mouth slack, breath coming in wet, even huffs. Every so often one paw twitches, like she’s running down prey in her sleep. Her fur’s fluffed out and clean, but the pink of her belly is raw from a night of grooming and the dregs of Trubbish trauma. The jar of honey from last night is still clamped in one paw, sticky with residue. She looks peaceful in the way only something that’s spent all its anxiety can look peaceful.

  I finish the math, stack the bills, and wrap them with a rubber band I scavenged behind the register. The back of my skull prickles—Beldum’s signal, checking in on my plans. Most days, the connection hovers in the background like the buzz of a phone that never stops vibrating. But when Beldum wants something, it steps right to the front of the queue, no matter what I’m doing. It’s not a voice so much as a pressure, a thought that arrives fully formed and leaves no room for negotiation.

  Today, the message is simple: “Acquire information.”

  “Yeah,” I say aloud. “I was getting to that.”

  The only way to know what comes next is to see what the city thinks already happened. I need a phone, one that doesn’t ping back to me or the League or Plasma. There’s a pawn shop three blocks over that deals in “lost” tech—credit-card phones, half-jailbroken, preloaded with enough ghost-ware to last a week before they burn out or get hijacked by the next buyer. I scoop Muse into his ball, the recall beam catching him mid-hum and silencing the tune like a cord yanked from the wall. Luna takes longer—she’s dead asleep, but the ball doesn’t care, just swallows her whole and leaves a whiff of honey and warm fur behind. Beldum hovers for a second, eye locked on the bills, then on me, then back again, as if calculating the odds I’ll blow it all before lunch. “Acknowledged.”

  The return ping is a pulse, sharp and efficient, and then they’re all gone, sucked into the dead quiet of their Poké Balls. I hoard the last scraps of breakfast—three ‘soft’ rolls and half a sausage, which I stuff into the gym bag along with the burner and cash.

  The morning air is a slap—hard, chemical, busy with the smell of melting snow and spent engines. I keep my head down, hood up, and make for the pawn shop. Every few steps, I break off a piece of the ‘soft’ roll and let it dissolve on my tongue, the bland flour taste a comfort against the sharper flavours of the street. Sips of water to keep the edge off. I pretend I’m just another body heading to a job that doesn’t pay enough to matter. If anyone bothers to look, that’s probably what they see.

  The pawn shop is wedged into an old bank, the kind with frosted glass and a security gate that’s been repainted so many times the bars have gotten thicker. Inside, it’s all televisions and cracked phone screens, glass cases crammed with jewelry and knife sets nobody ever needs. The guy at the counter is built like a Muk—no neck, skin the colour of concrete—and he clocks me the second I step through the buzzer.

  “You got a license?” he grunts, never looking up from his phone. His hair is shaved tight, the scalp underneath mapped with a grid of old cuts.

  I shrug. “Lost it. You care?”

  He snorts, the kind of sound that means ‘get to the point.’ “Looking for a burner,” I say, and rest both hands on the counter, palms open. “Something that won’t melt if you sneeze, and doesn’t call home to anyone. Extra points if it comes with a VPN and a clean IMEI.”

  He scrapes his thumbnail across the old lacquered wood and finally looks up at me, eyes two chips of river stone. “Yeah. That’s a real specific ask for a guy who can’t keep a license.” He waits, lets the words hang. “Planning to do some crimes, or just nervous?”

  I tip my head, try for a smile, but my mouth is too dry. “Wouldn’t dream of it,” I say. “I’m a model citizen. Just got privacy issues.” I count out the cash, slow—there’s something about the way he watches my hands, like he’s auditing my life one bill at a time. By the time I hit the end of the stack, there’s nothing left but a ten and the singles from lunch. I fan the last of it out, set it down hard enough that the bills stick to the glass with the sweat from my palms.

  He grins, but the smile’s got no teeth. He slides the money off the counter, vanishes it under the register, then kneels and starts fishing through a battered lockbox below. I hear the clack of plastic, the shuffle of SIM cards in their little foil sleeves. “What’s the rush? Who you hiding from?”

  “All of the above,” I say, and that’s not even a lie.

  He comes up with an old XTranceiver, the kind that looks like a remote detonator for a car bomb. The screen’s cracked open at the corners, but the numbers flicker to life when he punches the power. “Unlocked, no GPS, VPN good for another six months. Charger’s on the house if you promise not to pawn it back for drugs.”

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Promise,” I say, and for a moment, we’re both in on the joke.

  He hands off the phone and charger, then gives me a parting gift—a glare that says if I ever show up here again, I better have a better story or a weapon. I nod, pocket the phone, and step outside.

  The street’s gotten busy while I was inside. There’s a weird undertow in the sidewalk traffic—people moving in the same direction, not rushing but pulled by something they can’t quite name. I thumb the power on the burner, watch the start-up screen judder through a half-dozen fake splash images, then go flat white-on-black. It launches into the OS, background already running a VPN service with a name so generic you know it’s probably kompromat. First thing I do is kill the microphone and camera, then check the shell for malware. Whoever owned this last was either paranoid or an idiot; there’s nothing but the system apps and a blank contacts list.

  I start to head back to the laundromat, but the flow of people is too obvious to ignore. Something’s happening east, toward the avenue that cuts through the disused park and the power relay. I drift with the crowd, keeping a half-block buffer, until I see the flash of emergency yellow and blue tape—cop barricades, but not the kind they use for a crime scene. Controlled, not panicked.

  There’s a truck parked diagonal across the intersection, its bed stacked with a rolling stage and a pair of portable speakers. On the makeshift podium, a man in a purple robe stands with a microphone, his beard trimmed into a geometric wedge and his hair slicked tight to the scalp. Behind him, a flag snaps in the wind—Plasma’s symbol, refried and upscaled for TV. The crowd is maybe two hundred, clustered in a haphazard oval around the stage, each person watching the man with a look that’s either rapture or boredom.

  I hang back, wedge into the shadow of a bus shelter, and let the phone’s camera take a few stills. The man’s cadence is familiar—every sentence starts with a parable, ends with a threat. “We are not the monsters,” he says, “we are the only ones who listened when the world cried out for mercy.” The words whip across the avenue, amplified by a speaker rig that’s probably worth more than the truck beneath it. “They want you to believe we are the criminals, but who locked up our brothers and sisters in red balls? Who used Pokémon as tools of war, profit, vanity?”

  The crowd eats it up, or at least doesn’t heckle. A few have smartphones out, streaming the speech to whoever cares. I scan the faces: mostly young, mostly bored, a few true believers in the front row with expensive haircuts and expensive faces to match. If I’m honest, it’s not much different from any gym opening or League rally—just the branding’s been swapped for blue.

  The guy at the mic ramps up, voice going syrupy. “My name is Gorm,” he says, pausing just a beat too long, like he expects applause or a chorus of responding ‘Gorms.’ “I am one of the Seven Sages of Team Plasma.” He lets that marinate, the kind of intro that would have gotten you locked up a year ago, but now draws a polite ripple of attention. “We gather today because the League, and its agents, have spent the last decade telling you that control is compassion. That Pokémon love their cages, their battles, their status as property.”

  He spreads his arms, the sleeves of his robe spilling over like he’s about to conduct a choir. “But what is compassion when it is enforced by violence? What is freedom if every choice is made for you?” He leans in, voice dropping an octave: “Pokémon are not pets. They are not soldiers, or social capital, or currency on the street. They are our kin—our equals.” The last word is a hammer, and it lands hard enough that even the bored kids up front flinch.

  Next to me, a couple of teenagers record the speech and mime his hand gestures, parodying the drama. But I keep watching Gorm. He’s not a good actor; he’s too earnest, or maybe too far gone to know the difference. “Team Plasma demands only one thing,” he says, “and that is the freedom to choose—no more forced capture, no more battle for entertainment, no more ‘ownership’ of sentient life.”

  He’s got the cadence down. He references the old League scandals—how every attempt to reform ends in more bureaucracy, more gyms, more Pokémon bred for brutality. “Even your so-called ‘rescue’ organizations are run by those who profit from suffering,” he says, and now people are listening, because the rescue scams are too fresh to ignore.

  He’s smart, too. He doesn’t just rail against the League or the cops—he offers absolution, a place to belong. “If you have ever loved a Pokémon,” he says, “if you have ever wondered whether they loved you back, you are already one of us.” It’s a neat trick, and it works. The crowd’s mood shifts, a low energy gathering like a stormfront.

  Behind him, the Plasma flag unfurls, and a couple of volunteers start passing out flyers. The print is cheap, the edges already curling in the damp, but the message is clear: Join Plasma. Vote Plasma. The Revolution Is Now.

  I watch the crowd, counting the number who pocket the flyers versus those who toss them. My read is fifty-fifty, and that’s maybe more terrifying than anything else. Two months ago, these people would have crossed the street to avoid a Plasma badge; now, they’re nodding along like it’s the weather report.

  I lose patience with the speech when Gorm starts quoting Unovan Revolution poetry; the cadence is all wrong and too many of the syllables get stuck in his beard. I keep moving, letting the crowd swallow me and spit me out the other side. There’s a cordon of city cops doing crowd control—bright blue jackets, pokémon at the hip, eyes tracking every face they haven’t seen before. I keep my hood up and shuffle with a group of old ladies in puffer coats, heads bent, as if we all have somewhere better to be. Nobody stops me. Nobody even looks twice.

  I need more money. I need it fast, and I need it in cash. The Trubbish job was a short high, but the city’s always hungry for a little more hustle. My feet drift toward the market district, where the buildings get lower and the signs switch from LED to hand-painted. There’s a cigarette shop with a “HELP WANTED” sign, but I know it’s code for “family only.” A window washer’s union, but you have to buy the bucket and squeegee up front, and they’ll steal it back after you climb three floors and slip once. The pawn shop again, but the concrete man at the counter won’t be fooled by a new disguise.

  Instead I walk. I walk until my legs ache. Every three blocks, I watch the burner for news updates—my face, one step away from being a meme, but so far just a blur in the “person of interest” line-up. The city cycles through panic and apathy like it’s on a laundry timer. There’s a mugging, a League scandal, then a dog show, all in the space of a morning. The only constant is the feeling that someone, somewhere, is making money off the churn, and I’ve never been that someone.

  I wander farther than I mean to, out past the old stadium and down into the dead part of the warehouse district. The snow here is grey, the sidewalk a patchwork of salt and shoeprints. There’s a liquor store on the corner, the kind with bulletproof glass and security cameras pointed at the beer fridge. Above it, a weathered sign: “Slooker & Associates—Detective Agency.” The font is all caps, the paint half-faded, and the S is drooping like it tried to escape.

  I stare at the sign for a minute. Out of every hustle in the city, private investigation is both the saddest and the most honest. The best you can do is dig up dirt for someone with more money than sense; the worst you can do is get caught at it. I push open the door.

  Inside, the air is spiked with aftershave and the tang of burnt coffee. The front “lobby” is a folding table behind a half-glass partition, with a stack of business cards and a gold plastic trophy labelled “Best in Town.” There’s a bell on the counter, the cheap kind that always rings half a second after you touch it. Behind the glass, someone coughs. I can’t see him, but the cough is the giveaway—a rattle that says “three packs a day and a little bit of pride.”

  "Be right with you," a voice says, then immediately hacks up what sounds like a ghost-type's worth of phlegm. A man emerges from behind the partition, all gut and yellow shirt, the kind of skin that never stopped being teenage greasy. He sizes me up, then his eyes drop to my belt where the tell-tale gleam of minimized pokéballs catches the fluorescent light. "Here for supplies?" His smile is missing two actual teeth and a metaphorical dozen.

  "No," I say, nodding toward the window. "Saw your sign. You need help?"

  He squints, then wipes his hands on his pants—leaving two fresh streaks on the corduroy. "You a cop?"

  I shake my head. "Just out of work."

  He leans in, lowering his voice like we’re about to commit to something illegal. "You got any priors?"

  "None that stick," I say, and he barks a laugh that shakes the plastic trophy.

  He gestures for me to follow him through a side door, up a narrow flight of stairs that smells like old cheese and burnt toast. Each step creaks as if registering a formal complaint. "You ever do PI work before?" he asks, opening a door that marked this as one of the city's forgotten corners.