The approach to the Team Galactic base had gone almost suspiciously well.
From the moment they left Orange Island to the moment they found the submarine entrance, they had encountered no real resistance. The weather that made those waters genuinely dangerous to anyone else had been a non-issue with Mewtwo present.
Getting into the submarine itself had required only Mars's face at the scanner, and the rest had followed from there.
The interior was not what any of them had expected from the outside. The submarine looked enormous submerged in the water. Inside, it justified that impression.
The space was dense and layered, a compressed world of steel corridors and cylindrical chambers stacked with sophisticated equipment, but it was far larger than it had any right to be from a structural standpoint.
Living here wouldn't have felt as claustrophobic as it should have.
"Which way?" Lorelei's eyes moved to Ash.
His Aura gave him a natural advantage in a place like this. She didn't need to spell that out.
Ash closed his eyes. A moment later he opened them and pointed right. "That direction. My Aura is being blocked somewhere down that corridor."
They moved. At every locked door, Mars stepped forward and provided her face for the scanner. As the highest-clearance person aboard, she could open anything that required verification.
The Team Galactic members they passed along the way never reacted, moving through their routines as if the corridor were empty. Mewtwo's psychic cover held perfectly. Cameras captured nothing. Not a single alarm triggered.
Mars walked with them and said nothing. The shock building in her mind had gone well past the point of expression. She had tried making noise earlier, testing quietly whether sound could carry past whatever Mewtwo was doing around them. It hadn't.
Whatever she tried now would accomplish exactly nothing, and she was self-aware enough to recognize that.
She watched Ash move closer and closer to the holding chamber and felt something cold settle in her chest. If Charon didn't have some detection system she didn't know about, this was going to be a complete disaster.
They would lose Cynthia, lose two executives, and still have nothing to show for it. All because they had assumed Ash was the easier problem to handle and moved on him before dealing with Lugia first.
The logic had seemed sound at the time. He was fifteen, he had won a League Championship, and Lorelei was the real threat in the room. Strike when Lorelei was elsewhere, overwhelm him fast, take what they came for. Simple.
Nobody had anticipated that Ash would be the harder one to deal with.
Ten minutes after entering, they stopped in front of a massive iron door. The air around it felt different, heavier, the spatial energy Palkia had left behind pressing against everything that came near it.
Lorelei tugged the rope and brought Mars forward. "Last door. Do what you did at the others."
"This one is different." Mars's tone was flat. "Face recognition alone won't open it. It needs fingerprints and a password. Untie me or I can't do it."
Lorelei looked at Ash. He nodded. The rope came apart with a single motion.
Mars's Pokémon were already gone. Without them, she was a woman with excellent composure and nowhere to apply it. There wasn't much she could do under four sets of eyes.
She rubbed her wrists, stepped to the panel, and began entering the password. Her fingers moved quickly through a sequence that looked almost random. The string of digits went well past twenty characters. A normal person wouldn't have bothered memorizing something that long.
The door began to open.
Ash and Lorelei exchanged a look. The moment it was wide enough, they would go in.
The light in the corridor turned red.
An alarm tore through the silence from every direction at once.
Misty spun toward Mars immediately. "What did you do?"
The iron door, halfway open, reversed direction and began sliding shut.
Mars said nothing. The expression on her face said enough.
The password had done two things at once. It had started opening the door, and it had triggered the base-wide alarm.
Ash's expression hardened. He brought both hands together and an azure sphere of energy formed between them in an instant.
"Aura Sphere!"
The shot traced a clean arc through the corridor and connected squarely with the closing door.
"It's useless. That door can't be broken by a Champion-level attack. You're just going to have to wait for"
The door exploded.
A visible shockwave rolled outward through the corridor. The iron door, reinforced with Team Galactic's best technology and infused with divine power, came apart in fragments that scattered across the floor and walls.
A piece grazed Mars's cheek and left a clean scratch. She didn't react to it. Her eyes had gone completely blank.
That door was supposed to hold against Champion Peak output. She had watched it get shattered by a single unaided strike from a fifteen-year-old.
The dust and mist from the blast drifted outward through the opening, and then footsteps came from inside. The measured click of heels on metal flooring, calm and unhurried.
The figure that emerged from the mist wore a long black coat. Long golden hair. A face that belonged on someone who had never spent a month locked in an underwater prison.
"I knew you would come," Cynthia said.
Garchomp and the rest of her team were at her side. She had released all of them while she was inside, partly to keep watch for any attempt by Team Galactic to enter the cage, and partly because she had been working with them to find any weakness in the spatial barrier. The barrier had been holding, but it had been weakening. Given enough time, she would have found her own way out.
Whether Team Galactic's plans would have succeeded before that happened was a different question entirely.
"Miss Cynthia, are you alright?" Ash crossed the distance quickly, the worry and relief fighting each other on his face.
"Perfectly fine." Cynthia held up one finger with a slight smile. "I couldn't get out and I couldn't send messages, but they couldn't actually harm me either. I had my Pokémon, I had supplies, and I had time. I treated it like a forced vacation. The only real complaint is that I couldn't take a proper bath."
A month in total isolation, no contact with the outside world, no way to track the passage of time. Most people would have come apart mentally well before the end of it. Cynthia had apparently used the time to rest.
"Your composure is genuinely remarkable," Lorelei said, and she meant it without reservation. She was honest enough with herself to know that the same situation would have left marks on her that didn't fade easily.
"When you can't change the facts, optimism is the only sensible response." Cynthia's eyes moved around the corridor with a calm, assessing look. "I take it we're surrounded?"
They were. Team Galactic members had closed in from both directions while the group's attention was on Cynthia. All of them wore high-tech visors, small lights pulsing inside the lenses, running analysis or relaying communications or both.
Mars had slipped back into their ranks during the chaos of the door coming down and was now standing behind Ash and the others with a sharp, satisfied expression.
"You rescued her. Congratulations. Now none of you are leaving."
"Mars." A dry, unhurried voice cut through from further down the corridor. "Getting worse with age. You led them directly here and let the Sinnoh Champion walk free. When the boss hears about this, your position as executive might not survive the conversation."
The Team Galactic members parted instinctively as the speaker walked through them. He was older, balding, with grayish-white hair and a white lab coat that had the comfortable look of something worn every day. His pace was completely unhurried.
Mars didn't flinch. "Don't put it all on me. You sent me after that boy without doing proper research on him. If the boss assigns blame, neither of us walks away clean. Charon."
The name registered immediately in Ash's mind. He looked at the old researcher directly. "You're the one who did that to Lugia."
Charon shrugged without any visible discomfort. "Does it matter? What matters is that you brought my experimental subject back to me. I'll consider it a gift."
The words hit Ash like a physical thing.
Experimental subject. Not a Pokémon. A subject. Something to be used and measured and filed away. The casual ease with which Charon said it made it worse, not better.