Cold shock gave way to a sudden, blinding rage, one that made him feel like he was filling with magma, something hot enough to eat its way through his skin. He grabbed her by her throat and shoved her back into the trunk of the nearest tree, pinning her there as he held his fist up, level with her face. “Don’t fuck with me, Mystique,” he snarled, his stomach like a lead knot throwing off his center of gravity. “What the hell do you know about me?”

She grabbed his wrist hard, but couldn’t break his grip, not without morphing into something new. She seemed to realize this was too much for him, and shifted back to Rita, but his anger did not diminish. He was seeing red out of the corners of his eyes, like his corneas were bleeding. She got her foot up into his abdomen and kicked him back, hard enough to break his grip, but not hard enough to send him back very far. Still, she held up a hand as she grabbed her throat. “I can’t talk if I can’t breathe, psycho,” she rasped, glaring at him.

He didn’t care. He was still so angry everything he heard had an undercurrent to it, a slight but audible roar, a river of blood raging inside his head. He was so angry he was shaking, and he didn’t know why. What the fuck had gotten to him so much? “Tell me!” He roared, keeping his fist up, like it was a sword he was going to run her through with if he didn’t get an answer he liked. He didn’t know what he would do, or what an acceptable answer would sound like.

She looked positively annoyed with him, the unlucky mother of a demanding, unreasonable child. “You are a tool of the oppressors, Logan, an Uncle Tom. You think you’ve been protecting the world from big bad mutants? Bullshit! At least half of them were never legitimate threats to anyone, not even themselves. You’ve been killing innocent people, your people, to help the baselines retain their control over us - and their control over you. You’re their pet.”

“I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t threaten me,” he snapped back, not actually certain that was true anymore. He still couldn’t figure out what happened between him and Phan, but if fear was the only power he had, there never would have been a contest. “And I’m no one’s pet.”

“Oh really? Where are your memories, Logan? What were you doing last month? What’s your favorite fucking color? Tell me!”

His heart was doing that thing again, skipping and racing, trying to burst through his chest and make a run for it. Mystique was a known terrorist, a liar and a fanatic, a grinning psychopath with a boatload of nearly sensible sounding rationalizations. That’s why she was so dangerous. She could twist truth just enough to make down seem like up.

The annoyance had disappeared from her eyes, but they were still narrowed in suspicion. “You figured it out, didn’t you old man? You knew what they were doing was wrong. But you’re just too good at killing mutants, too much of an investment to let go, and - damn me for sayin‘ it - you knew too goddamn much. So when they finally hunted you down, they just knocked your brains out of your ears, and they keep doing it, ’cause they don’t want their big bad weapon to go all AWOL on them again. Do you recover from that too? When they wipe your brains, do you heal faster each time? You know that means, don't you?  That soon you‘ll leave them no choice.”

“Again? What d’ya mean again?” She hesitated to answer, so he closed the distance between them, fist still held up in that awkward pose. But he knew that all he had to do was pop his claws, and with one swipe the top of her skull would go flying; she’d never recover from that. There wasn’t a mutant alive he couldn’t kill …

… and Mystique had just proved her point.  Oh god …

“You escaped them once. You were living under an assumed name in Tokyo; I stumbled upon you during a job.  You’d gone native, had a wife.”

His heart seemed to free fall into his stomach. “You’re lying.”

She morphed into the Japanese woman again, and he thought he felt bile rising in his throat. “I admit, I was curious.  I just had to see who had managed to tame the big bad Wolverine.  Frankly, I was a little unimpressed.  She didn’t look like anything special.”

Before he knew what he was doing, he'd grabbed her and slammed her up against the tree, shaking loose leaves and a couple of unripe fruits. “Don’t you ever say that about her,” he spat, not even sure who he was referring to.  It was all gut instinct, a knee jerk response, just like the fact that the face of this new morph made him want to burst into tears.

There was a noise, the doors of the church opening up, and Mystique had a better visual angle on things than he did.  From the look in her eyes, she didn’t like what she saw. “Fuck,” she hissed. “Kiss me.”

“What?” But that was all he got to say before she pulled him into a sudden clinch as he heard footsteps coming their way.  He resisted at first, but then it occurred to him he wanted to kiss her -- well, not Mystique, but her morph. They weren’t the same thing at all, but … close enough.

He was vaguely aware the man - it was a man - stopped and looked at them for a moment, before telling them in Spanish to go somewhere else, as this wasn’t a place for exhibitionists.  They didn’t even acknowledge him, just kept on kissing, Mystique pulling him into a tighter embrace, like she was trying to crush his ribs.

They waited for another minute after he was gone before they stopped, although he didn’t know why.  He tried to pull away, suddenly disgusted with himself, with his desire for a woman represented by another woman that he couldn’t stand, but Mystique had wrapped one of her legs around his and kept him more or less where he was.  “You were getting into that, weren’t you?” She said, her grin both smug and mocking.  And he felt conflicted, because he was looking at the face of someone he knew he used to love, and yet - at the same time - someone he wanted so badly it hurt.  He knew, if he could just find her, find the other woman, he’d be okay. They could put a bullet in his brain a second later, but he wouldn't care, because he would have seen her one last time, and she would be alive.

“Tell me my name,” she purred, slipping her arms around him once more. “Come on, lover, what’s my name?”

He thought for a moment that she had gone crazy, but then he realized she was asking what “her” name was, the woman’s name, the name of his wife.  And here he was, helplessly staring her replica in the face, and he could remember nothing; his mind was a perfectly smooth surface, flat and vast, the color of bleached bones.  He had nothing; no words came to him, no names. All he had was this feeling that he was dying inside, that something in him was suffering a slow and horrible death.

Again.

6

By the time he got back to the hotel, the sky was starting to turn a velvet orange at the horizon, sunset coming on, the wind turning blessedly cooler even if the heat hardly dissipated. His clothes were sticking to him, sweat making them cling, and he couldn’t wait to hop into the shower. Maybe a bath would be better; a nice bath of boric acid, just boil his skin right off.

As soon as he entered their room, Sloane jumped off the bed, spilling crumbs from a bag of potato chips. She was only wearing shorts and a burgundy sports bra, watching the BBC world news feed. “Where the bloody hell have you been?” she demanded, exasperated. “I went back to the market and had a look around again. I thought maybe she’d killed you!”

“Her and what mutant army?” He peeled off his shirt and threw it on the bed, heading to the bathroom. He kicked off his hiking boots before he unzipped his jeans and stepped out of them, leaving them on the floor, and left the bathroom door ajar, because he just knew Sloane was going to follow him in, being irate.

He was right. He was just turning on the taps in the bathtub when he heard her shove it open. “What the fuck happened? Don’t give me the silent treatment, you wanker.”

He gave her a small shrug as he finished stripping off his clothes, leaving on the blue tiled floor as he stepped into the tub full of tepid water and sank into it. It wasn’t quite tepid enough; he was still sweating. “I’m not.  I’m just tired, and hot.”

She stood in the doorway, hands on her hips, waiting impatiently. “Well?”

“The automotive factory is a dead end.  It’s a drug processing plant for the Mendoza cartel.  If it has anything to do with Nova, it’s purely financial.”

“She told you that?”

There was no harm in lying. “Yeah. And I checked it out. Nothing but cocaine and lazy guards.”

“Did she say where we should look for Nova?”

He scrubbed the water into his hair, letting it trail down his neck. The shampoo the hotel provided was too flowery, so he figured he’d just use the soap to wash the sweat and bar smell out of his hair. It didn’t smell that great either, but it was better than the shampoo. “It’s underground, beneath an old army base about twenty klicks from here. As soon as I clean up we can head out.”

“What do you mean head out?  That’ll be breaking the mission profile.”

“The mission profile doesn’t matter.” He stuck his head under the still roaring tap, not just wetting his hair but drowning out noise, even that of her voice.  He’d been unable to name the woman, and Mystique said she’d never bothered to learn it,as she'd only caught a glimpse of her.  Also, she said she'd been murdered, and she heard the Organization did it prior to them bringing him back into the fold.  An agent of theirs couldn’t have any outside ties, any family to hold them back.  He kept reminding himself that Mystique would say anything to turn him against the Organization, but he knew that the woman - his wife; his poor, nameless wife - was dead.  He could feel it, a hollow pit gouged out of his insides, something cold and gaping, a wound that never closed.  How had he never noticed it before?

When he raised his head, he heard the words she was saying. “ - ter? Of course it matters. Unless … what did she tell you exactly?”

He decided to just make something up.  It wasn’t like she could check. “The group that has Nova is preparing to move. Someone tipped them off about us. If we want any chance at this, we have to move ASAP.”

“Who tipped them off?”

He snorted, rubbing his soap lathered hands through his hair. “How the hell should I know? It could’ve been her for all I know. She wasn’t surprised to see me.”

“Shit.” Sloane was now actually in the bathroom now, probably for the purpose of shouting at him when his head was ducked under the water. She sat up on the edge of the sink, and stared down at the floor as she considered their options. “Get anything else out of her?”

“Nothing important, except the group she was working with had no interest in acquiring Nova.  She was just here gathering  intell on it and, knowing her, probably some computer files.”  He rinsed the soap out of his hair, and wondered why he couldn’t think of his wife's name.  What purpose was there in taking her away from him if she was already dead?

When he raised his head, Sloane asked, “Did you kill her?”

“No point.  She didn’t fight me; she knew she wouldn’t win.” Not physically, but she did fight him and win psychologically, didn’t she?  She knew something he didn’t, and used that knowledge to break him.  It now made him wonder if Phan did find something to use against him.  Maybe his enemies had weapons fashioned from his own past, an inborn weakness courtesy of the Organization.  But what did they want from him? Hadn’t he given them enough?  They had him, they had his life - were his memories necessary too?  How much did you have to give before you couldn’t give anymore?

He noticed Sloane looking at him curiously out of the corner of his eye.  He soaped up his arms for no other reason than to avoid looking at her, but this was a pointless exercise.  He wasn‘t going to be clean; he would never be clean.  He could peel his skin completely off, and he would still be stained. “Somethin’ wrong, Logan?”

“No.  Why?”

“You just … I dunno. I guess you kinda look sad.”

“I just wanna get this over with.  I’m tired of spending all my time in humid countries.”  And, if this was a trap for him, he began to wonder if he had any reason at all to avoid it.  It might be easier if he just walked in, eyes wide open, and accepted the bullet.

It wasn’t like he had anything to live for, anyway.

7

Sloane wanted to call in back-up since their mission was compromised, but he didn’t see the point. They needed to move fast, and he wasn’t sure there was any back up that could get here in time.  Still, she did it anyway, and he went out and used his claws to wedge open a locked car in the hotel parking lot and hotwire it.  He went ahead and ripped the license plates off, so if the cops actually did get called tonight and bothered to look for it, a plate trace would do no good.  But it was unlikely that the police would mount a search tonight, or anytime soon; this was one of the top five car theft capitals in South America.  Chop shops employed as many people as the coffee shops.

He brought the car around front and Sloane hopped in with one of the backpacks, now heavy with equipment.  As he drove them out toward the old army base, she started checking weapons, making sure they were loaded and the safeties were off, and then put a Browning Hi-Power Mark III beside him. “You prefer those, right?”

He glanced down at the gun, at the black polymer body, and wondered if he put a bullet in his head, through his eye, would it kill him?  Would that be enough?  Or would he need to have a good angle, to make sure the bullet tore up as much of his brain as it could as it caroomed around his skull like a loose pinball?  There was no way he could recover from that, was there?

She slammed a full clip in the Glock she had chosen for herself, and wondered, “Did Mystique give you any estimate on the people there?  How many Shining Light morons we’ll be dealing with?”

“Would you trust any number she gave me?”

She dipped her head, agreeing with that point. “Okay, but should we trust any damn thing she said?”

“Technically no, but our initial intell was shit.  Someone oughta tell Control he needs better inside men.  First Keogh, now this.”

“What do you mean?  Keogh’s death was just a horrible chance occurrence, not an intelligence failure.”

He made himself nod, because he couldn’t mouth the lie.  He didn’t believe that.  If she wanted to believe that, if that let her sleep through the night, okay, but he couldn’t pretend.  Keogh had known his place less and less, and he'd probably been preparing to make a move; he was cut down by his own, pure and simple.  By someone on Stryker’s personal squad - that would explain the yelling that Sloane had heard.  Stryker wanted to stay and take care of Wolverine, but Control was more concerned about Keogh, and Control made the call on who was more of a risk.  Stryker disagreed, but at the end of the day, he wasn’t the ultimate boss, and Control wasn’t about to allow a mutant freak who threatened his dominance to exist a second longer than necessary.  Logan was no threat to Control; but Stryker was worried about himself.  Why?  The name did cause that dyspeptic feeling, though, so Logan just assumed they had a bad history - a bad history he didn’t remember.  What a coincidence.  He bet Stryker didn’t want him to remember either.

How did he keep doing this?  How did he go on pretending that he didn’t know he couldn’t trust these people?  He just couldn’t do this anymore.  Better to die than to try and keep living a lie - somebody else’s lie.

“How’re we gonna play this?” Sloane asked.

“Let’s go with scenario gamma.”

“Aw, not gamma.  Why do you get all the fun?”

“You can come up after me.” Gamma had him scouting ahead, to get a general idea of their surface opposition, while she blocked comms and cut power.  He would also be doing a lot of “neutralizing”, a nice word for general slaughter and mayhem.  That way, if they wanted to close a trap on him, Sloane would never be in danger.

The city gave way to slums that were little more than shanty towns, then small and rough looking factories where people worked for wages little better than slave, and then everything became rolling hills and fields of brown and green, with gnarled looking trees fading to copses that could have come from a John Constable painting.

“You sure you’re okay?” Sloane wondered. “You seem awfully quiet.”

He shrugged. “Nothin’ to say.” What was her name, dammit?  Why couldn’t he think of her name?  And why couldn’t he quite remember her face, even though Mystique had taken on her image just her hours before?  It was like they put something in his head that wouldn’t let him remember her … but that was impossible, right?

No, it wasn’t.  Behold the wonders of the modern age, when you could invade another person’s mind and rearrange the furniture, so it didn’t seem like their mind at all anymore.  Where you could kill a guy with knives that came out of your body, and where a woman could block your telephone line just by thinking about it.  Nothing was impossible; it was only a matter of degrees.

He pulled the car quietly over to the soft shoulder of a road that was mostly dirt, and killed the engine. “The base is over the next hill,” he told her.  It was traditional to do scouting on foot, if you didn’t have access to a remote viewer, a teleporter, or a flyer.

She nodded, and rummaged in the backpack. “I’ll see if the scanner can get a count before I kill everythin’ electrical.”

“You do that.” She got out of the car and he just sat there a minute, listening to the engine tick.  The opening of the door had let in a night scent of jasmine and hay, clover and field mouse dung, and it was strangely comforting.  Yet, while he was sitting there, both doors closed, a new scent made itself aware to him.  It was … where was it coming from?

It was coming from nowhere; rather, it was something his mind had churned up, a scent memory.  It was the smell of clean skin, with hints of musk and tea, vanilla and cinnamon, a woman’s smell.

And he knew.  He knew right then that they couldn’t take that away from him. They could fuck with his mind, but they couldn’t take away his scent memory, the catalogue of smells he had accumulated in a place beyond the reach of most telepaths.  And if he closed his eyes and concentrated, he could almost feel her skin, soft and warm, beneath his fingers. They couldn’t touch his sense memories, just his actual ones. He didn’t know her name, his mind refused to completely give up her face, but he knew her; he had her smell.  Just like he had Mystique’s, even though he had no idea when he’d ever encountered her before.  His senses, powerful and annoying as they often were, also gave him something they'd never really realized, something they couldn’t take away without compromising him: total recall.  Even when his conscious mind gave him nothing, he still had her scent.

In the darkness behind his eyes, he saw something, a little spark that flared to life, and he could feel it deep inside his breastbone.  Now that he knew he still had something of her, it sparked a terrible yet empowering knowledge.  Not all was lost.  He could rebuild from this, from here.  He had something they could never take away from him.  It felt like he’d won something, had a small victory, although it was probably nothing of the sort.

How could they be so stupid?  Even in normal people, the olfactory senses were powerful memory triggers.  Did it never occur to them that it would be even more true for a man with “super” senses?  For god’s sake, they used him for his sensory abilities - they should have known.  Did they think fucking his mind up was enough?  Maybe it was for a while, but eventually the scent would come back to him.  If they couldn’t permanently erase it, it would always be there, waiting to surface again.

Maybe it had before.  Maybe that’s why they had to keep doing this to him again and again and again.  Mystique had been right about that; eventually they would have no choice.  Eventually he would prove too costly to keep, and he would be cancelled.  Maybe that’s what was planned for tonight.

Sloane opened his door and leaned in. “Scanners are picking up lots of shit.  They have some kinda scrambler preventing just about every reading you can name. The only thing we could use would be sonar.”

He nodded, and she moved back as he slid out from the driver’s side. “I’ll just hafta go in cold.”

“Good thing you like it that way, huh?” She gave him an encouraging little grin, but it faltered and faded quickly.   She touched his arm gently, but he quickly stepped back, out of reach.  He didn’t want to be touched right now, at least not by her. It made her frown, though. “What’s wrong with you?  You seem so ... off tonight.”

“I’ve just been wondering.  Do you think we’ve ever done any good?”

She raised her eyebrows slightly in surprise. “What?  What d’ya mean?”

“For the world, for mutants, for others.  Have we ever done any good in the Organization?  Has anything ever changed?”

Now her eyes seemed to harden, as if she was now positive he was crazy. “Of course it has.  What did Mystique say to you? Was she fillin’ you full of propaganda shit?”

He shook his head, and looked toward the crest of the hill.  There was the faintest haze of light rising from it, illumination from the base at the bottom of its valley. It would soon be prematurely and inexplicably dark. “I wouldn’t trust her as far as I could sling the Eiffel Tower. I’ve just been tryin’ to figure out, if we’re the good guys, why doesn’t anything ever change for the better?  Nothing does, Sloane.  There seems to be a new terrorist group every five minutes, all built on the ruins of others we supposedly wiped out.  It’s almost like we’re helpin’ create more of them.”

Her frown had become a scowl, and she looked pissed off. “Don’t you give me that shit.  We’ve done real good, Logan.  It’s just that the world is full of lowlife assholes, ain’t it?  Hell, you told me that!”

He nodded.  He didn’t remember telling her that, but it sounded like something he might say. “Yeah, but things aren’t any better for mutants, are they?  People hate and fear them - us - even more.  And look what we’re doing.”

“And what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“Our mission objective.  We reacquire a stolen doomsday weapon - and take it for ourselves, the Organization.  Just like these Shining Light guys took it for themselves.  It’s like we’re government sponsored terrorists, only, since our government is Western, we’re supposedly the good guys.  But do you really think Stryker is a good guy?  Or Control?  What do you think they’re gonna do with Nova?”

There was a small frown line between her brows, echoing the shape of her mouth. “They’re gonna destroy it, that’s what.”

He couldn’t help but chuckle and shake his head. “You’re not that naïve, Sloane.  C’mon.”

She crossed her arms tightly over her chest, giving him a death stare that was belligerent and hot enough to be warming.  “Do you know what they would do to you if they heard you saying this?”

“And that’s a real good guy thing to do, isn’t it?  Act like the Stassi?”  She turned away in disgust, so he asked her something he needed to know:  “Do you know what they've done to me?”

She froze, spine stiffening in surprise, with the briefest hesitation before she went on, “Logan … I know it seems strange … but after Kyoto -”

“Save it,” he interrupted, figuring he had her answer - yes.  She knew; they probably all knew.  And they abided it for reasons all their own, beyond whatever the official reason was, because no one was dumb enough to buy the party line.  Maybe they all accepted it because it was better him than them. “Give me forty seconds, then shut them down. Wait another two minutes, then follow me in.” He headed off, up the hill, without waiting for an acknowledgement.

“Wait, what about your gun?”

“I don’t need it.” He paused and looked back at her.  In the pale light of the cold moonlight, she looked ghostly, an apparition of a past best left forgotten. “One more thing.  What’s your favorite color?”

Now she was staring at him like he was insane.  When they got back to headquarters, she’d probably report his “erratic” behavior. “Huh?  Green, I guess.  Why?”

“No reason.” He started trudging up the hill again, feeling a sort of freedom in his steely resolve.

He was not dying tonight.  Trap or no trap, it didn’t matter.  He had found his reason to go on, his purpose for living.