Chapter 17

Hayden awoke in someone else's bed. He took a few seconds to understand his surroundings—the oversized soft sheets, the strange smells that did not belong in his own quarters. Most of those came through Liz, with her pokémon senses so much sharper than his own. But even with only the dim senses of the human body, Hayden couldn't lay there without realizing things were different.

His whole world was different now. Every place the silk sheets touched against skin was another reminder. Some things were missing, other things shouldn't be there. All was inevitable, an inescapable conclusion. And worse, it wasn't an accident. Lady Gracidea had planned this from the moment he was discovered. Shaymin House had no use for a male mew. 

But a girl—now that could change the world. Never mind what that girl wanted with her life, or whether she even wanted to be changed.

Hayden opened one eye, and saw only long pink hair cascading down in front of his eyes. One of the many things that shouldn’t be there. His parents had never let him grow it out this long. What would Evelynn say? He could imagine her there now, with that brush she always used. She would fix the unruly mess, and tell him to tuck it away, so their parents wouldn't see.

He brushed it aside, and saw a huge green space in the room beyond. The walls behind the bed were painted with a landscape of rich forest, so lifelike he thought it was a photograph at first. But he didn't care about that. There was only one thing he wanted to see in the whole world, his daemon.

Liz nudged up against his side from under the covers. He curled up tighter, feeling her soft fur against bare skin. "They didn't take you away," he whispered. It wasn't his voice he heard. It could've been Ellie's, except maybe a bit higher. He was the youngest, after all.

"They couldn't," Liz answered. For all he had changed, she sounded exactly the same. "We'd die before letting that happen." 

He rolled onto his back in the strange bed. There was nothing to constrict him—he wasn't even wearing the ceremonial dress anymore. "You're not changed too," Hayden whispered. There was only a trace of envy in his voice. Daemons were supposed to go through everything alongside their person, yet his had escaped this. She wouldn't have to learn to be a boy.

"I think that means something," she thought to him, so timidly she almost didn't dare to say it. But those thoughts were so loud, he would've realized them himself, anyway. "I'm your soul, Hayden. If I didn't change, it means your insides didn't change. We were always—"

He sat up abruptly, jostling her sideways off his lap. She landed on the soft bed with only a faint squeak of protest. Soon enough she stopped obeying gravity completely, and poked her head out of the covers beside him. 

The curtains were drawn, and the door shut. But there was a crack of early morning light shining in under the blinds, and that was enough.

The room was the same basic plan as the one he'd been given, one of any number of identical-sized spaces. Only this one had an upper balcony that wasn't connected to the floor by any means, with a cozy reading area and lots of shelves holding things that he couldn't see from this angle. There were several large wardrobes, not just one, and each one overflowed with clothes. 

The walls were covered with a single living forest mural, more detailed than anything he'd ever seen painted. A slight trickle of water bubbled in the air, filling the room with the smell of flowers and plants. There was only one pokémon depicted in the mural, though there were many of them, apparently wild without any humans to form their other halves.

A strange design choice, one that caught his eye every time he saw it. There were dozens of shaymin, flying through the sky overhead, washing in painted streams, or snacking in the painted flower-gardens. There were even subtle differences between them, in the arrangement of the flowers or the growth on their backs. Hayden hadn't even realized he could tell the difference before now, but it was unmistakable. 

He could tell the pokémon apart. The painter could too, and from the detail he guessed these were real individuals. Maybe they'd flown in through the huge shut balcony to pose for their place in the mural.

What space wasn't occupied with clothes instead had dozens, maybe hundreds of stuffed pokémon toys. Each one was a different species, and at least in these his instincts found nothing strange. Many children played with stuffed daemon toys. The daemons enjoyed them too, usually as subjects to copy. Hayden had an eevee doll in his suitcase from home, one so worn that the fur was coming off in patches. Every single one of his brothers and sisters had once called it theirs.

Liz floated into the air beside Hayden. As she flew past, Hayden felt the space bending around her, in a way he'd never felt it before. The force of gravity warped and angled, avoiding the little feline by centimeters. It lifted the hair on his skin as she passed. And more importantly, it felt so welcoming. He longed to move that way, as she did.

At least he could share Liz's feelings for now, and understand even better how comfortable the sky could be.

"I smell him," she said, turning to a corner. "The quicksilver. He's here."

Something landed on the bed beside them. It was a huge space, so big that the mattress barely moved. Hayden's eyes darted to him even so. Loch the ditto, a distorted blob of goo with crude imitations of eyes. He didn't really have those, though—his whole body could see. That was just to give other Pokémon a way to interact with him on comfortable terms.

"It's our room," he said. "Of course we're here."

Hayden had been so disoriented with every other change that he hadn't looked. Now he did, without using Liz to do it for him. He felt a mind beside the bed, buried in that sizable mountain of plush dolls. And when he looked, he caught her—a pale green nightgown emerging in places. He'd almost never seen Eleanor that way, and it brought a little warmth to his cheeks.

Of course, Hayden wasn't wearing anything at all. Maybe he shouldn't be embarrassed for someone else. "What happened?"

The ditto changed. Hayden knew Loch well enough by now to recognize when something was easy for the ditto, and when it was hard. Pokémon that were smaller, weaker, and simpler always came easier. This change took nearly ten full seconds, briefly filling the bed with a shimmering white glow. When it faded, there was another cat there, with a long pink tail and big blue eyes.

He took off unsteadily, bobbing up and down in the air instead of remaining still like Liz could. He floated closer anyway. Liz caught him in the air, touching noses in a feline greeting. Then they purred, rubbing past each other. The hug made him sniff, his eyes welling with tears. This gesture was not as intimate as Cody's strange presence in the woods, but intimate wasn't what he wanted anyway.

He sniffed, then wiped tears away from his face with an arm. "I want my mom," he whimpered, in a voice that wasn't his own. Tears streamed freely, just as they had the night before. A full night's rest had refreshed his personal supply. 

Plush toys tumbled over each other, then a figure emerged from beside the bed. Her smell had gone instantly familiar. Her mind was different too—instead of a silvery mirror that was at once simple and subtly difficult to read. Eleanor was instantly trustworthy, someone he could relax around without worry. 

Another kitten wouldn't hurt him. It was almost as good as when Hayden thought he was an eevee, and had his whole family of different evolutions to keep him safe.

She wrapped her arms around his chest the same way her daemon embraced Liz. "The Great Families are better than ordinary people at almost everything," she said. "We're smarter, we live longer. We can plan better. But growing up in Shaymin House, there's one thing we're not better at. Your family had much less to give you, but I think they were still better at it than mine. I bet they didn't reject you when you turned into something they didn't expect."

Hayden stiffened at that last, remembering. His parents hadn't celebrated his settling the way they did with all the others. But he never sensed any disappointment that he wasn't an eevee. If he'd only been any ordinary Pokémon instead, they would've given him a party just the same.

"But we're not something else," Liz thought. There was something different about that too, now that he was awake enough to realize. The mew didn't have to work hard to send it, so much as Hayden felt them naturally shared. Did that mean he could send thoughts back to her without the mew to facilitate them? "If we were something else, we might not have been able to save Ellie. It was worth it."

"I think… so," he agreed. "My parents were so busy making enough for the shop to keep it open. But when they couldn't spend time with me, one of my big brothers or sisters always did. Mostly Evelynn. She would know what to do about this. Know how to… help me." Hayden eyed Eleanor skeptically, and the girl let go. 

"Surprised you don't have something mean to say. About how I should've seen this coming, or maybe how I was never cut out to be in your world. This is all my fault, isn't it? They spent all that time focusing on teaching me Unity, and I didn't see."

Eleanor folded her arms in her lap. She glanced briefly up at Hayden's chest, then away again. Loch landed atop her shoulder. "You're not off the hook with me, Hayden," she said, after a long silence. "But I think you've been through enough about this one. My family made you suffer enough. And there's so much more ahead. There's a lot for you to learn."

Hayden reached down, pulling the sheet up over his chest. There wasn't much there, but there was more than there should be. He'd always been scrawny, and that meant washboard flat. But that had changed, and would change a lot more as he got older. "Is that why I'm naked? And why I'm in here? Lady Gracidea wants you to teach me?"

Eleanor balled one hand into a fist, rising from the bed. She glowered down at Hayden, with an expression that was much more familiar to him. 

"You can say whatever you want about me, Hayden. Call me stupid, call me a failure like my family does. But don't you dare call me complicit. I would've warned you if I knew. I just didn't think—for our family, sex is something that changes depending on the role we play. My father is my father now because he decided to go flying out into our lands with our wild cousins. Lady Gracidea isn't my mother—she's my father, but she holds the title now because she's running the family."

Hayden's stomach turned at the thought. At least he hadn't ended up a shaymin. "I don't know how I could ever get used to that. Do they?"

Eleanor shrugged. "Don't ask me. A ditto who becomes more Unified with their daemon doesn't have a sex at all until they change into something. Point is, I don't blame you for not realizing this would happen. I blame me. I grew up with Shaymin, I should've realized how they think. They care so little about this kind of thing that they change all the time. Making you change just once to serve an important duty for the family… I should've known."

Hayden dropped the sheet. The passive knowledge that his sisters would've acted that way didn't mean he had to. "The real world doesn't see it that way, Eleanor. People out there don't grow up a boy and wake up a girl one day. Everyone is the same thing their whole lives, and it works. Even if you sometimes don't like parts of what’s expected of you, you do them"

Eleanor scoffed. "The rest of the world doesn't understand Unity. If they did, the Great Families couldn't keep the world peaceful. But you gave that up when you settled, Hayden. Now you're stuck on this awful ride like the rest of us. No way to get off now."

She lowered her voice to a bitter whisper. "But unlike me, you belong on it now. Maybe one day you'll be able to drive it somewhere better. I'll only ever be a passenger."

Eleanor's emotions didn't leak out for him to easily read when she changed into a legendary pokémon. But he didn't need psychic powers to feel the depth of her pain. 

"I'll trade you," Hayden muttered, catching Liz out of the air in both hands. His daemon was bigger now, probably because his own hands were smaller. Even so, holding her still brought Hayden some comfort. That long tail curled around his arm, along with the fur that was softer than anything else he could touch in the whole world.

Except maybe Celebi. He missed Cody. Maybe she could tell him what to do.

"You pretend to be me. Liz and I will learn to be a ditto, and we can take your place."

Eleanor laughed again, more energetic this time. "You're still new at Transform, so we'll give you a pass. But it doesn't work that way. Staying changed takes endurance. We can't just be something forever."

"It does not," Ahuiliztli argued, loud enough for them both to hear. "It's only hard at first. After that, the only hard part is being stuck as one thing for too long."

They didn't get the chance to argue the point, because someone rapped on the door. It wasn't the bang of a guard, or the harsh demands of Lady Gracidea. Just a servant. "Miss Eleanor?" 

A second later, the servant let herself in. She showed no more hesitation about it than when the male servants woke Hayden in the morning. Even so, he instantly lifted the sheets over his body, all the way to his neck. This was a woman seeing him naked. Without the familiarity of Eleanor's mew imitation, that reality struck with full force.

Hayden didn't recognize this one, or her minccino daemon. She made it all the way in, bowed to Eleanor—then saw Hayden there, and bowed to her too. "Oh good, that's where you are. You weren't in your new quarters, half the household was… I hoped you would've known where to find her, Miss. Eleanor. Which… you are Eleanor, aren't you? You're both, uh…"

Miss. Not those other silly titles.

"You only wanted to find me for her," Eleanor said, annoyed. "Go on then. What do you need her for?"

The servant shuffled uneasily, obviously frightened. Her little daemon actually squeaked under the pressure. "I'm required to take you to the family doctor for examination. After your, uh—change. It won't be a long visit. And I'm told all your duties are suspended for a week, while you recover. Isn't that, uh…"

Hayden nodded wearily. "Can you give us a minute of privacy so I can get dressed?" he asked. "I'll… cooperate."

The servant tilted her head to the side. "Your Grace, wouldn’t you prefer my help? That's the purpose of maidservants."

Hayden whimpered. Of course, the servant didn't think it was a big deal. He was a girl. "Maybe one day," he said. "Not today, please. My daemon and I are… strained. We want privacy."

She bowed again. "As you command, Your Grace. I'll wait for you outside." She turned, then hurried out the door.