Work Text:
06/05/2018
In view of what his team would have to face upon arrival, Logan's relief that day was limited when his kitten – somewhat roughly due to the lack of exercise in the last few months – touched the Blackbird down outside the camp ruins. At least this Alaskan wasteland saved them the search for a landing site.
While Katja shut down the engines, he turned to the passenger area, still not very enthusiastic about the sight of his so-called task force. Fuck, after the last numbing years of uneventfulness, the X-Men had simply not been prepared for shit like in New York II. “No heroics, no solo stunts. Don't run off too far. Don't need anyone to get lost.”
A mocking glance from dark eyes, as young as they were far too bitter, met his. “Get lost? When everything that isn't a clean white attracts attention within a ten-mile radius?” Bastian reached for a chewing gum, demonstratively unimpressed by Logan's dark expression. Maybe he was just trying to avoid looking through the windshield at the weathered, partially fallen fence posts, the remains of generators and sheds almost completely covered by snow.
This stubborn avoidance would inevitably come to an end in a moment, and then Logan wouldn't have time for therapy after hysterical breakdowns. If the kid was, understandably, too unstable for this, they should have left him at home.
“I've got better things to do than dig people out of holes who don't watch their step.” Logan unstrapped with an irritated blow to his seatbelt buckle. ”And unless they trained only your big mouths at that academy here back then, you might have heard of snow blindness, too.”
“Your sense of tact never ceases to amaze me, Claws.” Katja threw his jacket at him so roughly that it would have landed in his face if it hadn't been for his feral reflexes.
She herself didn't need any protective clothing, but still, Logan sometimes wished that she'd put something on over that sadistic costume of hers. Not because what had happened between them some 20 years ago would still have been of any significance, but because the open view of the traces on Katja's body from that asshole Anderson back then, the testimony of Logan's own failure to properly take care of one of his pack, didn’t hurt any less after all this time. Especially on a day when the fear was not unjustified that such dangerous conflicts would soon be on the agenda again.
“Being nice is not in my job description.” He turned away abruptly, focusing his thoughts on the essentials. Even if that only meant scouring a godforsaken area for clues that the traitor they were looking for, or the person who had hired them, had surely destroyed long ago, if they hadn't been complete idiots.
To Logan's surprise, Bastian was at least the first to head outside, albeit with a very pained expression. “Goddamnit, I forgot that the fucking wind here almost kills you.” His teeth chattering, he jumped down the last part of the stairs and rolled his eyes when he immediately sank knee-deep in the snow. Disgruntled, he pulled his hood deep into his face, but thankfully stopped his whining.
Not least because Gringo ran past him with an excited whine, surprisingly fast for one or other age-related conditions, probably scenting his birthplace. However, the fur ball had barely made the first round through the few outlines that could still be seen of this former refuge when he let out a bloodcurdling howl and cowered next to a fallen pillar, with his head between his front legs, whimpering to himself.
Bastian quickly had a similar expression on his face replace that provocation from a moment ago. Logan thought he heard the boy's heart skip a beat in the silence, interrupted only by the whistling, cutting gusts, as he, too, spotted the first frozen human bodies between torn tarps and crooked wooden stakes. He turned very pale, even staggered back a step, but then regained his composure.
And said something that sounded completely surreal at first ... But it was also one of the first things the boy let out that made Logan respect him a little. “Since you already dragged me here, I hope you don't mind that we bury these people. It's about time.”
Logan gave himself a push, jumped off the ramp as well and briefly put a hand on Bastian's shoulder. While he wasn't too hot on sentimentality ... No matter how much of human abysses that boy had witnessed in his youth, so many corpses of minors at once were probably a rare sight, even in a laboratory like those of these psycho fuckers in Helsinki. And the boy was standing before them for the second time in half a year no less. “If there's time.”
He went for an attempt at an initial scan of the area of several miles that the outermost protective field had once surrounded himself but quickly realized that it was useless while everything was covered by that damn omnipresent white.
It had been necessary for Noemi to come along. Today was as good a day as any. Let her get to know the things she would have to face regularly sooner or later if she stuck to her career choice.
Luckily, in the midst of his far too melancholy thoughts, his instincts kicked in. His head raised on its own, his nostrils flared from a scent that he couldn't immediately place. But most of all, he was listening. His eyes narrowed. Not here, not now.
“Firewing!” Within seconds, the situation had changed. Now Logan definitely couldn't babysit the girls on top, even though via Noemi's and his weak mental link, that his daughter's abilities had instinctively created years ago already, he could only too well feel the coldness of shock in her soul, and could see from the corner of his eyes how Saskia was clinging to her mother, too. This was the reality outside of their cozy little Danger Room right here; the sooner the two of them realized that, the better.
“On it. Stand back.” Pride stirred in Logan's soul when Noemi, using her telekinetic powers, swung up into the air, although she had turned quite a bit whiter in her face. Hopefully, his daughter had inherited his strong stomach.
So far, this only looked like the hints of some sick shit. Soon, nothing of it would remain hidden, not from unenhanced eyes either, and above all, it would smell like it.
Nevertheless, Noemi raised both arms without hesitation and sent a wall of fire racing through the air, across the ground, across the entire camp, while she protected the Blackbird and those present with separate telekinetic fields. A force of nature that made snow and ice disappear within seconds.
When Noemi landed again, with a grace that easily broke Logan's heart every time, because it reminded him far too well of where the girl got it from, she had become even paler. Not even swallowing thickly several times could hide the glistening of ice crystals on her cheeks when her small group now stood in front of a huge field of black corpses, curled up in pain, lying in their own feces. Exactly as they had died back then, the ice had preserved them. For a few seconds, Noemi and Saskia looked as if they wanted to go back to the jet immediately. “And now?”
“We split up. Hurry up. Belt cams on. Record everything you see and touch. We won't be coming back here again. Hurricane, Beast and I will check out what's left of the tents while the others take a look at the bunker,” Logan explained harshly, not saying a word more about the scene of the accident himself.
It wouldn't do anyone any good if he, too, let it show now how sick this all was. Or that in the face of it, an old fear was inevitably trying to surface in him. The concrete fear, not just the subtle dread that he'd had to live with every day of his life since the battle on the Scapels moon. The fear of losing someone he loved with all his heart at the hands of fanatical bigots.
“Look for documents. Files, flash drives, anything that might be useful. Hurricane, turn on the heating.”
Taking a deep breath, Saskia pulled away from Katja who looked at the camp with a composure that already made Logan forget again how annoying his kitten could be at times with her lack of self-confidence and constant self-reproaches. This woman had seen hell from up close before, and that had shaped her whole life. She knew when to function.
Unfortunately, Saskia tried to follow this impressive example in vain. Occupational hazard when a mutation depended on emotions. It was understandable that Saskia didn't feel like laughing right now. She tried hard to concentrate, with her eyes closed ...
When she opened them again, there were tears in them. “I'm sorry...”
Logan just shook his head. Such experiences were also part of a first mission. Hopefully, the fleas would learn something from it. ”Keep trying. Get to work.”
“I don't think there's much left in the tents. After the force field was deactivated, either the storms or wild animals have destroyed everything haptic here. We'll have more success down below.” Despite his renewed outrageous objection, Bastian didn't sound as if his mind was still really present. Tears were freezing on his cheeks. The now completely empty look in his eyes felt damn familiar to Logan. It wasn’t a surprise when the boy's legs suddenly gave in, at the first step towards the said underground facility already.
Logan would have to squeeze in some extra shifts in the Danger Room; he was starting to rust. But the truth was that he knew what it was like to have the world start to blur before your eyes, to see the ghosts of people flickering through your field of vision, until you forgot where you were and when. Kit had had to rudely shake Logan out of this trance a few times during his occasional trips to Africa before he could have made the acquaintance of a poisonous plant or a predator's teeth.
He turned away abruptly before his own concentration could wane. Thinking of people like Kit had just as little a place on a mission as untrained beginners. “Kitten, do something. We need him.”
But before Katja could take even one step towards Bastian, he raised his hand sharply. His other hand dug into the ground, snow trickling through his long fingers, again and again. With each time, his eyes cleared a bit, and when Noemi knelt down next to him, concerned, there was a jerk going through his body at last.
“In the tents, we never kept many things of importance.” Now his tone, fortunately, was stabilizing again, too. “But you could check here on the surface to see if any of the residents are missing that I don't know about. Then we can at least rule out the possibility that one of the teenagers helped the attackers. If we're in a hurry, I'm more useful downstairs, but you'll need a resident list with photos; those things were also stored in the bunker. The power cells down there will last for decades, so there shouldn't be much damage.”
He slowly raised his head to look Logan straight in the eye. “That is, if you don't mind, Sir.” Actually, it was admirable that even in the deepest state of mourning, this brat could still make a "Sir" sound like a "Fuck you".
“Hurricane, go with them, bring that list. Until then, we'll be done with the tents and have all the bodies on tape. Close the hatch before something freezes off of Bastian that might not grow back,” Logan growled, but not half as unkindly as he'd spoken of his latest favorite pacifist a few minutes ago still.
Despite his age-related immaturity, Bastian was doing quite well right now, and if taking care of him also gave the teenage girls the strength they needed to get through this, all the better.
The rest of them would have enough to do, turning over every stone up here.
“And when I say we're leaving, you don't ask, you just get your asses out of here.”
“Why?” Noemi asked suspiciously. ”What did you hear earlier?”
Sometimes it was annoying when your own daughter had telepathic gifts. Logan shook his head harshly. He didn't know anything yet. It could have been any other helicopter, which was hopefully already heading in a different direction.
“Move your asses.”
Noemi, Bastian, Saskia and Katja had quickly reached a decayed horse barn, which, apart from an unserviceable dog sled, contained nothing of value. Outside the sled, Gringo was already waiting for them, restlessly pawing at something metal in the ground.
The key to the hatch almost invisibly embedded in the frosty ground, which Bastian got from a barely inches-sized secret hiding place on the underside of the sled, they didn't need as they soon discovered – the entrance, through the width of which two people could just barely squeeze if you snuggled, was unlocked.
“So much for that.” Bastian pulled open the unpleasantly squeaking metal cover, already slightly bent due to the weather, and carefully descended the icy first steps, ignoring the rusted railing, which would have been more likely to slit one's wrists than to give support. ”Careful, don't break your ankle. Winter service stopped coming by here a few months ago, unfortunately.”
He quickly lost interest in his forced humor, but Bastian didn't seem particularly surprised by the chaos that awaited them downstairs either. “We're not the first ones here.”
Overturned chairs, pictures torn from the walls, half-tipped over cabinets ... The deactivated protective field after the viral attack had apparently been seen as an invitation by some scum.
“Why would anyone break in here? There's nothing of value here, is there?” Saskia was the last to join them, pulling the hatch shut properly this time to keep out the relentless storm.
As Bastian had predicted, both the heaters and the lights were still working, so at least they would be able to work under humane conditions in a few minutes.
“For mutant haters, there is.” Katja exchanged a look of sad agreement with Bastian. ”They were probably looking for data about New York II and mutants in general. Jericho has done a lot of research.”
“But he was smart enough to hide all the results and inventions in his laboratory,” Bastian added, his voice trembling ever so slightly. ”Apart from him and the older students, no one ever got in there. Over there. But first …”
He jumped over a few scattered items on the ground, swiftly pacing the large common hall, his eyes fixed solely on objects on the ground.
Katja caught up with him and grabbed his hand to stop him. “You can go back upstairs if it's too hard.” She had an idea what it was that the boy didn't want to see under any circumstances in these underground rooms.
You could smell it immediately, too, coming from the direction to which Gringo had instantly scurried, alternately whimpering and growling. It wouldn't be good for Bastian's state of mind if he were to track down what the dog had found himself.
Katja couldn't say that she was eager to do so either. Unfortunately, she wouldn't have a choice.
Bastian firmly shook his head. “I knew what I was getting myself into.”
With his shoulders tight, he began to rummage in a rusted storage cupboard that had tipped over onto a table, while Katja set out on an obligatory first tour of the common room, and to the most necessary of duties, as far as the victim in here was concerned.
“You can save yourself the time. There's nothing left here.” Bastian ducked his head back under his hood uncomfortably when three questioning glances turned in his direction, nodding at the scorch marks on the door of the cupboard.
”This looks like artificial radiation rays. Someone was here looking for something so important that they fought for it. I doubt that these were people who just leave things lying around. Stop looking at me like that. I've had plenty of time to read and to do computer games in my life, and in our lab, they mainly tested mutants with destructive powers. There are hardly any traces of any kind of radiation that I haven't seen before. With a little time, you could recreate exactly how they wreaked havoc here.”
“I'll get back to that.” Katja nodded appreciatively at the boy, although she felt her throat tighten again instantly. The Avengers' hunch seemed to have been right. Artificial radiation weapons was what Jean's killers had also used back then, as Katja knew from that one gruesome mission report.
“The lab it is.” She held out her hand to Bastian pleadingly. Logan was right: They couldn't linger here. And Katja and Noemi still had at least two rooms to search, including the private quarters of the former camp director. ”Ready?”
Bastian nodded jerkily and finally pulled a crumpled piece of paper from between the shards of crockery and some books. He pressed it into Saskia's hand before heading for the massive metal doors that separated the research area from the general one.
“Just as I thought: It's intact. They probably didn't dare to blow it up for fear of destroying something important in there. Jericho had some pretty tough security systems.”
Now he couldn't and didn’t want to put it off any longer; the renewed memory of the man who had given him a home back then, like so many others, was probably too painful for that. He turned his head abruptly in the direction of the corner where Gringo was cowering, where the smell of decay was most intense. He wiped a few new tears away, as his gaze fell on a snow-white, cramped hand, encased in the long black sleeve of a priest's robe, protruding from under the shadow of a long wooden dining table. “It wasn't the virus, was it? His skin looks normal.”
“Thirty-eight.” Katja squeezed Bastian's gloved hand once more. The fact that they had all known didn't make it any better. It was a more than unfair end for this dedicated clergyman, who had married Scott and her back then, and Jean and Logan, too. ”Don't do this to yourself if you want to remember him in a better way.”
Bastian nodded slowly, swallowing thickly once more. “I could really use a smoke right now,” he murmured, staring absently at the lab door.
He gasped in surprise when Katja tapped his arm with a crumpled pack.
“You don't tell my husband, and I won't tell Hank.” Grinning wryly, with a shrug, Katja accepted Noemi's downright stunned scrutiny from the side, too, lit a cigarette herself and promptly coughed. She was definitely getting too old for some things.
After a few drags, however, at least she no longer felt as if she wanted to run screaming from this damn bunker any moment.
“You don't sound like you should start again, to be honest. But thank you.” Bastian visibly felt a little more grounded, now that he had something to hold on to. As long as he didn't look into that one certain corner again, he would hopefully be able to get this all over with somehow. And tonight, probably the very first thing he would do would be to try and find out where the booze at Mutant High was hidden.
He used his teeth to pull off the glove of his free hand, wiped over the side of the doorframe and placed a fingertip on a dimly glowing spot in the middle of the display, peeking out from under the dirt. “Murray, Four Seven Alpha Tango.” A red ray of light first grazed his skin, then his right pupil.
The display changed to a confirming green. Almost silently, the door's halves slid apart.
“Damn it!” Katja stumbled back, the moment she could see as much as half an inch through the gap into the white-paneled room, bumping into Bastian without even realizing it. Her eyes were wide open when she saw a person floating in a clear liquid in a huge glass tank in the corner, a person she had thought – hoped – she would never have to face again.
What in the …? How could that even ...?
The answer flashed through her troubled mind as quickly as the reassurance that followed the first moment of shock, when it got clear to her that she definitely had nothing to fear from this unexpected encounter, at least for the moment. This time, she definitely didn’t, after the X-Men had already had fallen for the same misapprehension for the last fifteen years. No one could blame them for that, really ... They'd been made believe extremely thoroughly, just like the rest of the world, this obviously faked death of a terrorist icon. And Scott had had to deal with a whole bunch of annoying and completely unjustified self-reproaches in this regard ever since, on top of that.
Mystique, that goddamn ...
“Magneto.”
“What the ...?” Noemi hectically pushed past Katja, at first too disgusted by the fate even of an enemy to feel the same displeasure as Katja that the X-Men hadn't been rid of the guy as they'd hoped for so long. ”Seriously, what is wrong with these people who were in here? Isn't it bad enough to rob graves and kill someone? Why exhibit them like a zoo animal?”
“The attackers didn’t do that,” Bastian objected, audibly alienated himself still. "As I said, they couldn't have gotten in here, not a chance. Otherwise, the place wouldn't still look like it's been wiped clean either. Maybe ..." He hurried over to the man-sized tank, admirably suppressing his own shock.
When Katja followed him, she quickly realized from the corner of her eyes that the boy was right once again.
Unlike the others, this room was completely intact. Microscopes and monitors were in their usual places, covered only by a very thin layer of dust. Some of the machines were even still on standby. The colorful contents of countless test tubes seemed to be just waiting for someone with a keen scientific eye to bend over them and work with them ... Except that that would never happen again.
Only the amazement at seeing a face from the past in these rooms, now filled only with memories, a face that actually had nothing to do with this camp whatsoever, pushed this sadness into the background. And the faint hope that maybe not everything in New York II was dead. Even if this was truly the last person Katja would have wanted to see again.
“This is a cryogenic bath,” Bastian confirmed her suspicion. "One of Jericho's last inventions. Just look." He tugged at Noemi's cape to draw her closer, and pointed to the lifeless shape inside the thick, slippery liquid, to the healthy, slightly tanned skin color, the peaceful features.
“Cryogenic?” A look of vague recognition spread on Noemi's face. ‘The guy's alive?”
“As of yet. Wait ..." Katja took a closer look at the tall, powerful figure of her old enemy. Quickly enough, she spotted a jagged hole in his dark uniform, right in the heart area, and a dark spot below; the edges of the wound looked deep black. “Whoever this was, he must have been ambushed. He's been shot, but the wound isn't bleeding. Cryo-stasis. At least that's how Jericho described it to me. No breathing, no pulse, no bodily functions. Everything's stopped.”
“Just so you know: That's pretty freaky.”
Shaking her head, Noemi, together with Katja, examined the control terminal of the tank more closely. “The guy's lucky. The energy display is already down to ten percent. In a few days, the tank would have ceased to function. Didn't Uncle Scott get that guy six feet under a long time ago already?”
“It seems that his successor once more did a good job of making it look like it,” Katja replied, annoyed, still offended by how much they had all fallen for that blue-skinned bitch once more. ”Maybe she did no longer want to wait to inherit his legacy and tried to kill him herself. By framing us, she had the perfect excuse to continue the cold war against us, even after her people had been immunized.”
“Maybe Magneto sought help from U.G.E.R. and Jericho brought him here,” Bastian nodded thoughtfully. ”He has always been very ambitious when it comes to hopeless cases. It seems that he didn't succeed with this one though.”
Katja felt something like satisfaction well up in her. Not that she would have wished such a cowardly, painful attack on even an enemy, but she couldn't feel sorry for someone either who had made her early days at the Mutant High a living hell. “If Magneto went along with it voluntarily, it must have taken a lot of balls to jump in there. They say cryogenic fluid, that feels like ice at first and then burns like fire, until you pass out. In any case, he's not going anywhere for now. But if we take him to Westchester, Hank might even be able to fix him.”
She tightened her lips harshly. “There are too many crucifixes hanging around here. I'm actually considering helping this asshole. Me pulling the plug would be more what he deserves.”
“So much for Westchester idealism, huh?” Bastian couldn't help but give a cynical little snort, momentarily lost again in the aggression with which he had already confronted Ororo and Logan in the sick bay yesterday. ”Your team already left people here to die. I'd say that's more than enough. The guy missing a couple of sandwiches, fine, but he might know what happened here, and that, I want to know, so can you calm your tits, Mrs. Summers? Wasn’t it you who tried to tell me about how revenge is not worth it yesterday?”
“Revenge is Mystique's style, not ours.” Katja had to turn away, and from Noemi's similarly uncomprehending expression, too, before an even harsher comment could escape her. They had dallied enough, and getting a medical emergency out of here under time pressure would be a whole new challenge on top. If the teenagers would start to get that underway, at least she wouldn't have to deal with this damn tank anymore. The decision as to whether or not to take this risk would ultimately be Scott's anyway, and that was probably for the best.
“I, for my part, would just rather avoid Magneto looking for new research subjects again soon to enforce his plans of artificial mutation.” With a harsh movement, she pointed to the old but still clearly visible x-shaped scar on her lower abdomen. ”I don't ever want to have to pick people up like my own child from his damn table again, especially not with marks like this. There's a kind of hate in your soul that you don't get to choose, Bastian, I think you know that best yourself. Not acting on it is the balance we have to seek every day, that's all I was trying to make you understand yesterday.”
“I lived as a guinea pig for years. Don't you think I had enough time for that?” Bastian reminded her with a depressive levity in his voice, as if that were the most normal thing in the world. As if he didn't just have to wear this serenity like an iron mask on the outside because he had long integrated it into his soul.
“Those bastards took an extremely long time to find the limits of my healing powers and to test my pain threshold. I have been exposed to more physical, medical and sexual torture in this place than many of the residents of your school put together. It's really not cool to have to bathe in liquid gold or when your skeleton secretes the titanium that they wanted to put on your bones so badly, probably because they've jerked off a few times too many to the files of that Stryker guy back then.”
He probably saw that Katja was struggling for words, with a hint of guilt, and forced a weak smile on his lips. Maybe said healing powers had an effect on his soul too ... In any case, he seemed to have truly put this terrible thing behind him. Katja could learn a thing or two from that, and it left her feeling reassured that Bastian would hopefully not pursue his desire for retribution in blood as far as the disaster in this camp was concerned either.
“It's okay. But maybe you're starting to understand now why this whole X-Men thing is not for me. What I've learned to hate is violence, because I couldn't guarantee that I would stop once I started. That's the decision I consciously made when your people got me out of there back then. The one for a life in peace, except in extreme emergencies.”
“Sometimes they don’t make such a life possible for you,” Katja replied quietly but firmly. "I hope you don't have to learn that the hard way again.”
Bastian tiredly shook his head. "As I told you: If someone threatens me or those important to me, I have no problem using what I've learned here with Jericho. But until then, I prefer to use my energies for contrary efforts.” He nodded pointedly at the cryo-tank. ”Especially if someone is useful to me. But Mrs. Freeze will have to wait, one way or another.”
“Already on it. The data from this network is protected multiply,” Noemi joined the conversation again, audibly shaken herself by what she'd heard, but more professional than the other two combined. Katja's appreciative smile, she met with a short, proud grin, pulling a USB stick barely the size of a finger out of one of Jericho's computer towers. “Our experts at home will take a look at that. Without a few weeks of hacking, this is just a few terabytes of data garbage. And Jericho's bedroom was also ravaged by the attackers. Just debris and shards.”
“Then we have everything that could still be found here.” Trading a noticeably grateful fistbump with this remarkably tough young woman, Bastian hurried back towards the hatch.
On his way, his gaze fell on Jericho's body once more. After a moment's hesitation, he ignored Katja's advice earlier after all and approached the motionless body with trembling knees, his hands buried deep in the pockets of his coat. He probably owed the man at least a brief farewell.
It wasn't a pretty sight, but not as bad as the remains of the teenagers. Thanks to the much more protected underground location, for once, but above all because the sight of a normal decomposition process was almost reassuring in contrast to these damn disfigured black corpses. Only a little blood and hardly recognizable remains of something else at the back of the head. The handle of the weapon was still in Jericho's hand. He, of all people, a deeply religious Catholic, had really chosen this path. Either because he couldn't have borne to see his charges suffer or to escape the effects of the virus before it could really wreck his body. That didn't matter anymore.
“What was he like?“ Noemi had stopped close behind Bastian. She sounded more curious than upset.
“Jericho... was an angel for mutant world. They kicked him out of the church years ago because he had an affair and someone ratted on him, but he was the most Christian person I ever met.” A sad smile curled on Bastian's lips. “He managed to show each of us a way back to life. He only lived for this camp and for his research. He was just a bit quirky sometimes. Because of his mutation,” he answered Noemi's unspoken question. ”I was here for years, but I never saw him use his powers. He was always kind of angry with his God because he made us what we are.”
“About that, he's not the only one in the Catholic Church,” Katja remarked quietly. "Shall we?”
“One second." Bastian took a deep breath. It wasn't quite that easy to carry on as if nothing had happened after all.
“Tell me,” he whispered absently, closing the dead man's eyes carefully. ”Tell me what happened here.”
He bowed his head to say a short prayer, and after a moment's hesitation, Katja joined him. Not that she herself had any connection with faith, but she knew that Jericho would have appreciated it.
That was when she suddenly noticed something sparkling under a wrinkled fold of Jericho's robe, almost at the same moment that Bastian unexpectedly reached for it. “That's weird.” He removed the small pin to take a closer look. It was a flaming heart, pierced by a cross. “I don't recognize that. He always wore a different one, openly displayed over his robe.” And something about this fact visibly made the boy uneasy. This cross looked somehow strange. Eerie.
“Are you sure?” Katja took the pin out of his hand with narrow eyes, an old memory grazing her. ”When Jericho worked with us during the Great Inferno, I saw something like this on him. The symbol gave me nightmares back then already.”
“Something's not right here. The fur ball there isn't usually so paranoid either, is he?”
Bastian uneasily looked over at Gringo, who kept growling unwillingly in the direction of Jericho's body.
“Not with someone who helped his mother give birth to him back then, no.”
Fighting sudden nausea, Katja bent down next to him and, with a diamond-sharp knife from her belt, cut off a small piece of Jericho's robe, then led Gringo by the collar to the hatch, where she held the cloth in front of his muzzle. “Look! Come on, flea carpet, I know you can still do it. Look, Gringo!”
She had to repeat the game twice before the husky realized that he shouldn't run back to the dead body, but should search for other places in the camp that had its scent.
Bastian looked at her and Noemi critically from the side as they hurried after the dog. “What are we looking for this time?”
“Still the same ... clues.” Katja exchanged a gloomy, understanding glance with Noemi. ”We've all trusted this man unquestioned for decades. I mean, damn it, he used to be a priest. But Magneto didn't shoot himself, so it wasn't him who helped the attackers. He wouldn't have had any reason to do that anyway, even if he hadn't been in a deep sleep for years.”
“This is absurd, I hope you realize that.” Bastian was also visibly fighting nausea, which threatened to rise in all of them just from the thought of this monstrosity. With gritted teeth, he made his way back up the slippery, steep steps.
Katja didn’t say anything. If this really ... That would have meant that the X-Men had fucked up in a way that they could never make up for. That was bad enough. If she now let herself be overwhelmed to such an extent that she would not be able to complete this investigation, then she would have failed these children, who were lying around her in the snow, even more.
So she forced herself to walk past the deceased with a fixed gaze, following nothing but this tunnel vision, the iron determination not to give in to premature hysteria, to continue functioning, on and on, until she would have certainty. Then it would still be early enough to take out her anger on the next best thing she came across.
Bastian was already busy before she got there, tearing down the last remains of a shelter on the husky paddock, under which Gringo had crawled, barking, upset, and promptly came across another hatch, apparently to a second underground facility that none of the residents of New York II had ever known about. “What the ...?”
He stared at the heavily bolted opening with his mouth open, growing horror, as Noemi discreetly directed him a few steps backward so that he wouldn't catch a few extremely unpleasant sparks when Katja blew the obstacle to pieces with a single targeted flash.
“I hope that's not just the sewage plant,” Noemi whispered in an almost desperate attempt at a joke, as they all stared hesitantly into a small pit of less than two square meters, in which even the sudden morning light revealed only a yawning void.
“Hardly. We had Shi'ar vaporization technology here,” Bastian replied absently, watching with clenched fists as Katja was the first to descend the far less well-maintained staircase to this secret place, waiting, surely hoping that it would all turn out to be just a stupid misunderstanding, that this was nothing more than an unused storage room that Jericho himself had probably forgotten about at some point ...
He leaned down lower when Katja, who was quickly scanning the completely smooth walls, lined with heavy metal, stopped at a certain, equally uniform-looking spot, with her eyes closed, her mouth slightly open, stiff as a pole, almost like Logan had been earlier. “Cat?”
“Take cover again, both of you. I need more juice here.”
Katja was more and more confused herself, but she didn't hesitate for a second to retreat to the other side of the chamber and release another, this time much more powerful bolt at the spot that had caught her attention. With a crunching crack, the metal panel in question was torn in two, revealing another door like the one in the main laboratory facility. A final, well-measured, lightning discharge of artificial energy sent the display at that very entrance going up in smoke, which this time would surely not have responded so obediently to Bastian's input, but would probably have reacted with some kind of automatic gun instead.
Bastian stared from the open door into the pitch-black room beyond and at the wreckage of the first barrier, completely stunned, and then at Katja. “That thing, Jericho could only have moved with the help of its powers. So much for him not wanting to use them.”
“Apparently it just needed the right motivation to make him forget such principles,” Katja spat out between clenched teeth. ”Flashlights, you two. Mine didn't survive that.”
“What was that, if you don't mind me asking?” Bastian inquired, his head cocked to the side. "How did you do that? How did you know what was behind there?”
Katja slowly raised her shoulders, dropped them again, but then straightened them and pointed at the secret hiding place in determination. "Later. We're already way too late.”
Even though her curiosity was also visibly piqued, Noemi could only agree with this sober assessment. With flying fingers, she activated the aforementioned lamp on the multi-purpose wristband that Hank had provided her with in the morning before take-off, with an integrated com for emergencies. Katja doubted that she would need the latter. The only danger in this damn camp, they should have eliminated years ago.
It turned out that they didn't need to bother with far too small light cones. As soon as they took their first step into the room, motion detectors above the door activated bright ceiling lighting.
Katja only managed two more shaky steps before the nausea choked her again so badly that she had to put her hand over her mouth. So it was true.
Symbols of occultism sprayed in silver adorned the pitch-black walls of the barely ten-square-meter room, which, judging from a computer corner lying in ruins and thousands of shards and mixed substances on the floor, must also have served as a laboratory ... and as a refuge for a sick soul. There seemed to be only black furniture, and it was simple and scratched, with traces of kicks. There was also utter chaos, with photos that had fallen, been torn, or written on in black, wherever they'd shown Jericho. All the mirrors were broken, and there were shattered, half-empty alcohol bottles ... Not exactly the kind of furnishings you would expect to find in a parsonage.
“Looks like he wanted to live out all seven deadly sins at once after they threw him out,” Bastian commented with an almost hysterically forced snort. ”The desk.”
“I see it.” Katja had to brace herself on the tabletop to keep from giving in to the tremors in her body. Part of her had suspected it for minutes, but that didn't make it any easier. She leaned over the carved words on the rotten wood, reading out loud what someone had left there in a scrawly handwriting, probably in a completely dazed state.
“'I can feel the darkness surrounding me. My God, stand by me, lest I break under your cross. No less cursed my own life than that of the demons whom our Holy Spirit commands me to banish. How I wish you had never been born.'”
It took her a moment to realize ... Then, deep hatred clouded her vision at last. Hate for him, but also for herself. Because she had been too blind to see the signs. “Damn it!”
With sudden aggression, she kicked the table so hard that it slid away against the wall. With flying hands, she freed the laptop in the middle of the piece of furniture, the only electronic part in the room that still looked reasonably intact, from all the cables and stowed it under her coat. Hopefully, if there was anything left to salvage, the data pushers in Westchester would be able to do that as well.
Next to her, Bastian was already tearing open all the desk drawers with a similarly angry expression on his face, pulling out a few documents at random without taking more than a quick glance at them. The same symbol as on the pendant of Jericho's robe was printed on the letterhead on most pages, which was enough for them both as a clue.
“Noemi, film everything we can't take with us. Time to get out of here. There are people pulling the strings here who are way out of league for our little squad here.” Only that she spoke a whole nuance deeper than before, betrayed that Katja was just as close to freaking out as Bastian.
In a way, this might help the boy more than any comforting touch or soothing word. Right now, they both didn't need any reassurance. Right now, they needed this unholy, helpless rage of heaven.
“And please hurry, Noemi. We have to get back to Mutant High as soon as possible. I have to talk to Magneto ... Can you get this one open too, Cat?”
Almost simultaneously, Bastian and Katja had noticed a barely visible indentation in the wall at the back of the room, in the same direction as the camp, the bunker.
Katja let out a growl that would have made Logan proud. “With how pissed I am right now, you'd better ask what I couldn't take apart with my powers right now. Keep your head down.”
Manipulating lightning down the exit hatch and through entire rooms was a completely different challenge than controlling a storm in the open air, but for the moment, her instincts had completely taken control of her gift. Her eyes were shining in the light of the energy that turned another hidden passageway into a pile of rubble, her chest rose and fell a little too fast as she ran ahead through the passage behind it. Her half-come-apart braid blew in the strong wind that surrounded her body and cleared all the suffocating, dust- and insect-polluted air in the narrow corridor before Bastian had even caught up with her again.
This time, the boy kept his distance all voluntarily, because what was all but a corona of glistening energy surrounding Katja's body probably elicited a great deal of respect in him. With the help of the same, Katja also managed to rip the hopefully last massively bolted door that day to pieces, this time the one that led back to the public laboratory.
By the time the last bright glow had faded, the last dangerous volts had been scattered in a shower of sparks and Bastian could follow Katja, Noemi had also joined them again.
“We got it all. Should we take the body of this psycho with us, by the way? Maybe there's more to discover about him that will help you, Cat.”
Bastian grimaced. “Just leave the asshole here to rot. Nobody needs that guy anymore. But we need him.”
He hurried past Katja, in a rush because he surely didn't want to spend even a single damn minute more than necessary in this cursed place, and slapped the energy display of the cryo-aquarium with his hand. The temperature of the liquid inside began to rise instantly.
With that, there was only one thing left to do. With tight lips, he took a long knife out of his boot. “My parents gave this to me when they kicked me out like a dog. Touching, isn't it?”
Without waiting for an answer, he rushed out of the laboratory and bent over Jericho's body again. ”I just wish I'd done this earlier.” He grabbed the weapon tightly in both hands and plunged it into the heart of his former mentor. “What a shame you can't die twice.” He laughed bitterly even as he was bursting into tears and fell backward into the dust and dirt of the stone ground. “But I'll find someone else to blame for this just yet. And then have his bastard of their god mercy with them.”
“We just had that conversation earlier, I think.” Katja took him firmly by the shoulders. ”You're not going to run off rashly without even knowing where you have to go, understand? You think you can do this alone? Take on people who have the money and the power to breed viruses like this? You need our help! If you keep running off alone like this, that can only end badly.”
Noemi came over immediately and looked Bastian firmly in the eye as well. “Listen to Cat, okay? People die if you don't work together. And I don't feel like sewing the pieces back together when Logan is done with you until your body reassembles itself. My masochism doesn't go that far.”
Bastian bowed his head, visibly ashamed. Now he was clearly uncomfortable that he had spoken to Logan and Ororo like that the whole time, even though the children in that camp hadn't even realized that they had had a traitor among them. “I'll probably be stuck with you guys for a while longer after all, won't I?”
“At least for as long as we're hunting the same people, definitely.” Katja let go of him abruptly. ”Let's get Magneto to the jet. Now we need to be fast.”
The soft, regular beeping that had indicated the tank was working had stopped. Katja climbed the ladder on the side of the long cuboid almost completely made of glass, and she and Bastian opened the heavy lid together.
With her help, Bastian somehow managed to get Magneto's body out of the water. He wasn't much taller than she was; Katja was surprised that he could even hold the guy. But he managed it, trembling from the liquid that soaked his clothes and smelled sharply of disinfectant. “I'll so start lifting tomorrow, I swear,” he gasped when they finally made it up the stairs and Katja opened the hatch ...
And before either of them knew what was happening, all hell broke loose around them.
Obviously, the quick departure was not going to happen.