But Lyra noticed the whispers. The way Mr. Pokemon locked his door when Gold passed. How the Day-Care couple charged him triple. The ugly curl of a fisherman’s lip as Gold fished on Route 42: “Go back to your Celadon City high-rises, city boy. These waters are for Johto blood.”

The xenophobia wasn’t a scream. It was a low, constant hum.

Silence. The Gyarados’s corpse floated belly-up, a red island in the violet lake.

“He’s not the enemy,” she said.

Gold looked at Lyra. Not with anger. With exhaustion. The exhaustion of a fifteen-year-old who had already learned that some doors don’t open just because you knock.

“Keep your distance,” her mother warned that night, darning a woolly Slowpoke-tail sweater. “Kantonese have no respect for tradition. They took our Slowpokes during the war. They’d take our souls if they could.”