Most of the trainers on deck had fought well enough. What they had not done, once the Gyarados retreated and the smaller Pokémon began going limp in the water, was anything useful with the aftermath.
Sieg watched them stand at the rail and observe the floating bodies with what appeared to be a combination of relief and vague sporting satisfaction, and felt a mild, private contempt settle into the back of his mind.
Every one of those Pokémon was money sitting unclaimed in the water. The kind of opportunity that didn't come around twice. Wild Pokémon at combat-tested levels, already weakened, floating in open water within Pokéball range, and the people with the best access to them were standing there doing nothing about it out of some unexamined instinct that capturing defeated Pokémon in a crisis somehow didn't count as proper behavior. The unwritten social codes of trainers fresh out of their first few routes, applied to a situation that called for something considerably more practical.
If there had been a Rocket operative or someone else who operated in the grey zones anywhere on this deck, Sieg reflected, they would not have made the same mistake. They would have recognized the window for what it was and filled their Pokéballs before anyone had finished processing that the fight was over.
He stopped thinking about what other people were doing and went back to work.
The Gyarados' retreat had broken the attack group's coherence. The remaining wild Pokémon, leaderless and disoriented, were already diving. Within a few minutes the ocean surface had calmed to a level that made the engagement feel, in retrospect, further away than it was. The dark cloud mass that had arrived carrying the Gyarados was dissolving without anything to sustain it, pulling apart at the edges until it was simply weather.
And then, implausibly but undeniably, a short arc of color appeared at the horizon where the dissipating rain clouds caught the morning sun at the right angle. A small rainbow, vivid and slightly improbable, drawing eyes from across the deck with the particular authority that small beautiful things have in the aftermath of something ugly.
Serena made her entrance.
She came through the hatch at the measured pace of someone who had decided exactly how late to arrive and was satisfied with the calculation, her cane tapping the deck in the same unhurried rhythm it always did, and addressed the assembled crowd with the warmth of someone who had not been watching the entire engagement on a monitor from a comfortable chair one deck up.
"On behalf of this vessel and the Joy family, I want to extend my genuine gratitude to every trainer who answered the call today. The League will have a full record of your contributions, and a rescue coordination team is already en route. You have nothing further to worry about."
The statement did its job. The Joy family's name carried enough weight that even the people who might otherwise have had complaints found them difficult to articulate in the face of it. The tension on deck was released to some degree.
Medical staff came up from below. Trainers with injured Pokémon formed lines with the patient efficiency of people who had been through enough to know that waiting calmly was faster than the alternative. Sieg handed Honchkrow's ball to a medic with a brief, precise summary of what it had been through, asked for a full check rather than just the visible damage, and stepped back to wait.
He noticed Cynthia standing a short distance from the medical station, still wearing his coat over her wet clothes, watching Serena with an expression that had nothing warm in it.
She was working something out. The Gyarados attack had been outside normal probability for this route and this season, and the conspicuous timing of Serena's arrival, perfectly calibrated to miss every dangerous moment and appear only once the outcome was already settled, was the kind of detail that did not escape someone who had grown up in a family that taught its children to read rooms. Whatever conclusion Cynthia had arrived at, Sieg could see from ten meters away that she had arrived at it firmly.
She moved toward Serena with purpose.
Sieg did not follow. He could not have heard the conversation from here, regardless, and inserting himself into whatever was about to happen between those two would have been a mistake by any measure. He collected Honchkrow's ball from the medic, confirmed the all-clear, and turned his attention deliberately elsewhere.
He had taken perhaps four steps when he paused, circled back, and stopped beside Cynthia.
She was shivering slightly, still damp through, and the coat she was wearing was doing some work, but not enough. He had noticed it before deciding to say anything, which meant the decision had already been made before he was fully aware of making it.
"Here." He settled the coat more fully across her shoulders and adjusted the collar against the wind coming off the water, and swept a brief, pointed look around the nearby crowd at the various angles of male attention that had been collecting since the rain came down. The look communicated, without requiring any words, that those angles were no longer welcome.
Most of them found other things to look at.
Cynthia came back from wherever her thoughts had taken her, registered her current state with something that crossed her face too fast to name fully, and drew the coat closed with both hands.
"Thank you," she said quietly.
"Any decent person would have done the same."
The comment was not aimed at Cynthia. The men in the immediate vicinity who had been appreciating the view before Sieg's coat had intervened shifted with the specific discomfort of people who had been accurately described in public and could not disagree without confirming it. A few found pressing reasons to be elsewhere. One, whose companion had watched the entire exchange, was guided away with a grip on his arm that suggested the conversation awaiting him was not going to be comfortable.
Cynthia thanked him once more, then walked toward Serena.
Sieg watched for a moment, the set of Cynthia's shoulders, the deliberate quality of her approach, and then did not watch further. Knowing when to step back was its own skill, and this was not a conversation he had any business inserting himself into.
He retrieved Honchkrow and let the rest of the morning take its course.
The Chansey's crew had maintained the schedule with the highest grade of professionalism and were determined not to let it affect their timekeeping. By five o'clock, precisely as the original itinerary had indicated, the ship came into Slateport City's harbor, and the lines went ashore.
Sieg had slept from the moment he returned to his cabin until mid-afternoon, the kind of sleep that comes after the body has spent everything it has and simply stops negotiating. He woke sticky, groggy, and distinctly aware that he had not showered since before the battle. He addressed that first. By the time he was dressed and checking his Pokédex, he felt approximately human again.
Fourteen unread messages. All from Chloé. He worked through them in order, concern, relief, more concern, a question about whether he had eaten, more relief, and replied to each one with the brevity of someone who was grateful but also processing a great deal of other information simultaneously.
One message stood out from the rest.
He read it twice, then put the Pokédex away and made his way to the conference room on the top deck.
The room was considerably more occupied than he had expected. Serena was there, and Captain Yamamoto, and Cynthia, and a collection of other faces that Sieg placed as the ship's more notable passengers, family scions, established trainers, people for whom being in the room was itself a signal of their standing. Chloé appeared at the door the moment he stepped through it, closing the distance with the particular energy of someone who had been watching for exactly this arrival.
She came close enough to speak quietly, which she did.
"Because of the attack, there are press waiting at the dock. They were going to send one representative, but Grandmother said it was a good opportunity, for your profile specifically, so I put your name on the list."
The proximity involved in delivering this information was not lost on the room. Reactions distributed themselves across a predictable range. Serena's face remained neutral, but something in the set of it suggested that whatever warmth she had been extending toward Sieg before the conference room conversation the previous night had not fully recovered. Yamamoto and most of the other attendees registered surprise first, and then the particular quality of envy specific to people who had paid in favors or concessions for access that someone else had received for nothing. Cynthia, seated across the room, reached up and quietly removed Sieg's coat from her shoulders, folding it over the back of her chair with careful, deliberate movements, as though she had only just remembered she was still wearing it.
She placed it where Chloé would have no difficulty seeing it.
The briefing that followed was practical and relatively brief. Everyone who was going to speak to the press needed a consistent account, particularly regarding the Gyarados, the sequence of events, who responded when, what was used, and what the outcome was. Seasoned journalists made their living finding the gaps between separately told stories, and the last thing anyone in this room needed was a contradictory detail surfacing in print two days after the fact. They aligned on the key points with the efficiency of people who understood what was at stake and did not require it to be explained to them.
Chloé used the preparation time to touch up her appearance with the focused calm of someone who had decided that looking composed for cameras was a professional responsibility rather than a vanity. Sieg, sitting two chairs down, ran his fingers through his still-damp hair and concluded it was the best he was going to manage.
The gangway appeared at five o'clock exactly.
Slateport City's harbor greeted the Chansey the way it greeted everything that arrived carrying a story worth covering: with cameras, microphones, and more bodies than the dock was designed to accommodate comfortably. Sieg stepped off the gangway into a cluster of journalists that materialized around him before his second foot hit the dock, microphones appearing from several directions simultaneously, questions overlapping before any one of them had finished.
He handled it with the composure of someone who had rehearsed exactly this scenario in his head since the briefing.
Twenty meters away, Cynthia's situation was something else entirely. The scrum around Sieg was notable. What had formed around Cynthia was, by comparison, an entirely different category of event. The Sinnoh prodigy, the girl the circuit boards had been talking about for two years, present in Hoenn for the first time and having just been part of an incident involving a Sub-Elite Four Gyarados, the press interest in her was not proportionate to anything around it. She was surrounded so completely that the crowd had its own geometry, a dense, inward-facing ring with cameras at every angle, and her expression within it was the same composed patience it always was, answering each question with the same measured directness she brought to everything else.
Sieg watched it for a moment between his own answers, noted the scale of it, and filed it with the same quiet respect he filed everything about her.
There was a distance between where he stood and where she stood that had nothing to do with the twenty meters of dock between them.
He already knew that. The knowing did not make it smaller. It made it more specific, which was more useful.