Chapter 238 338
The coffee place on the corner had a line out the door most mornings, but Orion still walked the four blocks for it instead of sending anyone else. Latias called it a waste of an owner's time. He called it the only ten minutes of his day that didn't belong to a clipboard.
Three months since the second branch opened, and the walk still felt new to him in a way he hadn't expected it to. He passed a woman waiting at the crosswalk with a Growlithe sitting patient at her heel, its leash slack, its tail thumping once against the pavement when the light changed. Nobody on the corner looked twice. A man in a delivery uniform jogged past with an Emolga riding his shoulder like it had always belonged there. Somewhere in every block of maybe fifteen people, there'd be one with a Pokémon beside them now, and none of it drew a second glance anymore.
The food cart on Fifth had a little Pidgey that fetched napkins for the vendor between orders, hopping down off its perch on the awning whenever a customer needed one, hopping right back up when it was done. The vendor didn't thank it out loud. He just tossed it a piece of bread crust the way he'd toss anything to a coworker who'd earned it.
Further down, near the subway steps, a kid was showing off a Poké Ball to a stranger twice his age, comparing notes on catch rates the same way other kids argued about trading cards. The stranger actually knew what he was talking about, argued back about some evolution method the kid clearly hadn't heard of yet, and neither of them seemed to think it was strange that a grown man and a ten-year-old were having this conversation on a subway staircase at noon. Nobody stopped to ask if that was appropriate. Nobody stopped at all.
Orion caught himself doing the math without meaning to. Three months ago this same walk would've had people slowing their steps, phones coming up, someone always asking if they could pet the thing that used to only exist in games and cartoons. Now it was just Tuesday. He didn't know when exactly that shift had happened, only that it had, somewhere between one ordinary week and the next, and he'd been too busy running the sanctuary to notice it arrive.
That's the part nobody puts in the reports, he thought, coffee in one hand, the walk signal blinking down to nothing. Not the opening day numbers. This.
He got back to the sanctuary a little past noon, coffee mostly gone, and made it maybe ten feet past the gate before someone flagged him down about the new arrival in intake three.
It was a Shinx, still young enough that its markings hadn't fully settled, and it had wedged itself into the far corner of the pen the second anyone opened the door. The intern on shift had already tried twice and backed off both times, hands up, looking like she wanted someone with more patience than she had that day.
Orion crouched down instead of calling for backup. He didn't say much to it, just stayed low and let it look at him as long as it wanted to, the same way he'd done this a hundred times before and would probably do it a hundred more. The intern hovered near the door for a second, unsure whether to stay or clear out, and he waved her off toward the front desk without looking away from the corner. She went, clearly relieved to hand the whole thing off to someone who didn't mind the wait.
"You're supposed to be at the branch call right now," Latias said, from the doorway.
"I know."
"Marcus set that meeting up three days ago."
"He'll manage."
She leaned against the frame, arms crossed, watching him hold still for something that was, by any reasonable measure, not his job anymore. He'd trained people for exactly this, good ones, and somehow he was always still the one crouched in the corner.
"You went four blocks out of your way for coffee this morning too," she said. "And now you're in here talking a Shinx out of a corner instead of being on a call about budget allocations you actually asked for."
"Somebody's got to do it."
"That's the thing. Somebody already does. You just keep beating them to it."
The Shinx crept an inch closer, testing the air near his hand before deciding it was safe enough to close the rest of the distance. Orion let it come on its own time, no rush, no reaching.
"I like knowing it went right," he said, not quite an answer to what she'd actually asked. "That's all."
Latias didn't push it further. She'd learned a while back that some doors he closed himself, gently, before she could get all the way through them, and this was one of those mornings. She watched a beat longer, then let it go, the way she let a lot of things go with him that she still noticed anyway.
The Shinx settled against his knee eventually, small and warm, no longer looking for the exit. It was a clean, quiet win, nothing that would ever show up in a report Marcus asked him to sign off on, and exactly why a corner like this one kept winning out over a conference room.
The sun had dropped low enough to turn the east windows orange by the time Orion walked the lower hall to check the hub systems one last time. The readouts ran clean, same as always, power drawn straight from the bond network instead of anything with a plug or a circuit board behind it.
"Still funny to me," he said, half to Latias, half to himself, "that none of this runs on anything you could hack into. No wires worth pulling. No server room to break into. Just... this."
Latias glanced at the readout over his shoulder, unbothered. She'd heard some version of that same line from him a dozen times before.
"You say that every week," she said.
"It's still true every week."
She didn't argue the point. There wasn't one to argue. The hall stayed quiet, the readouts stayed steady, same as they had every night this month.
***