Linksshifter II

A Path Between The Waves - ~~~

Ajay shook his head vigorously. "No, no, it's for real. It's a horse that lives in the sea – it's got the most hp and the biggest attack of any Pokemon. Gavin's friend from Shetland caught one, he showed me the screenshot. But you got to camp the spawn place for two hours to get it to show, and the spawn time's on this timer that nobody knows about – someone said six hours, and it's not in a regular place." He leaned in over the table like this was a secret. "I haven't told Gavin yet, but I heard some fourth-years talking about it in the toilets. The water horse only spawns in a cave, and the cave got to be connected to the sea."

Sonali dropped her fork back to her plate with a clatter. There was something in this – something with the sea and the dream and the missing poster and the trilobite suddenly weighing on her chest again and Naresh's stories about horses in the water that were hungry for human flesh. Someone was spreading a story that would lure kids into remote caves and keep them there as the caves filled up with the tide. There was something swirling around in this that smelled wrong, that was turning the wrong switches. But all there was was something that smelled wrong, that felt strange; if she wanted to tell anyone about this, she needed to know more. "You – yous should be careful if you go around like that. It's dangerous to go in caves, especially sea caves – you can't ever tell when the tide's going to come back, nor how fast it is."

"No bother," Anjali said, pushing her porridge around in her bowl with her spoon. "Even if that's real, and I don't think it is because Gavin is a liar, it's probably like millions of CP and nobody's high enough level to get it."

"Gavin is not a liar, he even showed me the screenie on his phone."

"Be as it may," Sonali said, standing up again to turn the malpuas, "yous should stay out of caves, Pokemons or no Pokemons. There's enough kids gone missing about here the now – I don't want you joining them." She turned back around and started. "Baba! One second, I'll get you some porridge; there are a couple malpuas done on the plate, but it'll be a few minutes for fresh." She reached down to pick his bowl off the table.

"Sonali, what is going on here?" He wasn't angry, just confused.

"Breakfast, baba. I was up early, so I figured, why not?" She shrugged and set the bowl of porridge down at his place. "I figure I'll be out most of the day, so I might as well do something for everyone early. There should be khaman too, but I wasn't going to mess about with that before mum came down. Should I start the oven?" He shook his head as he sat down, and seemed like he was going to say something, picking up a malpua with his fork, but at the first bite he just stopped, thinking, or maybe staring simply into space, caught up in something nobody else in the room could follow – Uganda forty years gone, or maybe forty years from Kampala to Glasgow to Aberdeen, and a daughter who could cook like this even as she was trying to leave everything behind her and run off where he'd never hear from her again. Sonali looked away, back to the last batch in the pan.

It was one thing to decide someone might be laying a trap for local kids in a tidal cave; it was quite another to actually find one that might be getting used like that. Sonali'd never been real interested in the parts of the coast that there might be caves under – those were usually under crags, and on top of crags it was windy and the ground might fall into the sea at any minute, and beaches didn't have either of those problems – and it had taken her a while, riding up and down the shore, to get a handle on where she might need to start looking. The city was no good – they'd built the city where they had because of the harbor, which meant no crags and no caves. It wasn't where she wanted to look, but after near on ten minutes of swiping around on Google Earth and squinting at her phone to try and make sense of the shadows at the corners of the land, Sonali eventually came down to the idea that if there were any tidal caves around here, they were going to be in one place: under the fjords and fingers of rock on down towards Portlethen. She grimaced and mounted up her bike again; whether there was anything out there or not, it was going to take the rest of the day just going and coming back.