What the Trees Follow

Chapter 73

What the Trees Follow

They left the lab before sunrise.

Gray had argued for seven. Marcus arrived at six forty-three. Lyra had been ready at six thirty-five. Gray considered both of those facts offensive on principle, but by the time the truck was loaded, the last equipment case strapped down, and Lyra had checked the sample kits twice, he had enough coffee in him to postpone the complaint.

The road southwest of Hearthome was quiet at that hour. Frost still silvered the edges of the fields, and low cloud hung in long gray bands over the distant hills. As they left the denser roads behind, the landscape opened into farmland broken by shelter belts, narrow woodlots, orchard rows, and the occasional cluster of buildings gathered close against the cold. Most of the fields were empty except for old stalks and the occasional Pokémon moving along the margins.

Gray spent most of the drive looking through the printed maps again.

Lyra sat beside him with a travel mug tucked between both hands, watching him adjust the same historical survey against the same modern road map for what was probably the sixth time. “You know the site will still be there when we arrive.”

“That remains the working assumption.”

Marcus glanced at him through the rearview mirror. “He’s been looking at the same three maps for forty minutes.”

“I am comparing them.”

“You compared them yesterday.”

“Things remain comparable overnight.”

Lyra took a drink and looked out the window. “That sentence explains a lot about you.”

Gray ignored her and shifted the historical survey another few millimeters against the modern map.

The old access track they had found in Elias’s records was almost entirely gone now. A newer farm road crossed part of the same ground, but most of the original route had disappeared beneath field margins, drainage works, fencing, and regrowth. Even so, enough of it remained legible in the landscape that Gray kept finding pieces as Marcus drove.

An older line of trees where the modern hedgerow changed age abruptly. A low break in another hedge that no tractor appeared to use anymore. A shallow depression between two cultivated fields where no modern road or drainage ditch was marked.

Individually, none of it meant much.

Together, it was enough to keep him looking.

They reached the district a little after eight.

The first grower they met was the same man who had spoken during the video call, a broad-shouldered man in his late forties named Harven. He wore a heavy canvas coat and already had dirt worked into the knees of his trousers despite the hour. He met them beside a machinery shed, where a Growlithe slept on a folded blanket just inside the doorway, one ear flicking occasionally at the sound of voices.

“You made good time,” Harven said.

“Marcus drove,” Gray replied.

Marcus shut the truck door behind him. “That sounded accusatory.”

“It was neutral.”

“It never is.”

Harven smiled faintly and looked toward the cases stacked in the back of the truck. “You planning to stay?”

“Possibly two days,” Gray said.

Lyra, without looking at him, added, “Three.”

Harven glanced between them.

Gray sighed. “We have enough supplies for three.”

“That seems sensible.”

“Don’t encourage her.”

The second grower joined them a few minutes later. Sela was older than Harven, with a weathered face and a dark wool cap pulled low over gray hair. Her orchard bordered the southern edge of the woodland, and she carried a tablet loaded with recent damage reports. A Glameow walked beside her and regarded Gray with the immediate suspicion of a Pokémon who had not yet found a reason to tolerate him.

The conversation stayed practical from the start.

Harven showed them where Munchlax had repeatedly entered the fields, pointing out a section of bent fencing and a shelter belt where branches had been pushed aside often enough that the gap no longer looked accidental. Sela showed them another access point farther south where Heracross had been getting into stored fruit and where workers had started moving bins farther from the tree line.

Gray noticed something before either of them finished explaining.

The routes were wrong.

Not wrong in the sense that the Pokémon could not have used them. Just inefficient.

He stepped back from the fence and looked toward the woodland. The nearest tree line stood less than a hundred meters away, and a straight path from there to the nearest orchard would have crossed open ground with almost nothing in the way. Instead, the Munchlax tracks curved west, followed a low ditch for part of the distance, then entered the fields through a narrower gap.

Gray pointed toward the disturbed section. “Do they always come through there?”

Harven nodded. “Most of them.”

“Even when the eastern fence is open?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

Harven looked at him for a moment. “If I knew that, I probably wouldn’t have called you.”

Fair.

Gray crouched beside the track line.

The soil was frozen near the surface but not completely hard, and several prints remained visible where the ground held more moisture. Some were fresh enough to read clearly. Others had softened at the edges and overlapped with newer movement.

Munchlax.

Buneary.

Something smaller that could have been a Shinx or a young Glameow.

Lyra stopped beside him and looked down at the same run of prints. “Same route?”

“Looks like it.”

Marcus came over from the truck with the GPS unit already running. He looked toward the ditch, then toward the open ground between the woodland and the orchard. “Could be cover.”

“Maybe.”

“There’s more shelter along the ditch.”

“Maybe.”

Lyra looked at Gray. “You’re doing it again.”

He glanced up. “What?”

“The maybe thing.”

“I am demonstrating restraint.”

“You said that yesterday.”

“It remains true.”

Marcus made a small noise that suggested otherwise and started logging the route.

They began at the northern edge of the woodland.

From the outside, the site looked disappointing.

Gray liked that.

The photographs had made it easy to imagine patterns because photographs removed most of the clutter. On foot, the place was simply woodland. Young birch and alder filled gaps between older trunks. Leaf litter covered the ground beneath a thin layer of frost. Brambles occupied every patch of light they could reach. Fallen branches crossed the understory, and somewhere deeper in the trees a Starly made enough noise to suggest it had strong opinions about their arrival.

Gray stood just inside the tree line and looked around long enough for Marcus to notice.

“This could be nothing.”

Marcus adjusted the strap of his equipment bag. “You sound hopeful.”

“I prefer discovering I was wrong before paperwork becomes involved.”

Lyra looked back toward the truck. “Paperwork is already involved.”

“That is unfortunate.”

They began with the nearest cluster of old fruit trees.

Up close, the trees were easier to identify than they had been in the aerial survey, but their history was not. Several were old enough that the trunks had thickened and split around weather damage. Smaller wild growth had filled the spaces between them, and young saplings crowded places that had probably once been more open. Moss covered the lower bark on the shaded sides, while long-unused branches crossed through neighboring crowns.

Marcus stopped beside the first large tree and looked up through the canopy. “Apple?”

“Probably an older cultivar,” Gray said.

Marcus glanced at the trunk. “You can tell from the bark?”

“No. There are still fruit remnants under it.”

Marcus looked down.

Half-rotted fruit lay among the leaves, most of it already opened by small Pokémon. Tiny bite marks crossed some pieces, while others had been split completely and left to collapse into the soil.

Lyra crouched and picked up one piece with gloved fingers. “Small.”

“Could be the variety. Could be stress. Could be age.”

Marcus opened the sampling case. “Core?”

“Yeah.”

They took the first tree core carefully.

Gray disliked the procedure even though the damage was minimal when it was done properly. The increment borer passed through the bark and into the wood in a narrow line, removing only a thin section. Marcus handled the extraction while Gray recorded diameter, approximate height, slope position, and GPS coordinates.

The first core was difficult to read in the field, the rings too tight and uneven for anything useful without proper preparation, so they bagged it and moved on.

The second tree was easier.

The third had old scars on the lower branches.

Gray stopped beneath one of them and raised a hand without quite touching the roughened wood. The bark had folded over most of the damaged area, but the shape underneath was too regular to ignore.

Lyra looked up from the other side of the trunk. “Damage?”

“Maybe.”

Marcus came around to look. “Broken?”

Gray shook his head. “Too clean.”

He stepped closer.

Several of the larger branches had thickened around old cuts, the wound wood long since rolled over most of the original surface. Whatever had happened had happened decades ago.

Marcus studied the scar. “Pruning.”

“Possibly.”

“That one doesn’t sound like maybe.”

“It’s old enough that I don’t want to call it from one scar.”

Lyra stepped around the tree and tilted her head toward another branch. “There’s one here too.”

That made Gray look.

There was.

And another.

The cuts were not modern. Not remotely. The tree had grown around them for years, enough that only the shape of the old wound remained visible beneath newer bark.

Gray took photographs and measurements before they moved on.

By the sixth tree, the pattern was harder to dismiss.

Not every older fruit tree showed evidence of pruning, and some damage was still ambiguous, but enough of the scars repeated in similar places that natural storm breakage stopped feeling like the best explanation. More importantly, the trees themselves occupied similar elevations along the slope instead of spreading randomly through the low ground and higher patches.

Listening to this through a text-to-speech channel? The story was copied, and the author never agreed to it being read out here.

Marcus noticed that independently.

“Look at the GPS.”

Gray did.

The elevations sat within a surprisingly narrow range.

Lyra studied the map display over his shoulder. “Meaning?”

“They’re avoiding the lowest ground,” Marcus said. “But they’re not all on the highest ground either.”

Gray looked downslope.

A shallow depression ran through the trees, mostly hidden beneath leaf litter, frost, and brush. It curved rather than dropping directly away, broad enough that it might have been natural drainage and subtle enough that he would not have noticed it without the winter imagery.

“Water,” Gray said.

Marcus followed his gaze. “Probably.”

They marked the location.

A Burmy watched them from a branch overhead, so still against the bark that Gray only noticed it when Lyra tipped her head back.

The Pokémon hung beneath the branch with almost no movement, its cloak built mostly from dry leaves and pale strips of bark that matched the surrounding trees well enough to disappear at a glance. Marcus followed Lyra’s line of sight and squinted upward. “First one.”

“First we’ve seen,” Gray corrected.

Lyra kept looking into the trees instead of at the one above them. “There are more.”

She was right. Two more Burmy hung farther along the same general line, both partly hidden against the vegetation. One carried darker bark fragments through most of its cloak. The other had mixed leaves and something gray worked into the lower section.

Gray narrowed his eyes at it. “Stone?”

Marcus lifted the binoculars and adjusted the focus. “Could be.”

“That would be inconvenient.”

Lyra looked at him. “Why?”

“Because I’d want to know where it came from.”

They left the Burmy alone and moved farther downslope.

The shallow depression from the winter imagery appeared about twenty minutes later, although appeared was generous. On the map it had looked like a recognizable linear feature. On foot, it barely looked like anything at all.

The ground dipped by perhaps twenty centimeters across a width of less than two meters. Dead leaves filled most of the low point, small roots crossed it in several places, and the soil beneath the frost was darker where water had lingered. There was no active flow, only moisture and a faint difference in ground level that would have been easy to miss if they had not already known where to look.

Marcus stepped into the depression and checked the slope with the GPS unit. “Drainage.”

Gray crouched near one edge and pressed a gloved finger into the damp soil. “Maybe.”

Marcus looked over. “You’re enjoying that now.”

“A little.”

Lyra had moved several meters farther along the feature. She nudged a dead fern stalk aside with the edge of her boot and then stopped. “Does drainage usually have edges?”

Gray looked up.

She was pointing at stone.

There was not much of it. Three pieces, roughly flat, each partly buried beneath soil and leaf litter. Gray went over and knelt beside them while Marcus crouched on the opposite side.

The stones were local. Nothing exotic. There was no obvious shaping, no tool marks, and nothing clean enough to call worked stone with any confidence.

But they sat along the same side of the depression.

Gray brushed loose soil away from the nearest piece.

Another flat stone appeared beneath it.

Marcus stopped smiling.

“That’s less natural.”

“Maybe.”

Lyra stared at Gray.

He sighed. “Yes. Less natural.”

They followed the depression after that, moving slowly enough that progress became almost secondary to documentation. The stones did not continue in a perfect line. Some stretches showed nothing visible at all, while others revealed one or two flat pieces emerging from beneath roots or leaf litter. The depression itself curved gently instead of taking the shortest route downhill, bending around slightly higher ground before passing beneath another cluster of older fruit trees.

Marcus kept checking elevation as they went. “It drains toward the south.”

Gray nodded.

“But badly.”

“Now?”

“Probably always.”

Gray looked along the curve again. “That seems useful.”

Marcus glanced at him. “That sounded sincere.”

“It was.”

The feature did not behave like a modern drainage ditch. It was too shallow, too irregular, and too willing to bend with the terrain. There was no clean excavation line and no sign that anyone had tried to force water into the most efficient route.

But it did move water.

And it passed directly through the section of woodland where the oldest fruit trees were concentrated.

Gray took more notes.

By late morning, the site had become slower.

That usually happened when fieldwork was going well.

They stopped moving from one obvious target to the next and began spending longer in each place. Every older tree needed measurements. Every meaningful soil change got coordinates. Marcus kept finding subtle differences in moisture and structure that meant very little on their own and became more interesting when compared with the rest of the site.

The Combee appeared around eleven.

At first there were only two moving between the upper branches. Then five. Then enough that Gray stopped trying to count individual Pokémon and started watching direction instead.

They were moving between flowering plants closer to the woodland edge and several older trees farther inside.

Marcus looked up. “There’s nothing flowering on those.”

“Not much.”

“Then why keep going there?”

Gray watched rather than answering.

The Combee disappeared behind the trunks, stayed out of sight for several minutes, then returned along almost the same route.

Lyra pointed toward one of the older trees. “Hollow?”

Gray followed her line of sight.

A long split ran up one side of the trunk, wide enough near the base to create a substantial cavity inside.

“Could be shelter.”

“Or hive access,” Marcus said.

They did not approach closely enough to disturb it. There was no reason to turn an observation into interference when distance was sufficient.

Instead, they marked the location and stayed farther back.

Several Combee moved through the same corridor repeatedly.

The route was not straight.

It followed the shallow depression.

Gray noticed that first.

Marcus noticed him noticing it and said, “Resources.”

“Probably.”

“Still agreement?”

“Yes.”

Marcus looked almost disappointed.

Farther south, the Burmy distribution became more useful.

The Pokémon on the drier ground carried mostly bark and dead leaves. Near the depression, more of the cloaks included damp moss. Around one exposed patch of stone, two Burmy had gray fragments worked through their outer layers.

Gray stood beneath them and looked down.

Small pieces of flat stone lay scattered through the soil.

Not enough to call a structure.

Enough to explain the cloaks.

Lyra looked from the Burmy to Gray. “So they’re using whatever’s available.”

“Of course.”

“And whatever’s available changes along the old feature.”

“Yes.”

Marcus adjusted the GPS unit and saved another point. “Which makes their distribution useful.”

Gray nodded.

That part pleased him.

The Pokémon were not preserving anything because it was historical. They were not maintaining an old site out of some abstract understanding of human archaeology.

They were simply living there.

The useful part was that ordinary behavior reflected the structure of the landscape. Burmy chose material from what surrounded them. Combee followed reliable routes between resources and shelter. If those resources were concentrated along older human modifications, then Pokémon behavior could reveal patterns that had become difficult to see directly.

Around noon, they stopped for lunch near the eastern edge of the woodland where the trees opened onto a low rise.

Lyra took off her pack and produced food.

Gray looked at the amount.

“This is excessive.”

“It’s lunch.”

“There are six sandwiches.”

“There are three people.”

“That is two each.”

“Yes.”

“We don’t need two each.”

Marcus had already taken one. “I do.”

Lyra handed Gray a sandwich.

He accepted it.

“That proves nothing.”

“No one said it did.”

Gray sat on a fallen log and ate.

The woods were quieter there, though never truly silent. Small Pokémon moved beneath the leaves in brief rustles. A distant Kricketot clicked somewhere toward the southern edge. Combee crossed overhead occasionally, their wingbeats fading between the trees. Wind moved through the upper branches with a dry winter sound.

Marcus settled onto a flat stone opposite Gray and watched him over the top of his sandwich for a few seconds before speaking. “You like this place.”

Gray looked at him. “I have been here four hours.”

“That wasn’t a denial.”

“It is a woodland.”

Lyra had already opened her second sandwich. She glanced between them, amused. “He’s attached.”

“I am not attached.”

“You moved an old branch so you wouldn’t step on a sapling.”

“That is basic field practice.”

“You apologized to the tree.”

Gray frowned at her. “I did not.”

Marcus was openly enjoying this now. “You said ‘sorry.’”

“I was talking to Lyra.”

“I wasn’t near you.”

Gray took another bite and looked deliberately away from both of them. The conversation ended in his favor because he refused to continue it, which was not quite the same thing as winning but was close enough for lunch.

After they packed the food away, they moved toward the pale feature they had picked out in the winter imagery. It took longer to find than Gray had expected. The coordinates only narrowed the search to a small patch of woodland, and the ground there was cluttered with exposed roots, dead fern growth, and several seasons of leaf litter packed into the low spots. Gray circled the area twice, checking the slope against the aerial printout and trying to match the angle of the depression to the image, before Marcus stopped several meters away and called him over.

“Here.”

Gray crossed to him and crouched.

A flat stone lay beneath a tangle of roots, almost completely obscured by soil and leaves. This one looked different from the scattered pieces they had found earlier. It was not obviously shaped, but it had been placed. Its upper surface sat nearly level despite the natural slope around it, and once Gray saw that, the surrounding ground started to look different too.

Another stone lay beside it.

Then another.

They worked carefully, clearing only loose leaves and surface debris while avoiding the roots and anything deeper in the soil. A short line emerged beneath the vegetation as they exposed more of the surface. Five stones. Then six. The arrangement crossed the shallow depression at an angle rather than running with it.

Lyra crouched a few feet away and studied the alignment. “Crossing?”

Gray looked at the slope, then at the width of the depression. “Maybe a step.”

Marcus shook his head. “Too low.”

“Channel support?”

“Could be.”

Gray followed the line with his eyes. The stones formed a small retaining edge where the depression narrowed, enough to reinforce the soil at a point where water had probably crossed or pooled repeatedly. It was modest construction, the sort of thing that would disappear easily once nobody maintained it.

He reached down and touched the top of one stone with two fingers. “This was built.”

Marcus nodded. “Yeah.”

Gray took several photographs before any of them moved farther. It was the first thing they had found all day that he was willing to state without adding a qualification afterward. Not a ruin. Not a wall. Not anything that would look important to someone passing through without context. Just a small piece of deliberate construction where deliberate construction had no obvious modern reason to exist.

For now, that was enough.

They mapped it carefully. Marcus measured the channel width above and below the stones while Lyra recorded its position relative to the nearest older fruit trees. Three of those trees stood within roughly thirty meters, all on slightly raised ground rather than down in the wettest part of the depression.

Gray looked from one to the next.

Something about the spacing bothered him.

He walked several meters uphill, stopped, looked back, and then returned along the opposite side. Marcus watched him make the circuit before asking, “What?”

“The gaps.”

“What about them?”

“They’re wide.”

Lyra looked around at the surrounding trunks. “For what?”

Gray did not answer immediately.

The old trees were not crowded. That had already been obvious in the aerial imagery, but on foot the spacing felt more deliberate because of what remained empty between them. The branches did not close into one continuous low canopy. Open strips ran between the trunks, and those strips were wide enough for several Pokémon to move through without forcing their way through brush.

Wide enough, in places, for something much larger than a person.

Marcus followed his gaze down one of the openings. “You think machinery?”

“Maybe carts.”

“Path access?”

“Maybe.”

Lyra had moved a few steps into the gap. She pointed toward the ground. “Tracks.”

Gray looked down.

Current tracks crossed the open space. Several sets, some fresh enough to hold their shape and others softened by damp soil and old frost. Buneary. Stantler. Then something heavier whose prints sank deeper and stretched farther apart.

Gray crouched beside the larger impressions. The edges had blurred with time and moisture, but enough of the shape remained to narrow the possibilities.

Torterra, perhaps.

Or a large Grotle.

Marcus stepped closer and measured the spacing by eye. “That’s large.”

“Yeah.”

Lyra glanced from the tracks to the surrounding trees. “Does that help us?”

“Not yet.”

They followed the modern Pokémon path for another hundred meters.

It remained broad.

That interested Gray more than the individual prints did.

The rest of the woodland was threaded with narrower routes where smaller Pokémon had pushed repeatedly through brush, leaving compressed leaves and thin openings between saplings. This corridor was different. It stayed open without becoming straight, curved naturally with the terrain, and passed between the older fruit trees again and again rather than cutting through the densest growth.

Some of that could be ordinary movement. Some could be soil conditions. Some could be chance. Gray was not willing to turn repeated coincidence into design until they had more to work with.

But the old trees kept appearing along the corridor’s edges instead of inside it.

Marcus stopped beside one of the trunks and looked down the open route. “If someone planted these, they left the middle empty.”

Gray nodded.

“For carts?”

“Maybe.”

Marcus glanced farther down the corridor. “For larger Pokémon?”

“Maybe.”

He smiled.

Gray sighed. “Yes. Still maybe.”

They did not see the Torterra that day.

What they found instead was evidence that something large still used the route. Bark had been scuffed on one tree at a height too high for the smaller Pokémon they had seen. A section of soil had been compressed into a shallow trough where repeated weight had pressed through the leaf litter. Farther on, vegetation had been flattened across a patch broad enough that something substantial had either rested there or passed through often enough to keep the growth down.

None of it was fresh enough to identify confidently.

Enough to note.

By midafternoon, the character of the site had changed without becoming any easier to explain. Gray, Marcus, and Lyra had collected nine tree cores, fourteen soil samples, mapped two shallow channels, documented the stone crossing, and recorded three repeated Pokémon corridors. None of it amounted to the kind of evidence that let Gray draw a clean line under the day and declare the problem solved, but the woodland had stopped looking accidental. That was enough to matter. It was also not enough to conclude much, which Gray preferred. Certainty gathered too quickly usually meant somebody had skipped a step.

They started back toward the northern edge as the light thinned through the canopy. The woodland had become easier to read after several hours inside it, though Gray was no longer sure whether that was because the patterns were genuinely becoming clearer or because he had learned where to look. Lyra was a few paces ahead when she stopped beside one of the oldest fruit trees and looked down toward its base.

“Gray.”

Something in her tone made him turn before she said anything else. By the time he reached her, she had crouched near the trunk and was brushing loose leaves away from a squared edge protruding through the soil. At first Gray assumed it was another exposed stone, but the shape became harder to dismiss once more of it was visible. The edges were too regular, and the trunk had grown around part of one side as if the object had been there long before the tree reached its current size.

Gray knelt beside her. Most of the object remained buried, but enough was exposed to identify it as a short stone post. Roots passed over and around it, and one face had been worn smooth enough that any original marking was gone. There was no inscription left to read, no convenient symbol announcing what it had once meant, but the placement itself was useful.

Marcus came up behind them and studied it for a few seconds. “Boundary marker?”

“Could be,” Gray said.

Lyra looked past the post toward the nearest depression. “It lines up.”

Gray followed her gaze. She was right. The post sat almost directly beside one of the shallow channels they had been tracking all afternoon. An older fruit tree stood perhaps twenty meters beyond it, with another farther along the same curve. Once he noticed the alignment, the pattern kept going.

Not rows.

Not really.

Something looser than that.

He stood and looked through the woodland again, letting his eyes move past individual trunks and onto the spaces between them. The site changed when he stopped trying to force it into the shape of a conventional orchard. The trees curved with the ground instead of cutting across it. The channels followed the same terrain. Open corridors passed between the older trees, and current Pokémon still used those corridors often enough to leave repeated tracks.

The Combee had been moving along the old fruit-tree clusters. The Burmy had been building cloaks from materials concentrated around the stone and drainage features. Something much larger was still traveling through the broad gaps. None of those Pokémon cared what the site had once been called, but their movement made parts of the old layout visible again.

Marcus stepped up beside him. “Thinking?”

“Yes.”

Lyra remained crouched near the marker. “About what?”

Gray did not answer immediately. He looked from the post to the channel, then toward the nearest open corridor. “Whoever laid this out wasn’t trying to make the land convenient for people.”

Marcus followed the line of trees. “No straight rows.”

“No.”

“No efficient walking lines either.”

“No.”

Lyra glanced toward the broader route they had followed earlier. “But something moves through it.”

Gray nodded.

That was the interesting part.

Not proof.

Not yet.

They still needed dates from the cores, better soil results, more records from Elias, and probably more time watching how the Pokémon used the site. But the shape of the place had started to make more sense once he stopped asking why the orchard was badly arranged for humans.

They packed the equipment slowly and headed back toward the field boundary. Harven was waiting near the edge of the farmland when they emerged, hands tucked into the pockets of his coat. He looked past them toward the woodland before asking, “You find anything?”

Gray shifted the strap of his pack and glanced back at the trees. “Somebody managed it.”

Harven nodded once. “Orchard?”

“Probably.”

“Important?”

Gray looked at him. “Don’t know yet.”

Harven accepted that without complaint, which Gray appreciated. No argument, no attempt to push him toward a useful answer, no request for certainty the evidence had not earned. Just a nod and room to keep working.

They loaded the samples into the truck. Lyra checked each container twice before securing the case, while Marcus entered the last coordinates from the day into the GPS log. Gray stood beside the tailgate and looked back toward the woodland until Lyra shut the equipment case with a solid click.

From the field, the trees looked ordinary again.

That was fine. Most useful things did.

The return drive was quieter than the trip out. Gray opened the map again anyway.

He traced the old access track, the shallow channels, the stone crossing, the broad corridors, and the current Pokémon movement. The same curved pattern kept appearing no matter which layer he brought forward.

The old orchard had not been forced into straight lines.

Whoever planted it had worked around the shape of the land, and maybe around the way Pokémon moved through it too.