2

He jackknifed awake, gasping for breath as the sweat poured down his body, squeezed from his pores like he was a sodden rag.

His heart pounded savagely in his chest, he could hear the blood thundering in his ears, although for the life of him he couldn’t remember what nightmare had just awakened him. As Logan fought to get his breathing under control, to stop gasping it in like a drowning man, he sensed that was it. Not drowning so much as about to. Something - or someone - was holding him under water. He couldn’t breathe, and he couldn’t fight; he was trapped and helpless, and he needed to breathe - he was paralyzed with the need to breathe.

Logan yanked the sheets off him, a difficult prospect since they were clinging to his sweat soaked skin like a burial shroud, and sat on the edge of the bed, trying to will his heart to slow down. For some reason, he thought he could.

He didn’t want to sleep, but he’d been exhausted; his body gave up in spite the general unwillingness of his mind. He wondered if that was just more of the side effects of being hit by Phan. (What had Phan done to him?) Through the sheer curtains drawn across the window, he could see the sky turning a pale pink over the Philippines, which is where he decided he was. Right now, he didn’t want to get back under water, but he had to have a shower to wash off the sweat, and he tried not to panic under the stream of tepid water. Something in him wanted to.

But as he watched the water swirl down the drain, he remembered somebody - a man; perhaps Stryker? - telling him he was an animal, and he would always be an animal. It was such a curious thing to say, he wondered if it was true.

He looked around the room, and found a plain brown suitcase sitting inside the closet. In it was a change of clothes - worn jeans with a hole in one knee, socks, worn brown leather hiking boots, boxer shorts, a ribbed olive drab tank top, a blue plaid flannel shirt, and a very worn and cracked brown leather jacket. They were all the right size; in fact, judging by smell, they were all his clothes. The Organization thought of everything didn’t they?

They were clean, but in spite of the faint soap smell (scent free laundry detergent? How thoughtful), he could still smell himself in them, his own personal pheromones embedded in the fibers, worn by him so long that to take him out of them would require endless washings and dousing in strong perfumes. He got dressed, appreciating the softness of the well worn clothing, and realized the boots and flannel shirt were way too warn for the Philippines this time of year, but figured they’d be just fine for wherever he was going. Either that, or he was supposed to look like he had embraced the “grunge” movement wholeheartedly.

He shrugged the flannel shirt on but didn’t button it up, and started shoving his older “mission” clothes in the bag, because he was under the impression that that’s what he should do. They would take care of it.

There was a knock at the door, one he didn’t expect, but his sudden paranoia was abated by the scent of strong coffee wafting through the door. It was room service with his breakfast, one he didn’t order, and yet he wasn’t suspicious; it seemed like another example of creepy Organization efficiency. He was disappointed it seemed mostly American, as he would have preferred more traditional Filippino foods., even though he had no ideas what those were, and he wasn’t that hungry.

He pick at the scrambled eggs, which were strangely rubbery, but the croissant was actually pretty good. The coffee seemed too punishing to his nose to even attempt to drink, but as soon as he adjusted to the acidic bite of the orange juice, he managed to drink that down. Somehow he knew a roll and some juice wouldn’t hold him for long, but he could get something to eat back in the States … or wherever he was going.

Could he just leave? He thought about it, staring out the window at the streets below. He could just walk away. But they would find him, wouldn’t they? He couldn’t imagine that it would be as easy as walking out the front door and getting lost in a crowd. He had the nagging feeling he had done something like that before, and it didn’t work

This was silly. He was an “agent“ of some sort, right? A military guy? So why did he feel like he was in prison? He watched people milling about on the sidewalks below, and felt a curious but savage sting of envy.

The air shifted behind him, and he caught a familiar scent that was a mixture of cinnamon, cigarettes, and sweat tinged with just a hint of Vicodin - Javier.

“Ready to go, big guy?” He asked.

Logan just nodded, then turned around, done people watching for the moment. He had no idea why he envied them. He wasn’t like them and couldn’t ever be like them. Why he had no idea, he just knew that was the truth. He deserved to remain apart, because there was no way he could fit in with them, and did he want to? People did hideous things; they lied, they betrayed, they killed. At least, with the Organization, those things were never personal.

He picked up his coat off the bed, and gave Javier his arm. In a moment, they were standing on a tarmac beneath the bright morning sun, just short of the shadow of what appeared to be a military cargo jet. Yeah, right, did he think he was going out on a commercial flight? Dead men didn’t travel first class.

“You okay dude?” Javier wondered. “You look a little … I dunno. Down.”

“Didn’t sleep well. Breakfast sucked.” At least those weren’t lies.

Javier shrugged as he shaded his eyes to get a better look at him. “The no tell hotels ain’t known for their food. Or accommodations, or much else. They just keep their mouths shut, and what more could you ask for, huh?”

Walking around the plane, he saw a staircase leading up to a currently closed door. He knew it was for him, but for a moment, he did consider asking Javier to “jaunt” him as far away from here as possible. But even as he thought it, he knew that was never going to happen. “Thanks for the lift,” he lied, as he headed up the stairs.

“That’s the job,” he replied casually, and Logan didn’t need to turn around to know he was gone. But the thought that maybe he could disappear never left him.

*****

There was no peace for him on the plane, in case he thought he was going to get any. Although there was no one on this flight besides the pilot and co-pilot, the co-pilot came out to give him a dossier. “Stryker wants you to translate these ASAP,” he said, putting the sealed envelope in the empty seat beside him. There were ten seats in the back, suggesting that it was a form of passenger vehicle at times. The only bright spot was he found that one of the crates actually being transported contained bottles of gin. He took one back to his seat with him.

For a long time he just stared at the papers in the envelope, not sure what he was supposed to do. It came to him, slowly, each slug of warm gin helping, even though he had yet to feel the alcohol. The pages were part of a decrypted file of a terrorist group that called itself New Dawn. Even though they were based in Brussels (of all places - who’d ever heard of Belgian terrorists? ) the files they had been able to recover and decrypt were in a language no one had ever seen before, and no one had a translation program for. Logan somehow figured out it was a really obscure Arabian dialect spelled mostly phonetically ( how had he known this? He wasn’t even sure he knew at the time he figured it out), and since he was the only one who could make heads or tales of it, it fell to him to translate them into something the section leaders could use.

Even though it looked like pure gibberish to him, something in his mind was pulling sense out of it, and he found the tape recorder in the seat pocket ahead of him. He droned out sentences that were mostly fragments, weird bits of code that had probably been mashed together by accident. After all, these were things being salvaged from a destroyed hard drive; they had no guarantees that any of this stuff would ever make sense. But, he had to admit, it passed the time.

This was no normal military jet, either - it was going way too fast. Yet that didn’t surprise him either. This probably wasn’t a real cargo jet by any sense of the term.

Maybe it was the senseless translation, the warm gin, or both, but he must have dozen off at some point. Because he bolted awake with a scream lodged in his throat, but not quite willing to come out, a projection of fear that wedged in his windpipe. Again, he had more feelings and vague impressions than anything truly concrete, but he thought he remembered seeing ghostly figures over him, looking down, faces distorted just enough to seem wrong, far away enough to seem like mirages, with no bodies to hold them down.

But the more he thought about it, the more it seemed like he was looking up through water at someone. No, plural - a man and a woman. With the memory came a feeling - drugged, hazy, like his skin was being burned off with acid. What the hell did that mean? His mind seemed to instinctively shy away from it, and wouldn’t let him think about it too hard.

He was up and putting the tape in with the documents when the plane landed, and it seemed like he had followed the sun across the world. It was overcast though, with a heavy fog layer, so he couldn't tell if it was just growing light or just getting dark. But he shrugged on his coat, and went to see where he was now.

He honestly couldn't tell. It was about twenty degrees cooler, though, the air tinged with sea salt and industrial effluviums, and he thought maybe he was somewhere in Northern California, but he had no idea what gave him that impression.

As soon as he touched down on the macadam, he heard an Irish accented voice ask, "Hey you. Miss me?"

He turned to see a woman standing there. She was about his height, with shoulder length red hair and clear blue green eyes that seemed bright with mischief. She wore black pants and black Keds, a joke navy blue t-shirt with a white logo reading “Ski Mt. Kilimanjaro”, and a blue suede jacket. He did know her, but it took his mouth a moment to catch up with his brain. "Sloane," he said, as she jumped into his arms and squeezed him tightly. He did know her ... were they dating? Maybe they once were; he had the vague impression that they had slept together at some point. But it felt like he hadn't seen her for ages.

"You look fabulous," she said, pulling back to give him a big, crooked grin. She smelled of coffee and cigarettes, bergamot and cherry blossoms. Her scent was familiar, and instantly soothing. "How you feelin'?"

He stared at her a moment, seeing a nagging familiarity in the delicate bones of her face, in the pale hue of her skin, and realized she might tell him some things that Javier would not. He had a feeling he could trust her, at least above the others. "Okay, I guess ... considerin' I was blown to pieces not too long ago."

Her smile faltered, twisted into a slightly pained grimace. "You remember that, huh?"

"Not a lot. Just enough to make me wonder how I survived that."

She slipped out of his embrace, but kept a hold of his arm, almost leaning against him as they walked away from the plane. He was pretty sure she just felt one of his arm muscles, although he had no idea why. Checking to see if he was all there? "You survive a lot of things, Logan, even stuff that maybe you shouldn't."

He glanced at her sidelong, but she was staring out at the fog, lost in thought. What a curious thing that was to say. Was she sorry he survived? Should he be?

To break the awkward silence, he asked, "So where've you been? I haven't seen you for a while."

She brightened visibly, glad for the change of subject. "Oh, I was workin' a problem in Berlin for a while, then they sent me off to Finland."

"Finland? What the hell's in Finland?"

She shrugged. "I have no idea - and I was there. That's pretty bad, isn't it?"

Something random popped into his mind, a song, and he quoted a bit of it. "Finland, Finland, the country where I quite want to be. Your mountains so lofty, your treetops so tall -"

She laughed, a musical sound that it warmed him to hear, and she gave his arm a gentle slap. "Yer the only guy I know who can quote Monty Python for any occasion. How d'ya do that? I mean, without being a nerd?"

Monty Python? Who the hell was that? He just rolled his shoulders, not a shrug but an amazing impression of one. "It's a gift."

"A secondary mutation," she suggested jokingly.

He played along. "Total Monty Python recall. Really helpful in hostage situations."

That made her laugh again, and he could see that she was steering him subtlety towards a car, a strangely sleek sedan that he suspected was armored - among other things. She leaned in and kissed him on the cheek, a bit of contact that he didn't mind. In fact, he wanted more; he had some sense memory of her mouth on his, her body soft and warm, surrounding him like a second skin. Did he love her? He wasn't sure.

He saw something in her eyes - wariness, fear - and she slipped away from him, putting a little distance between them. Did something happen between them, something he didn't remember, that put an end to ... well, whatever it was they had? Or did she just not feel the same way about him? She cleared her throat, and said, all humor and lightness gone from her voice, "I'm supposed to get you back to base ASAP. We have an emergency briefing; we may have to deploy to the field right away."

Did she just want to keep this all business then? Fine, that was probably better until he could remember things of more substance. "It's that bad?"

"I don't know the details. But it sounds that way, doesn't it?" She started to walk away, around the car to the driver's seat.

"I did, you know."

"What?"

"Miss you."

That made her freeze, her back stiffening as if in shock. Why had that been the wrong thing to say?

The wind came up then, roaring across the open expanse of the mostly abandoned airstrip, but still he caught her strange reply, a whisper torn away and shredded like so much paper: "I missed you too. I always miss you."

****

The base, as far as he could tell, was underneath what appeared to be an aerospace construction plant, and while he could hear noises and smell various things, he wasn't convinced it was still operational, not in any real sense. He saw no one else beside an occasional sullen (and way too muscular) "security" guard once Sloane got them inside. She led him to an elevator that required a code to descend beyond level one - which was odd, because there were no other levels listed, and hey, weren't they on level one?

But they descended anyways, the elevator doors opening on a large, utilitarian room, where people who looked like soldiers milled around, and others worked at computer monitors displaying things whose significance he couldn't begin to guess. It looked like a small airplane hangar converted into a high tech workplace, and in spite of the harsh illumination of florescent strip lights and the blue glow from computer screens, there was something dark and slightly ominous about the place, like this was a thin façade concealing a medieval dungeon.

Although people looked at them as they went past, absolutely no one met his eyes. Even when he tried to make direct eye contact, their eyes would slide off him like he wasn’t really there at all. Were they afraid of them, or were they just part of the scenery, things to be tolerated only when they had to?

Sloane led him to a back room, which looked like a type of conference room, dominated by a circular black plastic table surrounded with maybe a dozen chairs, with some kind of flat screen digital apparatus pointed up towards the ceiling. As they came in, he realized several seats were taken, and a hard faced man in a strangely dignified gray business suit was standing on one side of the room. “Static,” the man in the suit said by way of greeting. Right, Sloane’s codename. “Wolverine, congratulations on the Cambodian job. Mirage was a truly hard target.”

Mirage? Phan had a codename too? Was he … did he used to be one of them?

Someone scoffed, and said, “Our Wolvie’s made for hard targets, inne? Oh, and me.” The Scottish man who said that was sitting at the end of the table, leaning back in his chair like he hadn’t a care in the world. His hair was as red as Sloane’s, although he was probably younger, somewhere in his mid to late twenties. He was handsome, but everything about his expression, his posture, his voice, said he knew it; even the tilt of his chin was arrogant. This man he knew - this was Keogh, a/k/a Timebomb. He was a quasi-telekinetic; quasi in that he could only make things burst or blow up, and mainly animate - as opposed to inanimate - objects. He enjoyed going “Scanners on everybody’s arses”, meaning he had a tendency to just cause his opponent’s heads to explode. He lacked delicacy as an assassin - he left a holy hell of a mess, ever and always - but if you needed someone taken out as a startling message to others, or lacked an army to take on a squad, he was your m! an. He could foment mass panic like no one else could. Amazing what blowing up someone’s head could do to everyone else around them.

Sitting next to him was a startling young Chinese girl, maybe early twenties if he was being generous, with her long, sleek black hair held back in a tight braid. She glanced at him, and seemed to color slightly as she quickly looked away, bringing a nervous hand to her throat. He couldn’t tell if she was afraid of him, ashamed, or both. She was Xia, a/k/a Atomic, and she was very much still a rookie, but her power made the Organization move her up into the main strike unit. Her power was the ability to create an impenetrable force field, one that could even keep out telepaths. She couldn’t project the ability, it simply clung to her body like exoskeleton, but when it was “on”, she was impervious to all harm, and could bust through everything in her path; her field just wouldn’t let her come to harm, and it wouldn’t bend to anything.

He took a seat next to Static, not sure what else he should do. Hearing her codename, he remembered what her power was - total interference of any and every kind of transmission, from radio frequencies to telepathic and telekinetic impulses. At full power, she could shut a whole building down, from the telephones to the elevators, and any unlucky teep who happened to be there.

And his power was …? What, didn’t he remember his file from yesterday? He healed fast, had blades in his hand, and had a gift for punching things. They were the glamour players, the special, gifted ones, while he was just ground level muscle. That was fine with him - they couldn’t all be thrilling - but he had the sudden suspicion that they were understaffed, that key people were missing. There was a woman who should have been here, icily beautiful but distant, a wiry guy who could barely sit still and always seemed to be on a jittery coffee high, and a man who had all the emotional range of a fire hydrant. Inferno, Lightning, and Reaper … right?

Right, those were the codenames his mind churned up. But, wait, hadn’t Stryker said on the phone that Inferno had “crapped out” on them? And he had a vague impression that Reaper only showed up for really big jobs, that he was too highly placed in the Organization to even bother with most things. And Lightning ..? Why couldn’t he remember what happened to Lightning? Maybe he was busy on another mission, but that didn’t sound right …

Control touched something that lowered the light level of the room, and brought the thing in the center of the table to glowing life. “We have solid intell that a new terrorist group in the South American region, calling itself Shining Light, has gotten its hands on an unknown “super weapon” known only by the project codename “Nova”. We have very little information on this weapon, we only know that it was stolen in transition from a weapons facility in Middle America four months ago.”

“What kinda super weapon are we talking here?” Logan asked, surprised that he was actually speaking. But he felt like he should, that his people deserved as much information as they could get before being engaged in the field. “Nuclear, biological, tactical armament, mutant?”

… “His” people?

(What was Mirage’s power?)

He could barely see Control’s chiseled face in the dimness, but since he never showed any expression that didn’t look like he was on the verge of a psychotic episode while suffering from the most painful bout of constipation ever, that was somewhat irrelevant. “We’re not honestly sure, Wolverine, although we believe it’s some kind of explosive.”

Keogh scoffed again. “Whoopty shit. No doomsday weapon is ever an explosive, unless it can distribute strontium 90 throughout the atmosphere or some kinda shit like that.”

“Nova was responsible for the blast that leveled Merrill City, South Dakota.”

They were all quiet for a moment, and Logan was glad, because it gave him a chance to search his memory for it. All his mind spat out for him was it was a small mining town, no great shakes, that suddenly just disappeared off the map. It wasn’t that there was rubble and bodies - there was fucking nothing left of the town, nothing to prove it had ever existed. Just an extremely large but shallow crater, several miles across. Even the plants and animals were gone, the topsoil; there was a small lake that didn’t even leave a puddle.

“So it was an American government project?” Logan finally asked.

“It would seem that way, although officially it’s been denied, and covered up well enough that we haven’t been able to scrape up a shred of evidence about it.”

“Who can hide from us?” Sloane asked, sounding genuinely surprised.

Control didn’t answer the question, just looked more uncomfortable. “Static, Wolverine, we want you to leave ASAP for a reconnaissance mission. You will be joined on site by Spectre, who’s already in play in the region.”

Keogh snorted derisively. “That bloody fuckin’ coward. Are you even sure he’s been there? And what about Atom and me?”

“There’s an emergency situation involving New Dawn developing in Florida. We’ll be sending the two of you there to begin with. You will join Wolverine and Static after initial reconnaissance.”

Keogh clicked his tongue and sighed, sounding and looking exasperated. “Why send big guns after peons? Shit, we can take those pathetic cunts out and join Wolvie and Irish here on the first flight out.”

Control’s eyes narrowed, and Logan knew Keogh was on dangerous territory here - you did not question Control’s decisions, certainly not in a briefing - but he also knew that Keogh knew this, and couldn’t give a shit. He felt a sudden coldness in his stomach, fear for the cocky, infuriating, and slightly psychotic Keogh. You could only push Control so far , and at the end of the day, they were all expendable. “Never underestimate your opponent, Timebomb, or have you forgotten what happened to Lightning?”

Logan saw, out of the corner of his eye, Xia cast a guilty, furtive glance in his direction. What was that? What did that mean?

“Well, that was -” Keogh began, and glanced his way too. What? What were they implying? Did he have something to do with Lightning’s death?

(Death?! Lightning was dead?!)

Keogh did something he almost never did: he thought better of something, and decided to actually keep his trap shut.

“Are you through?” Control asked, so coldly there was no way in hell that was a genuine question. Without waiting for a response, Control went on. “You might be called upon to neutralize competition, Wolverine, and you might be targets. We have it on good authority that someone else is after Nova for themselves; someone who has hired the most deadly mercenary available.” He pressed a button on the table, and the light display flickered, eventually resolving into the image of a startling women, with blue scaled skin and bright red hair slicked down to her scalp like a skull cap, her yellow eyes exuding a chilling brand of malevolence.

Static groaned as if she had been physically hit. “Mystique.”

“The blue assed bitch,” Keogh said, with a strange sort of cheerfulness. “I’ve always wanted to meet a girl with naturally expandable tits.”

Control glowered in disapproval. “Do I need to tell any of you how deadly she is? We must assume, if she spots you two first, she will attempt to neutralize you. You must be prepared to take her out first.”

“And how do we know her?” Sloane pointed out. “She could be anyone at any time. Is there any way to scan for her specific DNA signature?”

Control’s eyes, so dark they looked like nothing but holes in his skull, settled on him, and he could almost feel them like a cold weight on his skin. It was a look that Logan instantly hated, and wanted to squirm out from underneath. “Wolverine, you can find Mystique, can you not?”

For a moment he had no idea what he was talking about, but then it occurred to him almost as an afterthought. “I know her scent.” He did? So he’d encountered her before? “If she gets near me, no matter what she looks like, I’ll know it. She can’t change her scent.”

“Yeesh,” Keogh exclaimed. “Mate, that’s just creepy. I bet bus stations are a side trip to hell for ya and that fabulous schnozz o‘ yours.”

Although he didn’t appreciate that, he noticed a muscle in Control’s jaw starting to twitch - his patience for Keogh was wearing razor thin - and he decided to distract him with what he thought was a relevant question. “Who’s Mystique’s employer this time?”

“We’re not sure, but her last employer was the Russian government. It wouldn’t surprise me if they were interested in Nova.”

“So we have to get it first,” he sighed. This sounded routine and tiring. But better than killing a man over a computer disc any day of the week.

Control turned off the projection and brought up the lights in the room, the cue that the briefing was over. “Wolverine, Static, report to the secondary transit site in twenty minutes. Remember to dress like tourists; your cover is that you’re newlyweds on your honeymoon, and Wolverine, remember to pretend you don’t speak the language. Full background files will be waiting for you on site. Timebomb, Atomic, I want you at the primary transit point in five minutes. No dicking around.”

They all got up out of their seats and headed for the door, but Keogh and Xia went out a second door on the other side of the room, but Xia paused long enough to give him another one of those guilty glances. What was that about?

“Do we have time to get a beer?” he asked Sloane.

She nodded, seemingly liking the idea. “As long as we make it quick, yeah.”

“Good. I can use one.” And also he thought it might be a good excuse to hash things out before they left.

And maybe, just maybe, find out what happened to Lightning, and whether or not it was all his fault he was dead.